The Tenderness of Wolves (36 page)

‘What? The serving woman?’ Moody looks startled. But more because it is the squat, unlovely Norah than because Nesbit is committing an impropriety. Such things go on all the time. He compresses his mouth; it is possible that he is thinking of filing a report. ‘How do you know?’

‘I saw them.’ I don’t want to say I saw them when I was sneaking around the fort at night, and luckily he doesn’t ask.

‘Well … she is a widow.’

‘Is she?’

‘One of the voyageurs here. Sad business.’

‘I didn’t know.’ I ponder that being a Company servant is a dangerous profession. ‘What I was going to say is, we will have to ask people questions … without them knowing.’

Even as I say this, I wonder how on earth we are going to manage it. Moody looks less than impressed. I have to admit it’s not a brilliant plan, but it’s the best I can do.

‘Well, if there’s nothing else …’ He shoots a meaningful glance at the door. I think of Stewart’s arm and telling Moody about it, but he doesn’t trust Parker as it is, and may well start asking questions about how Parker came to be in Dove River. Questions I don’t think I want to answer at the moment. ‘I really must get some sleep. If you don’t mind.’

‘Of course. Thank you.’ I stand up. He somehow looks smaller huddled beneath the bedclothes. Younger and more vulnerable. ‘You look exhausted. Have you got someone to look at your blisters? I am sure there is someone with medical knowledge here …’

Moody grips the covers and pulls them around his chin, as though I have advanced on him with an axe. ‘Yes. Please just go! All I need is some sleep, for heaven’s sake …’

As it turns out, plans to talk to the staff the next day are postponed, because by the time we get up, most of them have left. George Cummings, Peter Eagles, William Blackfeather and Kenowas–in other words, all the adult, non-white males who live and work at Hanover House, with the single exception of Olivier–have gone to search for Nepapanees’ body. They left before dawn, silently, on foot. Even the man we saw on that first afternoon, the cataleptically drunk Arnaud (who is, it turns out, the watchman), even he has been sobered by grief and joined the search party.

The widow and her thirteen-year-old son have gone with them.

A week after Francis rejected Susannah’s overtures, he went to Jammet’s cabin on an errand for his father. He still thought of Susannah Knox, but now school had closed for the summer and the day on the beach seemed like a hazy, unsteady memory. He had not gone to the picnic, nor had he sent any message. He had not known what to say. If he wondered at himself for spurning what he had for so long dreamed of, he did not do so often, or with any self-reproach. It was somehow that, having held her for so long an unattainable ideal, he could not imagine her being anything else.

That day, it was late in the afternoon and Laurent was inside brewing tea when Francis whistled outside the front door.

‘Salut, François,’
he called, and Francis pushed the door open. ‘You want some?’

Francis nodded. He liked the Frenchman’s cabin, which was shambolic and utterly unlike his parents’ house. Things were held together with string and nails; the teapot had no lid but was kept on because it still managed its job of holding tea; he kept his clothes in tea chests. When Francis had asked him why he didn’t build a chest of drawers, as he was perfectly capable of doing, he replied that one wooden box was as good as another, no?

They sat down on two chairs inside the door, which Laurent wedged open, and Francis smelt brandy on the Frenchman’s breath. Sometimes he drank during the day,
although Francis had never seen him the worse for it. The cabin faced due west and the low sun struck them both in the face, forcing Francis to shut his eyes and tilt his head back. When he glanced at Laurent again, he found the older man looking at him, the sun mining golden lights in the depths of his eyes.

‘Quel visage,’
he murmured, as if to himself. Francis didn’t ask him what it meant, as he didn’t think it was for him.

There was a wonderful stillness in the air; the sound of crickets the loudest thing. Laurent produced the brandy bottle and tipped some, unasked, into Francis’s tea. Francis drank it, feeling agreeably reckless: his parents would yell at him if they found out, and he said so.

‘Ah well, we cannot please our parents all our lives.’

‘I don’t think I please them any of the time.’

‘You’re growing up. Soon you will leave, no? Get married, get your own place, all the rest.’

‘I don’t know.’ This seemed unlikely, dizzyingly distant from crickets and brandy and the low, blinking sun.

‘You got a sweetheart? That little dark girl–is she your sweetheart?’

