by Clio Gray
‘Let’s start again,’ he said, holding up his hands in placation. ‘My name is Ruan Peat,’ and was immediately gratified by the girl looking at him curiously with her wonderful green eyes.
‘Is that so?’ she said, same truculence, but a definite softening at the edges. ‘Well then,’ she added, ‘then my name is Greta Finnerty, and I’ve come a very long way to find you and yours.’
Joachim moved down the centre of the library. Hendrik was curled up on a large leather sofa, head and knees tucked inwards, hugging himself, hands showing on either side, just like he’d done as a boy when the world got too much for him. Joachim sat down. He was finding it hard to breathe. The lung that had collapsed when the arrow hit him was not yet at full capacity and whenever he was under stress, or tried to do too much, it felt like it was collapsing inside him all over again.
‘It’s me, your father,’ Joachim said gently.
He was desperate to put out a hand to comfort his son, now a man around the same age Joachim had been when he’d chosen to leave him. But he did not, wasn’t even sure if he could. A tremor was beginning to take him over at just the effort of breathing, unable to cope with the depth of grief he was witnessing.
He’d seen it all before, both on the battlefields and at the Servants, but it had belonged to other people then, villagers for the most part, someone dying from gangrene or fever, or lost at sea. But this was Hendrik, his little Hendrik, the boy who was born with such a full head of hair his mother had gasped whilst Joachim – or Wynken as he had been back then – laughed.
‘Such a strong boy he’ll be because of it, you’ll see,’ he’d said, and he’d been right. Hendrik was never huge in body but had the most tenacious of minds, and Joachim had been so proud of him he could have burst all the while he was growing up. That’s how he’d known Hendrik would save the printing press Joachim had brought to its knees, and Hendrik hadn’t let him down. Had never let him down, ever. And he’d gone on to be so much more: become a scholar, an elected member of the city council, put in charge of one of the greatest libraries in Europe.
Hendrik moved. Hendrik uncurled enough to speak.
‘I’ve no need of a father,’ he said weakly. ‘I’ve no need of religion of any kind. You don’t want to hear what I think about God on this particular day, so I’d be glad if you would just take yourself off and go do your do-gooding someplace else.’
Then back up he curled, and Joachim had to bring his hands together to stop them shaking, interlacing his fingers as if he was about to say a prayer.
‘You misunderstand,’ Joachim whispered. ‘It’s not a father here with you, it’s your father. It’s me. It’s Brother Joa…it’s Wynken. Your father.’
‘So what is it?’ Greta asked of Ruan, pointing at the tangled mess of strings she’d turned out onto the reading table.
Ruan wasn’t listening, his eyes locked on the ring that had spilled out with it – his ring – the one that had belonged to old ancestor Walter, Il Petrogradia, with its etching of the stone circle at Kilmartin and the rising sun. He picked it up and slid it onto his finger. Far too big, not that Ruan minded, only that he now had two very valuable rings in his possession, made more so by him having them together.
If everything went south because of the loss of the documents in the fire on the Singel then at least he had a back-up. A bit of gold never went amiss, let alone a couple of huge precious stones, and it occurred to him that with the researches Hendrik had been carrying out about the Lynx he might be able to bargain them both as a package to someone more interested in dusty old societies than he was himself.
‘If you’ve finished being distracted by shiny things,’ Greta said scathingly, ‘it was actually this that I was asking about.’
She rapped at the table with her knuckles to draw Ruan’s attention. She wanted to scrape the eyes right out of his head. She’d never met such a blockhead as this man was proving to be, so unlike Fergus who’d been willing to chuck himself into the Cause. She couldn’t imagine Ruan doing anything like it in Fergus’s place.
‘What are you looking at?’ asked George, coming up to join them, setting a couple of candles carefully into the empty holders by Greta’s elbow.
