by Clio Gray
In between the two misshapen groups was a small wall of fire coming up from the library’s floor, waxing and waning as if it was breathing, heading for the dark hulks of two barrels, one maybe ten yards further up than the other, barrels just like the ones he knew had been in Hendrik Grimalkin’s house.
‘Everybody out!’ he shouted. ‘And I mean everybody. Isaac, Joachim, drag your charges out by their heels if you have to, but get them out!’
Ruan started running like a madman around the library, grabbing up several buckets of sand meant for the stubbing out of the cigars the visiting scholars were so fond of. He hurled their contents over the floors and the wall of flames that were gathering in strength, heading without compassion or diversion towards two barrels, one goal. The sand hit but did not extinguish the flames, merely moved them to one side or another, the draft from Ruan’s movements apparently exacerbating them so they jumped and spat, making the situation all the worse and far more dangerous.
In desperation Ruan did the single most heroic thing he’d ever done in his life and side-stepped the small ocean of creeping flames, tried to tighten the nozzle from where the turpentine was still dripping and, when he couldn’t stop it, indeed only made it worse with his fiddling, picked the barrel up, groaning with the weight and size of it and half ran, half staggered with it back down the length of the library and out through the kitchen door, its contents all the while freed up by his jiggling and jogging so the nozzle finally gave, began to pour its contents freely down his back as he ran with it.
Once out of the library he heaved the barrel far as he could into the yard beyond. He didn’t wait to see what became of it, merely turned and ran back into the Athenaeum, screaming at Joachim and Isaac to get a move on, not understanding why they were hauling their respective burdens towards the kitchen and not the fastest and safest way out which was through the doors at the front. But he wasted no time and went on up the library, as inexorable as the flames that seemed to be all about him, still lowlying but high enough.
Ruan ran through the knee-high flames, ignoring the singe and sear of his clothes and boots, the thin line of fire that was creeping up his back where the turpentine had sketched out a rudimentary route; reaching the second barrel and hauling it upwards, although it was already beginning to snap and burn. How he had the strength to do it he never knew, but have it he did and he took it up, hoisted it upon his shoulders, shuffling and staggering with its weight. His nostrils filled with the fumes of turpentine evaporating from his coat, the growing sensation of heat upon his back as the flames began to take hold of both coat and barrel. But he did not let go, would not give up.
He got down the library’s length, stumbled down the last few steps into the kitchen and out through the open door, stepping straight into the spilled puddle of turpentine gathering between the cobbles from the splitting of the first barrel that had broken as it fell, Ruan’s heart hammering so hard he could hear it. He understood that any second now he was going to go up like a tar-dipped brand and would most probably die here in this yard but Jesus, he could see all the others scattered about him: Joachim, for some undetermined reason in his singlet, dragging a man across the cobbles, Isaac leaning over Caro who was pale as a swan, Hendrik Grimalkin – who had managed to crawl his way down the alley and was leaning up against the post of the wall trying to haul himself to standing and Greta Finnerty crawling towards Hendrik on hands and damaged knee, and that was the last spur he needed.
‘Out of the yard!’ he yelled. ‘Everyone out of the yard!’
He couldn’t hang on for long because by now his sleeves and the back of his coat were burning and he could feel the heat mere millimetres away from his skin, but he kept that barrel upon his shoulders until he saw from his peripheral vision that all were out. Then his legs went of their own accord the few yards towards the water trough, kept there for the tradesmen’s horses’ use, and dropped the barrel in. It hit the edges but was too wide to touch the water and the wood did not cease its burning, indeed seemed invigorated by the rush of air occasioned by the fall.
Ruan staggered backwards as the flames suddenly took on new life, about to lunge forward, try to scoop the water from the trough onto the staves with his bare hands when someone grabbed at his shoulder, pulling off his coat, hauling him bodily, if lopsidedly, out of the yard and behind the wall.
It was Greta, her face grimy and with one eye puffed up to the size of a duck egg.
‘Enough, Ruan Peat,’ she commanded. ‘You’ve done enough, and we need to get out of here before it blows.’
