The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  Vogel had understood. He was running down the hillside, shouting to the boy as he came, and the hill was suddenly alive with Serse’s People, some going in the direction of the gas chamber, but others running away. The boy who had fired the petrol-stick had flung it to the ground and he was stamping frantically at the flames, but even through the panic, Isarel could see that it was still burning, and at any minute – oh dear God, at any second – the gas chamber would blow.

  He reached the steel doors at the same instant as Vogel himself, and by now uncaring of who and what Vogel was, dragged at the bolts. As the doors yielded, thick choking carbon monoxide and petrol fumes belched out and Isarel staggered back as if he had been hit, gasping.

  But Vogel did not hesitate. He went forward, as if he was mad or possessed, his hands raised above his head in blind consuming fury. Isarel, still gasping and half-blinded, received a brief dreadful glimpse of another man who had stormed like this, and who had held dark sinister sway over a nation, and who had pursued a cruel warped dream of creating a perfect race . . .

  There was just time to think: Vogel’s going inside, he’s going into the gas chamber to get Ahasuerus, and Isarel heard Ciaran coming towards them, shouting to them to get clear.

  The words were lost. There was an explosion of sound, and a huge, ear-splitting crackle. A livid wall of scarlet and yellow flame shot upwards, searing their vision. Half of the hillside burst open, and showers of earth and boulders and huge burning clods rained down upon them.

  A terrible scream from within the gas chamber rent the air, and in the seconds before Isarel blacked out completely, a figure that had been huddled on the other side of the doors, fell forward and lay on the ground.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  A pall of black smoke hung over Eisenach Castle, and the acrid stench of burning was still thick on the air as Ciaran and Kate walked slowly out of the Black Duke and up the narrow cart-track. The castle itself was untouched: grim and forbidding against the morning sky, and the gaping hole where the underground rooms had been was not visible from this side.

  ‘Over,’ said Ciaran, stopping halfway up the track. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Kate stared up at the rearing outline, and shivered, pulling her coat about her. ‘I think so. I hope so. Yes, of course it is; it has to be. Vogel’s certainly dead. We saw his body.’

  ‘And several of his people.’

  ‘Yes.’ She was still watching the dark silhouette. ‘Some people might think Vogel got his come-uppance very neatly.’

  ‘The cleansing flames?’ said Ciaran, a note of amusement in his voice. ‘And you a cynic and a sceptic, Kate.’

  ‘I know one thing,’ said Kate. ‘Moira was right when she said Ahasuerus never intended to harm any of us. He’d tried to get Jude to the outer door, hadn’t he? Where the air would stay fresher.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ciaran softly. ‘We can’t know exactly, but I think he had.’

  ‘Even when Ahasuerus was trying to reach me while I hid in the ovens,’ said Kate, repressing another shiver, ‘even then, he was trying to help – I see that now. If he could have called out, he would have done. But he had no knowledge of our modem speech—’

  ‘And perhaps speech was difficult for him anyway,’ said Ciaran carefully. ‘He had been dreadfully mutilated already.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kate felt a coldness, remembering the thin, pale mask with the eye-slits. How had Ahasuerus really looked? She said, ‘I’d like to have seen him as he really was. I mean at the very beginning.’

  ‘In first century Jerusalem.’

  ‘Yes, Moira saw him, didn’t she? That’s why she wouldn’t say much about him.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Ciaran softly.

  ‘The priest and the lover and the rebel.’ Kate glanced at Ciaran. ‘Maybe I’m not quite such a cynic as I like to think. I should like to have seen Jude as a young man, as well. He must have been pretty astonishing.’

  ‘He was pretty astonishing in the underground room,’ said Ciaran.

  ‘Yes. Moira was absolutely spellbound, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Moira,’ said Ciaran, ‘is spellbound by Jude’s grandson, only I’m not sure if she’s wholly realised it yet.’

  ‘I noticed that as well. It’s mutual, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is. And if anything comes of it, they’ll have battles royal, because Isarel doesn’t know yet what kind of cat he’s got by the tail.’

