30

I took the news of all these events to Frere, but he showed little interest in what I told him. I started to tell him of the contradictory stories Nash had been told, but he insisted he did not want to hear them. He asked me instead if there had been any word of the steamer, but I could tell him only that it was two days from us on a falling river.

I told him of what I had destroyed, and in a voice devoid of all conviction and emotion he said I’d done the right thing.

Looking around for anything further he might want removed and burned, I saw that a great deal had already been taken from his cell.

‘Bone,’ he said. ‘I paid him to destroy what was left.’

‘Was that wise?’

‘I insisted on watching the fire through my window and paid him when he was done.’ He picked up his Bible from the desk. ‘I want you to take this,’ he said. He paused slightly before releasing his hold on it. ‘Is it tainted, do you think?’

I took the book from him. ‘May I send it to Caroline?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘It was beyond me to ask it of you.’

*   *   *

‘I will write to her,’ I said.

‘I know. I imagine you’ve already started and destroyed a dozen letters. Tell her your truths. Make no case for me other than what exists in your heart.’

‘She would never have condemned you,’ I said, knowing that these most distant of connections would never be severed. I took his hand in mine and felt his fingers tighten around my own, and we sat like this for several minutes, neither of us speaking or knowing how to speak, until finally his grip slackened and he withdrew from me.

‘Go,’ he told me. By which he meant that this was our parting, his final act of severance.

I went without complaint and he watched me from where he sat, his hands splayed on the boards of his table.

A bright light shone in on him through the open doorway and I stood to one side to see him fully bathed in its glow. His eyes were closed – though whether against the intensity of this glare or the fact of my departure, I could not tell.

At the outer doorway I paused again and secured the Bible beneath my jacket. Men and women passed back and forth across the garrison yard; Bone and his men performed some perfunctory drill; a tethered goat repeated its child-like bleat. I saw how far I had come in those few paces and seconds from the man alone and adrift at his table.

I walked into the yard and passed through the crowd there towards the river. I was accosted by several traders, but I ignored them all, knowing that if I attempted to speak I would only choke on the silence I had swallowed.

*   *   *

The following morning both Perpetua and Felicity were found hanging from the same limb of an ironwood tree a hundred yards from the compound wall. It was a low limb and the two bodies hung barely a foot from the ground. They were close together and the arm of Perpetua was extended towards Felicity as though the two women had held hands during their final moments. Both wore their nuns’ habits, and around the neck of each woman was a sign saying ‘Please Forgive Us’; the same three words, and each sign written in the same careful hand.

I was alerted to the discovery by Cornelius, who had himself been roused by Bone, but we knew nothing of what we were about to see until our arrival at the tree, beneath which the women still hung and twisted on their ropes. Twenty or thirty others knelt in a circle around them, praying, and occasionally falling forwards to clutch the ground in their grief.

Klein stood to one side of this crowd, his head bowed, a book of prayer closed over the fingers of his hand.

No-one turned at our approach, and Cornelius and I stood at the edge of the trees, unable to take our eyes from the bodies. I felt numbed by what I saw.

Cornelius went ahead of me, through the praying circle, until he stood beside the women, and just as he had cut Perpetua from her cross, so he took out his knife and cut her from her rope. He called for help from the crowd, but no-one rose to assist him.

He held Perpetua as she fell loose, and then laid her on the ground beneath the tree. He then did the same for Felicity, laying her close beside Perpetua and folding their arms across their chests. He pulled their long skirts straight and brushed the leaves and dirt from their shoulders. Then he cut the messages from around their necks and took them to where Klein stood. He tore the boards into pieces and threw them in the priest’s face. Klein, though lifting his head to look directly at Cornelius, did nothing to protect himself, merely standing as the pieces of torn card struck him and then fell fluttering to his feet.

I wondered what Cornelius might do next, and I started moving towards him, but as I did so he turned away from the silent priest and came back to me, passing me without speaking.

A detail was sent to remove and bury the two bodies, at which Klein himself insisted on officiating.

I watched this later in the day and saw the two younger women chosen by Klein to become his new helpers, the black-and-white outfits already worn by these grateful, excited novices.

I left the graveyard at the first of the hymns.

Late in the afternoon, the deformed boy ran terrified into the compound and lay on the ground screaming until Fletcher went out to him and shook him into silence. He called the boy our bird of ill omen and told him to leave. But the boy refused to go, and afterwards Fletcher and Cornelius took it in turns to question him until he screamed again and told them of what he had seen.