41
RESOLUTION AND SOMETIME REDEMPTION
And blow it did.
Moments later the back yard of the Athenaeum Library went up like the greatest fireworks show Deventer had ever seen, the sound of the explosion bouncing and reverberating from eve to eve, from street to street. It brought Deventer’s inhabitants running from their houses, fearing the French had finally arrived and were laying the city to siege.
It blew Greta and Ruan off their feet. They were fifteen yards down the street but were showered cruelly with the stones and bricks of the Athenaeum yard’s retaining wall that came at them like shrapnel. Both were floored, clinging to one another like shipwrecked sailors as they were rolled along the cobbles, winded and then elated as they lay like upended beetles when once all had settled, laughing hysterically to find themselves still alive and relatively unscathed. Not so hysterical when they found themselves side by side with Caro, shielded by Isaac during the blast, but not doing well.
‘Come on, Caro,’ Isaac was saying. ‘Come on, lad. Just stay calm, just keep still and I’ll have you fixed up in a moment.’
Greta recognised the noises Caro was making as he tried to breathe, a task that was obviously getting more difficult by the second, his lips already turned a ferocious blue.
‘We have to stick a pipe in him,’ she said, disentangling herself from Ruan and rolling over onto her knees, wincing with pain as she did so.
Isaac shook his head. A pipe? What kind of pipe? What was the girl intending to do? Lucky for Caro, Ruan understood. He fumbled in his pockets and brought out a pen, thrust it quickly into Greta’s hands. She swiftly pulled out the nib and broke off the top, draining the ink and then pulled her knife from her belt and jabbed the point of it deftly into the hollow of Caro’s naked throat before Isaac could stop her and after it went the tube of the pen, and then Greta blowing gently, once, twice and again, Caro’s heels tapping at the ground as his body shook, as Greta blew again and again at regular intervals, until his lungs started to move again of their own accord and he relaxed, lips and skin resuming a more normal hue as the oxygen returned to his blood.
‘Done it for piglets a hundred times,’ Greta said, by way of explanation as she rocked back on her heels. ‘Had this sow once, always bore her litters blue.’
She winced, becoming aware of numerous cut and grazes sustained during the explosion and then narrowed her eyes, knife in hand, having noticed Luigi a few yards up and recognising him: the man at the Servants, the man she blamed for all this. Joachim was crouched beside him, grey and curled like a hedgehog newly rolled from the fire, ears ringing, inexplicably holding Luigi’s head in his hands.
Greta got up, her bad knee almost giving way – almost, but not quite – staggering towards the enemy; she wanted to fillet Luigi like the wet fish he was. She instead settled for sending a very unladylike fist straight and hard into his face, breaking his nose with a horribly audible crack.
‘See you?’ she said, breathing hard, sheathing her knife. ‘That’s barely a pennyworth of what you deserve.’
Luigi moaned at the impact of her fist and Joachim looked up swiftly to complain at the injustice but Greta didn’t see it, pain and exhaustion coming over her in a wave that had her bum-down on the cobbles, Ruan stumbling up beside her and gently scooping her up, arm muscles stretched and strong from the barrel-carrying, getting her to the nearest wall against which he gently propped
her, the two of them sitting side by side, backs against the stone. Two disparate people emerging from a battle won.
The library was saved; the low-licking fire inside soon extinguished by the men and women of Deventer running to the fountain in the Brink with every bucket, pail, pan and chamber pot they could lay hands on, and within half an hour of the explosion in the yard it was doused and done, long dark streaks and shadows burned into the wooden floors and up the legs of several tables, shelves and chairs to mark its passing. These latter were taken outside in case they harboured embers that might yet burn – as had happened with such terrible consequence at the Grimalkin household – and sitting on them were all manner of sightseers and rescuers, all chattering like excited starlings about their part in saving one of the most important institutions in the town.
Barely a one of them had thought of it that way before, let alone gone inside its walls, but today the Athenaeum was the emblem of their collective resilience, of clawing back what had almost been lost to unnamed and unknown assailants. Let the French come, because if they did this was what they would get: a town ready to rise up and fight for their own. The town of Deventer was theirs, as was everything and everyone in it, and they were damned if anyone was going to take anything from it anytime soon.
