I wait only a short while, just long enough to make sure Fran has truly gone, before leaving Mama’s empty cottage. The thought of that home now hollow and cold invades my thoughts, its vacuum leaching from my mind the old and fond memories of Fran and me chasing our brothers through bright rooms, screaming and giggling. Of family meals alive with the noise of excitement and mirth. Of tender evenings when stories were told around an ember-warmed hearth. Even if I did not have to retrieve Mama’s body, I could in no way stay there tonight.
Wrapped in my warmest winter clothes, I step out into the dim street and lock the door. I wish I followed those two men immediately after they left, but fear prevented me. At least I was given the name of the artist. I had not heard of Keitus Vieta before, so he must be new to the town. Armand Balleo, the leaseholder, will tell me where Mr. Vieta has settled. If anyone knows, he will.
I hurry across the fast settling snow that coats the cobblestones, looking up briefly to see the time on the clock tower a few streets away. It’s almost ten. I am surprised to see so few people out. Then I remember what Fran said about the riots, and I look again at the clock. The glow of fire lighting its face is brighter—an indication perhaps that the mob or its violence in the center of town has not yet been subdued.
I stop to listen. There’s a dull crackle of fire, the sharp tinkling of breaking glass, and a body of voices crying out indecipherable abuse. A pang of anxiety holds me in place as I imagine fighting through an angry crowd to find Armand, but I hear Mama calling for me. I have let her down all my life. I cannot let her down when she needs me most.
I press onward, turn the corner, pass the stables where horses are stomping nervously, quicken my pace. Ahead the shouting is getting louder, and when I reach the end of the road where the local inn is belching smoke from its windows and doors, a throng of staggering men lurches into view, coughing, grasping at their grimy collars for air. I recognize two of them, and as I back up against the bricks of the house next to the tavern, one of them sees me.
“Dominique? What are you … doing here? Get back home. Get … to safety. They’re burning the whole … the whole town!”
“What? Who would do such a thing?”
“It’s Balleo. He—”
“Come on, Vidi.” One of his companions snatches at his sleeve. “They’re almost on us. We have to go.”
“Quickly, Dom, come with us?”
Before I can answer him or even think about where to go, a bottle flies between us and bursts into a ball of fire on the wet road. The flames are soon lost amongst the snow, but two more bottles follow, smashing into the opposite wall. The men begin to run, pausing to shoot an apologetic glance in my direction. With Balleo implicated in the riots, I have nowhere to go. Where will I find this Keitus Vieta? How will I stop him from violating Mama?
Burning air brushes my cheeks as the wind changes, and the bitter damp of the inn wall soaks through to my back, assaulting my senses in a confusion of hot and cold. Directionless and panic-stricken at the sound of marching feet beyond the billowing cloud of smoke rolling into the street, I ball my fists and press myself harder into the wall, squeezing my eyes shut, praying to God this frenzied monster will pass by without noticing me.
Men and women rush past, bawling, screaming, cursing the pope for stealing their lives. Roaring their demands that the devil should take his own back into hell, that they would never allow Rome to oppress them. What seemed to me an infantile joke earlier in the day is now a raging beast, possessing the town folk and driving them to destroy their own homes rather than listen to reason.
Something buffets my arm, knocking me down onto wet stone, and only then as I lay winded on my back do I open my eyes to take in the full scope of the danger I have walked into. Boots stamp about my head as the mob surges onward, and I struggle to turn onto my front, pushing against the road with trembling arms in a futile effort to stand up against the tide.
I am swept along by a sea of people. Probably no more than fifty but for me it is an army, dragging its prisoner and parading it through the streets until it is either crushed or discarded. I think of Fran’s warning. If I were to be condemned as a witch, this feverish march would be my funeral procession, my last terrible minutes before being tied to a burning pyre. For more than fifteen minutes I am battered, torn, and carried through a blur of houses, fire, and faces until a change as sudden as a wave crashing into a dam turns the direction of the rabble.
An uncanny silence allows the noise of fire and falling debris to take precedent as the people turn about, and I wonder if the city guards have finally done something to quench the crowd’s aggression. But, no, something else has caused the change.
The shape of a man catches my eye. Silhouetted in the doorway of the tallest building in the street, a small, hunched man watches the hostility as it sweeps past. Like a school of fish unaware that a shark has come to observe them but dimly aware of the danger, they keep their distance. The man is untouched, apparently unimpressed by the tumult, and whilst the flames lick at the buildings on either side, his residence remains unscathed, as though the fire itself is afraid of approaching him.
But more than the bizarre aversion of the riot to turn upon him, something else is stranger still. The man himself is utterly wrong. I cannot explain it other than my instincts telling me that he must be a ghostly apparition that maintains a firmness of flesh and the command of a powerful presence. I think of the two men and their apprehension at revealing their employer’s name. I sense now that it was fear of the man himself—Keitus Vieta. The shadow in the doorway must be this same man. I know it deep in my spirit.
Still thrust along by the crowd and away from that part of the street, I watch the hunched man turn and slink into the darkness of his home. Unless I act now, I may not be able to retrace my path back to this place. I scream in the faces of the people beside me. No longer willing to be caught in the flow of the mob, I claw against them, fighting for breath, thrusting my elbows on either side as if swimming uphill through a mountain of earth until eventually I fall, breathing hoarsely, against the wet oaken doors of Keitus Vieta’s home.
With one last glance at the seething mass of bodies I escaped from, I bang my bloody knuckles against the door. “Mr. Vieta? Please … Please let me in.”