  ‘They’ll love every minute of it,’ said Kate, smiling.

  She looked up at him, and Ciaran said softly, ‘And now what about us, Kate?’

  ‘Is there an us?’ Kate had known they must have this conversation since approximately three o’clock in the morning when, exhausted by the police interrogations, and still filthy from the smoke of the explosion, she had climbed wearily into bed at the Black Duke. She turned to face him, searching his expression. ‘You’re going back, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re going back to Curran Glen.’

  There was a long silence, and then Ciaran said. ‘Yes. I’m going back.’ He looked at her. ‘And so, I think, are you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To Richard?’

  ‘To Richard,’ said Kate. ‘There was never really any other option, Ciaran. I wish there could have been.’

  ‘I liked him very much,’ said Ciaran, his eyes on her.

  ‘Yes. I like him very much as well.’

  Ciaran paused, and then said gently, ‘My darling girl, I don’t believe anything else was ever really possible. I wish it could have been. If we had been different kinds of people—’

  He stopped, and Kate said, ‘The trouble is neither of us could compromise. And certainly neither of us believe that a promise can be qualified. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Whether you make the promise to God or to a husband, you don’t say, Yes, I’m going to make this promise and I’m going to keep it, but only so long as such-and-such doesn’t happen.’ She made an impatient gesture. ‘Since Richard’s accident there’ve been one or two—’

  ‘Adventures?’

  ‘That’s as good a word as any. Yes, adventures. But they didn’t mean anything. They wouldn’t have happened – at least I don’t think they would have happened – before the accident. And they didn’t touch what I felt for Richard. I kept the vow according to my own lights.’

  ‘“To thine own self be true.”’

  ‘Yes, exactly that.’ Kate thought she should have known that Ciaran, with his quick intuitive mind would understand.

  ‘But you – you’d be dangerous,’ she said. ‘You’d walk into my mind and you’d take it over. You’d smash everything up, the fragile relationship I’m managing to sustain with Richard—Forcing him to stay hopeful, at times simply forcing him to stay alive—’ She stopped and then said, ‘I can’t leave Richard – I can’t ever leave him. I think I can allow myself the occasional fling – I don’t think that’s breaking the rules – but you wouldn’t be just a fling. You’d be so overwhelming that I wouldn’t have any mind left for anything else. I’d be breaking my own rules.’

  ‘Dishonouring the vow.’

  ‘Trust a religious to put it in a high-minded way. But yes. Even if you—dishonoured your own vow, I couldn’t do it, Ciaran. And,’ said Kate, ‘I don’t think you will. I don’t think you could square your conscience with—what ought I to call it? Revoking? Renouncing?’ She looked at him, and waited, as if saying: all right, that’s my side: now it’s your turn.

  Ciaran said, ‘Since entering Curran Glen there’ve been one or two ladies who’ve tempted me. And I have to be honest and say that several times I’ve come dangerously close to abandoning celibacy. But those ladies didn’t—impinge on my mind. They certainly didn’t seriously endanger my vow to God. But you did. The barriers went down when we were both trapped in the underground room, but I don’t dare let them down any further, Kate.’

  He stopped, as if considering whether he should say any more, and Kate said, ‘That’s the strength of the vow, isn’t
it? Sometimes you have to fight to stay inside Curran Glen, but it’s a fight you want to win.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you remember me?’

  ‘Every day. And,’ said Ciaran, and then the sudden, slant-eyed glint showed, ‘also every night, may God forgive me. I’ll pray for you, of course.’

  ‘Well—thank you.’ Kate found this disconcerting, but she managed not to show it. He’s retreating, she thought. He’s deliberately drawing the folds of his monastic life around him. Get you gone, lady, you get no more of me . . . I can’t think of a single thing to say. All the rivers of sorrowing verse written, all the torrents of anguished sonnets penned down the ages, all the scholars and the poets and the philosophers who wrote their scalding words about parting, and I can’t find a single thing to say to him.

