Heroes and Villains (17 page)

‘Venturing on to the stair for the purposes of nature, Jewel Lee Bradley, who should I find but your child bride intent on fleeing your embraces.’

‘Not so much my embraces as fear of their consequences.’

‘There’s nowhere to go, dear,’ said the Doctor. ‘If there was, I would have found it.’

He held out the flask to Jewel who approached crabwise and accepted it. He sniffed it suspiciously, wiped the top and drank. A cold wind disturbed the rushes on the floor. Jewel’s brown throat rippled and, watching him, Marianne wondered if the urge she felt to touch him was a need or a desire or if, contrary to what Donally said, both were functionally the same. The Doctor was perhaps experiencing a similar emotion. His hand came to rest on Jewel’s shoulder. Marianne saw his fingernails were carefully, even beautifully, polished and manicured.

‘Hands off,’ said Jewel, shaking himself. ‘I’ve told you often enough.’

‘Show me my picture,’ said Donally. ‘Take off your shirt.’

He felt under the collar and began to pull off the garment; Jewel shrugged and allowed himself to be stripped.

‘Kneel down.’

‘You silly old man,’ said Jewel almost tenderly and knelt. He parted his river of hair, exposing his neck as for the executioner’s blade, and revealed again the monstrous tattoo, the Garden of Eden, the tree, the snake, the man, the woman and the apple.

‘Observe the last work of art in the history of the world,’ said Donally to Marianne. ‘Observe the grace of line and the purity of execution.’

‘You always did fancy me, you old bugger,’ said Jewel, flinching a little as his tutor’s hands slid lovingly over the incised marks.

‘Not at all,’ said Donally. ‘Though how attractive you were at fifteen years old, wild as Cambyses and gentle as Ahasuerus.’

‘I saw him for myself when he was fifteen,’ said Marianne coldly. ‘And I thought he looked a perfect savage.’

At that, Jewel raised his shaggy head and cast her a look of such naked distress that all at once she felt wounded herself; she gasped.

‘It’s a small world,’ said Donally, satisfied with looking. He dropped the shirt back on Jewel’s shoulders and tipped his bottle. ‘It’s as small a world as the Romans found and much smaller than Uther’s, getting smaller all the time. Contracting, tightening, diminishing, shrinking.’

‘Shall I offer her a real choice?’ suggested Jewel. ‘The more choices one has, the larger the world grows.’

‘She’s got no surprises for me, I assure you. I know which way her wind blows.’

But Jewel took up the candle, extended his hand to the young girl and said: ‘Come.’

Donally sank back on the altar, banked by many sparkling feathers, his bottle in his hand, and watched them go with an air of applause. Outside the door, Jewel thrust the candle and the knife into her hand.

‘Light your way out and defend yourself; feel free to go, get going.’

The flame cast a ring of pure light which illuminated only their faces so they were forced to look at each other closely. The terrible stench from the hall caught at Marianne’s throat and somewhere a baby began to cry; she was filled with foreboding that her own children might one day weep in some hut or ruin among such wretchedness but she could no longer set her foot outside the compulsive circle, not, at least, tonight, desire it as much as she might. She made a convulsive movement as if in a last self-thwarted attempt to escape his magnetic field but his candle seemed the only light in the shrunken, darkened world. Yet she was determined to keep face, even if the world contracted a little more because she refused to take advantage of his offer.

‘I’m tired, now,’ she hedged. ‘Besides, it’s raining.’

He rearranged his face into an indecipherable smile. At his back stood Adam and Eve.

‘How much … how much did it hurt when he tattooed you?’

‘Nothing hurt me so much before or since. Why do you have such a morbid interest?’

‘It is like the mark of Cain.’

‘It was your brother I killed, not my own,’ he said and pettishly snuffed out the candle flame with his fingers so they were in the dark again. At that, the wind began to howl dreadfully and Donally to savage the organ with his drunken fingers. Discordant chords zigzagged about
the landing like bats. Marianne thought: ‘He will wake the whole house up’ and then realized the house was already stirring and waking. Points of light appeared at the mouths of rooms and footsteps began to patter, scarcely distinguishable from the sound of rain, for it was by now the moist beginnings of a new day. When they reached Jewel’s tower, they found Mrs Green had been there before them and packed away the pots of paint, the jewellery, the weapons, the furs and the mattress into his wooden box, leaving only a rifle, some knives and his immediate clothing. He loaded the rifle in the opaline dawn, which almost entirely surrounded them for the wind and rain had brought the rest of the roof down and the room was now in the open air. The floor was an inch or so deep in rainwater; now the room belonged only to whatever birds might choose to nest in the walls next spring, to the rustling tree and to the devouring elements. A bird plopped on to the holly tree and shook its marbled feathers. It was a magpie.

