by Clio Gray
‘This day was the start of his journey towards its understanding. He had sworn it when he’d woken up that morning, and he swore that oath again now, standing as he was at the foot of those contradictory cliffs, looking up towards the blackened boles of the trees that reared like hungry animals from its shale: trees that were trees and yet were also stone, and no way – yet at least – to tell which one was turning into the other.’
Such words! Here was the beating heart of the Lynx. Hendrik was thrilled by the wonder in them, the same pulse that drove all scientific enquiry on. And he was certain he’d read something before about trees turning into stone, or stone into trees. The Della Porta box maybe? And the bees, they jogged a memory too, but he couldn’t quite put his finger…
‘Mijnheer Grimalkin,’ Hendrik didn’t look up. It was Friedrich, one of the young scholars who assisted at the library, but Hendrik was far too intent on the Cesi document to reply.
‘Mijnheer Grimalkin,’ Friedrich said again, his feet dancing awkwardly on the wooden floor, Hendrik distracted by the movement and looking up.
‘What is it, Friedrich? I’m in the middle of something important here.’
Hendrik’s tone was brusque, dismissive, and although the young assistant flinched he didn’t back away. Hendrik threw a glance at the large clock on the wall of the library. A while past three. He should have been home a half hour since. It had become their custom for Louisa, Caro and Hendrik to meet for lunch at two thirty before separating again to their afternoon’s allotted tasks. Unexpectedly he smiled, looked up at Friedrich, about to make a light-hearted comment about being a brow-beaten husband these days, until he saw the grim look on his assistant’s face.
‘Is something wrong, Friedrich?’ he asked, and was answered with the worst of news.
‘It’s your house,’ Friedrich whispered. ‘Your house is on fire…’
Hendrik blinked, and blinked again.
‘My house is… on fire? My house is…’
He put a hand to his mouth until the shock of the news kicked him into action.
He stood up abruptly, his chair clattering noisily to the floor, as he started running like a maniac through the main body of the library, bumping into one person and then another, knocking their books out of their hands. He didn’t apologise, kept on crashing through them all until he bowled his way out onto the street and up the road.
He could see smoke and flames curling into the sky, could see it was possible they were coming from his house but couldn’t quite grasp that this could be the case, until he turned the corner and came running onto the flat promenade of the Singel and there it was – indisputable – his home blazing like a bonfire on New Year’s Eve, a wiggly line of men going from the river to the house, casting useless buckets of water onto the flames about the door in the vain hope that if anyone was in there they might be able to get out. Someone was snaking the hose-pump – one of many kept curled up below the jetties for just such an emergency – from the water, another banging at the other end with his fists, trying to open the rusted valve.
Hendrik saw his whole life disintegrating in that awful burning and then suddenly the shouts crescendoed and everyone renewed their efforts as the flames began to creep along the jambs of the window-frames from Hendrik’s house to the one next door – empty, thank God, its owner a single merchant, often abroad on business. The flames leapt and licked and increased their intensity and were soon jumping from roof to roof, their direction bent by a westward breeze.
The glass of the windows in both Hendrik’s house and the one next door exploded altogether, shattering into a thousand splinters that rained down onto the men below who dropped their pails, flinging arms and coats above their heads, everyone praying this empty house would somehow swallow the fire, keep it contained within its bricks.
All along the Singel people were spilling from their front doors, alerted by the shouting, dragging excited children behind them. Women held their pinafores before their faces, men yelling for everyone to get back down to the water with their buckets and for someone, anyone, to get the hose-pumps working. At last they did – a man with hands the size of shovel-blades physically ripping the rusted valve clean off the hose-end so that at last the water began to bulge and course along the length of the pipe, coming out in a great and hopeful gush. Then the same man fought to keep it steadily pouring into the open windows of the house beside the Grimalkins – for there was no saving that one – others taking turns to operate the pumps, heaving the handles up and down with all the force their shoulders and backs could muster.
