been captured, of course, and silenced — in God’s name — along with everyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with them during their time outside these walls.’ He noticed Athanasius blanch. ‘The Sacrament must be protected.’
The Abbot had always considered it regrettable that his chamberlain did not possess the stomach for the more complex duties of their order. It was why Athanasius still wore the brown cassock of the lesser guilds rather than the dark green of a fully ordained Sanctus. Yet so zealous was he, and dedicated to his duty, that the Abbot sometimes forgot he had never learned the secret of the mountain, or that much of the Citadel’s history was unknown to him.
‘The last time the Sacrament was threatened was during the First World War,’ the Abbot said, staring down at the cold grey embers of the fire as if the past was written there. ‘A novice monk jumped through a high window and swam the moat. That’s why it was drained. Fortunately he had not been fully ordained so did not yet know the secret of our order. He made it as far as Occupied France before we managed to. . catch up with him. God was with us. By the time we found him the battlefield had done our job for us.’
He looked back at Athanasius.
‘But that was a different time, one when the Church had many allies, and silence could easily be bought and secrets simply kept; before the Internet enabled anyone to send information to a billion people in an instant. There is no way we could contain an incident like that today. Which is why we must ensure it does not happen.’
He looked back up at the window, now fully lit by the morning sun. The peacock motif shone a vibrant blue and green — an archaic symbol of Christ, and of immortality.
‘Brother Samuel knows our secret,’ the Abbot said simply. ‘He must not leave this mountain.’
Chapter 11
Liv pressed the buzzer and waited.
The house was a neat new-build in Newark, a few blocks back from Baker Park and close to the state university where the man of the house, Myron, worked as a lab technician. A low picket fence marked the boundaries of each neighbouring plot and ran alongside the single slab pathways to every door. A few feet of grass separated them from the street. It was like the American dream in miniature. If she’d been writing a different kind of piece she would have used this image, conjured something poignant from it; but that wasn’t why she was here.
She heard movement inside the house, heavy footfalls across a slippery floor, and tried to arrange her face into something that didn’t convey the absolute loneliness she’d felt since her lunch-time vigil in Central Park. The door swung open to reveal a pretty young woman so heavily pregnant she practically filled the narrow hallway.
‘You must be Bonnie,’ Liv said, in a cheerful voice belonging to someone else. ‘I’m Liv Adamsen, from the
Bonnie’s face lit up. ‘The baby writer!’ She threw her door wide open and gestured down her spotless beige hallway.
Liv had never written about babies in her life, but she let that slide. She just kept the smile burning all the way into Bonnie’s perfectly coordinated kitchenette where a fresh-faced man was making coffee.
‘Myron, honey, this is the journalist who’s going to write about the birth. .’
Liv shook his hand, her face beginning to ache from the effort of her smile. All she wanted to do was go home, crawl under her duvet and cry. Instead she surveyed the room, taking in the creaminess and the carefully grouped objects — the scented tea-lights blending the smell of roses with the coffee, the wicker boxes containing nothing but air — all sold in matching sets of three by the IKEA cash registers.
‘Lovely home. .’ She knew that’s what was expected. She thought of her own apartment, choked with plants and the smell of loam; a potting shed with a bed, one ex-boyfriend had called it. Why couldn’t she just live like regular folk, and be happy and content? She glanced out at their pristine yard, a green square of grass fringed with Cypress leylandii that would dwarf the house in two summers unless pruned drastically and often. Two of the trees were already yellowing slightly. Maybe nature would do the job for them. It was her knowledge of plants, and their healing properties in particular, that had landed Liv this gig in the first place.
‘Adamsen, you know about plants and shit,’ the conversation had started prosaically enough when Rawls Baker, proprietor and editor at large of the
‘Ain’t a whole lot of medicine involved, far as I can see,’ Rawls had said as he marched out of the elevator. ‘Just find me someone relatively sane who nevertheless wants to have their baby in a pool or a forest glade without any pain relief bar plant extracts and give me the human interest story with a few facts. And they’d better be a citizen. I don’t want to read about any damned hippies.’
Liv found Bonnie through her usual contacts. She was a traffic cop with the Jersey State Police, which took her about as far from being a hippy as you could get. You couldn’t practice Peace and Love when dealing with the daily nightmare of the New Jersey turnpike. Yet here she was now, radiant on her L-shaped sofa, clutching the hand of her practical, lab scientist husband, talking passionately about natural childbirth like a fully paid-up earth mother.
Something about the touching intimacy and selflessness of this moment pierced the armour of Liv’s good cheer and she was shocked to feel tears coursing down her cheeks. She heard herself apologizing as Bonnie and Myron both rushed to comfort her and managed to pull herself together long enough to finish the interview, feeling guilty that she had brought the dark cloud of her unhappiness into the bright sanctuary of their simple life.
She drove straight home and fell fully clothed into her unmade bed, listening to the drip of the irrigation system watering the plants that filled her flat and ensured, in the loosest sense, that she shared her life with other living things. She picked through the events of the day and wrapped herself tightly in her duvet, shivering with cold as if the solid ice of her loneliness could never be melted, and the warmth of a life like Bonnie and Myron’s would never be hers.
Chapter 12
Kathryn Mann swung the minibus into a small yard behind a large town house and brought it to a standstill amid a cloud of dust. This segment of the eastern part of the city was still known as the Garden District, though the green fields that gave it that name were long gone. Even from the back, the house had an aura of faded grandeur; the same flawless, honey-coloured stone that had built the public church and much of the old town peeped through in patches from beneath blackened layers of pollution.
Kathryn slipped out of the driver’s seat and headed past an empty cycle-rack built on the site of the well that had once provided them with fresh water. She fumbled with her jingling key ring, heart still hammering from the stress of the several near misses she’d had while driving distractedly through the thickening morning traffic, found the right key, jabbed it into the lock and twisted the back door open.
Inside, the house was cool and dark after the glare of the early spring sunshine. The door swung shut behind
