The Guardian of Secrets and Her Deathly Pact Page 37

  19 January 1936

  I do not know how I managed to get through this evening without breaking down and making a complete fool of myself. I wanted to take Marta in my arms and hold her prisoner forever, but she looked so happy and serene that I can only admire and wonder at her faith. Tonight was even harder to bear than I had imagined it to be. My child, my Marta, so beautiful and kind, has broken my heart into so many pieces that I don’t know if it will ever recover. How can I put my feelings into words? I will probably read this when I am an old woman and will probably feel the same pain that lies heavy on me now, for my words will not dispel it. No words can do justice to my feelings or bring comfort to my unbearable sorrow.

  Had it not been for my darling Ernesto tonight, I think I would have gone mad. He understood exactly how I felt because his pain was as evident as my own, and somehow knowing that made it easier for me to bear mine.

  I remember that when my father died, I thought my life was over. I remember when Joseph Dobbs raped and beat me; I thought my life was over then too. But tonight part of me really has died. When I sat at the edge of Marta’s bed and said goodnight to her for the last time, I realised for the first time in my life that nothing is permanent. Love is, I suppose, everlasting, but it is not always possible to keep it physically close by. God is so selfish sometimes! I only hope that I can forgive him because he has stolen my daughter from me, just as silently and as menacing as a thief in the night.

  Marta has chosen a path that she truly believes will end in happy fulfilment, and for her sake, I must try to feel happy for her. God help me, but I feel that I am not selfless enough to do that. Tomorrow she will leave me forever, and I will never recover from her loss … ever!

  Chapter 39

  Paris

  The small funeral gathering of four men, the gravedigger, and a woman stood in silence by the graveside. There was no priest present. No flowers sat on top of the coffin, and no black costumes or hats adorned the mourners. The four men and the gravedigger placed the coffin in the hole, looked at it for a moment, and all except one then turned from it and walked away.

  Joseph Dobbs stood for a while, drinking from a half-finished bottle of wine, alone now and watching the gravedigger filling the hole with muddied earth. Suzanne the prostitute was gone, and the longest relationship he had ever been in had ended. He sat down and felt a tear run down his cheek.

  “Joseph, stupid git, pack it in,” he mumbled through a haze of alcohol.

  Suzanne had been a good girl, and he had never once hated her, not in all the years he’d spent with her. He’d slapped her about a few times, but he’d never hated her. He pictured Suzanne’s face, and the thought struck him that she had actually been his match – the mother and wife he had always wanted but never had. He cried again. Her death would leave a void that no other human being could ever fill.

  It was growing cold, and Joseph buttoned up his overcoat, lay back on the damp grass, closed his eyes, and listened to the soft thud of earth covering the hallowed ground where Suzanne would lie forever. Today marked the end of an era. Whenever he thought about that era, his time with Suzanne and his years in Paris, it always brought a blurred vision of bittersweet memories and finally a depraved existence of nothingness.

  The Great War, along with a world economic depression afterwards, had stopped his financial advances on the city, a city that had held so much promise for him in the early days. Men disappeared quicker than the leaves on the Parisian tree-lined streets in that first autumn of the war, and not many returned. The Gare du Nord railway station lost its regular passengers, save for the soldiers going to and coming from the front. Most of the gambling clubs had shut down and had reopened as venues for officers, who were fed, plied with drink, and ensconced nightly in a bevy of titties and bums. Foreigners were also noticed a lot more: questions were asked, spies were shot, and he, in his wisdom, decided to keep a low profile.

  Money was sparse too, Joseph remembered hazily, and no one had been worth robbing, but Suzanne had lots of money back then. She made more money during that war than in all the fucking years since. Desperate men wanting some fun before death was her explanation for the increase in business. Those years had been the bittersweet ones, for although he had been denied enterprise because of the war, he was sure that he’d also been overlooked by the stream of bounty hunters and private detectives that Marie Osborne and John Stein would have no doubt sent after him had there been peace in Europe.

  Joseph clasped his hands on his bulging stomach and thought about Roddy. He then hiccupped and belched loudly. The gravedigger stuck his head out of the hole and mumbled to himself in French.

  “And the same to you too,” Joseph slurred back.

  Roddy, the fucking bastard … The devious little git and his treachery was all he had thought about for years. He had often imagined in his head what he’d do to Roddy if he ever showed his face again. He would make it a slow death so that the bastard suffered. There was no pain too good, too slow, or too excruciating for Roddy.

  Joseph hiccupped again and then relived the night he was stood up. Roddy hadn’t been as stupid as he had thought at first. The bugger had stolen from him, played him like a fucking game of poker, and had left him dangling on a string with nothing more than a fucking note, given to him by a bartender.

  Dear Harry,

  I have left for London and I won’t be back, so don’t bother looking for me. By the way, I’m thinking of looking up some old friends of yours.

  Regards,

  Roderick Smyth Burton

  Joseph rolled over and vomited at the side of the grave; he hated French wine. He giggled, then wiped his mouth and let out a bitter laugh. Roddy was his only friend. He’d liked him right up until he done a bunk.

