The Prisoner's Dilemma

by Sean Stuart O'Connor

  Dunbeath and David Hume roared. Even Adam Smith’s face creased into a wide grin. The crisis passed.

  ‘Let me ask you this, Captain Zweig,’ continued Dunbeath as the laughter died, his humour now restored. ‘You have seen much of the world - do you not agree with me that it is the ugly force of greed that makes us what we are? Self-interest leads to more self-interest in my view. Not Mr Smith and Sophie’s belief that it leads to goodness in us.’

  ‘Well I am just a foolish sailor,’ replied Zweig, ‘but I must agree with you that greed can be so powerful that it can even overcome caution, even our fears. Let me show you something. Do you have a gold guinea, my lord?’

  Dunbeath fished in his pocket and passed a guinea to Zweig. He held it up for the table to see.

  ‘Let me auction this for you. Let us see who will give you the most for it. The only condition of the game is that the under-bidder, the next losing bid, also has to pay you as the seller.’

  Adam Smith brought his gaze down from the ceiling.

  ‘I’ll bid you a penny.’

  ‘And I’ll bid you tuppence,’ said Hume. ‘So, Mr Smith, you owe Lord Dunbeath a penny. And you have nothing to show for it.’

  The auction continued, each new bid being met by shrieks of laughter as the price went up and up and the under-bidder’s exposure grew. Eventually greed gave way to fear as the bids came closer to a pound. The party’s hilarity was partly a reaction to Smith’s shocking theory and partly a sign of end-of-an-era high spirits. And when David Hume offered more than the face value of the guinea, just so Adam Smith was committed to paying the losing amount, it seemed the funniest thing that anybody had ever seen. The wine flowed and the little group’s flushed, laughing faces as they glowed in the candlelight, showed how close their friendship had become through the trials of recent events.

  Eventually, Dunbeath glanced through the window and saw the first signs of gathering dusk.

  ‘I’m sorry that the party must end,’ he said, ‘but it approaches four and the tide will soon be at its lowest. Zweig, you must leave now if you’re to get out through the escape route. Let us go down to the cave to see you off. Sophie, perhaps you’d like to come with us to take your leave of the captain and give him any messages you may have for your family?’

  Zweig rose and warmly shook the others by the hand. There were many good wishes for the future and David Hume gave Zweig’s arm an admiring squeeze.

  ‘Goodbye, captain. I shall never forget your days on the dunes. I learnt much from watching you there.’

  Zweig went to the hall to retrieve his wet weather jacket and then joined Dunbeath and Sophie in the storeroom. Once they were there the earl leant down and lifted the corner of the flagstone. It came away and he put his hand into the hole and pulled up the large stone.

  ‘Now, captain,’ he said, ‘let me do this before we go through the cave.’

  He went to a shelf in the room where he had left two huge leather pouches and handed them to Zweig.

  ‘Here is the gold, the very finest. This bag is for Herr Kant – the debt repaid. And this other one is for as much powder, arms and ammunition as you can buy with it.’

  Zweig took the heavy sacks from him and Dunbeath then walked over to where a large piece of material was hanging from a hook. It was a cloak of black grogram lined with white silk and he handed it to Zweig with a smile.

  ‘And here is my father’s old boat cloak for your journey. Something for you to remember the Urquhain by before we meet again. I fear it will become colder as you head for Königsberg. You will need it.’

  Zweig smiled in gratitude, touched by the gesture. He shook Dunbeath by the hand.

  ‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said, ‘I shall see you again soon. Where we agreed.’

  Dunbeath nodded.

  ‘You must go now,’ he muttered. ‘We’ll help you with the boat.’ He took one of the bags back from the captain and stepped into the hole. Sophie and Zweig carefully followed him down the wet stone steps to the cave and together they gathered on the ledge at the back.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ said Dunbeath, ‘and get the boat in the water. I’ll shout when I’m on the boulder and then you follow next, Sophie.’

  Dunbeath ran through the cave towards the light at the opening. There was none of the urgency of previous sprints as the sea was flat and limpid, with the slightest of swells slopping water gently against the rocks. The oiliness of the surface and the clammy atmosphere were odd, not unlike the calm before the great storm of the Swarzsturmvogel’s sinking.

