by Tim Willocks
‘Swallow this, with some wine. The taste is bitter but worth the bite.’
He put the soft black pill flecked with gold into Grymonde’s palm.
Grymonde rolled it between finger and thumb.
‘What is it?’
‘It is a Stone of Immortality. A physic of my own confection but devised by Petrus Grubenius, after the discoveries of Paracelsus.’
‘Yes, yes, I’m sure. What’s in it?’
‘It will give you a glimpse of what it’s like to exist as pure spirit.’
‘My mother gave me such glimpses all my life. I ignored them. What’s in it?’
‘Brandy, lemon oil, flaked gold –’
‘Pah.’
‘But mostly it’s a ball of raw opium –’
Grymonde popped it down his throat and swilled wine.
‘Is one enough? For a man of my constitution?’
‘We’ll see.’
A brisk woman called Jehanne turned up and dug an oval pebble from Tannhauser’s back and closed the wound with a sail-maker’s needle and thread. She did the same for Grymonde’s scalp and thigh, the bone of which appeared sound, and for some gashes over his ribs. Jehanne dabbed the burns to his face with a calamine salve, the white streaks of which augmented the unnaturalness of his features and filled his vacant orbits with a ghostly glow. No artist ever painted a more demoniac visage.
‘What do you know of the Hôtel Le Tellier?’ asked Tannhauser.
‘Naught worth stealing in there, naught worth the effort. Fifteen rooms, cellar to roof. Marcel lives alone – but for his valet, his cook, his housekeeper, Sergent Baro, and sometimes his son, Dominic, who’s a –’
‘I know Dominic.’
‘Dominic left my house with Carla and Garnier. Likely it was he killed Alice.’
Grymonde clawed his fingers.
‘The Hôtel Le Tellier,’ said Tannhauser.
‘Of custom there’s a lit lantern above the front porch, where a sergent stands watch, not to defend Le Tellier’s person – for anyone grand enough to assail one so grand would use more subtle means, and what’s a sergent but a sack of yellow shit? – but to ward off beaten wives and drunkards, and other rabble fool enough to seek justice at his door. The Châtelet’s three minutes at a run, ten to get help. At the back stands a high wall and an iron gate, and a door stout enough to stand a cannon shot. The door to the cellar matches it. The ground floor windows there are barred. What strength protects him tonight, I don’t know.’
‘Marcel can’t imagine the strength it would take to stop me, and so it won’t be there.’
‘No one’s ever dreamed of sacking a commissaire’s hôtel, except me, and even I could see no point to it.’
‘We have a point tonight,’ said Tannhauser. ‘As to doors, I understood this was a den of thieves. Have you not yet learned how to pick a lock?’
‘I can pick any lock in Paris, blind. Andri! What if the door’s bolted?’
‘The city’s in chaos,’ said Tannhauser. ‘Marcel is the chief of police. There’ll be comings and goings. The inner guard won’t bolt the door between every knock, and what’s a guard but a man looking forward to his bed? You say an attack has never been dreamed of. He’s not expecting the Mongols. At worst, he expects me.’
‘I doubt even that. Unless he knows, as I do, that you’re brain-cracked.’
‘Marcel has risen high,’ said Tannhauser, ‘but there are plenty stacked higher above him, and he has reason to fear their displeasure. He committed many treasons today. He stained his office. He betrayed the will of the Crown. He exploited the Pilgrims’ honour and blood. These wrongs he has concealed and must continue to conceal lest he lose his head. He won’t ask the Governor to call out his troops, let alone the King his Swiss Guard. And anything less won’t be enough.’
‘The Pilgrims –’
‘He can’t ask the Pilgrims to guard his hôtel. Against whom? He daren’t even call out his own police in any number.’
‘Marcel is wily,’ said Grymonde. ‘You don’t know him.’
‘I’ve known many like him and they’re all the same. He’s grubbed for power and believes that it serves him, but power has no master, only slaves. His power is the cage in which I will butcher him.’
Grymonde pursed grotesque lips but said no more.
‘Where is his office?’ said Tannhauser.
