by RA Williams
‘Strange,’ he whispered. ‘There’s more activity since I was last here.’
‘How long ago was that?’ Elle asked.
‘A fortnight,’ he replied, looking to the eastern sky. Following his gaze, she saw the first blushes of morning. ‘We must press on.’
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she said. ‘It’ll be dawn soon and I still have no clue where your little stroll is taking us.’
He turned. ‘Caponnière 1, of course.’
‘Caponnière? You’re taking me to a chicken coop?’
He nodded, brushing by her, the thermos in his hand grazing her sore ribs.
‘That’s what it means, doesn’t it?’ she pressed.
‘No chickens where we’re going.’ The Belgian came to a halt as they arrived at a point above the barracks. ‘It’s through there,’ he whispered, pointing across the open ground to a high embankment covered with scrub. At its base sat a low tunnel entrance. ‘That is where your chicken is kept.’
A soldier stood beside a piquet house outside the tunnel.
Elle gestured towards him.
Gaele had a long look. ‘Private Jones. Don’t you worry about him.’
‘Either Private Jones is nine feet tall, or the tunnel entrance was built for the Seven Dwarfs.’ As they moved closer, she saw that the guard was no taller than she.
‘Who’s that?’ he challenged, displaying even less discipline than Elle expected of a soldier.
‘Quiet,’ hushed Gaele. ‘You’ll have the entire British Army awake.’
‘That you, Flemi?’ he said, and pushed the sling of his rifle back on his shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you send word you was coming?’
Producing a pair of women’s silk stockings from his jacket pocket, Gaele handed them over to Jones.
‘Do not think I neglected your request.’
Accepting them without hesitation, Jones gave them a sniff. ‘Nice, ain’t they?’
‘Only two days ago, they were in a Paris hosier’s.’
The soldier tucked them away inside his tunic. ‘Me missus’ll be well pleased with them.’
‘She won’t be the only one, I suspect.’
Jones offered a cheeky grin in reply, his teeth a row of bombed-out houses. He gave Elle a suspicious looking over.
‘Ah, Private Jones, this is Dr Annenberg. An American.’
‘A Yank? Nobody but you meant to pass through the engineers’ tunnel. Cubby Smyth was quite clear about that.’
‘Dr Annenberg is Mr Smyth’s guest, and as such shall be afforded equal discretion.’
The Tommy didn’t mull it over for long. ‘It’ll cost you, Monsieur.’
‘Everything does,’ replied the Belgian.
‘Bottle of fancy smells them proper ladies in Paris wear.’
‘Eau de toilette or eau de parfum?’
‘Wot me missus want with water from the bog?’
‘Eau de parfum then,’ Elle cut in, trying hard to remember the last time she had had a conversation about perfume.
The Belgian’s eyes darted to her before he smiled at Private Jones. ‘Without delay.’
‘Get on with it, Mssr Gaele. You lot won’t be welcome round here much longer, even if you was in with the king himself.’
‘Oh?’
‘They don’t tell a screw like me nuffin’ much, but I does know another brigade is boots-up here since your last visit. Another regiment arrives tomorrow.’ Jones looked around. ‘Best I shut me gob before I go on report.’
‘Be a good boy now and look the other way,’ said Gaele to the private as he motioned for Elle to enter the tunnel.
She ducked inside. Unlike the rest of the Heights, the tunnel was newly dug. Not more than shoulder-width, the squared-off walls were barely four feet high. Fortunately, it was blessedly short, opening into a dry moat, its brown brick-and-flint revetments rising fifty feet. A polygon-shaped redoubt arose before her, strands of ivy creeping up the brickwork, imposing bastions guarding the corners. While the barracks they had passed displayed a sense of order, the redoubt looked dilapidated. More overgrown Mayan temple than Victorian fortification.
‘Imposing, no?’
‘Very.’ She stared down the sharp edge of the bastion, the brooding curtain walls of which were an endless expanse of brick and stone. ‘It’s immense.’
‘The redoubt walls are twelve feet thick. If Napoleon had come, his men would have been scythed by enfilade musket and cannon fire from four caponnières.’
‘And… Balthasar Toule is here?’ Elle asked tentatively.
‘He is.’