  As Dunbeath reached the mouth of the cave he clambered up the handholds on the side of the giant boulder, manhandling the gold after him. But no sooner had he climbed out of sight than Sophie turned in the half darkness of the cave and looked searchingly into Zweig’s face.

  ‘And, so you go.’ She spoke quietly. ‘But, listen. Tell me quickly. Tell me again of your choice in the Dilemma.’

  ‘You do not need me to say it, Sophie.’ Zweig held her by the shoulders. ‘I would stay silent. You know that I would always stay silent. Why would I mind if I died as long as you went free?’

  At the other end of the cave Dunbeath leant down towards the gap. He shouted in a hoarse whisper for them to come. After a few seconds there was the sound of running feet and Sophie came through the gap. Dunbeath put his arm down and pulled her up.

  There was more splashing and Zweig appeared. He swung the gold bag up to Dunbeath and then pulled himself easily up the rock. The three now stood together on the boulder.

  Dunbeath had the tender in the water with the bow pointing away.

  ‘You have no time to lose, captain. You’ll have read the weather better than me – there’s a bad storm coming and you’ll need to be in the jacht before it hits. Let’s hurry now. Hold the stern here, would you Sophie? I’ll undo the rope.’

  Zweig climbed into the boat and settled himself at the oars. Dunbeath passed him the gold and the captain stored it carefully in the bow. Sophie was on her haunches, holding the back panel while Dunbeath untied the painter from where it had been coiled around a sharp rock. He threw it down into the boat.

  Sophie rose to her feet. She looked intently at Zweig and for the shortest of seconds their eyes met. She gave an almost imperceptible nod of her head. He looked away, busy with putting the oars backwards for the first stroke.

  And then she stepped into the stern.

  Zweig pulled twice and the rowing boat was instantly ten feet from the shore. Dunbeath stared at it and then at Sophie, sitting now, gazing back at him. His face was twisted in bafflement, quite unable take in what he was seeing.

  ‘What are you doing, Sophie?’ he said in an odd voice. ‘You have got in the boat. You are not going, you know.’

  But her anguished face told him everything. She was in agony – but she had made her decision.

  ‘No, Sophie,’ mumbled Dunbeath, looking at her as she rocked on the swell, his face a ghastly mix of pain and disbelief.

  ‘No, you cannot go.’ There was a pause. ‘You cannot,’ he whispered. ‘I love you. I need you here.’

  She continued to look back, her sorrow for him clear, her face crumpled in distress.

  The little craft bobbed in the flat calm. Then Zweig dropped the oars and rose to his feet, the Urquhain cloak hanging down over his enormous frame. He bowed deeply to Dunbeath.

  ‘My lord, I wish you farewell.’

  ‘No, no!’ said Dunbeath with growing realisation and panic, his face collapsing in pain. Then, like a stricken pilgrim, he slowly dropped to his knees, his hands held out in front of him. His voice cracked as he looked pleadingly at the only two people he had ever loved.

  ‘No, Sophie! No, Alexis! Don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me. Take me with you. Please!’

  Slowly Zweig dipped the oars in the water. The distance doubled in a stroke and then doubled again. Dunbeath let out one last tortured cry. He had only one thing left to offer.

  ‘No! Please, don’t go! Ta
ke me with you! I’ll co-operate. Please, I’ll agree. Don’t defect. Please, don’t defect!’

  Chapter 31

  Dunbeath lay where he’d collapsed on the boulder, no longer looking out to the open sea and the faint outline of the rowing boat as it disappeared slowly into the distance. But, at last, an unconscious survival instinct told him he had to get to his feet and he dropped down to the gap and stumbled, weeping, through the cave. Somehow he climbed the steps and made his way to the salon.

  Smith and Hume rose immediately from their seats by the fire. One glance at Dunbeath’s wild eyes and frantic look was enough for them to know that some terrible disaster had struck.

  ‘She’s gone, Hume! She went with Zweig! Oh God, she’s chosen to be with Zweig. What am I to do, Hume? What am I to do?’

  He fell to the ground in front of them, broken and sobbing as the two men exchanged a glance before they ran over to comfort him.

  Outside, the wind was freshening and the afternoon dusk was fast turning to gloom. In the distance came a loud crack of thunder.

