Dead. A smaller word than alive; but it took the breath away.
‘He can come and go,’ said Lacey, ‘any time he wants.’
‘Are you saying Henessey is dead?’ said Redman. ‘Be careful, Lacey.’
The boy hesitated: he was aware that he was walking a tight rope, very close to losing his protector.
‘You promised,’ he said suddenly, cold as ice.
‘Promised no harm would come to you. It won’t. I said that and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean you can tell me lies, Lacey.’
‘What lies, sir?’
‘Henessey isn’t dead.’
‘He is, sir. They all know he is. He hanged himself. With the pigs.’
Redman had been lied to many times, by experts, and he felt he’d become a good judge of liars. He knew all the tell-tale signs. But the boy exhibited none of them. He was telling the truth. Redman felt it in his bones.
The truth; the whole truth; nothing but.
That didn’t mean that what the boy was saying was true. He was simply telling the truth as he understood it. He believed Henessey was deceased. That proved nothing.
‘If Henessey were dead —‘
‘He is, sir.’
‘If he were, how could he be here?’
The boy looked at Redman without a trace of guile in his face.
‘Don’t you believe in ghosts, sir?’
So transparent a solution, it flummoxed Redman. Henessey was dead, yet Henessey was here. Hence, Henessey was a ghost.
‘Don’t you, sir?’
The boy wasn’t asking a rhetorical question. He wanted, no, he demanded, a reasonable answer to his reasonable question.
‘No, boy,’ said Redman. ‘No, I don’t.’ Lacey seemed unruffled by this conflict of opinion. ‘You’ll see,’ he said simply. ‘You’ll see.’
In the sty at the perimeter of the grounds the great, nameless sow was hungry.
She judged the rhythm of the days, and with their
progression her desires grew. She knew that the time for stale slops in a trough was past. Other appetites had taken the place of those piggy pleasures.
She had a taste, since the first time, for food with a certain texture, a certain resonance. It wasn’t food she would demand all the time, only when the need came on her. Not a great demand: once in a while, to gobble at the hand that fed her.
She stood at the gate of her prison, listless with anticipation, waiting and waiting. She snaffled, she snorted, her impatience becoming a dull anger. In the adjacent pen her castrated sons, sensing her distress, became agitated in their turn. They knew her nature, and it was dangerous. She had, after all, eaten two of their brothers, living, fresh and wet from her own womb.
Then there were noises through the blue veil of twilight, the soft brushing sound of passage through the nettles, accompanied by the murmur of voices.
Two boys were approaching the sty, respect and caution in every step. She made them nervous, and understandably so. The tales of her tricks were legion.
Didn’t she speak, when angered, in that possessed voice, bending her fat, porky mouth to talk with a stolen tongue? Wouldn’t she stand on her back trotters sometimes, pink and imperial, and demand that the smallest boys be sent into her shadow to suckle her, naked like her farrow? And wouldn’t she beat her vicious heels upon the ground, until the food they brought for her was cut into petit pieces and delivered into her maw between trembling finger and thumb? All these things she did.
And worse.
Tonight, the boys knew, they had not brought what she wanted. It was not the meat she was due that lay on the plate they carried. Not the sweet, white meat that she had asked for in that other voice of hers, the meat she could, if she
desired, take by force. Tonight the meal was simply stale bacon, filched from the kitchens. The nourishment she really craved, the meat that had been pursued and terrified to engorge the muscle, then bruised like a hammered steak for her delectation, that meat was under special protection. It would take a while to coax it to the slaughter.
Meanwhile they hoped she would accept their apologies and their tears, and not devour them in her anger.