Vango

by Timothee de Fombelle

  In the middle of the braying pack, Ethel recognized the man she had spoken with by the thorny hedge, the rider on the black mare.

  “Earl, my dear Earl!” simpered Beth Cameron.

  “And who are you?”

  “I am Lady Cameron.”

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” said the Earl of Galich, without much regret. He was sure he’d never encountered this muddy specimen before.

  “We’ve lent our field for your horses.”

  “The field . . . ah, of course. Yes, they did tell me about that. Thank you very much.”

  “Look! Sound the horn. It’s my husband. He’s caught the stag with his bare hands.”

  A second later, a bulky shape rose up triumphantly out of the lake, and under the beating rain, Ethel could just make out that Ronald Cameron was indeed holding a live animal in his arms.

  “A sheep,” murmured the earl, scrunching his eyes.

  “Heavens above!” said Lady Cameron. “It’s a sheep.”

  My ewe! thought Ethel.

  The ewe had a broken leg. She had gotten stuck in the bog two days earlier. So it hadn’t been the sheep that had kept the hunters on the run.

  “A strange day,” the earl concluded.

  Galich had politely turned away to spare the Camerons. Even the hounds thought it was a sorry scene. They stopped barking.

  They tied the legs of the quavering animal together, and Ethel wedged it in front of the saddle on her horse and rode off.

  The hunt vanished into the fog.

  Tom Cameron had never felt so embarrassed.

  It was the first time that Paul wouldn’t be there for Christmas. His squadron had been posted to India until the rainy season.

  So Ethel went down to the village church with Mary, who dragged her along for the celebrations. She also went to please the minister, for whom she had developed a soft spot. This dated back to the time she had caught him picking mushrooms in the Camerons’ woods and hiding them in haversacks beneath his cassock.

  The church was full. And hot. The Christmas carols rang out to the far end of the village. The minister noticed Ethel sitting in the pew at the back and even put in a word for stray ewes in his sermon.

  Ethel sometimes took the minister out for a spin in her Railton. She would set him a metaphysical question or two while driving at ninety miles an hour downhill:

  “Didn’t you ever want to wear trousers?”

  The minister would burst out laughing, and Ethel would smile. Nothing she said could shock him.

  “Don’t you wonder what you’ll say, if none of it really exists after all?” she had asked him on one occasion.

  “None of what?” asked the young minister, cupping his hands close to his ear.

  “None of it, none of your stories, none of what you believe in. Heaven and all the rest . . . If it doesn’t really exist?”

  The minister started laughing again and shrugged.

  “Don’t tell anyone, but it wouldn’t much matter to me!”

  “Why?” Ethel had grilled him, narrowly avoiding going off the road.

  “I’d ask myself, would I have preferred not to believe?”

  She gave him a quizzical look.

  “What matters,” he declared midjolt, “is that I can answer this question: Would I have been happier for not believing?”

  Ethel frowned. She drove in silence for a while to mull over this response. Then, with a mounting sense of indignation, she shouted above the roaring engine, “What about my parents, then? What about them?”

  The minister fell quiet. But Ethel wouldn’t let it drop.

  “Answer me! Give me an answer!”

  He turned toward the rearview mirror. She had hoisted her pilot’s goggles up off her face. The minister was watching the tears on Ethel’s cheeks being erased by the wind and the speed. But he couldn’t say anything to make the tears go away.

  As the parishioners trooped out of the church to greet one another in the cold, Mary exchanged a few words with the mother of a girl she had taken on as third linen maid at Everland. She turned to Ethel to explain that she had just been invited to her protégée’s family for Christmas Eve dinner.

  “You don’t mind being on your own?” asked Mary excitedly.

  Ethel smiled and shook her head.

  “Why don’t you invite yourself to join in Justin’s party?” Mary suggested. “He’ll be with his family.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Are you sure? Are you quite sure?” asked Mary, who was already in the festive spirit.