‘Louisa! Louisa!’ Hendrik ran towards the crowds, searching for his wife amongst the clamour of people, but no matter how many times he shouted, how many shoulders he grabbed at and spun around, he saw no trace of her.
Tears were running down his smut-blackened face, skin smarting with the heat and smoke and his despair. And next to the empty house was Teresa Arnolfini’s, she of Louisa’s Sewing Circle, and inside was Teresa, who had tipped herself off her chair and tried at first to stagger and then crawl towards the window, using the floor and then the wall as her support, smoke billowing in through every crack and crevasse from the adjacent empty house.
She could hear the commotion outside, could hear Hendrik’s high voice keening for his wife and she began to shout and shake with fear, calling out for someone to come and help her because there was no one in the house but her, the maid having gone down to the boat-docks to fetch the flounder for their tea and no one down below coming to her rescue. Her legs would not support her weight but she managed to drag herself to the window of her second floor sitting-room where she fumbled with the fixings to get it open. Her fingers weren’t working properly – too much smoke in throat and lungs, too much dread, too much heat in the fixings.
In the end all she could do was heave her heavy body up onto the sash-seat where she began hitting at the window with her fists, hammering at the glass with all the strength she had left so that eventually the glass gave way. Everyone looked up then and saw her, and could hear her wordless shrieking as she forced the top half of her body out over the jagged shards of the window as if she was about to fling herself out.
The breaking of that window sent some unseen signal that suckled the fire from its low creep and lick across the neighbouring roof towards her own as if it had been waiting for this moment. It gained a new surge of life, whooshing and swooping, pouring straight towards the open window where it swallowed Teresa Arnolfini whole.
‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ Hendrik covered his mouth with his hands as he craned his neck up with all the rest, and although he felt those words in his throat no sound came out.
There was a collective silence for a brief moment as everyone saw the flames engulf Teresa, everything catching alight at once – hair, clothes, skin – and that part of her they could see thrashing and mewling like no one had ever seen or heard before and prayed God they would never again. And barely a minute later, Teresa Arnolfini – gossipy, gout-ridden old Teresa – was burned right through at the middle, the fire releasing the top half of her torso with her head still attached, mouth still moving as it tumbled right down into the street, burning and smoking, writhing faintly like a snake that has been sliced through by a scythe until someone had the wit to pour a bucket of water over the part of her that had landed at their feet, sizzling and spitting and then – thank God – was still.
Many said later it was Teresa’s life that had satisfied the fire, for after her falling it shrank of its own accord, withdrew towards its source, removed itself from the Arnolfini house and from the intervening neighbour’s, pulling itself back to its primary source where it burned on and smouldered, singing itself quietly to sleep as the Grimalkin house collapsed about it, going on long into the evening and then the night, seemingly content to stay there, contained and restrained, slowly consuming every last particle of that abode that it could find.
Most of Deventer turned out at one time or another during
those last hours to gawp and sigh and thank Christ it had been someone else’s bad fortune to have their life reduced to ashes for no apparent reason. Ruan arrived, a little drunk, on the scene two hours later, having finally heard the news that was going the ups and downs of every tavern in Deventer. He was of no use to anyone by then. The men at the pumps and buckets had desisted their unequal fight and Hendrik Grimalkin slumped in one of the seats that lined the Singel’s wide promenade.
‘What’s happened?’ Ruan asked of the first man he saw, though it was obvious even to him that the Grimalkin house was no more.
‘Burned down,’ the man replied shortly, before turning away and throwing up for the fifth time that night, the same man who’d chucked the bucket of water over what was left of Teresa Arnolfini, unable to get the taste of her out of his mouth, didn’t think he ever would. Never ate meat again, throughout the whole of his long life.
‘But what’s happened?’ Ruan Peat persisted, accosting the next person he stumbled into. ‘I don’t understand. How could this happen?’
