The Last Four Things

  ‘All’s well that ends well.’ But Vague Henri was looking increasingly green. Cale’s bad temper diminished slightly. ‘I am pleased to see you.’

  ‘How about a kiss?’

  ‘I’m not that pleased.’

  They both smiled.

  ‘How about something to eat?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘It’s ordered.’

  As if he’d been listening outside, Model knocked on the door and entered with a tray of food for two.

  ‘The same again,’ said Cale.

  ‘There’s a limit, sir, they won’t take my word for so much.’

  Cale wrote a note threatening the kitchen with Bosco’s wrath and as Vague Henri sat down to eat he demanded that Cale give his story first.

  It was more than two hours and well into Vague Henri’s second tray before Cale had finished.

  ‘So Bosco really is as mad as a sack of cats,’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘Luckily for you and me.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Stay here,’ said Cale. ‘See it through.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I’m the observed of all observers – where would I go? There’s no Memphis any more. There’s no Materazzi. Except for Antagonists who’d drop me on sight. Who else, even if I could get there, which I can’t, would be stupid enough not to hand me over? Without Bosco I’m done for. And now St Vague Henri of the goody-two-shoes, so are you. Bosco owns us from snout to tail more than he ever did.’

  Vague Henri sat for a while.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, at last.

  ‘Tell me something I didn’t know.’

  They drank beer and smoked in dismal silence for a while.

  ‘Now you,’ said Cale.

  Vague Henri started with his decision to follow Cale after his departure from Memphis.

  ‘Kleist wasn’t keen.’

  ‘I can imagine. I’m astonished he went at all.’

  ‘Don’t be too astonished. After a week he ran away.’

  ‘Which is exactly what I’d have done if Bosco had taken you instead of me.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘Anyway. IdrisPukke and me we lost you near Tiger Mountain – the approaches are a bit rocky for tracking. Not my strong point anyway. IdrisPukke tried to persuade me to go with him to take the ferry out of Whitstable. I miss him. I made it to Voynich and that’s pretty much it.’

  ‘You were a long time in Voynich.’

  ‘It’s a nice place that. I wish I was back.’

  And that was that for explanations. Cale had kept things short despite talking for two hours, partly because he had no taste for war stories but partly because he had seen the look in Vague Henri’s eyes when he had told him about Bosco’s belief that he was the agent of the death of mankind. He was not sure what it meant, that look, not belief and not fear or anything he could put his finger on – or wanted to put his finger on. So he played it down after that, the wrath of God stuff, even as he failed to cover up what bothered him about Vague Henri’s reaction. It was not that Vague Henri thought it might be partly true that rankled but that on the contrary he regarded the idea as laughable. Something inside was drawn to the idea of his own magnificence and did not care to be mocked.

  Vague Henri on his part had not just played down the truth he had directly lied, although when he began telling his story he had not intended to do so. In six months they had both changed. And the question in both their minds was by how much.

  The next day when Vague Henri was brought to his room things between them were both good-natured and awkward. But Cale wanted to show that while he had made terms with the man and religion they both hated, he had done so in a way very different from the past. He took Vague Henri to the convent, though without telling him where they were going. Then he got his first surprise – Cale produced a key! And it was, Cale let him see, one key among several keys. It was as shocking as if Cale had got down on his knees and started to celebrate mass or had produced a bishop’s mitre and stuck it on his head. But while Cale was thinking that it demonstrated that he was now in power in the Sanctuary, for Vague Henri it was a worrying sign. Perhaps Cale had taken a bribe the way Perkin Warbeck had taken a gallon of sweet sherry and a dozen sheep to betray the Hanged Redeemer. It was not possible and yet the last year had taught him that anything was possible.

  Cale opened the door and they were inside the first layer of walls that protected the convent. They walked on for ten yards to a second door with no fewer than three locks which required three separate keys. Inside the convent proper the harsh green pitch of the floor changed to limestone, softened by carpets, and there were candles every few yards throwing the soft warm light of beeswax and not tallow from cows and pigs. They approached another door and Cale opened it, without keys (an unlocked door?) and, throwing it wide, gestured Vague Henri inside.