She studied the caponnière, the sills of the gun embrasures too narrow to crawl through. And, in any case, out of reach.
‘How do we go in?’
‘Through the chicken coop.’
Crossing the moat, they stopped before a jutting corner. Five steps receded into a break in the brickwork. At its top, an iron postern was secured by a keyhole. Producing a skeleton key from his pocket, Gaele slipped it in. The lock clicked gently, just like the doors in the smugglers’ passage under the parish church.
‘Greasing doors a hobby of yours, is it?’ Elle asked.
‘Of Cubby’s. Smugglers are nothing if not quiet,’ he said as they went through.
It was pitch-black inside. Gaele closed the door behind and locked them in.
A match was struck. She smelled sulphur. For an instant, the Belgian was illuminated by a wavering orange glow, dimming to blue as phosphorus ignited potassium chlorate.
Leaning forward, Gaele took hold of a dinged-up brass lamp. Holding the match to the opened lamp, it burst to light. Handing it to Elle, he lit another for himself.
Elle took the moment to have a look around. They stood at the base of a stair. Climbing, she came to a landing made of slate.
‘Posh, for a bastion.’
‘Welsh slate,’ the Belgian remarked.
‘Opulent.’
‘It doesn’t spark.’
‘That’s a problem?’ She reminded him he’d just lit two lamps using matches.
‘Not any more,’ he replied, joining her at the landing before ducking through a low-arched passageway into a cavernous casemate. ‘But not long ago, these redoubts were filled with barrels of gunpowder. A spark could create a very nasty surprise.’
The vaulted interior of the caponnière was entirely lime-washed. Moonbeams filtered in through the loopholes of a musketry gallery above. The ceiling, a study in masonry skill, was supported by courses of finely joined brickwork, meeting at a spine wall. But the chickens had flown the coop, and from the amount of dust and bird droppings crusting the creaky wooden floors, it was clearly abandoned long ago.
‘It’s empty.’
‘Is it?’ Gaele asked suggestively, turning to a passage ascending into darkness. Grasping a wrought-iron handrail, he disturbed a gaggle of slumbering pigeons, their wings flapping in the darkness. He reeled back as they fluttered up into the musketry gallery, settling in the loopholes. Something about them seemed to spook him.
‘Jitters?’ Elle asked.
He took a long breath. ‘The sound of their wings brings unpleasant memories, that’s all.’
Climbing the wide steps to the musketry gallery, they passed empty expense magazines. Tucked inconspicuously under a stairway was a small room, empty except for a peculiar raised ledge, reinforced with a glazed porcelain backsplash. An enamel bucket sat atop, its handle rusty.
‘Thuisken,’ he said before she could ask. ‘For the men to relieve themselves. It is clever, no?’
‘If shitting in a bucket is clever.’
‘Very clever, as you shall see.’
Reaching through the cobwebs clogging a slit vent in the low ceiling, he fished about before a hollow click emanated from within. He continued fiddling. Another click. A third, and Elle heard the now familiar sound of whirring gears. A final click and the entire loo popped forward an inch.
‘Not so sophisticated a mechanism as that sarcophagus under the
parish, but no doubt clever, ja?’
Handing her his lamp, he put his shoulder against the bucket. A firm nudge, and the assembly shifted. The porcelain backsplash, bucket and all, rotated sideways, balanced on a pinion.
‘I have become well practised in shifting these silly conjurer cabinets,’ he explained. ‘Come on.’
He ducked back into the darkness. Elle followed.
Their lamps bathed the arched passage of decaying bricks and crumbling masonry in an ominous glow. Stalactites leached from the arched ceiling.
‘Lime,’ he explained, catching her gaze.
‘Balthasar is down here?’ Elle’s optimism battled with caution. Clever contraptions were all well and good, but she was not here for them.
‘He is,’ he said, beckoning for her to make her way down a newel staircase, spiralling into a dark void. The darkness receded before her as she descended, the stair coming to an end in a vault that smelled of damp, the remains of old barrels and smashed crates scattered about the chalky floor.
‘A forgotten champagne vault,’ said Gaele, lifting a scrap of crate. ‘Heidsieck Cuvée. 1907. Ah, that was an exquisite vintage. Cubby tells me a lot of French champagne came through here.’
