Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  Ell looked so beautiful standing there, her lips grinning and pursed at once, her eyes dancing in the light from the lantern in the centre of the lobby, her radiant red hair now loosely draped across her shoulders, her whole form alight with daring and mischief. And then she started to take a step in those big, stupid purple boots, and tripped, and fell, and her face hit the floor first. The jacks clattered on to the stones before her outstretched hand.

  In the gap before she could cry out, the porter, Rex, jumped to his feet and sprang lightly over to her. He reached down, lithe and strong, and caught her up. The movement was sinuous, the spring and cradle entirely balletic. Kay hardly had time to breathe before he was sitting down again, the whole sobbing form of her sister tightly, snugly nestled in his arms. She watched, at once shocked and mesmerized. For her part, Ell settled into Rex’s arms as if he were a hearth.

  Slowly he rocked her; slowly the little girl’s sobs subsided. Kay noticed she was gripping Rex’s keys so hard that her hand had turned white; a piece of sharp iron had made a welt on the edge of her palm. She held them out. The noise shook Rex from something like a reverie, and he looked up at her. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly. Ell sat up on his knee, as if awaking, and she, too, looked at Kay. Rex took the keys. Still he stared. And then Kay saw it: a perfect symmetry between the old man and the little girl – as if cut from a single stone by the same hand, as if painted in the same colours, as if sung by the same singer, they regarded her with their heads at an angle, their eyes at one focus, their mouths equally parted. All was equal. Kay froze.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Rex said slowly, somehow at once both fulfilling and breaking the spell, ‘something exceptionally beautiful happens just before a calamity.’

  Every hair on the back of Kay’s neck stood up, but not in fear. His eyes were too kind for that – as if they were the eyes of her own sister. Sometimes, somehow, something.

  ‘I think these are yours,’ he said to Ell as he tipped the three spilled jacks from his palm into hers. Ell looked at them, picked one out and presented it to him.

  Just then Clare Worth came running two at a time down the spiral stairs. She sprinted past them, out through the double doors and into the courtyard. Rex set Ell on her feet, then, with some deliberateness, put his hands on his knees, pushing himself up. Slipping the jack in his pocket and hooking the keys back on to his belt, he held the girls’ hands, and they walked after Clare Worth as quickly as he could. A few minutes later, safely belted in the back seat of the car, both girls turned as their mother – oblivious – pulled out of the Pitt car park. They were still stunned, watching for the old man on his step. He stood there, looking, Kay thought, like a man composed all of sadness, like someone condemned for a crime he did not commit. His hand was raised in farewell.

  It was the same at St Nick’s. No one seemed to know Edward More there, either; and the college room where Kay had spent her half-term holidays, looking impatiently out of the window at the afternoon activity, had someone else’s name over the door. In fact, it had the same name over the door as that on the board in the Pitt: DR ANDREA LESSING. Only this time the light inside was on, and the woman who answered Clare Worth’s knocking appeared to be as surprised as they were. She was tall, but also somehow small and delicate, and Kay thought her bones were probably as thin and wispy as her gold hair. She was wrapped up in serpentine coils of scarves and throws.

  ‘I have no idea what you can possibly mean,’ she said. ‘I’ve had these rooms for the last fifteen years. I’ve never had any other rooms for as long as I have been at St Nick’s. Have a look round,’ she continued, stepping back from the door and gesturing around the room with fine, elegant fingers. Kay thought they looked, each one, like nimble snakes, writhing with venom and muscle. ‘These are my books, my things, my work.’ Kay’s mum had been frantically explaining while two porters hovered nervously on the stairs behind them, unsure whether to intervene. ‘I really can’t help you,’ Dr Andrea Lessing added. ‘In fact, I was just about to go home for the holiday.’ She started to close the door, but Clare Worth had seen something, and she wedged her foot firmly in the way.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ she said accusingly. Kay shrank from the menace in her mother’s voice.

  ‘I am sorry for that, but I hardly think it’s my fault,’ replied Dr Andrea Lessing.

