Chapter Three

Nightfall

1st May 1586

“For a start, young lady,” Lady Anne shrieked as she dragged Mary by the ear under the Lion Gate and across the lawns towards John Brackenbury’s lodgings, “you are not to set a toenail outside of the door without my permission! You – you have dishonoured the noble name of Middleton beyond compare…”

Mary Middleton was not listening to her mother’s torrent of verbal abuse. Her thoughts, however groggy and wine-sodden, were still focused on the man she had met at that bar, and exchanged flirts and insults with.

She had not even asked his name. Over that elongated period of time she had spent arguing with and teasing him, she had forgotten to ask his name. He had asked her name, but she had not thought to return that question.

For a highborn, dignified and well-educated young lady, she could be as thick as a re-enforced floorboard sometimes.

“Did you even think? Did you even stop to ask yourself the question about the consequences of your little rebellion? Obviously not! Otherwise, you would not have ended up like this – intoxicated most foully!”

Mary groaned. Sixteen years of constant nagging and haranguing had returned to her, after those three hours of freedom and experience. She was not sure whether she was worse off drunk and experienced or sober and inexperienced.

“Inside!” Lady Anne snapped, manhandling and shoving her supposedly fragile daughter against a large wooden surface. Mary blearily recognised it as the door to the Brackenbury household. Had they crossed the large courtyard of the Tower in that short space of time? It seemed that the alcohol was playing havoc with her perception of time passing as well.

She fumbled around for the doorknob and pushed in, staggering as the support of the door left her. Sloppily wiping her feet on the threadbare mat, she collapsed into a wicker chair by the fireplace, only to feel a firm hand dragging her back up to her feet again.

“Up!” Lady Anne commanded, now reverting entirely to imperatives. She pushed Mary up the stairs, despite the dead weight of her daughter constantly flopping back with exhaustion.

Mary felt herself stumbling into her bedroom. She felt herself falling to the floor, and crumpling against the rug. Every muscle, tensed by the minor physical violence inflicted from her mother, relaxed and flattened against the floor.

Her senses snapped up and alerted as the door slammed behind her, surprisingly wordless from her vocal mother. From across the room, she felt the scratching of the key gradually fitting into the lock and turning, giving her the final reminder – her life was lived in a virtual prison, and escape only resulted in inevitable recapture.

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“Tom, you – you bloody – IMBECILE!” Olivia shrieked, dragging a near-senseless Tom back over the fresh grasses of Tower Green. “I thought you’d stopped! I thought you saw sense!”

“Obviously not, Livvy,” Tom snapped, rolling his eyes. “Just how gullible are you exactly?”

“That’s no reason for you to go back to your old ways,” Olivia snapped. “Preying on young, innocent women like her…and don’t call me Livvy! You know I hate that name!”

“And you know I relish the fact that you hate that name!” Tom snapped back. “Little Livvy Dacre – will you ever get over yourself?”

“And will you get over your bloody sex mania?” Olivia replied, dragging her over to where Corinna was leaning against a signpost. “Sorry about the wait, Corinna. We all have to take out the rubbish every so often.” She gave Tom a meaningful glare.

“No matter,” Corinna sighed, levering herself upright from her sitting position. “Where are we going to sleep then?”

“Rough, as usual,” Tom muttered acrimoniously. “Sorry if it’s not up to your standards, your most bloody royal majesty.”

Olivia kicked her friend with the most force that she could muster in the ankle. He hopped, clutching at his soon-to-bruise ankle.

“You deserved it,” she snapped, before returning her conversation to Corinna. “I don’t usually resort to petty violence, but I’m afraid sometimes with Thomas Brackenbury it’s necessary.”

“Necessary for you, perhaps,” Tom muttered sourly, still hopping around and pinching himself to alleviate the throbbing pain in his ankle. He limped off up the street and strayed out of the girls’ earshot and into the shadows, leaving Olivia and Corinna alone to talk to each other.

“Sorry about him,” Olivia sighed. “He’s been having foul mood swings for the past few months. Slightest thing gets him going.”

“Any reason why?”

Olivia breathed slightly, holding a note of sudden doubt. Corinna could already sense that there was something important that Olivia was trying to conceal from her. It was a perceptive gift that she had had for as long as she could remember.

“Tom’s mother died of complications after childbirth earlier this year. The baby died soon after, and Tom’s father became an alcoholic. That’s all he’d tell us. We didn’t dare ask anymore.”

