26

Considering his earlier errors, and determined not to repeat them, Klaes went back to first principles.

The only substantial pointer to what it was the villagers were trying to conceal—and it was clear now, if it hadn’t been before, that they were trying to conceal something—was the words spoken by the yokel Kopesz when Klaes was lying on the ground and presumed to be stunned.

About Petos. About the cellar, and all that stuff.

That had given him two directions to investigate, and he had been remiss in both. First of all, he had taken Bosilka’s threat to tell Meister Weichorek to mean that it was to the burgomaster that this secret belonged. And he had taken his lack of knowledge to the mayor and tried to bluff the secret out of him, with predictable results. He had no desire to repeat that experiment any time soon, although he promised himself that when he got to the bottom of this he would pull Weichorek’s beard hard enough to hurt.

But he had also assumed that the tiny room behind the kitchen where the gypsy had made her nest was the only cellar that the mansion boasted. He knew now that this could not be the case. Weichorek had described much more extensive cellars, complete with wine racks and broken furniture. Perhaps if he were to seek them out, he would find something in them that would either answer his questions or point him in a new direction.

So he descended the main staircase to the mansion’s wide entrance hall and began to search the rooms on the ground floor. Most of these were still empty, apart from Molebacher’s kitchen and the adjacent apartments that he was using as storage space.

Klaes began there, at the rear of the house, and made a slow, methodical clockwise circuit, through the sodden, mildewed wilderness of the east and north extensions, then back into the habitable part of the house via a vast echoing ballroom. His skin prickled unpleasantly here, but most likely it was only the chill.

Nowhere did he find what he was looking for: a door or trap with a staircase behind it, leading down into the mansion’s underground levels. Was this another lie of Weichorek’s? Was Drozde’s rancid hideaway, after all, the only cellar Pokoj possessed? It seemed highly unlikely now that he thought about it. A house whose living space was this large would surely have needed storage on a similar scale. And yet it seemed there was nothing.

Klaes completed his circuit at Molebacher’s kitchen again. This was the most likely place for a cellar door. The mansion would have needed a spring house or icehouse, or something of that kind, and such accommodations were typically below ground. He walked round all the walls of the kitchen itself—the quartermaster sergeant was evidently still closeted with Colonel August—but nothing presented itself to his eye. The only stairs were those that led down to the room the gypsy had claimed.

He turned his attention to the floor. No trapdoors could be seen, and there were no coverings beneath which one might have lain hidden.

He was about to begin a second circuit of the walls when it occurred to him that there was another telling mystery in all of this. When they had first come here, a few short weeks before, they had found a house open to the elements and obviously deserted. If there had been a militia detachment here, what rooms had they occupied? Why had they left nothing behind of themselves, not even the rubbish from their meals or the shit from their latrines?

Perhaps the colonel was right, Klaes thought, and Petos had deserted. But then, what had happened to the rest of his detachment? Surely they had not gone with him: a dozen militiamen to turn into ghosts, all at once, and leave no shadow or footprint? It was hard to credit.

But what if one were to start from the opposing premise? If they had been here, then the signs of their presence would be here still. It was just that he hadn’t seen them.

He walked the rooms again, looking this time not for doors but for evidence of human habitation—by a large group of men, and in the recent past. He found none.

He went back up onto the upper floor and did the same. He could not, of course, go into the other officers’ quarters, but then he had been largely responsible for supervising their installation and so he felt reasonably sure that memory would suffice here.

Nowhere in the house could he find any relicts of Petos or his militiamen. No lost items of clothing, no personal belongings forgotten in the haste of a sudden departure. No apple cores, nutshells or cheese rinds from hasty barracks meals. No scuffs or scrapes left by pallet beds pushed up against walls or boots dragged across floors. Above all, no indication that anyone had ever tried to make this bleak and decaying place more homely or comfortable to the tiniest degree, except in the rooms that August’s officers had taken over. If they had ever been here, the militia had taken away with them every last atomy of their goods and of their detritus.

