The Left Hand Of God (23 page)

Though at first lost in the delight of knowing that she was breaking more hearts now than even the detested Arbell Swan-Neck, Mademoiselle Jane started to become uncomfortably aware of something so strange and unfamiliar that she was for some weeks sure she was imagining it.

Some of the young aristocrats who came calling, and only some, seemed not quite as shattered by her continuous rejection as she had come to expect. They groaned and lamented and pleaded for her to reconsider as much as the others, but she was, as we have seen, a sensitive girl (if only to herself) and began to suspect that their protestations were not entirely sincere. What could this possibly mean? Perhaps, she thought, she was becoming used to breaking hearts and the pleasure was diminishing, as pleasures too frequently indulged usually do. But it was not this, because she continued to feel exactly the same intense rush of feeling with those who really were heartbroken by her coldness. Something was going on.

Mademoiselle Jane always set aside the late morning for breaking hearts and she gave her suitors generous slots, sometimes as long as thirty minutes if they were particularly good at lamenting her beauty, heartlessness and cruelty. She decided to set the entire morning aside for those she was suspicious of in order to see if she could get to the bottom of her disturbing qualms. Her chambers were constructed in such a way that she could spy easily on her suitors as they arrived and left and she duly spent the morning doing so.

By the middle of the morning she was in a furiously bad temper, with all her fears confirmed even though in a manner that beggared belief. It was all the fault of that ungrateful slut Riba.

Three times that morning she had endured the lying protestations of heartbreak from young men who, it was now clear, had been coming to see her only because it gave them the opportunity to arrive early to go through the motions of groveling before Mademoiselle Jane, and then leave as quickly as possible only so that they could make cow eyes at that fat whore Riba. It was unthinkably humiliating; not only were they deceiving the most beautiful and desired woman in Memphis (something of an exaggeration—she was number fifteen at best—but allowance must be made for her understandable outrage), but also they were doing so with a creature the size of a house who wobbled like a blancmange whenever she walked.

This insult—and for a Materazzi female to call a woman fat was a deadly one—was by no means entirely accurate either. Certainly Riba made a striking contrast to her mistress, and indeed to all the Materazzi women, but she had never wobbled like a blancmange; besides, in the two months she had been at Memphis, Riba had been so busy that she no longer had either the means to eat so much as she had at the Sanctuary, or the time. The result was that she had lost a considerable amount of her buttery pulchritude. What before had been too much of an unusual thing had now become a very enticing and unusual thing. Because they were used to the boyish slenderness and bad temper of Materazzi women, the curves and swaying undulations of Riba made more and more of the Materazzi men watch Riba with greater and greater interest as she sauntered past them with her disdainful mistress. Almost as engaging was her cheerful smile and welcoming manner. The Materazzi men had been brought up on the rituals of a courtly love that involved a despairing and unrequited adoration for a distant object of affection who only ever treated all men like dirt. And so the quick conversion of a number of young men to a shapely good-looker who didn’t look down on them as if they were something the cat had dragged in hardly needed much explanation.

In a dreadful state, Mademoiselle Jane ran down from her hiding place and through the door of her main apartment and into the reception hall where Riba had just closed the door behind a young Materazzi, who was ushered smiling into the street in a haze of desire and longing. Mademoiselle Jane screamed out for her housekeeper.

“Anna-Maria! Anna-Maria!”

An astonished Riba stared at her mistress, who had gone quite red with fury.

“What’s the matter, mademoiselle?”

“Shut your mouth, you potbellied lump of lard,” replied Mademoiselle Jane in a most unmademoiselle-like manner as Anna-Maria, astonished by the feral screaming, hurried into the room. Mademoiselle Jane looked at her housekeeper as if she might burst and then pointed to Riba.

“Get this treacherous bilker out of my house. I never want to see this beezle ever again.”

Mademoiselle Jane was about to finish her tirade by fetching Riba a slap on the face but thought better of it as the young woman’s expression turned from astonishment to anger at being so furiously insulted. “Get her out of my sight!” she yelled at Anna-Maria and hissed back into her chambers.