Help was soon at hand for Caro too, several women easing him from Isaac’s cradling arms, the pen sticking up like a thorn from his neck, quivering with every shallow breath he took. The beeswax from Isaac’s coat had done a good job by its melting, thereby sealing the edges of the wound and stopping the blood. He was in a desperate state but alive, and alive an hour later when Deventer’s most experienced surgeon arrived to sew him up properly. The man went on to extract shards of wood and stone from Greta, Ruan and Isaac; tended to Hendrik’s shoulder, dressed the worst of the burns on his head.
Hendrik’s hair never grew back except in tufts, and the tips of his ears remained melted and deformed, but he was glad of it – a constant reminder of his guilt. He would accept no external exculpatory explanations of why he had so suddenly shut down that evening. He couldn’t understand it himself, or clearly remember it.
Up one minute, down the next, like Ruan and Caro on their raft during their black night at sea. And with them had been Federigo Ducetti – the architect of all their misfortunes – who had killed a man one minute and the next was buoying up the other surviving souls on the raft with a bravery that bordered on altruism. A curate’s egg of a man then, like most were; a complex, contradictory tangle of motivations and emotions.
Hendrik raised his eyes to the dark sky above Deventer now that the worst was past. If Joachim’s God really was up there, looking down in judgement, he wondered who would be found wanting at the final trumpet call: him or the Ducettis. If it hadn’t been for Ruan Peat the library, and all its collective knowledge, would have been razed to the ground with Hendrik not lifting a finger to save it. In the face of adversity he’d simply gone to bits, abnegated all responsibility, preferring to lie like a dog in his ditch. And for that he would never forgive himself.
Hendrik swore an oath, as he sat there that evening outside the library that he would put heart and soul, every remaining breath he had, into the resurrection of the Lynx. And heart and soul and every breath he did: firing out letters to every journal and broadsheet he could think of, promissory notes of donations soon pouring in from every corner of Europe, the Enlightenment getting up from its knees and starting to run.
The punishment of the Ducetti family was another matter entirely, and neither good nor fair. Ricardo disappeared like a ferret down the ginnels and side streets of Deventer, never to be seen again. Plainly he’d gone straight to Amsterdam for, by the time the authorities there were alerted, the store was discovered to have been entered, the safe open and empty, and some very valuable and easily transportable items missing from the inventory. Federigo Ducetti played his hand differently, remaining where he was, still at the inn where Caro had left him, carrying on business as usual; surprise his main defence.
No, he didn’t know where his nephews were or what they had been doing in Deventer.
And no, he’d never heard of the Lynx, whatever that might be.
And yes, by all means he would accompany the arresting officers back to Deventer and offer what help he could in wringing a confession out of Luigi, the only member of the family to be actually apprehended in the middle of a murderous attack. The poor boy was always slow, he volunteered in Luigi’s scant defence, and undoubtedly his brother was the mastermind, but where was Ricardo? Federigo had no idea. Try Amsterdam, he suggested, or possibly even Rome.
That Rome was the last place Ricardo would go was a moot point, news of the Lynx Affair quickly travelling abroad down rivers and canals, trade routes and pilgrim trails, and when Rome heard of it Rome was mighty displeased. It wasn’t the worst scandal to hit the Papacy – there was at least one every century: Pope Pius IV executing the nephews of his predecessor Paul IV in the 1560s; the notorious nepotism of Cesi’s beloved Maffeo – Urban VIII – that led to the inglorious but happy rioting in the streets when he died in 1644; and now this, right at the end of the 1700s.
That a member of the enclave – a man a hair’s breadth away from Papal election – could be connected even so tangentially with the plot that had unravelled in Deventer was not taken well. As luck would have it, the ailing Pope had revived enough to have the enclave dismissed, for the time at least, but Cardinal de Ducetti would not be asked back again. No longer was he in the running for anything but a mean post as far away as the Vatican could get him, despatched to South America as soon as they could bundle him onto a ship, his name scrubbed from their records and never spoken of again.
