I travelled for an entire two days with a small band of gypsies, sharing their supper when they made camp and joining in their music. They are interesting people, the Romanies, with vivid history and colourful traditions and wild passion-filled music. Also, their idea of food and drink is generous and their ladies very friendly. We parted company with regret and declarations of undying friendship, although, to be fair, that last may have been due to the quantities of wine consumed.
I reached the outlying districts of Germany in the late afternoon, and if I narrowed my eyes and concentrated I could make out the ancient city of Liége in the distance. Even from a distance I could see the silver strands of the Meuse River and the faint outlines of several of the twelve forts encircling the old city.
As I approached Liége I was aware of an unrest – it was a curious sensation, almost as if something, some invisible force, knew that a massive conflict lay in waiting. Rather as someone may suffer a headache just before a thunderstorm. I had no explanation for the feeling then and I do not have one now, but walking through the wooded areas between Germany and Belgium, listening for the marching feet of the invading armies, I felt as if something had been wrenched away from its roots, as if some natural force had become distorted and something dark and heavy was trickling into the world.
Nearing Liége, seeing those grim towers built over twenty-five years earlier to repel invaders, I felt as if a vast, tightly-stretched drumskin was being tapped somewhere close by. I could not quite hear it, but I could feel it, as if I were lying on a railway line, hearing a train approach. On and on it went, in a rhythmic tattoo. I knew what it was. The marching of armies. The Kaiser’s forces advancing on Liége.
Iskander’s words were so vivid that when Michael leaned back from the table for a moment, he had the impression that the echoes of those armies were reverberating across the years, rippling against his own mind.
He was reaching for his pen again when he realized that the sounds were not from the past at all; they were here in the present. They were real sounds, and they were not drumbeats – they were footsteps. The slow, soft footsteps Michael had heard last night and that had frightened Luisa during supper. Tap-tap … Like a faint, blurred rhythm.
It’s Stephen, thought Michael with a lurch of apprehension. He was here last night – he got into the house – I saw him. And now he’s coming back. He’s walking down that path, he’s coming through those bushes now, and he’ll try to get in again. Will Luisa let him in again?
‘Let me in … Please let me in …’
The words lay like clotted cobwebs on the air, the sounds half shrivelled in the sunlight. It’s because they’ve travelled across a century, thought Michael. They’re clogged by dead men’s dust – by the antique dust that’s lain unswept. Unswept antique dust … is that from Coriolanus? God help me, I’m hearing whispering voices from a man dead for nearly a century, and I’m quoting bloody Shakespeare!
I’m not really hearing the whispers, though, he thought. I’ve fallen asleep for a few moments – the warmth of the sun on those windows – or maybe Luisa Gilmore laces her coffee with cannabis.
‘Let me in …’
A cloud moved across the sun and the garden dipped into shadows, and the whispering faded. The antique dust has settled back into place, thought Michael. Either that, or I’ve woken up.
He turned determinedly back to the paper-strewn table and Iskander’s journal.
As I walked towards the fortress towers of Liège, I could hear the marching feet of the soldiers with more clarity. I tried to convince myself they were growing fainter, but they were not, of course. They were getting louder and closer.
The forest was behind me by this time, and ahead were fields. I went across those fields like a fleeing hare – I swear I had not run so fast since the night when I had to make an unplanned retreat from the Volkov-Yusupov Palace, along with a pair of gold candlesticks, an ormolu mantel clock, and something I believed might be a hitherto-unpublished poem by Alexander Pushkin. (The poem turned out to be a forgery.)
On this particular day, however, I was not burdened with candlesticks or fake Pushkins, and I reached the edges of the German fields safely and thrust my way through a gap in the hedge. I was close to one of the fortresses now – a chimney-like structure, stark and forbidding, rearing up into the afternoon sky like a black jutting tooth. I paused, wondering if I dare try to get into the tower and hide. But wouldn’t they try to take possession of those towers anyway? Then I saw that to the right of the tower – perhaps the length of a small field away – was a low, rambling greystone building, with a small bell tower and, rising above its roofs, the outline of a cross.
A convent. And convents were places of sanctuary; they had the same immunity from violence and invasion as churches.
I went across that short distance at the speed of the Hound of Heaven fleeing down the arches of the years.
Eight
As soon as I neared the convent’s walls, I became aware of music trickling from the windows – thin sweet music, young girls’ voices, blending and weaving together in the most heart-scalding perfection I had ever heard. And I may be a thief and a man of few principles, but I can appreciate beauty as well as anyone else, and I stood there for several moments, listening, feeling a balm lay its hand across my soul.