Blood Ties (20 page)

‘I think we should keep going, Father. And did you not say there was an inn at Pont St Just?’

‘There was.’ A memory came, of wielded blades, men dying, a first glimpse of a dangerous enemy. ‘It may not still be there.’

‘Let us hope it is. A double reason to go on, then.’

‘Aye. But let’s ride at the least. These horses have rested enough.’

The mud sucked at their hooves, but the rain had stopped and the wind now pushed them forward. The forest started to thin, some trees were coppiced, or had been reduced to stumps, the trunks for building or fuel. They passed a rough hut, its side walls bulging outwards, a thin straw roof that must have been less protection even than his hood. There was movement from the side of it, and a pig rose from the mud within its pen, sniffed at them, lay down again. Jean thought he saw human eyes peer at them from a doorway, only to dart swiftly away. He had been raised in similar country himself, also in the Loire, knew the terror their passing such a lonely place would have caused. Travellers were rare at the best of times there. On such a foul night, they could only be the Devil’s messengers.

The road twisted between two banks, curved around almost on itself, then broke sharply northwards again. Within the glimpses of the moon he was able to see up ahead, to a line of blackthorn at his left, another at his right. The road led to the gap between them, a last twist and corner concealing that gap until they were upon it.

Jean was not sure if he reined in or his horse halted of its own will, but they stopped just as the moon cleared a bank of cloud, dappling the crossroads, glinting off the gibbet beam and the scrap of metal that swung from it. The cage of his memory was mostly gone; only the headpiece remained, rusted, split, yet still retaining the vague form of a man’s face, curved out for nose, lips, chin; hanging like heads that had hung from his hands on scaffolds across Europe, raised by the hair to screaming crowds.

‘By the wounds!’ Jean swayed, felt a hand reach out to steady him, too late, as he slipped from the horse, sliding down its flanks, his legs giving way and dropping him onto the ground. He sat there, in the red mud, and stared up at the mask he’d once stared out from and the years collapsed in on themselves, he looked again through slats, tasted again of that horror, felt, in every tortured bone and ravaged joint, the hurts inflicted on him since the time he last fell to this ground from that cage, each of them flaring within him.

Anne was beside him in a moment, supporting him, helping him to stand and lean against his horse, pressing a rope-wrapped bottle of wine against his lips. He drank, choked, drank again, his eyes gradually clearing till they could focus on the face before him. Strangely, she was smiling.

‘Wrong crossroads then?’ She spoke like a child and as if she had been promised some treat at their destination. She had that from him, the scaffold humour.

‘Happily not.’ He managed a half-smile, shook his head, trying to clear it, looked down – and all humour was snatched away. Where he’d landed, at the very centre of the crossroads, there was a pile of disturbed earth, crumbling into a shallow pool. Someone had dug there and recently, for not even the rain had managed to obliterate the trace of it.

He fell again, thrust one arm into the dank water, up to the shoulder, fingers flailing at the edges of the hole. He couldn’t believe he encountered the bottom of it so soon. The casket, with its treasure, had been buried far deeper, deep as any grave. Here, there was nothing but mud, water, loose stones. No hardness to give him hope.

He felt Anne’s hands on him again, under his shoulders, and he let himself be lifted till he was once more leaning against his horse.

‘It is gone, Anne,’ he whispered. He was not sure if he spoke to the woman who was there or the one who was not.

She held him there against the horse, feeling his heart shudder, his shallow breaths. She knew he had been sustained by his little hope, that somehow the hand would still be here, undisturbed in its meagre tomb, that his son had not violated his life’s faith, that a monster had not risen from the dead. If all that were true and the quest of the hand over, he could return to Tuscany, try to make amends to Beck, seek the rest that, surely, he had earned. She had hoped for it, prayed, in her own way. Yet in her mind she knew Gianni had too great a start on them and in her heart she held the vision of the tormented land.