  ‘Are you an archaeologist?’ Clare Worth’s eyes moved more wildly now, ranging around the room, trying to make out the titles of the books just to the left of the door. The light was low. Kay noticed that her own leg was shaking, so she pressed her foot hard into the floor of the staircase. ‘I see you have some of the same books my husband has,’ she said. ‘Many of the same books, in fact. Do you work on the Fragments Project?’

  ‘Mrs More –’

  ‘My name is Worth.’

  ‘Mrs Worth, really, I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this. Yes, I do, but no, I really must ask you to let me close the door and get home to my family.’ Dr Andrea Lessing was pushing the door. Kay’s mum’s foot was sliding back on the wooden boards. Then her heel hit the ridge where the raised lip of the door-frame blocked the draught. Her foot held. There was an awkward silence, and the porters started to shift, leaning forward as if about to intervene. Kay drew a breath and raised her hand to reach out, to touch her mother on the shoulder or at the vulnerable place at the tip of her elbow. She wanted to get her out of this place. Instead, Ell’s hand shot out and took hers; her face was fierce and full.

  ‘Do you know about the Bride of Bithynia?’ It was her mother’s most level, grave, but also, now, desperate tone.

  Kay knew it the way she knew how the stone outcrop behind her house felt to her knee when she smashed down upon it with her full weight. She knew it as well as she knew the tread of the stairs to her room, the soft click of the door’s latch behind her, and the comforting, lofty quiet of her top bunk. And she knew that the diminutive Dr Andrea Lessing had to be pushing with enormous force, because this door suddenly slammed shut on her mother, knocking her back on to her left foot and very nearly crushing Kay and Ell against the cold and flaking plaster of the stairwell.

  Clare Worth looked dazed, her daughters not less so. The porters were clearly distressed and apologetic. For some reason they could not explain or understand, they felt a sympathy for Clare Worth, whom they knew they knew, though they couldn’t say the first thing about Edward More. They kept saying so to one another in muted tones as they walked back through Sealing Court. Clare Worth seemed to have given up trying to understand. The porters held the door for the girls as they stepped through the wicket of the Tree Court gate, back into Litter Lane, where they had distractedly ditched the car half an hour before. With gingerly moving fingers the two men ushered the gate closed behind them, as softly as they could, trying not to give the impression, Kay thought, that they were shutting them out. But they were shutting them out. And the moment the lock clicked, Kay’s mum began to cry. She didn’t move from the gate or put her hands to her face. She just looked down. The only sound Kay could hear was a ventilation fan up the alley, pumping steam and the smell of grease out from the college kitchens. Ell shivered at Kay’s light touch.

  ‘Mum,’ Kay said.

  ‘Yes, Katharine, what?’

  ‘Mum, there was something strange about that porter at the Pitt. Rex.’

  ‘What, Katharine?’ She was still crying. Clare Worth didn’t sob when she cried, but the tears now came quickly and heavily.

  ‘Well, for one thing, when you were walking up to Dad’s office – well, what should have been Dad’s office – and the courtyard was really quiet, your feet were making a lot of noise on the stone, and you were leaving footprints in the grass. And so were we. I checked.’ Ell had been kicking a cobble. Now she stopped.

  ‘Yes, of course, Kay.’ Clare was reaching in her pocket to find an old tissue, which she laboriously picked apart and flattened. She sounded annoyed. Kay took and squeezed Ell’s hand while she waited, but
Ell pulled it away and stared hard at her sister, as if to warn her off, to make her stop. Ell was always telling her not to bother Mum, not to stick her nose into other people’s business.

  ‘Well, you know how that old porter had a limp or something? And he walked heavily? But he didn’t leave any prints on the grass, and I don’t think I could hear his feet on the cobbles at all.’

  ‘Katharine.’ Clare Worth exchanged the tissue in her hand for the keys in her pocket and unlocked the car. ‘That’s the very least of my worries right now. Something horrible is going on, and footprints in the frost don’t matter. Not at all.’ She stood up and bore down on her daughters with newly hardened eyes. ‘Now get in.’

  In the back of the car, Ell’s face was wearing that fierce look again. ‘Told you,’ said her eyes.