  He sat up and opened a paper bag containing the last dregs of red wine in the bottle he’d bought on the way to the cemetery. He pulled the cork out and put the bottle to his lips, shaking its last drops on to his tongue, then threw the bottle away in disgust. He looked around him at the trees, bushes, headstones, and then at the newly filled grave containing Suzanne’s body. Everything was moving. He giggled again. All around him, imagages were darting back and forth across his eyes. He blinked and tried to focus on one single thing, the tree branch. If he could get it to stop moving, he’d be all right. Then he decided that he didn’t want it to stop moving and he didn’t want to be all right. He laughed, then giggled softly and fell back down onto his side. He liked feeling the way he did. He liked floating, seeing the world in a detached way, and not being bothered about anything one way or another. Life was not really worth living without feeling this way. Reality was a bastard. He giggled again.

  He turned onto his back and stared up at the heavy grey sky. He tried to remember the early days after the war, but there was nothing much to remember. He knew he must have got back some of his losses, for he had bought a new suit, shirt, and tie. He looked down the length of his body. The suit still looked good, he thought. The trousers were a bit tight, a bit of middle-age spread round the waistline, but apart from that, it looked as good as new. Paris had welcomed in a whole new breed of men with open arms just after the war; that’s why he’d got the suit in the first place. He thought back then that he could carry on where he’d left off. Instead, he found it harder and harder to fit in anywhere. The men he’d played poker with talked endlessly about the war. It was like a fucking private club for war heroes, and as far as they were concerned, he hadn’t the right to membership. He’d been just as much a hero, he thought now. He had survived the whole bloody war stuck in an attic and in backstreet bars where poker was played for matchsticks.

  The old gambling circuit went as suddenly and as quietly as the bombs. The whorehouses shut down, and major construction works began to herald in the new era, disrupting the quiet streets that had once made him feel safe. Paris cleaned up the city’s corruption rackets. Then came the twenties, when even honest robbers were being robbed. Those years were, for the
most part, just a blur, and this decade hadn’t been any different so far. The monotony and uselessness of his life had crept up on him without warning and had swallowed him whole. He played less and less poker now but drank more and more wine, whisky, and anything else he could get his hands on, for his life was unbearable when he was sober.

  “It’s not fucking fair!” Joseph shouted in the deserted graveyard.

  It was all Celia Merrill’s fault, everything. She had forced him to live in fear and had prevented him from becoming well known and respected, for to be famous now was one dangerous indulgence he couldn’t afford. He trusted no one, hadn’t for years. He isolated himself in a prison of his own making, but he’d survived because of the steps he took to safeguard his identity.

  Roddy would have told Stein and Ayres where he was, he thought for the umpteenth time, and because of that, every new face he saw was the face of one of John Stein’s agents, detectives, or mercenary hunters. That’s why his life was a blur of nothingness. He laughed again. They hadn’t found him, as he was too quick for the lot of them.

  Paris: he hated the place. Hated it so much he wished the ground would swallow it along with every one of the French bastards that lived in it. Paris could have given him a fortune a hundred times over if only he’d stopped Roddy from leaving. The English newspapers he read at the Gare du Nord railway station had not mentioned a Joseph Dobbs or a Harry Miller since the beginning of the war, but he knew that if Marie Osborne and her bastard son were still alive, they would never give up the hunt. He hiccupped again and let out a long luxurious belching sound that came from deep within his throat. Suzanne was gone, and he was drunk.

  Joseph focused his bloodshot eyes on the grave. It was a mound of dirt now, just like all the others that surrounded it. Only the wooden cross at its head with Suzanne’s name on it would bear witness to her last resting place, and soon that cross would rot in the elements and there would be nothing.

  Joseph dozed off, but the rain that had spit softly on his face and eyelids had gathered momentum and was now slashing across his cheeks like needles. He got up awkwardly from the verge of the grave, staggered towards a clump of trees, and fell to his knees under them. He put his hands inside empty pockets and shivered. If only he hadn’t spent the money on the funeral, he could have bought himself a bottle of whisky to keep warm, had he not been forced by Suzanne’s friends to give her a decent burial. He laughed at the irony of his life. He’d been rich in Kent, then rich here for a while too. He’d been cheated by men not fit to lick his boots. He had been forced to run, forced to beg, forced to hide under rat-infested roofs and in alleyways, all because of a run of bad luck that seemed to go on forever. He moved his head from side to side and then up and down. He opened his mouth and let it catch the rainwater dripping from the branches.

  He was starving; he felt sick with hunger. He’d been drunk for days … or was it weeks? He laughed. He’d been drunk for so long now that he couldn’t remember the last time he was sober. That was Suzanne’s fault. She’d been ill for a long time, and he’d been under pressure to get money to buy medicines. She’d lain in bed coughing and spluttering every day for a year into bloodied handkerchiefs and dirty sheets that had been piled so high he could hardly get into the place. It was enough to drive anyone to fucking drink!

