by Helen Grant
Veerle didn’t care about any of it. She was going to do this.
25
In the end, disaster nearly did befall the planned expedition, because Geert nearly did go away on business, and he talked quite seriously about Veerle skipping the trip to the Rijksmuseum to stay with Anneke.
Anneke came home from the hospital and Veerle had her first glimpse of her half-brother, a tiny wizened-looking face so muffled up in cap and blankets and the padding of his brand-new car seat that he looked like a small pinkish cameo lying on an overstuffed cushion. She waited to see whether she would feel a sudden rush of sisterly affection. Mostly she felt curiosity. She had lived through her entire childhood without a sibling, and now, just as she was checking out, here was her half-brother checking in. And then there was the fact that they had so very nearly not been in each other’s lives at all.
I wasn’t supposed to be here, in Ghent, in Geert’s house.
Perhaps Anneke sensed that Veerle’s feelings towards Adam, while friendly, were more curious than enthusiastic. At any rate, she flatly refused to be left with Veerle for company.
Veerle listened to Anneke shouting at Geert through the closed living-room door. Anneke was worn down by hormones and lack of sleep, the bedrock of her feelings breaking through the thin topsoil of convention. She didn’t bother to pretend that she was concerned about Veerle missing an educational opportunity, or that she regretted asking Geert to stay at home. She shouted at him that he had to stay, that she wasn’t being left with Veerle, who shouldn’t have been here anyway, who was in Adam’s room, and that, Verdomme, she had been looking forward to a couple of days with Geert and Adam without Veerle hanging around.
Veerle listened to this not because she liked eavesdropping but because she wanted to know whether Geert was going to cancel her school trip or not. She found that she did not care very much what Anneke said or thought about her, so long as she could get away. She wanted to stand at the top of the Gravensteen at midnight, with the chill night breeze stinging her face, and see the contours of the city laid out before her, a kingdom that belonged to her and a few others.
When Geert said, ‘All right, Anneke,’ his gruff voice weary and resigned, she could have cheered.
The Amsterdam trip was on a Thursday and Friday. All the previous week Veerle waited for Geert to say that the school secretary had telephoned, or perhaps the directeur himself, to discuss the fact that Veerle was missing an important cultural milestone in the syllabus. He never did. Nor did he offer to accompany Veerle to the school in the mornings, not even on the day when Veerle was supposedly departing for Holland. In truth, Geert was looking haggard and preoccupied. He still reminded Veerle a little of a bear, but no longer a bluff, slowmoving droll kind of bear; now he looked like a bear that has had a ring inserted into the tender part of its nose and been made to dance to the point of exhaustion. Broken nights, and days spent trying to catch up with work he had missed were taking their toll on her father.
Veerle packed a small rucksack and walked to school by herself. She stood at an upstairs front window and watched her classmates milling around the bus that was to take them to Amsterdam. Suki stood a little apart from the rest, leaning against the side of the bus with a bored expression and chewing gum. Once she glanced up at the school building, but if she spotted Veerle looking down she gave no sign of it.
After the bus had gone Veerle went to spend the rest of the day in quiet study along with two other students who had been unable to take the trip.
Tonight, she kept thinking. It was all she could do to stay in her seat, calmly leafing through her textbooks and making notes. She kept glancing at her watch, marking off the hours, the half-hours.
Twelve o’clock. In twelve hours I shall be locked inside the Gravensteen. Her heart raced at the thought of it. Or if we mess up, maybe we’ll both be at the police station trying to explain ourselves. She didn’t think that was going to happen – she hoped it wasn’t going to happen – but she wished it was six p.m. already. She wanted to be safely tucked away in whatever hideout Bram had in mind for them, listening to the staff locking the doors, the sound of iron keys jangling and heavy antiquated tumblers falling into place, footsteps retreating down stone stairs and fading into the distance.
When the final bell rang she was out of her chair with indecent haste, sweeping her books and pens up into her arms. She dumped everything in her locker and then she ran out of school, taking the stairs two at a time, the rucksack thumping on her back.
She’d arranged to meet Bram at Sint-Veerleplein. When she got there she couldn’t see him at first; it wasn’t until he came right up to her that she recognized him. He had put on a peaked cap that shaded the upper part of his face.
Smart, thought Veerle. Why didn’t I think of that?
By comparison, she felt naked and exposed.
Better hope no one gets suspicious, because I’ll be the one they remember.
‘Ready?’ Bram asked her. He seemed different somehow; Veerle realized that it was because he was not smiling at her as he normally did. There was a grim tension in his manner. He was just as keyed up as she was.
Bram nodded towards the front gate of the castle. ‘We’re just in time. There’s a tour group about to go in.’
He was right: when they got to the gate it was almost completely blocked by a group of perhaps twenty-five elderly Germans, who were listening impassively to something their tour guide was explaining to them. Veerle and Bram pushed their way carefully through the crowd and went into the glass-fronted ticket office. Bram had barely scooped up his change and the tickets from the desk when the tourists began to crowd into the office behind them.
