by Paul Hoffman
But if it were not to be quick or even reasonably so then it was hard to see how he could avoid it collapsing. With winter coming on Cale would have to disperse the army before it fell apart through lack of food, water and the momentum needed to keep such disparate groups – predictably the New Model Army and the Laconics already hated each other – in the field in such hostile conditions. Even Cale was surprised to realize how little safety his great successes of the last few months had brought. In many ways, he wasn’t much safer than, say, the day after Deidre had slaughtered the Two Trevors. He’d expected to reach a position of power that offered a respite, a defence, an asylum, but he could see that while he really did have power, great power, it wasn’t made of the solid stuff he’d thought it would be. He’d thought it would be like a wall, but it wasn’t: it was like something else he couldn’t put his finger on.
But however elusive the question of how powerful power really was, he clearly had a great deal of it and that was why he was able to do something very foolish. He’d become obsessed with knowledge and feared never having enough of it. It was to him like the soother he saw in the mouths of infants. He saw very early on that information was odd stuff: you could easily end up with too much, or most of it was wrong or, even worse, correct but in a half-baked or misleading way. Still, he fancied himself, with some reason, as a good sifter of the stuff and had learned never to trust one source, not even the source he valued most in the world: IdrisPukke. It was true he felt a certain shame about this but not enough to stop him. The most important of these alternatives was Koolhaus, who had grown ever more disdainful and obnoxious the more he was able to demonstrate his superior intellectual gifts to the world. It was never enough for Koolhaus to be right, someone else had to be wrong as well – and he wanted them to know it. This was a weakness, perhaps a crippling one, as was the fact that his emotional grasp of the world was rather crude. Nevertheless, as a source of information and an evaluator of it he was invaluable. There was also Kleist. Intelligencing was the kind of work he was good at and which kept him busy: it was enough to distract to a certain extent from the fact that he was dangerously close to the sharp knife or the expensive narcotic from which he would never wake up. Kleist was not ready yet but he thought about it often. He made it through many bitter nights comforting himself with the thought that he could bring things to an end. Then there was Simon Materazzi. Cale had given Simon the freedom to go wherever he wanted. Simon could tell him what was happening in the camps and the streets. It was Simon who was the first to let him know that the puppet Cales were working to raise spirits and the first to let him know when the endless defeats and the slaughter that followed had demoralized the troops to such an extent that they couldn’t go on working any more. But by then Hooke had perfected and made hundreds of the shooters that were to change everything and give the men the one thing that made manipulation of their trust unnecessary: success. It was from both Koolhaus and Kleist that Cale received the same information at almost the same time, and from IdrisPukke shortly after: Arbell Materazzi had been given permission to leave for the protection of the Hanse. It revolted and shocked him how much it hurt to read that she was leaving. Even he realized the stupidity of feeling as if she had betrayed him all over again. He never stopped, not really, thinking about her. He realized, and this proved it, that she never thought about him at all, unless as someone to be avoided. No amount of anger with himself at the grossness of his stupidity could stop his useless and childish heart from crying out above his fury: How could she? How could she?
If you despise him or find his weakness detestable or even merely irritating it was no more than he found himself. She was an infection in his soul and that was that.
The idiocy of what he did next was obvious to him even as he did it: he wrote to Kleist and told him to take however many troops of the Spanish Leeds garrison of the New Model Army he needed to arrest her and bring her to the Sanctuary.
‘Fucking idiot!’ said Kleist, on reading his order. But at least it gave him something interesting to do.
‘Windsor has the crab.’
‘Really? Bad luck,’ said Fanshawe. ‘He’s sure?’
‘Had one of the quacks look him over. He’s a dead man.’
‘It’s an ill wind, I suppose,’ said Fanshawe.
