Shroud of Shadow (33 page)

What gets us through?

The question remained, stark and uncompromising, as Hadden and Wheat drove toward Denver. They swung north at Albuquerque, passed through Las Vegan and Raton, climbed through the Sangre de Christo mountains, and descended into Trinidad to eat at the McDonald's just off the highway.

Here, surrounded by brick buildings a century old, by the rusting undersides of railroad trestles, by the dark faces of descendants and relatives of the migrant farm workers who picked and harvested their way across the Southwest—following the crops, following the seasons—the question came again, shouldering its way through the plastic and the gloss and the hamburgers.
What gets us through?

But the wind from the east took the pollution from the air and left the mountains clear and focused. Even between the railroad trestles and the highway overpasses, the sky was blue; and just out beyond the parking lot, where the asphalt did not quite reach, was dirt, simple dirt, patched with spotted spurge and crabgrass and wild lettuce and all the weeds that owed their allegiance not to any human desire or will but only to the sun and the rain.

Hadden was looking out the window. Dirt. Weeds. Growing things. Yes, as was the case everywhere, there was poverty here, and the hands of human beings had sullied much; but the land was still beneath it all, and the mountains were lovely, and the sky . . .

“It's a nice day,” he said softly, staring, his Big Mac forgotten for the moment.

Wheat—blue-eyed, slender, with the wide gaze of a child who had seen, perhaps, a little too much—was nodding. “It is.”

“Is that it, do you think?”

“What?”

“Is that what gets us through? Nice days?” He laughed quietly, self-consciously.

She smiled, dropped her eyes. “Hell of a thought, isn't it?”

Her lapse into her former manner of speech made them both laugh out loud, and there was something silvery in their voices that put a pause to twenty or so restaurant conversations, made eyes flick toward the man and the woman over in the corner booth.

Wheat glanced about, blushed. “Oops.”

Hadden was still looking out at the mountains and the sky. A smile, faint but genuine. “We're here. They'll just have to adjust, I'm afraid.”

“But what about us? We'll have to adjust, too. But to what? And what are we?”

“We'll figure it out.”

But on the way out, they both saw the resignation in the eyes of the young women behind the counter, and there was a dull, plodding manner to the other customers. Faint expectations, frustrated hope. This was it. This was all that could be expected from life: work (maybe), and an occasional meal in the plastic and gloss of a fast-food restaurant. And Hadden and Wheat knew again that they themselves had been blessed. Oh, there would be work, to be sure, tedious and mind-numbing upon occasion; and there would, doubtless, be any number of impersonal meals in coffee shops. But they had seen the mountains and the sky, fields of stars and fields of wheat. And they would, they knew with certainty, continue to see more. Still . . .

. . . still there was pain in the world. And they saw it. They felt it. Deeply. Terribly.

What gets us through?

There was something. There
had
to be something. And when Hadden pulled out onto I-25 fifteen minutes later, he had already made up his mind that his destination would not be Denver. He would, instead, pass through that city, guiding the van toward that strange little turn-off from Highway 6, the one that, weeks ago, had caught his imagination and his spirit, lifted them, and begun the process of transformation that had led him first through the mountains, and then onward onto fields of mingled sorrow and praise.

He nodded to himself. Wheat looked at him inquiringly. “Denver?”

“I want to show you something first,” said Hadden. “I want to show you where it started. For me. Maybe it'll finish there for both of us. Or maybe it'll start to finish. I don't know for sure. But I want to show you. And I want to show myself.”

***

Eudes found Marjorie's body the next morning, her eyes decently closed, the covers tucked up beneath her chin, and—oddly enough—a look of quiet peace on her face. Pausing only long enough to cross himself, the trusty old wardrobe ran to fetch his master; and Jacob, who had fallen asleep over a plate of cold dinner and been left undisturbed throughout the night, came to kneel beside the corpse of his wife . . . and his dreams.

She was gone now. The little farce was finished. His fantasies had been shown to be fantasies, his avarice and spleen permanent constituents of his personality form which there was, and would be, no deliverance. The grave, perhaps, would save him, but that was all.

