‘Where?’ said Kleist.
‘We were thinking somewhere over the sea. The Hanse is pretty welcoming to the wealthy. And Riba owes us.’
‘Does she know that?’ asked Daisy. ‘My husband told me when you were in the desert he suggested you should leave her there.’
‘She’s right, he did,’ said Vague Henri.
‘But we never told her that,’ said Cale. ‘Besides, Riba was the cause of everything. She knows she let us down about Kitty so this is her chance to make it up.’
‘Why not send Vague Henri?’ said Kleist. ‘She won’t mind helping him.’
‘I’ve got to stay here.’
‘Yes?’ said Kleist. ‘Why?’
There wasn’t the slightest hesitation.
‘The night before we make the assault on the Sanctuary I’m going to go in heavy-handed to take the quarters where the girls are being held. So you’re really the only person who can do it. Besides, you’re the only one of us with a wife and family.’
So it was settled. Kleist would return to Spanish Leeds and with Cadbury’s help – Cadbury was very keen also to get some of his money out of harm’s way – he’d get out of Switzerland with all their money and as much as they could sell off in the meantime.
‘You were a bit harsh on Riba,’ said Vague Henri, when Kleist and Daisy had left.
‘I’ll squeeze Riba dry if I have to – and it still wouldn’t be enough.’
There was a bad-tempered silence. It was Cale who decided to make things up. ‘That was pretty quick thinking when he asked why you weren’t going.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘What?’
‘No, it wasn’t quick thinking,’ said Vague Henri. ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid. He probably killed them months ago, years even.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Based on?’
‘Based on I don’t think so.’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No isn’t clear enough?’
‘I’m not asking your permission.’
‘Look, I may have gone along with some half-wit notion of yours that we’re equals – nobody else thinks that. You’ll do as you’re bloody well told.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Yes, you will.’
‘No, I won’t.’
This bickering went on for some time. There were threats from Cale to have him arrested until the siege was over and invitations from Vague Henri to shove his threats up his arse. But what broke the deadlock was an appeal to Cale’s heart, peculiar object that it was.
‘Annunziata, the girl I told you about – I love her.’ This was not true. He cared deeply about her, more than the other girls although he cared deeply about them too. Why the desire to save them was so intense he could not say. But there it was. He had better insight into Cale’s soul than his own. Everyone has a sentimental spot for something, even, or especially, the wicked. It was said that Alois Huttler found it hard not to weep when he saw a puppy and that he kept a painting in his bedroom of a little girl feeding a lamb milk through a horn. At any rate, Cale could hardly deny the power of love, given its hold on his own soul. It was, after all, the source of much of his self-pity that he had risked his life so madly to save Arbell.
Two days later Kleist and Daisy were lined up in their heavily guarded train, with Cale and Vague Henri there to see them off.
‘What’s to stop me lepping off with the money?’ said Kleist, hands shaking like an old man.
‘Because,’ said Cale, ‘you can trust us.’
‘Trust you?’ said Kleist, ‘Oh, right. Trust you.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Daisy. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Tell you later.’
‘I’ve written to Riba,’ said Vague Henri. ‘She’ll be all right.’
‘And if she isn’t?’
‘Mrs Kleist seems to have her head screwed on. You’ve got money – you’ll work something out.’
‘Thanks,’ said Kleist, and seemed to mean something particular by it, but Cale wasn’t sure what.
He shrugged, awkward.
Holding the little girl, Daisy kissed both of them on the cheek but said nothing. Then Cale and Vague Henri watched them leave, a strangely desolate experience for them both.
36
Over the next two weeks the man-made ridge from the Little Brother loomed towards the top of the Sanctuary walls while Vague Henri practised climbing in the dark with his hundred volunteers. One man died on the first night, screaming as he fell, a noisy accident that would have had the lot of them killed if it had been the real thing. A climb of this type would only be possible with the right kind of half-moon – if they could see too easily then they could be seen too easily. Luckily the right phase was expected at the same time as completion of the ramp. It was decided to climb in small groups of ten further around the side of the Sanctuary where the climbers would be mostly obscured from any watching guards. They’d collect on the mountain just below the walls and then move up as it became dark; one of Artemisia’s alpine climbers could take a line to the top and pull up a rope ladder designed by Hooke.
‘It’s the stupidest bloody thing I’ve ever seen,’ said Cale.
‘Mind your own beeswax,’ replied Vague Henri.
As the ramp came closer the builders became more vulnerable once again to the arrows, bolts, rocks and boulders thrown at them by the Redeemers – an assault as hideous as it was desperate. They slowed the progress but it was not enough, as the Redeemers must have known. Then, twenty feet from the walls, construction stopped. To complete it would have allowed the Redeemers to attack across it themselves. Hooke had provided a wooden bridge affair, covered in on the roof and at the sides and about forty feet long. When Cale decided to attack, the bridge would be pushed along the ramp to close the gap, like a plank going over a river. It was wide enough to take eight soldiers shoulder to shoulder. Hooke had also provided an unpleasant way of clearing away anyone in front of the bridge, a variation on Greek fire. He had built several great pumps to spray a large area in front of the emerging soldiers, which would cover every Redeemer within fifty yards in a liquid fire.
‘God forgive me,’ said Hooke.
‘Just remember they’d happily do the same to you – they would’ve done it already if I hadn’t saved your skin.’
‘That’s supposed to make me feel better, that I’m no worse than they are?’
‘Suit yourself. I don’t really care.’
The last few days before the attack over the ridge passed at a feverish speed, an unpleasant sensation for Cale and Vague Henri, as if they were rushing towards something out of their control. Now that it was coming, what they were doing seemed unbelievable to them. They were going back to the place they hated most in all the world and yet which had made them; and they were going to clean it out. Two days away and they were pin-eyed with agitation – but also self-possessed and still.
IdrisPukke, who had returned to witness the taking of the Sanctuary, was made uneasy by the two boys, though tense enough himself. ‘They were like the old adage,’ he said later to Vipond. ‘Those houses that are haunted are most still – till the devil be up.’
If there’d been any moisture in the air you would have said there was a storm coming. At night the grasshoppers stopped their usual throbbing racket. There seemed to be fewer sand-flies trying to get at the moisture in the soldiers’ mouths.
People with the luxury of living quiet lives look down on melodrama, on sensational action, on exaggerated events intended to appeal to coarser emotions than their own. The life they lead, they think, is reaclass="underline" the day-to-day ordinary is how things truly are. But it’s plain to anyone with any sense that for most of us, life, if it’s like anything at all, is like a pantomime where the blood and suffering is real, an opera where the singers sing out of tune, wailing about pain and love and death while the audience throw stones instead of rotten fruit. Delicacy and subtlety are the fantastical great escape.