  But he made it easy for her. He took her hands and looked down at her very intently, and said, ‘You will be in my thoughts and in my prayers for a part of each day, Kate. May God bless you always, my darling girl.’ His eyes were serious and intent, and Kate stared at him. This is how I shall remember him. In the months and the years ahead when I have to force Richard to live and hope, and endure more operations and re-enter the world, this is how I shall remember Ciaran. Not as the charismatic Irish monk, silver-voiced and far more worldly than is strictly safe for him, but as the man of God. The committed devout religious. Praying for me, praying that God – his God – will bless me.

  As they walked slowly down the road, Kate said, ‘Do you know, I feel extraordinarily light-headed. It’s a bit like being drunk.’

  ‘Ah, you’re suffering from a rush of morality to the soul,’ said Ciaran promptly. ‘It’s a wonderful feeling: it comes from the awareness of self-virtue and the gift of chastity, although as somebody once said, that’s a thing I wouldn’t have as a gift—’ He smiled at her, and Kate thought: it’s going to be all right. I think I’m going to cope. And then, with sudden angry determination: of course I’m going to cope.

  They walked back towards the Black Duke. Richard was flying out to join them; if his plane had been on time, he might be there already. He might be waiting for me, thought Kate, with a sudden uplifting of her emotions.

  There was an unexpected balm in the knowledge that Richard would be waiting for her.

  Finale

  The windflowers and the wood anemones had thrust their way out of the ground, and the jagged tear in Eisenach Castle’s western side had already been softened by a sprinkling of bellflowers and primroses.

  Memories skinning over, thought Isarel, standing in Eisenach’s massive marble and gilt hall. Wounds healing and ghosts banished.

  The ghosts were still here, of course; they might fade in time, but they would never quite go. Isarel could feel them crowding into the already-packed hall, jostling for place with the living, as if they were saying: but we have as much right to be here as all of you! We made the past and we created the present, and this is our night as much as anyone’s!

  It was a night for ghosts and it was a night for memories to be unrolled and spread out like faded cobwebby tapestries.

  It was a night when, if you could reach out and scoop up a handful of the atmosphere, you would find that cupped in your hands were old agonies and new loves and ancient curses and lingering bitternesses.

  And threading it all together, the haunting, legend-drenched music.

  And if you could really have taken that pot-pourri handful of tonight’s ambience, you might also have received a full-volt electrical shock, for Eisenach Castle was so heady with anticipation and excitement, it was thrumming with such expectancy, that every brick seemed to be sizzlingly alive.

  In the great domed roof the newly cleaned chandeliers sparkled and coruscated, illuminating the trailing microphones and TV leads and camera flexes. The cameras and the microphones and the spotlight-hung gantries were jarringly out of place here, of course, and they were violently at war with the ghosts, but they had been unavoidable. Every TV station and radio station from three continents had bid for a place here tonight; every branch of the media had been determined to capture tonight’s concert for all time. Reputations might be made or ruined out of tonight’s events.

  ‘The cameras will capture the living,’ said Moira softly, at Isarel’s side. ‘But I’m glad that the ghosts will elude them.’

  It was comforting that Moira could feel the ghosts as well; Isarel thought he ought to have realised she would be aware of them, but he was grateful to her for acknowledging them, nevertheless.

  Champagne was standing ready in ice-buckets in the ballroom beyond the hall, and it was Clicquot and Bollinger because anything else would have been unthinkable. The long table had been carefully and lavishly set by the deferential caterers, and there were glistening salmon and trout on beds of crushed ice; lobsters and quail in aspic, silver dishes of Beluga caviare and Perigord truffles; foie gras and out-of-season fraises des bois.

  Hothouse flowers were banked against the orchestra’s platform, and the heady scents mingled with the expensive perfumes of the female guests. Isarel did not know whether the gowns were Worth or Dior as once they would have been, but he thought that most of the exclusive designer houses of today’s haute couture would be represented.