  “Happy Christmas!” Ethel called out as she headed back to the castle. Her footsteps made crunching noises up the drive.

  The kitchen was lit up, and there were strains of songs coming from it.

  The entire family of Justin Scott, the cook, had traveled up from Glasgow, having requested permission to celebrate Christmas in the servants’ hall. There were forty-two of them.

  Ethel didn’t show her face. She climbed the stairs to her bedroom, got undressed, and went to bed. The rain was lashing against the windowpanes. Laughter could be heard coming from the other wing of the castle.

  She found herself staring at the canopy above her four-poster bed.

  She was alone. She had never felt so alone. She turned over and plunged her face into her pillow. The overstarched linen squeaked against her forehead.

  Ethel had been hoping for a Christmas fairy tale tonight. She had requested it silently, and with a certain sense of embarrassment, in front of the church candles. A Christmas fairy tale. Nothing else. It was ridiculous, she knew. Part of her was laughing in her funny, disillusioned way. But her hands and sheets were drenched with tears.

  Even the lost ewe had been returned to its mother in the shed. But Ethel was alone.

  When she finally got to sleep, she had a dreadful nightmare. The pounding heart of the hunted prey was coming back to her in flashes. She could dimly hear the sound of cries. It felt as if she were struggling in the undergrowth. She thought she could hear her horse whinnying and stamping its hooves in the stable. Suddenly, a steaming hound dragged a man’s body over to her.

  Gasping for air, Ethel opened her eyes.

  She got up and tiptoed over to her jacket, which was hanging in the corner.

  She felt in her pocket and took out the scrap of black material that had been torn by the hound. She stared at it for a long while, and sniffed it too. Then she opened her wardrobe and took out a hunting gun.

  Five minutes later, she was back on her horse. She had put her clothes on over her nightshirt. She had no idea what she was doing anymore. Her horse was galloping over the moor. The rain had stopped.

  She rode through woods, over streams and hills, and reached the edge of the rocks of Chaos. It was almost pitch-black. A few openings in the treetops let in a glimmer of light from the sky. She dismounted, tethering her horse to a branch. Birds flew overhead, following the heartbeat of the night.

  Ethel started to walk between the trees.

  She reached out to touch the trunks, one after another. The gun was slung across her shoulders. She went over to the rocks. The branches were swaying gently above her as if a breeze had picked up, but she couldn’t feel any air moving on her face.

  She realized that the glimmer had to be a fire in the hollow of the rocks. She was sure of it.

  She slid her hand over her shoulder to grab the gun and held it in front of her as she advanced, step by step. The branches kept on swaying above her. She approached the cave. No one. He couldn’t be far. She knew he could see her.

  Ethel hadn’t been mistaken. The animal pursued all day by the hunt was in fact a man. She had seen him in her nightmare.

  She skirted the mound of rocks in the midst of the trees as she felt her boots sinking into the mud. She stopped, retraced her steps, and shivered. Her legs felt heavy.

  At that moment, she heard a loud cracking in the branches. She looked up. A shadow was moving quickly in the tree above her. E
thel started running. The shadow moved at the same time. The forest was increasingly dense. Ethel couldn’t see where she was putting her feet. She kept bumping into tree trunks. Then she fell to the ground.

  Her hand began to tremble on the gun. She aimed it into the night sky and fired the first shot. The shadow stopped and flung itself into the void just above her.

  “No!” screamed Ethel.

  She fired her second shot at random.

  The shadow let out a cry and came crashing down, half crushing her.

  Ethel was panting, groaning, trying to push the heavy body off her chest. Her arms had gone numb. She heard an exhausted voice whisper in her ear:

  “Ethel.”

  I must be dead, she thought, and in another world, because that voice belongs to Vango.

  “Are they here, Ethel?”

  “Vango?”

  “Are they still here?”

  “It’s just me, Vango.”

  She put her arms around him, kissing his forehead and his eyes.

