Fortnight of Fear (30 page)

He came around the gatehouse yet again, and it was then that he saw them. He stopped, and he stared. It was so dark that he could scarcely make them out. He said, “Carole?” once more, but he wasn't sure whether he had spoken her name out loud or not.

He was trembling, juddering – not only with cold, but with the greatest dread he had ever known.

Carole was standing by the railings overlooking the cliff, where today the bulldozer had been working. Her face was very white and her blonde hair looked white in the darkness and she was still wearing the white nightdress
that she had been wearing yesterday morning. Her eyes were smudgy with fatigue and fear.

Facing her – very close, with his back turned to David, so that David couldn't see his face – was a tall youth wearing a loose brown shirt and brown leggings and boots. His arms were outstretched, like a crucifix, and he was approaching Carole with a slow, strange gait, as if he were trying to embrace her.

But there was something else. Carole's breath was visible in the cold; but the boy himself was
smoldering
. There was smoke pouring from his hair, and smoke trailing out of his cuffs; and as David gradually came nearer, he could see something orange glowing through the rough-woven hessian of his shirt. Something that crawled, and flickered, and grew brighter.
He was alight. He was literally burning alive
.

“
Carole!
” David screamed at her. “
Carole!
”

He rushed forward. The boy whipped around, and David stopped dead.

Jesus, it wasn't a boy at all. It was a girl. A young, plain-faced girl, with a straight, bony nose and a bowl-shaped haircut and eyes like nothing that David had ever seen before. They were black, as black as jet, but fire was glittering out of them like fire through a keyhole.

“What?” David shouted at her. “What do you want? Who are you?”

The girl hesitated for a long time. Then she said, “You are not welcome here,
monsieur
.”

David tried to circle around her, to reach Carole.

“Carole? Are you all right?”

“
Monsieur
,” the girl interrupted. “You needs must leave now.”

“Oh, no,” said David. “Not without my wife.”

“Your wife is forfeit,
monsieur
. From the day that the Pope's council first met to rehabilitate me, one English woman was forfeit, every witch-year.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” David shouted at her. “I want my wife, and I'm not leaving without her!”

“
Monsieur
,” the girl blazed at him; and her eyes brightened now, and the smell of burning hessian grew stronger. “A witch-year is three-score and seventeen years; and Satan demands that three-score and seventeen witch-years shall pass before the settlement is finally settled; and that in every witch-year an Englishwoman shall burn as
I
was condemned to burn, in the place of my imprisonment, until the English are forgiven and the Popes are freed of their obligation.”

David stared at her. He felt as if the whole world were turning beneath his feet; as if time and gravity had no meaning at all; as if Hell were real.

“You're Joan,” he whispered.

She laughed, and smoke poured out of her mouth, and tongues of flame began to lick at her shirt. “
Ah, oui monsieur
, Joan, burned at the stake for heresy and witchery! And then forgiven, for my Master Lord Satan would not have me sacrificed, not without seventy-seven sacrifices to redeem me! And the Pope's council shook in their shoes, and knew no sanity, and heard the dead screaming in the night, and saw dead dogs running through the streets of Rome.”

“You're not taking my wife,” said David. His head pounded, his adrenaline-level was rising like a thermometer.

“I have already taken her,” said Joan. “I came to her, and I talked to her, and she took all of her possessions and burned them. Now she, too, is prepared to be burned. Look at her!
Regarde!
She is waiting for that last embrace! She is impatient for it! And all I have to do is to take her into my arms!”

“
No!
” yelled David.

But Joan smiled and shook her head and fire licked out of her sleeves: David could hear it softly crackling.
Then Joan turned back to Carole, and raised her arms, and Carole hesitantly came towards her, as if she really wanted to be burned; as if she were really happy to be sacrificed.

David wasn't sure if he were sleeping or waking, but he rushed toward Joan and clutched her in his arms with the terrible enthusiasm of a true martyr.