  * * *

  Major Sharrocks knocked and came smartly into L’Arquen’s office.

  ‘You sent for me, sir?’

  L’Arquen rose from behind his desk, dropping the letter opener he had in his hand and peeling off his gloves. He glanced briefly towards his major.

  ‘I’m going to retire now, Sharrocks. Wake me when he breaks.’

  * * *

  Hume and Smith had somehow managed to get Dunbeath onto a sofa, and he now sat there, curled over and shattered beyond any pretence of dignity. Hume had an arm around his shoulder to keep him upright and a glass of whisky ready for his lips. They looked up as the door opened and Annie stumbled into the room, her eyes red with weeping. She seemed to have aged twenty years and had clearly reverted to the oblivion she’d so often sought from drink in the past.

  ‘Master!’ she cried with a wild gasp. ‘Terrible news. Gordon McKay has come just now from Dunbeaton. They have looked everywhere for your lordship’s boat but they cannae find it! They’ve been searching these past four hours. I fear there’s no sign of your man, Makepeace either.’

  ‘What!’ shouted Dunbeath, jumping up, suddenly energised by the appalling news. ‘It must be there. I told Makepeace to anchor it in the bay. It can’t be gone!’

  Another enormous clap of thunder cracked overhead, far louder than before, as the storm broke beyond Dunbeaton’s headland with a terrifying savagery.

  ‘My God. Look at this weather! Look at this weather! Where is the boat? What will they do if it isn’t there? I must go and search for them.’

  The earl looked wildly from Hume to Smith and then ran out of the room. They heard him as he took the tower steps, two at a time, hurtling manically up to his observatory.

  David Hume looked over to where Smith sat staring towards the bow window, deep in thought.

  ‘Mr Smith. You may as well retire to your room. I shall stay up with Lord Dunbeath. I fear I have seen these signs before, many years ago when we were students. I’m afraid the shock of Sophie leaving may have pulled the trigger for another collapse.’

  But Adam Smith seemed not to have heard him and instead looked over with a feverish glint in his eye. Hume glanced up and Smith quickly turned his gaze back towards the window.

  ‘Isn’t this of the greatest interest?’ he said quickly, plainly very excited. ‘We have been playing these games, speaking all the time of our interpretations of them – and here, laid out for us to see, is the clearest example of the Dilemma in action we could ever imagine.’

  ‘Please, Mr Smith, please’ replied Hume quickly. ‘I beg you, sir. Not now.’

  ‘Do you not see, Mr Hume?’ Smith carried breathlessly on, ignoring Hume’s plea. ‘Miss Kant has done exactly as I predicted. She has chosen one man over the other. No doubt she sees in Zweig some greater qualities she wishes for her children! How very interesting this is.

  ‘And, as to the game itself, do you not also see that the captain was working to bring it to an end all the time? He knew that he was creating that rare thing: a finite event. We spoke of life as having ends that the theory did not, and here is just such a case. As for Sophie, well, did she not see the hundredth turn as she looked at Zweig’s boat? That trust and co-operation counted for nothing when her life had come to such a choice? She was finally faced with a one-time Prisoner’s Dilemma. There was no future in her thinking. There was no further need for reciprocity. We know what to expect at such a time …she could only defect.’

  ‘Mr Smith,’ repeated Hume in a broken voice. ‘I beg you once more. This can all wait until we are back in Edinburgh.’

  Adam Smith took no notice. His face was flushed and he continued hectically on, the words tumbling out.

  ‘The only thing I don’t understand is why Lord Dunbeath should be showing such concern for them. Didn’t we agree that there would be no hatred like the one we reserve for people who betray us? For the traitors in life?’

  He looked over at last to where David Hume was sitting, silent now, bent, his shoulders drooping.

  ‘Why, Mr Hume,’ Smith said in his rapid rattle, an uncomprehending half smile on his face, ‘is the smoke from the fire bothering you? Your eyes are watering.’

  Hume just looked ahead.

  ‘Please, Mr Smith, go to your room now. You are very young, sir. Yes, you are very young.’