I
drisPukke had refused to give up trying to reeducate Cale’s stomach. His new diet would at first have to be simple—and was not simplicity, after all, a test of a good cook’s skill? The next time Cale returned to one of IdrisPukke’s special meals, it was to fresh trout caught in the lake next to the lodge, lightly steamed and with boiled potatoes and herbs and leaves. Cale was cautious with the potatoes because they had a tiny amount of butter melted over them, but they stayed down and he even asked for more.

And so the days and nights passed. Cale continued on his long walks with and without IdrisPukke. They sat in silence for hours and talked for hours, although it was IdrisPukke who did most of the talking. He also taught Cale to fish, how to eat in civilized company (no belching, slurping, eat with your mouth shut), told him about his extraordinary life—along with many stories at his own expense, something that Cale continued to find bewildering. To laugh at an adult meant a vicious beating—for one to invite you to laugh at him defied belief. At night he would sometimes feel almost uncontainable bursts of joy for no reason at all. IdrisPukke also continued to offer Cale the benefits of his philosophy of life. “Love between a man and woman is the best possible example of the fact that all this world’s hopes are an absurd delusion, and it is so because of the fact that love promises so excessively much and performs so excessively little.” And again: “I know you don’t need me to tell you that this world is hell, but try to understand that men and women are on the one hand the tormented souls in that hell and on the other the devils in it doing the tormenting.” And yet more: “No one of real intelligence will accept anything just because some authority declares it to be so. Don’t accept the truth of anything you have not confirmed for yourself.”

In turn Cale told him about his life with the Redeemers.

“At first it wasn’t just the beatings that scared us. In those days we believed what they said—that even if we weren’t caught doing something wrong we were born evil and that God saw everything we did so we had to confess to everything. If we didn’t and we died in a state of sin, we would go to hell and burn for all eternity. And we did die, every few months, and what they told us was that most of us went to hell and burned for all eternity. I used to lie awake at night in those days after the prayers that always finished ‘What if you should die tonight?’ Sometimes I was absolutely certain that if I fell asleep, I’d die and burn forever in agony.” He stopped talking for a moment. “How old, IdrisPukke, were you before you knew what terror was?”

“A lot older than five, anyway. It was at the Battle of Goat River. I was, what, seventeen. We were ambushed on a scouting trip. My first time in a real fight. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been trained. And I was pretty good, third in my year. The Druse Cavalry came over the hill and then there was just confusion and noise and chaos. I couldn’t speak, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I began to shake and I wanted to . . . well . . . I mean.”

“Shit yourself ?” offered Cale.

“Why not be blunt? When it was all over, and it didn’t last more than five minutes, I was still alive. But I hadn’t even drawn my sword.”

“Did anyone else see?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“They didn’t beat you?”

“No. But if it happened again, well, you weren’t going to last long.” There was another pause. “So you’ve never felt like that?” said IdrisPukke at last.

It was by no means a simple question. One of the conditions on which his brother, or, to be precise, his half brother, had released IdrisPukke and put Cale in his control was that he must find out everything about the boy—and most important his apparent lack of fear and whether or not this was exceptional or in some way engineered by the Redeemers.

“I used to be afraid all the time when I was young,” said Cale after a while. “But then it stopped.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” This was not true, of course, or not entirely true.

“And now you’re not afraid at all?”

Cale looked at him. The last few weeks had amazed him, and he was grateful to IdrisPukke and had felt many odd and unfamiliar emotions of friendship and trust. But it would take more than a few weeks of kindness and generosity to shake Cale’s wariness. He considered whether or not to change the subject. But it didn’t, on the face of it, seem to matter much if he told the truth.

“I feel afraid about things that can hurt me in general. I know what the Redeemers want to do to me. It’s hard to explain. But fighting—it’s different. What you were saying about the Battle of . . .” He looked at IdrisPukke.

“Goat River.”

“. . . That stuff about shaking and wanting to shit yourself.”

“Don’t think you have to spare my feelings at all.”

“For me it’s the opposite. I just go cold—everything becomes very clear.”

“And afterwards?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you feel afraid?”

“No. Mostly I don’t feel anything—except after I gave Conn Materazzi a good hiding. That felt pretty good. It still does. But when I killed the soldiers in the ring, I didn’t feel good. After all—they never did me any harm.” He paused. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

And being wise, IdrisPukke did not push his luck. And so for the next few weeks Cale went back to his wandering, and in the evening they drank, smoked and ate together, the food slowly becoming richer as Cale was better able to take some fish fried in crispy batter, more butter on his vegetables, a drop of cream with his blackberries.