His connection to the man who had begun the entire fiasco was never uncovered, the secretary of the Aquasparta Estates of the Dukes of Cesi smiling broadly every morning to think of the tidy nest egg he’d been given by the Cardinal for the information passed on about Golo Eck and the Lynx.
Of all the Ducettis, it was the one who did the least who shouldered the most blame, Luigi mouldering in a dirty prison cell in Deventer where the untreated burns on his legs became rotten and gangrenous within forty eight hours, at which point enter the prison surgeon – barber and tooth-puller by trade – who took one look at the blackened mess of flesh and bone and rubbed his hands in glee.
‘Have to chop them off,’ he said, unrolling his band of dirty tools, glad of the practice but needing more: Luigi’s howls and screams echoing about the Brink for almost a full hour as his legs were sawed and then hacked through mid-thigh; a bottle of bad brandy an ineffective anaesthetic; flesh tied and stitched in unpretty, preinfected stumps. Luigi emerged the other side of his surgery into an ever narrowing tunnel of increasing agony.
His amputated limbs were taken in plain view: severed into sections, tumbled into a large bucket in the corner of his cell, collected later that day by a pig man – friend of the barber – to add to his slurry. Brother Joachim was appalled at the unnecessary butchery for, if left intact, Luigi would have died soon enough and in far less pain, not this half-a-man tumbling downhill at breakneck speed towards his death, tortured by every breath.
Joachim tried to make him more comfortable, wiped the comingling sweat and tears from Luigi’s cheeks, pushing pillows below the grotesquery of his stumps.
‘Thank you,’ Luigi murmured, Joachim closing his eyes, the injustice almost unbearable; plain as a pikestaff Luigi had done nothing worse than send a boulder tumbling down a cliff meant to slow folk up, holing a ferry, following a plan he neither properly understood and never endorsed. Federigo had chucked Golo overboard with his arms bound, not that it could be proved; Ricardo had been the one to impale Joachim and also doing for Louisa in his attempt to get rid of Hendrik.
Not that Hendrik’s neighbours cared for the difference between the brothers, preferring to plump for the one in custody who looked kind of like the man running off so quickly with his empty dray. It seemed to Joach
im that Justice had taken an ill-advised holiday and was nowhere to be seen.
He administered Last Rites. He said prayers. He felt Luigi’s fingertips tapping at his arm as he knelt beside Luigi’s pallet.
‘Will…God have mercy…on my soul…do you think?’ Luigi whispered, Joachim placing a hand lightly on Luigi’s forehead. No sweat there now, and no tears, only that strange dryness to a person’s skin as the body pulls its resources inwards in a last desperate gambit to draw in another breath.
‘I know He will, Luigi,’ Joachim softly said, ‘and it will not be long. Remember, my friend, that suffering is of this world not the next. Keep your faith and all will be right.’
But it wasn’t right. It could never be right. Not George, nor Luigi, not any of it.
And it would trouble Joachim for the rest of his life.
‘Can you tally any of it?’ Joachim asked Hendrik later that day, Hendrik shaking his head.
‘If you can’t,’ he said sadly, ‘with God on your side, then what chance do I have?’
Joachim grimaced, Hendrik immediately apologising.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that badly,’ casting a quick smile at his father. ‘Remember that old proverb of mother’s? The one she used when I complained I’d been hard done by?’
Joachim’s turn to smile. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Justice becomes injustice, one man given two wounds when he barely deserves one.’
‘Harsh words then, harsh words now,’ Hendrik commented. ‘But with Luigi…well…where to start…’
‘Is there nothing you can do, Hendrik?’ Joachim asked, ‘nothing to at least get this Federigo fellow clapped in irons? Or get Luigi’s name cleared?’
He looked about the library where his son spent all his days and now his nights too, Hendrik living in one of the upstairs rooms. Plans had been put to him of getting his house rebuilt with monies from the Common Good Fund of Deventer, Hendrik quashing them from the start, stating that he absolutely wouldn’t countenance living on the Singel, certainly not on the same spot Louisa had died.