  * * *

  David Hume stayed with Dunbeath throughout the night. At first he tried to speak to him, to ease his mind with conversation. But Dunbeath seemed not to notice. He ignored his old friend and paced backwards and forwards by the windows, muttering occasionally to himself and frantically scanning the surface of the sea with the Domenico Salva, over and over again, first with hope and then with mounting despair, the sky constantly lit by huge sheets of lightening as the storm raged above them.

  Eventually Hume dozed in his chair, but Dunbeath searched manically on, focusing and refocusing the eyepiece of the telescope. Again and again he swung it across the wildness of the open sea as mountainous waves rolled in from the blackness of the distant horizon and piled onto the shore.

  As he did so, his confused anxiety seemed to mutate into a deranged blankness, and from there to a deep, bleak sadness. Images of Sophie and Zweig came pouring out before him – Sophie smiling at him as she sat by his bed, Zweig laughing at Warleigh Point, Sophie convulsed with her giggles and dimples at the guinea auction, Zweig bellowing with laughter in the carriage after he’d beaten off the hussars, Sophie smiling. Sophie always smiling, smiling, smiling.

  * * *

  James McLeish pushed further back into the sandy crook of a dune. The storm raged unabated about him and, as the lightening lit up the bay, he could see the great breakers as they pounded the shoreline, and sheets of slashing rain rolling in towards the beach and drowning his little shelter.

  He had done as best he could the evening before, fixing an old fishing net over the natural curve of the dune and holding it up with two straight sticks. Then he’d packed grass and sand to form a roof. But this had all been useless against such a storm and he was now drenched and frozen. No sleep had been possible and he stared ahead, his lips moving and his face tight with hatred.

  * * *

  It was about three in the morning when Major Sharrocks made his way quickly up the main staircase and then down a long corridor towards L’Arquen’s bedroom. Inside, the colonel breathed lightly, sleeping peacefully in Viscount Duncansby’s fabulous state bed. But at Sharrocks’ sharp knock he was immediately awake. He pulled on a gown and went to the door.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Makepeace would like to see you, sir.’

  They made their way downstairs as the first streaks of dawn came through the large windows of Craigleven’s great staterooms. L’Arquen pushed open the door of his office and saw Makepeace slumped in the chair opposite his desk, a hand buried beneath his coat front.

  ‘Mr Makepeace,’ he said, brightly, ‘ho
w good to see you again. I understand you have spent some time with Trooper Williams. Good, good. Now, perhaps I can ask you once more, do you have any idea where Lord Dunbeath and Captain Zweig might be?’

  Makepeace could hardly speak for his pain.

  ‘They got off,’ he mumbled. ‘There was a sheet hanging from the castle. The German said it meant you were there.’

  L’Arquen’s face twitched at the memory of some past slight.

  ‘They rowed to the castle. There’s a cave there. It’s a way into the castle.’

  ‘What!’ screamed L’Arquen. ‘You mean Dunbeath and Zweig have been in the castle all this time? Why didn’t you tell me this before you treacherous bastard?’ He ran towards the chair in his fury and kicked Makepeace in the side. ‘Call yourself an Englishman? I shall finish with those two and then come back for you. Have no doubt on that matter.’

  He swung round on Major Sharrocks.

  ‘Harken, Sharrocks. Get the troop together. Now we’ll settle the score.’

  It didn’t take Sharrocks long to issue his commands and a few minutes later his men were dressed and standing by their horses in the yard, ready for the order to leave. They looked up as they heard L’Arquen clattering down the stairs and a moment later he emerged to join them, swinging his riding crop, his face set marble hard with the desire for revenge. He strode across the cobbled surface of the stable yard and stepped onto a stone riding block where a man stood, shaking slightly as he held his horse. L’Arquen mounted and lifted the crop to signal the off when, from around the side of the stable block, the sound of galloping hooves and raised voices made him hesitate.

  He lowered his arm again as a mounted rider swept into the courtyard and came to a halt in front of him, ragged and mud stained.

  ‘Colonel L’Arquen?’ the man asked, breathing hard. ‘I am a King’s Messenger, sir. I have an urgent order for you from the Prince von Suderburg-Brunswick-Luneburg in London.’

  L’Arquen tore open the order and read it. A huge smile broke over his face. He read it again and then threw his head back, bellowing in a triumphant, vicious laugh. For half a minute or more he laughed again and again as his men watched him in silence, only too aware that they were not to join in his merriment.