Chapter Twenty-Five
The cottage on Holy Island was more of a manor, having many rooms and a large, windswept garden leading down to a stone wall built by hands that knew a craft fast becoming scarce. Immediately beyond lay an intimate, curved shoreline of green and black boulders, some round but others angulated despite the endless blandishments of the sea. From the bathroom Victor could see the deep pink sandstone ruins of a Priory, hollowed by wind and rain; from where he slept he looked out upon Lindisfarne Castle, cut against a pale sky joined as one to the high crag from which it rose, reaching out to the Northern Lights. Beyond lay Broad Stones and, further, Plough Rock, and then the bare, flat, silent sea.
‘You should be safe here,’ said Robert. They had walked to the north end of the island, overlooking Emmanuel Head.
Victor nodded.
‘I told him what you told me, that Victor Brionne died after the war; and I told him what I told you, that someone else married my mother. I told him the truth. If anyone comes asking questions about you, they’ll be told you’re dead.’
Victor stood once more upon the lip of an abyss. There could be no further discussion. It would have been better if Robert had not gone to the Priory, for he had become a tiny link between Victor and whoever might still want to find him. But he was trying to help his father and that was all that mattered. Robert wasn’t to know that Victor had changed his name a second time. No one knew that, so the chances of anyone looking for Victor Berkeley being led to Victor Brownlow were remote. Perhaps he had been precipitate in disclosing anything to Robert at all. Maybe he should have taken the risk and carried on as if nothing had happened, living his life on the ground he’d laid over the past. But with Schwermann unmasked, the desire to hide had been irresistible; and, despite the burden of secrecy, he’d wanted to tell Robert at least who he had been, to let Robert in, ever so slightly, on the scourge that had laid waste to his father.
Brownlow: Victor liked the name and always had done. It had been an inspired choice.
They turned and walked back, arm in arm, to ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’, Robert’s holiday cottage. A cold sea wind, wet with spray hustled them along. And, with a sadness first born when he was a boy Victor thought of Jacques, and now Pascal Fougeres, whom he had never met and who had wanted to find him. They should have been able to meet as friends and bridge the years, but a great gulf had been fixed between them. Victor followed Robert through the garden gate and thought angrily:
I could never have helped Pascal Fougeres, even if he’d found me — that would only have been possible if Agnes was alive. But she’s dead, as if by my own hand.
Part Three
‘Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done…’
Third Prologue
6th January 1996.
The slow, physical destruction was matched by an increased mental clarity, a loosening between flesh and spirit. Agnes often felt a fluttering in her stomach, as though something roped to a ground peg was trying to take off. She wondered if she was going to be sick.
Agnes had lain day after day and night after night upon her back, or on one side and them the other, Wilma doing the dutiful, turning her this way and that. And then came the ointment, and the jokes, for the bedsores. The job done, she was left alone.
Agnes never realised there was so much to contemplate in one room: the paint lifting ever so slightly on the window frame, soon to be a soft curl pulling away from the wood; the pattern of faint shadows changing imperceptibly with the movement of the cloud, lighting little things with a barely noticeable difference. But once Agnes had seen all there was to see she got very bored. And then, for no apparent reason, she remembered how Merlin had taught Wart, the future King Arthur, the art of seeing — by changing him into another animal. So Agnes imagined herself as a bird, looking down from on high at the intricate mingling of things, like a hunting kestrel afloat on a bearing wind.
She saw the boat upon the Channel, bound for France, and her father staring anxiously out to sea with a little girl by his side — a beautiful girl, standing on the first rail, her hair adrift and her red coat about to be thrown leeward before he could stop her or see the abandon upon her face. She saw Father Rochet holding her boy in a parlour, just after the baptism, staring bravely through those infant eyes to another place and another child. She saw Madame Klein by the split boards of a cattle truck, pushing other mouths away from a thin stream of air, standing on a fallen, wheezing mound. Agnes turned into her pillow with a low moan and rose higher still, above the gathering wind. Through the first swirls of evening mist she saw a light upon the Champs-Elysees and a young man behind a desk, checking address lists and the timings of the next day’s work. His face was set hard. Down she swooped, faster and faster, over the chestnut trees heavy with leaves, and into the room, through the slate-blue iris and into his shivering optic nerve.
And Agnes understood. She finally saw into Victor Brionne, the traitor. Slowly she raised her hands, frail fingers extended and shaking. She could not speak. It was too late to write anything now And she could no longer dictate.
Wilma bustled through the door with a cup of ice cubes, a saucer and a teaspoon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1
The trial of Eduard Walter Schwermann opened on a warm morning in the second week after Easter. Queues for the public gallery stretched from the Old Bailey towards Ludgate. The Body Public sat on canvas chairs nibbling sandwiches. Flasks of tea stood like skittles on the pavement. Many in due course would be turned away when the Porters informed them there were no storage facilities for their hampers. Anselm, on his way to meet Roddy, was forced off the kerb. He crossed the street and looked back at the noble inscription high upon the court wall: ‘Defend the children of the poor and punish the wrongdoer.’ Anselm gazed upon the crowds and moved on, discomposed by the faint hint of carnival always attendant upon the airing of other people’s tragedy
Two weeks beforehand, Schwermann had moved out of Larkwood at six in the morning, hidden among a loud convoy of vehicles and motorbikes. He would be held on remand for the duration, Milby had said with yawning indifference. Schwermann’s stay at the Priory had lasted a year. That same afternoon, Anselm and Salomon Lachaise met at The Hermitage for a glass of port over a game of chess. Reviewing their many matches, Anselm had been judged the overall winner, although that did not reflect the distribution of talent between them. Luck, it seemed, had played the better part. The ensuing match was a draw, each not truly wanting to win. Salomon Lachaise had left the next day for London. He would be staying in a small flat above Anselm’s former chambers, overlooking the main square of Gray’s Inn and a short walking distance from the Old Bailey The offer had come from Roddy on his last visit to Larkwood (while he didn’t believe in God, he often came to the Priory just to ‘peep over
