It would be nice to believe her dreams had meaning. If only Isabelle Lockwoode could remember her dreams. But she never does.

How strange then, to awaken with the certainty of having dreamed, yet have no recollection of the dream itself.

After folding back the bedding to allow the mattress to air - the sheet would need to be changed: Isabelle had bled in the night - she turned to her bedroom window and drew open the curtains.

Instead of a sunlit and dew-wet garden, there - pressing against the window-glass and obscuring everything - was a red mist.

Mistress Rose guides them through to the hall. The walls are lined with the skulls of the dead. His Lordship walks beside Isabelle; oft reaching out to palm the cranium of one or other old acquaintance.

Here is the house of all lost secrets and forbidden loves. This is the dream twelve year old Isabelle can never recall.

'The girls will be with you shortly,' says Mistress Rose. 'If you'll amuse yourselves in the parlour?'

She pushes open the heavy door. The noise and the heat surprise Isabelle. They sting with the fury of a cannon's rolling retort. The parlour reeks of powder-smoke and hot blood. There is nothing to revere in the human flotsam that litters the room.

A dead child emerges from the press of bodies to show them to their table. His left eye is missing; the empty socket an angry and puckered scar. Yet Isabelle thinks him beautiful - though his beauty is unique. Like a broken doll.

The weight of his Lordship's arm is an anchor on Isabelle's shoulders; his lips pressing close to her ear. 'Only the dead serve,' he tells her, 'the living and the loveliest await.'

'Why can I not have this one?' asks Isabelle.

'Do not pout,' his Lordship chastens her. 'I have spoiled you.'

He guides Isabelle through the raucous and revenant host with a firm and steadying hand.

The stories he tells her are of dark misfortune. And his tale of the House of the Crimson Flower is the darkest yet.

'Having sufficiently recovered from that which Surgeon Tyrell had described as a minor alteration - twin incisions in the outer labia so the left could be excised and the right drawn across and stitched in place to close the entrance to the vagina - eleven year old Lilt Lanahann was bonded in service as "Ship's Boy" to Captain Jon Gaunt, master of the Argo. A whaler and fur sealer out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Lilt's hair has been cut, queued and tarred stiff, and he appears on deck dressed in canvas trows and a short jacket of blue wool. Only some few days after setting sail, the ship's crew are summoned, one by one, for questioning. Seeking Lilt in the night, Captain Gaunt had stumbled over the child's dead body. A sailor's skinning-knife had been driven into Lilt's left eye. No one confesses to the crime: all are suspect. Lilt's body was stitched into a canvas shroud and stored in the ship's hold.'

'Until it could be delivered, here, to the House of the Crimson Flower.'

Some time during the night or early morning of the third of August of that year, my sister Elizabeth was taken from her bed. She was ten years old. The ugliest of ugly ducklings, her only friends were Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.

Maybe you read about it in the papers. Nearly all of Bane County came out to search for my sister - for those two terrible weeks; when all my parents could do was wait, and pray.

Alders Dam lies on the Reservation River where it cuts through Tecumseh Canyon. There are caves in the canyon with paintings that are tens of thousands of years old. The art is ancient. The human remains are not.

Alders Dam was where Becky Ludlow showed me her breasts. Becky was sixteen that summer, and her breasts were all the proof a boy ever needed that there really was a God.

Pretty and popular, Becky was my first girlfriend and my first real kiss. The sin and the desire to sin. If I sinned from her lips, it was trespass sweetly urged.

Sky Fell was my best friend. What the hell kind of name is Sky, anyway? He ate at our table. My mother taught him to read. My sister loved him, I think, in her own way: awkward and angst.

One day I said to Sky, 'Your dad's a drunk and your mom makes the rent money lay-n on her back.'

And he said, 'Those are just my foster folks. They're not my real parents.'

'Don't kid yourself,' I told him. 'You ain't no fortunate son.'

This was before me and him went swimming in Alders Dam. Before the Daltons' trailer burned to the ground with Sky's foster parents inside it. Before my best friend turned up on our doorstep in the middle of the night to tell me he was leaving - running away.

