And then the sight of the broken strongbox brought to me a memory erased by hours of pain, fatigue, and misery.
“My father’s strongbox!” I said. “I’d forgotten it.”
Kevin’s expression mirrored my own surprise. “And I had forgotten your family entirely,” he said. “Are they—are they taken?”
“Dead.”
Kevin looked stricken. “All?” he said, and I nodded. Kevin stepped to me and embraced me. “I had thought only of my own kin,” he said. “Yet how much better my parents are in captivity than yours in the grave.”
Not in the grave yet, I thought. I returned Kevin’s embrace, and said, “We have survived, and now we must rebuild. We have nothing with which to reproach ourselves.” I hoped this last statement was true.
We returned to my house, and found the strongbox where it had fallen to the ground amid the burning ruins of an upper story. I searched my father’s body to find the key on his belt, where he had always carried it. Inside the box were three gold royals, enough silver to make up twenty-four royals in value, a few pennies, and some foreign money of uncertain value—hardly enough to rebuild the house. There was also the gold alderman’s chain belonging to my father. Documents—property deeds, records of money owed to Alderman Quillifer, agreements to deliver sheep and beeves—all had burned to ashes when the box baked in the fire.
There will be many suits at law over all this, I thought. I would put Lawyer Dacket on retainer, if I could; but since my master was lost, I should hire the first surviving advocate I could find.
The strongbox was too heavy to carry with me, so I found a box with a broken lid that the reivers had thrown away, and put the money and the chain in it, then bound the lid with twine.
Kevin and I returned to Scarcroft Square, where a surviving alderman, an apothecary named Gribbins, was arguing with Sir Towsley Cobb over who was in charge. I could not bring myself to care about the outcome, and Kevin and I went into the Spellman house, where we found some cheese in the servants’ pantry and made the best meal we could, after which I went to sleep on a groom’s pallet, lying on bundles of sweet-smelling rushes. My last memory was seeing Kevin, who had got pen and paper from his father’s study, staring at the paper and murmuring to himself as he made a record of all of his father’s transactions that he could remember.
* * *
In the morning, I found Kevin asleep in his father’s countinghouse, his head on the desk, the ledgers stacked around him, the candle burned out, his fingertips black with ink. We finished the cheese and walked to the square, where we found Gribbins and the Cobb family still arguing over the proper course of action. Gribbins should have been overwhelmed by sheer numbers, but the Cobbs could never agree with one another, and the arguments looked like every man or boy for himself. Nevertheless, some things seemed to have been accomplished—there were regular companies of men drilling with pikes and firelocks, and enormous cauldrons had been set up to make porridge out of whatever grains could be brought to the square. At least one bakery was delivering loaves of bread, but these were promptly confiscated by the Cobbs and doled out to whoever they saw fit. Sir Towsley and his sons dismissed me without a word, but Kevin’s social prominence rated a loaf, which he shared with me as we considered what next to do.
Smoke hung again in the air. The Aekoi had towed off whatever ships they could from the port, and burned the rest along with the looted warehouses. They had not left the Duisland coast, but moved most of their power to Cow Island while small squadrons of chebecs patrolled the coast in search of fresh prey.
Kevin’s family concern had lost one pinnace set afire and another carried away, and Kevin fretted after a third ship that was expected soon to return from Varcellos, and might sail right amid the pirate fleet before they knew they were in danger. He paced in agitation, but I was too weary and sore to keep pace with him.
While prowling the square, Kevin overheard Gribbins arguing for building a funeral pyre for the dead, an idea which the Cobbs, for the moment, declared premature.
“They’re going to wait till carrion bursts the crows’ bellies,” Kevin said in disgust.
“I am not going to burn my family on a common pyre,” I said. “Nor wait for the crows. Or that quarrelsome oriole Sir Towsley Cobb.”
Kevin and I returned to Princess Street and confiscated a cocking cart from a neighbor who kept fighting birds—all the cocks eaten now, it seemed, and the neighbor carried away. I threw the cages off the cart, and made further space by removing the rear seat intended for the groom. The cart was pulled to where my family had been laid on the bricks. I saw that the bodies of the two apprentices had been carried away, I presumed by their families.
Kevin mutely assisted as I lifted my family into the cart, and in the absence of a horse, we two set ourselves between the shafts and pulled the cart out the North Gate, and to the city of the dead that stretched north from Ethlebight toward the old, abandoned city upriver.
The necropolis was deserted, and a fitful north wind sighed and muttered among the half-sunken tombs and tilted, lichen-crusted slabs that stood as the silent guardians of the worm-eaten dead. Cows and sheep grazed upon the grass, and had cropped away the underbrush to reveal old mounds, broken urns, and a few old bones that had worked their way to the surface. Here, in the shadow of the gray tomb of an extinct noble family, was a section of ground owned by the Quillifers, where Quillifers dating back to the foundation of new Ethlebight were buried. I had taken a pair of spades from a shop on Royall Street as I passed, intending to bury my family in a single grave atop my grandfather until more proper burial could be arranged. But on the sight of the old tomb, I paused for thought.
The outlines of the tomb’s irregular blocks of gray stone were revealed by crumbling plaster. For some reason, there were geometrical objects standing on the four corners: a sphere, a cube, a tetrahedron, and a cone.
I smashed the tomb’s rusted padlock with three swings of my spade. Because the tomb had partly sunk into the soft soil, there was some digging before I could wrench open the iron door. Ancient hinges shrieked, and birds took flight from nearby monuments.
The tomb smelled of damp earth. Lying on their slabs, beneath moth-eaten shrouds, the sad remains of a noble house gazed blankly at the sun for the first time in generations. My spade cleared away skeletal rubbish from a pair of the slabs, and then Kevin and I carried my family into the darkness that was their new home. My father was laid to rest on one slab, with little Alice lying under his arm; and on the other slab, my mother, Cornelia, with Barbara. I draped the unbleached muslin over them for shrouds.
“I will raise you a tomb of your own,” I told my family. “I swear it.”
Kevin nodded. “I am witness to the oath,” he affirmed.
And then I heard the sound of hoofbeats outside the tomb, and I froze, my mind alight with the absurd possibility that after all this I would be arrested for tomb-breaking. Cautiously I peered out the door.
A carriage rolled past on its way to the North Gate, drawn by four weary horses. Burly footmen rode atop the vehicle, and I could see a heraldic badge on the door.
“That would be Judge Travers,” I said, “come for the Assizes. A fine mess will he find, with the Cobbs and Gribbins at odds and the docks still smoldering.”
“Ay,” said Kevin. “There’s more for him to do than to judge whether or not Sir Stanley Mattingly stole a river.”
We left the tomb, and I closed the door and stopped it with turf and stones. My body ached, and I rolled my shoulders against the pain and looked at the silent tomb with its geometric figures. My eyes lifted from the rusted iron door to the name carved above the lintel, and I read, shaype.