The Beating of His Wings

  Conn waited to be instructed what to do. A curate approached him. ‘It has been agreed that you may speak but I’m warning you not to say anything against the Crown or the people.’

  Conn moved forward. The noise of the crowd diminished a little – a good speech could be dined out on.

  Thirty yards away the bookies at their trestles were taking bets on how many spurts of blood there’d be.

  ‘I haven’t come here to talk,’ said Conn, startled by the firmness of his voice as his stomach surged. ‘I’ve come here to die.’

  ‘Speak up,’ shouted someone in the crowd.

  ‘I’d be heard little if I shouted myself to death. I’ll be brief – I’d prefer to say nothing if it weren’t that going to my death silently would make some men think I submitted to the guilt as well as to the punishment. I die innocent …’

  Up in the tower Cale heard the word ‘innocent’ but nothing more as the curate signalled the drummers to drown out Conn’s accusation of injustice. Whether he cut it short because of the drums or he didn’t have much to say, Conn finished and walked towards, if not the executioner exactly, at least the man responsible for the workings of the gibbet.

  ‘I hope you sharpened the blade as duty obliges you. And I’ll have my head cut off at the neck and not topped like an egg as I hear you did with my Lord the Cavalier of Zurich. Botch it and there’ll be no tip. See it done properly and you’ll be glad you killed Conn Materazzi.’

  ‘Thank you, zir,’ said the almost-executioner, who depended on such tips for payment, ‘we have a new doings to prevent such han unfortunate thing happenin’ agayne.’

  Conn walked to the gibbet, took a deep breath as if to swallow back his terror, and knelt down, his neck fitting into a clearly brand new semi-circle made in the wood. The new cross plank above was swiftly put in place with the matching half of the circle and locked into position. Above him, the flat blade in its heavy wooden block was held in place by two pins, each one attached to a separate rope. One of the pins was held in place by a clip and it was the rope leading from this one that the gibbet-master threw into the crowd. He waited until the scrabble for a handhold on the rope was finished then went up a ladder placed against the gibbet and put his right hand to the clip holding the pin in place, so that no one in the crowd could prematurely pull it out. He addressed the people.

  ‘I will count to three – any man’s hand now on the rope that stays on the rope after the count of three will be whipped.’ Satisfied that those holding the rope were in command of themselves he called out: ‘One!’

  ‘TWO!’ shouted back the crowd. ‘THREE!’

  He whipped the clip free with a great flourish.

  The rope and pin whipped loose, the block and blade rattled in the rail and struck with a dreadful bang. Conn’s head shot from the gibbet as if it’d been launched from a sling and flew over the platform and into the crowd, vanishing among the Sunday best of the men and women of fashion.

  Cale stared down for a moment. Why this? he thought. Why like this? then he turned away, dropped what was left of the cigar on the stone floor and left.

  But just as he could see what had happened, Cale could also be seen. Afterwards it was put about that he had not only smoked during Conn’s death but that he had laughed at the horrible conclusion. In time this did great damage to his reputation.

  Arbell was standing at the far end of the room, staring out of the window and holding her baby tightly, slowly rocking backward and forward.

  To Riba and her husband it seemed like a very long walk indeed. They stopped a few feet away; both said after they had left it was as if the very air between them and Arbell trembled with terror and held them back.

  ‘Is it finished?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he suffer?’

  ‘It was very quick and he was calm and showed great courage.’

  ‘But he didn’t suffer?’

  ‘No, he didn’t suffer.’

  She turned to Riba.

  ‘You weren’t there?’ It was an accusation.

  ‘No, I wasn’t there,’ Riba said.

  ‘I wouldn’t let her.’ Arthur Wittenberg thought he was helping. He was not.

  ‘Of course I couldn’t go, I couldn’t,’ said Riba, reassuring.

  ‘I should have gone,’ said Arbell. ‘I should have been with him.’

  ‘He would have hated that,’ said Riba. ‘Hated it.’

  ‘He made it very clear to me,’ said Wittenberg, ‘last night when I spoke to him that he wouldn’t countenance your being there – under any circumstance.’