But which of the four ways do we now take?
she thought. Neither the Fugger nor Erik had overheard the grave robbers’ destination. Closing her eyes did not help – her visions took in the consequence but did not extend to the practicality of tracking their quarry. In the sky, between tatters of cloud, she could see Polaris, the North star, that they had followed up from the coast. Should they take that road, continue north? Without knowing her brother’s intentions, any direction they took could be opposite to the one they needed. She could get no sense of where Gianni was in the world. Back? They would have met him on the road south. East, where a gradual lightening finally showed the approach of day? Down to the coast by the mountains, over the next range and the next and finally into the Italian States, thence back to the heart of his beloved Church? Or …

It was when she turned to the west that she saw the figure, a shape she’d taken to be just part of the midden, emerging from the shadows beneath the gibbet, as if drawn by the moon. A hood was bent over, hands tightly clasped against a stomach, the back leant into the wooden upright.

‘Father!’

Her gasp brought Jean away from the horse, which, spooked, skittered away with its companion to the field’s edge. He looked at her, followed the direction of her hand, froze. At last, when there was no movement from any of them, he whispered, ‘Was he here when we arrived or is he newly conjured from the earth? Hell’s spawn or human?’

She whispered back, ‘I do not know.’

They waited, watched, holding each other. They could see the apparition’s cloak was brown, his feet bare in sandals, that a puddle of rain water had gathered in the lap.

‘I will go and see.’ She took a step forward.

‘No.’ Jean’s throat was dry, the word came out in a rustle. Clearing it, he said, ‘I will.’

First, he went to his horse, calming it with gentle sounds, reaching up to the pack. His hand touched the hard outline of a sword hilt beneath some sacking, but he wasn’t ready for that. In a saddle holster lay a powderhorn and a pistol, a wheelock. He carefully poured a little fresh powder into the pan, lowered the serrated edge onto the flint. With the weapon held before him he moved cautiously toward the gibbet.

He was a step away when the hood lifted. He thought about firing, put pressure on the trigger, felt it give slightly. A swift pull and the spark would fly, a lead ball would send this demon back to whatever hell it had come from. Then the demon spoke, a single word.

‘Rombaud,’ it said, and Jean saw within the brown folds of cloth, the face within the shadows. Though it was a face from any nightmare, he knew it had not come from fresh from hell. For he had seen it many times, under swung blades, through a sheen of blood, within the walls of agony. Nineteen years before he thought he had seen the last of this face as it fell to this same ground, pierced through the eye by the Fugger’s dagger, and though he’d been told this corpse yet walked the earth, Heinrich von Solingen speaking his name froze him where he stood, his useless finger struggling to pull the trigger.

They remained like that until a woman’s voice ended the silence.

‘Is this him, Father? Is this your tormentor?’

‘Tormentor.’ The word came to the scarred lips as if they tasted it, the voice without colour. ‘I tormented you. I thought to watch you die.’

‘By what pact with Satan are you yet living, Heinrich von Solingen? Here, upon this ground, nineteen years ago, I thought I
had
watched you die.’

‘Well, you can watch me die now.’

As he spoke the hands clasped in his lap parted and the puddle there Anne had assumed was rainwater suddenly filled with entrails and more blood. The face whitened, the one eye closed.

‘No!’

Anne’s cry took her forward before Jean could stop her, hands reaching out to push back the awful flow, the remorseless rush of death. And a hand, slick with blood, closed over Anne’s there, the grip unbreakable.

It was Jean who cried out now, stepped forward with pistol levelled, and it was Anne’s other hand that halted him.

‘No, Father.’

She had never been able to bear any suffering, be it a rat in a snare, a rabid dog. Now she held the hand of the man she knew had inflicted such pain on one she loved. Yet her voice, when it came, was gentle.

‘Be at peace, friend.’

‘Peace. Friend.’ Once more he sampled words, the strangeness of them in his mouth. ‘I have not known either of these things.’

‘You will soon perhaps.’

He looked through her, past her in distance and time, then settled back. ‘I have been told I am a sinful man. I can remember the reasons why I am called that. Rombaud bears scars that prove it. But …’ There was a shudder, a grimace of pain. ‘Something happened to me here when that knife entered my head, when I should indeed have died. It cut the cord between the sins and their reasons. I feel neither guilt nor joy in them. They just are.’

His voice faded as he spoke, the eye fluttered as if to close. Then it fixed on hers.

