The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set

by Tarn Richardson

  Alessandro could feel the muscles in his chest tighten. He could feel his heart thump inside him, sweat prickle his forehead. He took up his cup and clutched it in both his hands to hide the tremble in his fingers from the sorrow and exhaustion in his heart. The light from the lantern and the candles still burning from last night drew shadows across his face and gave him an even more grievous look. He stared into the middle distance, his coffee sitting untouched in his hands.

  “There was a woman we saw,” Tacit continued, “outside your house. Just now.”

  Alessandro quickly stared at Tacit. “Who are you?” he demanded, putting down his cup.

  “We’re from the Church,” replied Isabella, calmly.

  “The woman?” Tacit pressed, his voice growing firmer.

  “Why’d you want to know?”

  “She was here, outside your house. She was there, before the death of your brother. We need to find her. And it seems to me you know who she is.” Tacit leaned forward so that his entire weight was on his knuckles. They pressed into the creaking table beneath him and he thrust his face within inches of Alessandro’s. “And seems to me that if you know who she is and you ain’t saying then you’ve got something to hide. And hiding something in a murder enquiry, particularly the murder of your brother, is a serious offence.”

  “I need a drink,” mumbled Alessandro, a tremor in his voice. Alessandro stared at Tacit. Tacit stared back.

  Alessandro stepped away, over to the cupboard, and drew out a bottle of liquor. Tacit noticed he left the good quality cognac on the side.

  “Present from someone?” he asked, indicating the voluminous bottle.

  Alessandro ignored him. He gathered three glasses from a cupboard.

  “I won’t have any,” Isabella said.

  Alessandro ignored her.

  “Drink,” Tacit ordered Isabella, as the butcher set the glasses down on the table and uncorked the bottle. He poured three large measures into each of the glasses and pushed two of them towards the Sister and Inquisitor. He took a large swig and pulled a face against the burn. Tacit necked his in a single pull and poured himself a second.

  “Please, help yourself,” Alessandro called sarcastically.

  “I will,” he replied, filling his glass again. He proffered the bottle to Alessandro who necked the rest of his drink and set his empty glass in front of Tacit to be filled again.

  “Your brother was murdered,” Tacit began. “I’m sorry about—”

  “How did he die?” Alessandro interrupted. He finished his second glass and shook his head as the liquid scorched his insides. Tacit refilled his own.

  “Someone set upon him, beat him up. Badly. No man could have lived through what they did to him. Your brother, did he have any enemies?”

  Alessandro laughed cruelly. “Enemies? He was a fucking Priest!” He held up a hand to Isabella in apology, who shrugged it off.

  “Priests have enemies like anyone,” Tacit suggested.

  “Not my brother. He cared. Cared too much, if anything.”

  “This woman. She gave him a package, that day, before he was killed.”

  “Oh yes? Was that all she gave him?” Alessandro replied, with a smirk.

  “Your brother know a lot of women then?”

  “Lots. A lot of women attend church, you know?”

  “This woman who came to visit your brother, she was outside your house an hour ago. Who is she? She knows you, or knows where you live.” Alessandro stared into the bottom of his glass. Tacit continued. “Dark haired. Tall. Beautiful, from what I could tell. Ring any bells?”

  Alessandro necked his drink and pushed it forward for Tacit to fill.

  “Oh, I know her alright,” he said, taking back the replenished glass. “Sandrine. Sandrine Prideux.” He shook his head, almost a little sadly.

  “And how did your brother come to know Miss Prideux?” Alessandro laughed again, but their was no warmth within it. “How do you know her?” Tacit asked, changing tack.

  Alessandro shrugged. “I thought perhaps we were lovers. Perhaps my brother thought the same of her.” He sat back, his eyes lolling with the alcohol and emotion. “Sandrine, she knew a lot of men.”

  “But your brother was a Priest.”

  Alessandro laughed coldly. “That meant nothing to him, not when Sandrine was involved. She had something, you know, that power, almost a power—”

  “Over men?”

