HS03 - A Visible Darkness (58 page)

Together they had schemed and planned. Together they had done it. Helena had been the target. Helena, and the child that she was carrying in her womb.

Blood roaring through my temples, my hands came up, hovering at her throat.

‘You knew what he was after, didn’t you?’

She stepped back, eyes wide with fright. She could not escape me in the confines of the hall. The only way was out, and I was blocking the door.

‘Of course, I did, sir,’ she cried, protesting. ‘Why else would I have come here?’

As I advanced on her, she cowered in the corner.

I blocked her in, felt the pull of my jaws, my teeth exposed, the desire to rip her body to shreds as a wolf might have done.

‘Why, Edviga?’

She stared at me in puzzlement.

‘I was afraid. That’s why! The French were working on the beach. Colonel les Halles wanted to get rid of us all. You know what he was planning, sir. That’s why I ran away.’

We were so close, I felt her warm breath on my face. Once, I had desired such intimacy. That thought now turned my stomach. I pressed my hands against the wall for fear of tangling them around her slender throat.

‘I fled to Pastoris,’ she went on quickly. ‘His girls had been dismissed. Those Frenchmen had taken over the polishing of the amber. The women had been told to leave that night. I decided that I’d go with them. I’ve got this mark on my face, I can limp like the best of them. Hans Pastoris would never give me away. He took me in. That’s what I did, sir. I left my things in the hut. I walked out on the water.’

‘So, Pastoris was lining up his lambs to march them out.’

A look of anguish flashed upon her face. It made her seem almost human once again. This was the Edviga that I had spoken with on two occasions. I did not shift my hands, or ease my stance. I would crush her like a viper the instant she spoke of Gurten. I had to know how deeply she was in league with him.

‘Hilde Bruckner had them,’ she burst out suddenly. ‘Ilse had given them to her to keep the night before they found her dead in Ansbach’s pigsty. With Ilse dead, she was at her wits’ end, sir. Crossed herself again and again, and swore she wouldn’t touch a thing that Ilse had handled. Would I take them? That’s what she said.’

My head was spinning.

‘Take
what
?’ I said.

‘Ilse’s things, sir. She’d dug up her treasures. Ilse was planning to leave as well. She’d left her things with Hilde. Ilse had a man, I told you that. Remember, sir, the one that drew her? We’ve always hidden our stuff in Nordbarn. We trust the girls. Anything we’re bringing out, or taking in. Spener’s stolen amber passed that way, I’d wager.’ She hurried on, as if to cancel out what she had just said. ‘Poor Hilde’d no idea what was in that sack. Ilse had stashed a load of amber, I expected that. But what surprised me more was the . . . the . . . what do you call them, sketches? Two of them, there were.
One was a picture of a neck and chin. I realised that was Ilse. He cut her throat out, didn’t he, sir?’ She sobbed and looked away, but only for a second. ‘The other picture . . . Oh sir, it was a . . . a picture of a woman’s . . . of a woman’s belly, a woman that was carrying a babe. But Ilse Bruen wasn’t pregnant!’

Slowly, I let my hands slide down and away from the wall.

Edviga’s eyes flashed nervously from side to side, following them down.

A deep sigh escaped from between her lips.

Was that what she had hoped to achieve by telling me her tale? Did she dare to think that I could be placated?

‘It was you,’ I said.

She shook her head, eyes down. ‘I can
never
have a child,’ she murmured. ‘Still, I thought, it must be one of us. But who, sir? Only the doctor would know for certain. All the girls go to him . . .’

‘Go on,’ I urged her.

She refused to meet my gaze, as if to spare my embarrassment.

‘I knocked on Dr Heinrich’s door,’ she said more calmly. ‘He’d gone away, his housekeeper told me. Gone to buy medicines and stuff for his trade. Back tomorrow, the lady said. Of course, I didn’t believe her. He doesn’t want to speak with us no more, that’s what I thought. Got no time for amber-girls now. He knows we’re being sent away. But as I was turning away from his door, another possibility flashed through my mind. It frightened the life out of me, sir. There
was
a woman who was pregnant. But she was not in Nordcopp. Not there on the coast . . .’

Her eyes were wide as she relived the terror of that moment.

‘A woman that the killer would be interested in. Frau Helena, sir, your wife. He’d want
their
child, I thought. You believed that you were chasing him, but was he chasing you? He’d set his eyes on everything that you held dearest.’