  “Who fired?” asked Vango.

  “It was me. Just me.”

  Ethel was sobbing and smiling at the same time. She hugged him very tightly.

  “Where have you come from, my Vango? There isn’t even any moon to see by.”

  “They’ll be back,” he said.

  “No. You’re staying with me.”

  “They’re after me. They’ll never stop coming after me.”

  “They won’t find you here.”

  “They’ve got hounds. I’m tired.”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “You’ve hurt me,” said Vango.

  “You’re the one who hurt me. I’ve been waiting for you for six whole years.”

  “I was on my way to you, Ethel. I’ve come on foot from London. And from much farther than that too. . . .”

  “Come here.”

  “They won’t leave me alone. There are so many of them. They’ve got hounds.”

  “Stay with me.”

  “I’m not mad, Ethel. But they’re closing in on all sides.”

  “I know you’re not mad. I know they’re after you.”

  “Ethel . . .”

  “You promised me, Vango. In the balloon, you promised me. . . .”

  “You’ve hurt me, Ethel.”

  “I’m the one who’s been suffering. I love you. I’m here. I love you.”

  “You’ve shot me through the arm,” sighed Vango.

  Ethel let out a shriek. She could feel the blood on her hands.

  “Vango!”

  The first bullet had gone in just above where he’d been injured in London, and he had felt the second one skim his hairline.

  She had to leave him lying on the ground to go and find her horse: she felt as if they were being torn apart.

  But nothing could separate them, not even the darkness and the forest. After gently helping Vango to climb up, she thought she must be dreaming when she felt him behind her, his arm around her waist. Then she gave her horse a sharp kick in the flanks.

  At three o’clock in the morning, the horse walked into the kitchen.

  The Scott family’s Christmas Eve party was in full swing.

  Justin had just put four spit-roasted chickens on the table, their grilled skins swimming in a pool of boiling grease.

  When the horse appeared, everyone gathered in the kitchen rose to their feet in a clamor of surprise.

  “Bandages and a doctor!” Ethel called out without dismounting. “Justin, bring water and alcohol up to my bedroom.”

  Vango had fainted against her back. Ethel guided her horse down the corridor, then coaxed it to climb the grand staircase to her bedroom.

  Mary arrived back at the castle a little later. People were running everywhere. One by one, the lights were going on in dozens of the castle’s windows.

  “Should I untie the horse from the piano on the second floor?” Peter the gardener inquired of the housekeeper without batting an eye.

  Realizing something was most definitely up, Mary began to take charge of operations. She didn’t ask who the boy lying on Ethel’s bed was, but she put herself at the doctor’s disposal.

  The doctor had arrived by car, together with his small red-haired dog. He had winced on discovering the state of Vango’s arm.

  He began by removing a bandage that Vango had tied around his own arm. The wound was infected. Vango had swum in the Thames, traveled the length of the country, slept in barns and cattle wagons. There were still pieces of glass in his skin. And the gunshot hadn’t helped matters.

  Ethel threw the bandage into a basin. As the blood spread through the warm water, she recognized the blue handkerchief. The embroidered writing was slowly being reborn. The star was shining above the V of Vango.

  How many kingdoms know us not.

  Before getting down to work, the doctor pushed Ethel out of the door and ordered his dog to stand guard. She no longer had the right to be in her own bedroom.

  Ethel lay down on a rug on the landing outside. She was still unable to sleep. She was overwhelmed by the emotion of it all. The effect was like that of rain on a mountain stream: at first, you don’t notice the rain falling on the swirling waters, but slowly it makes the water levels rise until, one fine day, the stream overflows its banks and floods everything.

  The doctor looked quite a sight when he emerged from the bedroom in the morning light. He was disheveled, his forehead was terribly pale, and his eyes were surrounded by dark circles that looked like lunar eclipses.

  Ethel rushed over to him.