  “Over people. Something irresistible. Something … you’d do anything for Sandrine. Whoever you were.”

  “Was she his girlfriend?”

  Alessandro looked sadly down into his glass. He almost appeared to shrivel in size before the pair of them. A sadness drew across his face. “Maybe?” he said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Who wouldn’t want to be her girlfriend? She was … magnificent. Beautiful and spirited and vulnerable. Everything, rolled into one. But if he was her boyfriend, he never told me.”

  “And she lives in Arras, this Sandrine?”

  “Arras?” replied Alessandro. “She doesn’t live in Arras!” He said it like a scoff, as if he thought everyone knew of Sandrine, of where she originated from.

  “She doesn’t?” asked Isabella, stealing forward. “Then where?”

  “Fampoux,” replied Alessandro, draining his glass. He turned and looked at the Sister and the Inquisitor. “She lives in Fampoux.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  11:32. WEDNESDAY, 14 OCTOBER 1914.

  FAMPOUX. NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  Lieutenant Henry Frost had found a table which, remarkably, still had its legs after being buried in much of the wreckage of the house. He also found a chair, plain, light coloured, possessing all of its legs as well. It was a start.

  He set the two by the broken window, looking out onto a rubbled side street to the ruined houses opposite. It wasn’t much of a view, but it gave him some natural light on the unit diary as he wrote. After all, there was much to document. The artillery strike. The German trench. Fampoux. The patrol which never returned from last night’s sortie. He stopped and thought about each man who’d gone forward and never come back. He wondered what had happened to them, what the Germans were doing to them now; for surely they’d run into a German patrol themselves, or stumbled into the German front line and been taken prisoner. He hoped they were being treated well, according to the Geneva Convention, according to the morals of man. It might be war, but they were all still gentlemen.

  One thing it proved to Henry was that the Germans weren’t beaten, that they were still entrenched in the nearby land. Almost on cue, the whining shriek of a barrage sounded from the east, thundering down on the far outskirts of the village. The rolling, shrieking roar sent men tumbling and careering for cover, men who twenty hours earlier had proudly stood in the ruins of Fampoux and boasted of their invincibility, of the might of the British Expeditionary Force and the cowardice of Fritz. Now they ran, charging and plunging for their holes, like foxes from a hunt.

  The barrage was brutal and purposefully mean, an inhuman rampage of shells and explosive rounds full of venom and spite at the Germans’ loss of Fampoux. Henry sat and listened with trepidation to the falling bombs, the cries of the injured. The French boy with the perfect teeth suddenly appeared at the window, making Henry jump and curse.

  “Les Allemands viennent!” he cried and then laughed before skipping away – “The Germans are coming!”

  A cold trepidation swept over Henry. Urgently, he stood and crossed to the far window, one which gave him a better view of the land to the east of the village. There was nothing to suggest the Germans were on the charge, no grey silhouette or slow gathering of men, bayonets glinting, eyes fixed firm to the western horizon. He chuckled and gently cursed, shaking his head at the image of the boy giggling and running away. It alarmed him that he could turn from cold panic to wry humour in the split of a second. He wondered how much more this war would reveal about himself. A fly buzzed about his face and he chased it away with a hand
. Unlike the birds, which took flight at the first sound of falling bombs, the flies seemed defiantly resilient under the barrages. But they’d be foolish to leave such choice delicacies of the dead upon which to feed.

  The thought of the dead drew the question of the boy’s parents into Henry’s mind. He wondered what had become of them. It was a pointless thing to consider and Henry quickly gave up on the idea. Henry was slowly accepting that in this war, people simply vanished, never to be seen again.

  His mind turned to his own parents and his younger brother. He checked his watch and considered what they might be doing at this very moment, over the channel, back in Britain. He supposed his father Thomas would be at work at Flitchards, studiously studying lines of accounts, estimating dividends, calculating profit margins and expenditure for the company’s clients. Later he would leave for home, a short walk through the Cathedral grounds of Salisbury into Harnham and the small family home on the river.

