by Claire North
Like me, she had taken pains to affect a disguise. Gone was the beautiful woman I had known. Gone was her pride, her haughty manner, her joy and her delight. Instead, a beggar stood crooked outside the music hall on a Thursday night as the wind bit in sideways down the bustling street, hustling for coins, stooped and shrouded in a shawl, head down and knees knocking, and she was Margot, come for Albert’s child, as she always would. Descending from the evening’s pantomime, from the painted revelry and the shrill mockery of the year’s events, from the parody of the costermonger’s warbling and the high kicks of the petticoat girls, came Albert, Flora, their child and their silent entourage sweeping the crowd for the danger that they want to come and the truth of their hearts is…
Complicated. Love, fear, guilt, excitement, dread, hope, hate – Flora hopes that her husband will remember what it is to love again; Richard is bored, things simple as only a child can be; and in Albert, such a maelstrom. To look at it, for a moment I thought it might break my heart, the lines between his heart, my heart, her hearts, all our hearts are breaking.
Their guards… their captors, if you will… have only one thought in mind: find the woman, find the man. It is a pity they cannot kill us on sight, but their orders are to shoot us in the knees before they aim for the chest.
Margot knows all this too, as surely as I, watching this huddle as they descend the steps. Their passage sweeps them across the street towards the wider thoroughfares of High Holborn and Kingsway, and as they pass, her eyes follow, and our eyes meet, and here we are.
Langa is here, and I cannot lie. I cannot lie but I do not know how to tell you this in words. We stood apart, she and I, in the middle of the London street, in the city where it had all begun. Coman, the Nineteen, and at her back was the shadow of the daughter who died, and at mine came the boy who burnt by the boab tree, and between us spun the hearts of men, oblivious to our communion, and their truths were…
Cold but hand warm in the touch of the one I love and
hungry but filled to the brim with a thousand other feelings, swept up in the brush of snow the sound of laughter the taste of winter’s air the brush of wool the weight of feet upon stone
frightened, angry to be alone.
For a little moment, when the shadows come, there are no people walking through the world from the cradle to the grave. There are no men or women, no young or old. We exist in an instant balanced in togetherness, sharing the heat, the cold, the air and the earth of this moment, the songs of every heart, our songs; their sorrows, our sorrows. The bitter stories that make up the heart of men strive always for some clean repose, some simple solution, and make of their needs realities that melt as quick as snow. Now this is truth, and now it is not. Now we must believe, and now we have forgotten all that we were, and in every moment our lives dissolve into something new and who we were yesterday is vanished as quickly as who we were in this instant when we breathed out, and only in the eyes of strangers do we see ourselves, and only in the hearts of men do we know the meaning of the words we utter as if they were truth. Man’s mind swirls in contradiction, striving for ever to settle on truth, truth, truth, to find an absolute that it may sit in for perpetuity, blessed at last with a stone that stands constant against the turning of the tide, and never finds it, for in man’s heart there is no truth at all, only seeking, picking, wondering, and on a very rare occasion, the meeting of another’s eyes.
So we looked.
And our shadows came.
And for a moment, we were one.
And I knew at last what I had wanted to know since I had met her: that there was no such thing as simple as the story-teller’s love in her, that love was a tangled measure of a thousand different things, and that sometimes there was a word called love that she knew and understood, and then sometimes it was gone, and she could not master it, and being unmastered, she longed to let it go, and then thinking of it, it came again.
Perhaps, when Doireann came, her shadow would kill me.
Perhaps she would at that.
For a while, in coming to London, Margot had toyed with it, and at the last moment shied away from taking her daughter’s blackened hand.
And in that way too, perhaps she loved me. Perhaps that mercy was enough.
And finally, we were out of time, for she knew my heart as surely as I knew hers, and knew how things had to end.
So seeing, she reached the only conclusion left, and pulled a pistol from her pocket, and marched into the street.
No time for curses, no place for dark ritual or the death of children.
She had eyes only for Albert, her gun levelled at the back of his head, and God help me, I stood by and would let her do it. Her hate was mine; she had caught it from me, and in a way she was being kind too, killing the father that the son might live. I didn’t want it, I wanted it, I was horrified, I couldn’t look, I wanted it, forgive me God, forgive me, forgive me my heart, a man stood by the boab tree as an innocent boy burnt, and all these years later, these many, many years later, an old man would watch the woman he loved shoot another in the back of the head, and nothing had changed, and nothing had changed, and nothing had changed, and the world burnt.
She didn’t get close enough to pull the trigger.
The jaws of the Nineteen snapped shut around her as soon as the pistol was drawn from the folds of her tattered, muddy skirt. One man cried “Gun!” and another barrelled Richard to the ground, thinking the child the target of the attack. Albert began to turn, and in credit to what little humanity he had left, the realisation of what he had done nearly floored him. After all that scheming, all that fantasy and dreaming of what he would do with Margot in his hands, the reality now stood before him – that a woman was coming to kill his son. It didn’t even occur to him that she would kill him, so fixated was he upon his child. It was as if he had never seen his boy before. Certainly, he had a son, and that son was beautiful, and clever, and talented, and he loved him inasmuch as any father must. But he had not been a living creature of free mind and independent feeling, a breathing soul as beauteous as any angel, until the moment that his life was in danger of being extinguished. Then, for that second of revelation, Albert saw just what a lacklustre father he had been, just how far from the path of righteousness he had strayed; but all too late, it’s all too late you came too late Albert came too late and you know it coming going coming going he’s coming and you came too late!