  A lie was seldom told so clumsily. But Arbell was not in any state of mind to judge very much of anything. The baby, who had been very calm because he liked being held tightly, started to wriggle. ‘Yaaaaaaaaach!’ shouted the baby. ‘Bleeuch!’ Finally he managed to free his right arm and started pulling on a lock of Arbell’s hair. Yank. Yank. Pull. Pull. She didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Shall I take him?’

  Arbell turned away from Riba as if it were an offer to remove the child permanently. Gently she unfastened the baby’s hands from her hair.

  At the door a servant called out, ‘Lady Satchell to …’

  But the end of his sentence was drowned in the dramatic bustle and noisiness of the woman herself.

  ‘My darling girl,’ she wept from the other side of the room. ‘My darling girl … what a cauchemor, what a nagmerrie, a kosmorro!’ No single language was enough for Lady Satchell to perform herself in. She was known, even among the Materazzienne, as the Great Blurter. There was no situation that, by her instant appearance, she could not puff up with hysteria. Not even this one.

  ‘I am so sorry, my dear,’ she said, grasping Arbell to her chest. No trembling shield of grief would put Lady Satchell off. She no more saw Arbell’s pain than the bull sees the spider’s web. ‘It was dreadful, strasny! Terribile! The poor boy – to see that handsome head go weerkats down the Quai des Moulins.’

  Fortunately the sheer power of Satchell’s hysterical capacity for stirring caused her to shift into Afrikaans so that Arbell barely understood what she was talking about.

  ‘And that mostruoso Thomas Cale – I heard from one who was with him he laughed at the Misero Conn as he died and smoked a cigar and blew rings at his disgraziafo corpse.’

  Arbell stared at her. It was hard to imagine that someone would go so white and still live. Riba took her by the elbow, pulled her physically away, whispering, ‘Shut your mouth, you heartless bitch!’ and signalled to the two servants at the door.

  ‘What are you doing? I’m her dear cousin. Who do you think you are, you toilet scrubbing slut to …’

  ‘Get her away from here,’ said Riba, to the servants. ‘And if I see her here again I’ll make you both wish you’d never been born.’

  Lady Satchell was so startled at being manhandled by the servants now gleefully licensed to mistreat one of their betters that she was outside before she could start flapping her mouth again.

  Riba walked back to her former mistress, working out her story.

  ‘Is it true?’ Her voice so quiet Riba could barely hear her.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘But you heard it, too?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t believe it, not a word. It’s not like him.’

  ‘It’s exactly like him.’

  ‘He saved my life. He saved Conn’s life too, for your sake.’

  ‘And he perjured himself against Conn because he thinks I betrayed him. There was nothing else I could do. But you don’t know him when he’s against you – what he’s capable of doing.’

  Torn between the two of them as she was, Riba’s first thoughts were not generous to her former mistress. If you hadn’t betrayed him, Conn would still be alive. Everything would have been different. Of course, part of her knew that this was unfair, but it didn’t stop it from being true.

  ‘I told you. I don’t believe a word of it.’ But this was not entirely t
he case. Which of us, on hearing that our closest friend had been arrested for a dreadful crime, would not think, buried in the deepest recess of our soul, hidden in the shadows concealed in our heart’s most crepuscular oubliette, that it might possibly be true? How much easier then for Arbell to believe that Cale had laughed at her darling husband as he died. She should not be blamed for this lack of faith in Cale – it’s only human to hate the person you have hurt.

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Sounds bad – so probably it is,’ said Cale. There was no mistaking Artemisia’s suspicious and angry tone.

  ‘Answer me. Did you laugh at Conn Materazzi when he died?’

  He’d many years of practice at not giving away his feelings – control of spontaneous emotions was a matter of survival at the Sanctuary – but a less angry person than Artemisia might have noticed his eyes widen at the accusation. Not for long and not by much.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said, casual.

  ‘I don’t know what to think, that’s why I’m asking you.’