  There was a great gasp and a ripple of excitement, long repressed as if his arrival was the very summit of anticipation. Around the walls in each corner were nuns, benign and smiling, and seated in the room as squirmingly impatient as a group of children awaiting the arrival of a birthday cake were twelve girls from perhaps thirteen to perhaps eighteen – pink girls, brown girls, black girls, ones with perfect olive skin, ones with complexions white as ghosts. They almost groaned with pleasure as the two young men came in the room, there was even a stifled squeal followed by a reproving cluck of the tongue from the nun behind and a cautionary hand on the shoulder.

  ‘Good morning, ladies,’ said a smiling Cale.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Cale,’ they echoed back as one.

  ‘Let me introduce you to my oldest and my greatest friend. This is the great Vague Henri that I told you of – legend of Memphis, hero of the Battle of Silbury Hill.’ Vague Henri smiled the smile of a man wound up. The girls burst into applause only slowly calmed by Cale’s raised palms.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now listen all of you. Who would like to take special care of Vague Henri?’

  A dozen hands shot in the air.

  ‘ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!’

  Vague Henri seemed to go pale and blush with delight at one and the same time.

  ‘Patience! Patience! Girls! Behave!’ said the Mother Inferior. ‘What will Vague Henri think of us?’

  ‘I think I could answer that,’ whispered Cale into Vague Henri’s ear. Vague Henri looked at him and Cale realized he’d been teased enough.

  ‘Mother Inferior, would you choose two and send for us when the room is ready?’ The Mother Inferior bowed politely and Cale pulled Vague Henri by the arm towards a door, opened it, again without a key, and they were in a sitting room. He gestured Vague Henri over to a large sofa that was more like a bed than a place to sit.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s beer or wine.’

  ‘Beer.’

  Cale pulled the linen off a jug, poured a glass and handed it to him.

  ‘What do you expect me to do with them?’ he said after taking a long swig.

  ‘What you want to do with them.’

  ‘They’re slaves – slavery is wrong.’

  ‘For what it’s worth, which isn’t anything at all, they’ve all been freed in law. They’re as free as you or me used to be.’

  ‘You still haven’t said what you expect me to do.’

  ‘Why would I expect you to do anything? If you’ve got a guilty conscience it’s because you’re pursuing evil thoughts.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes.’

  ‘All right.’

  It was an apology.

  ‘Look. You’re in a state worse than China. All these girls have ever been brought up to do is look after men.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’ll keep.’

  ‘No. I want to know.
Riba told me everything she knew. But I want to know why.’

  ‘They can make you better here, look after you like you’ve never imagined being looked after, better than the most spoiled-brat Materazzi mademoiselle you could imagine.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Have it your own way. I’ll tell you over lunch. You just lie back on the bed and we’ll eat.’ In a few minutes nuns with trays knocked and entered and began laying out the food on the huge sofa next to Henri. There was beef with German custard, a blancmange of signal crab with sugar lumps, fried chicken and a plate heaped high with the crispiest pork crackling dripping soft fat and foot-long doozle-dogs with tomato ketchup and yellow mustard sauce. There was caviar from Nigeria and champagne from the Ukraine. And then rosewater jellies mixed with curds to finish off.

  While they ate, Cale took Vague Henri through the details of Picarbo’s manifesto.

  When he’d finished asking questions Vague Henri was silent for a minute and then shook his head as if trying to shake something off.

  ‘And I thought Bosco was completely nafi. How can you be that mad and live?’

  They both giggled, back to sharing their past again.

  ‘And the girls don’t know anything about this?’ said Vague Henri.

  ‘They think that we’ve been sent here to choose them as wives and that we really do have white horses and silver armour. No, really. They’re clever enough but they don’t know anything. All they’ve ever been taught is that men are like angels – brave and courageous and kind and noble and strong. Only now and then some men might get very angry because a devil makes them but that even if they hit them they have to be kind and say sorry and be nice and then the devil in them will go away and everything will be all right again.’

  ‘You didn’t try telling them the truth?’