Jacob's heart was cold as he rose from the bed and told Eudes to inform Bishop Etienne of the death. “I want a big funeral,” he rasped at the steward. “Big. Spare no expense. Make up some expenses if you can. Throw as much money away as possible.”

Eudes blinked, arched a molding, bent his stiff and wooden frame, and departed. Jacob stood for another moment at the deathbed. Then:

“I hate you,” he said. “I hate you all.”

He turned and walked out of the room, only to meet Francis in the hallway.

“Father! I heard . . . I mean—”

“She's dead.”

For a moment, Francis looked relieved, and then, properly and pompously, he put on grief as another man might have donned a cloak. “I'm . . . sorry . . .”

Quiet and dry as Jacob's voice was, it contained an ocean's depth of contempt. “The hell you are. You didn't want her any more than she wanted you. Neither did Josef. I saw the look on his face. Damn near threw up.” He glared at his eldest son for a moment more. “Where is he, anyway?”

“Josef?”

“Who else? He should know that he's safe with his books now.”

“He's . . .” Francis stared, flustered. “I mean, didn't you know?”

“Know? Know about what?”

“Josef is gone. He left the other night. He took some food, a sword, and a horse.”

Jacob stared, the chill in his heart deepening, bringing on, slowly, a sense of frost, then of ice. Frozen. Frozen and dead. “Did he say anything?”

“Nothing,” said Francis. “Not even a note. No one heard him leave.”

Jacob passed a hand over his face, felt the sere dryness of aged skin, the graying bristles of an unshaven beard that stood stiffly, like the stubble of wheat in a reaped field. Josef. Gone. Small loss, really, but—

Small loss? But that was what Marjorie would have said. A nitwit, she had called him, even from his first breath, his first tentative suck at her teat. And had it been Marjorie, then, who had first named him so, who had first branded him with the unkind and hasty appellation that had clung to him, turned from mother's curse to destiny? Was that it? Had the lad never even had a
chance
?

Jacob pressed his fists to his temples. His heart was cold, but his brain seemed ready to take fire and burn down the house.

“Well, you know,” said Francis, squaring his shoulders and clearing his throat, “I suspected he'd come to this. Gone down to join Karl, I guess. He won't last a season—”

His words were cut short by Jacob's fist. Francis lurched, gagged with the impact, fell against the wall. Jacob placed his foot against his son's forehead and shoved him all the way to the floor. “That's my son you're talking about, you insolent young pup!”

Francis was holding a cut jaw. Blood was seeping through his fingers. “I'll remind you . . .” He gagged, coughed. “. . . that he's my brother.”

Jacob resisted the impulse to kick him. “Oh, really! For years, he's a nitwit. He's an idiot. He's a fool. He's not worth taking into any of the family confidences. You always used to beat the snot out of him when you were growing up together because you said he offended you. By living, no doubt! But a little blood on your chin, and he's suddenly your dearest brother!” He crowed with sarcasm. “Oh, such virtue! Such fraternal love!”

Francis's blood streaked a white, angry face. He crouched against the wall like something about to spring.

For another moment of contempt, Jacob stared down at him. And then he turned away. “Josef was worth ten of those dogs that you and Claire whelped.”

Francis staggered to his feet as his father clumped down the corridor. “I . . .”

Jacob spun. “You
what
?”

“You're . . . insulting my wife and my sons.” Francis's voice was venomous, as dark as the blood that covered his chin. “I demand an apology.”

Jacob almost laughed. “You won't get one. Go feed your pigs. I'm surprised they're not all here to fight over the carcass.”

Francis's eyes burned with impotent rage, but Jacob went off down the hall without another look at him. Marjorie was gone. Now Josef was gone, too; and Francis was probably right: the lad would not last a season. He might not even last a mile. Jacob's heart turned even colder, turned towards death, as he considered all the opportunities he had been given—opportunities missed or rejected—to make something out of Josef. But, no: he had treated his sons just as he had treated Marjorie—

He stopped, clenching his jaw. There was the fantasy again. Just as he had treated Marjorie? But how had Marjorie treated him? She had abandoned him. She had ridiculed her sons. She had rejected everything because everything was not hers.

And so: Josef. And so: Francis. And so, more than likely: Karl. And so, the next generation down: Edvard and Norman. All fine specimens of the old Aldernacht sperm!

