Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

heart. Dyer slowly raises his pistol. The Reverend thinks: How excellent all his movements are to watch. Makes the cat look clumsy. About is up to something. Does Dyer know that? About

is a stranger to him. What should he think, a pistol pointed at his heart? He does not seem to care. Nothing more dangerous than a man who does not care. Or does he think himself immortal? Is that it?

Tire!'

Impossible to say whose finger is first to pull the trigger. The Reverend, sitting equidistant from both men, hears the snap of the pistol actions almost as one, though if he were forced, he should say that Dyer was a fraction quicker. There is no flash, no report. Yet something, some bright object - what? Birds! - small jewelled birds are emerging slowly from the end of both men's pistols, flapping their golden wings and singing a mechanical song, half a dozen notes, which, in the profound silence of the room, are the most delicate and pretty sound imaginable.

From behind them comes a scream, ecstatic, terrified: 'Jesu! Bin ich tot}'

The postillion is sitting up, staring madly at them from his bed of straw. In Dyer's hand, in About's hand, the little birds fold their wings and glide back into the barrels of the guns.

'Time?'

Mrs Featherstone, Grimaldi's old watch in her hand, says: Three minutes. Somewhat less I think.' Dyer says: 'How did you like that, Reverend?' It takes a moment for the Reverend to find his voice. He says: *I congratulate you. Doctor. It was . . .'

Dyer washes his hands in a bucket, releasing from his fingers clouds of blood. He takes his coat from Mrs Featherstone, his

watch, then leaves the room. The others step forward and look down at the unconscious man on the table. Mrs Featherstone says: 'What shall we do with him now?'

Her husband says: 'Not much work for a one-armed post-boy.'

Dusk. The Reverend Lestrade moves clumsily towards the woods in his snow shoes. He has left the other men in the stable working on the runners for Mami Sylvie. They have all been at it most of the day, have dug out the coach, removed the rear wheels and fitted two of the runners, though only after much shaving and hammering. Much cussing too, in which he, to his shame, was not the most backward.

He has come now for solitude and for the beauty of the evening: a white sun settling over the forest, snow the colour of slate, the air pierced with light, the sky an immense glass bell in which the world's few sounds swell the silence, the plaintiveness. It is a world, an hour, created for solitude. The Reverend relishes it, feels with each hissing step the expansive inner presence of his soul. Hymn-writing weather!

The black fringe of the forest is half a mile from the monastery, possibly less, yet it approaches with the slowness of a coastline watched from the deck of a ship, and in the same way it is suddenly there, leaping into focus, each tree its separate self, no longer black but green and purple. At the treeline he stops and looks back. Someone stands by the monastery wall. He cannot tell who it is. He waves but the figure does not wave back. Very likely, under the shadow of the forest, he is invisible. He turns and steps past the first trees. He does not intend to go far; no more than a

few yards. Yet how seductive it is; a forest for a fairy tale! He goes deeper, threading his way towards the ogre's lair, the dragon, the fair princess.

In time to come, when he is growing stiff and old and there are no more adventures but the last, he thinks how things might have been if, on reaching the forest, he had turned back. Was that what the figure by the monastery wished him to do? Or were they all unwitting agents of a power that had long since decreed he would not stop but walk deeper and deeper until he saw the lights and the dogs and the silent woman fleeing for her life . . .

She runs soundlessly on top of the snow, so silent he might easily have taken her for a spirit, a ghost. It is the grey stream of her breath which tells him she is real. She stops a dozen feet from where the Reverend crouches, looks directly at him. The lights of the men move through the twilight towards them. Adulteress? Witch? He holds out his hand to her. It is an instinctive action, and for a moment it seems she might come to him, but she dives away, light and fleet as a deer, running between the trees while the torches of the men fan out into a glittering net. The Reverend thinks: They will catch her, kill her here. And if they catch me? What law will protect me in a place like this? All sense tells him that he must escape, that this is not for him to meddle with. But he waits, even creeps forward a way. There is a great confusion of barking and voices. The lights are congregating. Have they found her? His knees are trembling. He edges closer, sliding over the snow, hardly daring to breathe. He sees below the lights the dance of shadows; the woman's persecutors. Have they found her? He waits for a scream, for the sound of men killing. But the lights disperse and move away through the forest, the voices of the men and the dogs fading swiftly.

This is where they were; here where the snow is turned over. He can smell them, the fat from their torches. He looks about, sees on the ground the body of the woman. He goes towards it,

expects to see some horror, the snow discoloured, a gaping throat. But when he kneels, touches the dress, it is empty. Dress, shoes, stockings, scarf. Everything she was wearing. It