  ‘The thing is – I was in the tower on my own. I could have sacrificed a goat in there and no one would have known.’

  ‘You still haven’t answered the question.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No, I didn’t laugh at Conn Materazzi when he died.’

  And with that he stood up and left.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said IdrisPukke.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘It’s not long ago that you would have told her you did laugh at Conn, just to punish her for asking.’

  ‘I thought about it.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘Why would she believe something like that?’

  ‘You are widely referred to as the Exterminating Angel. It’s not so surprising that people fail to give you the benefit of the doubt. Besides, the times need a man with a reputation for unmitigated cruelty – people want to feel that with such a creature on their side they might have a chance of living through the next year.’

  ‘But they don’t know me.’

  ‘To be fair, it’s not an easy thing to do – know you, I mean.’

  ‘She should by now.’

  ‘Really? She knows you lied under oath with as much ease as if you were telling an old woman that you liked her hat.’

  ‘Not that again. What was I supposed to do? If I’d confessed we’d both have had our heads bouncing across the square.’

  ‘I agree. But for all her eccentric skills, Artemisia doesn’t understand things as they really are. She’s one of them. The more money you have, the nicer the world is; if you have money and power the world’s niceness is almost heavenly. To such people the world’s cruelty is an aberration not the normal state of things. You’ve had the good fortune never to believe that anything was fair. You must allow her time to learn that she’s living in another world now. She hasn’t had your disadvantages. The spirit of the times used to move through her and Conn and the King – now it moves through you. This is your time, for however long it lasts.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘There’ll come a time when it isn’t.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Hard to say. The thing is that whenever it comes to an end the person whose time it used to be is usually the last to realize.’

  25

  There’s not much to be said for being sick, except that if you’re sick for long enough it gives you endless opportunities to think. For the permanently unwell there are not enough distractions to fill the endless days and, besides, illness can drain you easily of the energy you need to read or play a game. Then you must think, even if it’s the drifting sort of thinking that floats you aimlessly from past to present, from meals eaten, lovers kissed, to nights of humiliation, bitter regrets. Cale had a talent for this kind of thing. In the madhouse ruled by Kevin Meatyard he had been able to use the skills honed in the Sanctuary for all those years to go into hiding somewhere inside his head. But in those days he’d been as ignorant of the world as a stone: there was his hideous real life and his imaginary world where everything was wonderful. Now the drifting daydreams were all mixed up with the numerous things that had happened to him since then. Daydreaming was not so much a pleasure any more. So he tried to think of useful things – the mulling of ideas, the beating out of plans and working up of notions that had he been well he would have brushed to the back of his mind and left to the dust.

  The religion of the upper classes of the Swiss and their allies was an odd affair. It had come as a considerable surprise to Cale that they also worshipped the Hanged Redeemer – but as the true Redeemers had created a religion full of sin and punishment and hell, of things that filled every waking moment, the religion of the Swiss aristocrats and merchants had developed in more or less precisely the other direction: beyond church on Sundays, weddings and funerals, there seemed to be no specific demands made nor any reference to the dire consequences that would result from failing to meet these loosely-hinted-at suggestions. But this was not the case with the working people and the peasants. The latter in particular were extremely religious, so much so that they had a large number of creeds to service them but at the bottom of them all was the Hanged Redeemer. Though each sect considered itself to be the sole true heir of his beliefs, they recognized to varying degrees that they belonged to a family. But one thing that united them was their universal loathing for the Redeemers themselves, whom they regarded as corrupt, idol-worshipping, usurping, murderous heretics. Whatever the differences between the Plain People and the Millerites, the Two by Twos and the Gnostic Jennifers, Cale had talked to enough of them to know that their commitment to destroying the Redeemers was of a kind where death would be a privilege rather than a price. Whatever his own feelings about martyrs he was used to making them work for him. It was a currency that he understood. It was now nearly three weeks after the death of Conn Materazzi, and he had used the time to persuade the various heads of the important religious factions (Moderators, Pastors, Archimandrites, Apostles) that he was as deeply committed to destroying the Redeemers and their hideous perversion of the true teachings of the Hanged Redeemer as only someone who had suffered personally under their yoke could be. Fortunately this did not require Hanseatic diplomatic skills: they were only too ready to believe in him. And hence why all of them were present on the Silver Field at ten in the morning to witness the very far from mock battle between Cale’s fledgling New Model Army and the Swiss. Also present were Vague Henri, IdrisPukke, Kleist and a still frosty Artemisia Halicarnassus. Standing to one side, looking suspicious, was Bose Ikard and an assortment of newly appointed Swiss generals, elevated to their new positions courtesy of the cull of their former senior officers now rotting gently in the grave pits at Bex.

