by Clio Gray
‘Is it she?’ Hendrik whispered, although he already knew the answer.
‘I think so,’ George replied, for who else could it be?
Hendrik went down on his knees with an audible thud, George holding out his hand, keeping the man back from the body. And thank God he did, for right on Hendrik’s heels came a few other men from the Singel including Pieter Dulke who had served for many years in a munitions factory supplying gunpowder, cannon balls and shells to anyone who would buy them, and knew how to survey a blowing-up with a practiced eye.
He’d managed to procure a few candles and got one lit, thereby revealing the dark halo of blood beneath Louisa’s head and also a thin black line burned into the cellar’s floor that led from a burned out circle in the soil to the steps that went from cellar up to kitchen. Immediately over this circle a massive hole had been blasted into the earth above. Dulke followed the black line of what he recognised to be a fuse, taking his time, undistracted by the other men milling about the cellar that had undoubtedly been constructed well, its dimensions large and admirable, the pantry alcoves dug into its walls seemingly untouched.
Men were even now taking out the foodstuffs that had been stowed within those alcoves – jars of pickles and bottled fruit, cheeses, hams, smoked meat joints, jams and chutneys. Pieter Dulke hoped these rescued vittals would be reunited with their proper owner, though he rather doubted they would, but it was not his primary concern. Instead he was looking above him, at that ragged hole, and all about him, at that line from stair to stack and, as he did so, he saw and understood what must have happened here.
He walked towards Hendrik Grimalkin, who was still on his knees, watching as George turned his wife’s body back to the wall, but oh so gently, so that Hendrik could not see her face. Pieter went towards Grimalkin but it was to George Gwilt that he spoke, recognising a certain professionalism in the way George was conducting his actions.
‘What can you see?’ Pieter asked. George coughed, and then spoke, apparently understanding his role, and that less, in this situation, was more.
‘She’s one blow to the back of her head,’ George said, ‘and another to the side that took out an eye, and there’s blood but no smoke in her nostrils, so pray God she wasn’t alive when the fire took.’
Small comfort for Hendrik, but it gave Pieter another piece to his puzzle. He nodded, then placed a hand on Grimalkin’s shoulder, gripped it a little harder until Grimalkin reacted, got off his creaking knees and stood up.
‘There’s some surmises I can put forward,’ Pieter started, ‘though I can’t say exactly what happened, only that it seems to me most likely that someone offloaded a couple of barrels down here – one of turpentine maybe, like the lass said, because I can surely smell it too – and another keg, probably of gunpowder. They were here, see,’ Pieter pointed to the burned out circle that was surrounded on its outer perimeters by small wisps of straw and several curved staves of wood.
‘On the straw bales,’ Hendrik whispered. ‘Louisa kept them for kindling for the range.’
‘Doesn’t everyone,’ Pieter stated blandly before pushing on. ‘Seems like they laid a fuse. See here?’ He pointed out the wriggly line that ran from the blackened circle to the kitchen steps. ‘Probably set the fuse going there, at the bottom of the steps,’ Pieter said, ‘so’s to make sure they’d get out in good time,’ telling the scene as he saw it, ‘for it’s no easy science is explosives. But when it went, the main blast went straight up yonder, blowing out the soil between the joists immediately above the bales and kegs, pushing the fire straight into the house. Lots of air up there,’ Pieter added as he looked upwards, ‘and would have drawn the fire very quickly up and away. Which explains why this place never got much of a look-in, and why your lady here is still pretty much as she was when she was left.’
Pieter glanced at Hendrik Grimalkin at this last pronouncement, saw his face set like rock and everything about him as grey and forbidding as the ash that was filtering down from the ceiling above. He decided he might as well go for bust, was enjoying this analysis, hadn’t done it since he’d been back at the Munitions Factory when he and his colleagues spent all day long blowing stuff up and figuring out ever more efficient ways to do it.