“Eudes!”

In a moment, the old servant creaked into sight. “Yes, Mister Jacob?”

“Those orders I gave about Marjorie. Cancel them.”

“Cancel . . . ?”

“Bury her like a pauper. No ceremony. Find a plot somewhere, sew her into a shroud—canvas, if you can find it—and have a priest put her in. That's all.”

Eudes, blank as a varnished board, nodded faintly. “Yes, Mister Jacob.”

He started to go off, but Jacob called him back. “One more thing. When I die, you bury me the same way.”

“But—”

“Those are my orders. I'll have Charles draw up the papers this afternoon. Just shovel me under and leave it at that. Like a pauper. Because that's what I am. That's all I am. Understand?”

Eudes stared, awash in bewilderment.

Jacob took a step toward him. “
Understand?
”

“Y-yes . . .” Eudes looked ready to bolt. “Yes, Mister Jacob.”

“Off with you, then.”

The wardrobe left quickly. Jacob clenched his hands. A pauper. Yes, that was exactly what he was. He had once possessed dreams and fantasies, but no more. He had money, but money could not keep the cold from his heart. He had sons . . . once. He had a wife . . . once.

Now, nothing. All he had left was . . .

“Natil!” he called suddenly. “Natil! Come here! I need you!” He wanted music. He wanted song. He wanted the honesty he had always read in her face and eyes.

But Natil was gone, and, an hour later, after a search of the house and grounds and city had been unable to produce the harper, Jacob stood in her small room. The Aldernacht livery she had worn lay strewn on the floor, and her fantastic garb of cloth and beads and feathers was gone. A few scraps of rags, some bloody footprints, evidence of belongings gathered fearfully and in haste, but that was all.

And though there were signs aplenty of something more than a simple unauthorized departure, Jacob flared with the rage of the abandoned. He could understand that Marjorie had left him. He could reason out a meaning behind Josef's action. But this blatant and traitorous flight on the part of the harper was beyond any kind of forgiveness or mercy, and his anger—already overflowing—turned to violence.

“Manarel,” he said to his road steward. “Call up the guards. I want a troop of men saddled and armed by midmorning. I want Natil found.”

Manarel, who had seen his employer's anger many times before, asked no questions. He simply bowed. “The men and I will leave immediately, master.”

Jacob shook his head. “I'll be going with you.”

Manarel stared.

“I want to kill the bitch myself,” said Jacob, and he was fully cognizant of the double meaning inherent in his words.

***

“I want to hear everything. I want to hear the truth.”

Harold was neither a hero nor a defiant representative of free thought. He was a shawm player. And though he was used to the many kinds of hardship intrinsic to a musician's life—fleas, hunger, knife fights, an occasional fist to the face—he was unprepared for the methodical and surgically precise torments inflicted at Siegfried's command. Needles in nerve, the touch of red hot irons, a tongue dragged forward and seared white: all these were well beyond both his cognizance and his endurance, and they extracted from him, thickly interspersed with screams and blabberings, a tale of pernicious and widespread heresy the monstrousness of which astonished even Siegfried.

“And you confessed to this so-called priest how many times?”

“I . . . I . . . I . . . hundreds . . . hundreds . . .”

“Come now, Harold. Do not play with us.”

His eyelids were bruised from clenching. They seemed black holes in a skull. “Fifty. I confessed fifty t-times.”

“Are you sure?”

Stiff with crusted burns, his tongue could hardly form the words: “Th-th-th-thirty-five.”

“All right then. And what did he tell you afterwards? Who did you meet? You returned to your master, Jacob Aldernacht, did you not?”

“I . . . I swear . . .”

“Do not speak to me of swearing. You and your kind absolve one another regularly for swearing in an effort to preserve your sect. This I know. Simply tell the truth. Tell us about Jacob Aldernacht.”

But despite his torments, when it came to Jacob Aldernacht, Harold turned suddenly reticent. Siegfried had expected this, though, for silence invariably meant guilt. Yes, Jacob Aldernacht was a heretic, and his plans to bring gold and prosperity to Furze were but a furtherance of his efforts to establish a kingdom of Satan in the middle of Christian Europe.”

“Tell me everything. Tell me the truth.”