The Horn of Roland

by Ellis Peters

  ‘Whatever you say,’ said Mike Brace.

  They didn’t understand, but they obeyed, large-eyed, wondering, but not questioning. Perhaps there was very little they did not dimly perceive, but they knew when to hold their tongues.

  ‘And anything you may have overheard before I opened the door – except for the words Herr Spindler recognised – you will forget,’ he said with finality, as they turned towards the door. ‘We were going over the facts together, to see if there was some significant point we’d missed. You understand?’

  They said, almost truthfully now, that they understood. It was the fiddler who suddenly turned back in the doorway, detaching his arm from Mike’s guiding hand to fumble through his pockets.

  ‘I had forgotten – you sent a message by me, and I could not deliver it. They had taken your man away. I knew of no one else who was safe. And then, one did not ask.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Lucas, quivering to the too vivid memory, ‘one did not ask anything. Not unless one already knew the answer. We shall speak of it soon.’

  ‘Yes, surely. But this – this I give back to you. I could not deliver it, I had no right to destroy it.’ He had an instinct for the natural nobility of simple creatures who keep their word once they have given it, who do not hold themselves excused by time or circumstance. ‘Now I give it back to you.’

  He had found what he was hunting for, in the depths of a cloth wallet stuffed with God-knew-what of personal memories, inarticulate souvenirs, photographs to him invisible. He held it out, after smoothing it attentively between the fingers that did his seeing for him. ‘This is the right one. I know it by the edge, and this stamp here – it makes an oval ridge I can feel. This is yours.’

  All the rest of them were still, as Lucas took it in his hands, and smoothed it as the fiddler had done, but with a movement that was like a measured and marvelling caress. An oblong card in an old-fashioned cellophane pocket, creased into so fine a network of wrinkles that it half obliterated the limp pasteboard within. There was a flurry of typed details, a printed number, a blue official stamp just infringing the discreet, half-identifiable photograph. All the art of the war years was in that photograph, the ability to be half one person, half another, half on one side and hunting one’s own kind, half on the other side, where one’s heart and all one’s passion converged, with the hunted, helping them over frontiers into safety. The typewritten name, the forged signature, were fictional; but the face, however artfully half-withdrawn, was without question, for those who loved and knew him, Valentine Gelder’s face. Lucas could see his daughter there, unbearably poignant and young. And this had been carried for twenty-eight years in the fiddler’s wallet, waiting to be delivered or punctiliously returned. A man of his word, once given.

  Lucas looked up at them with eyes almost as blind as Blind Heini’s, and said quietly:

  ‘Thank you! Leave this with me, now. And go away! Please!’

  ‘But I still don’t see,’ said Una, slicing onions and tomatoes in the kitchen for a scratch supper all round, ‘how you knew he’d be blind.’

  She and Mike had the commissariat to themselves, and were sampling the joint experience with a certain amount of curiosity and self-interest, looking to the future. Hugo Geestler and Richard Schwalbe were shut up in the formal dining-room with the fiddler, taking down a lengthy and dramatic statement. Lu would have to deal with their professional suspicions later, but if they were convinced – more important, if Wehrle and Heinz-Otto Graf were convinced – that the trouble was over and would never recur, they might be disposed to meet him halfway. Lu would manage whatever he wanted; Lu with that tone in his voice and that look in his eye could manage anything. Una had a feeling that she ought to be worrying about all that remained unexplained, about the locked door and the tense voices, and Crista’s motionless silence in the big chair. But where life was, and truth had declared unmistakably on Lu’s side, everything else seemed good and acceptable.

  Especially this improbable culinary partnership. Who would have thought Mike would have had such a light hand with a salad dressing?

  ‘I didn’t know. But I thought he might, from various things your dad had said. His man always said: “I heard”, never “I saw”. People don’t, you know, eyes always take precedence, even in the dark. And then there was the bit about turning his head away while he talked to him, never looking directly at him. People who have to use their ears for eyes often do that. And then it accounted for his not reading the papers at all. An ordinary man would have come forward to tell what he knew. And if he was blind, I hoped he might be someone who didn’t go far afield, only around the Tyrol. So then I thought of Blind Heini. Well, I knew him, I’d seen him around, all the fairground gang know him. And he was the right age, and what the hell, it was worth a try. But all morning round the fairground I couldn’t find him, and it was only just before rehearsal that I heard he’d gone out to one of the farms to play at a wedding. So I had to go and fetch him out of there – and you can’t just rush in and pinch the fiddler, you have to wait until pretty late in the proceedings. And it did take rather a time.’