During the two months that Cale and IdrisPukke had been enjoying the calm and tranquillity of Treetops, a man and a woman had been watching over them. This should not imply care or concern—imagine the loving watchfulness of a mother over her child but without the love.

In stories of the good and bad it’s only the good who are subject to dreadful luck, mischance and blundering. The bad are always sharp and act with discipline, have cunning plans only just thwarted in the nick of time. The evil are always on the cusp of winning ways. In real life bad as well as good make simple and easily avoidable mistakes, have dreadful days and go awry. The wicked have weaknesses other than their willingness to kill and maim. Even the bleakest, cruelest soul can have its tender spots. Even the harshest desert has its pools, its shady trees and gentle streams. It’s not just the rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike, but good and bad luck, unlooked-for victories and unmerited defeats.

Daniel Cadbury, his back against a mulberry tree, closed the book he was reading,
The Melancholy Prince
, and grunted with satisfaction.

“Be quiet!” said the woman, who had been attentively facing away from him but, on hearing the snap of the book being shut, turned her head sharply in his direction.

“He’s two hundred yards away,” said Cadbury. “The boy heard nothing.”

Checking briefly that Cale was still asleep on the banks of the river below, the woman looked back at Cadbury and this time merely stared. Had he been other than he was—murderer, former galley slave and sometime intelligencer to Kitty the Hare—Cadbury might well have been unnerved. She was not ugly, exactly, perhaps just extremely plain— but her eyes, empty of everything but hostility, would have made almost anyone uneasy.

“Would you like to borrow it?” said Cadbury, gesturing at her with the book. “It’s very fine.”

“I can’t read,” she said, thinking that he was mocking her, which he was. Normally Cadbury would not have been so unwise as to taunt Jennifer Plunkett, a killer so admired by Kitty the Hare that he reserved her for none but his most difficult assassinations. He had groaned in dismay when Kitty the Hare had told him who was to partner him.

“Not Jennifer Plunkett, please.”

“Not an amicable companion, I agree,” gurgled Kitty, “but there are many very important persons interested in this boy, myself included, and it is my instinct that a good deal of mayhem of the kind at which Jennifer Plunkett so excels might be required. Abide her for my sake, Cadbury.” So that was that.

It was boredom that caused Cadbury to goad the dangerously talented butcher still glaring at him. They had been watching the boy for nearly a month now, and all he had done was eat, sleep, swim, walk and run. Even the pleasures of
The Melancholy Prince
, a book he had enjoyed through a dozen readings in as many years, was not enough to stop him from growing restless.

“No offense, Jennifer.”

“Don’t call me Jennifer.”

“I have to call you something.”

“No, you don’t.” She did not look away and did not blink. There were limits to her tolerance and they were not very great. He shrugged to suggest that he was giving way, but she did not move. He began to wonder if he should get ready. Then, like an animal, not the kind that cared for human company, she turned her head away and went back to staring at the sleeping boy.

It’s not just her eyes that are odd,
thought Cadbury,
it’s what’s behind them. She’s alive, but I can’t put my finger on exactly how.

Given his profession, Cadbury was entirely familiar with murderous persons. He was, after all, one himself. He killed when it was required, rarely with any pleasure and sometimes with reluctance and even remorse. Most murderers for hire took a certain pleasure, more or less, in what they did. Jennifer Plunkett was different in that he found it impossible to tell what was going on when she killed. His experience of watching her dispose of the two men IdrisPukke had bribed the soldiers to arrest was unlike anything he had witnessed before. On their release and unaware of their role as stooges, they had somehow blundered into the forest half a mile from Treetops and made camp. Without consulting him—professionally discourteous, but he’d decided to let the matter drop—she had walked toward them as they sat brewing up a pot of tea and stabbed them both. It was the lack of fuss that so astonished Cadbury. She killed them with as little effort as a mother might give to the picking up of her children’s toys, a kind of bored distraction. By the time the men realized what was happening, they were already dying. Even the most vicious murderers in his experience had to, or wanted to, work themselves up to kill. But not Jennifer Plunkett.