‘On the first floor of the south wing, overlooking the river.’
‘Is there a separate stair?’
‘No. A landing and a corridor from the main staircase.’
Grymonde sent Andri to fetch his tool bag.
‘What if he’s prepared to kill Carla, at any intrusion?’ asked Grymonde.
Tannhauser was surprised by a surge of cold rage.
He leaned towards Grymonde’s scourged face.
‘Is Marcel not the sort to pay someone like you to do it elsewhere?’
Grymonde flinched. ‘You gamble with her life.’
‘Don’t claim concerns you have no right to, blind archer, or I’ll leave you to bleat for your mother in the dark.’
Grymonde clenched his fists. His eyeless grimace was monstrous.
‘She’s your wife.’ He nodded. The fists relaxed. ‘I meant no disrespect.’
Tannhauser swallowed a mouthful of wine and watched him.
Grymonde’s scorched, painted and misshapen face twitched. He seemed assailed by many thoughts and many feelings. Tannhauser reminded himself of the man’s vile deeds. If all the men he had killed that day were to pool their crimes together, they would unlikely equal the crimes of Grymonde. Strangely, even so, he felt for him. And not because of the man’s dire afflictions. If his own path had been dark, Grymonde’s had been darker. What they had in common, Tannhauser realised, was that each of them knew that it need not have been so; and that it was not so because of the choices each, on his respective road, had made. Grymonde came to some conclusion and revealed what fragment he felt proper. He grinned.
‘You would have liked my mother, Alice. She spoke up for you.’
‘I’m honoured.’
‘Alice loved Carla.’ Grymonde shook his head. ‘And Mam guarded her affections, excepting babes. She knew, she’d learned, that to spend that treasury was to exhaust it. Carla’s coming was the sign she’d been waiting for. The sign that she could go in peace, because she knew there was at least one other to bear the flame. She was right, as always. There was no hurry. Carla loved her, too.’
Tannhauser did not question these riddles. The Stone of Immortality was working on the Infant’s brain. Tannhauser was undecided on the best course to take, after he had settled his affairs at the Hôtel Le Tellier. He and Carla would not be safe at the Louvre. There would be too many lies to tell, too many liars. To claim sanctuary at the Temple would likely require more bloodshed, with her in tow. A different set of lies, too, and there they would stick harder in his throat, though he would swallow them. His decision must wait on Carla’s needs. Pregnant as she was, he didn’t know how hard she could travel. For himself, he would rather get out of Paris.
‘The gates of the city are locked,’ he said. ‘Do you know any other way out? A smugglers’ tunnel or some such?’
‘Smugglers don’t dig, they bribe,’ said Grymonde. ‘But the Porte Saint-Denis will open at midnight to let in the meat on the hoof, the grain for the mills. Thousands of animals. Wagons. The Châtelet doesn’t control the gates. The Governor’s troops and the tax collectors do. Collectors like to collect, if you can pay.’
‘I’ve been gathering wages all day.’
‘Aye, I didn’t find a sou on those bravos in the chapel.’
‘Marcel may have stationed a sergent or two, not to arrest me – to take word back, with a view to catching us out on the open road, which would be easy enough. But by then I’ll have sheathed my sword in his bowels. It’s the Pilgrims’ part I can’t foresee.’
‘You said they aren’t his dogs.’
‘Garnier is his
own dog. The danger is, he may want to bite me.’
‘Why?’
‘This morning I killed seventeen militiamen.’
Grymonde laughed. He cursed as his blisters excruciated him.
‘This afternoon, when Garnier suspected as much, I made myself his friend.’
Tannhauser took out his whetstone and dipped it in his wine.
‘Marcel knows I killed the militiamen. If he wants to play out his blood feud in private – as he’s so far contrived to do with great care – he’ll keep that dagger up his sleeve. If he has to, he’ll draw it and tell Garnier, and Garnier is a leader of men in a way that Marcel is not. Garnier is a butcher and he is proud, a man of passion. He believes in himself, and in his purposes. His men believe in him, not in his rank. Garnier is not constrained by politics, and today they are all giddy on the taste of blood.’