‘Possibly Windsor would take a different view,’ said Ormsby-Gore. Ormsby-Gore did not care for Fanshawe. He talked too much and he had a diplomatic way of telling him what to do that he suspected was not as diplomatic as it sounded. What were really orders were dressed up with ‘I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea if …’ or ‘I could be mistaken but it might be worth trying …’ and so on. The Laconic way was to say what you had to say with the fewest words possible, a habit Ormsby-Gore took to extremes. For Fanshawe to be so roundabout in his orders felt like he was taking the piss.
‘Still, you have to admit,’ said Fanshawe, ‘it’s convenient and he has volunteered.’
The crab, a tumour that grew in the neck and was said to look like one, was a disease that afflicted Laconic males. About one in every fifty developed this condition, which was held by their enemies to be caused by everything from their hideous soup – made from blood and vinegar – to engaging in too much buggery with young boys. Given that it was invariably fatal and that long illnesses in Laconic society were notable by their absence it was the tradition that anyone so afflicted would offer themselves for a suicide mission as a means of making themselves useful.
‘How bad is it?’
‘Bad.’
‘But we have some time?’
‘Suppose.’
‘It might not be necessary to wait too long.’ He paused, hoping that Ormsby-Gore would be forced to speak. Fanshawe recognized this was childish but it gave him considerable pleasure. ‘What do you think?’
A pause. ‘Your patch.’
‘Still, I’d be very interested in your opinion.’
‘Act,’ said Ormsby-Gore, not because he believed they should murder Cale immediately but because it offered him the chance to use the fewest number of words.
‘You know, Ormsby-Gore, you could be on to something. Those howitzer thingies of his were the most appalling bloody shambles. What a cauchemar! Don’t you think?’
‘Don’t speak French,’ said Ormsby-Gore.
‘I know what you mean,’ agreed Fanshawe. ‘I’ve often regretted that I do.’
He didn’t have the slightest interest in Ormsby-Gore’s opinion but the question of when to kill Thomas Cale was still a problem. Hearing rumours about Hooke’s arrival he’d been pretty sure something like the howitzers was on the cards. If they had worked and the Sanctuary fell quickly then in the confusion it might have been possible, even probable, that an arrow in the back from a Redeemer would be taken at face value. The Swiss wouldn’t go looking for an explanation and with Cale dead they’d go back to holding the whip hand in the Axis again. There was only the New Model Army to worry about – they hated the Laconics and if there were a sniff of their involvement in Cale’s death there’d be trouble, particularly if they were stirred up by IdrisPukke and that rather engagingly yummy Henri boy. But, handled with care, the circumstances might mean there’d be no suspicion at all. Bad luck and handkerchiefs all round. The thing about sieges was that, once you were stuck into one like this, what mostly happened was nothing. Killing him and trying to make it look like something else was almost impossible to get away with when nothing much was happening. Windsor and his crab turning up was an unexpected benefit because he wouldn’t expect to survive the event – but it was more risk than Fanshawe was willing to take. An opportunity might come but he decided to wait.
35
‘You’re under arrest.’
Kleist was rather pleased with the way he’d used the bridge over the River Chess to cut Arbell Materazzi’s escort in two. Not that it would have made much difference if they’d taken them armed only with wet towels. They were kids. The Materazzi rump had mostly died at
Bex. The few that were left had been dumped by Cale and sent to guard Redeemers in the prison camp at Tewkesbury in order to avoid any chance of one of them distinguishing himself in combat. Whatever he owed Vipond, helping to ensure a Materazzi revival was not going to be part of the repayment.
‘On whose authority?’ Arbell was with a young man, softly spoken. ‘It’s Mr Kleist, isn’t it?’
‘You are?’
‘Henry Lubeck – Consul to the Hanse.’
‘You’re free to go, Lubeck.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Kleist, but you haven’t answered my question.’
‘Be a good boy and fuck off out of it.’
‘It’s all right, Mr Lubeck,’ said Arbell. ‘This person is a creature of Thomas Cale’s. You’ve a lawful warrant, of course?’
Kleist took out a piece of paper and a lead pencil – these days he was always having to write things down – wrote ‘You’re under arrest’ and signed it. He was about to hand it to her but stopped. ‘There should be a charge.’ He thought for a moment and wrote ‘For tax evasion’.