Corinna paused, in a pause similar to the one Olivia had taken just seconds beforehand. It must have been a terrible thing to lose a mother. A terrible thing to lose either parent, or a loved one.

“So where exactly are we sleeping?”

“In the Lost Kids’ cellar,” Olivia explained. Seeing Corinna’s slightly confused look, she clarified slightly. “This old family – they’ve been here for generations – let us use their cellar to sleep. We call ourselves the Lost Kids, because most of us come from broken homes. There are some orphans, and some were just abandoned at birth. There are runaways like Tom and his brothers as well.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, what are you?”

“Me?” Olivia said, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “I’m an orphan. My mother died giving birth to my little sister, and my father died of a broken heart soon afterwards.”

“I’m sorry,” Corinna murmured, still taking in the tragic events that everybody seemed to have suffered.

“Don’t be,” Olivia replied. “I’m as happy as can be with the Lost Kids, looking after them. Some of them are as young as two or three. Most of them call me mama, because they know no different. What about you? You’ve barely said a word about where you came from.”

“I – I don’t want to talk about it.”

“C’mon,” Olivia sighed, “a secret’s never a secret forever, from my experience.”

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Corinna promised, most probably in vain.

Olivia rounded a corner into a narrow alleyway, populated by crates and barrels casting long, strangely formed shadows across the path. Clambering over them with an odd form of grace, Olivia knelt down on her haunches, and removed a large iron grate from the wall. Lying on her stomach, she pulled herself through the narrow gap and disappeared into the moderately lit cellar.

Corinna blinked several times, being unsure of how a grown woman like Olivia could haul herself through that seemingly tiny gap.

“C’mon!” she could hear Olivia shout from inside. “It’s easy!”

Drawing a sharp breath and trying to make herself as thin as possible in trying, Corinna flattened onto her stomach and heaved her body through, before falling a short distance onto an oddly lumpy straw-stuffed mattress.

Sitting up straight again, she accustomed her eyes to the panorama of extreme poverty set before her.

The cellar was crammed with children – around forty or fifty in number, from the ages (based on appearance alone) of about two to twenty-two.

The smaller children were now tucked up, sharing one single mattress with a scavenged blanket in the far corner. Their eyes were wide open to their extent, to see a somewhat better dressed stranger in their midst.

The older children and teenagers were huddled around a miniature makeshift fire, warming their hands. One occupied a small chair, and seemed to be asleep. Their eyes regarded Corinna with similar wideness, only some harboured suspicion, fear and confusion in their pupils.

Finally one spoke up, a boy of around fourteen who seemed to be the spitting image of Tom, only his features were younger, punier and altogether less developed. A pair of broken spectacles was drooped sorrowfully on his nose.

“Sweet Lord, that’s all we need. Even more overpopulation.”

Riled at the bitter comment, the apparently eldest of the children, a young woman of about twenty-two, threw a battered cushion at him, which he barely dodged.

“Stop complaining, Gilbert,” she snapped. “If all you do is moan, why don’t you start another Peasant’s Revolt? I’m sure Her Majesty wouldn’t mind at all!”

“Yeah, don’t be such a pessimist!” somebody else chorused.

“I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist,” Gilbert replied with the deftest of dismissals. “Realists are – realistic.”

“And you call yourself the brains of the gang,” the young woman sniped at him. Her hand was slowly making its way towards another pillow to use as another missile in case of any backchat.

“That’s Helen,” Olivia explained, motioning towards the pillow-thrower. “She’s my big sister. She’s the eldest one here, I think. And the pessimist over there is Gilbert, Tom’s little brother.”

“R-E-A-L-I-S-T,” Gilbert growled.

“R-E-A-L-I-S-T spells pessimist to us uneducated people,” Olivia growled in return. Gilbert quailed slightly, before resuming his sarcastic, supposedly realist façade.

“You’re Tom’s brother?” Corinna raised the subject before any full-scale arguments broke out within minutes of her arrival.

“No, we’re sisters,” he snorted sarcastically, before another boy, who was around Olivia’s age, forced him into headlock and clamped a firm hand over Gilbert’s mouth.

“Thank you, Dick,” Olivia sighed, retaining a calm smokescreen. “Dick, or rather Richard, is Tom’s elder brother. Edmund, the eldest, is away as a soldier in the Netherlands.”

“And who’s our newcomer?” Dick asked kindly, before Gilbert could make another resentful comment.

“This is Corinna,” Olivia introduced her. “Corinna Ramona.”

“Romula,” Corinna corrected her gently.