Greta was a quick study and had picked up a few words of Dutch from listening to the exchanges between Joachim and George and asking strategic questions when necessary, and got the gist of what George was saying. She delved into her satchel, took out the folded piece of beet bag and ostentatiously flattened it on the table to catch Ruan’s attention.
He took the hint and glanced at it, even as he surreptitiously slipped Walter’s ring away into his pocket. Greta stiffened. She knew from Joachim that Ruan was the closest person Fergus had to family, his guardian having died, though giving no specifics; she’d been harbouring some pity for this Ruan Peat, until she’d actually met him. Right now she had no sympathy for him at all, thieving magpie that he was. He’d not even asked about Fergus or what had happened to him, not that she precisely knew.
‘It’s a khipu,’ said the magpie, already sliding his eyes away, one hand fingering the pocket into which he’d secreted the ring, no doubt already planning to get it melted down to fill the teeth that filled his goddamned useless head.
‘A…khip…u,’ George repeated the word slowly as he drew up a chair and sat down between the two. ‘So what’s that when it’s at home?’
Ruan sighed deeply, realising he was going to have to be the buffer between the two duffers on either side of him, neither speaking the same language as the other. He was pre-empted by a low rumbling coming from the other end of the library and all looked round to see Hendrik Grimalkin hightailing up the central aisle towards them, anguish sharpening his features and gait, eyes blazing like he’d the devil on his tail instead of Brother Joachim, who was hurrying on behind him, legs tangling in his habit and his haste.
Hendrik Grimalkin did not pause as he neared them, but all caught the dark fury clouding his normally passive face and saw the drawing back of bloodless lips from gritted teeth. He passed them by in a blur and moments later was flinging open the doors of the Athenaeum and marching out into the early afternoon.
George stood up abruptly as Joachim took a stumble, and was there within a moment, putting a supporting hand beneath his elbow.
‘Going back up to the Singel,’ Joachim gasped, plainly finding it hard to get enough breath inside him to speak. ‘Couldn’t stop him.’
Joachim collapsed onto the chair George had just vacated.
‘My fault,’ Joachim croaked. ‘Told him about the Collybuckie and Golo…told him what you said, George.’ He shook his head, kept on shaking it. ‘Shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t have said that…’
‘You’ve nothing untoward,’ George said firmly, ‘truth is what it is.’
‘What happened on the Collybuckie?’ Greta asked quickly, having picked out enough from Joachim’s slow speech to link what he was saying to the article Fergus had cut out, and that had to mean something.
‘It’s a boat. George thinks Golo was murdered on it,’ Ruan said. ‘Thinks someone did him in while we were all being shaken to hell in that storm. But I’ll say now what I said then. Why would anyone bother?’
‘Jees, but you’re a cold son of a bitch,’ Greta snapped, flashing her green eyes at him. ‘Do you ever stop long enough to think about other people? Has it never occurred to you that you’re not the centre of the wheel?’
Ruan was trying to compose an answer to this egregious accusation when Brother Joachim got some of his breath back, waved an arm.
‘I don’t care about your bickering,’ he wanted to shout but the words came out in a wheeze, as did the next. ‘All that matters now is that Hendrik is running back up to the Singel like a mad man, and you’re all still sitting here doing nothing about it.’
Ruan and Greta exchanged glances, and then both turned simultaneously to George Gwilt.
‘Get on,’ George said decisively. ‘We’ll follow you
up.’
32
TO THE SINGEL ALL
Greta and Ruan needed no more telling. They stood up, kicking back their chairs, youth and adventure coursing through their veins as they ran to catch up Hendrik, who was by then already half a street ahead of them, striding towards his goal like a man in seven league boots, so focussed that every other thought had gone out of his head.