  He was scarcely aware of taking his seat below the orchestra’s platform, along with Kate and Ciaran and Richard and Lauren, and when Moira put her hand on his arm, and said softly, ‘The orchestra’s tuning up,’ he felt the present blur and fuse with the past again. I’m going back once more, he thought. Only this time it’s different.

  As the Deputy Leader gave the A from the gleaming ivory and black Bluthner, the babble of talk and laughter and the hum of speculation stopped as abruptly and as completely as if a door had been slammed shut.

  There was a spatter of polite applause for the Leader who came quickly into the hall, acknowledging the audience with what was very nearly apology, as if, despite his knighthood and his long distinguished career, he knew himself necessary but unimportant tonight.

  Every eye was turned to the stair now, and the anticipation had returned, a hundredfold. The suspense was building up and up, becoming a tangible thing, stretching out and out . . . Unbearable, thought Isarel.

  And then, between one heartbeat and the next, he was there. Standing at the head of the sweeping marble and gilt stairway, exactly as he had stood fifty years earlier. Judas returning . . . Jude Weissman, avenged and revenged . . . This is it, thought Isarel, staring at the thin, upright figure. This is it, the justification, the vindication, the single, marvellous moment when all of those years are going to be swept aside, and when an evil reputation is going to be smashed once and for all, and a new one forged out of a dark romantic exile. Take this moment and hold on to it, because never in the whole of your life has there ever been anything like it, and never, not if you live to be a hundred, will there ever be anything like it again.

  Jude was moving forward: assured and elegant in the sharp formal evening clothes, walking sufficiently slowly to recall the torture of Auschwitz, but exuding that remarkable charisma, radiating the astonishing confidence. Arrogant! thought Isarel, feeling a thick choking knot of emotion start to form in his throat. He’s milking it of course. Playing to the gallery. I don’t blame him one bit. He’s stunned the audience into silence but at any second, they’ll erupt. It’ll be like uncorking a huge bottle of the creamiest, fizziest, most vintage champagne in the world. Yes, I was right, here it comes . . .

  Jude was halfway down the stair when the silence broke, almost hesitantly at first, as if no one dared shatter the spell, and then gathering momentum, erupting into a great deafening wave of sound, a mammoth shooting fountain of emotion that went up and up, louder and louder, finally bursting in a great firework explosion of delight that cascaded across the ceiling and showered over the entire hall. People shouted and cheered, and overhead spotlights flared and cameras swung and TV and radio announcers gabbled delightedly.

  Jude reached the f
oot of the stair calmly and stood facing the cheering throng, as composed as a cat, his eyes raking the assembly, a smile curving his lips.

  Isarel was between Moira and Kate, both their hands clinging to his, and he could feel the tears pouring down his face and he knew that Moira and Kate were crying as well, openly and unashamedly, and he knew that probably every person here tonight was close to tears by now.

  As the house rose to its feet, Jude bowed with perfect courtesy and unruffled poise, and smiled again, almost as if he might be saying: ah yes, this is how I remember it, and then walked with slow careful tread to the waiting Bluthner.

  The cheering and the applause stopped at once, and the silence came down again. Isarel saw Jude’s eyes narrow in concentration, and knew that for him the years of exile might almost never have been, and that there was nothing in the world for him save the music. The music saved me, he had said. The music kept me sane.

  The leader looked to Jude, and lifted the baton. And then the downbeat was given and Jude’s hands came down on the Bluthner’s keys. The music, the marvellous, soul-scalding music that had pulled a dazzling, rebellious High Priest from beyond the grave, that had cuckolded a Cremona lute-maker and charmed a Tudor King, that had fooled Nazis and helped lead Jews to safety, flooded the ancient castle, as, fifty years after he had first entered Eisenach, Jude Weissman again played the Devil’s Piper.

  Epilogue

  The BBC newsreader came out of the meeting preceding the evening’s news bulletin, and sat down at his computer terminal, assembling his notes and his thoughts.

  There was the usual depressing procession of items. The Economy failing, the Government making contradictory statements, the latest round of peace talks in places with unpronounceable names . . .