Louise Welsh - Death is a Welcome Guest

Magnus rubbed his arms, trying to restore their circulation. He was still uncertain of Jeb’s innocence and did not bother to protest it. ‘You know your way around the house.’

‘I make it my business to know my way around any building I sleep in. This place is riddled with hiding places. People didn’t like to see their servants in the old days. They kept them below stairs or in between the walls.’

There was a bed equipped with a bare mattress in the room. Magnus sat on it and waited for Jacob to leave, but the priest walked to the barred window and looked out. ‘I don’t want Belle, I’m still married to Annie.’ The priest’s back was towards Magnus, his expression lost in the dark.

‘Why were you so angry?’

‘I don’t know. It hurt me to see her in bed with him. Perhaps Father Wingate is right. I’m jealous of anyone with a future.’

It felt like their roles had been reversed; Jacob had become the prisoner, Magnus the priest. He said, ‘As long as we’re alive we have a future.’

Jacob laughed in the darkness. ‘So much death has made me realise that ultimately all of our futures are the same.’

‘I thought you believed in heaven and hell?’

Jacob shrugged; a shadow in the moonlight. ‘I believe in hell.’

Magnus nodded. ‘Me too.’

They stood in silence for a moment and then Jacob said, ‘We need you here. I’m not going to put you in leg irons, but I can’t let you go until we have more able-bodied men. Without the harvest we’ll be completely reliant on what we can scavenge.’

Magnus said, ‘My family—’

‘Your family are dead. I wish it wasn’t so, but you don’t need to see their corpses to know that I’m right. The living need to stick together.’

‘Whether they want to or not?’

Jacob turned away from the window, his face a white presence in the moonlit room. ‘The dead are lost to us. Our duty is survival.’

‘My family are survivors and my duty is to them.’

‘It’s natural that you should think so, but you’re wrong.’

The priest touched Magnus’s shoulder as he left the room. He turned the key in the lock, leaving Magnus alone in the dark.

Magnus was woken by a bang. It was not quite light yet and it took him a moment to realise where he was. Then he made out the shape of the unfamiliar room, the barred window. ‘Fuck.’ The noise was still reverberating in his ears, but the world was silent and he wondered if the sound had been the remnant of an unremembered dream.

Magnus pulled on his boots and got to his feet. He had slept in his clothes and his limbs were heavy. He tried the door. It was still locked. ‘Shit.’ He was thirsty but there was no sink in the room, no glass of water. Magnus went to the window and looked out from between its bars, into the grey dawn. He pressed his forehead against the cool metal. Soon the sun would creep over the horizon and Jacob would unlock his door. The priest had been drunk and angry. There was a chance that morning might restore his equilibrium. If not, Magnus would take the first opportunity to escape. He had managed to break out of Pentonville, he could break out of here too.

Somewhere in the not quite dawn a blackbird was singing. The nursery looked down on the kitchen garden. It was the same view that he had seen from Jeb’s room and Magnus wondered if he was imprisoned below. Jeb’s ruthlessness had enabled them to escape jail, but this time his injuries would make him a liability. Magnus recalled the way Jeb had stuck his knife into a prisoner’s gut during the final ruckus in Pentonville. It had been self-defence, but the action had been close to elegant in its swiftness. His own descent into violence had been messy. Magnus felt again the sensation of the man’s skull giving way as he had hit it with the fire extinguisher and shuddered. This time there would be no deaths.

Magnus desperately wanted to pee. He searched for something to relieve himself into. The room had been emptied at some point and only the bed and a few sticks of furniture remained. He tried the window. It was locked, but the fastenings were the old-fashioned type that unscrewed without the aid of a key. They were stiff, but he managed to undo them and push up the casement. The window was too high and so he dragged a chair over and stood on it.

Magnus was peeing into the dawn, the morning air on his face, the salt scent of his own urine a small victory of streaming steam, when he noticed the dark shape lying on the grass beneath the wall that edged the garden. At first he thought it was a shadow but something about its outline perplexed him. For a moment he thought the dark blot might be a black bin bag blown in from somewhere else, but then he realised that it was a body, lying motionless on the lawn. The thought of yet another death made Magnus feel weary, but it occurred to him that whoever it was might yet be alive. He tucked himself away quickly, stepped down from the chair and broke it against the bedstead. He lifted the sturdiest of its legs and battered it against the door.

‘Let me out! There’s someone out there!’

It took a while, but eventually Will shouted from the other side of the door, ‘I don’t have the keys.’

‘Get them from Jacob.’

‘He’s not in his room.’

A thought stirred in Magnus. He said, ‘Someone’s lying beneath the trees on the back lawn. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead.’

He heard Will’s boots thump downstairs and went to the window. He reached the garden quicker than Magnus had expected. He ran across the lawn, leaving a dark trail of footprints on the dewy grass. Will faltered, unsure of what direction he should head in. He looked up. Magnus pointed to where the body lay and Will sprinted towards it. He slowed. Magnus knew that whoever it was, they were dead. Will raised his face towards the nursery window and shook his head. Magnus could tell from the heaviness of Will’s limbs as he walked towards the house that it was someone they knew.

‘Please God, don’t make it Raisha,’ he muttered beneath his breath. He waited until Will was below and leaned against the bars of his window. ‘Who was it?’

‘Jacob.’ Will’s face was taut and white with anger. ‘That murdering bastard you came with shot him.’

It was a terrible thing to see an old man cry. Magnus had never liked Father Wingate, but he put a hand on the elderly priest’s arm as they walked away from Jacob’s grave and whispered, ‘He told me last night that he was still married to Annie. Jacob’s with his family now. That’s what he wanted.’ Magnus did not believe in the afterlife, but Father Wingate did and he needed to comfort himself, by comforting the priest.

The old man patted Magnus’s hand. ‘I’m crying for the end of the world. All things must end, us too, it is the order of things, but I cannot help but mourn their passing.’

They were still alive and the world was not yet completely dead, but there was no point in contradicting him.

Magnus and Will had buried Jacob in a nearby churchyard, close to a recent grave marked by a simple wooden cross inscribed Melody . Father Wingate had delivered the eulogy and then watched as they put the soldier into the ground. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Neither Belle nor Raisha had been there, it had been an all-male funeral, like they used to have on the islands when Magnus’s grandfather was a boy.

Magnus was aching and caked in mud. It had been hard, filthy work digging the grave, but he had been glad of it. The priest had saved his life and they had parted on uneasy terms.

He took Father Wingate by the elbow and helped him into the passenger seat of the truck they had used to drive Jacob’s body to the churchyard. Will was still standing by the fresh grave, his head bowed in prayer or resolution. Magnus watched him in the rear-view mirror and wondered if he was going to be a problem.