Carlos Zafon - The Midnight Palace

‘Aren’t you a bit young to be the headmaster’s assistant?’ asked Sheere, avoiding the boy’s eyes.

‘Young? You flatter me. I’m just blessed with an enviable complexion, but I’ll be twenty-three soon.’

‘I never would have guessed it,’ replied Sheere.

‘It runs in the family,’ Ben explained. ‘Our skin is resistant to aging. To this day people mistake my grandfather for an altar boy.’

‘Really?’ asked Sheere, suppressing a nervous laugh.

‘So how about accepting St Patrick’s hospitality?’ Ben insisted. ‘We’re having a party for some of the kids who are about to leave us. It’s sad, but a whole new life will open up before them. It’s exciting too.’

Sheere fixed her eyes on Ben and her lips slowly formed a sceptical smile.

‘My grandmother asked me to wait here.’

Ben pointed at the door. ‘Here?’ he asked. ‘Just here?’ Sheere nodded.

‘You see …’ Ben began, waving his hands about. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but … Well, I thought I might not have to. These things are not good for the image of the institution, but you leave me no option. There’s a structural problem. With the walls.’

The young girl looked at him in astonishment.

‘Structural?’

Ben adopted a serious expression and nodded.

‘Exactly. It’s regrettable, but here on the very spot where you’re standing, not even a month ago, Mrs Potts, our old cook, God bless her, was hit by a piece of brick that fell from the second floor and for two weeks she thought she was Moll Flanders. Imagine the scandal.’

Sheere laughed.

‘I don’t think it’s a laughing matter, if I may say so,’ said Ben, his tone icy.

‘I don’t believe a single word you’ve said. You’re not the headmaster’s assistant, you’re not twenty-three, and no cook was ever hit by a shower of bricks,’ said Sheere defiantly.

‘Are you suggesting I have provided you with inaccurate information?’

‘To put it mildly.’

Ben weighed up the situation. The first part of his strategy was on the point of floundering, so he had to think of a change of direction, and it had to be clever.

‘I may have been carried away by my imagination, but not everything I’ve said is untrue.’

‘Oh?’

‘I didn’t lie about my name. I’m called Ben. And the bit about offering you our hospitality is also true.’

Sheere gave a winning grin.

‘I’d love to accept, Ben. But I must wait here. Honestly.’

The boy adopted an expression of calm acceptance.

‘All right. I’ll wait with you,’ he announced solemnly. ‘If a brick falls, let it fall on me.’

Sheere shrugged and fixed her eyes on the door again. A long minute of silence went by. Neither of them moved or uttered a word.

‘It’s a hot night,’ said Ben at last.

Sheere turned her head. ‘Are you going to stand there all night?’

‘Let’s make a deal,’ Ben proposed. ‘Come and have a glass of ice-cold lemonade with me and my friends and then I’ll leave you in peace.’

‘I can’t, Ben. Really.’

‘We’ll only be twenty metres away,’ said Ben. ‘We could tie a little bell to the door.’

‘Is it so important for you?’ asked Sheere.

Ben nodded.

‘It’s my last week in this place. I’ve spent my whole life here and in five days’ time I’ll be alone again. Completely alone. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to spend another night like this one, among friends. You don’t know what it’s like.’

Sheere looked at him for a long while.

‘I do know,’ she said at last. ‘Take me to that lemonade.’

Once Bankim had left his office, Mr Carter poured himself a small glass of brandy and offered another to his visitor. Aryami declined and waited for Carter to sit in his armchair, with his back to the large window below which the young people were still celebrating, unaware of the icy silence that filled the headmaster’s room. Carter wet his lips and looked questioningly at the old woman. Time had not diminished the authority of her features in the slightest. Her eyes still blazed with the same fire he remembered in the woman who, so long ago, had been his best friend’s wife. They gazed at one another for a long time.

‘I’m listening,’ said Carter finally.

‘Sixteen years ago I was obliged to entrust you with a baby boy, Mr Carter,’ Aryami began in a low but firm voice. ‘It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life and I know for a fact that during these past years you have honoured the trust I put in you and haven’t let me down. During this time I never interfered with the boy’s life, for I was well aware that he wouldn’t be better off anywhere else but here, under your protection. I’ve never had the opportunity to thank you for what you’ve done for him.’

‘I was only doing my duty,’ Carter replied. ‘But I don’t think that is why you’ve come here, at this late hour.’

‘I wish I could say it was, but you’re right,’ said Aryami. ‘I’ve come here because the boy’s life is in danger.’

‘Ben.’

‘That’s the name you gave him. He owes everything he knows and everything he is to you, Mr Carter,’ said Aryami. ‘But there is something that neither you nor I can protect him from any longer: the past.’

The hands on Thomas Carter’s watch pointed towards midnight. Carter downed his brandy, then turned to glance through the window at the courtyard below. Ben was talking to a girl Carter didn’t recognise.

‘As I said earlier, I’m listening,’ Carter repeated.

Aryami sat up and, clasping her hands together in her lap, she began to tell her story …

‘For sixteen years I’ve travelled this country in search of refuge and somewhere to hide. Two weeks ago I was spending a month in the house of some relatives in Delhi, convalescing after an illness, when a letter arrived for me. Nobody could have known that my granddaughter and I were there. When I opened it, I found a blank sheet of paper inside, without a single letter written on it. I thought it might be a mistake or perhaps a joke, until I examined the envelope. It bore the postmark of Calcutta’s main post office. The ink was blurred and some of it was hard to make out, but I was able to decipher the date: 25 May 1916.

‘I put away the letter that had apparently taken sixteen years to cross India and reach the door of that house, a place to which only I had access, and I didn’t look at it again until that evening. My eyesight hadn’t played a trick on me: the date was the same, but something else had changed. The sheet of paper, which only a few hours earlier had been completely blank, now contained a single line written in red ink so fresh I smudged the writing with just a brush of my fingers. “They are no longer children, old woman. I’ve come back for what is mine. Stay out of my way.” That is what I read in the letter before throwing it into the fire.

‘I knew then who had sent it and I also knew that the moment had come when I must unearth the memories I had suppressed all these years. I don’t know whether I ever spoke to you about my daughter Kylian, Mr Carter. I’m an old woman now, awaiting the end of my life, but there was a time when I was a mother too, the mother of the most marvellous creature that ever set foot in this city.

‘I remember those days as the happiest of my life. Kylian had married one of the most brilliant men in the country and had gone to live with him in the house he had built himself in the north of the city, a house the like of which had never been seen. My daughter’s husband, Lahawaj Chandra Chatterghee, was an engineer and a writer. He was one of the first to design the telegraph network for this country, Mr Carter, one of the first to design the electric power grid that will govern the future of our cities, one of the first to build a rail network in Calcutta … One of the first in everything he decided to do.