Free States

12. UN HOMME DE PITIE

THE RULES AT last agreed, Paul Minct promised to tell them more after they reached the Frees and were off the raft. Then the three of them settled down to an easy companionship, playing a hand or two of old flat and a simulated folded paper version of Henri’s Special Turbulence which could only be modified with difficulty and which they eventually abandoned by mutual consent.

One evening, as Captain Ornate pumped his melancholy squeezebox in a corner and a couple of whiteys capered to the old familiar zee tunes, the conversation turned to the subject of animals and whether it was possible to have significant communication with them.

Mrs von Bek spoke of the famous Englishman, Squire Begg, a cousin of hers, and his affinity with crows. He believed they possessed a primitive wisdom enabling them to talk in some way with humans, but first one had to learn and obey their language and customs, which were simple enough, though immutable. It was by these customs that, down the long millennia, crows survived. Assured of your courtesy, the crow would give full attention to your thoughts and desires. ‘Crows,’ she said, ‘came from all over the world to his London mansion in Sporting Club Square, and he was frequently sketched in the company of Egyptian, Amazonian or Antipodean crows, mostly hooded, who would mysteriously leave, returning without warning to their native grounds.’

‘I was once an initiate of my tribe’s Crow Cult. ‘ Rodrigo Heat’s words were thick as Mississippi mud. ‘My totem was the crow. I was sworn to protect the crow and all his kind, even with my life, even above my family. In return the crow offered us his wisdom. But his advice was not always suited to modem times.’

‘I heard of a young buckaree from up in Arizone who had his eyes pecked out by a crow. He went crazy in the sun, they said, and jumped off that old London Bridge up there, straight down until he hit the granite, thinking he was a crow,’ said Sister Honesty Marvell. ‘Nobody ever found out why.’

Sam Oakenhurst suggested a game of Mad John Parker, but Honesty Marvell favoured Doc Granite, so in the end they made it a tambourine game and shouted like kiddikins over it. That night the Rose told Sam Oakenhurst that they might have to kill Paul Minct.

At your service, he signalled, but bile came up in his throat.

(We are not fragments of the whole, she would tell him, but versions of the whole. Mr Oakenhurst had told her of the last time he had stood in a ploughed field, full of bright pools of winter rain, on a fine, pale blue evening, with the great orange sun bleeding down into the horizon, and watched a big dog fox, brush high as he picked his way amongst the furrows, circling the meadow where he was hidden by the lattice of the hedge, sniffing the wind for the geese who had begun to cluck with anxious enquiry. All of it disappeared, Mr Oakenhurst said, in the Hattiesburg Roar. ‘I had thought that, at least, must endure. Now, even our memories are becoming suspect.’)

He had no qualms about killing the man, if he proved actively dangerous to them, but he was not at all sure he could play this. He had given his word to something for which he might not possess the necessary bottom. By now he was as nervous of losing her approval as he was terrified by Paul Minct’s displeasure. The irony of this amused and sustained him.

‘Ma romance,’ she sang, ‘nouvelle romance. Ma romancier, muy necromancier. Joli boys all dansez. Joli boys all dansez. But they shall not have muy coleur.’