‘What about my escort? What will happen to them?’
‘They’ll be disarmed and come with us. We’ll let them go in a couple of days.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘It’s a surprise. But don’t worry, you’ll find it interesting. You might learn something. Tell your people not to do anything stupid. Five minutes and we’re on our way.’
A coincidence is a peculiar thing. We all know that every time we happen on someone we know in an unexpected place there must have been a hundred such meetings in our lives that never quite came about – that long-lost love was eighty feet away instead of five; or they were five feet away but we happened to be looking in the opposite direction. And so on. Each coincidence implies hundreds of near-coincidences almost happening but not quite. There’s something unpleasing about the loss of all those chances for something wonderful that might have changed our lives but for a few feet or an undistracted glance.
Kleist’s near wonderful event that day was that his wife Daisy and their child were in Arbell’s column, where they would now have to stay for at least three days. It wasn’t, though, altogether an amazing chance that she was there. Daisy had recently been dismissed as kitchen char to a merchant family for stealing vegetables – not one or two carrots and the odd potato, but sacks of the things. Once she’d left they discovered that her larceny extended to small but valuable items of jewellery. As a result the Hermandad came looking for Daisy and she realized it was time to be gone. The problem was that she had no useful skills – she was a useless charwoman – and she had a baby and no one was leaving Spanish Leeds; with the front line of the war moving ever westward they were only coming back. After several anxious days, unwilling to risk the Hermandads on the city gates, she had been forced to bribe the cook in Arbell’s train to take her on as a washerwoman for no pay. This at least got them out of the city and once she was out it made sense to stay with the protection of the column. There were entirely untrue rumours of Redeemer fifth columns. Fed up with hard work for no pay she had been planning to disappear from Arbell’s entourage in the middle of the night along with whatever was valuable she could lay her hands on, but the arrival of the New Model Army had put an end to that. It was now too dangerous to run for it. It might be thought inevitable that in a column of only two hundred-odd people, most of them soldiers, that a meeting with what she thought was her dead husband was bound to take place. But she made a point of staying out of sight (just in case) and even when she was obliged to come out of the washing wagon it was placed at the end of the line so that no one had to look at the more menial servants going about their manky tasks. Lay down your bet, then, for the great game always playing behind our backs – for Daisy a life of grim uncertainty, for Kleist a solitary death. Roll the dice, spin the wheel, shuffle the pack. Play.
Kleist had spent the first day riding at the front, quite comfortably numb, the weather warm, the constantly changing scenery a narcotic to his cancerous distress. Despair with its fifty shades of grey can give the soul wounded days like this. He only went back down the line once, when Arbell was finishing her evening meal. He missed Daisy clearing up the dirty plates by nearly two minutes.
The next day there was a shout to halt and he rode back down the line to see what was causing the delay – a broken spoke on an ancient wagon wheel. Daisy had been sent to bring up water to the nobs and she arrived just as Kleist, seeing he would just have to wait until the wheel was fixed, turned back to the front. She caught a brief but clear enough sight of him. But he had changed; he was gaunt where he had once been jaunty and vigorous in his own cool way. And of course he was long dead in the gullies and barancas of the Quantock Hills. How could he be this big kahuna on a horse with the power to make even the aristos shut up for once?
On the third and last day Arbell’s followers were told they could clear off. Kleist, after a bad night, went down the column to check that no one was hanging on to Arbell who might be a nuisance. She was attempting to take five of her entourage with her, including two men who were clearly used to handling themselves.
‘You can have two maids. That’ll be enough.’
‘And who’s to protect me?’
‘Oh, we’ll do that, Your Highness. You’re as safe as Memphis with us.’
‘You think that’s funny?’
‘Not really – but it’s hot and it’s the best I can do at the moment. Two maids.’
‘Three.’
‘How about one?’
