by Claire North
“Madame,” he replied with a courtesy and obsequious bobbing of the head that he’d never graced me with. “You are as always ingenious, splendid and thoroughly underappreciated by your lessers.”
She snorted her distaste at the absurdity of his words, puffing up simultaneously with a peacock pride. “Well,” she muttered, whole form swaying from side to side now with the momentum of her march, “we shall see.”
We lodged in a grubby hotel a few streets from the squat castle, and for two days nothing happened. Madame Rossi and Ritte did whatever it was that Austrian spies do when looking for a needle in a foreign haystack, and I visited those places where sometimes I had met Margot for our secret assignations, for stolen nights and laughing days, and found them full of people and empty of soul, and wondered what on earth I was doing.
On the third day, Madame Rossi broke into our rooms with a cry of triumph that years of stern education could not suppress. “Josef, I have it! I have it! One man dead, no more than twelve hours ago, matching your description! He sided with the general in 1898, told the army to shoot and just keep shooting when the protesters marched for jobs and bread. His wife died an hour and a half before he did; twenty-eight years old, dropped dead in the middle of the street, trying to comfort her child. The child was screaming nonsense, and her mother had to hold onto her to stop her running away, and that is how she died. They don’t know where the girl is now; I imagine the family has her hidden away.”
My eyes locked with Ritte’s across the room. “We need to find the child. It is very, very important.”
“I will take you to the man’s house. You can join the louts who are waiting there, much good it will do you.”
The house was a tasteless modern beast slammed into too-tight streets to the south of the cathedral, all columns and great double doors, stables to the side and the smell of sluggish, river-stained sewage seeping from the nearby alleys and drains. A small crowd of the curious and the professionally nosy had gathered by the front door, some in black, others making no pretence of mourning. The cobbles were powdered with the spilt residue of a dozen flashes from the eager cameramen, the air thick with the smell of oxidisation.
Much as Albert had, Ritte considered me largely useless without Langa’s presence, and ordered me to wait across the street from the abode as he and Madame Rossi bustled and hustled, seeking servants with low morals and empty pockets, gathering whispers from the assembled there and wondering which lie might most effectively gain them access to the house. This left me standing for nearly two hours, beating my hands against a settling, damp cold. When the rain came, it was a thick, hammering downpour that sent all but the most determined photographers scurrying for shelter, and I grumbled and harrumphed and waited for my minders to return, and finally, in a fit of pique that had been growing upon me from the first cry of “Wait here, we will do the work!” to the latest drop of icy rain down my spine, marched across the sodden street and up to the front door of the house.
Hammering on the door provoked no answer, which was hardly a surprise, so instead I called out, “The child says she sees a shadow. It comes slowly towards her, reaching out for her, and the nearer it comes the more she speaks the truth until the words are unbearable. Then it touches her; she faints. At that moment, someone she loves dies. From the corpse of that individual the shadow rises again, and walks without rest towards the girl. It’s terribly cold and unpleasant out here; may I come in?”
The woman who let me in wore a veil. Her black skirt and peaked sleeves made her seem far wider than she was; somewhere beneath all that shadow, a frame of skin and skeleton shivered against the seams. A hook nose and flat chin sloped off beneath the gauze about her face, and her hands were adorned with a mixture of rings studded with semi-precious stones, which knocked dully against each other as she fiddled with the lock. A man in red stood behind her, watching me, ready to throw me out at the slightest sign of charlatanism. I shivered and stamped my feet by the door and pulled off my coat and, with no one to take it, slung it over my arm where water could seep into my jacket and skin.
The woman and the man watched me, unmoving, a tableau frozen in the hall, half illuminated by the light of a paraffin lamp. No other lights shone in the house, and only the shadow of the rain running down dirty windows spoke of the outside world.
I looked at the woman, and did not need Langa to tell me that she would be next to die, when the shadow caught up with the child again. “Where is she?” I asked.
They didn’t answer. I wondered for a second if they spoke any English, and tried again in feeble Italian, which came out nearer to Spanish. “I have a shadow that follows me,” I explained, swinging back to English with diminishing hope. “The nearer the shadow comes, the more the child cannot help but say things that she should not know. The hidden, deepest secrets of your heart. People will come for her. They will take her away. I cannot cure her. There is no cure. Take me to her, and she will tell you the truth of it. But I can help you. Please.”
The two figures frozen in the hall stared at me a moment longer, then the woman half turned to the man and said something at speed in Italian, which I could not follow, and he nodded, and said something back, and marched away. She shuffled towards me, laid one gloved hand on mine, nodded once, said in heavy English, “You follow, now, please.”
I followed.
They led me to a carriage pulled by a grumpy, tired mare. The man in red drove; the woman and I sat together at the back in silence. She pulled the blinds down, daring me with a look to defy her will, and I sat with hands folded in my lap as we bounced and rattled over uneven streets at a resentful trot. We didn’t say a word for the near-hour in which we travelled. When we came to a halt, it was on a muddy track lined with stiff, regimented cypress trees. From there we walked down a narrow path to a single house set back from the road, where a lantern shone in the highest window. A man guarded the door, a dog slumbering at his feet. He rose at once as we approached, looked at me with suspicion, at the woman with deference. Let us in.