Klaes leaned against the window frame in one of the rooms that overlooked the ruined abbey, gazing out through the shattered window. It was here, in the extensive grounds to the front and the southern flank of the house, that the enlisted men had set up their tents. And the camp followers, of course, had gone where the enlisted men had gone, just as surely as water runs downhill. There were a great many tents, but they were most thickly clustered close to the mansion, like children clinging to their mother’s skirts. Behind them and to the west was where the carpenters from the village were building the whipping frames for the next day’s flogging. The sound of their hammers came to Klaes on the crisp, cold air.

On the east side Pokoj directly adjoined the road.

What of the rear of the house, though? The stable yard was all he had seen, because the back door opened straight off it. He went there now and found a gate that took him past the well into a narrow kitchen garden bordered on all sides by walls of moss-covered stone. Another gate on the further side, closed with a bolt, led to an orchard with about a dozen trees. Some were obviously dead, bracket fungus spilling like intestines from their split, dried-out bark. A wicker basket lay under one, as though someone picking fruit had been called away or distracted in some long-ago summer, and had never returned to finish the task. Couch grass grew up through the basket’s broken weave.

Klaes walked on through the orchard, keeping the rear wall of the house on his left until he came to the corner. All was ruin and neglect here. The coulter of a plough, half-buried in the ground, almost tripped him. It was as though unimproved nature was triumphing over the men and women of the house, now dead, who had tried to tame and teach her.

He went back to the garden. This must once have been a well ordered kingdom of herbs and vegetables. Stone flags marked it out into three separate beds of roughly equal size, except that a heap of dry straw at the bottom of the middle bed left a smaller cultivable area. Nothing was being cultivated here now in any case: left to themselves for many years, all the beds were dense tangles of weeds. Some of the brambles had stems almost as thick as Klaes’s wrist.

He was still looking for discarded waste from the meals Petos and his men might have eaten here. That was why his gaze was on the ground, and why he saw what he would otherwise have missed. The grass and weeds had been cut away around the mound of straw. It hadn’t been dumped on top of the weeds: it had been set down in a cleared space between them.

Where had the straw come from in the first place, in a kitchen garden? It had most likely been brought in from the stable yard, but why would anyone do that? To start a compost heap? But the work had been done recently—too recently for the days when this garden was still fruitful and might have derived some benefit from composting.

Gingerly, because it was a little damp and musty, Klaes cleared away the straw. Underneath it was bare soil raised into a low, untidy mound. Someone had dug here and then heaped up the straw to hide the fact.

Klaes went to find a spade. There were no sappers with the detachment, but Sergeant Strumpfel kept six shovels for the digging of latrines. He found them leaning in a row against the walls of the stables and took the nearest.

There had been no serious frost yet, so the earth was soft enough. Klaes took off his coat, folded it carefully and set it on the ledge of a ground floor window. Then he rolled back his sleeves and set to work.

After some minutes’ digging, he struck something soft. He squatted down in the hole he’d made and scooped away the soil with his hands, revealing what looked at first like the fabric of a sack. A little further excavation, however, showed that this was not the case. Sacks have no buttons.

Klaes went and closed the gate that led to the stable yard. There was no bolt here, so he propped it shut with a stone. Then he returned to his work.

Ten minutes later he had dug all the way around the outline of the buried thing. It was six feet long, two broad, and had an army greatcoat draped over it. The greatcoat had been grey once, but now it was harlequined blue and white with mould and lustrous with the spoor of worms and snails. On its shoulders were the eagle and diamond lozenge that marked a captain’s rank.

By this time, of course, Klaes knew what it was that he had found. The foetid smell that was rising from the ground was as good in that respect as any gravestone. So he was not surprised at all when he peeled back the collar of the greatcoat and found himself staring into the sunken eye sockets of a corpse. He only winced as the stench intensified, billowing up like the dead man’s last pent breath.

“Captain Nymand Petos, I think,” he murmured, covering his mouth and nose with his cupped hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.” But that was just a sort of graveyard humour, spoken in bravado to push against the quiet horror of the moment.

He was not pleased at all. Not when he thought of what this would bring.