‘You have the same eyes as your brother.’

Anne leant in closer to hear, to speak. ‘You know him?’

‘I led him here. He took what was buried here. He put a knife into me here.’ His hands parted to another run of blood.

‘You lie.’ Jean came forward, the pistol before him. ‘Do not believe him. You know your brother. He is many things, but he is no killer. He is training to be a priest.’

The voice came again, a whisper now. ‘He is as good with a blade as you are, Rombaud. Maybe better. Hard to tell, as I offered no resistance. He came back for me, when the other, the Englishman, rode off, content to leave me here, since I wouldn’t leave. So you have your wish. You can watch me die, upon this ground, and blood of your blood the cause of my death.’

Anne took again the hand that had loosened in hers, placed the other to his head, warmth to its ice.

‘Friend, can you help us? Where has he …’ She flinched as she thought of her brother, the havoc he had wrought here, havoc that was beyond even her skill to heal. ‘Where has he taken what was buried?’

She thought she was too late, felt the pulse fade within his hand, sensed the door opening above her as it had for Guiseppe Toldo, as it would for everyone. Murmuring words to smooth the passage, she suddenly felt her grip returned, lips moved.

She leaned in. ‘What is it, friend? What?’

Words came. Only a few. Then he was gone. Beyond any doubt, Heinrich von Solingen was finally dead.

She folded his hands back into his lap. Standing, she looked at her father.

‘London,’ she stated, brushing past him, moving to the horses. ‘Gianni’s taken the hand to the Tower of London.’

The words sliced through him, severing the vague hope that here would be an ending, that he’d done all he could, that he could not chase the chimera if he had no notion of the direction it had taken. He was at the crossroads again and the way had been chosen.

‘London, he said, as simply as Heinrich von Solingen would have done.

Where it all began. London.

The peril was clear. If Elizabeth didn’t take immediate action her defences would be overrun. Yet what could she do? Hope was dwindling, each sacrifice costing her more, him less. On her left side, Renard’s white queen had advanced, threatening her king. Now the Fox strove to support the assault with mastery of the middle ground. It could only be a matter of time.

Renard was dictating the game, as he always knew he would. Playing white, he acted and she reacted, it was the nature of chess. Yet he was only playing this game to emphasize his dominance in their other, more vital struggle. Renard’s queen, England’s queen, threatened to end Elizabeth’s game, her very life. And as on the board so in the world, for Elizabeth could not reach her sister. Mary continued to deny her an audience where she might plead her cause. The struggle seemed hopeless.

No! She banged her hand down hard upon the table. Surrender was not in her nature. There had to be another way.

Rising, Elizabeth crossed to her window, seeking an escape through the thick, leaded glass. Above the brick wall a dozen paces away, the tops of the willows on the Surrey bank of the Thames swayed in a gentle spring breeze. They seemed so close, as if she could reach out and touch them … were her windows not barred against opening, were the gate in the wall below not locked and patrolled, were she not still a prisoner here at Hampton Court, able to leave her chambers only when some higher authority bid that she must or could. Only three people had that authority: Mary, whose thoughts were poisoned against her; Renard, who liked to keep her close; and …

The thought of that one other made her turn to study the board anew. After a moment, she laughed bitterly. ‘Yes,’ she said out loud, ‘in this, alone, does chess not parallel my life, Renard.’

On the board, she could not reach Renard’s king. Yet in the two weeks since the game had begun, scarcely a day passed without seeing him.

Philip. The thought of the Spanish King turned her back to the warmth outside that beckoned her from her cage. Just the day before he had taken her once again into Bushey Park, opposite the palace gates, a walled area her father had established for his hunting pleasure while in residence at Hampton; though yesterday they had exchanged the hounds and spear of the stag chase for the jesses of the hawk. Philip had presented her with a falcon, a young male, newly trained and untested by royalty, and she had been delighted when her gift soared to his great height, then stooped to take a pigeon on his first assay. Her heart had soared with him, her mind and body flying as free as him for his one glorious escape. Philip had sensed her sadness when the bird was held and hooded again. In an aside that none but she could hear, he had whispered, ‘He will fly again soon, my lady. As you will.’