The Trial of Hollis Wren – Part 2: Unfurl

He wrote the lines in a small cold room off the great hall, at a plain wooden desk, by lamplight. I will respect the Banner of the Crown. Five hundred times. His handwriting, usually tidy, wavered after two hundred. She sat in the corner with a book and did not speak for an hour. Every now and then she looked up, and he felt it like a hand laid on his back.

At the ninth bell she led him down to the Stone Cell and showed him the latch again, an ordinary iron bar, lifted with one thumb. He tested it, and it moved. He nodded. She closed the door, and the clang rang through the cellar, and the dark closed round him, and his stammer, to his astonishment, dropped away.

The cane was brief and exact. She delivered it herself, in the cell, with the lantern lit and the door ajar, thirty strokes counted aloud in his small steady voice, one, Your Excellency, thank you, and at every ten she stopped and put a hand on his shoulder and asked whether he wished to continue. He did. On the twenty-first, she asked twice. "I want to finish," he said, and she nodded, and finished, gently, to the count.

Then she left him, as the verdict said, with a blanket, a plate of bread and a jug of water. The cell was silent. He lay on the bunk and watched the lantern flicker on the vaulted roof, and felt, as he had not felt in years, entirely still.

At dawn she came down and stood in the doorway in her black coat, with the verdict in her hand, and read it aloud once more, in her slow, level voice. When she reached the last line, she stopped.

"Unfurl," said Marguerite, softly.

It was the word, and she used it for them both. She folded the verdict in half and set it on the bunk. The coat came off. She sat beside him on the narrow bed and put her arms round him.

"How are you?"

"Unfurled," said Hollis, in a shaky voice, with no stammer at all. "That's what it is, isn't it? As though something had been tightly rolled up for years."

"That is exactly what it is." She rested her cheek on his hair. "You were wonderful."

"May I burn another banner?"

"Not in public," said Marguerite, laughing. "In private, we may arrange a very small bonfire."

He laughed, and she held him, and the light came up grey and gold through the cell window.

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