  So Kay didn’t mention the other things on her mind: Ell’s fall, the strange kindness and familiarity of the porter, and something she thought she’d seen in the room at St Nick’s – what should have been her father’s room, but was the room of Dr Andrea Lessing. Something she had seen while her mother was being pushed back on to her left foot as the door closed abruptly behind the enormous strength of a very slight woman. Instead the two girls sat quietly and the car moved slowly, almost reluctantly, through the empty, dark streets, past the reaching winter spines of the chestnuts and the hawthorns and the oaks and the beeches and, above all, the countless lime trees, blacker than the visible light of the black night. And she didn’t ask about the Bride of Bithynia, and they ate their cold supper where it still sat on the plates Clare Worth had set out in the afternoon. And because of the tears that sometimes drew and dropped down their mother’s cheeks, the girls did as they were asked, or expected, and never once thought of their baubled and tinselled tree, unlit, or of the wooden box that contained their stockings, which in the past they had always hung from the mantel on Christmas Eve. And they never once dared open the door of their father’s study, for fear of the emptiness Kay was sure (her ear pressed to the door’s painted wood) would lie within it – the vacant shelves, the cleared desk, the stacks of papers that would not stand there on the floor where they had always stood before. The girls never once uttered a single word. Instead they brushed their teeth, and they dressed for bed, and they turned off the light. And all the time, without speaking at all, Kay kept her right eye shut, and Ell picked at her hands, and Clare Worth wiped those occasional tears from the bottom of her jaw on the left side, so that they didn’t drip on her blouse.

  But when Kay climbed up into her bunk bed, she felt something on her pillow. It was a card. She knew at once that she hadn’t left a card on her bed. It was small and stiff, about the size of the train tickets they sometimes got when Mum took them to Ely for a summer picnic. Kay held it up. She couldn’t read the writing at first; but a light shone from her mother’s room, where – uncharacteristically – she was sobbing a little, and a shaft of it, shooting through a crack in the door, caught the card as Kay turned it. Then the silvery letters leaped out, glittering in her hands. It read:

  Kay was exhausted, and below her Ell had as usual fallen asleep the moment her head hit the pillow. Listening to her deep breaths made Kay the drowsier, and she looked more and more vacantly at the strange card as it clung to the light in her weakening hand. Just before her left lid finally collapsed, and just as her hand was dropping out of its shaft of light, she might briefly have glimpsed the other side of the card, with its carefully stencilled and embossed silver emblem – the very symbol that, an hour before, she thought she had seen on a book lying on Dr Andrea Lessing’s wide wooden desk; a symbol she definitely had seen several times that day: the body of a snake entwined with the blade of a sword.

  ‘Is it done?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And have they left no trace?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And the children?’

  ‘The children?’

  ‘Has no one taken order for the children?’

  ‘But –’

  ‘You are a fool.’

  ‘But the order sheet –’

  ‘You are every one of you fools. Did I not use the old words so that you might understand? Did I not speak them in your ear, as in the old tales that you love? The snake must strike with the sword.’

  ‘It will be done as you say.’

  ‘They must all be destroyed – the thieving fox and his little cubs.’

  ‘As you order it, so it will be.’

  ‘See that it is.’

  The Author

  Kay was suddenly aware that she had been hearing voices. It was completely dark, so it had still to be night. She turned over very quietly on to her right side, and strained into her ears to hear. At first, still drowsy, she thought it was her mother talking on the phone; but these were low voices, men’s voices, and distant – maybe downstairs or in the garden. Then she realized, again at a stroke, that it was dark because her eyes were closed. Though at first slightly afraid to look, she cracked her left eye open imperceptibly. Everything appeared as black as if she had left it shut – until perhaps she saw a flash of light like a headlight sweeping across her window.

  She was imagining it. It was nothing but the wind, the moon. Her father said she had such an imagination. Give her a pebble, he said, and she will build a castle.

  ‘Ow!’ It was a whisper, or a kind of sharp and hissing breath, but it was loud and unmistakable.

  ‘It’s hardly my fault you’re so slow. Or that we’re gambolling about on gables for the second time in twelve hours.’

  ‘We’ve been over this already. I couldn’t have known she would take it with her. It’s not altogether customary to go about town with someone’s tooth in your pocket, now, is it? I admit I was wrong in the Habsburg case –’

  ‘You couldn’t have been more wrong in the Habsburg case –’

  ‘And I said I admit it. But that’s quite a different matter. Failing to collect a tooth and omitting – well, omitting a whole body are not, the last time I looked, even on the same page of the code.’