He thought she might burn him. He was afraid she might burn him. But his only experience of burns was scalding his hand on a kettle. He wasn't at all prepared for the blast of heat which roared through his eyebrows and his hair and which burst his lips open and shriveled his cheeks.

She was so fiercely hot that he couldn't even scream: couldn't draw breath. But he knew that he had to hold her tight and never let go, or else Carole would die, and he couldn't let Carole die for anything.

He turned his head around, fighting for breath, too agonized even to groan. He was afire from head to foot, and the pain was greater than any pain he had ever experienced or could ever have imagined. Every nerve ending was alight. Every inch of skin was alight. He felt the insides of his thighs wrinkling with pain, and then his testicles burn. He cried out, “
God! God forgive me
!” although he wasn't sure why. Then he gripped Joan's burning body as tightly as he could, and pitched himself right through the wooden railings and over the cliff and the two of them cartwheeled through the night, fiery and screaming, until they hit the sand below and burned and burned.

The next morning Carole stood on the beach with her hair blown by the wind. Robert and Jeremy stayed close beside her. The
pompiers
had already covered the ashes with a yellow tarpaulin, and an ambulance was driving across the sand with its red light flashing but no siren. A flight of geese crossed the estuary, honking plaintively as they flew.

The gendarme from St Valéry came up to Carole and made a sympathetic face. “I am pleased that you are safe,” he told her. “I am sorry for what happened to your husband.”

Carole nodded, with tears prickling her eyes.

The gendarme said, “It will be impossible for other people to understand, you know that? But what your husband did was very brave. Also, it finished something for ever. It broke a chain, if you see what I mean. The burning of an English woman was necessary for this process to continue. Joan was cheated of that. His Majesty was cheated of that.

The gendarme looked around, and Carole was surprised to see that there were tears in his eyes, too. “You know something?” he asked. “When Joan was burning at the stake, a priest risked his life to mount the burning brushwood and to give her a wooden crucifix, that she might hold it, and enter the kingdom of Heaven.

He lifted his hand, and offered Carole a crude oak cross. “I found it here, on the beach, amongst the ashes. It was not burned at all. I think, you know, that it must belong to you.”

Carole took the cross and pressed it close to her chest. Then she turned and walked back to La Colonne de Bronze, with Robert and Jeremy following her.

In the lounge, she found
madame
, dressed in black. “
Madame
, my husband's passport, please.”

Madame
opened her cashbox and handed Carole the maroon passport without a word. Carole opened it up, and saw that David's photograph was charred by a dark-brown diagonal scorch-mark.

She closed his passport, closed his life, and walked out into the gray overcast morning, where her boys were waiting for her.

Selborne, Hampshire

Although much of
The Sixth Man
is set in Antarctica, the real dark heart of the story beats in Selborne, in Hampshire. Selborne village is the birthplace of the Rev Gilbert White, 1720–93, the pioneering naturalist, and remains today very much as he knew it in the 18th century, with a giant old yew tree in the churchyard, and pollarded lime trees outside the butcher's shop. Gilbert White's 17th-century house, The Wakes, is now a museum which is jointly devoted to White himself and to Captain Oates, the ill-fated Antarctic explorer. Here you can see photographs and documents and artefacts which bring the suffering of Captain Scott's party into chilling life.

Afterward, you can climb the steep zig-zag path which Gilbert White helped to make up to the top of Selborne Hanger, and look out over the warm, spectacular countryside, and think about the meaning of ambition, and self-sacrifice, and the meaning of fear itself.

We were walking back to the house when Michael said, “I've discovered something rather strange. I don't quite know what to do about it.”

It was a perfect English summer's day. There was a deep, sweet smell of meadowgrass and clover, and above us the clouds lazed slowly over the Lyth like huge cream-colored comforters. Not far away, next to the split-rail fence, a small herd of Jersey cows stood thoughtfully chewing, and occasionally flicked their tails.

“Do you want to tell me what it is?” I asked. Michael was a petroleum geologist, a discoverer and an exploiter of oil-fields in far-flung and undesirable places, and not exactly the sort of chap who ever thought anything was “strange”, let alone worried himself about it.

