Cale stared at Koolhaus, while Vague Henri drew out a dagger he had specially made for himself based on the Danzig Shank and carved, for reasons he refused to explain, with the word ‘if’ on either side of the handle. He raised the dagger as if he were going to cut off Koolhaus’s head but only stabbed it down into the middle of the beautifully inlaid walnut table at which they were sitting. Vague Henri’s hatred of the aristos of Spanish Leeds had festered from a general disdain, born of the natural resentment of the nobody for the privileged, to a particular loathing based on the way he had been treated while Cale was in the lunatic asylum at The Priory. The idea that he would have to go without his beloved cucumber sandwiches while the Royal Family carried on unaffected was more than he could bear. So he put his foot down. There was a short pause.
‘So,’ said IdrisPukke, ‘we’re agreed: rationing for all – the Royal Family and present company excepted.’
After Koolhaus and IdrisPukke left, which was almost immediately, Cale turned to Vague Henri and nodded at the knife firmly stuck in the middle of the table.
‘I’m not paying for that,’ said Cale.
‘Nobody asked you to,’ replied Vague Henri.
There was a peevish silence.
‘Why’, asked Cale, ‘couldn’t you have just banged your fist on the table? Look at it, it’s ruined.’
‘I said I’d pay.’
Another silence.
‘Bloody hooligan.’
30
Along the upper reaches of the icy Mississippi something stirred. Lower down the river something else stirred as well. Artemisia Halicarnassus was cursing the good weather that had been such a blessing for Cale during the training of the New Model Army. In a normal winter, as the temperature shifts back and forth between freezing and slightly above freezing, the river was hard to read, even for the experienced: the melting but still massive blocks of ice that had broken off upstream would jam together to form great dams which might stick for weeks and then, with a day of warmer temperatures, suddenly give way and flow down like a slow avalanche, sometimes for miles, until they hit more dammed ice, at which it might jam again or cause a great collapse and start an even bigger flow. But the unseasonal warmth this year had made this process even more treacherous and unstable than normal.
But Artemisia had men around her who had lived on the river for sixty years or more. There was a large field of unstable ice jammed about five miles upstream but the temperature had dropped to around freezing, lessening the chance of a break. The danger was from large river-bergs from upstream crashing into the groaning, cracking and unstable dam of ice. But for ten miles upstream of the blockage the skilled and experienced were sprawled along the bank, each man tied by a line of string and signalling with different kinds of tug to the next man down the size of the river-bergs as they passed them by. On the ice jam itself men were stationed to watch upstream and gauge the stability of the ice they were standing on. Once darkness had come the crossing soldiers, wrapped against the cold as thickly as an expensive present, endured an ecstasy of edgy waiting. Then the word to risk it came. Twenty boats, carrying seven hundred men armed like hedge pigs, were launched into the narrowest crossing for many miles in either direction.
But not even the sharpest river pilot with the greyest beard could see under the ice where the great bergs jutted downward towards the silty bed and created vicious eddies in the current that carved great swathes out of the bottom of the river. These turbulent and restless undertows came and went with the shifting ice above. The oak tree, water-fat, passed the berg-watchers on the shore unseen, no more breaking the surface in its massive thickness than a hunting crocodile. Then it hit the ice dam with a thud like the low bass of the deepest note in a cathedral organ. It was felt by the lookouts on the ice itself as much in the bowels as in the ear. They waited for the great crack that might split the field and loosen the dam of bergs – and kill most of them. It never came. Pushed underneath the ice by the current the oak tree began to roll – down it went like the Jesus whale, down to the bottom of the dam where a few hours before two great fangs of ice had formed. Around them the current, powerful but slow, became in a moment frenzied, unstoppable and mad, driving the great trunk, sodden and three times its former weight, faster and faster as the current was squeezed more and more between the jagged ice and the riverbed. Sideways on, the tree trunk battered between the two great crags of downward-pointing ice, sending strange but incomprehensible tremors to the blind watchers above as it boomed and bashed deep beneath them. And then it was free, the now shooting current taking the tree’s super-saturated weight into a rapid but shallow climb to the surface so that it kept momentum from the currents speeding from underneath the ice. At eight miles to the hour, even an ordinary runner could have kept pace with it as it headed towards the fleet of boats – but it was not the speed that mattered but its size and terrible sodden weight. Still, only so much damage might have been done had it not glanced a mid-stream rock with its snout; the great leviathan of trunky wood began to turn flat towards the slowly crossing fleet.
Despite all efforts to prevent it, the twenty boats had been bunched together by the day’s strange currents and they were no small boats – thirty-five men in each. The oak did not so much smash into them as roll them up and under as if they were hardly there – barely a cry went up before each boat was at once struck beneath the water and turned over on its side. Because of the crowding, eleven boats went down in less than fifteen seconds. The tree moved on into the cold, wet dark leaving behind three hundred and eighty-four drowned men and one drowned woman.
As IdrisPukke finished telling Cale his grim news the sun came out and a warm shaft of light came through the partly stained glass windows, projecting delicate blues and reds onto the table and illuminating the bright dust in the air.
‘It’s certain?’ said Vague Henri.
‘As these things ever are. My man is reliable and said he saw her body before he left.’
‘What was the cause?’
‘It’s thought a wall of ice that broke away from a bigger field upstream. Bad luck, that’s all.’
‘But you predicted it,’ said Cale, softly.
‘To be unfair to my prodigious powers of foresight, I always make it a point to predict more or less every possible outcome. It could have as easily succeeded as it failed.’
‘Can it be kept a secret?’ asked Vague Henri.
‘Had they all lived or all drowned, perhaps. Not now … I’d say that …’
‘She’s a great loss,’ interrupted Cale, awkwardly and in an odd tone of voice.
‘Yes,’ said IdrisPukke. ‘She was a remarkable young woman.’
Nobody said anything. There was a knock on the door and Lascelles the butler crept into the room.
‘A letter for you, sir,’ he said to IdrisPukke, who took it and waved Lascelles away, waiting until he left the room before speaking. ‘There’s something iffy about that man. His eyes are too close together.’ He opened the letter. ‘Apparently Bose Ikard knows about the crossing and Artemisia.’
‘How?’ said Vague Henri.
‘The same way that I knew about it, I suppose.’
‘No … how do you know Bose Ikard knows?’