The other knight rides by. He doesn’t want to kill me, but as he passes he swings the butt of his spear into my ribs, knocking me back onto the ground. By the time I get to my feet, the battle’s over.
I stagger to the gate and see the departing raiders streaming back across the bridge with our livestock, my father’s horses, whatever bits and pieces of our household they can carry. One has a duck under his arm; another is carrying a stack of our silver plates as if he’s just cleared them from the table. A goblet wobbles on top of the pile.
My mother runs after them, screaming a cry that tears open my soul. She catches up with the knights at the head of the bridge. One of them turns; he makes a movement I can’t see, and my mother collapses to the ground. She looks as if she’s fainted, but she’ll never get up. My father is dead, run through his thighs with a lance and then beheaded. My brother Ralph died beside him. Wandering through the ashes, I see the crows and rooks coming to pick out his eyes. I run towards them in a fury, but I’m so feeble that day they barely move. They flutter onto a broken plough and watch, waiting for their chance. There are no buildings where I can hide Ralph’s body, so I dig his grave right there.
The Welsh love their feuds, as ready to avenge a hundred-year-old insult as one suffered this morning. They’re vindictive, bloodthirsty and violent. Perhaps, living among them, I’ve learned something of their ferocity, for now I have sworn revenge.
I am the oldest son now. Knighthood is my right, and my duty.
IX
A fog hung over London that morning. The streetlamps were still lit, casting a false dawn over the cobbled alleys and brick warehouses. If not for the lights of the burglar alarms winking from their gables, it might have been a hundred years ago.
Ellie stood waist deep in boxes and wished she’d worn gloves. The rain the day before had turned the cardboard to pulp, which came away in long strips when she touched it. The skip stank of damp and urine; the ground squelched underfoot. On the wall above, a scarred sign advertised the Rosenberg Automation Company.
Delicately, as if she were handling medieval parchments and not the refuse in a back alley behind a factory, she peeled the boxes apart to find the names written on them. She wrote them down on a pad of paper. Some had telephone numbers or web addresses, and she wrote those down too with shivering, sticky fingers.
When she was done, she clambered out of the skip and went round to the café across the street from the factory entrance. A Chinese woman brought her greasy eggs and coffee while she watched the morning shift arrive. Some of the workers came in to get breakfast or a cup of tea, and she listened carefully to their conversation. If any of them had seen her the day before, they didn’t connect her with the young woman who’d arrived in the Bentley and the thousand-pound suit. That morning, Ellie had scraped her hair back into the tightest ponytail she could manage, and put on an old tracksuit she hadn’t touched since she left Newport. She wore no make-up. She wondered if this was how she’d have looked if she’d never left home, never gone to Oxford, never written an essay for the Spenser Prize and never come to the attention of Vivien Blanchard. All I need is the baby, she thought.
She sat there most of the morning, pretending to read the Sun and observing the delivery vans come and go. At eleven o’clock she drained her last cup of coffee and found a bus to take her west. She showered at her flat and tried to scrub the dirt from under her fingernails. She looked longingly at the new clothes from the day before: would it be wrong to wear them two days in a row? She was sure Blanchard would notice.
‘I wondered if you would join us this morning,’ he said, when she finally reached the office. It was half-past twelve and he looked angry. Ellie didn’t care.
‘I’ve got it,’ she announced. ‘Rosenberg. We have consolidated our supply chain, he said, remember? They went too far. There’s a component in their products, a logic board, and they only have one supplier. They’re completely dependent on them.’
Blanchard leaned back in his chair and drew on his cigar. Ellie already recognised the trick: to lure you on with indifference, ready to snap back at a moment’s notice. ‘How do you know this?’
‘The accounts. Last year they spent a quarter less on components than the year before, but their sales stayed constant. I went down to the factory and looked around. There are only two companies in the world that make these logic boards, and only one of them has boxes going into that factory.’
Blanchard stared at the painting on the wall, at the helpless damsel tied to the tree.
‘They can insure against supply-chain disruption.’
‘Their premiums haven’t changed.’ Ellie could hardly control her excitement. ‘The old man hasn’t told them. He’s driving without insurance and praying he doesn’t get in an accident. I made a few phone calls.’ Pretending to be a buyer from a rival firm, trembling with the deceit and the fear of getting caught. ‘It would take him six months to arrange a new supplier, and the business doesn’t have the cash to survive that long.’
She stopped talking and realised she was shaking. For the first time, she began to understand the energy that drove Blanchard.
‘And you propose …?’
‘Buy the supplier as well. It’s owned by a private equity firm who are sitting on a lot of losses. They’d bite your hand off. Then merge the two companies and make the business properly viable.’
Blanchard knitted his fingers together and stared at her, as if she were a work of art he was slowly coming to appreciate. His cigar burned untouched in the ashtray.
‘Ellie, this is good. Very good indeed. Our client will be delighted when I tell him.’
When I tell him. Ellie tried not to look disappointed. Blanchard saw it anyway.
‘I am not trying to steal your glory, Ellie. Not at all. But I cannot spare you. I need to send you on an assignment straight away. There is a company in Luxembourg that one of our clients wishes to acquire a stake in. It is a complex arrangement and there are other bidders. At the moment we are performing due diligence. I want you to dig through their files and see if you can find anything that would affect the value of the company, anything they are trying to hide from us.’
In Luxembourg? What would she tell Doug? ‘When do I leave?’
Blanchard consulted his watch. ‘A car will take you to the airport in ten minutes. You are booked into the Sofitel. Not the best hotel in Luxembourg, I am afraid, but it is where the other bidders are staying. Perhaps you can get to know them. I’m sorry there is no time to pack. Buy whatever you need at the airport, or when you get there. Our local manager is a woman called Christine Lafarge. She can help you.’
Ellie turned to go. Halfway out the door she remembered something.
‘Why does the Rosenberg deal have to be completed so quickly? That was the one thing I couldn’t work out.’
Blanchard smiled. ‘I am glad there are some secrets we can keep from you, Ellie. In a month, the Government will announce an inquiry into the possibility of building a new freight distribution terminal in Woolwich. Major infrastructure investment. The Rosenberg factory will double in value. Six months later, the Government will decide in favour and it will double in value again.’
He sounded so certain it would happen, as if he could lift the veil and peer into the future at will. Ellie remembered the ministerial Jaguar she’d seen outside the bank on the day of her interview.
The adrenaline was draining out of her; guilt had begun to set in. She thought of the old man’s stubbornness, the weight of the generations on his shoulders. ‘I suppose it’ll be good for the business,’ she said hopefully.