“I've found a photograph,” he said. “I've looked at it again and again. I've even had it examined by the photo-lab. No doubt about it, it's quite genuine; but it makes no sense at all; and I'm afraid a lot of people are going to be quite embarrassed and hurt about it.”

We reached the edge of the meadow and climbed over the stile. I didn't push Michael any further. He was always careful and deliberate in his choice of words, and it was obvious that he was genuinely disturbed.

“I think I'd better show you,” he said, at last. “Come into the study. Would you like a beer? I think I've got a couple of cans of Ruddles in the fridge.”

We made our way through the tangled dog-roses at
the end of his garden, past the overgrown sundial, and in through the old-fashioned kitchen. His young wife Tania was out, collecting their three-year-old son Tim from playschool. Her apron lay across the back of the chair, and a freshly-made apple-pie stood in a circle of lightly-dusted flour. I had known Tania long before I had known Michael; and in a funny way I still wished that she and I could have loved each other more. It was unsettling for me to see her carrying Michael's son in her arms.

Carrying frosted cans of beer, we climbed the uncarpeted stairs to Michael's study. There was a smell of warm days and dried-out horsehair plaster, and oak. Michael's house had been built in 1670, but his study had all the equipment that a petro-geologist needed: an IBM computer, a fax machine, seismic charts, maps and rows of immaculate files and books and atlases.

He took out a large black folder labeled
Falcon Petroleum: Ross Ice-Shelf
, laid it flat on his gray steel desk, and took out an envelope. Inside the envelope were several copies of old black-and-white photographs.

“Here,” he said, and passed one over. As far as I could see, it was the famous photograph of Captain Scott and his ill-fated party at the South Pole. Wilson, Evans, Scott, Oates and Bowers, frost-bitten and making no pretense of being bitterly dejected. I turned it over, and on the back there was a typewritten label:
Captain Robert Scott and party, South Pole, January 17, 1912
.

“Well?” I asked Michael. “What of it?”

“There were
supposed
to be five of them,” he said. “Actually, of course, there were originally only supposed to be four – but for some inexplicable reason Scott took Lieutenant Bowers along on the last leg to the Pole, even though they didn't have enough food.”

“There
are
five of them,” I told him.

“Yes, but who took the photograph?” Michael insisted.

I gave him the photograph back. “They operated the camera with a long thread, everybody knows that.”

“Everybody
supposes
they used a thread. But if that's true … then who's this?”

He handed over another photograph. It showed Scott standing beside the small triangular tent left by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had beaten the British expedition in their race to the Pole by just over a month. There was Oates, bending over beside one of the guy-ropes; there were Evans and Bowers, standing close together, Bowers making notes in a notebook. But in the background, about fifty or sixty yards away, another figure was standing, in a long black coat, and a huge black hat, neither of which remotely resembled any of the coats or hats that the rest of the party were wearing.

Michael tapped the photograph with his finger. “Presumably, this picture was taken by Dr Evans. It's not the kind of photograph you could take with a thread, anyway, not with the type of camera that Scott took with him to the Pole. Too far away, too difficult. But look at the caption … Dr Evans hasn't attempted to give any special emphasis to this unknown sixth man; and none of the others seem to be concerned that he's there. Yet, he isn't mentioned Scott's diary; and we know for a recorded fact that only five set off on the last leg across the polar plateau. So where did he come from? And who is he? And what happened to him, when all the rest of them died?”

I stared at the photograph for a long time. The mysterious sixth man was very tall, and his hat had a wide sweeping brim, like a coal-heaver's hat, so that his face was obscured by an impenetrable shadow. He could have been anybody. I looked at the back of the photograph, and read,
R. Amundsen's Tent At The Pole, January 17, 1912
. No mention at all of the man in black. A mystery, nearly eighty years old, but Michael was right about its sensitivity. At the time, the tragedy of Captain Scott's
Antarctic expedition had moved a whole nation to tears; and there were many people in England, even today, who would find any revisionist explanations of their fate to be gravely offensive.