Up a staircase of stone, ducking through the low doorway at the top, into a corridor that smelt of old wood and fresh beeswax candles, to a room with a white wooden door bolted shut. I could hear the child before I opened the door; her Italian was too fast, too frightened for me to make any sense of it, but the rhythm of it was an old, old friend. The woman went in first, grabbed the child in an embrace that pulled her close, as if she could somehow muffle the babble of noise in sheer love and fear. I followed, and the girl’s eyes as they turned to me were red with crying and fear. At once she pointed at me and the rush of her words rose. I stood and let her talk, grateful that I couldn’t understand the truths she pulled out from my heart. The woman listened, her face unreadable in the low gloom, nothing but a shroud. After a minute I said, “Have you heard enough? Does she tell you that I speak the truth?”
The woman nodded.
“We need to get her moving right now. Is there somewhere you can send her, far from here? A relative, perhaps?”
“My daughter, in Napoli.”
“That will do for now. I need horses, one for me, one for you and the girl. You ride?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Her shadow is very near now. Does she say I’m honest?”
The woman listened a moment, then nodded. “Yes.”
“And you believe her?”
Another moment, a settling-in of dread as she decided between two truths – the truth of what had been before, of an ordered world with heaven above and hell below, and the truth of what her world must be now.
She nodded, reaching her decision, and bundling the child up in her arms shooed her from the room, and towards the sodden night.
We started walking before the horses came. I carried the child on my back for a little while, marching east, away from the city, away from the place where her mother had died, as she gibbered out the secrets of my heart, arms wrapped around my chest. Dawn was a spider’s thread on the horizon
when I paused to rest, legs burning, back a bent, aching weight. The man in red had run before, hired the fastest horses he could. He threw himself on one, plucking the girl from my arms, and was cantering east before I could say another word. I crawled, aching and yearning for sleep, onto the back of the other, and followed.
The girl stopped babbling the truth a little before ten a.m., and was asleep almost moments later. The man in red stopped the moment she did, fearful perhaps that she was simply dead, then looked at me for answers, but I didn’t have any Italian, or he any English, so I simply smiled and nodded and hoped that conveyed enough, and on we rode.
We drew a long, wide loop around Milan, swinging south and finally north again at the end of the day, trusting to guesswork and a little maths that we had pulled her shadow far enough away that we could make a dash for the railway station. The girl sometimes stirred and sometimes slept, and I watched her constantly for the burble of truth that could not be denied, and was grateful that she said nothing. She was no more than seven years old, still dressed in the blue and white frock she had been wearing when her mother died, perhaps less than ten hours ago. Her father had died an hour and a half after that; it had only taken so long for the shadow to crawl from one parent to the other.
On the edge of the city, we paused to eat, and I telegrammed Ritte.
Station STOP
The woman in black was waiting for us in the ticket hall, buried beneath a great volume of luggage, far more than anyone could ever conceivably need. She had already purchased tickets for the last train to the south, and was swaying from side to side like bamboo in the wind, crying out as we approached and reaching up to grab the half-unconscious child and bundle her close again.
“We go now,” she barked, as our ragged group tried to work out how best to transport the absurd number of cases she had provided. “We go now!”
I grabbed as many belongings as I could, and followed her, groaning a bit at the weight of the things, towards the platform below. Even on this cold evening, with the last train pumping smoke and steam through the billowing narrow corridors, the station was crammed with travellers, too many for the building, a volume of humanity that its tight brick walls and old, sloping platforms couldn’t contain. The woman in black ploughed through them all, head down like a bull, girl clutched to her side, while I jostled and muttered half apologies, and ached and wanted nothing so much as sleep.
For all that the Italian state had made great steps forward in seizing control of its railway lines, the state of the trains and the passenger cars was still deplorable. Ancient rolling stock, splintered, creaking, cracked and rusted orange, squatted with the allure of a dying millipede. Men shouted and hurled insults at each other as train doors slammed open and shut, bouncing on crooked hinges and failing to sit properly in their locks. Our second-class compartment was a hurried mess of padded seats devolved to cracked wood, and fittings hanging off the walls and ceiling, barely lit by a single oil lantern dangling overhead. Nevertheless, it was a train out of the city, so the man in red scrambled on board, and he and I passed luggage between us to form a little avalanche of over-packing in the corner, before handing up the girl as tenderly as a broken flower. The woman in black boarded immediately after, and as she settled, I caught her arm.
“Who did this?” I asked. “Who did this to her?”
She struggled for a moment with the words, moving through French on her way to English. “A woman. Hair like winter wood. Smiling eyes. Spoke English, like you. Walk with limp.”
“Did she have a name?”
A single nod, exhausted, the child held close to her side. “Her name is Margot.”
The whistle blew, and the door slammed shut behind them as the train pulled away.
Chapter 68
Margot – what have you done?
What have you done?
