A cool rain falls over Emil Winge and Mickel Cardell as they walk back to Dane’s Bay Hospital, by a now familiar route. From time to time the wind picks up, and the salty gusts from the water tear at every strip of cloth that isn’t secured with stitches, buttons, or clasps. The wheel tracks in the road are slowly filling with brown water until it finally spills over, leaving their leather soles without refuge. For a time, the sound of their progress grows irregular as they vainly measure their steps between dry spots, but soon the wetness of their feet makes the point moot, and the march resumes at a regular pace. Cardell maintains a grumpy silence, and for Emil Winge it becomes clear that it is something more than the weather and boots that is rubbing him up the wrong way. Time and again, Winge sends him a sidelong glance, only to find him wearing the same sour face, frowning in thought. Only once they are out of sight of the tollgate does he find the courage to ask.
“Jean Michael, what’s wrong? Our chances are better than ever before. Three Roses will be clearheaded by now, and we’ll finally get to hear the whole story, straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Cardell pauses, sweeps his hat from his head, and scratches angrily at his forehead, where his exertions have caused the sweat to run.
“It’s about a girl. No, nothing like that, I’m too old for her, and for… many other things besides. She helped your brother and me with the missing piece of a puzzle. I went to look her up yesterday, but she’s nowhere to be found. When last I saw her, she was with child. She should have been delivered of it by now. Where she has gone, I have no idea, but I sense trouble. Stockholm is no place for a young mother with a babe in her arms.”
Cardell turns his back to the wind and squints at the buildings of the city, as if what he is looking for could more easily be spotted from a distance. When he turns back again he meets Winge’s eyes and is brought up short by the disappointment he glimpses there. He wipes the rain off his face.
“I beg your pardon. You’re right, and it’s a poor way to repay your sharp mind for me to go moping around like this. Our business does for the first time look promising, and that’s thanks to you. If I let my thoughts wander for a moment, then don’t take it as anything but proof of my confidence in you.”
He sets off again and gives Winge a clap on the shoulder, strong enough to make him stumble sideways. Winge hurries to keep pace.
“I wish I could help you. Will you describe her to me, so I might recognize her if I see her?”
Cardell does his best to oblige.
In Erik Three Roses’s room, the bed has been stripped to its slats, the mattress confiscated. What few possessions there once were, are nowhere to be seen. In shocked silence, Cardell and Winge each cross the threshold and survey the empty space. Cardell is the first to express their feeling in words.
“What the fuck?”
Winge stays put while Cardell circles all four corners of the room, as if to assure himself that no explanation has been concealed among the sparse furnishings. Their confused silence is interrupted by a knocking on the wall, and they follow the sound to the room next door. Here the situation is reversed. The room bears traces of long-term occupancy, and half sitting in the bed is a man in shirtsleeves. A curtain hangs in front of the window, and it’s only when their eyes have grown accustomed to the dim light that they can see how the sheets have been arranged to hide the dropsied man’s swollen belly and legs.
“Joakim Ersson is my name. A merchant once, before this malady laid waste to me.”
Cardell gives him a nod in greeting.
“Cardell and Winge. We extend our hopes of a speedy recovery.”
Ersson pats his thigh and chuckles with bitterness.
“Every day they come here and drain me of a whole pitcher of mucus, to no avail. If I could only find any demand for the stuff, my fortune would be made. Here are deep resources, let me tell you.”
“We are looking for Erik Three Roses.”
The merchant nods.
“He isn’t here any longer.”
“No? Then where?”
“They have taken him to the madhouse.”
Cardell’s voice is a shocked roar.
“What the hell for?”
An expression close to despondency flickers across the merchant’s face.
“They saw no other way. The boy was no longer himself, not even compared to how he was before. Once they drain me, I can sometimes walk a few steps, and more often than not those take me to Three Roses’s room. The drops he receives make him groggy, and he’ll rarely speak to me. But I can banter enough for two and at least I always felt myself in the company of a fellow human being, but now…”
“What happened?”
“There were visitors. Two unfamiliar voices alongside that of Three Roses. They talked for some time. Then they did something, and I don’t quite know what. I heard some noises I can’t explain, and then there was a smell like that of roasted meat, and then they left Three Roses alone. When I finally managed to drag my miserable body over to him some hours later, he was lying in his bed and he…”
Ersson’s heavy lips begins to tremble, before the corners of his mouth curl into an involuntary grimace.
“I was already here the day Three Roses arrived. You gentlemen can see that I will never be well enough to return to any normal life, but that boy was young, with his whole life before him. I always hoped that Three Roses would recover. So few of us can afford any hope of such a thing. In lieu of any triumphs of my own, I told myself I would at least have the chance to witness his.”