‘She must’ve been down here when the blast took, but wasn’t directly affected by it,’ he said. ‘And most likely wasn’t aware,’ he added, having taken in what George had said previously. ‘Body says relaxed,’ he ploughed on, ‘which most likely means unconscious or already dead. Probably blown over from maybe there to the wall,’ he pointed with his boot at the faint marks on the cellar floor where something prone had rolled along through its dust, eventually abutting against the wall a few foot distant, where Louisa’s body lay.
A brief shudder went through his body as he thought of the other body – Teresa Arnolfini’s – for fire, Pieter Dulke knew, was capricious that way: gentle one moment, inestimably cruel the next, seeming almost conscious in how it moved, as if it had a logic all its own, able to burn out one place so completely and be so ferocious it could halve a woman right through at the waist and yet leave the place it had started in – and Pieter was in no doubt that was here – with barely a scorch mark.
He caught something flickering at the corner of his vision, shifted his gaze, saw it move and change, saw that the fire, beautiful and unpredictable as it was, had read his thoughts. He looked straight up above him, at the huge wooden joists that were holding the cellar’s ceiling in place over their heads and raised the corner of his lip in a smile that was teetering on admiration; and knew that the fire wasn’t done, that the beams were nested through and through by several slow-burning patches of embers, consolidating and warming themselves these last few hours like a body of hornets trying to burn out an intruder. He understood too that they were just about to go up again in the reconflagration the men on the Singel had so feared, mostly likely kicked back to life by the opening of the hatchment doors and all these men moving and churning up the air about them, and that all the while they’d been down here the fire had been gathering itself, getting hotter and stronger, firing up from grey to red, from red to white, and were about to go to hell and fury.
‘Everyone out!’ Pieter suddenly shouted. ‘Joists are going! Whole place is going to fall down about our ears any moment!’
And all the men down in that cellar looked up and saw Pieter was right and that the small pockets of embers they had glanced at previously, and had assumed were the last hurrahs of a dying fire, were burning now with a determined furiosity that was frightening in its intensity and speed. It crept down every crevasse and crack along the pathways of the wood grain and next began to leap and jump from joist to joist as if in some game whose rules only they understood.
‘Get out, get out!’ they all began to shout, immediately running and tumbling over one other in their panic to get back up the cellar steps.
They all funnelled towards the only exit, dropping their candles, whose tiny flames joined in the game and began to seek out the still unburned threads of turpentine that had soaked into the soil when the first barrel blew so suddenly its staves were punched out all across the cellar floor.
‘Get back, get back!’ they yelled, a thick press of bodies corralling at the bottom of the steps as everyone began to push and shove, all grabbing and grubbing to get themselves out, dragging others up behind them the moment they hit the afternoon air, the only ones left behind being Hendrik and George, and the already dead body of Louisa.
‘I can’t leave her,’ Grimalkin said grimly, but it was George who was closest and so he dipped down and scooped his arms below Louisa’s, Grimalkin coming immediately to his aid, grasping at her feet to take the weight and together they staggered across the cellar floor, the fire now bright and burning so they knew the way to go.
A sudden guff of smoke speckled with grit came billowing down from above, leaving them blind. But they were at the bottom of the steps now, Hendrik stumbling into the lowest, droppin
g Louisa’s feet with the force of his ankles hitting the stone. He scrambled upwards, gained a couple of steps, got his balance, but by now the burning embers were raining down upon them both, falling onto their backs, eating their way into the seams of their coats, the worst of it on George, who was still in the body of the cellar, trying to shove Louisa on.
The smoke was getting thicker and blacker and hotter with every tiny step he took, the heat suddenly so intense George wasn’t sure he could make another inch. And then his load was lightened, Grimalkin having grabbed his wife’s ankles and began to haul her up the steps as he bum-shuffled up them one by one, George trying to keep her head from bumping against the stones, still pushing her up from down below although he couldn’t see a thing, because by now the smoke from the cellar was heading for its own escape, going the same way they were, right up the steps and out to freedom.
