Shades of Red (20 page)

“This time we go alone, Delaney-boy. Just like the first time, remember? Except this time, let's hope we know what we're doing. The only problem we have now is — which doorway do we pick?”

The dog looked up at her, wagging his tail gently and raising his eyebrows until she smiled and made her decision. Holding his collar in one hand and her favourite walking stick in the other, she stepped toward the middle doorway as the symbol of a broken crown glowed a hot, beckoning red.

Darrell lay on her back, staring at the wooden beams of the ceiling for quite some time before she realized where she was. A late afternoon light poured through the window, and she saw she was in a tiny shed that held some extra benches and materials for the chapel. A knot formed in her stomach as from outside came the sound of hammering.

Darrell slipped a mint into her mouth and, after a moment or two, crept out of the shed. Delaney curled up in a sunny spot by the wall, and Darrell paused on the grass to watch as two young men constructed a high scaffold on a small paved area outside the chapel.

The Tower of London.

Darrell took a deep breath to steady her nerves. She stared around, eyes wide. There could be no doubt; it looked just like the pictures in the library books at
Eagle Glen. So she might have a chance to say goodbye to Anne, after all. With luck.

She ducked back into the side door of the chapel, needing somewhere quiet to think. The Chapel of St. Peter was quite different from the other cathedrals she had seen in this place and time. It was smaller for one, though certainly not tiny, and very old.

What had she learned of the Reformation during the time of Henry and Anne? Darrell remembered Anne reigned for barely a thousand days — as the second of Henry's wives, she had been queen for less than three years before Henry had her beheaded for treason.

Darrell shivered. The Nan she had met was full of herself and intolerant of others — especially of Katherine, Henry's first queen. But now that Darrell had entered Anne's world, she knew Anne to be a complex, fiery, flesh and blood creature. Did she have to die?

She slid onto a bench and briefly considered saying a prayer. Awkwardly, she slid off the bench onto her knees.

I don't know what to pray for. Do I pray for Anne's life? For Conrad's? I don't even know what I am praying to — how can a just God allow such terrible things to happen?

Darrell's eyes welled with tears, and she was grateful for the dim light in the tiny chapel. The cobbles dug deeply into her knees. She struggled for a few seconds to find a comfortable position but realized almost immediately that comfort was not to be found here.

She thought about the penitent she had seen on her first day in Windsor. It seemed so long ago. She remembered he had carried a scourge, or perhaps a horsewhip, and he had beaten his back with a sickeningly regular rhythm. The thin leather strap had described a lyrical arc over his head before the tip of the lash bit deeply into his own flesh. She remembered Paris's appalled face as he'd watched the man's blood trickle into his own footsteps as he walked away. That flagellant and others of his kind sought no comfort from their faith.

Darrell stood up.
I still don't know what I believe.
At the front of the chapel, a priest clad in the habit of a Grey Friar walked in the door, heavily laden with candles. Darrell slipped out the back of the chapel and into the thin sunlight of late afternoon.

A few steps from the front door a figure in a long scarlet cloak stood beside the scaffolding, perhaps watching the construction of the executioner's block. Darrell clutched her walking stick tightly and hurried nearer.

The scarlet cloak swirled in the afternoon sun, and the figure swept into the main doors of the Chapel of St. Peter. Darrell, in spite of the stiffness in the newly donned wooden leg, followed right behind.

She caught her breath for a moment in the entranceway as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. There was no
sign of the scarlet robe, but she would look all night if necessary. It had to be Conrad — it just had to be.

At the front of the chapel, the friar, dressed in a drab surplice of grey, had his back to the door, lighting candles on the altar. He moved silently in and out of the shadows. Darrell searched her memory for the name of Anne's priest.

“Excuse me,” Darrell said, her voice sounding small and hollow in the open space. “Are you Father Priamos?”

The friar nodded.

“I — I wonder if you can help me. I'm looking for someone very important.”