“Weren’t you going to tell us about where you’ve come from?” Olivia pried into the subject forcefully. Corinna bit her lip. She had been hoping that Olivia would somehow forget about her previous question.

“Like a story?” The nearest of the bedded children sat up, looking eager.

“S’pose so,” Olivia replied. “So tell us your story, Corinna.”

“Story! Story! Story!” the entire population of the cellar chanted in unison, from the smallest infant to the eldest, Helen. Even Gilbert seemed to be chanting, from behind Dick’s hand.

Corinna finally caved in to the large amount of peer pressure being shovelled down upon her.

“OKAY!” she had to shout over the colossal chorus of voices demanding a bedtime story. “Let me start.”

“I think it all started six years ago…”

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Obax’s skin blended in perfectly with the sheer pitch black of midnight’s cloak, or so he thought.

The clock mounted upon the church had been illuminated by the liquid quality of the moonlight that lapped across the rooftops of the city. The smaller hand was pointing halfway between ten and eleven. Obax, unused to the customs and methods of Western civilisation (if you could call it that) guessed that it was somewhere close to midnight.

Back in his tribe, there had been no need for everything this city had come to possess. They used the most minimal forms of these European commodities. A roaring campfire had been a fine enough, if not better, substitute for the elaborately designed fireplaces and chimneys built into the houses. The simple structure of their tents provided them shelter and warmth for a night, before they moved on again when dawn broke. These houses were stationary, rooted to the floor, and were so full of draughts that one might as well have stepped naked into a Scottish loch.

And Obax had tried that on a December morning.

He made his way along the row of terraced houses lining one side of Tower Green. All of them were rickety and ramshackle, nearly falling apart at the seams and on the verge of collapse. Certainly they gave off a weary impression.

He fumbled his way along, now that the midnight’s shadows had obscured even the basic outline of the wall beside him. He felt the wall disappear from against his hand, feeling his palm drag along the wobbling wooden texture of a gate.

Rubbing a couple of planks of wood together (a useful trick he had learnt on his many travels), he ignited a spark, which developed into a flame. He held it up, illumining a sign.

Madame Christine Rusesabagina

Mistress of soothsaying and clairvoyance

Your fates revealed for a small price

AND BOARDING HOUSE

He continued to hold the flaming torch above his head, and made his way up through the path. As he approached, more of the slender house, which resembled more of a slum, was elucidated.

The panes in the upstairs windows had been splintered, broken or otherwise shattered. The owner of the house, or its landlord, had obviously not bothered to replace the vandalism. The wood that the entire house was forged from had begun to rot and steadily flake away. All in all, it was simply a picture of age.

He extinguished his torch in a nearby bucket of water so that the licking flames did not engulf the house as well. Pushing cautiously through the door, careful that it did not shatter, he stepped into the dimly lit hallway, admiring the barely visible features of the room.

A staircase led upstairs, taking up the entire left side of the hallway, half of its steps snapped or else damaged. The right side of the hallway was a thin passage, leading to a doorway filled only by a shimmering bead curtain, as if something had just passed through it.

Humming noises drifted along the hallway, ensuing from behind the beaded curtain. Obax neared the source of the gentle hum, which sounded old and withered. He swept the bead curtain aside, and his nose inhaled the smell of cooking, or steam at least.

An elderly lady, her dark skin in heavy contrast to the fuzzy whiteness of her hair, was seated at the table, hunched over a boiling pot of exotic herbs and spices. The fumes were intoxicating, and Obax had to suspend his breath so as not to inhale anything poisonous.

“Excuse me,” he stuttered.

The ancient woman’s head snapped up, her eyes wide and milky, every muscle tensed and her veins rising to the surface in tautness. She appeared to have descended into some kind of prophetic trance.

“The house of the scrambled enigma…a gun…two…the well…whistling through the night…the doctor is screaming and shouting – dying…no…more screaming…two…he watches…crouches…bushes…to be buried forever…until the progeny returns…six of them…but death…death and destruction…devastation shall come to the house of the progeny…death, destruction, devastation…they shall return to the house of the progeny…darkness sweeps over…they shall return…six shall return who have been before…it shall be soon…long buried truths shall be unearthed…so soon…IT IS NOW!”

Obax jumped back from his chair in fright at the sudden, weathered shout the old woman had just given. The scraping of the leg against the floor brought the woman from her trance. As she shook her head and rose from her chair in greeting, her heavily jewelled earrings started jangling annoyingly and her shawls flapping away.

