Agnes could no longer lift her arms or head, but her fingers moved and she could still use the alphabet card if everything was held in place. There were still some things that had to be said.
She was fed by drip now, procured by Freddie when he insisted that his mother would not die in a hospital bed but in her own home. Everyone diligently fussed over her needs, not realising that Agnes didn"t care, knowing nothing of the carnival that raged out of sight.
For within her the heavens were lit by repeated explosions of fireworks, with every shade of blue and green and yellow and red, splintering into trillions of gleaming particles against a vast stream of silver, dancing stars. They fell as a shower upon her raised head, on to her lashes, balancing precariously on each curved, counted hair before tumbling joyously over into the abyss beneath, where she would soon follow after the reunion with Robert that would surely come. She had entered upon a timeless, enduring, secret benediction.
Chapter Forty-Five.
1.
The reliability of a wartime revolver after decades in a cupboard was literally a hit and miss affair. Unlike capsules of pota.s.sium cyanide. Which struck Anselm as a happy imbalance in the scheme of things, given Lucy"s misguided attempt to provoke Victor"s suicide.
It transpired that Victor had had no intention of killing himself at all. Like all men who have known grave dependence on alcohol, he had a certain clarity of mind that was sharpened when drunk. And so, confronted with a young woman whose level of foolishness reflected the degree of her distress, he"d thought it prudent to accept the offered gun. After Lucy had gone he"d pointed the barrel at his face, looking into the dark, narrow hole. It had been, he said, a sort of playing, an acting out of the preliminary steps to an oblivion that had its attractions but which he would not choose. How could he? No matter what personal suffering he had endured, no matter the scale of moral compromise, there was Robert, the children and the grandchildren. They rose like flowers from the catastrophe of his life, and their splendour, however circ.u.mscribed, had a fragile, redemptive quality. He lived for them. And now, Victor had learned that they lived for Agnes.
And yet, but for the protecting hand of luck, Victor would have shot himself. Upon lowering the barrel, the hammer suddenly discharged, held back (it turned out) by a hairline trigger. The round went off, destroying a rare copy of Doctor Johnson"s dictionary that had cost Victor most of his retirement lump sum.
Victor was kept in hospital overnight, on account of his bitten lip and presumed shock, and released the next morning, whereupon Anselm paid him a welcome visit at home.
"As I told you before," said Victor, "I had always seen the irony of my predicament - on paper, I was the one who had betrayed The Round Table. So when I came to England I decided to set the record straight, if you will forgive the expression. The idea came to me when I was wondering how I might conceal my ident.i.ty still further. I decided to change my name a second time. What name? I thought."
"Brownlow?" interjected Anselm with a faint, querying smile.
"The man who rescued Oliver Twist," replied Victor. For him it was an old joke, lame but enduring, a sniff at adversity.
"Of course," snapped Anselm. "I knew I recognised it."
Abandoning the advantages his education and talent would have brought him, Victor then chose factory work as a long-term hiding place. For most of his employed life he stood by a conveyor belt putting lids on jars of mustard. He saved what he could for Robert"s precocious talent at the piano. He met Pauline, his wife-to-be, at a church fair bookstall. Nature ran its course and she became a mother to Robert, but he was old enough to remember her coming into his life.
"When he was old enough to understand, I told him his real mother had died during an air raid. Disasters are always convincing."
For twenty-six years Pauline had been his strength, the woman to whom he confided all that had happened. When she knew she was going to die from a rare kidney complaint she wrote Victor a letter, to help him after she had gone. But they were lifeless words, shapes in ink. He used to stare at them, trying to summon up the voice that had once spoken to him, her pa.s.sion, her belief in him, her constant forgiveness for the wrongs of which he was a part. He"d been to confession.
"He gave me absolution," Victor remembered, "but he refused to give me a penance. Keep talking to Pauline, he said. And I did. But her kidneys packed up and she died. That"s when I started drinking."
All the family thought it was grief, which was true, but it was also the other burden he could no longer carry alone. He attended an expensive rehabilitation programme sorted out by Robert and found it completely humiliating - not because he was proud but because he could not disclose the reasons for his collapse.
"They thought I was "avoiding the pain required to face the truth about myself". I found that judgment distinctly unpalatable. It was, as with so much of my life, a hideous misunderstanding."
They sat in silence until Anselm rose. He had a train to catch.