Elle shone her lamp down the length of the vault as it faded into blackness.
The Belgian continued, ‘Behind the brick walls is chalk, quarried for the lime. The Western Heights are honeycombed with tunnels, bored all the way from Dover Harbour. This one long ago caved in and was abandoned.’
Shining her lamp towards him, she replied, ‘Not by everyone.’
‘Precisely. These tunnels served many masters: stores awaiting payment of tax, cheese vaults, truffle growing. Even an air-raid shelter in the Great War. Never mind smuggling.’ Elle watched as Gaele removed a rusty lantern hanging from the brick wall. ‘Cubby’s ancestors made much use of this place over the years.’
His lamplight revealed a keyhole that had been hidden behind the lantern. From his pocket appeared a hand-hammered key. He inserted it into the keyhole and gave it a twist.
A whir of gears. From somewhere deep in the tunnel rolled a deep grating sound. Gaele’s lamp lit the way down a jaggedly cut chalk passageway, its walls dripping with calcifying lime.
Cautious again, Elle unsnapped the leather cover of her compass, checking the dial.
‘Is it wobbly?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘It took a fit in the Parish Church of St Emiliana’s earlier as well.’
‘Crimen.’
She looked at him, now even more ill at ease.
‘Yes. When they are near, a compass loses its magnetic north.’
She remembered the reaction of her compass in the passage under the Externsteine. ‘And if it spins like a whirling dervish?’
‘Pray.’
She was about to turn tail when she saw them: parallel gouges in the chalk floor.
The warning was forgotten as she followed the grooves, an anxious shiver running down her spine. They came to an end before an enormous blocking stone.
‘Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,’ she said, staring at the familiar death symbol chiselled into the stone, its Totenkopf spitting an all-too-familiar apophthegm – identical to the Externsteine.
Almost identical.
‘It’s open,’ she said. ‘Did the keyhole behind the lantern activate a mechanism?’
‘An elaborate one, as well,’ said Gaele with a nod. ‘And easily missed.’
‘That’s the idea though, isn’t it? To be easily missed.’
Had she, in her haste, missed such a keyhole in the passage under the Externsteine? Putting a shoulder against the boulder, the Belgian rotated it into the wall with surprising ease.
‘What an ingenious pocket door,’ she marvelled, pulse quickening as she awaited the reveal.
Inside was another chalk passage leading to descending stairs, precisely set with ornate tiles, and opening to a long chamber lined with fluted Doric columns.
‘What is all this?’ she whispered in awe, her shoes crunching over a layer of calcified lime obscuring intricate mosaics. She twisted her neck to look at them better. A goddess, but upside down. They must have entered the chamber from the opposite direction. Turning around, she lowered her lamp to look again at the mosaics.
‘Morta.’ She looked up at Gaele. ‘The goddess of death?’
He nodded. ‘The Roman goddess of death.’
‘Roman?’ she repeated.
‘The Heights have long been important,’ he explained, seemingly unimpressed by the subterranean chamber’s importance. He had clearly come this way many times over. ‘Before Normans, Saxons and Templars, there were the legions of Rome, invading Britain through Dubris.’
‘Of course – Dover.’
‘The key to England.’
She heard his words, but her eyes found something more fascinating still. In the niches between the columns, under centuries of calcified lime, were bones. Thousands of them: femurs and tibiae, skulls topped with bronze helmets, now green from a millennium of oxidation.
‘This is a necropolis,’ she said.
‘Ja. From the reign of Emperor Claudius,’ Gaele replied.
She watched him lift a galea from the pile, the helmet falling to bits in his hands.
‘That must be two thousand years old.’
‘Centurions killed in Britain’s outposts were brought here and comforted by the goddess Morta, while awaiting a ship of the Roman fleet to return their earthly remains to Rome. The chalk was ideal: it absorbs moisture, drying the bodies.’
He placed the bits of helmet back onto the old bones.
‘Morta,’ she mused, looking along the chamber’s length, niches overflowing with the dead. ‘Roman goddess of death.’ Then a realisation. ‘Camazotz, to a Maya. Hel, to a Germanic pagan.’ Turning to him, she said, ‘This is a Crimen hollow.’