“Obax!” she croaked, spreading her arms in welcome. “Grandson!”

“Nana!” Obax came into her arms, and lifted his grandmother off the floor in a tight embrace. Her skeletal body felt like an alabaster statue in his hands.

“My grandson,” she murmured, her dark eyes surveying him. “You have grown so much. It has only been a few years since I left the circus. You only came up to my shoulders then. And now look at you! You’re a giant!”

She loosened her grip on him and he pulled away, leaning against the sideboard and still facing his, to be politically correct, much more mature grandmother.

“Why are you here?” she asked, her eyes suddenly narrowing. “You’re far too young to leave the travelling circus.”

“I’m sixteen, nana,” Obax sighed. “I can take care of myself, no matter what. I got myself safely from the old country to this frozen wasteland alright.”

“But why would you leave them all behind?” Christine pursed. “Why? They love you, you love them…oh.” Realisation dawned upon her face, every feature changing in the daunting understanding flooding her.

Obax nodded.

“They’re gone,” he whispered, tears prickling his eyes. “They’re all gone…”

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Elvira could barely find her way through the night as it darkened around her. Midnight in such a savage, hostile country as this, so removed from the civilisation she had grown up surrounded by – it was hard to know when you were being watched, or ambushed, for that matter.

So treacherous. So unpredictable.

She had memorised the place – but now the night darkened so it was impossible to distinguish every fine outline. How could one distinguish dark shadow from dark shadow? Especially at midnight?

This God-forsaken middle-of-nowhere with its treacherous midnights, its cunning, unpredictable fog – she wished fervently that she was back in her native Spain again.

That Spain she knew where the sunlight glazed the tiles and terraced roofs of the houses, with the stagnant pools and bronzed coastlines. That Spain she knew where everybody would rest in the tranquil repose of a siesta, free of the cares and stresses of the world for that afternoon. That Spain she knew where everybody was a friend, and everybody treated everybody like a friend.

Not like England. She had not seen, since she had left Lisbon, the sun bother to peep its head over the infuriating mask of clouds. She had found a single time or place to rest and relieve herself of life. Not a soul, save perhaps for Juan, had shown her a scrap of friendliness or compassion. Even then, Juan had tried to undermine her.

She could still write. Her friend Luisa had insisted that she write in full detail about England and its supposedly beautiful scenery. With all that she had seen in this past day, she already knew that it would be a struggle to commit words to paper in description.

She was eighteen years old, a fine young woman, but in these strange, unfamiliar and sometimes terrifying surroundings, she felt like that scared, tensed little three-year-old girl again.

A little lost girl, drifting in and out of the crowds.

There were no crowds – the last of the near-paraplegic drunkards had staggered from the square, bellowing out curses and chanting out old sea shanties. Elvira, for one, could not stand the taste of England’s beer. It was murky, foul, and bitter – at times it was a fitting habitat for frogspawn.

She stumbled up the path to the derelict house, a house that she had just seen a dark silhouette enter. Pushing open the door, she stepped warily inside. In such a hostile, alien country such as this, one could not know what to expect.

An old woman, her skin blurring in like paint into the night around her, and dressed in a terrifyingly contrasting white dress, floated into the hallway, carrying a flickering candle in one hand.

“Did Juan send you over?” she asked in halting English.

“Yes.” A word in English that Elvira felt sure that she knew the meaning of.

“Come further inside then, and shut that door. I don’t want a poor mite like you catching a cold. Bloody England – always far too cold, even in the summer.” She halted, peering her head over her shoulder. “Wait – are you Spanish? I recognised the accent.”

Elvira could not be sure of what she had just said, but she had heard the word ‘Spanish’, so nodded enthusiastically. The hag-like woman motioned towards the door, which blew shut without Elvira even touching it. Pupils darting from woman to door, she decided the draught must have closed it.

“My grandson arrived just now,” she explained in equally staccato Spanish. Elvira decided that, whatever her mother language was, it was far from European. “You look like you’re tired.”

“I’ve been through the wars, yes,” Elvira murmured, staggering along the hallway. She supported herself on the wall, stumbling through the bead curtain into a steam-filled kitchen.

Sat at the table was a young black man, around her age, perhaps a few years younger, nearly lulled to sleep by the circulating fumes. He smiled weakly to see his grandmother return. Upon noticing Elvira’s strange new presence, he muttered a quick question to his grandmother, who replied in a murmur. Presumably their mother tongue.

“So,” she sat down at the table, conversing again in Spanish, “sorry dearest, but what was your name again?”