  “If you want to keep him alive . . .” began the doctor, sounding very serious. He was busy unbuttoning his blood-spattered shirt on the landing. Ethel watched him pacing about half naked in front of her.

  “If you really want to keep him alive, young lady . . .”

  He took a clean shirt out of its package and put it on.

  “You’d better stop firing at him!”

  Ethel broke into a smile.

  “Is he doing better?”

  The doctor nodded as he tightened his tie. Beaming, Ethel put her hand on the door handle. The dog growled.

  “No,” said the doctor. “You’ve got to let him sleep for twenty-four hours. I don’t trust you, Miss Ethel. Don’t go in there before he’s able to defend himself.”

  At that moment, Mary appeared.

  “I’ll keep an eye on him,” the housekeeper reassured him.

  “It’s this young lady you should be keeping an eye on, ma’am!”

  The doctor whistled to his dog and headed downstairs.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Vango didn’t sleep for twenty-four hours. He slept for twenty-four days and twenty-four nights. He might even have slept for a hundred years, just like in a fairy tale, if he hadn’t found Ethel sitting next to him or standing in front of the window each time he half opened an eye.

  He had also sensed someone breathing above his face while he was asleep.

  At night, when the night-light was dimmed, to begin with he couldn’t see her kneeling close to his bed. He thought he was alone, but little by little he was able to make out the ivory white of her eyes staring up at him through the darkness.

  Vango would eat a small amount and try to take a few steps, his arm wrapped in a sheet. Then he would lie down again.

  So he woke up the following year, in the third week of January 1936.

  And then they started talking.

  It started slowly, shyly, with long pauses. When they were able to walk as far as the window together, and later to the steps leading outside, and then as far as the trees, their words increased with the number of steps they took.

  Week after week, they filled the years of silence with words.

  Ethel told him about how it had been for her, six years earlier, after their grand round-the-world trip in the zeppelin, to experience his sudden disappearance. Icy voiced, she told him about the ensuing years with her brother at Everland. Then about the time
s she had spent in Edinburgh and London, from the age of fifteen, dancing, twirling, and trying to stay awake in order to forget. Then her despair, on the day she had received a note that she’d mistaken for an invitation to a wedding at Notre Dame, and her surprise on arriving in Paris for the marriage ceremony to discover Vango lying on the cobbled square in front of the cathedral. She told him about spotting the marksman who had been standing in ambush, about the investigation, about the visits she had paid to Eckener and Boulard, about her encounter with the Cat.

  Vango, for his part, told her about his headlong flight, about all those who had fallen or disappeared around him: Father Jean, Mademoiselle, Zefiro, even Mazzetta and his donkey. He told her about his childhood, about the cliffs, about the monastery, and the fragile secret he had finally discovered: the big boat marked with a star, his mother singing, the pirates, the murder, the shipwreck. He told her about the questions that still remained, about Mazzetta’s guilty involvement, the death of the second pirate, the departure of the third for America, and the plunder that he might have taken with him.

  “Treasure!” exclaimed Ethel.

  “Why did Cafarello kill his friend? It makes me think perhaps there was something to share.”

  Vango also told her about the message signed by Ethel, containing the words “Who are you?,” which had proved such a wake-up call for him. And the shadows always there behind him that would inevitably find his trail, making him chase after zeppelins and trains and jump into rivers.

  Together, they began trying to piece together some answers to this string of mysteries.

  Toward mid-March, when Paul had just announced his imminent return from India, the occasional silence was allowed to occur between them. These silences spoke volumes. Sometimes they led the two of them all the way to the other side of Loch Ness.

  What now? That’s what those silences were saying. What now? They would look at each other, then avert their gaze.

  Ethel wasn’t wearing her heart on her sleeve. She hadn’t said “I love you” again since that Christmas Eve. They were waiting.

  One morning, sitting on a flat stone down by the loch, Ethel said to Vango, “What was the name of that donkey again?”

  “What donkey?”