‘Oh … Ida? No, she’s just a friend–we walk home from school some days.’ God! Did everyone in the county think Ida was his girlfriend? ‘No, I …’

For some reason, he found he wanted to talk to Laurent about it. ‘There was a girl I liked. Everyone likes her actually, she’s real pretty, and real nice, too … At the end of term she asked me to a picnic. She’d never really spoken to me before … and I was really flattered. But I didn’t go.’

There was the longest silence after that. Francis felt uncomfortable and began to wish he had not spoken of it.

‘Don’t know what’s the matter with me!’ He tried to laugh it off, not altogether successfully. Laurent put out a hand and patted him on the leg.

‘Nothing is the matter with you,
mon ami
. My God, nothing at all.’

Francis looked at Laurent then. The Frenchman’s face looked very serious, almost sad. Was it him? Did he make people sad? Maybe that was it. Ida always seemed to be sad around him lately. As for his parents, well … they were gloomy beyond belief. Francis tried smiling, to cheer him up. And then things changed. They got very slow–or was it very fast? He realised that Laurent’s hand was still on his leg, only not patting him now; now it was stroking his thigh with strong, rhythmic movements. He couldn’t stop looking into the golden-brown eyes. There was a smell of brandy and tobacco and sweat, and he seemed to be glued to the chair, his limbs heavy and immovable as if filled with a warm, viscous liquid. More than that, he was being drawn towards Laurent, and no power on earth could have stopped him.

At some point Laurent got up and went to the still open door to close it, then turned to Francis. ‘You know, you can go, if you want.’

Francis stared at him, breathless and suddenly horrified. He didn’t think he could speak, so he shook his head, just once, and Laurent kicked the door shut.

Afterwards, Francis realised he would, at some point, have to go home again. He even remembered the tool he had come for, although it seemed an inconceivable length of time ago. He was scared of leaving in case things went back to normal. What if the next time he saw Laurent he behaved as though nothing had happened? He seemed perfectly relaxed now, pulling his shirt on, with his pipe clenched between his teeth and clouds of smoke swirling round his head, as though this were a normal, everyday thing, as though the earth had not shifted on its axis. Francis was scared of going home, of having to look at his parents with these eyes, wondering, from now on, if they knew.

He stood in the doorway with the flaying tool, uncertain how to leave. Laurent came over to him, smiling his wicked smile.

‘S … so …’ Francis stuttered. He had never stuttered in his life. ‘Shall I come … tomorrow?’

Laurent put his hands on Francis’s face. Rough and tender, the thumbs traced his cheekbones. Their eyes were absolutely on a level. He kissed him, and his mouth felt like the centre of life itself.

‘If you like.’

Francis walked up the path towards home, in ecstasy and in terror. How ludicrous: the path, the trees, the crickets, the fading sky, the rising moon, everything looked just the same as before. As if it didn’t know, as if it didn’t matter. And he thought, as he walked, ‘Oh God, is this what I am?’

In ecstasy and in terror: ‘Is this what I am?’

Susannah was forgotten. School and the concerns of schoolboys faded into a distant past. That summer, for a few weeks, he was happy. He walked through the forest, strong, powerful, a man with secrets. He went with Laurent on hunting and fishing trips, although he neither hunted nor fished. When they met anyone in the forest, Francis would nod to them, grunt curtly, his eyes on the end of the fishing line, or scanning the trees for signs of movement, and Laurent would hint that he was becoming a tremendous shot, eagle-eyed and ruthless. But the best times were when they were alone at the end of the day, in the forest or at the cabin, and Laurent would become serious. Usually he was drunk as well, and he would take Francis’s face in his hands, looking and looking as if he couldn’t get enough.

Looking back, there weren’t so many times like that–Laurent insisted that he should not stay at the cabin too often, or people might suspect. He had to spend a reasonable amount of time at home too, with his parents. He
found it difficult–ever since that first evening, when he had walked in to find them sitting down to dinner. He held up the tool.

‘Had to wait for him to come back.’

His father nodded briefly. His mother turned round. ‘You were so long. Your father wanted to get it done before dinner. What were you doing?’

‘Told you, I had to wait.’ He put the tool on the table and walked upstairs, ignoring his mother’s weary cries about dinner.

Trembling with shivery joy.