A single ember caught Hendrik’s hair and began to sizzle its way through all the rest, and George’s trousers were burning at their ends where he’d stumbled over a couple of turpentine-soaked staves set to flame by one of the candles the Singel men had dropped. Hendrik still pulled for all his worth, heaving Louisa’s body up one step at a time, George still pushing her on from down below.
Several men up above tryied unsuccessfully to grab at Hendrik, beaten back by the smoke and because his head was truly on fire now and it was hard for them to get a hold of him. Hendrik looked to George, from down below, like one of those saints in the windows of the Servants’ chapel, the ones with those golden aureoles painted about them, and just for a moment he thought he could see Joachim’s face there too, just behind those flames. Because of it he gave one almighty push and up Louisa went, Hendrik reaching the final step, someone smothering the flames over his head with their jacket, others pulling him on, and Louisa with him, so that George could see the last of her disappearing up into the light.
George let out a long breath, glad the deed was done, that Hendrik had got his wife back and Joachim there to see her right. His lungs were seared from the acrid smoke and could draw no more breath in. The day was there at the top of the steps but down below George was going up in flames lithe and strong, orange fire, black smoke, a tiger eating him alive. His head fell forward, propping his chin upwards on the bottom step, eyes blinking despite the lack of breath and half of him devoured, last sight a shadowy glimpse of Joachim peering down into the cellar, hands waving madly, other hands holding him back; last thought flickering through George like a sigh, the vague hope of there being something on the other side, his Maker, maybe, if Maker there was. All over for George Gwilt a millisecond later when the central joist groaned and fell, burying him beneath a ton of earth as the cellar’s roof gave way and brought the house of the Grimalkins down upon his head.
33
WIND AND WATER, AND THOSE WAITING TO BE BURIED
Maker or no, the rain came down that night as if heaven-sent and carried on, unstinting and unstoppable, right into the following morning, dousing the smouldering, smoking remains of Hendrik’s house. It filled the air around it with eerie pops and groans as it sizzled and settled, pulling itself down into the cellar below.
Wet ash was everywhere, carried by the night breeze gusting down every gap and ginnel and by the rainwater that funnelled down the central gutter of the Singel, snaking into every adjoining street, carried further abroad by people’s boots right into the Brink and beyond. Small scraps of Hendrik’s house carried all over Deventer, smaller scraps of George going with it.
In the library, the mood was grim. Hendrik insisted Louisa be brought in with them, and she was lying wrapped in a dust sheet on a couple of reading tables that had been hastily shoved together at the base of the library beyond the green sofas where Hendrik was keeping vigil, Caro curled up beside him, sleeping when he couldn’t keep his eyes open a moment longer.
They looked a motley pair, grey as mules, ash in every corner and crevasse of their clothes and skin. Hendrik’s head was almost entirely bereft of hair, his scalp the colour of boiled beef, blisters rising up and bursting, only to rise up again, Hendrik refusing all attempts to have it cleaned and salved. He wanted to suffer. He deserved it, after what Dulke had said and George had done. One night of it at least.
‘So what are we going to do about Mr Grimalkin?’ Greta spoke quietly to Joachim where they sat together a few tables up, the huge shelves of books towering above them, heavy giants at their backs.
‘We leave him be,’ Joachim replied simply. ‘Death requires space, but I’ll tend to both him and his wife in the morning.’
Ruan clicked his tongue.
‘Should she really be here at all? It’s just not right. It’s not hygienic. Don’t you have undertakers in this part of the world?’
Greta rolled her eyes, but was too tired to respond. If Ruan was going to behave like a child then she would treat him as such and ignore him. Joachim was more tolerant.
‘It’s plain you’ve not had much contact with the dead,’ he said, ‘or those they leave behind. Everyone grieves in their own way, and this is Hendrik’s. If you want to be of help you could go and find an undertaker yourself, pick out a coffin. Plain but functional, I suspect, would be best.’
Ruan creased his face in irritation.
‘But it’s dark out there, and bloody well pouring with rain. I’m not going out in that.’