The closer he got to the Singel the tighter his focus became until he no longer saw the streets or the buildings, only the fact that he was going forward. Had to go forward. Brother Joachim – his father, Wynken Grimalkin – coming back to life was too much. He couldn’t cope with it. Not with what he’d said and that Golo Eck had been murdered, because there were the leaves again in their inscrutable pattern and the Lynx whispering at his back, everything connected if only he could figure out how and why. Just needing to get back to the Singel, just needing to get back…
He got there. He saw the blackened carcass of his home and imagined the blackened carcass of Louisa somewhere inside, overwhelmed by the need to find her. Ruan bumped into Hendrik’s back as he rounded the corner on a run, Hendrik looking back in irritation to see a young girl with Ruan he’d never seen before who must have arrived with his father, re-emerged from the past.
It might have seemed a miracle in any other circumstance, but not today. He’d lost the most important person in his life, a truth he’d only just begun to realise. A long lost father turning up was nothing in compare. Hendrik had a rage in him that all the waters of the Ijssel couldn’t put out, just as they had failed to put out the burning ruins of his house despite being only yards from its front door.
The group of men who had been keeping watch by those waters stuttered into belated movement once one of them realised it was Hendrik Grimalkin himself who was here and not another gawper come to see the wreck. Their muscles twitched but they didn’t approach him, instead looked mutely at one another when Grimalkin suddenly strode into the hot ashes, right up to his knees, and started frantically scrabbling through them, whatever search he was undertaking surely futile.
‘Oh my God,’ Greta whispered as she came up beside Ruan, putting a hand over her mouth, her stomach lurching, her throat constricting, her eyes involuntarily watering up.
‘What the…’ Ruan began, stopped from saying more by Greta lashing out and thumping him hard across his chest, pushing out all his breath.
‘Shut up, why can’t you!’ she hissed. ‘Can’t you see what he’s doing?’
Ruan let out a wounded breath and shrugged because no, he had no idea what Hendrik was doing. He looked like a maniac – a grey, ash-covered, ash-coloured maniac – poring through dirt and hot embers for Lord knew what.
‘Oh Lord protect me,’ whispered Joachim, who with George had just turned the intersection to witness his son scouring through the dead remains of his dead house for his dead wife.
‘I’ll get him,’ George said, detaching himself from Joachim, but before he could do so a movement caught his eye and he looked towards his right, saw a small figure appearing at opposite end of the Singel. The small figure was walking, and then walking faster, and then running, and then running and calling, and then running and calling and crying and then was in their midst, ripping off his backpack but did not stop. The boy was still running and crying when he went straight into the wreck of the Grimalkin house, wading through the ashes, kicking up burning embers that tinged the air with the singing of his trousers and his hair, but still he did not stop. He went straight to Hendrik Grimalkin like an arrow from a bolt, keening like a puppy being strangled.
‘Oh no oh no oh no…’ the young lad did not stop until he reached Grimalkin and flung his arms about Grimalkin’s waist, arresting Hendrik for just a moment from his useless task, for just long enough for him to turn within the orbit of the boy’s arms and recognise his assailant.
‘She’s in here, Caro,’ Hendrik whispered, ‘and I mean to find her,’ and in truth Ruan’s assessment had been correct: there was madness in his eyes, and soon there was madness in Caro’s. The two of them began their digging in unison, flinging out ashes with their hands, chucking pieces of wood behind them, chips of crockery, splinters of glass, the spines of dismembered books, the detritus of daily life burned down into its component parts.
It was enough to break anyone’s heart and Greta couldn’t stand to look any longer. She turned away, walked a few yards around the corner, towards where the back of the house would have been if it was still standing. The stench was too raw and recognisable and she was fearing she might start to blub at any moment, and the thought of Ruan Peat seeing her cry was too much.
She came to an abrupt halt when she saw the delivery hatches where coal and wood would have been thrown down into cellar below. They looked to have been blown clean off their hinges only to settle right back down again into their accustomed places, edges splintered and blackened, but intact. She put her fingers below one of them and lifted it a few inches, shifting it over its supine companion and, by doing so, could see the wooden chute off to the left, and a set of stone steps immediately beyond, heading down into darkness.
