‘I’m not easily offended, don’t worry.’
‘Well … it’s just that the more I hear about your Order, the less like priests you seem to be. Father Nicholas’s temper and the brothers all familiar with Theda Bara. And then the brandy.’
‘Ah, the sins of the flesh,’ Father Sandru said. ‘We do seem to have more than our share, don’t we?’
‘I have offended you.’
‘No. You’ve simply seen the truth. And how can a man of God be justly offended by that? What you’ve observed is no coincidence. We are all … how shall I put this? … men who have more than our share of flaws. Some of us were never trusted with a flock. Others, like Father Nicholas, were. But the arrangement was never deemed satisfactory.’
‘His temper?’
‘I believe he threw a Bible at one of the parishioners who was sleeping through the good Father’s sermon.’ Zeffer chuckled; but his laughter was silenced a moment later. ‘It killed the man.’
‘Killed –?’
‘An accident, but still …’
‘– with a Bible. Surely not.’
‘Well, that’s how the rumour went. Father Nicholas has been dead twenty years, so there’s no way to prove it or disprove it. Let’s hope it isn’t true, and if it is, hope he’s at peace with it now. The fact is, I’m glad I was never trusted with a parish. With a flock to tend. I couldn’t have done much for them.’
‘Why not?’ Zeffer asked, a little impatient with Sandru’s melancholy now. ‘Do you have difficulty finding God in a place like this?’
‘To be honest Mr Zeffer, with every week that passes – I almost want to say with every hour – I find it harder to see a sign of God anywhere. It would not be unreasonable, I think, to ask Him to show himself in beauty. In the face of your lady-companion, perhaps … ?’
Katya’s face as proof of God’s presence? It was an unlikely piece of metaphysics, Zeffer thought.
‘I apologize,’ Sandru said. ‘You didn’t come here to hear me talk about my lack of faith.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Well I do. The brandy makes me maudlin.’
‘Shall I take a look then?’ Zeffer suggested. ‘At what-ever’s in here?’
‘Yes, why don’t we?’ Sandru replied. ‘I wish I could give you some kind of guidance, but …’ He shrugged; his favourite gesture. ‘Why don’t you start looking, and I’ll go back and get us something more to drink?’
‘Nothing more for me,’ Zeffer replied.
‘Well, then for me,’ Sandru said. ‘I’ll only be a moment. If you need me, just call. I’ll hear you.’
Zeffer took a moment, when the man was gone, to close his eyes and let his thoughts grow a little more orderly. Though Sandru spoke slowly enough, there was something mildly chaotic about his thought processes. One minute he was talking about furniture, the next about the mad Duke and his hunter’s habits, the next about the fact that they couldn’t make a hospital here because the Devil’s wife had cursed the place.
When he opened his eyes his gaze moved back and forth over the furniture and the boxes without lingering on anything in particular. The bare bulb was stark, of course, and its light far from flattering, but even taking that fact into account there was nothing in the room that caught Zeffer’s eye. There were some finely-wrought things, no question; but nothing extraordinary.
And then, as he stood there, waiting for Sandru to return, his gaze moved beyond the objects that filled the chamber, and came to rest instead on the walls beyond.
The chamber was not, he saw, made of bare stone. It was covered with tiles. In every sense, this was an understatement, for these were no ordinary tiles. Even by so ungenerous a light as the bare bulb threw upon them, and viewed by Zeffer’s weary eyes, it was clear they were of incredible sophistication and beauty.
He didn’t wait for Father Sandru to return; rather, he began to push through the piles of furniture towards the designs that covered the walls. They covered the floor, too, he saw, and ceiling. In fact, the chamber was a single masterpiece of tile; every single inch of it decorated.
In all his years of travelling and collecting he’d never seen anything quite like this. Careless of the dirt and dust laden webs which covered every surface, he pushed on through until he reached the nearest wall. It was filthy, of course, but he pulled a large silk handkerchief out of his pocket, and used it to scrub away some of the filth on the tiles. It had been plain even from a distance that the tiles were elaborately designed, but now, as he cleared a swathe across four or five, he realized that this was not an abstract pattern but a representation. There was part of a tree there, on one of the tiles, and on another, adjacent to it, a man on a white horse. The detail was astonishing. The horse was so finely painted, it looked about ready to prance off around the room.
‘It’s a hunt.’
Sandru’s voice startled him; Willem jerked back from the wall, so suddenly that it was as though he’d had his face in a vacuum, and was pulling it free. He felt a drop of moisture plucked from the rim of his eye; saw it flying towards the cleaned tiles, defying gravity as it broke on the flank of the painted horse.
It was a strange moment; an illusion surely. It took him a little time to shake off the oddness of it. When he looked round at Sandru, the man was slightly out of focus. He stared at the Father’s shape until his eyes corrected the problem. When they did he saw that Sandru had the brandy bottle back in his hand. Apparently its contents had been more potent than Zeffer had thought. The alcohol, along with the intensity of his stare, had left him feeling strangely dislocated; as though the world he’d been looking at – the painted man on his painted horse, riding past a painted tree – was more real than the old priest standing there in the doorway.
‘A hunt?’ he asked at last. ‘What kind of hunt?’
‘Oh, every kind,’ Sandru replied. ‘Pigs, dragons, women –’
‘Women?’
Sandru laughed. ‘Yes, women,’ he said, pointing towards a piece of the wall some yards deeper into the chamber. ‘Go look,’ he said. ‘You’ll find the whole thing is filled with obscenities. The men who painted this place must have had some strange dreams, let me tell you, if this is what they saw.’
Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the wall and a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden catafalque, too large to move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his jacket did the job his handkerchief had done moments before. Dust rose up in his face.
‘Where now?’ he asked the Father when he’d got to the other side of the catafalque.
‘A little further,’ Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly taking a swig from the bottle.
‘I need some more light back here,’ Zeffer said.
Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He rummaged in one of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his palm, found a length of cloth and wrapped it around the base of the lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord, to give himself some more play, and made his way through the confusion of stuff in the room, to where Zeffer was standing.
The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of the painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and right of him; and up above his head; and down to the ground, spreading beneath his feet. Though the walls were so filthy that in places the design was entirely obliterated, and in other places there were large