The priest hesitated a moment, and then turned to her, the heavy cowl of his robe shrouding his face.

“I am looking for — for a priest who wears a scarlet cloak,” she said. “That is all I know of him, except perhaps that I think he may have white hair.”

“And the name of this priest?” His voice was rough; he sounded like he needed to cough.

Darrell paused for a moment. What did she have to lose? “I know the name he was once called,” she said softly. “His name was Conrad Kennedy. I don't know what his name is today, or even if he is still alive. But if he is and you know how I can find him, I beg of you to help me.”

The brother pushed back the heavy cowl and exposed shiny red flesh that ran down the right side of his face like melted candle wax. He was missing an eye.

Darrell's knees failed, and she sat down hard on a low wooden bench near the altar. Could it be? But then, who was the figure in scarlet? Somehow it no longer mattered.

Unable to look at the terrible scarring, she dropped her eyes. “You have been burned,” she whispered. His bark of laughter made her look into his face once again.

“Yes, Darrell Connor, I have been burned, and in more ways than one, as I am sure you will agree.”

It
was
him. The room swam briefly, and she closed her eyes, head bowed like a supplicant.

After all this time. She had finally found him. She felt so guilty and wretched that all the speeches she had prepared were gone from her memory.

“I came to find you to bring you home,” she said at last.

He laughed a little. “I am home,” he said more gently than before. “And I did expect to see you again one day, though I knew not when.”

“I'm sorry I have come so late,” she whispered.

He looked at her critically. “You are just as I remember,” he said, “though perhaps a little thinner and with deeper circles under your eyes. If I may ask — how much time has actually passed since the fire?”

“Almost six months.”

He bowed his head and was silent for a moment.
“So little time,” he said finally. “You have done well to find me after so little time. And yet look at me — I have lived a lifetime since I saw you last. Many lifetimes.” He fell silent.

“Maybe — maybe you could tell me a bit about it?” Darrell ventured. “I have read the diary you left with Brother Socorro. I still have it — see?” She pulled the worn notebook out of her skirt pocket.

Friar Priamos — she still could not bear to think of him as Conrad — cleared his throat and reached over to take the small book.

“Brother Socorro was a good man,” he said, his voice quaking with emotion. “I owe him my life — and much more, I owe him my spirit.” He looked down at Darrell for a moment and then sat beside her on the bench. “May I keep this?” he asked.

“Of course — it's yours, after all.”

“Are you sure you want to hear?” he said gently, his voice forming syllables awkwardly as he traced his way along a dialect long unspoken.

Darrell lifted her head. Her eyes burned, but she clenched her teeth and willed herself not to cry. “I need to hear,” she muttered. “I need to know what I did to you.”

“My child,” the friar cried out, and then bit down on his words. He stared at her in silence for a moment and then laughed dryly. “It is hard to forget how close
we used to be in age.” He paused again. “My story is not to punish you, Darrell,” he said at last. “My only wish is to set you free.”

His gaze rested on her face a moment, and then he turned to look at the damp stone wall of the chapel, as if the pictures of the story he told were played out there in living colour.

“I have much to answer for,” he said, his voice a mere shred above a whisper. “But that will be in another place from this one, and before a judge more terrible and beautiful than even you, my old enemy.”

Darrell tried to smile. “No longer an enemy, I hope,” she said.

“As do I.” His voice strengthened. “I cannot think of that boy, the boy who would try to sell his friends for money, who would deliberately hurt defenceless animals, who lived in a world of betrayal — no, I cannot think of that boy as myself.” His fists curled and loosened convulsively on his lap. “And yet it was from that shell of a boy I was born. Born, justly for a child begat in hell, of fire.”

“I have read your journal so many times,” Darrell interrupted. “It told so much, but now that I see you, I can't believe how little I know.” She forced herself to look straight into his remaining eye. “How ...” Words failed her and then returned, in a rush. “How can there be so little hate? How can you not hate me?”