  It hadn’t been finding him that had taken the time, but sobering him up sufficiently to get him on a pillion safely, even after his identity and his memory had been put to the test. All that labour with coffee and the farm pump had paid off in the end. Mike didn’t grudge it now. Particularly when he contemplated Una in a fresh dress and a nylon apron, flushed and intent, with one eye on the clock and one on her salad.

  ‘He hasn’t forgotten anything. Not a thing. He never talked about it much, because even for some years after the war it was still the sort of thing you didn’t talk about. But still it was his bomb-story, if you know what I mean. And keeping that legitimation all this time – that’s proof positive.’

  ‘I think you’ve been marvellous,’ said Una, with a warmth that made his heart somersault in his chest. It was extraordinary how far from brash he felt tonight, handicapped as he was by her natural gratitude. She didn’t really feel anything for him, except on her old man’s account. It wouldn’t do to kid himself.

  ‘You know, Mike,’ she said seriously, ‘you promised to tell me what it was you didn’t want the police to know about you. I mean … You know how happy Lu and I would be if there was something we could do for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t the police I minded knowing, it was your old man. Well, there was just this thing about running off from Innsbruck without paying my lodgings, but that didn’t matter, because I’d sent her the money from here as soon as I drew my first pay, so my nose was clean about that. That was why I was so broke. No, it was your old man who bothered me. Once I told them all that string of addresses, it wouldn’t take them long to find out what I was doing, running round on one-week stands and café gigs with a horn. And I didn’t want him to know – not until I’d had a chance to show what I could do with straight stuff – that I only really played in a third-rate jazz band. I thought I might be out on my ear again,’ he said ruefully, ‘if he found out.’

  ‘Mike!’ said Una reproachfully, shaken out of her happy housewifely trance by the unaccustomed note of humility in his voice. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘All? It was enough to fix me. This band of ours,’ he said bitterly, ‘bust up in Innsbruck. The chap who ran it went off with a girl who sang in the café, and took all our pay with him. I had to sneak off on the sly to come here for an audition, my landlady wouldn’t even have let me take my horn if she’d known I was flat broke. Can’t blame her, I suppose. But I did send her the money as soon as I landed the job. You can see I needed that job pretty badly, I couldn’t afford to get labelled as a small-time jazz player until I was well set. And it wasn’t the money, either. That music of your old man’s – once I’d got my hands on that I didn’t mean to let go. The solo part! And it just dropped in my lap!’

  ‘After all you’ve done for us,’ said Una, pushing back a fistful of fair hair and addressing herself energetically to whisking a bowl
of eggs, ‘he owes you a special concerto of your own. You can bet nobody’s going to be allowed to rob you now – even if you did have to row yourself into the middle of the lake to get in a little secret practice.’

  ‘I didn’t do so much,’ he said seriously. ‘And even if I had, he wouldn’t let that influence him, not where music’s concerned. If I’m not good enough he’ll throw me out on my ear. I wouldn’t respect him if he didn’t.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, of course you’re good enough, he thinks you’re fine. He said you’ve got a great future ahead of you, all you’ve got to do is work at it. You surely don’t think you’re going back to sleeping rough and working café gigs, after “The Horn of Roland”, do you?’

  She detected in her own voice, interestingly enough, the same defensive warmth with which it had once spoken up, in and out of season, for Lucas. The one man of all men, as far as she could see from her last glimpse of him, who was least going to need a champion from now on.

  Mike must have heard something in it to his peculiarly intimate and personal advantage, too, even if he could not so readily identify it. She turned suddenly to switch on the top plate of the cooker, and found she had somehow walked into his arms. It was plain dreaming clumsiness on his part, not calculation, but it served the same purpose. His last coherent thought, before the tide of events carried him away, was that he hoped her old man wouldn’t pop out on them too soon. He might think this was con just a little too much brio!

  Lucas relocked the door, and went and sat down on the arm of Crista’s chair, facing her with a tired but tranquil smile. She neither moved nor spoke; she sat with eyes fixed in an exhausted stare. Until he touched her she did not seem to be aware of him; but her senses within the frozen shell had followed everything, and he knew it. He laid the identification card in its crazed plastic cover in her lap.

  ‘This is yours. They’ll need to see it, of course. But it belongs to you.’