"Robert will have to be told everything," Victor said, exhausted. "Difficult as that might be, the thought of it done is like ... an accomplishment."
"I have already arranged to see him," said Anselm.
Cautiously, reflectively. Victor said, "It"s all been an inexplicable mix of misfortune and luck. But since I"m a religious man, I look to Providence. Only that rather complicates things, don"t you think? Because there"s no accounting for the graces received, set against what went wrong, without hindrance, for so long."
Anselm didn"t have a reply for that particular observation.
2.
Lucy met Father Anselm on the forecourt of Liverpool Street Station. She had wanted to see him before he went back to Larkwood Priory, to say thank you, and had duly rung him at St Catherine"s the night before. The monk stood behind his suitcase like one of those carved statues on the front of a cathedral, observing the pa.s.sing world on its busy way to somewhere important. He saw her and raised a hand.
Lucy said, "I"m told it"s because of you I"m not going to be charged."
"That"s not strictly true," replied the monk. "Detective Superintendent Milby and I go back a long way He"d never have put you through the system if he could help it. But what you did was remarkably daft, wasn"t it?"
"At the time I was watching myself," said Lucy. "It was as though the whole episode was part of a play and once I"d started writing the script I couldn"t stop. At last I was in control. I could choose the ending. But it was unreal. I just wanted to rehea.r.s.e what it would be like and see it through to the end." She felt again the queasy warmth of guilt pa.s.sed by "Detective Inspector Armstrong told me that, once c.o.c.ked, the trigger was so light it could have gone off in my hand without me even touching it."
"And you would have killed the last knight of The Round Table," said Father Anselm, "the man who saved Robert. It doesn"t bear thinking about." The monk went on to give a short account of Victor"s true position in the weave of events. Horrified at the magnitude of her error, humbled and ashamed, Lucy said, "Someone must have been looking after me."
"I know what you mean," replied the monk pensively "That is a phrase upon which to ponder." He glanced at the departure board. "I"m afraid I have to go.
Lucy walked with him along the platform. "I must tell my father who he is."
"Yes ... and I must tell Robert Brownlow whose son he is."
Lucy felt the first stirrings of an idea that she knew would fulfil itself. She had a sense of festival, streamers, a family outing. Father Anselm stopped by the train door and said: "Did you know that Salomon Lachaise was saved by The Round Table?"
"No." She thought of the gentleman who had become her friend, having at one definite point in the course of the trial sought her out, along with Max Nightingale. "And yet he didn"t sit with the other survivors.
The monk looked at her curiously "How strange. I didn"t realise that ..."
Lucy"s idea took a firm shape: "I"d like to bring all these people together, before my grand-mother dies. They all belong in the same room.
Surprised agreement lit the monk"s face.
She said, "Would you come." Father?"
"Thank you, and remember ... I"m also a messenger from the past."
A messenger: somehow, despite the long, unrelenting conspiracy of misfortune, a letter had been pa.s.sed on, as by runners at night, despite the guns, despite the wire. It would be brought to Agnes just before she died.
A man in a tired uniform appeared, urging stragglers to get on board. The one remaining question fell from her lips as the door began to swing on its dirty hinge: "I wonder what Mr Lachaise said to Schwermann ..."
"Yes, I wonder," replied the monk.
The door banged shut. A loud whistle soared over the carriages. The train heaved forwards, clattering on the rails. The man in uniform walked quickly past, his job done. And Father Anselm, his face framed by a grimy square of gla.s.s, moved away.
Chapter Forty-Six.
Salomon Lachaise said he wanted to come to Larkwood. He needed some time to be alone and asked if he might stay at The Hermitage. The Prior granted his permission. For three days the Priory"s guest wandered in the woods, along the stream and round the lake. Then, one morning, Anselm found a note in his pigeonhole. Salomon Lachaise would welcome a visit.
Anselm walked quickly through the fields after lunch. About two hundred yards from The Hermitage was a narrow wooden footbridge, without railings, spanning the stream. The small man sat upon the timbers. Silently, Anselm joined him. Their legs hung loose over the edge.
Salomon Lachaise said, "Do you remember, before the end of the trial, saying you had been one person with me while all the while you were another?"
"Yes. You replied that that was true of all of us."
"Your memory serves you well."
"I wondered what you meant. "
"I"m not sure I"ll ever be able to explain. But I will try. You know that I learned early on in my life that I was one of the few who had escaped ... that my whole family had been taken away. I kept the memory of their names alive. I told you that I found peace in scholarship, that I owed the outset of my academic life to a survivor."