  Thomas would spot his teenage son Ralph hanging by an arm from his favourite tree, or doing something equally ridiculous in their garden, as he reached the apex of the bridge across the River Avon, and he’d be considering whether he had time to slip into the Rose and Crown for a quick half before supper was on the table. His mother Ethel’s meals were legendary. It was said she could make a feast out of a famine. Henry licked his lips unconsciously and heard his stomach groan.

  A bitter longing for home came over him. He’d been away from home with the army many times before. After all, he was a professional soldier. It was his life now. But he’d never been out of the country for so long in such conditions. Whenever he returned home, he secretly cursed the cramped living conditions, the sterility of the life presented, its regimented sameness, and couldn’t wait to leave. Now, it was all he wished to know.

  To the backdrop of the falling bombs, he sat down at his desk and began to write: detailing the capture of Fampoux, the digging of trenches beyond the village’s reach, the lack of resistance from the German forces, the fact that you could now turn around and see the joint British and French line behind you whilst Pewter’s unit was moving ahead. The thought both charged and concerned Henry. Great gains had been achieved but, having moved forward, he was painfully aware they had pushed ahead of the accompanying lines either side of them. They were exposed on three sides, as if they had forced themselves forward into the jaws of the enemy, and at any time Fritz could take a bite.

  He wrote with conviction, his tongue always firmly wedged between his teeth, his studious eyes fixed to the paper. He recalled the endless hours of handwriting practice, the sharp bite of the cane from the master when a character ran over a line, when a word was misspelled. How he had hated handwriting lessons at Winchester. But, as he looked proudly at his manuscript in the pale light of the Fampoux sun, he had a new-found appreciation for them and the tyrannical master who corrected mistakes with corporal punishment.

  This was how Sandrine found him, bent over the diary recording the developments in the unit, when she walked into her home. Henry nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of her and reached for his revolver.

  At first he thought her grey with age, courtesy of chalk dust, until she began to beat the dust out of her hair. He was instantly smitten by her loveliness, despite her bedraggled appearance. There was a flair and easy style about how she stood and held herself, about how she moved.

  “Who are you?” she demanded curtly in French, one hand still on the edge of the door in case a sudden escape was required. Despite many hours in the tunnels between Arras and Fampoux, her senses were still honed, her mind full of distrust, her heart still beating hard within her chest. She’d cursed herself for her stupidity at returning to Alessandro’s house. Returning for what? For a loving reunion with him? As soon as she’d been told of Andreas’ death she knew, somewhere and somehow, things had gone badly. To have gone back to his house had been too foolish a thing to have done. She’d found the body in the crypt, she’d seen the wounds with her own eyes. What was to be gained by returning to Alessandro? To tell him the truth, that no heart attack had killed his brother? She’d chastised herself for her good heart. She knew she had a responsibility, which stood above any such reckless care.

  For all she knew, Alessandro was now probably dead too. Had she been a moment slower in recognising the danger in that street, she too might have been dead. The Priest and the Sister, they looked like killers, particularly the Priest. The net had closed. There was no question in her mind that they’d come to that place in the hope of finding her, perhaps to kill her, to silence her and the plans she’d helped to put in place. She’d experienced the ruthlessness of the Catholic Church first hand. She knew when it acted, it acted without emotion or hesitation.

  When she’d pulled herself out of the tunnel hole into the light of Fampoux, her mind was still a rage of doubt and worry. How much had the Church uncovered? How much did they know of the plot? But she knew there was nothing that could be done. She just prayed that the plan still did remain undiscovered, unchanged.

  Henry put down his pencil and brushed at his clothes. The fly returned and Henry rather impressed himself by catching it in the snatch of a hand.

  “Lieutenant Henry Frost,” he said, proffering his other hand and a smile.

  Sandrine ignored it.

  “What are you doing in my house?”

  “Your house? Oh sorry. Uh, writing,” he replied, hesitantly in French. He stepped to one side and indicated the open tome on the table.

  “Writing? Writing what?”

  “Our achievements.” Henry shrugged and felt foolish and arrogant to have used such a word. “Events, in our unit’s life.”