‘And so you came to Lotingen . . .’

The air wheezed out of me as I tried to speak. My chest ached with the tension. Would she finally reveal the horror?

‘Frau Helena was in a proper state,’ she said. ‘Her labour had started, though the babe was not expected for a week or two. The
waters broke while I was standing at your door. Lotte was in a panic, the little ones were terrified. They’d seen their mother lying on the floor. I told a lie, sir . . .’

‘What lie was that?’

‘Lotte thought that you had sent me, and so I said that you had.’ As she pronounced this sentence, her eyes lit up with simple pleasure, and a giggle issued from her lips. ‘Oh sir, they were so afraid and lost, they’d have welcomed in Napoleon himself!’

‘Who was in the house?’ I asked, still wary.

Edviga shrugged her shoulders as if it were a silly question. ‘The mistress on the floor. The babes around her crying. Lotte doing her best to calm their tears and see to Helena. I dropped my bag, took off my cape, and set to work. Your wife was in a fright, sir. I tried to calm her, saying that you would soon be home. But there was no time to be lost. A decision had to be made.’

I braced myself to hear how my son had been torn from Helena’s body. The blood-soaked object Gurten had let me glimpse. The tiny face a dark, twisted pulp of flesh and blood . . .

I saw darkness, felt that I might faint away.

‘Are you feeling ill, sir?’

Edviga’s voice revived me like smelling-salts. I had to hear her out.

‘What did you decide?’

‘To send Lotte off with the children. Her brother lives in . . .’

‘I know where Lotte’s brother lives!’ I snapped.

It was the worst scenario I could imagine. Helena helpless. Lotte gone. My wife left all alone in the hands of Edviga. Gurten waiting somewhere close by. He’d have come to her the instant that the coast was clear.

And then . . .

‘Lotte did not want to go, but I persuaded her,’ Edviga continued. ‘I made Frau Helena comfortable where she lay, while Lotte took the children off to safety. They’re still there, sir.’

I saw a single ray of light. The children were safe. And Lotte, too.

‘But you stayed here with Helena,’ I murmured. ‘Alone . . .’

Edviga did not speak, she merely nodded her head.

‘Then Gurten arrived,’ I cut in quickly.

Edviga stared at me. Surprise traced furrows in her brow and seemed to etch the livid scar more deeply in her cheek. ‘It was a good while later, sir. Frau Helena’s labour was long and very hard,’ she replied obliquely, as if she would not be deflected from her tale. ‘The child would not come out . . .’

‘But out it came at last,’ I countered brusquely. ‘Who delivered it?’

Edviga stared at me, her eyebrows arching.

‘What a question, Herr Magistrate!’ she said, caressing the scar on her cheek. ‘I delivered the child, and cut the cord.’

‘It was a boy.’

Again, she stared at me transfixed.

‘A girl, sir.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came.

I lurched forward, crushing her forehead with my own.

‘But Gurten knew. He knew, did he not?’

Her brow was moist, her skin was cool. I felt the corrugation of her forehead.

‘Herr Gurten, sir? Why should
he
know? What difference would it make?’

My hands closed round her throat.

‘He told me that the baby was a boy,’ I managed to say.

‘Herr Gurten?’ she echoed hoarsely, her voice rising, fingers scrabbling desperately to prise my straining hands away from her gullet.

In that instant, a sharp cry sounded in the house.

I looked towards the stairs.

‘Please, sir. Let go of me,’ she shouted, pushing hard against my chest.

Her strength, as I have remarked more than once, was equal to a man’s. She threw me effortlessly off, and was gone in an instant, darting across the hall, dancing up the stairs. Her feet made the slithering sound that Lotte’s generally made. It was as if she had stepped quite literally into Lotte’s slippers.

Then, I heard that cry again.

I darted after her, my nostrils filling with the odours of my home: the lingering sweetness of honey, the sharper smell of burning camphor to ward off flies and insects. My eye fell on a basket on the landing. It was billowing with sheets. They were spotted with blood. I stopped abruptly, closing my eyes for fear of what I would find, bracing my hands against the bedroom doorway.

‘You did not keep your promise, Hanno.’