She lay down on her stomach and poked her head through the gap she had made. The first thing she noticed, once her eyes had got used to the dark, and after she’d brushed away several motes of ash that blurred her vision, was that this underground cavern was uncluttered by any fallen timbers. It had been excavated directly into the compacted ground below the house, a couple of yards of packed earth separating the two, bolstered by props and joists to keep the cellar ceiling up, keep this space cool for any foodstuffs, fuel or drink that needed to be stored down here. The house above might have collapsed but this cellar was relatively undisturbed, a dark and empty place into which Greta wriggled.
At the far end she could see where a hole had been blown into the house above, or from the house above down into this space below, seeing the black and ragged diameter and the thin lines of ash that were trickling between gaps in the soil, caught by the dark light of several smouldering patches of embers in the two foot thick joists that were nevertheless strong enough to keep the remains of the house from tumbling in.
The second thing Greta noticed was that there was a very distinctive smell down here, now she’d got half her body in. She wrinkled her nose, sniffed some more, because it was a smell she recognised from Peter’s printing presses, coming from the strong solvent they used to clean away the old ink from the printing plates when it had begun to clog the presses up.
She wriggled a little further in, but there was only darkness and more of it, and into that not even Greta was willing to go. She backed her way out, wondered if she should say anything. She had an idea, but might be wrong. She thought on Hendrik Grimalkin and that young boy shovelling their way through the ashes up above like beavers going haywire. She might be right, she might be wrong, but she knew she had to say it.
She took a few minutes to pull away the remaining boards of the hatchments and then walked her way back around to the Singel. The men who had been sat over the way were now gathered in a huddle with George, Joachim and Ruan at their centre. She went to Joachim, tugged at his habit, pulling down his ear.
‘Um, don’t know if it means anything,’ Greta whispered, ‘but the cellar’s pretty much intact down there, and there’s a bit of a reek in it that I’m thinking is turpentine, or something very like it.’
Joachim heard the words but didn’t comprehend their implication. He was finding it inestimably hard to witness his son digging through the ashes, and even more so when Caro had come out of nowhere to join in. If George hadn’t been hanging onto him like a crab he would already have gone blundering in to intervene.
‘What did she say?’ George asked.
Joachim translated like an automaton, alarmed when George suddenly let him go, went running off around the corner, grabbing at the young girl’s shoulder as he went.
‘To the cellar!’ George was shouting, flinging his arm to g
ive direction to the others. ‘Get round the back and to the cellar!’
The cluster of men were slow to react. By the time they’d turned the corner, following George, he was already all the way down the cellar’s steps. Greta had been right, he knew it immediately. The smell was all pervasive and unmistakable. He needed a light, he needed to see down here. He went back up a few steps and shouted loudly.
‘Get me a lamp, but keep it shuttered!’
The straggle of men understood the words, but no one had a lamp, shuttered or otherwise.
‘Grimalkin!’ George yelled. ‘Get Grimalkin here!’
He’d seen something rolled against the far wall. Or rather, someone. He could see her head. Definitely a head, hair coming out in wisps from one end, boots – toes down – from the other. No time to spare. No time to wait for a light. He inched his way across the earthen floor of the cellar, hands held out in front of him in case anything was in his way that he couldn’t see. And there she was. Louisa Grimalkin. Not burned up in the fire but down here all the time. George knelt and moved her gently away from the wall.
She was dead. Obviously so. No one could have survived a fire like that, not even down here. Smoke inhalation was George’s best guess, for her face was drawn and contorted, her mouth a horrid echo of a smile. He stood back. He didn’t want to touch her. Not his call, nor his duty, no matter what Joachim had taught him at the Servants.
‘She’s here,’ he said, his voice quiet, no one else to hear him, until suddenly there was, the grey shape of Hendrik Grimalkin thundering down the steps and arriving at George’s back.