‘Happens all the time, mate,’ said the man who was dispiritedly rolling up the pump-pipe that had proved so worthless when put to the test. ‘Could happen to any of us. Just be grateful it hasn’t happened to you.’
30
FROM SEA TO SERVANTS
Greta was not intimidated nor made sick by the rolling waves, she was instead astonished. She’d always had the concept of its enormity in her head but once out of sight of land she found it hard to grasp the reality of its length and breadth and depth. She spent most of her days helping out in the galley or scrubbing the decks or cleaning the nets – a task her small fingers quickly became adept at.
The rest of the crew did as bid and kept their distance, so the nights were her own. Sometimes they were spent leaning over the rails, gazing at the coal-black roll of the ocean shot through on occasion by lines of phosphorescence flowing and fluctuating like underwater murmurations of the starlings she saw back home who gathered in the sky, wheeled and dipped in rapid formation, before settling down to roost.
She saw great rafts of eider tipping wing to wing into the water as the boat approached them, emerging twenty or thirty yards further on a few minutes later, calling to each other in eerie whistles that filled the darkness and might have seemed – to a less level-headed person than Greta – to be the calls of drowned sailors sorrowful from the depths.
On the last night, a low mist drifted across the waves, giving a damp drizzle to the air, confining Greta to the tiny cabin she’d been allotted that was barely bigger than the hard board of her bed. She sat on its edge, not tired enough to sleep, too full of what the next day might bring, the light of her candle wavering with the gentle rocking of the boat and, for the first time since leaving Shauna’s she had the idea to take out the pouch and the little package in which the stringy thing was wrapped. Out it came and, stuck to its bottom, was a small scrap of paper she’d not noticed at Shauna’s: a tiny article ripped from a broadsheet with a few haphazard scribbles in faint pencil upon its edges. She moved her candle closer and leant in to read them the better:
Brother Joachim/Walcheren. Grimalkin/Deventer. Golo Eck/Ruan Peat/Loch Eck, Scotland.
The words meant nothing to her, excepting Walcheren, until she recalled that the pouch was not the only thing to have come from Fergus for she was still carrying the letters he’d given her with such urgency the morning of the Battle of New Ross. They’d been tucked into the poacher’s pocket carefully sewn and concealed into the back of her jacket but so much had happened since she’d forgotten they were even there. She coloured slightly with the guilt of never having done anything about them, and knew it was probably too late to do anything about them now, but she removed her jacket and took them out anyway.
They were mere folded sheets of paper, badly creased and a little tattered at the edges, but still intact by dint of the poacher’s pocket aligning with the small of her back, and she brought in the candle to see to whom they’d been addressed. The first, perhaps not surprisingly, echoed several of the names she’d just read: To Golo Eck, care of Brother Joachim at the Servants of the Sick in Walcheren, and if not there then care of Hendrik Grimalkin of the Athenaeum Library in Deventer, Holland, and if not to Golo Eck himself then to Hendrik Grimalkin.
The second was slightly more alarming, being addressed to someone whose name she knew but could not understand how Fergus could possibly know it too, or why:
To Wolfe Tone, of the French Revolutionary Council in Paris, Leader of the Irish Legion of Napoleon, on behalf of Golo Eck from Loch Eck in Scotland.
She went back to the small scrap of paper and brought it right up close to the candle, the letters of the article so small she could hardly make them out with setting them to flame, some already lost to damp and wear.
Lost, the Collyb…kie, departed from Port Gl…. nd for the Continent… thereafter in a stor…aid the captain, James Fe... rom Vlissingen, ‘We lost several passen…ut thanks to God’s Gr… nsular of Walcheren, an… rvants of the Sick who bide ther... rsonal thanks must go to one B…ther Joachim who w… back to health aft… even now caring for… engers who did not fare so wel…
Greta sucked in her breath and laid the letters Fergus had written side by side on the blanket of her bed and next to them the tiny article, with its worn words and strange message jotted in the margin, and wondered about Fergus, who apparently knew Wolfe Tone, and maybe knew about the botched invasion of his French forces back in June, and likely too therefore, she reasoned, knowing also of the Road to Exile.