What have you done?
I staggered like a drunk man through the crowds at Milan station. Stopped now, oblivious now. Then walked a few more steps. Then stopped again.
If I had been a better spy, I would perhaps have known that someone was watching me, and in more than the distracted way of strangers alarmed by the strange.
I was always a terrible spy. I depended too much on Langa, used him to do my dirty work for me.
Consequently, as I shambled in a daze towards the city streets, I neither spotted the knife coming nor, when it pressed suddenly into my back, really registered that this new presence was a blade at all, until the man who held it hissed in my ear, “Go left, now.”
“What?”
This was not the reaction he was expecting. A knife should make people immediately obey, but I was too stupid to really connect what was happening, even though he spoke English with a familiar lilt in my ear. So he cut me. It wasn’t deep, or a clean little slice; he simply pushed the tip of the blade into the back of my shoulder blade hard enough to make me nearly choke on my own tongue, and then, his point made, grabbed me by the other arm and dragged me across the street.
I thought of shouting for help, of explaining I was being kidnapped, but in that moment the Italian for “excuse me, I am in mortal danger” vanished from my tongue and all I could think of was how stupid it would be to have my throat cut at this exact point in time. So meek as a kicked puppy, I permitted myself to be pulled into the shadow of a crooked, tumbledown building slated for destruction when the new station finally arose, pushed up against the wall and spun round a hundred and eighty degrees, the knife now laid across my throat, pricking at beads of blood, and my attacker finally visible to me.
“It’s your fault,” hissed Peadar Coman, as he pressed the blade in a little deeper. “It’s your fault.”
“Coman,” I gasped, “Please, wait, it’s—”
His lips curled with hate, and he hit me. There was no reason for it, no plan, he just wanted to with every fibre of his being and so he did, and with a knife in his hand I neither fought back nor begged for him to stop. When I dropped, he picked me up, slammed my head back against old timber, and hit me again until the blood ran freely down my face, salt in my mouth, crimson at my neck. In that moment I knew as surely as the shadow had come that he was going to kill me. The certainty of it nearly made me laugh; finally, finally a truth that I could know for myself without Langa’s help, the last, most important truth of my whole life.
Then a gun clicked behind Coman’s head, and Ritte said, “Is he a British spy? Should I kill him?”
Coman froze, but the knife didn’t move from my neck. I closed my eyes, trying to find some clarity in the dead, nauseous pain of my own body, trying not to giggle at the absurdity of it all, clutching my ribs as the pain of laughter pushed up regardless. “He’s Margot’s husband,” I breathed, perhaps the last breath I’d ever take. “And I have no idea if he’s willing to die to kill me.”
By the weight of the blade against my throat and the fire in Coman’s gaze, for a moment neither did he. Only Ritte seemed calm, collected, confident of his course. “Really. Why does he want to kill you?”
“It’s my fault,” I replied, staring straight into Coman’s eyes, trying to read something of the man in them I had never bothered to know. “It’s all my fault.”
For a moment, the weight of the knife against my neck eased a little, but Coman’s body was still pressed to mine, the gun still lodged against his skull. I wanted to wipe blood from my face, the strange itching of it as it began to dry more distracting than the solid thrum of pain where he’d hit me, and didn’t dare move.
Then Ritte mused, “Of course, there is always another—”
He didn’t finish his own sentence before smashing Coman as hard as he could across the back of the head with the butt of his gun.
Chapter 69
There are two types of head injuries – those that leave you permanently crippled, and those that daze you for a few seconds. For a few seconds, Coman was dazed, and I shoved him back as hard as I could, palms to chest, trying to buy myself an inch of clea
rance from the blade in his hand. His feet tangled, so Ritte hit him again, and one more time, and this time the knife fell from his grasp and I caught it with a gasp and scrambled back on all fours like a drunken sloth, waving it half-heartedly.
Ritte, however, had little patience for threats, and hit Coman one more time to drop him to the ground, before kicking him in the belly and proclaiming as the other man crumpled, “Nothing like seeing old friends, yes?”
In the end, we managed to drag him into the back of a cab, me slumped bleeding on one side, Ritte in the middle, Coman curled at the end of Ritte’s gun on the other. No one felt much need to chat as we clattered the few streets to our destination, tipping the driver a month’s salary, and when Madame Rossi answered the door she exclaimed, “No blood on the upholstery, please!”
“Fear not, much of the blood is already dry,” Ritte chirruped.
Coman was guided to a seat by the window, the shutters drawn. I washed away the worst of the blood in a pewter bowl as Ritte sat, gun in lap, eyeing up the would-be revolutionary. The water brought a little clarity, a moment to think. Madame Rossi put another log on the small fire in the corner of the room, and folding herself down on the armchair nearest it produced from her bag a plush blue velvet box containing her own tiny revolver, which she set to cleaning in a click of chamber and swish of metal brush.
Finally, when I didn’t think it likely that I’d throw up embarrassingly, I sat on a suitcase opposite Coman, there being nothing else left to perch on, and said, “Hello, Peadar.”