“Elvira de Puebla,” Elvira replied, descending into a rickety little chair and tried to find some comfort in it, amongst the savage country she had been forced to endure for the past day, and would probably be forced to for the rest of her life.

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When Nicholas woke up, he found himself sprawled on the damp floor.

The building around him seemed to be wailing, in a dreaded chorus of sorrow and despair. The walls and surfaces seemed to radiate unhappiness and desolation. The floor was hacked out from the most despondent of stone, and the straw torn from the bales that prickled the most with hopelessness.

When his vision ceased sliding from side to side and focused, he immediately noticed the long bars at the door of this secluded little room. He ran instinctively to them, running his hands up and down the rusted iron poles. He shook them, in an attempt to break them. They just clanged and crashed against the floor and ceiling with the utmost sullenness.

“HELP!” he shouted, rattling the bars of the cell in synchronicity. “LET ME OUT OF HERE!”

“No use saying that,” a ratty-sounding voice emerged lithely from the shadows, “ ‘cause that’s what the entire prison’s sayin’, ain’t they?”

“Who’s that?”

“Oh, no-one. Just your average prison guard at your service, me old mucker.”

The prison guard emerged from the shadows, his rat-like, acne-encrusted face wearing a permanent leer on it. It must have become like that from constant jeering at the prisoners’ predicaments. He was almost skeletal in figure, the skin that barely stretched across his skeleton being a horrible, pasty colour.

“Don’t call me that – whatever it meant!”

“I’m just bein’ polite, ain’t I?”

“Piss off.”

“That’s nice, ain’t it? Course, swearin’ at your most ‘umble and esteemed jailer ain’t goin’ to get you out of ‘ere sharpish, ain’t it?”

“More to the point, why am I in here?”

“Ooh, ain’t you all ‘igh-class and sophisticated?”

“Don’t bloody start.”

“Well, you better get used to me, my son…”

“Could I ever?”

“…because you’ll be in ‘ere for a looooong stretch. You only look about eleven – and what are you doin’ goin’ around stabbin’ strangers in a local pub? You’re lucky the landlord called the watch – we don’t want little whippersnappers like you goin’ round old London town with your loony attitude.”

“I AM NOT A LOONY!”

“Temper, temper, violence ain’t always the answer,” he snickered. “You’re really disturbed in the head, you. The name’s Mark, by the way. Mark Punshike.”

Nicholas somehow managed to regain control of his temper, and decided it would be a good start to introduce himself, if he was to be staying here for the long haul.

“Nicholas,” he said. “Nicholas Schindler.”

“Nice to be meetin’ you, to be meetin’ you nice!” He grabbed Nicholas’ hand and shook it. “Schindler – ain’t that a German name?”

“I lived in Prague for a long time.”

“Pah, all the same to me, your ‘umble jailer as always. Anyways – I’d best be off for now. Let’s ‘ope we get off to a good foot, shall we?”

He strolled on along the corridor, whistling a merry little tune. Nicholas had never met anybody so chirpy and upbeat, despite wearing a very sinister leer across his face simultaneously.

He sank down onto the floor.

He had done it now – in prison for violent assault and attempted murder. It should have been enough to merit a death penalty, at least. He supposed there would be a trial, the verdict and the inevitable sentence.

“Nicholas Schindler, you shall be taken from this place and hanged from the neck until you are dead,” he murmured to himself almost trivially. The court would not take kindly to the fact that he was a foreigner, or at least brought up in a foreign country, either.

He supposed that he only had days left, to waste away alone here in a prison, before dying, mocked and jeered, on a gibbet like an animal.

Something squeaked and scuffled along the floor, brushing straw out of the way as it skidded along.

A rat.

Nicholas had never had a particular fear of rats. His home in Prague had been infested with the pests. It scuttled across, and came to rest on his hand, seemingly undaunted by his presence.

“What?” he asked it, as it began to nibble on a pellet of food, while looking up somewhat expectantly at him. Those beetle-black eyes, shaped like succulent blackcurrants dotted in the middle of its face, regarded him, compelling him almost. “If you want food, I don’t have any – if you want drink, I don’t have any…”

The rat squeaked, and somehow Nicholas knew what it was asking for. In his old home in Prague, so infested with rats, he had taken the time to bond with a few of them. By now, he knew most of the gestures and mannerisms of the rat.

“You want a story?” he said incredulously. The rat seemed to give some assent, nestling into a corner. “I don’t know many. But I have one. A true story…”