  “British?” Sandrine enquired. It was a silly question. She could tell from his accent he was as British as bowler hats and pipe smoke.

  “Yes.” Something about the woman transfixed him. He watched her shake herself down. “Have you …” He stopped. “I am sorry, my French is not that good.”

  “Then you should have tried harder at school,” Sandrine retorted in English for the first time, tying her hair back in a plait, once she was sure as much of the chalk dust as possible had been removed.

  Henry laughed.

  “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I should. I apologise. I was just going to ask, have you climbed out of the ruins? You look, well, dusty?”

  Sandrine ignored him. She was stepping her way slowly through the house, her hand to her mouth in horror.

  “I’m sorry,” called Henry, stepping after her. “I haven’t had a chance to tidy up.”

  The Germans had made a mess of Sandrine’s home. It seemed that everything they could ransack or damage they had. The windows had been smashed in, doors splintered. Every piece of furniture had been pushed over and emptied, all Sandrine’s belongings ripped out, torn and hurled around the place. A dreadful stench hung in every room so stubbornly, it was as if the awful odour had actually seeped into the very fabric of the building.

  The Germans seemed to have taken delight in wanton destruction, every plate in the house used and then thrown into a wall, every glass smashed. She stepped through into the pantry, her shoes crunching on the broken crockery as she went, and, as expected, she found the shelves stripped bare, all her jars and pots of carefully stored produce, her curing meats and vegetables gone.

  She had stayed longer than most of the residents in the village when the Germans had first appeared on the horizon, a reluctant hurrying stream of refugees pouring out from Fampoux to the west. She hadn’t wanted to go. She was needed in Fampoux. She had errands. She’d watched the slow progression of people tread past her house, residents driving their carts and livestock in ragtag clumps of a fleeing nation: the cranking turn of a wagon wheel, a low moan from their livestock, the shrill cry of a terrified infant. There was rumour of dark happenings within villages further east when the Germans arrived; tales of rape and torture as the invaders looked to gather information as to what lay ahead of them and take possessi
on of what they could.

  “Come away, Sandrine!” villagers had called to her, as she stood at the doorstep of her home. “Come with us before they arrive.”

  She’d watched the Germans’ appearance on the horizon, the vague outline of a vast black army, trundling forward with their huge machines and their innumerable grey and black clad soldiers, rifles slung across shoulders, Pickelhaubes shimmering in the late summer sun. At first, barely audible above the cacophony of panicked cries and screams from those residents who had stayed, the sound of music came. As it grew louder, people stopped in their dashing about to gather their belongings and escape and, instead, turned and looked in the direction from where it was coming, out along the main road east towards Fampoux. Now the music was ringing out clearly in the air of the summer morning, music from a marching band, the voluptuous thump of the bass drum, the shrill heights of the piccolo. A man shouted out ‘The Faithful Hussar’ and all heads turned in wonder towards this army who were playing songs as they conquered.

  Row upon row of soldiers, dressed in sharp uniforms, short boots of black untanned leather, huge knapsacks straining at the seams, picks, spades and other utensils clanking from straps of the backpacks, rifles slung over shoulders, marched up the road in precise and efficient lines. At their front marched a military band, boots gleaming, instruments glinting in the early morning sun. As they neared the village, a great crowd of residents waiting for them caught hold of the tune and joined them.

  So it was that the Germans took Fampoux, amid cheering and singing from the residents who stayed.

  But quickly the Germans had rounded up those who had stayed behind and interrogated each of them to find out what they knew of the defences ahead, who they were and what they could offer in the village. Four men were taken out into the main square and shot without hesitation when they refused to part with information deemed pertinent to the war effort. Only a few women had stayed with their husbands or out of loyalty to their village. That evening, as the officers billeted themselves within residences, they took turns raping those women who had stayed behind, as a means of recovering and recuperating from their long and arduous push across France. The husbands, if not shot for resisting the crimes beforehand, had been forced to watch and then taken to the main square and shot afterwards.