The voice that spoke to me was calm, amused. I had heard that mocking note whenever the children did not do as they had been told. Apparently severe, there was a lingering, ironic undertone to it.

‘Husband, you have come too late!’

Helena was pale, thin. Like a swimmer struggling against high seas, it seemed that she might disappear beneath the rolling ocean of pillows, sheets and bolsters that covered the bed. Close beside her, Edviga was bending over an empty cot, straightening pillows, the parody of a fairy godmother in some cautionary children’s tale.

Helena had loosened one of her breasts from her smock.

I could not see the infant, but I could hear the sound of feeding. Regular, insistent, soothing. Like tiny waves rippling gently on a sandy shore.

‘She is so impatient,’ Helena chided with a broad smile. ‘Don’t you want to see her?’

I seemed to float towards the bed in a dream. My hand reached out like a disembodied thing, and shifted back the coverlet. A tiny face, shiny and red. Eyes tight closed, dark curling lashes. A close pelt of dark hair covering her scalp. Two plump cheeks that seemed to have a life of their own. Two bunched fists that moved in tandem as she sucked contentedly. I placed my hand on Helena’s brow, which was hot, slightly damp. Her hair was wild, uncombed, a rambling thorn-bush. Her eyes were two bright pinpoints of feverish light. Her cheeks, slightly sunken, made her face seem gaunt and angular. Yet still she smiled. Clearly exhausted, she was recovering with Edviga’s help.

‘Your daughter could not wait to see the world, sir,’ she whispered, casting down her eyes upon the infant at her breast. ‘She almost wore me out, I think it’s fair to say. I prayed that you would come in time. Of course, you did not. But you did the very next best thing. Edviga.’

She held out her hand, which Edviga took at once and fondled warmly.

‘You gave to her the same task I had given to you. Don’t you remember? Save the lives of the women on the coast, I said. You have done just that, she swears. And she has saved my life in return, together with the life of our new daughter. Why, she would not even let that young assistant magistrate of yours . . .’

She looked at me enquiringly.

‘What was his name again?’

Edviga and I replied in chorus: ‘Gurten.’

‘Goodness knows what use he would have been to
me
!’ my wife exclaimed. ‘And yet, he was most insistent, Hanno. I think he was afraid of your reaction. He’d come too late to help. Edviga would not let him in to see the child, though she did consent to take your letter from him. Oh, it all went off so perfectly. She whispered words of comfort in my ear as the little one came into the world.’

Helena caught the girl’s eye.

‘She was born before her time, Hanno, yet she is beautifully, perfectly healthy.’

She patted the coverlet, indicating that I should sit beside her.

‘Don’t you want to tell me what you’ve been up to on the coast?’

I
TOLD
H
ELENA
very little of what had truly happened on the coast. But later that morning, I was obliged to admit a great deal more to Colonel les Halles. He arrived outside the house at about half past ten in an open-topped barouche with four armed troopers. Sergeant Tessier jumped out first, kicking down the folding step, eyeing me suspiciously, as if he believed that they had come to arrest me.

Les Halles’s lined face bore smudged traces of oil and dirt. He still wore the filthy overalls he had been wearing while conducting the operations down on Nordcopp shore the night before. With his bib and braces, trousers stuffed into his boots, he might have been a fisherman. Certainly, he gave no impression of being a high-ranking French officer. He looked to be what he was: a worker, who had gone without food or rest, and had not seen soap and water in a long while.

‘What’s all this about, Stiffeniis?’ he said, marching to the gate, his manner stern, reproving. ‘Given the circumstances, I made all the haste that I could.’

I apologised quickly, and told him that the fears I had expressed on Nordcopp shore had proved unfounded.

‘Do I take it that your family is safe?’

His eyes were veined and red with lack of sleep. They might have been cartographer’s maps.

‘Safe, well, and greater in number than the last time that I was home,’ I replied.

A expression of joy lit up his rugged face, and his hand reached naturally for mine. He shook it for longer than I might have expected. His skin was rough, dry, calloused, his grip firm and strong.

‘That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time,’ he said. To my surprise, he winked. ‘Almost as good as the fact that the
coq du mer
has tripled production in a single night.’ But then his gaze took on a more stern and guarded look. ‘Now, tell me, what exactly happened on the coast last night. The message you sent to Nordcopp was garbled by the man who brought it. I came here expecting to find . . . well, I know not what!’