"Yes." I remember."
For a short while Salomon Lachaise pondered the rush of water beneath his feet. He said, "My life changed on a bright, cold morning just after a lecture on feudal iconography I walked into the common room at the University and picked up a newspaper. A journalist had discovered that ... that man ... had found refuge in Britain after the war."
"Pascal Fougeres was the author?"
"Yes. I decided to contact him, and told my mother. No, she said, dear G.o.d, no. Leave the past alone. I turned to Mr Bremer - I told you about him when we first met - the lawyer who had become my guide. He, too, had seen the article. He, too, advised me to get on with my life ... to forget what I had read."
"Did you?"
"No."
Salomon Lachaise proceeded in a low monotone. "I went to see Mr Bremer. I told him my mind was made up; I was going to join myself to those who were seeking that man. I asked for his support before I told my mother."
"You received it?"
"No. It would be right to say he lost his professional detachment."
"Why?"
"The article we had both read gave the name of the small town that man had come from ...Wissendorf ... Mr Bremer recognised it from his dealings with the lawyer retained by my benefactor. He made what I think is called a reasonable a.s.sumption of fact. My refusal to heed his advice forced him to tell me that the German lawyer acting on behalf of the "survivor" was the family solicitor for ... that man."
"Schwermann was the ... survivor?" asked Anselm, aghast at the appropriation of the word.
"Yes. And to think ... I made my name in a field of learning that is known as the age of patronage."
Salomon Lachaise watched his dangling feet, carefully trailing the soles of his shoes against the heavy pull of water. Blackened silver spurted either side at every sweeping touch.
Anselm said, tentatively "Why you?"
Very slowly Salomon Lachaise said, "I was the last child saved by The Round Table, taken to safety by Agnes Aubret just before her arrest."
Anselm turned and scrutinised the face of his companion. It was a miracle of calm, a screen of chalk that would fall into powder if touched. Uncomprehending, Anselm said, "He must have seen your existence as a salving of conscience."
"My entire academic life rests upon contamination. Everything 1 have achieved rises from poison, bright flowers out of filth. I shall never practise my art again.
Anselm struggled to remonstrate, "But surely ..." He floundered, lacking conviction, for he knew that the most costly decisions are often not made - they happen.
"I did not contact Fougeres and my mother thought that I had taken her advice. Shortly afterwards she died, peacefully. And while that brought grief, it set me free."
"To do what?" Anselm had sensed something specific ... something crucial.
"Mr Bremer was a meticulous man, a keeper of detailed records which he never destroyed. By chance there had once been an error in the transfer of funds from the solicitor in Germany. to him. In sorting out the tangle he"d learned the name of the client. At my request he dug out his old papers and there it was... Nightingale."
"And you pa.s.sed that on to Pascal Fougeres?" asked Anselm.
"Yes. When that man claimed sanctuary." I took early retirement and followed his route of escape, from Paris to Les Moineaux. I had an inkling he"d somehow taken the same route as my mother. Then I came here, to Larkwood. After that it was a matter of waiting for the outcome of the trial." He breathed deeply, like one bent over." preparing to heave a rock to one side. He said, "I waited for him to speak, to hear what he had to say to those he had robbed. But in the end he said nothing, and they freed him. He was exactly what he appeared to be, only the jury had a doubt. The moment I"d waited for had come ... and I did not want it. I told an usher I wanted to see him and I gave my name.
Again he ran his feet upon the surface of the stream, watching the sweeping cuts in the silvery rush, opened up, now closed, then opened up again. Salomon Lachaise described how he was shown through to a room rather like a post office counter.
A window of thick gla.s.s lay seated in the wall. Beneath, on each side, was a wide sill - a table pa.s.sing through the divide - and a chair.
"A door opened and suddenly there he was. For a long while I just looked at him, each line upon his face, the nails upon his fingers. He raised a hand, putting it against the gla.s.s."
Schwermann had spoken first across the divide: "I didn"t realise it was you, in the woods ..."
"Yes."
"I can hardly believe that you are here, that you have come. Grat.i.tude and fearful wonder loosened his drawn features.
"Yes, I have come.
"How did you find out?"
"I am here, that is all that matters."
"I managed to save you, do you know that?"
"Yes, I do."