Veerle saw the heads of both the ticket sellers turn towards the press of elderly tourists. One of them stood up and began to advise them that if they were in a tour group they should wait outside; their tour guide would buy the tickets. When this advice got no response he switched from Flemish to English. Meanwhile the tour guide herself was calling out something ineffectual from the back of the crush. Elderly men and women milled about in the enclosed space, their shoulders rubbing the glass, the air crackling with their voices.
Veerle and Bram walked out of the other door into the castle precinct.
‘Perfect,’ said Bram under his breath.
Veerle said nothing. She was too busy looking around. Bram had been right when he told her that nobody broke into the Gravensteen. From the outside it presented an impregnable mass of towering walls and turrets. Here, inside, there were open spaces and even grass, but the defences of the castle were constructed on such an enormous scale that she felt like a mouse running along a skirting board. To their left was a mighty wall studded with lookout points, as though anyone might have been able to cross the moat and assail the walls. To their right the imposing grey bulk of the keep loomed above them, its crenulated corner turrets like bunched knuckles thrusting brutally into the autumn sky. Veerle gazed up at it, her hand shielding her eyes. She was impressed, and not entirely pleasantly. She thought that spending the night up there would be like spending it on the exposed face of a mountain. Like ascending a mountain, it required commitment; it was very clear that once the main gate was locked for the night, there was no getting out until it was unlocked the following morning, no matter what happened. They would be sealed inside as effectively as if the gate were the steel door of a bank vault, with a timer set to open it in sixteen hours’ time.
Assuming we don’t get caught before they close up, she reminded herself.
Bram took her hand and began to pull her towards a doorway at the bottom of the keep. Veerle glanced back and saw that elderly German tourists were starting to spill out of the glass-fronted ticket office, like a swarm of wasps crawling from their nest. Then she and Bram passed through the doorway and the Gravensteen swallowed them up.
26
‘Here,’ said Bram in a low voice, coming to a halt.
‘Here?’ Veerle looked around, feeling
slightly puzzled. ‘But there’s nothing here.’
They were in an empty room whose only feature was a large stone fireplace about a metre from where they were standing.
‘I know,’ said Bram. He glanced about casually. Then he said, ‘I’m going to put my arms round you, OK?’
‘What for?’
‘So I can say this right in your ear,’ said Bram, pulling her into an embrace.
‘Say what?’
‘Look, round the next corner is the weapons room. There’s nobody keeping watch in here because there’s nothing to keep watch over, but there might be someone in there, and we don’t want them hearing every word we say, OK?’
Veerle tried to nod, and found that at these close quarters it was impossible to do so without nuzzling up to Bram like a friendly pony. ‘OK,’ she said hastily.
‘You see this chimney?’ Bram was saying into her ear. ‘There’s one like it in the weapons room. Looks nearly the same, but with one big difference. This one has been blocked off, and that one hasn’t.’
‘So?’
‘So that’s where we’re hiding.’
Bram must have felt Veerle pulling back because his arms tightened around her. ‘Hey, don’t go running in to look. Like I said, there might be someone in there. We’ll go in there in a minute and we can just wander past like we’re admiring the architecture or something. We’d better not spend too long staring up the chimney. If there is a guard, it could make them suspicious.’
He let her go.
Veerle made herself stroll calmly round the corner, as though she had nothing particularly pressing to do.
The chimney? she was thinking. We’re hiding up the chimney? That’s a crazy idea. She imagined herself wedged in some narrow soot-encrusted gully, elbows and knees scraped raw by the walls and her nostrils full of the choking scent of old burnings. I hope it’s a big chimney.
The weapons room was quite large and there were a number of glass cases in it, making it impossible to get a clear view of the entire room at once. For a moment Veerle thought that she and Bram were alone, but then she heard the sound of shoes scuffing the polished wooden floor and realized that there was someone else in there with them. She resisted the temptation to go and examine the fireplace immediately. Instead she wandered over to one of the display cases and pretended to examine the objects inside. There were enormous ornate swords, the type you had to hold with two hands at once, and what she thought were pikes.
‘You could do a lot of damage with one of these,’ she said to Bram, who was at her elbow.
‘Wait till you see the torture chamber, then.’
‘Charming.’
Veerle rounded the end of the display case, and now she saw that the other person who was in the room with them was indeed one of the castle staff: a rather stout middle-aged man with a name badge prominently pinned to his lapel. She saw him give her an incurious glance before turning on his heel and strolling away to the other end of the room.
She leaned close to Bram. ‘What if he’s here all afternoon? How are we going to get up the chimney without him seeing?’
‘He won’t be,’ said Bram confidently.
Veerle was keeping an eye on the man, in case he came within earshot. ‘How do you know?’ she said.
‘I’ve been in here before. They move about. It’s not manned all the time.’
‘What if he doesn’t move?’
‘He’ll have to. They do a walk-through just before it closes, to make sure everyone is out. If he’s here he’ll have to go back to the start and shut the door. We just have to make sure we’re ahead of him, and out of sight before he comes back through this room.’