When Albert realised the pistol was aimed for him, he was so surprised he didn’t move.
Which was why he barely blinked when his nearest guard, a man by the name of Young, who had served some time in the military and had ceased to be alarmed ever since a man with a knife had nearly taken his ear off in Burma over a business with some chickens, shot Margot in the leg, and then, as she stumbled, hit her round the side of the head with the butt of his gun, breaking her jaw and two of her teeth, before stamping on her wrist and snatching the weapon away from her as she fell.
Now the street got about the business of running. Most ran away, a busy, chaotic affair of crowds unsure which way to go, of steaming breath and slipping, slithering feet on cracked black ice. Flora had Richard round the waist and was half carrying him with remarkable speed any direction but that of her husband, while Albert was knocked to the ground by his own escort for fear of a second assailant. I ran for Margot. It was not an intelligent decision, nor was there a plan. It is perhaps one of the stupidest choices of my life, and yet one of the very few I am even remotely proud of it, for all that it achieved nothing.
I had to push and shove and stumble my way through a tide of humanity that flowed the opposite way, elbowing and cursing, so that by the time I reached the scene, Albert was half recovering, crawling back to his feet. The tumult of people gave me a little cover, and I caught the military man square in the back with a kick that made my hips creak in the cold, sending him sprawling face-down into the ground. Another man, who looked like he might be vaguely involved in proceedings, r
eceived an elbow in the face, followed by a remarkably successful punch to the throat, both of which floored him, wheezing and bloodied, long enough for me to reach down and hook one of Margot’s arms across my shoulders, dragging her halfway to her feet. She nearly made it all the way up before her weight gave beneath her again, and I sagged, off balance and panting, only for a hand to reach out from behind me and grab me by the hair. Cursing, I tried to catch hold of the arm that pulled me from her, managed to fumble my way to what felt like someone’s eye, tried to dig a finger in, felt the face at my back lurch away and the grip on my skull briefly slacken, before something hit me in the ribs hard enough for blue powder to burst into flame across my eyes, and a pistol was pressed into the side of my neck.
“Calmly, William, calmly,” panted Albert, though he was as calm as a steam engine about to burst. “Calmly!”
I half shrieked some animal noise, I don’t entirely know what, buckled against him, felt an arm slither across my throat, nearly choking me, kicked and scrambled and half fell in the grip that held me, dragging whoever was at my back down too, felt another arm grab for my flapping limbs, another for my feet.
In the end, three men pulled me down, largely through the exercise of sitting on my limbs and back until I finally understood that I couldn’t shift them. That, more than any pistol, silenced me, as much as a loss of breath, and cheek to stone I lay beneath them, not three inches from Margot’s gaze as she regarded me.
And the truth of her heart was that I was an idiot, and she was glad, and she was glad that she would die this way, and she was glad that there would be an end, and she wished she had killed Alfred, and she hoped that Doireann killed me soon, so that I need not be afraid any more, and she loved me, and she had never really loved me, and things were never simple in the hearts of men.
She knew the truth of my heart too, and knew what would be done, and smiled a little as they picked her up and carried her away.
At least, she thought, this way she would be a different kind of monster.
Then Albert’s face was where hers had been. He squatted on all fours opposite me, and gazed into my eyes, so that I might see the truth of his soul. He tried very hard in that moment to imagine what it would be like when he cut off her hair. He yearned for me to feel, as he had felt, the sudden wet release of the drill as it popped through skull; the satisfaction as he prised away bone, the texture of brain beneath knife. He wanted me to know the texture of little pieces of it in your fingers, how it stuck to your skin, before you wiped it away into the glass dish at your side.
This was his intention, but the heart feels more clearly than it thinks, and all I really knew was that he was more angry than he had ever been, not at me, but at himself, and ashamed to have called himself a father, and being as he was angry and ashamed, he could not begin to look himself in the eye or think clearly, and so turned his hatred onto the world, as an easier target for his self-loathing. In time, that would become a habit for him, filling his soul with hate. Only when Richard lost his legs did Albert remember again that he was the villain, and he was ashamed.
Luckily for him, Langa was near enough that I knew the rest, and he saw it in my face and the way I struggled against his men, and heard it in my screaming, and this done, stood up quickly, and went to follow Margot’s stretcher to her end.
Chapter 75
For a while, they kept me in a locked room in I knew not where, and I was grateful for that, because Langa was coming. As long as he reached me before they could drill a hole in my head, I was grateful.
Then they moved me, and I screamed until they hit me enough to stop me screaming.
The Nineteen had a Model T.
I had never been in a car before. I found the whole experience incredibly uncomfortable and unnerving. For a moment I understood the baron’s distrust of all this new-fangled machinery.