  ‘I don’t know how. I thought you might have some ideas but you just listen to them and let them make you better first. You’ve never heard anything like the drivel they come out with. But they believe it – every word.’

  ‘I’m not going to do anything to them.’

  ‘They won’t mind.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Do what you want or don’t want. If they’re willing, why not? You could be dead in a few weeks and so could they if Bosco makes up his mind what to do with them. Live, eat and be happy for tomorrow we die – isn’t that what IdrisPukke said?’

  ‘Just because IdrisPukke said it doesn’t make it true.’

  ‘Have it your own way.’

  So it was that Vague Henri was taken to the wet and dry room.

  13

  Windowless and lit by beeswax candles so that it did not smell or feel like the inside of an oven, the wet and dry room in the convent of the Sanctuary was lined with red cedar from Lebanon and on the floor with menge from no one knew where but prized for its resistance to water and soap. In the middle of the room were two wooden squares that looked like oiled butcher’s blocks. A curious Vague Henri, full of anticipation and worry, was led into the room by the two chosen girls. One introduced herself as Annunziata and the other as Judith.

  ‘What are your surnames?’

  ‘We only have one name,’ said Judith.

  ‘Are you,’ enquired a hopeful Annunziata, ‘feeling ill-tempered?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It would,’ said Judith, ‘be a help to us if you were to shout at us.’

  ‘And slam those doors to the cupboards.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’d like to practise calming you down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Men shout a lot, don’t they?’

  Bewildered by what they wanted from him, Vague Henri had to concede that in his experience this was indeed true.

  ‘We asked Mr Cale to shout at us but he said it wasn’t a good idea.’

  ‘Probably that’s true.’

  ‘Will you? Oh please!’

  They were so sweetly beseeching that awkward as he felt, Vague Henri thought it would be churlish to say no. Five minutes later he was sitting in the corner of the room weeping as if his heart would break while the girls, pale and bewildered themselves now, stared down at him, shaken by the storm of fury that had erupted from the sweet young man, sobbing uncontrollably in front of them.

  After ten minutes the agony began to pass and the girls helped Vague Henri to his feet.

  ‘Sorry,’ he kept saying. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘There, there,’ replied Judith.

  ‘Yes,’ added Annunziata, ‘there, there.’

  They led him over to one of the large blocks of wood, after stripping him of his shirt and trousers and socks. He vaguely resisted when they started to remove his loincloth but ‘We have to wash you,’ they said as if it was as immutable as the laws of God. He was too tired to resist. The girls sighed at the ancient scars and the new cuts and bruises from the beatings in Clink Number Two and asked him so gently how he had come by them that he almost started crying again.

  ‘I slipped on a bar of soap,’ he said, and laughed and so was able to control himself. Seeing he was unwilling to tell them the girls left him and went and fetched hot water and soap which they knew he had not slipped on because it was clear he had not seen soap for some time. Judith poured a bucket of hot water over him in a careful flow from head to foot and Annunziata began to work up a great frothy blanket of suds, so very careful not to press too hard on his cuts and bruises. Over the next hour they squeezed and rubbed and eased his aching body so gently and with such skill that he fell asleep and when they finished he did not wake even when they dried him carefully, like a baby, in every crease and fold and dusted him with fine talcum from the chalk farms of Meribah and scented him with oil of apricots. They covered him in towels and left him to sleep. He did not wake up until late in the evening when the girls returned, took him to the dining room and fed him all over again and questioned him about his life outside. There wasn’t any point he thought in telling them anything unpleasant; nor did he want to. So he told them about his life in Memphis as they gasped in amazement and delighted in every word about its dreaming spires, its frantic markets and its golden youth – its great men, its snow queen women (‘How?’ they cried in horror, ‘Why?’). Sitting there drinking and eating and wonderfully at ease with these two beautiful girls hanging on his every word he was aware even as he talked that this was something that might never come his way again. But the delight was not over. When their curiosity was satisfied, if only temporarily, the two girls had more in store for him. But about that it is not necessary to say anything.

  14

  ‘Only God and those girls could love you for yourself,’ said Cale to Vague Henri after two weeks of being handed from one set of girls to the next as if he were a wonderful prize. ‘The poor things just don’t know any better.’