  Joseph stumbled to his feet and zigzagged again towards her grave. He bent over it and dug his hands into the runny blood-red mud that covered it. He watched the dirt drip through his fingers and shook the last of it off his hands. He would never come back here. Suzanne was in the past now, and he would look to the future. It had been an unfortunate outcome, but he had been forced to kill Suzanne in the end. She couldn’t pay her way anymore, couldn’t look after him properly. She had outlived her usefulness, and he didn’t have time for useless people who depended on his charity.

  Chapter 40

  Marta walked up the steep hill and at the rise caught her first glimpse of the large austere building that was her new home. There it is, the commanding fortress housing the soldiers of God, she thought. The main convent building had a turret on each corner, and their early Christian design spoke of a timeless, untouched era that even now had the power to conjure up some medieval fantasy. The mother superior’s orders had been precise: Marta’s parents could accompany her no farther than the train station in Valencia. There they would say goodbye, with no further contact, until instructions arrived from the convent and the mother superior alone. Marta wished now that her parents were here with her to take her final steps into her new life. She was sure that this momentary loneliness would pass, that she would soon be filled with Jesus’ love, and that she would need no one but him in her life; but for now, she felt the loss of her family.

  Marta wore a black dress and coat with sturdy walking shoes. She carried a small black suitcase containing her undergarments and prayer books, which was all the mother superior said she would need, and a letter of acceptance clutched in her gloved hand. The ground was still thick with frost. It was so much colder here, Marta thought, as she continued on her last walk in the outside world. On the train, she had passed sparse villages, orange groves, vineyards, and cherry trees shrouded in pink blossom; but the landscape outside the monastery gates was barren, flat, and colourless compared to the lush greenery of home. Home, gone forever.

  At the entrance to the great walled garden, a nun appeared and ushered Marta inside. Marta walked silently and reverently behind until she was shown into a room that looked more like a small chapel than a reception area. In the stone walls sat arched windows, stained with gold, cream, and red glass, and as the afternoon sun shone through them, it bathed the room in a soft pink glow of warmth. Wooden benches lined the walls of the room, and Marta thought it looked like the village dance hall, with the dance floor in the centre and young girls sitting around its edges, waiting to be asked to dance.

  After being seated, the heavy doors opened again to admit four more new postulants. They sat next to her, and still no one spoke. Silence was a virtue there, Marta was reminded by a whispering girl to her right. After half an hour or so, twenty girls were crammed onto the benches, with not a centimetre separating them. There was an air of silent questioning and a nervous shuffling of feet. Everyone waited for something to happen, for someone to speak.

  The door opened loudly, making a loud creaking noise that echoed around the room. Two nuns swathed in black robes walked briskly to the front of the pews and turned to face them.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” the smaller of the two said. “I am Sister Teresa, and this is Sister Juan. We are the postulant mistresses, and it is our duty not only to instruct you but also to welcome you to your new family. Lunch, I think, Sister Juan.”

  How strange, Marta thought. Was that it? Was that all they had to say after all the waiting? She thought they’d at least tell them what was going to happen to them, but lunch … It was all so normal.

  In the great hall, nuns shuffled between the lines of wooden tables, serving a soup that looked like coloured water with chickpeas floating on top, and as she ate, she noticed that the nuns watched but didn’t eat with them. She nudged the girl next to her and whispered softly, “Why are they not eating?”

  The girl told her. “They don’t eat with us because we’re not religious yet. To eat with anyone who’s from the outside world means that they are sharing something with the world they’ve left behind, and that’s just not done. They have to remain separate. They’ve turned their backs on all life outside these walls, and that includes us. We’re not like them, yet.”

  “I see,” Marta said.

  There were too many names for Marta to remember, but she did get along well with the two girls sitting next to her. One was called Mercedes, and there was a small skinny girl called Christina.

  The first few days were going to be the most difficult, they’d been told. The hooding ceremony, which was when they went into the Church to be blessed with short white veils worn by all new postu
lants, was to take place at eight o’clock, but first they had to find their cells.

  “Cells, such a strange word to describe our bedrooms, don’t you think?” Marta said to Christina, who shrugged her shoulders in response.

  “I suppose it’s because in a way, this is a prison. Oh, don’t get me wrong. It’s a very welcome one for me, but nonetheless, it is a place from which we’ll never leave.”

  Marta nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I certainly don’t ever want to leave here. I feel quite at home already.”

  After they’d been allocated their cells, which were no more than small spaces with a single bed surrounded by a curtain, the sisters arrived with two second-year novices, each holding bundles of clothes.

  “You will all change now,” Sister Juan said. “Wash first. You’ll find a basin under your bed and water outside in the ablution hall.”

  Marta carefully laid out the robes handed to her and smiled with excitement and a joy she could only describe as heavenly. She had been waiting for this moment. She looked forward to getting rid of everything to do with money, possessions, and vanity. First she scrubbed her body and face with the hard cake of soap that smelled like disinfectant, and barely lathered when she rubbed it with her hands in a bowl filled with cold water. Then she rinsed the small amount of soap off her, and dried herself with the towel that had been supplied. It felt as rough as sandpaper, but she scrubbed herself dry until her skin was red and tingling all over.

  “Just think, this time next year you’ll be doing the same thing for someone else,” the second-year novice outside the curtain whispered to her.