‘Then hold your tongue,’ Joachim said, more sharply than he’d meant and immediately regretting it, tried to soften his words. ‘Why not go and get some sleep? I gather you’ve a room upstairs you’re using.’
Ruan knew when he was not wanted – this time at least – and no more did he want to be here. He cast a glance down at the sheeted figure lying on her makeshift bier and shuddered. It wasn’t natural, and if he didn’t have to be here then so be it. He was off, taking quick strides up the library towards the stairs by the door that led to the upper floor, Isaac appearing suddenly from the outside, time for his shift. Ruan nodded briefly but was not about to hang around passing niceties and took his noisy way off up the stairs.
Isaac gazed after the young man, then slowly turned and carefully bolted the library’s doors. He hadn’t been sure whether he should come, not tonight, but he’d no one at home. He’d arrived in Deventer as one of the many Jewish refugees after the Seven Year War, his village near Lobosik destroyed by the Prussians, every last member of his family brutalised and killed in ways that didn’t bear thinking about. Once safe in Deventer, he never made new friends, let alone attempted to create a new family. He couldn’t stand to go through all that again, all that loss, and when he’d heard of the Revolution in France and their insidious advancement from border to border he was glad he hadn’t. This library and its books and the people who visited it were all the family and social life he needed, and he thanked God for it every night when he tidied away the books left out for re-shelving, and later took a snooze in the peep-hole room. It was Isaac’s favourite place in the Athenaeum – small and round, no corners for shadows, snug and safe. The perfect place.
Coming in now he wondered if he shouldn’t just slip into it and close the door. He couldn’t face Hendrik, would have no words, violent bereavement a private endeavour, his instinct to steer well clear; but he’d steered clear the night before and couldn’t spend another night alone at home. And he was glad he’d come now, because there were two people sitting partway down the library that he’d never clapped eyes on before, and that – in the words of Ruan Peat – just wasn’t right. The library at night was his purview and he took exception to anything going on that he didn’t know about.
‘Hello?’ he said, taking a few steps towards them, stopping short as he caught sight of the draped figure lying on the desks at the other end of the atrium lit by two candles, one at head, one at foot.
Joachim stood up and came to greet him.
‘It’s Louisa,’ he said, ‘Hendrik’s wife. We brought her here a while since.’
Isaac nodded. He understood
. For what else should Hendrik have done with her?
‘It’s a terrible thing, terrible,’ Isaac said slowly, and Joachim could see the old man knew the meaning of that word right down to the bone.
‘I’m Brother Joachim, Hendrik’s fa…Hendrik’s friend,’ he introduced himself. ‘And you?’
‘Ah,’ Isaac said. ‘Isaac. Night watchman. Usually tidy away the books, replace candles, refill inkwells and the like.’
‘Not tonight, I fear,’ Joachim replied sadly.
‘Not tonight,’ Isaac repeated. ‘No. I see that. But if it’s alright with you I’ll take my usual post. Keep my usual watch.’
‘I think we’d all be glad of it,’ Joachim nodded his approval. And indeed he was.
He didn’t know the details of what had been said down in the cellar before it had all gone to fire and burn. He swallowed, didn’t want to think about George, that last sight of him being engulfed, George’s face an agony of resignation, if two such words could be coupled, but Christ, that’s what he thought he’d seen. But no time now for that. Time now to be a father to his son, if Hendrik would allow it. His own personal loss could be dealt with later when he was alone again, when he was back at the Servants amongst the people who knew George best. And Goerge’s sons.
He let out a breath. God knew what he was going to say to them. He closed his eyes, rubbed a hand against his temples. Made a conscious decision to brush all that away. Concentrate, he told himself. Concentrate. From what he’d gathered from the swirl of men who’d come bursting out of the cellar dragging Hendrik and Louisa after them, the talk was definitely of foul doings, of deliberation, of the fire having been engineered into existence. He tried to recall the name of the man who’d come up with this explanation, but could not. A munitions expert, he remembered, someone who surely knew what he was talking about. Come the morning he’d need to try and find the man, get him here, sit him down, talk it all through.