  ‘All the more reason to enjoy it while it lasts.’

  And there was no arguing with that. One night one of the girls who had drunk more wine that she was capable of holding had blabbed to Vague Henri that he was by far the girls’ favourite of the two boys. Obviously delighted, Vague Henri had demanded to be told more and, despite the scolding of her partner, the loquacious girl had happily spilled all the pearls. ‘Your friend is always either sad or angry,’ she complained. ‘Nothing we do really delights him, not like you. He can be such hard work. You know what we call him, some of us?’

  ‘Can’t you keep your big mouth shut for once,’ scolded her friend.

  ‘Shut up, you! We call him – we call him Vinegar Tom.’

  ‘You mustn’t be too hard on him,’ said Vague Henri, a little maudlin because he too had taken too much wine. ‘He has a broken heart.’

  ‘Really?’ said the girl and fell asleep. But the other girl, Vincenza, was a clever thing and, as was her smart practice, having hardly touched a dr
op questioned the loose-tongued Vague Henri and got the whole story out of him.

  ‘A bad girl,’ said Vincenza. ‘What a wicked thing to do.’

  ‘I used to like her,’ said a now sad Vague Henri. ‘Kleist never did.’

  ‘I think your friend Kleist was right not to like her.’

  ‘I don’t think Kleist liked anybody.’

  Unknown of course to Vague Henri this, if it ever had been true, was certainly no longer the case. Kleist was now happily, not to say ecstatically, married, not that among the Klephts this was particularly complicated. It was a simple, even cursory, affair without the weeks of pointless feasting and ruinous expense, as Daisy’s father complacently pointed out, of the even humblest Musselman wedding. ‘What a performance! What on earth for?’

  In fact the Klephts were always anxious to pick up news of Musselman weddings in the hope that those they couldn’t rob on their way to the ceremony they could rob on the way back. And it was during a particularly epic one of these even more fabulous than usual marriage celebrations that Kleist first went to work on behalf of his new relatives.

  Realizing that large numbers of men would be away in one place for the duration, the Klephts launched a raid on Musselman territory and given the considerable nature of the opportunity they put more men into the raiding party than it was their usual habit to risk. Though carefully calculated, it turned out to be unwise. The Musselmen had spread the rumours of the great marriage solely as bait for the Klephts and having drawn them in had sprung the trap and surrounded them in the Bakah Valley, also with considerable skill and great cunning. Suveri had led a breakout from the valley at night and tried to lead the bulk of those who had survived the first day back to the mountains. It was a long way and a difficult one and he would certainly have died along with his seventy men if it had not been for Kleist. For the next three days the two hundred and fifty Musselmen, who had tried to follow with every intention of massacring them, were picked off by a sixteen- or possibly fifteen-year-old boy they never even saw. By the end of the third day Kleist had killed so many of them he had become sick of the slaughter and, much to his new father-in-law’s annoyance, just shot their horses from under them. But when the screams of the animals also became too much to bear he just fired warning shots. With such terrible losses and all their attempts to find their tormentor a failure, the Musselmen reluctantly turned back, taking their dead with them and leaving the victory to Kleist, who returned to the mountains both pleased with his work and also somewhat low at how easy it was to kill other human beings in such large numbers. If he did not stay down for long, neither, in a small but marked way, was he ever quite the same again. He knew it was a terrible thing to kill a man because he felt most strongly that he did not want to be killed himself. He had worked hard to stay alive even in the Sanctuary, a place where he now understood that life was not really worth living. So he knew he ought to feel worse than he did – even though he felt bad for a few days after killing so many. But something nagged at him, perhaps the conscience the Redeemers were always blathering on about but never showed any signs of possessing themselves. But it was not strong enough to be remorse or guilt, just strong enough to tell him that the Redeemers had made their mark on him, not the one they intended but one that would never go away. He did wonder from time to time what he would have been like if he had never gone into the Sanctuary. Utterly different that was for sure. But what had been done couldn’t be undone so there wasn’t much point worrying about it. And, by and large, he didn’t.