The tears begin to roll down the merchant’s plump cheeks, and his nose starts to run. Ersson conceals his face in a corner of the sheet. His words emerge muffled from the cloth.
“They did something to his head. There were stains all over the floor. The bandages weren’t enough to stanch the blood, his whole pillow was stained red. And Three Roses… there was only an empty shell left of him.”
On the cliff by the sea, the lunatics are restless. The guard who shows Winge and Cardell the way through the corridors, resounding with derision and despair, sends them an occasional apologetic glance over his shoulder.
“They are too many, the overcrowding has got too bad, and if any of them start acting up it’ll spread like wildfire through the entire building before you know it.”
They walk up a flight of stairs, across a courtyard and onwards through the large building, before a guard unlocks a heavy oak door and shows them into a corridor flanked by doors with hatches at eye level.
“Here’s our new arrival.”
He opens a hatch and peers in, making a face at the smells and gesturing them to see for themselves while he steps aside to scratch a stye on his eye. Cardell blinks to force his eyes to make sense of the gloom. There is hay on the floor, an overturned chamber pot, four men, naked or in rags, tightly crowded together to shield themselves from the light they have learned to fear. He curses profusely as he makes room for Winge to have a look. Cardell shakes his wooden fist at the lock.
“Open up and let him out. And get him something to cover himself with.”
The four lunatics meekly back away, and Cardell stands wide-legged in the middle of the room as if to keep them at bay in the corner. The room is chilly. Three Roses is sitting on the floor with his legs bent in front of him and his hands resting on the floor, motionless, without any noticeable reaction to the changing light or the visitors who now lay their hands on him and try to get him to his feet. His limbs appear palsied. Shaking and limping, he allows himself to be led across the floor. Winge whispers the few words that come to him, their blandishments meaningless. He places his hands gently on Three Roses’s shoulders in order to get him to sit on the bench under the barred window. The boy stinks worse than the rest of the cell. Excrement and urine have run down his legs, dried, and caused his skin to break out in a bright red rash. His lips are blue. Around the boy’s head is a soiled bandage, adorned as if with an obscene rose where the wound has bled through.
The guard returns with an oversized linen shirt, and when Winge has carefully pulled it over Three Roses’s head and threaded his arms through, he points to the bandage.
“What can you tell me about his injury?”
The guard shakes his head so hard it sends the lice flying.
“Nothing, sir, he arrived here in that state.”
Erik Three Roses doesn’t move a muscle as Winge palpates his head with light fingers, loosening the knot that keeps the bandage in place and starting to unwind it. Underneath, the long hair is shorn away, and parts of the skull have been shaved. The wound itself is as small as a shilling. It is at the top of his forehead, ringed by clusters of lice that have drowned at their feast. The blackened crust cracks where it has caught in the fabric bandage and lets out a thin stream of blood and fluid. Winge sits staring at it before kneeling in front of Three Roses, his hands on his cheeks in an attempt to get him to meet his gaze. He only finds emptiness there. The swelling from the injury has spread to the forehead, where a dark engorged bruise now hangs down over the eyes, forcing a squint. One eye is crossed inward, inert as marble. The mouth hangs open and as saliva pools under the tongue, it overflows the corner of his mouth. Cardell turns towards the guard.
“Wash him up and give him a room of his own.”
The protest is almost on the man’s lips before Cardell beats him to it.
“I don’t care how cramped you are. Do as I say, even if it must be your own. He won’t be any trouble, and if the door lacks a lock, so what, given the state he’s in.”
He shifts his gaze to Winge, who whispers in response.
“An empty shell.”
Outside, the evening wind whistles by the corners of the madhouse. Headwind on the trip out, headwind on the way back. The waves lick the shore. When the sunset wind starts blowing out to sea, Cardell is usually the first to head inside, but now he tolerates its gusts with equanimity, happy to let the blasts air the madhouse out of his clothes. On the opposite shore, the shadows of the shipyards blend into a greater darkness. Beyond the islets, the flag is lowered on the fortress guarding the inlet, and further inside the bay, the City-between-the-Bridges waits for its lanterns to be lit. A delayed vessel is making its way towards the harbor, its lanterns twinkling, in hope of docking while there is still some light. Only when they have left the tollgate behind them and found shelter from the wind under the ridge does Cardell open his mouth.
“What now? What should we do?”
Winge jerks at the words, interrupted from the same line of thought. He hesitates for a moment before shaking his head.
“Please give me time to think, Jean Michael.”
On the other side of the Lock they part ways, each to a different alley, Cardell in his heavy boots, Winge with rapid steps, avoiding the flickering overtures from the shadows when the gusts start to set the lanterns in motion.