But he hadn’t come to Ireland to join their cause, at least not to fight. He’d come specifically to find Peter, to ask for Peter’s help in getting to Mogue Kearns, maybe as a conduit to Wolfe Tone. It was only because Peter had been arrested that Fergus ended up with Greta, got taken to Mick Malloy who had bullied Fergus into fighting at New Ross. Backbone of the rebellion and all that, but Malloy not a man anyone refused lightly.
She’d never considered previously where Fergus had come from or why he was in Ireland or how he’d ended up, which was most probably dead, seeing as Mogue had given her his pouch. Nor had she considered the true worth of what he’d given the Cause in the form of the stringy thing, not until she and Shauna had taken a proper look, figuring out how it could be used, was maybe being used right at this moment.
A gift beyond compare and no wonder Mogue so keen to get it out, maybe the reason Fergus came to Ireland in the first place, because obviously he was more than one of the other Scots who joined the Cause, not if he was on speaking terms with the likes of Wolfe Tone.
She shook her head, unable to get to the bottom of it, but she could at least deliver his letters, or one of them at least. Walcheren, the Servants, exactly where she was heading, and now she had this Brother Joachim’s name into the bargain.
Ruan was fidgety. He’d not slept well, he and Hendrik billeted in the Athenaeum Library where several rooms were kept for visiting scholars. And they were decent enough, spacious and comfortable; what worried Ruan, when he got up the following morning, was that all the correspondence passed between the lawyers here and in Scotland, all the papers that said he was who he was, and the signed document from the Servants that was witness to Golo’s death, had gone up in smoke. Literally.
He hated to think he’d have wait yet more weeks, maybe months, to go through it all again, not with Golo’s Last Will and Testament due any day. He’d no doubt it would be delivered here instead of to the smoking remnants of the Grimalkin house, but what if the lawyers refused to budge without the rest of it? What was he going to do then?
He certainly couldn’t ask Hendrik to help out. The man appeared to have drifted off on a sea of grief the moment it became evident that Louisa – dry old stick that she was – had gone up with the house. Being young and resilient Ruan couldn’t quite grasp Hendrik’s depth of despair, was frustrated and impatient and made no bones about it, stamping up and down the library, hoping to indi
rectly shake Hendrik from his torpor.
‘I’m going back up to the Singel,’ he announced loudly. It was eleven o’clock, late morning, not yet twenty four hours since the fire had started, ‘see if there’s anything can be salvaged.’
Hendrik didn’t move. He’d been curled up on one of the large leather sofas in the library since being dragged back from the Singel and deposited there the night before.
‘We could really do with moving,’ Ruan was saying.
Hendrik heard the words but didn’t respond. They were of no consequence. Ruan himself was of no consequence. A great welter of images was swirling through Hendrik’s head, twisting and tumbling, patterns forming and disintegrating, joining and separating, unpredictable as autumn leaves jumbling down a weir Their primary function was to barricade him in, fill his head so entirely that nothing else was allowed: no memories that could soak him up like ink into blotting paper; everything dispersed and therefore easier to bear, locking him down until he could cope. Better to jettison the anchor than lose the boat.
The fire of the Singel transmogrified into the last thing he’d been thinking about before he’d got the news, that thought about the bees he’d not been able to grasp coming to the fore: that mere wisp of smoke going up, not into the sky above Deventer but into the sky above Rome. A faint buzzing sound filled his ears from the thousands of bees said to have swarmed into the Palace during the papal conclave way back when – taken as a sure sign that Maffeo Barberini was their man, his family crest being a trigon of wasps; the manuscript of the Melissographia hoving into view – the very sound of it soothing – dedicated to Barberini by the Lynx, first known microscopic pictures of the bee, amongst the rarest manuscripts in the world.
