Cale stared down for a moment. Why this? he thought. Why like this? then he turned away, dropped what was left of the cigar on the stone floor and left.
But just as he could see what had happened, Cale could also be seen. Afterwards it was put about that he had not only smoked during Conn’s death but that he had laughed at the horrible conclusion. In time this did great damage to his reputation.
Arbell was standing at the far end of the room, staring out of the window and holding her baby tightly, slowly rocking backward and forward.
To Riba and her husband it seemed like a very long walk indeed. They stopped a few feet away; both said after they had left it was as if the very air between them and Arbell trembled with terror and held them back.
‘Is it finished?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he suffer?’
‘It was very quick and he was calm and showed great courage.’
‘But he didn’t suffer?’
‘No, he didn’t suffer.’
She turned to Riba.
‘You weren’t there?’ It was an accusation.
‘No, I wasn’t there,’ Riba said.
‘I wouldn’t let her.’ Arthur Wittenberg thought he was helping. He was not.
‘Of course I couldn’t go, I couldn’t,’ said Riba, reassuring.
‘I should have gone,’ said Arbell. ‘I should have been with him.’
‘He would have hated that,’ said Riba. ‘Hated it.’
‘He made it very clear to me,’ said Wittenberg, ‘last night when I spoke to him that he wouldn’t countenance your being there – under any circumstance.’
A lie was seldom told so clumsily. But Arbell was not in any state of mind to judge very much of anything. The baby, who had been very calm because he liked being held tightly, started to wriggle. ‘Yaaaaaaaaach!’ shouted the baby. ‘Bleeuch!’ Finally he managed to free his right arm and started pulling on a lock of Arbell’s hair. Yank. Yank. Pull. Pull. She didn’t seem to notice.
‘Shall I take him?’
Arbell turned away from Riba as if it were an offer to remove the child permanently. Gently she unfastened the baby’s hands from her hair.
At the door a servant called out, ‘Lady Satchell to …’
But the end of his sentence was drowned in the dramatic bustle and noisiness of the woman herself.
‘My darling girl,’ she wept from the other side of the room. ‘My darling girl … what a cauchemor, what a nagmerrie, a kosmorro!’ No single language was enough for Lady Satchell to perform herself in. She was known, even among the Materazzienne, as the Great Blurter. There was no situation that, by her instant appearance, she could not puff up with hysteria. Not even this one.
‘I am so sorry, my dear,’ she said, grasping Arbell to her chest. No trembling shield of grief would put Lady Satchell off. She no more saw Arbell’s pain than the bull sees the spider’s web. ‘It was dreadful, strasny! Terribile! The poor boy – to see that handsome head go weerkats down the Quai des Moulins.’
Fortunately the sheer power of Satchell’s hysterical capacity for stirring caused her to shift into Afrikaans so that Arbell barely understood what she was talking about.
‘And that mostruoso Thomas Cale – I heard from one who was with him he laughed at the Misero Conn as he died and smoked a cigar and blew rings at his disgraziafo corpse.’
Arbell stared at her. It was hard to imagine that someone would go so white and still live. Riba took her by the elbow, pulled her physically away, whispering, ‘Shut your mouth, you heartless bitch!’ and signalled to the two servants at the door.
‘What are you doing? I’m her dear cousin. Who do you think you are, you toilet scrubbing slut to …’
‘Get her away from here,’ said Riba, to the servants. ‘And if I see her here again I’ll make you both wish you’d never been born.’
Lady Satchell was so startled at being manhandled by the servants now gleefully licensed to mistreat one of their betters that she was outside before she could start flapping her mouth again.
Riba walked back to her former mistress, working out her story.
‘Is it true?’ Her voice so quiet Riba could barely hear her.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘But you heard it, too?’
‘Yes. But I don’t believe it, not a word. It’s not like him.’
‘It’s exactly like him.’
‘He saved my life. He saved Conn’s life too, for your sake.’
‘And he perjured himself against Conn because he thinks I betrayed him. There was nothing else I could do. But you don’t know him when he’s against you – what he’s capable of doing.’
Torn between the two of them as she was, Riba’s first thoughts were not generous to her former mistress. If you hadn’t betrayed him, Conn would still be alive. Everything would have been different. Of course, part of her knew that this was unfair, but it didn’t stop it from being true.
‘I told you. I don’t believe a word of it.’ But this was not entirely the case. Which of us, on hearing that our closest friend had been arrested for a dreadful crime, would not think, buried in the deepest recess of our soul, hidden in the shadows concealed in our heart’s most crepuscular oubliette, that it might possibly be true? How much easier then for Arbell to believe that Cale had laughed at her darling husband as he died. She should not be blamed for this lack of faith in Cale – it’s only human to hate the person you have hurt.
‘Is it true?’
‘Sounds bad – so probably it is,’ said Cale. There was no mistaking Artemisia’s suspicious and angry tone.
‘Answer me. Did you laugh at Conn Materazzi when he died?’
He’d many years of practice at not giving away his feelings – control of spontaneous emotions was a matter of survival at the Sanctuary – but a less angry person than Artemisia might have noticed his eyes widen at the accusation. Not for long and not by much.
‘What do you think?’ he said, casual.
‘I don’t know what to think, that’s why I’m asking you.’
‘The thing is – I was in the tower on my own. I could have sacrificed a goat in there and no one would have known.’
‘You still haven’t answered the question.’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘No, I didn’t laugh at Conn Materazzi when he died.’
And with that he stood up and left.
‘I’m impressed,’ said IdrisPukke.
‘Because?’
‘It’s not long ago that you would have told her you did laugh at Conn, just to punish her for asking.’
‘I thought about it.’
‘Of course you did.’
‘Why would she believe something like that?’
‘You are widely referred to as the Exterminating Angel. It’s not so surprising that people fail to give you the benefit of the doubt. Besides, the times need a man with a reputation for unmitigated cruelty – people want to feel that with such a creature on their side they might have a chance of living through the next year.’
‘But they don’t know me.’
‘To be fair, it’s not an easy thing to do – know you, I mean.’
‘She should by now.’
‘Really? She knows you lied under oath with as much ease as if you were telling an old woman that you liked her hat.’
‘Not that again. What was I supposed to do? If I’d confessed we’d both have had our heads bouncing across the square.’
‘I agree. But for all her eccentric skills, Artemisia doesn’t understand things as they really are. She’s one of them. The more money you have, the nicer the world is; if you have money and power the world’s niceness is almost heavenly. To such people the world’s cruelty is an aberration not the normal state of things. You’ve had the good fortune never to believe that anything was fair. You must allow her time to learn that she’s living in another world now. She hasn’t had your disadvantages. The spirit of the times used to move through her and Conn and the King – now it moves through you. This is your time, for however long it lasts.’