  By then she did not need it as evidence, he thought; but she had great need of it as a talisman, something that could be touched and handled and verified, something that could justify her and even overflow into forgiveness for her mother whenever she looked at it, until the time came when she turned herself about fully and gave herself to life, and did not need to look at it ever again. She laid the fingertips of one hand upon it slowly, not to lift and examine it, more of a hieratic gesture like touching the king’s sceptre for sanctuary. She saw the name that meant nothing, and the face that meant everything. The rigor of her arms and body relaxed a little, the lines of her face lost their icy edges. When he took her gently by the shoulders and drew her towards him she yielded to his hands, and let her forehead rest against his breast. In a little while warmth seemed to come back into her body, and colour into her face, and she softened in his arms, and heaved a great, liberating sigh.

  ‘No one shall touch you,’ said Lucas in a quiet, reasonable voice, though he knew that was not what burdened her. ‘No one need know anything. Una and the boy won’t talk. Tomorrow we’ll issue a joint communiqué – the final story, over your name and mine – Valentine. The police will call off the hunt for you – I’ll see to that. You think it’ll be difficult? You know what they’ll be saying? The whole thing has been a well-run publicity stunt for the festival. And everybody’ll be satisfied with that.’ Still she didn’t speak. ‘Do you want your gun back?’ he asked rather helplessly. ‘Or shall I drop it in the lake?’

  She shook her head a little, and in a moment words came out of her in painful gasps, like spurts of arterial blood: ‘If they’d even let her see him! He knew you – he would have known. She’d have believed him!’

  ‘She’s dead now?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Two years ago. Women are strange,’ she said wonderingly, as though she contemplated a species not her own. ‘She never let me rest from hating and blaming you. And yet she married again – only three years after they shot him. Lohr was her name, not mine.’

  So much the better, he thought, they won’t have traced you yet, and somehow from tomorrow we’ll close this, for good. They’ll be glad to let it drop, and assume that once the truth was established young Gelder, like a sensible lad, believed it, and dropped his vendetta. And even if they’ve got as far as discovering that the lad wasn’t a lad at all, but a girl, still I think they’ll be content to let well alone. He touched her black hair, and it clung quivering to his fingers.

  ‘Crista Valentine Gelder, look at me!’

  She lifted her head. He saw a living face again, warm and mobile, though the dark eyes still had their wide, stunned look.

  ‘I should certainly have killed you,’ she said, ‘if he hadn’t come. It’s all I was bred for. She always said you’d come back, some day. All I had to do was wait.’

  ‘I know. You needed him even more than I did. But he did come, in time for both of us. I’m alive, and you’re absolved. There’s nothing to agonise about any more.’

  She shook her head, her eyes still searching him through and through, because now she could believe what she saw, and admit what she knew of him, without asking leave of any other creature, living or dead.

  ‘You’d better have that drink now,’ he said, relieved to see her stirring into life and feeling again; and he rose, and went to fetch it from where he had set it down for safety when death was only a matter of seconds away from him.

  Crista braced her hands upon the arms of the chair and raised herself slowly, watching his straight, slender back walk away from her. She held her father’s legitimation in her hands, but it was at Lucas she looked.

  In a very low voice she said: ‘You won’t mind if I stay here until morning? I’ll leave early, I promise you won’t have to see me again before I go.’

  She had had some warning in her heart before she spoke of how terrible the words would sound to her, but she had had no inkling of how profound an effect they would have upon him. He spun round with the glass in his hand, gaping at her in consternation, and his lips shaped: ‘Go?’ in a soundless gulp. It took him a second or two to recover his voice.

  ‘Go?’ he repeated, loud and indignant, like a child threatened with abandonment. ‘You can’t go! I don’t want you to go! You’re surely not going to desert me now? For God’s sake, girl, can’t you see you’ve gone right through into my bones? What should I do without you?’

  The words fell between them, dismayed and dismaying. They stood staring at each other like people startled out of sleep, astonished and afraid. They could not speak; they had no idea what was to become of them, and dared not look ahead beyond tomorrow. But he knew and she knew that she would do whatever he asked of her, and that as long as she lived she would never willingly leave him.

  About the Author

  Ellis Peters is a pseudonym of Edith Mary Pargeter (1913–1995), a British author whose Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are credited with popularizing the historical mystery. Cadfael, a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey during the first half of the twelfth century, has been described as combining the curious mind of a scientist with the bravery of a knight-errant. The character has been adapted for television, and the books drew international attention to Shrewsbury and its history.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1974 by Ellis Peters

  Cover design by Barbara Brown

  Illustrations by Karl Kotas

  ISBN: 978-1-4804-4379-2

  This 2016 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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