He paused and sighed deeply, turning his face from her. After a moment he resumed his narrative as if she hadn't spoken. “If you have read my journal, then you know most of my life as it has become. The truth is, I don't remember much of the first moments out of the flames that consumed the stable. I know I heard a gun go off — was it mine or the one held by Salvatore? I cannot remember. I just remember searing pain, and then having my arm yanked so hard I thought it would come off. My rescuer rolled me over and over on the ground outside the burning stable, though I'm not sure if my clothes were aflame or simply smoking. My legs and torso bear no scars from the fire, so I have to think he rolled me out of instinct more than any altruistic need to save my life. In fact, he took one look at me and vomited into the ditch.

“I lay on the ground where he'd left me, the hard rime of frost biting into the rawness that once had been my face.”

Darrell flinched but clenched her hands together tightly, unable to take her eyes from Conrad's face.

“I just lay there and listened to the closest thing I had to friends scream as the fire consumed them. I closed my eyes and waited for the end to come. The man who had pulled me to safety had shown no mercy. It seems that the sight of me and the blackened charcoal that passed for my skin was too much for him.

After spilling his guts on the street he got to his feet and I never saw him again.”

The old friar shivered a little. He stood suddenly and poured a splash of wine from a jug on the altar into a ceramic cup and leaned forward to sip from it.

“Medicinal,” he said, and the right side of his face quirked into a smile. He sat down again. “The screaming didn't last, of course. That old stable was filled with straw and debris and was built of powdery old wooden beams. It went up like a roman candle, and the roar of the flames soon drowned any other sound.”

Darrell put a hand on his arm. “You thought we might have burned to death? And we thought the same of you.” She shook her head sadly. “All of us wrong.”

He nodded his agreement. “The night, or rather early morning as it now had become, was cold, but the crisp air and frozen ground couldn't hold the flames back. The dry cold of that February morning in Firenze kept all decent citizens wrapped up tightly in their beds and asleep past the time when the smell of smoke might have saved the stable.

“By the time a call rang through the streets, the stable was no longer the issue. The stable, in fact, was no longer there. I watched as the tiny sparks that kaleidoscoped skyward in blue and green and vivid orange-red danced across the lane to the thatched roof of a neighbouring potting shed. Tongues of flame licked the walls
of the nearby house, slipping through cracks and sliding along crevices to the wooden beams inside the mudand clay-covered walls.

“I could only watch the fire move with one eye, for I knew the other eye to be full of mud. I lay there and waited for the wind to turn. The merest hint of a breeze would bring the flames back to my spot on the frozen, rutted mud track, and I would be engulfed. The bells that signalled the gates of hell had truly opened began to toll, one after the other, summoning all lost souls. I closed my eyes to the brilliant sight and waited for death.

“It was the mud that saved me, you know. The frozen road where I waited for death slowly thawed in the heat from the flames. The thick muck, churned into ridges and tracks by the hooves of many horses and the wheels of many carts, softened and plastered itself in a thick mass to one side of my face. The occupants of the house next to Verocchio's old ruin discovered the flames too late to save their own home but early enough to save all the family members and to peel my remains off the ground. By my very strangeness, they must surely have believed me to be the source of this flaming tragedy. The two youngest sons, stalwart lads in their early twenties, scraped me up and flung me without ceremony into the back of a cart with the few belongings they were able to salvage before their villa burned to the ground. A donkey was hastily hitched to the cart and,
led by the lady of the house, trundled to the only place of sanctuary the local residents could imagine: the Church of Saint Mary de Fiores, The Duomo.”

A quiet knock at the door made Darrell jump as though she had been struck.

“Father? The lady awaits you.”

The friar gathered his cloak closely around his shoulders and pulled the cowl back up to shroud his face.

He turned to Darrell and took her hands in his own. “That is more than enough,” he said, his voice steady. “My first duty now is to my lady in this hour of her most desperate need. All that remains is for me to ask your forgiveness.”