THE TRIAL OF
Callista Blake
There is no ethical absolute that does not arise from error and illusion.
—GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, The meaning of Evolution.
St Martin's Press
New York
Copyright © Edgar Pangborn 1961
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-13391
Manufactured in the United States of America
by H. Wolff, New York
The author wishes to express his thanks to William Morrow &Company, Inc., for permission to use an excerpt from THE COURT OFLAST RESORT by Erle Stanley Gardner, Copyright 1952 by ErleStanley Gardner; to Yale University Press forpermission to use aquotation from G. G. Simpson's THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION; and toCharles Scribner's Sons for permission to use a passage from THESTORY OF MY LIFE by Clarence Darrow.
To the
Memory of
My Father
NOTE: All characters in this novel are fictitious, not intended toresemble any actual persons living or dead. The locale issemifictitious: for "New Essex" read "almost any of the northeasternStates within a 300-mile radius of New York City."
E.P.
THE TRIAL OF CALLISTA BLAKE
1
Now laws maintain their credit not because they are just, butbecause they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of theirauthority: they have no other.
MONTAIGNE, Of Experience
I
Doves wheeled above the city's winter morning, vanishing by a turn ofwings, reappearing in a silent explosion of light. Judge Terence Mannsaw smoke rising through windless cold from a thousand chimneys, andsaw, beyond a bleak acreage of city roofs, the apartment house thatcontained his bachelor burrow; further on, the Veterans Hospital shonenot as a temple of sickness but a shaft of splendor in the sun. His eyessmarted as he turned away from the brightness. That was partly from alack of sleep. The Judge remembered that, like this robing-room, thedetention cells also looked up across the long rise of land where, forsomething like three hundred years, the city had been haphazardlyexpanding, fattening on river commerce, and becoming—in the Americansense—old.
Some day, should the small gods in the state capital approve, the cityof Winchester would own a Civic Center near that hospital, with a newcounty courthouse. Judge Mann had seen an architect's dream picture inthe Egypto-lavatory style, a kind of streamlined cake ofsoap—optimistic in a time when Winchester's population of 80,000 wasremaining constant while suburbs oozed in heedless growth over the[4] oncemagnificent countryside. In any case this late-Victorian-Gothic firetrapdowntown would have to serve for the ordeal of The People vs. Blake.
He shoved the black sleeve clea