Gaele stood before an archway, darkness giving no hint as to what lay beyond. ‘This way.’
She followed, caution gone, her lamplight revealing fluted Corinthian columns topped with acanthus-leaved capitals. If the previous chamber was suitable for centurions, this was fit for an Imperial legate. Between each column lay a recumbent emissary, surrounded by statues, vases and terracotta urns encrusted with calcified lime. Intricate mosaics underfoot reflected her lamplight.
Someone had tidied up, although not very recently. In the newly forming lime crystals, she saw footprints leading to a strong door – not Roman, but a match to the one securing Balthasar’s vault beneath the Parish Church of St Emiliana.
A padlock hung loose from the door. Raising the latch, Gaele swung it open.
From within came sudden and violent movement. He was lifted from his feet and tossed against a column, his rifle, Henry, clattering to the floor.
Fumbling to take up the heavy Winchester, Elle recognised a familiar face glaring back at her. Bowler hat, small round spectacles, an air of abstruseness on a gaunt face.
‘You.’
‘You.’ A slight smile crept across his face as he stared at Elle before fixing his gaze upon Gaele, tommy gun gripped in his right hand. Releasing a disapproving sigh, he helped the Belgian to his feet.
‘You ought not to have brought her here.’
Brushing lime dust from himself, Gaele lifted the thermos from the floor of the narrow passage.
‘I’ve brought your tea, Mahmoud. And I found some of those shortbreads you like.’
‘It’s not all you’ve brought,’ Mahmoud replied discordantly, taking the thermos from Gaele, before glancing at her again. He remained inexplicably donnish, unscathed by the years.
‘It was you, wasn’t it? Across the lake at St Dunstan’s,’ said Elle.
‘It was.’
‘And on Titanic, in the hold.’
‘Have you got my tennis ball?’ he asked.
‘Have you got my talisman?’
‘It wasn’t yours to have.’ There was nothing warm in his reply.
Taking Henry from h
er, Gaele said, ‘Dr Annenberg, this is Mahmoud Hajian.’ She leaned against the wall of the passage, a heavy exhalation disguising her nervous laugh as all the loose ends came together.
‘What is she doing here?’ Mahmoud asked.
‘You know perfectly well,’ the Belgian replied.
Unscrewing the top of the thermos, Mahmoud examined the tea inside. ‘Good, it’s still hot.’
He looked momentarily pleased. Blocking them from the door to another chamber, he added, ‘He wouldn’t want her here.’
‘It’s not for you to decide,’ Gaele shot back.
‘Neither is it for you.’
‘It’s too late for this argument now.’
‘I have naught interest in arguing, Monsieur. There is but one position. Mine,’ Mahmoud stated.
‘She’s in it now,’ Gaele told him.
‘Up to her neck,’ the Persian rebuked, before turning towards her. ‘A very pretty little neck it may well be, but don’t think for one moment I wouldn’t choke the life out of you.’
‘In for a ha’penny, eh, Mahmoud?’ said Gaele.
‘In for a pound,’ Elle blazed, fed up with being left out of the conversation. ‘Stop goddamn speaking like I’m not standing here.’
Mahmoud took a step back. ‘I cannot possibly forget you are standing there, Dr Annenberg. Much as I am pleased to see you looking well, it would be better if you had not come.’
‘But she is here,’ Gaele interrupted. ‘And you must let her see him.’
‘Oh, must I?’ Mahmoud’s lips tightened.
‘Can he be moved?’
By the look on his face, Mahmoud found the question odd. ‘Why?’
‘The British are mobilising.’
‘I have been hearing increased activity above these last days.’
‘It’s time,’ said Gaele.
‘Neither you nor I make such a decision.’ He glared at Elle now, but continued to direct his displeasure at the Belgian. ‘What have you done bringing her here?’
After a painfully long pause, Mahmoud finally relented. He raised his tommy gun to his shoulder, tipping the brim of his bowler with the barrel as he moved aside.
Elle brushed against him in passing, his woollen jumper itchy against her bare forearm. She looked into his spectacles. The eyes behind were empty. A little smile he tried his best to stifle suggested that, despite his outward objection to her presence, he was pleased she was there after all.