The car stopped and started many times, and they blindfolded me and threw me in the back like a piece of luggage, and we drove for a little over an hour in teeth-rattling discomfort. There was some sort of gap in the floor of the boot, so that whenever we bounced over a puddle or melted pool of snow, I was splashed in the shoulder and side of the face with filthy frozen water, and several times the engine just stopped altogether and the driver got out to shout at the contraption.
When at last we stopped for good, it was on a muddy path in the middle of a ploughed, blackened field. I was hauled out by a man dressed in grey, flat cap upon his brow, long, white scar across his right hand, and deposited by the steaming, smoking front of the vehicle.
I waited, as grey clouds rushed overhead and the carrion pecked over the last stems of winter grass. Then another car pulled up, protesting at every bounce and rattle, moving no faster than a walking pace, the driver cursing every inch. Albert was swathed in coat and scarf, a bowler hat on his head. He opened the door and stepped out into soggy ankle-deep mud, scowled, cursed the car again, tried to compose himself, and walked towards me.
I waited, shivering, watching, listening to his heart. His eyes tracked me as he walked round to my side, then stayed on mine as he stood before me. Then lowered for a moment, then came back to my face. Then he knelt down in front of me, and held out his right hand, palm up.
“Is he near?” he asked. “Is he coming?”
His hand floated before me, fingers open, slightly bent by their own construction. I found myself listing muscles of the hand, flexor pollicis brevis, opponens pollicis, but the distraction wasn’t enough, and I nodded, peeling my lips back against my teeth.
He nodded too, flexed his hand towards me again, inviting.
I don’t know why I took it.
His heart, my heart; the lines were thin as the shadows drew long.
He smiled, relief flickering like a candle when our skin touched, his fingers nearly as cold as the winter wind against my neck. He clasped my hand tight in his, looked away again, looked back.
“Am I good man?” he asked, and there were tears on the edge of his eyes, and he had grown old. “Did I do the right thing?”
“No,” I replied, for that was the truth of his heart, and he already knew it, but needed it said out loud. “You did not.”
He nodded again, and this time when he looked away, it took him a long time to look back. “What are we like?” he asked.
I tried to tell him. I tried to speak of hatred and cruelty, of self-important little men in our self-important little stories, from which we had created nothing but worlds of pain. Instead, all I could manage was “I love her.” It seemed the only truth that mattered.
He nodded, said nothing.
“Please don’t. Please don’t. Albert – please don’t. We can find another way.”
“Did you find a cure? William? Did you find a cure for it?”
I shook my head.
“Then there’s nothing else to be done.” He pulled his hand from mine. I tried to hold on, and couldn’t. He stood, awkward, creaking, thought about trying to brush the mud off his trousers, saw the futility of the motion. Nodded once at the man behind me, then, addressing the air above my head and nothing else, said, “You’ll have an eight-hour head start. After that, the Nineteen will come for you. I can’t hide it any longer than that. Thank you – for Richard. For trying to… Thank you for the truth.”
He walked away. I shuffled on the spot, craning to see him, and the man at my back gently held me down.
“Don’t do this,” I called. “Don’t make me do this. Albert! Please, let her go and do whatever you want to me, please!”
He didn’t look back, struggled with the heavy door of the car, folded into it awkwardly, unused to the shape of things, muttered as the engine struggled to start.
“I will come for you!” I snarled as it spluttered into life. “I swear I will come for you!”
He didn’t look at me, focused on laboriously turning the car, which took far too long, and rattled away into the dark. I watched with the man with the gun until it was out of sight. T
hen the weapon was removed from my head, and the man cranked the handle of the car until it finally belched into submission, and after several false starts at a creaking turn, managed to point his vehicle the other way, and drove off into the midnight mist.
I stayed where I was until they were gone, then rose to my feet, and began to walk.
Chapter 76
Beneath the red Australian sun, the truth-speaker walks barefoot along the songlines, and talks to fire, and listens to the hissing of the serpent in the bush.
The woman who taught Margot how to curse is dead, her bones buried by the side of the land that was no longer hers.
Saira closed her eyes as the shadow came, and it dissolved before it could reach her, hands outstretched, failing at last with the final beating of her heart.
In the temples of Hunan, the priestess spears her tongue with a burning needle and calls on the spirits to bring her the knowing, and the people pay gold for good fortune, and comfort themselves with rice and meat when she tells them the truth, and quickly find a new way to interpret bad news.
The sangoma is shot in the savannah as she runs into the dark, because a black woman was seen stealing grain. All black women look the same, the white man says; maybe it was this one. Maybe another. She would have been a thief anyway.
On the operating table, Albert prepares to cut into the skull of the woman I love. He does it for his country. He does it for humanity. He does it for knowledge. He does it for truth. He does it so that one day he might know God.
He does it because, like the rest of us, he doesn’t know how to do anything else any more.
I love her, I love her not.
Coman is buried in an unmarked grave.
Ritte has never cared much for friends.
And in a muddy field in England, I turned, and turned again, tasting the cold winter breeze, licking in the scent of a home I would never see again, and whispered, “I love her, I love her not, I love her, I love her not” until finally I found the point of the compass where the whispering was true.