'Running to where?' I asked him.

'Mexico,' he told me.

'What's in Mexico?'

'Freedom.'

'Your family?'

'Maybe.'

'Sure,' I said. 'You just keep right on dreaming.'

He told me one other thing.

Where to find my sister's dead body.

I already knew. I think I'd always known.

And Elizabeth wasn't the only one.

Just about everyone in Bane County went out looking for Becky Ludlow. They never found her. Maybe you read about it in the papers.

Charlie Meadows has a penis but she's not a boy.

If you ask her, Charlie will tell you she's always been a girl. Charlie thinks like a girl. Behaves like a girl. And would dress like a girl all the time - if she could. If only Charlie's parents weren't so... inconsistent.

It's morning. Charlie comes downstairs for breakfast wearing a navy-blue cardigan over a white blouse, a pink corduroy skirt, white ankle-socks and pink Nikes. Her shoulder-length blonde hair is parted in the middle and tied in twinned braids with white ribbons.

Charlie's dad looks up from his plate of steak and eggs, sunny side up, and says, 'You're not going to school like that.'

'Please,' begs Charlie. 'Just this one time? It's dress-up day.'

'We talked about this, remember? What you can wear inside and what you can wear outside. Girl clothes are only for inside.'

Charlie's mum pours herself a glass of orange juice - spilling it on the faux-wood linoleum. 'What's your teacher going to think?'

'For Christ's sake, Carol, watch what you're doing!'

'Don't yell at me, Geoffrey!'

'Can't you do anything right?'

Charlie's mum takes a bottle of vodka out of the refrigerator freezer and tops up her glass. 'Don't think I don't know what you're doing.'

Charlie's dad gets up from the table. 'What do you mean?'

'I'm just saying...'

'What is it you think I'm doing, Carol?'

'You shouldn't encourage him. That's all.'

'Who gave him goddamn dolls to play with?'

Charlie sees her chance and makes a run for the front door. Her mum and dad are yelling now. Charlie blames herself. Charlie's parents blame each other.

'I was never like that when I was a boy!'

'Well you're not much of a man!'

At school, Charlie's teacher sends her to the principal's office. The principal sends Charlie to the school counsellor. There's a pack of Camels in Mister Edward's shirt pocket. He smells of cigarette smoke.

'Can you tell me why, Charlie? What was it you were you hoping to prove?'

Charlie has tried smoking; it made her throw up.

'Is there something else? Something you feel you can't talk about?'

Charlie shakes her head. 'No.'

'Why are you dressed as a girl?'

'I am a girl.'

'Do you dress like that at home?'

'You shouldn't smoke.'

'When you say you're a girl...'

'I am a girl.'

'Is it something you like to do?'

'What do you mean?'

'Some people like to pretend.'

'It's not pretending.'

'Do you dream?'

'Everybody dreams.'

'Can you remember yours?'

'They're mostly about doves.'

'Are you a dove, Charlie?'

'I'm a pigeon. I crap on everything.'

It's recess. Charlie is being ignored. Charlie's teacher, Miss Bronski, offers to drive Charlie home.

'My parents are at work,' says Charlie.

'Is there someone who can stay with you?'

'It's okay. I have a key. And there's Ronnie.'

'Ronnie?'

'Veronica. Our neighbour. She's old but she's nice.'

'You could change your clothes. Come back to school.'

'I don't think so.'

'I'll wait for you.'

'No, thank you, Miss. I'll be okay. I'm not a child.'

'You're eleven, Charlie. I'll wait for you. Come on.'

At four minutes past five in the afternoon, Charlie's phone rings.

'Hi, Rory.'

'Hi, Charlie. Where are you?'

'Home.'

'I think you're really brave.'

'Why didn't you talk to me at school today?'

'I wanted to, Charlie, I really did. But the others, you know?'

'Bye, Rory.'

'I wish I was brave like you.'

'Bye, Rory.'

'Will I see you tomorrow?'

Charlie disconnects.