‘One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy,’ said Jewel. He seemed to take a wry pleasure in this scrap of folklore.

‘Where are we going?’

‘The sea. Down south. For the winter, it’s warmer. And we trade furs for fish and so on.’

In the meadow, the cavalcade was once again forming. The horses whinnied and stamped and the carts creaked, piled high with chattels. A cow lowed and an escaped goat ran frisking down towards the river, followed by a horde of screeching children. In their minds, the tribe was already up and away; the mansion echoed with the sounds of imminent departure and seemed quite hollow, once more abandoned. The kitchen was full of men snatching breakfast standing up; their already wet clothes steamed in the heat of Mrs Green’s last cooking fire. Surrounded by incomprehensible business, Marianne detached herself; she found some bread and meat and took her accustomed place by the fire.

‘You go in the cart with Mrs Green, like a bloody lady.’

‘I’ll go wherever you go.’

An expression of terror briefly crossed his face; she could not fail to recognize it, printed as it was on her memory.

‘Oh, no, you won’t, you’ll do as I say.’

‘Oh, no, I won’t, I’ll do as I want.’

He scowled and vanished into the throng. Gradually the room emptied but Marianne remained on her broken chair. Her eyes kept closing and at last she fell asleep, for she had not slept at all the previous night. In the bustle, she was left oblivious and when she woke abruptly, some time later, the kitchen was quite empty. Even the joints of meat were gone from the hooks in the ceiling. A child had deserted a crude wooden doll, which lay face down on the floor and the door swung on its hinges, creaking faintly, and that was all. In all the huge pile of rotting masonry nothing was left alive but the last embers in the hearth and they were dying. Marianne was stiff and cramped; she stretched and went to the door, momentarily hoping they had ridden off without her, but a black horse and a dappled pony stood together, ready saddled, in the yard, nosing for grass between the flagstones, so Jewel had evidently accepted her presence beside him as inevitable, with however many curses. The half-witted boy’s plate lay turned over on its face. Marianne went back into the house, looking for Jewel. On the outside wall of the chapel, Donally had penned a last slogan, in case the wind blew anyone after them into the house and they might be able to read. The letters were slurred and staggered dreadfully but Marianne was able to make out the following:
I THINK, THEREFORE I EXIST; BUT IF I TAKE TIME OFF FROM THINKING, WHAT THEN
? She despised him for resorting to rhetorical questions. Jewel appeared in the doorway of the chapel, carrying a burning branch.

‘They’re all off on the road,’ he said. ‘I have stayed behind to burn the house down.’

She followed him along the aisle. She approved his decision.

‘Will it burn in all this rain?’

‘Rain’s easing off.’

He pitched the brand at the organ, which was made of old, dry wood. In a few moments, the gilded cherubim were blazing cheerfully. Jewel and Marianne, united in a joint purpose, retreated to the doorway and watched the chapel consume itself; when the hides over the windows began to smoulder and the wax effigy spilled down its own front, they left the fire to proceed by itself and went to the hall. Just inside the front door, she found Jewel had already constructed a spiky pile of dead wood. He produced a fuse of fire by means of a tinder box which interested
Marianne very much for she had never seen one in use before. They waited to make sure the flame had taken and then walked round the house, along the terrace, past the backs of the disinterested statues.

They built another large bonfire in the kitchen on top of and around the central table; on this, they emptied the contents of the hearth. She had never seen the kitchen so well lit before; she noticed the ceiling was totally covered by a grey canopy of cobwebs. Flames leaped from shelf to shelf of the dresser. They went out into the yard, mounted their horses, who were now beginning to be agitated by the flames and smoke issuing from the kitchen door, and rode through the empty meadow, across the river and up the bank, towards the woods. It was a clear, grey morning and the rain came only in intermittent gusts but the wind blew Jewel’s hair like innumerable black flags. At the crest of the bank, they halted and turned.

