‘How much longer?’ she said.
‘Soon. Soon.’
‘Soon? What sort of word is that? Soon! Ten hours? Ten days? Ten years? Did you find the tunnel?’
Veil turned his eyes from her, and rested them for a moment on each of the others in turn.
‘What did you find?’ repeated the girl, still looking over his shoulder.
‘Quiet, curse you!’ said the man Veil, raising his arm.
The Black Rose stood unflinchingly upright, but with all the coil and re-coil of the flesh gone out of her. She had been through too much, and all resilience had gone. She stood there, upright but broken. Three revolutions had rocked over her. She had heard the screaming. Sometimes she did not know whether it was herself or someone else who screamed. The cry of children who have lost their mother.
One night they took her naked from her bed. They shot her lover. They left him in a pool of blood. They took her to a prison camp, and then her beauty began to thicken and to leave her.
Then she had seen him: Veil, one of the guards. A tall and spindly figure, with a lipless mouth, and eyes like beads of glass. He tempted her to run away with him. At first she believed this to be a ruse, but as time elapsed the Black Rose realized that he had other plans in life, and was determined to escape the camp. It was part of his plan to have a decoy with him.
So they escaped, he from the cramping life of official cruelty; she from the pain of whips and burning stubs.
Then came their wanderings. Then came a time of cruelty worse than behind the barbed wire. Then came her degradation. Seven times she tried to escape. But he always found her. Veil. The man with the small head.
FIFTY-SIX
One day he slew a beggar as though he were so much pork, and stole from his blood-stained pocket the secret sign of the Under-River. The police were in the next street. He crouched with the Black Rose in the lee of a statue, and when the moon dipped behind a cloud he dragged her to the river-side. There in the deep shadows he found at last what he was looking for, an entrance to the secret tunnel; for with a cunning mixture of guile and fortune he had learned much in the camp.
But that was a year ago. A year of semi-darkness. And now she stood there silently in the small room, very upright, her eyes staring into space.
For the first time the Black Rose turned her head to the man standing before her.
‘I’d almost rather be a slave again,’ she whispered, ‘than have this kind of freedom. Why do you follow me? I am losing my life. What have you found?’
Yet again the man cast his eyes about the small, silent assembly, before he turned once more to the girl. From where she stood she could only see the man in silhouette.
‘Tell me,’ said the Black Rose. Her voice, as it had been throughout, was almost meaninglessly flat. ‘Have you found it? The tunnel?’
The bony man rubbed his hands together with a sound like sandpaper. Then he nodded his small head.
‘A mile away. No more. Its entrance dense with ferns. Out of them came a boy. Come close to me; I do not care to be overheard. You remember the whip?’
‘The whip? Why do you ask me that?’
Before answering, the silhouette took hold of the Black Rose, and a few seconds later they were out of the lamp-lit chamber. Turning left and left again they came to a corner of stones, like the corner of a street. A streak of light fell across the wet floor. Her arms were rigid in his vice-like grip.
‘Now we can talk,’ he said.
‘Let go my arm, or I will scream for God.’
‘He never helped you. Have you forgotten?’
‘Forgotten what, you skull? you filthy stalk-head! I have forgotten nothing. I can remember all your dirty games. And the stench of your fingers.’
‘Can you remember the whip at Kar and the hunger? How I gave you extra bread! Yes, and fed you through the bars. And how you barked for more.’
‘O slime of the slime-pit!’
‘I could see for all your coupling, your indiscriminate whoredom that you had been splendid once. I could see why you were given such a name. Black Rose. You were famous. You were desirable. But when revolution came your beauty counted for nothing. And so they whipped you, and they broke your pride. You grew thinner and thinner. Your limbs became tubes. Your head was shaved. You did not look like a woman. You were more like a …’
‘I do not want to think of that again … leave me alone.’
‘Do you remember what you promised me?’
‘No.’
‘And then how I saved you again; and helped you to escape?’
‘No! No! No!’
‘Do you remember how you prayed to me for mercy? You prayed on your knees, your cropped head bent as at an execution. And mercy I gave you, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, oh yes.’
‘In exchange, as you promised, for your body.’