Tannhauser refreshed the edges on his weapons. In the light of the coals the people of Cockaigne tended their dead. Lamentations broke out as this or that loved one was discovered.
‘When are we going to move?’ asked Grymonde.
‘When the Pilgrims have had time to get their pat on the back from Marcel. Then he’ll dismiss them. He might like them to camp on his doorstep, but it wouldn’t be politic.’
‘I’m tired of thinking. The cards are in play, so at best it’s vanity.’
‘The cards?’
‘Carla drew them. She drew you. Anima Mundi saw you coming.’
The tarot. Carla had been suspicious of the cards, he knew, but for that very reason he was not surprised that she might have a gift for their mysteries. He didn’t ask which card she had drawn to represent him.
‘I want to kill,’ said Grymonde. ‘And then die a violent death.’
Tannhauser saw no reason to dissuade him of these ambitions.
‘Strange as it may be,’ said Grymonde, ‘I feel quite cheerful.’
He did not attribute this happy fact to the opium; but that was no surprise.
Distant cries drifted across the sky.
There were still thousands of Huguenots to root out. The streets crawled with murderers. The murder gangs worried Tannhauser a good deal more than Le Tellier did.
‘You could hide,’ said Grymonde. ‘There’s places no sergent ever heard of. And one or two even Paul never knew.’
‘As I told Paul, hiding doesn’t suit my temper.’
‘Paul likes a good parley. He must have loved you.’
Tannhauser let that one lie. Grymonde had a revelation.
‘I need another of your Immortals. This one seems weak.’
His grin, rendered demonic by the whited sockets, suggested the contrary.
‘You want a violent death. You don’t deserve a painless one.’
‘When Carla sent me to find you,’ said Grymonde, ‘she feared you’d kill me on sight. She gave me a charm to protect me, a sort of spell.’
Tannhauser laid down the spontone. He drained his beaker.
‘Spit it out, my Infant, or you’ll have need of it.’
Grymonde laughed and flinched. He scratched the stitches in his scalp.
‘What was it now? A tiny bird. Andri! More wine! A wren. A crown of thorns.’
Beyond Grymonde’s bulk, Tannhauser saw a small, slender girl creep into the yard from the east. Damp, curly tresses cloaked her almost to her elbows. A heavy satchel hung at her hip. With both arms she carried a small rag bundle.
‘Aha, I have the spell exact,’ said Grymonde. ‘A new nightingale awaits your thorns.’
Tannhauser spoke her name without needing to think.
‘Amparo.’
‘My, my. Indeed it works like magic.’
Tannhauser felt a chill. Amparo was dead. She had died alone, in pain and terror and worse; for he had abandoned her. He had surrendered his weapons in the hope of protecting her; and he had been wrong. Carla knew it all. No. She hadn’t found Amparo’s corpse. She would never know what it had cost him. Carla had loved Amparo, no less than she loved him. Only Carla knew the meaning of the nightingale.
He grabbed Grymonde by the forearm.
‘A new nightingale?’
‘Another Immortal, I say. So strong a charm must be worth at least that.’
Tannhauser’s fingers dug into the densely muscled flesh.
‘Grymonde?’
Tannhauser looked over at the wild-haired girl. Her voice rose.
‘Grymonde!’
The girl seemed too overjoyed to dare believe that it was him.
‘La Rossa!’
La Rossa’s smile was radiant.
Grymonde’s joy equalled hers. His smile was horrific, though he could not know it. With his gouged and painted visage he looked like some gigantic and deranged harlequin. He lunged to his feet and turned and threw his massive hands wide. Tannhauser stood up and grabbed his shoulders to stop him; to turn him back; away from her.
‘My Infant, let me prepare the girl –’
La Rossa saw Grymonde full-on.
She screamed.
Her badly nourished face was gored by pity.
‘Where are your eyes?’ sobbed La Rossa. ‘Where are your eyes?’
Tannhauser dropped his hands as a sound took him by the throat.