To make the point that this was the end of the conversation he turned his horse away and stepped it down the line as if he wanted to check that his orders were being carried out. Daisy was about fifty feet away, sideways on and bending down to pick up their daughter, who kept trying to run away under the wheels of the turning wagons. This time he saw her face clearly enough, but a year can be a long time for someone her age and she had filled out, no longer a lanky girl but a young woman. Something in the way she moved stirred now unpleasant memories and had she laughed rather than just smiled to herself at the little girl’s desperate efforts to get free of her protective embrace he would have recognized the sound anywhere. And then she had the child firmly embedded on her hip as it reached out with pudgy hands to pull Daisy’s now much longer hair and she moved on past a covered wagon and out of sight. There was no numbness now but a terrible surge of loss and grief. He wanted to get away and spurred the horse back towards the front of the column and signalled the horsemaster to move the convoy on.
It was the moment of the final entry for Kleist into the black place where the doors are shut and the windows are barred. Except for one thing. As he rode ever farther away from the millions of joys he had so nearly stumbled upon, he could not entirely forget the image of the young woman which had given him such dreadful pain: the easy to dismiss familiarity of the way she moved. It made sense to get away from the cause of such agony. Going back to look at her would only make things worse.
But all the same he turned around. Then he stopped. It was foolish. Pointless. Ridiculous. He turned around again and rode away from the woman for several minutes, making it impossible to go back to wound himself further for no reason. Too far now. Then some pointless hope of something, of at least seeing an echo of everything he’d lost, made him turn again. He wanted to rush and not rush. But a certain composure returned to him, a sense that he was headed for a last, thin ghost of a reminder of her presence. You could not call it hope, because she was dead, but it was movement away from the black room. Impatient, he drove on, now he had made the decision, anxious to see it through. Look at her, get it out of your system and stop this idiocy. He raced past the end of his own column and then towards the meandering remainder of Arbell’s former followers. As he arrived they looked at him warily – what new thunder here? He ignored them and slowly began to search among the untidy line. Then he saw her just ahead. With hips that Daisy had never had, he almost said
nothing – she was not even a distant simulacrum of the girl he’d lost. Something terrible collapsed in his heart. He turned the horse away at the pointlessness – but the horse, having been pulled about more than it thought fit, jibbed at another clumsy pull and snorted in irritation. Daisy looked round at the unexpected intensity of the sound, wary of harm to the little girl. Kleist stared at her. Still ignorant, she stared back, leery of the peculiar-looking young man, then alarmed as she saw his already pale face go white. He let out a dreadful cry as if he were dying.
Then it came to her. She drew in a breath as deep as if it had to last for the rest of her life. He was off his horse and tried to get to her so quickly he slipped and fell in the mud, then up and slipped again, utterly ridiculous. ‘Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!’ he shouted, then grabbed her and the child in a mad embrace. But she couldn’t speak, she could only stare. Watched by the astonished onlookers, they knelt in the mud, unable to weep, and simply groaned. The toddler found a new toy in playing with her father’s hair, casually accepting of the joyous agony wrapping her in its arms. ‘Honour!’ shouted the baby – although it could not have been what she really said, that was what it sounded like to the watching servants. ‘Honour! Honour!’
Imagine then the jumbled brew of mixed and bruised emotions that arrived at the siege camp in front of the Sanctuary a few days later, the traumatized joy of Kleist and Daisy and the seething fear and anger of Arbell Materazzi.
Cale had already prepared a fenced-off compound for Arbell, well-guarded and away from the nosy in the walled tent city that had grown up near the walls of the Sanctuary. He’d considered carefully whether to wallow in the pettiness of ensuring the compound was as uncomfortable as possible or to show Arbell that he was somebody to be reckoned with through his ability to provide luxury even in a shithole like the scrubland in front of the Sanctuary. Fortunately for Arbell, he chose the latter. He was also regretting in a half-baked way his decision to bring her here at all – it’s not given to many people to do whatever they want and he was discovering another facet of such immense clout: absolute power tends to confuse absolutely.