She saw the valley was now quite deserted, sunk in dreary autumn, for it was growing late in the year. The silence of the dripping woods oppressed her. She buried her hands in the pony’s mane. The Barbarians had come and gone and left only the dung heap already dissolving in the rain, a few shards of broken pottery, a grave marked with the skull of a horse and a forlornly flapping shirt, left out to dry on a bush and forgotten; but Jewel intended nothing should remain. For a moment, the shipwrecked building glowed with interior incandescence; then there was a tremendous roaring crash and the roof caved in, releasing a spiralling jet of flame so tall it licked the lowest clouds and turned the sky pink.

Within the twinkling of an eye, the eclectic façade was consumed and the internal structure of the house revealed, ablaze, caging an intense white core which radiated red, yellow and mauve flames. The line of blackened statues stretched their arms forth, as if attempting to flee the fire which nevertheless engulfed them. The river flared with reflections of the tumultuous inferno and terrified birds started upwards from surrounding trees. Jewel’s horse showed the whites of its eyes and reared; he muttered some words to it and, dancing sideways, it quieted. The wind blew sparks into their faces. Then an inner floor gave with a rending roar and it was as though a fiery and all-devouring lion pounced upon the meadow. The terrace itself vanished. The dead rose trees
blazed. Distant thunder rumbled behind the sky. The grass charred and leaves shrivelled up and dropped from the trees. The wind tossed tides of blazing debris hither and thither around the valley.

‘And will the whole forest catch fire?’ she asked.

‘Maybe,’ he said with a certain anticipatory relish. His eyes were discs of reflected flame. He turned his horse into the wood, gesturing her to follow, and soon they reached a green road, leaving behind them a valley occupied by fire alone. A pheasant rattled upwards from the grass at their approach. Then they caught up with the last lagging travellers and were absorbed into a group again.

The travelling required a great deal of organization. She saw the Bradleys had a certain dislike of delegating authority; even Precious, though he was only fifteen, would give orders to men two or three times his own age and have them obeyed. The brothers preferred to take upon themselves the task of combing the woods at the side of the road for concealed attackers or spying out the road ahead in case a Professor convoy was seen approaching. Movement itself progressed so slowly that distance, like time, no longer had a practical application; motion became another aspect of the road. Now the travellers were in their element, a steady, persevering progression from nowhere to nowhere, in featureless, colourless weather. Sometimes they stopped, to rest the horses or to eat. A blackbird with one startling white wing came hopping for crumbs.

‘Scavengers,’ remarked Jewel. ‘What will the birds do when we’re gone?’

Mrs Green pulled his sleeve and drew him a little to one side. Two or three of the brothers had gathered around them, to get some food.

‘Jewel, my duck, another baby is sick, Annie’s baby, and the travelling is harming it. She didn’t say nothing, not this morning.’

‘No,’ said Jewel. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted to be left behind.’

‘Would you have left a woman and a child behind because the child was sick?’ exclaimed Marianne.

‘That would depend on the disease,’ he replied. ‘But we always abandon the most cruelly deformed of the new born in the forest. What else did you expect?’

He sank into silence, tearing up blades of wet grass. Johnny lay down carelessly at rest beside his brother; he turned his face up to the cool
sun, just now appearing from behind a cloud, and whistled a snatch of tune. Jewel struck him on the mouth with a hand heavy with rings. Johnny’s lip cut and trickled blood. Johnny knocked Jewel down. The brothers fought in the long grass, clawing and punching one another until Johnny knelt on his half-brother’s belly methodically hitting Jewel’s face again and again. The fight began so unexpectedly and reached its climax so swiftly Marianne was transfixed but Mrs Green took a pail of water which stood ready for drinking and calmly emptied it over them both, as Marianne had seen Worker women pour water on cats battling under domestic moons. Johnny dashed the water from his eyes, swearing, and scrambled off Jewel, who stretched out and pressed his face into the ground.

‘Brothers should be friends,’ said Mrs Green sententiously. ‘You go and change your wet clothes and let Jewel alone.’

‘He started it,’ said Johnny truculently, wringing water from his braided hair.