  The day after the meeting with Bose Ikard and Fanshawe, Cale had written to demand that, as the fate of several nations hung on his successful attempt to create this New Model Army, the fight of his one hundred against that of the Swiss Knights should be fought with sharp weapons and without rules, except that surrender would be permissible. As intended this alarmed the Swiss who, rightly suspicious, demanded that only blunt practice arms be used. Cale refused. Eventually a compromise was reached: unsharpened weapons, no spikes or points, and crossbow bolts and arrows to have dull tips and bars to prevent deep entry.

  The day began with a strange incident involving Cale, which in the telling and re-telling gave rise to a peculiar legend. The person involved was only a very minor member of the country aristocracy who had arrived in Spanish Leeds the night before and had managed to hang onto the coat-tails of some prince or other and was enjoying the attention of the various flunkeys seeing to the needs of the assembled gentry. Not realizing that the white-faced boy standing next to him in his plain black cassock was the incarnation of the Wrath of God and all-round exterminating angel, he had mistaken him for a servant and politely, it must be said, asked for a glass of water with a slice of lemon. The servant ignored
him.

  ‘Look here,’ he said to Cale more forcefully. ‘Get me a glass of water and a slice of lemon and do it now. I won’t ask you again.’ The servant looked at him, eyes blazing with an incredulity and disdain that he took for the worst kind of dumb insolence.

  ‘What?’ said Cale.

  The newly arrived country toff was anxious not to be regarded as a bumpkin of the kind who would allow himself to be intimidated by a dogsbody and took the stunned silence from those around to signal that they were waiting to see whether he was up to dealing with insolence from a servant. He fetched Cale an enormous blow to the side of his face. There followed a paralysed stillness that made the previous silence seem raucous. It was the prince who’d invited him who broke it.

  ‘My God, man, this is Thomas Cale.’

  There is no adjective in any language fit to describe the whiteness of the country gentleman’s face as the blood drained into his boots. His mouth opened. The others waited for something horrible to happen.

  Cale looked at him. There was a long pause, a dreadful silence, suddenly broken when Cale let out a single loud bark of amusement. Then he walked away.

  Each side had been allowed forty horses and when the Swiss entered the field they certainly looked impressive, the horses pulling at their bits, anxious to get on, and beside them seventy knights on foot, armour carapaces sparkling in the morning sun. Beautiful. Formidable. They took up a line and waited. Not for long. From the other side of the park what looked like a peasant wagon came into view, and another one after it and another – fifteen in all. Each one was led by two heavy shirehorses, bigger than the hunters ridden by the knights by half as much again. As they approached it became clear that these were not the usual wagons for carrying hay or pigs – they were smaller, the sides slanted and they had roofs. By contrast, the fifteen wagons were flanked by ten of Artemisia’s horse scouts, slight men on fast and famously agile Manipur ponies. They were carrying crossbows, not a weapon used much in Halicarnassus. They’d been designed by Vague Henri for use on horseback – light, nothing like as powerful as his own overstrung but very much easier to draw and load. The wagons came to their marked place and then curved round into a circle. The drivers leapt off and unhitched the horses, pulling them into the centre. The gap between the wagons was not very great as the horses had been carefully trained to offset them before they were unharnessed. Each driver quickly removed a detachable wooden shield hung from the back of the wagons, which they slotted between them so that now the wagons and shields formed a continuous circle without gaps.