Veerle stared straight ahead, as though fascinated by the contents of the glass case. She could see her own reflection in the glass, chewing her lip doubtfully.
‘What if we don’t manage it?’
Bram shrugged. ‘Then we have to come back another day.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Well, then, I guess we have to manage it.’
‘Hmm,’ said Veerle to her reflection.
‘You didn’t tell me how you managed to get away this time,’ Bram reminded her in a low voice.
‘School trip to the Rijksmuseum,’ said Veerle. ‘Dad thinks I’m on it but I cancelled the place.’ She looked at Bram. ‘He thinks I’m in Amsterdam right now. I’ll probably have to phone him from the chimney and tell him I’m standing in front of that painting – you know, The Night Watch.’
‘Have you actually seen it?’
Veerle shook her head. ‘I looked at it on the Rijksmuseum website, just in case.’
She saw the expression on Bram’s face at this revelation and turned away, biting her lip in case she laughed out loud.
Don’t draw attention to yourself, she berated herself.
Footsteps on the wooden boards: the man with the badge was approaching. Veerle looked right through the glass case and saw him strolling along with his hands behind his back. She put her head down.
When he had passed, she and Bram drifted down the room towards the fireplace. It was massive, the chimneypiece a huge gable of grey stone supported by two thick pillars. The hearth was a combination of flagstones and reddish bricks. It was enormous, so big that she and Bram could have stood inside it. Veerle dared not linger there, but she risked ducking under the heavy stone gable and peering up the chimney.
The view was unnerving. All she could see was blackness. It was impossible to say how far up the chimney went; she supposed it must be blocked somewhere since there was no light coming down from above. Nor could she tell how wide it was. She pushed away thoughts of sticking fast in some dark narrow space, as though the ancient castle had swallowed her whole and she had stuck in its gullet.
When Veerle ducked her head to come out again she was restless with anticipation. She wanted to go up to the man with the badge and put her hands in the middle of his back and push him out of the room. Instead she made herself wander a little further along the line of display cases, as though the brief foray into the hearth had yielded nothing of interest.
After a couple of minutes Bram evidently judged that they had spent enough time strolling about looking nonchalant. He took Veerle’s hand and led her to a doorway leading to a flight of stone stairs. Veerle followed him up, neither of them saying anything. She was conscious of the man still pacing the room below. She was not sure how well their voices would travel in a building like this, where everything was solid stone, with no soft furnishings to deaden sound.
Why would he listen in anyway? she asked herself. You haven’t done anything wrong yet.
After a steep climb they reached a doorway leading out onto the top of the keep. Even on the way up the stairs Veerle could hear the whisper of the wind outside, but when they stepped onto the battlements it was more like a howl. The wind plucked at their clothing and battered at their ears. Veerle pulled her jacket tight around her body.
‘We’re going to freeze up here,’ she said to Bram.
‘What?’ he shouted.
Veerle flapped her hand at him to say, Don’t worry, not important.
She went and stood by Bram and stared out over the battlements at the city of Ghent. From here they could see the three towers: Sint-Baafs, Sint-Niklaas and the Belfort.
‘It’s kind of strange,’ said Bram in Veerle’s ear, leaning close so that she could hear him over the wind. ‘Anyone who stood here for the last six hundred years could have seen those towers. It’s only the stuff in between that’s changed.’
Veerle supposed he was right. When you craned over a bit and looked down at the streets below you could see cars and vans creeping about the busy streets, or the occasional tram swaying along the track that ran past the castle. There were traffic lights and illuminated shop-window displays, and the streetlamps were on too. Sometimes between the buffeting gusts of wind you could hear sounds floating up from below as well: car horns, tram bells, fragments of music. You could see and he
ar all that, and then, when you looked up you could see those three ancient stone towers, landmarks of Ghent for centuries. The twenty-first-century life that swarmed around them at ground level might as well have been waves breaking over the base of a lighthouse for all the impression it made.
Six hundred years, thought Veerle. She found herself thinking about that story Bram had told her, about Joos Vijdt, the rich man who had commissioned the painting of The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb that hung in Sint-Baafs cathedral.
Supposing the story was true and he really didn’t die? she mused. He’d have been roaming Ghent for nearly six hundred years himself by now. A traveller from a time when people believed in demons. Veerle shivered in the chill wind. It’s weird to think how much of the city he would still recognize after all those years.
After a while she and Bram wandered round to the northeast side of the battlements and gazed out there too. Veerle thought that the house Bram called de ladder and the rooftop where she had sat with him, watching the sun set behind the Gravensteen, must be visible from here, but she couldn’t pick out either of them. She was becoming really chilled, and it was a relief when they crossed the rooftop and went back inside.
27
After a while they came to a room containing a guillotine standing on a blond wooden floor under the glare of modern spotlights. The blade was raised as though ready to sweep down with vertebra-cleaving force. Veerle went and stood by the guillotine and stared at it. The once-bright metal was spotted with brown, which logic identified as rust. There was a coarse-looking sacking bag waiting to catch severed heads. She couldn’t resist peering into that too, although it was obviously empty.