If it were not for the floggings . . . But he had ample evidence now that Colonel August would react in an extreme and intemperate way to the news of Petos’s death. And Klaes did not really know, yet, what his death portended. It was even hard, at this remove, to determine what had caused it. There were rents in the front of the greatcoat that seemed to suggest violence. But perhaps the captain merely kept his coat in poor repair, or perhaps Klaes had torn it himself by thrusting in the blade of the shovel as he was digging. The dead man’s shirt had already rotted off his back and most of the flesh beneath had fallen away, so there were no clues there. The side of the skull was squashed in and misshapen, but was that from a blow or from being thrown into the hole?

He resolved that he would not act, or inform anyone of what he had found, until he had some answers to these questions. To do so, in the current climate of mistrust and resentment between Narutsin and the camp, would be to inflame emotions already roused and tender. He emphatically did not want to bring more fuel to the colonel’s fire.

So he would wait until the floggings were done, and then he would approach Bosilka again. He had trusted Meister Weichorek once, and would not do so a second time, but he believed he could explain to the girl what was at stake. She was intelligent enough and brave enough to tell him the truth, and once he knew the truth he would decide what needed to be done.

Until then he would keep his counsel.

He straightened, picked up the shovel and set to work to hide all over again what he had just uncovered.

Sergeant Molebacher returned to his kitchen, his mind distracted and his emotions agitated. His interview with Colonel August had had a favourable outcome, but he was still in a sort of suspended state, and would remain so until another interview—with Drozde—had taken place.

It was time to start the preparations for dinner, and he hadn’t even decided what the menu was to be. He had beets and hogweed, so he could make a proper borscht, and there were chickens for the main course if he could think of something suitable to do with them. He needed either carrots or potatoes, or possibly swedes. And flour for a staka.

He went into the larger of his two food stores to see what was there. Empty space, for the most part. Normally he could perform miracles even with empty space—and normally he would be calling up some of his little demons now, his light-fingered skirmishers, to go about among the fields and gardens and take a secret tithe from the farmers of Narutsin. But he had been thrown off balance by his discovery in the village. He could not face the privates he normally bullied and hectored so easily, knowing that they had seen him broken, for however short a time. Now he was running to catch up with himself, and a fat man running is an undignified sight.

As he was rummaging among the shelves, hoping to find some vegetables that had escaped his attention, he chanced to glance through the window. It looked out onto a walled space that might once have been a garden. It was a wilderness now, and offered nothing of any use to anyone except a dumping ground for scraps.

But there was Lieutenant Klaes in his shirtsleeves, squatting on the ground at the far end of the enclosed space. What was Snotwipe doing out there? Taking a shit? No, he was looking into a hole in the ground, with a mound of earth beside him and a shovel lying at his feet.

And now he was standing, and shovelling the soil back into the hole. Sergeant Molebacher put his face closer to the fly-specked pane. He could see the troubled expression on Klaes’s face, the furtive glances he cast over his shoulder as he worked. He looked towards the house once or twice too, but Molebacher remained perfectly still and let the lieutenant’s gaze sweep right past him. He must surely be invisible in the darkened room, the contours of his face lost in the window’s filthy constellations.

Klaes put all the earth back in the hole, and then heaped straw over the place where it had been. It was an extraordinary thing for an officer to do. Molebacher couldn’t think of anything the lieutenant might have to hide that would justify such a laborious procedure. Even if he’d killed a man in a fight, say (as if Klaes would ever have the balls to do a thing like that!), it would be easier to leave the body by the side of a road than to bring it home with him and give it a decent burial.

So there was something here, and it piqued the sergeant’s curiosity even in his present preoccupied state. He had not yet repaid Klaes for shaming him in front of his men, and Molebacher did not easily forget those sorts of debt. Besides, the colonel didn’t like Klaes, so anything that put him in a bad light would bring the added benefit of pleasing August and assisting Molebacher in his ongoing programme of ingratiation.

There were other things to see to first. There was dinner to prepare for the officers, which would need to be served up promptly. And the floggings were set for the next morning: it was important that he was present for that entertainment.

But he would keep an eye on Lieutenant Snotwipe, he decided. And he would find out, as soon as was convenient, what was buried in that hole.