Part 8 (1/2)

I could feel eyes upon me, though I could not see them. There were movements behind the narrow window-slats as I planted my feet in the centre of the open s.p.a.ce. Then, like an actor in a tragedy, I cleared my throat, and began to introduce myself to my invisible audience.

'My name is Hanno Stiffeniis, Procurator to His Majesty the King . . .'

A gaggle of geese came waddling around a corner. Wings held wide, beaks up and gaping, they screeched, slithered and slid to a halt in front of me, like troops running out from a besieged fort to repel an attack. A large pig came snorting after them, with two less corpulent swine hard on its heels. The door of the middle house opened slowly, and a man appeared in the doorway.

He stepped out into the sun. He was squat and built like an ox, though aged.

'I must speak with the women of the village,' I announced.

'What do you want with them?' he barked, his voice coming in great choking gasps. He raised his head at an angle, as if to see me better. His left eye was milky white with cataracts. His skin was scarlet, his face round. Bald on top, he had spa.r.s.e white whiskers sprouting from his chin like onion roots. There was something of the terrier-before-the-baiting-starts about him.

'I wish to ask them some questions,' I said.

The man twirled his forefinger in the air. 'There's lots of women working here,' he sighed. 'You'll need to be more exact, Herr Magistrate. What exactly is your business with them?'

He dropped his aitches, rounded his consonants. He was intelligible, but only just. And I felt that he was toying with me. He knew why I had come. For all I could tell, he knew everything that there was to know about what happened on the coast.

'A woman was found the other day down on the beach. She had been murdered. I'm trying to trace anyone who may have known her . . .'

'Best place to start,' he wheezed loudly. 'The beach, I mean. Bet them French soldiers could tell you what you want to know.'

I was surprised by this bluff reply. Anger was a better word for my reaction, though I struggled not to show it. I did not intend to start my enquiries by telling this upstart why I had not begun my investigation down on Nordcopp sh.o.r.e.

'Her friends work here, I've been told. I want to talk with them.'

I employed the peremptory tone that any magistrate might use, though I lacked the power to command that I had once possessed. I knew it, and so did he. Since the coming of the French, the authority of every magistrate in Prussia had been diminished. Even a humble village elder might decide to question it.

But he did not. He smiled as if something privately amused him, turning away with a nod of his head and a theatrical gesture of open-handed welcome, inviting me to follow him into the building.

I might have stepped through a magic mirror. It was day outside, but everything inside was darkest night. A fire burned at one end of the room-weak flames, a great deal of malodorous smoke coiling up from damp wood. The temperature was intolerably hot. Lanterns hung from low beams above the heads of a score of people working there. All of them were women, and they were bent over strange machines, like winkles attached to a rock in the sea.

I looked in horrid fascination at the faces staring into mine.

Wherever I glanced, I saw raw stubs where fingers, hands and arms should have been. There was a distinct disproportion between the number of limbs in that place and the number of faces. Many of the women lacked an arm, or part of it. A very young maid sitting close to the door had one leg only. Two whole hands attached to the same body were in very short supply.

One woman in particular caught my attention.

I might have been staring at the body I had examined the night before.

Stained teeth and jagged grey bone poked out of the left side of her face where her cheeks ought to have hidden them. Her purple tongue lolled out, before she sucked it in again. The entire left side of her face had been roughly tacked together, the skin stretched tight, but never tight enough. I would not have employed the surgeon who had treated her to make a sack of jute for me. Her eyes were fixed on the old man, like a dog that was waiting for a bone. She raised a mangled hand-the thumb and a finger remained-slicking away the saliva that dribbled from her sagging mouth and ran along her jaw and chin.

Could that creature speak? And how did she manage to eat?

'Get to it!' the old man wheezed.

The woman pressed hard on a treadle, a grinding-wheel began to twirl, and she bent forward, huddling over her work. All the other women did the same. The hive of bees began to drone again.

Could the wealth of Prussia come from such a dark, dank hole?

Those people looked as though they had lost a battle, and been badly mauled in the fighting. Was this how amber was processed before it went to market? By women with ravaged limbs and half-formed faces?

In the centre of this den stood a wooden table. A basket of apples, two loaves of bread and a stone flagon of small ale had been laid out there. Would their wheels stop whirring for half an hour to permit them to eat and talk together? Or would they take it in turns, first-come-best-served, in some hierarchy of merit or terrible disability that I could not divine?

'Over here, sir,' the master gasped, making his way to a larger machine which stood close to the fire. It looked more complicated than the others. He placed his hand on one of the wheels with a show of proud tenderness.

'I'd invite you to sit down,' he whispered hoa.r.s.ely, glancing around the room, 'but then you'd have to earn your living.'

I had never seen the inside of an amber workshop. Like any other manual trade, I imagined that it would require a steady hand, and a sharp eye. But this man's hands were twisted with arthritis, and one of his eyes was as white as chalk. He peered at me, but I did not think he could see me very well.

'I can speak well enough on my feet,' I replied. 'Where are these women?'

With surprising agility, the man seated himself astride the machine as if he were riding a horse. Resting his hand on a sort of pommel, he turned to look at me, a parody of a general posing for an equestrian portrait.

'Why would the French send a Prussian magistrate here?'

He unlatched the b.u.t.ton of his collar as he spoke, and a bluish-grey goitre spilled onto his chest. It was like a second head that swelled and bobbed as he wheezed, 'What's up, sir? Ain't you never seen the scrofula before?'

He seemed amused by my discomfort. I had observed the same sort of defiance in my father's serfs. The master might own their bodies, but their souls and maladies were their own private business.

'Never let them think that they know better,' my father said to me one day.

He had a score of tied serfs on his estate, and one of them had just claimed that there was one thing the master could never do. My father grabbed the knife from that man's hand, gripped the large striped sow between his knees, and drove the blade deep into its windpipe. Red blood gushed over his shoes and his new silk stockings, spurting across his yellow waistcoat and into his face, but my father did not flinch.

I took my lead from this example.

'I've seen worse things than your swollen crop,' I said.

Kati Rodendahl's face flashed before my eyes.

Then, I could not help myself, I glanced in the direction of the horribly disfigured woman that I had noticed immediately I entered the house.

She stared back at me with sullen fixity, and I quickly looked away.

'Would you rather speak to the French?' I challenged him. 'It's all one to me.'

It was not the same, of course, and he knew it. He pulled a wry face.

'Let's waste no time,' I snapped. 'Which women here knew Kati Rodendahl?'

He pointed to the woman whose ravaged face had unsettled me twice.

'Hilde knew her, sir. But she can't tell you nothing. She's lost her tongue, so to speak,' he sneered. 'You'll have to speak with me . . .'

I stepped forward, pushed him hard in the chest, and knocked him from the saddle. The women stopped working, their treadles ground to a halt.

'If you hope to continue in this trade,' I warned him, 'you will co-operate with me.'

All eyes in the room were riveted on me, as if they thought that I intended to harm him. I towered above their master physically, but my dominance was of a different sort. The weight of centuries pressed down heavily on that man's round shoulders. The French had freed their serfs, they had forced us to do the same, but he would always be an underling. I had it in my power to take away all that he had slaved to obtain, and he knew it.

I motioned to him to get up.