Since relations with his parents were rudimentary at the best of times, they did not seem to notice a difference if he was silent or distracted. He spent the time between visits to Laurent’s going for walks, lying on his bed, carrying out his chores with impatience and bad grace. Waiting. And then there would be another night at the cabin, or a trip to a fishing lake, when he could be truly himself. Seized moments, intense and sharply flavoured, when time could dawdle like Sunday afternoon, or rush like a speeding torrent. If he counted the number of nights he had ever spent at Laurent’s cabin, what would it come to?

Maybe twenty. Twenty-five.

Too few.

Francis is jolted from his past by Jacob walking into his room. He is grateful for the interruption. Jacob looks more agitated than he has ever seen him. Francis rubs his hand over his face as if he has been asleep, hoping Jacob will not see the tears.

‘What is it?’ Jacob has opened his mouth but nothing has yet come out.

‘A strange thing. The woman Line and her children, and the carpenter–they have left in the night. The carpenter’s wife is threatening to kill herself.’

Francis gapes. The carpenter, whom he has never met, has been spirited away by his nurse. (So why did she kiss him?)

Jacob paces. ‘It is going to snow. It is not a good time for travel, not with children. And I saw her, the night before last, in the stables. She asked me not to say anything. So I did not.’

Francis takes a deep breath. ‘They are adults. They can do what they like.’

‘But if they don’t know the country … they don’t know how to travel in winter …’

‘How long before it snows?’

‘What?’

‘How long before the snow? A day? A week?’

‘A day or two. Soon. Why?’

‘I think I know where they might have gone. She spoke to me; she asked about Caulfield.’

Jacob follows his thinking. ‘Well they might make it. If they are lucky.’

An hour ago they came to the first trees, small and sparse to be sure, but still trees, and Line felt a rush of joy. They really are going to get away. Here is the forest, and the forest goes all the way to the lakeshore. It is almost as though they are already there. Her piece of paper tells them to go southeast until they hit a small river, and then follow it downstream. Torbin is sitting on the saddle in front of her, and she has been telling him a story about a dog she used to have as a child in Norway. She makes him sound like the dog in the fairy story with the soldier, with eyes as big as dinner plates.

‘You can have a dog too, when we find somewhere to live. How would you like that, huh?’ It slips out before she can bite her tongue.

‘Somewhere to live?’ echoes Torbin. ‘You said we were going on holiday. We’re not, are we?’

Line sighs. ‘No, we’re going to go and live somewhere else, somewhere nicer, where it’s warm.’

Torbin squirms round in the saddle to look her in the eye, a dangerous look on his face, closed and taut. ‘Why did you lie?’

‘It wasn’t really a lie, darling. It was complicated and we couldn’t explain it all to you, not at Himmelvanger. It was important that no one there knew or they wouldn’t let us go.’

‘You lied to us.’ His eyes are hard and confused. Per and the red-roofed church have made him a pedantic little boy. ‘Lying is a sin.’

‘It wasn’t a sin in this case. Don’t argue, Torbin. There are some things you can’t understand, you’re too young. I’m sorry we had to do it this way but there it is.’

‘I am not too young!’ He is angry, his cheeks red with cold and excitement. He is wriggling around now.

‘Sit still, young man, or I’ll give you a smack. Believe me, this is not the time for arguments!’

But somehow in his wriggling he manages to stick his elbow hard into her stomach, causing her to gasp and feel a surge of anger. ‘Enough!’ She takes her hand off the reins and whacks him on the leg.

‘You’re a liar! Liar! I wouldn’t have come!’ he screams, and wriggles out from between her arms and slithers to the ground. His ankle buckles beneath him momentarily, then he picks himself up and starts to run off, back in the direction they have come.

‘Torbin! Torbin! Espen!’ Line shrieks, her voice a shrill cry, yanking on the reins to try and turn her horse round, which it doesn’t seem to understand. It stops still, then doesn’t move, like a train arrived at a station. Espen, up ahead with Anna, pulls his mount round, and sees Torbin darting between the trees.

‘Torbin!’ He jumps off, with Anna in his arms, and gives her to Line, who has dismounted, leaving her horse where it is.

‘Stay here, I’ll get him! Don’t move!’

He runs off after Torbin, dodging round trees and stumbling over fallen boughs. In a frighteningly short time, they are out of sight. Anna looks at Line with her solemn blue eyes, and starts to cry.