  ‘You didn’t just miss the body.’

  Kay was more alert now, and her left eye widened. The voices were coming from outside, and there was a light, a light that every so often swept across her window behind the curtain. It must be a torch, she thought. There had been a fair amount of grunting and scrabbling, but that stopped now.

  ‘Look, you weren’t there. As I testified at the tribunal, it was an honest mistake. The order said, Archduke Bartolomeo, Prince of Prussia, and the address was a villa in Vienna. So I went to the place, searched it and identified the subject. I followed procedure and submitted the order sheet. He must have known I was coming. It’s not my fault he switched the body – I mean, his body – for someone else’s. And it looked the same to me; it was right where I’d left it, under a mulberry tree in a courtyard garden, wrapped in a silk kaftan. Still haven’t figured out how he knew I was coming.’

  ‘That’s hardly the point. You removed the emperor, by the muses!’

  ‘Well, that was a bit on the embarrassing side, I admit. But how was I to know he was the emperor? It’s not as if I’d ever seen him up close. Emperor Shmemperor. And like I said, he was just where I’d left the archduke, all wrapped up and dozing under the mulberry tree, as dukishly as you like. Arch as can be. Now what’s an emperor doing dozing under a mulberry tree? I ask you.’

  ‘He was wearing the imperial crown, Will.’

  ‘Look, Flip, I’m in removals now. I’m a removals guy. I’m not a herald, I’m not a lawyer and I’m definitely not an emperor. For better or worse – mainly, if truth be told, for worse – I’m in removals. I remove.’

  ‘By the stones, Will, you may be my best friend, but you’re still half idiot. Ow!’

  Then the grunting started again, and Kay heard a scraping noise – the tiles, the tiles on the lower part of the roof. She flinched; these voices were close.

  ‘Anyway, this is hardly comparable. We’ll just pop in,
find the tooth and get out again. Nothing simpler.’

  ‘When it comes to working with you, Will, nothing is ever simple.’

  The light outside the curtain was bright now, and Kay reckoned they were just on the other side of the window. Something was sounding a note in her head like the muffled bell of a broken alarm clock. A tooth? What were they talking about?

  Kay tried to sit up straight, but the blood rushed from her head and the world spun giddily around her. And then she remembered the card that had been on her pillow – the card that was now under her pillow. She pulled it out and looked at it again. There at the bottom, in large letters, it clearly read, Removals. So these were the removers, Will O. de Wisp and Philip R. T. Gibbet. But who were they here to remove?

  Like a wave it broke on her: they were talking about her father’s tooth – his wisdom tooth, which he had had removed last year and had given her (reluctantly) because she had asked him for it. Begged him for it, in fact. To remember. She kept it in the left pocket of her cardigan, which was hanging – where? – on the near post of her bed. The cardigan she had been wearing on Christmas Eve. Today. Yesterday.

  They were very close now, close to the window, probably shoved up against the ledge. All the scrabbling and scraping against the roof tiles, so clear in the dark stillness of the house, had stopped. In the silence she could hear the latch turning. As quickly as she could, she reached out her hand, stretched down until the blood screamed in her head, felt her way into the pocket of her cardigan and retrieved the tooth. She put it in the palm of her right hand, which she clenched into a fist under her pillow. Then she closed her open eye and, pressing her head with great purpose into the soft down, pretended to be asleep.

  Every space has its own noise, like a fingerprint. Most of the time no one notices this noise, of course – it might be a hum, or in some seasons an occasional creak, a draught, the skittering of birds or maybe mice or hedgehogs in the garden. In the winter, for the girls’ room, this ambient noise was the quiet voice of the tall evergreens two or three metres outside their window, swaying in the wind or scraping against the corner of the house when disturbed by some night-foraging animal. As Kay lay in her bed with her eyes tightly closed (too tightly? – she relaxed them) and her right hand clutching her father’s tooth beneath her pillow, that familiar noise changed completely – opened up as a draught swept in past the curtain. The two men were in the room.