The little bundle that La Rossa carried in her arms had started crying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mice
PASCALE DREAMED OF Tannhauser.
She had thought of him while she lay on her pillow in the hope that she would, and she did. In certain wild flights, which even in sleep she strove to prolong, the dreams were erotic. Other flights were bloody, the two of them in league, and she loved those, too. In yet others, Tannhauser was wounded and alone, beset by monstrous beasts whose strength, though only thanks to number, exceeded his.
When she awoke, she remembered that his wife was dead. She thought: I’m almost old enough to marry. She kept her eyes closed and pictured the battle he had fought on the stairs outside her bedroom.
When her father had experimented with his drawings and carvings for a new typeface, for he thought most barely readable, he would give himself entirely to the moment. Everything he was. Tannhauser did the same – only more quickly, and intensely – when he killed. There was nothing in him but the killing. Thoughts, yes, but all those, too, devoted to that purpose. No fears, no doubts, no pity. Just movement – decision – flowing wherever it needed to, the way a swallow used its wings. It was that beautiful. How could he not love it? How could a swallow not love flying?
He said that seventeen men hadn’t stood a chance, and she felt she understood why. It wasn’t just that he knew more about fighting. They had brought too much that they didn’t need, including each other, and each other’s fears. They thought being together was enough. They’d decided what was going to happen, not what to do. Not one of them knew how to decide; not really. They knew only how to get killed.
She opened her eyes on the Mice, who sat facing each other on the second bed, playing some game with their fingers. Pascale lay on her side, watching them, waiting for the heaviness to leave her limbs. She had seen the twins before, on the streets, and had never paid them any mind, any more than she had to the thousands of other children living wretched lives. She recalled what Tannhauser had said, about their courage, and their timber being warped by men, and she felt ashamed. She wondered how a man so steeped in blood might see so much in two so small and so forlorn.
‘What are your names?’ she said.
They stopped their game as if caught doing something wrong. They didn’t speak.
‘Do you know how to talk?’
They looked at each other and came to some mutual but invisible decision.
‘What do you want us to say?’
‘We’ll say anything you like.’
‘You could tell me your names,’ said Pascale.
‘Our real names or our work names?’
Pascale remembered. They were trained to please. She didn’t like the ide
a of being pleased, at least, not just because someone felt that they should please her. But she didn’t expect she could change them if their timber was warped.
‘Your real names. My name is Pascale, my sister’s name is Flore.’
‘We know,’ said one. ‘I’m Marie.’
‘I’m Agnès. Tybaut said they weren’t very pretty names.’
‘He was wrong,’ said Pascale.
She remembered what Tannhauser had said about Clementine. It was the moment she had known that it was right to love him.
‘I would call your names the most beautiful.’
The Mice looked at each other.
‘Now you ask me something,’ said Pascale. ‘Anything.’
‘Is the funny man coming back?’
‘What funny man?’
Pascale remembered the eggs.
‘Tannhauser. Mattias. Yes, he’ll come back.’
Pascale tried to sound more certain than she was. And yet, how could he not?
‘He always comes back.’
She stretched and rolled onto her back. Flore wasn’t there. She felt alarmed.
‘Where’s Flore?’
‘She’s working in the other room, with Juste.’
Pascale leapt to her feet and opened the door. The palliasse laid out for Juste was empty. She stepped to the door opposite and grabbed the handle and stopped. She was breathing hard. Flore was her senior by a year, yet Pascale had always taken the lead. Usually, she would not have hesitated, but this was not usually. She felt betrayed. Working? Flore? They’d trifled with boys, rather Pascale had trifled for both of them, but they had never considered more than that. She squeezed the handle and hesitated again.
She was in charge. Tannhauser had left her in charge. He had taken her aside, not Flore, and though he had taken Juste, too, she knew he put his faith in her, not the boy. Juste was too tender hearted to be in charge. But not too tender hearted to be in the bedroom with her sister when he should have been on guard in the corridor. Against her instinct to charge in, she knocked. As she did so, she thought she heard another knock come from downstairs.