It's ten minutes to eight. Charlie's mum is still not home. Charlie's dad comes into the kitchen through the connecting door from the garage.

'No Mum? She must've had to work late. Go and have your bath, Charlie. I'll order us some Thai food.'

Charlie turns to go upstairs.

'And Charlie? No pyjamas. You can wear something of Mum's. You know what I like.'

'Yes, Daddy.'

'That's my girl.'

Shilo Greene and Atticus Bloom were the only two people in Freeport. Missouri, who didn't think their friendship an odd one. She was a ten year old white girl who could name all fifty states alphabetically. He was a sixty year old colored man who'd never made it past the seventh grade. Shilo loved everything to do with horses. Atticus had been kicked in the head by one.

'Didn't ever trust one since'.

'Maybe you just didn't treat it right.'

'Maybe.'

'If I had a horse, I'd feed it carrots every day, and an apple on Sundays.'

'I expected you might.'

'Going fishing tomorrow?'

'Always do.'

'Can I come?'

'Ain't never told you no before.'

'It's pretty here.'

'Lord surely knew what he was doing.'

'Daddy says there's nothing lazier than a river in high summer.'

'I expect it's so.'

'Why aren't you married?'

'Had me a wife once. She died.'

'You could always find another.'

'Ain't a woman fool enough to have me.'

'There's nothing foolish about love, Atticus.'

'I expect you'd know.'

“If love be rough with you, be rough with love.”

'Where'd you come by that?'

'William Shakespeare.'

'Can't say I ever met him.'

'I'd be fool enough, Atticus. To marry you.'

'Now don't you go giving me none of your lip, Miss Shilo.'

'What if I do?'

'Never could stand a lippy child.'

'You and Mama both.'

'Getting to be too big for your britches.'

'I surely do hope so.'

'Did you hear about Old Miss Cobb?'

'Spinster Cobb?'

'Fell off the back porch and broke her hip.'

'Lord have mercy!'

'Mama says she'll never recover.'

'Where's she at now?'

'Mulder's Infirmary.'

'Doc Mulder is a good man.'

'Miss Cobb doesn't like him.'

'Can't think of many folks she does like.'

'There's this play. Romeo and Juliet. His family doesn't like hers, and her family doesn't like his. So they marry in secret. But it all goes wrong. Romeo drinks poison, and Juliet stabs herself with his dagger.'

'Why would they go and do a fool thing like that?'

'For love. Don't you see? It's so beautiful. And sad.'

'Sounds plain crazy to me.'

'It's getting late. I should go.'

'Ain't right for a young lady to be out after dark.'

'Will you walk me home?'

'Always do.'

'Going fishing tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow is the Lord's day.'

'I'll bring you an apple.'

'There you go with your lip again.'

'Do you think the moon cares if we live or die?'

'Don't see why it would. It's a long ways away.'

'Say it's only a paper moon, Atticus.'

'I expect you're right.'

'Shakespeare writes about an envious moon.'

'Can't say I ever read it.'

'There's Mama. Thank you, Atticus.'

'Goodnight, Miss Shilo. And don't you fret none. The moon has no business with us.'

When you said COOKIES!

I thought you were offering

but you ate them all

Scattering crumbs

with your NUM NUM NUMS

and making a mess

all over the damn floor

Which - by the way

I've just vacuumed

My mother warned me

you were a MONSTER!

But did I listen?

Kaspar du Vries stood an inch over six feet tall. At thirty-four, the Major looked ten years older, his thinning dark hair combed back and streaked with grey. Nothing aged a man faster than the reality of war. He'd learned how true that was during the siege of Stalingrad, where he'd lost his hand. The black-gloved prosthetic attached to his right wrist was next to useless. Only good for snapping off a salute.

A shadow passed behind a rambling hedge of elderberry by the side of the road. Tossing away his cigarette, du Vries drew his service pistol.

'If you're trying to hide,' he said calmly, 'you'll need to try harder.'

An odd-looking dog stepped through a narrow gap in the trailing foliage.

'Mijn God,' said du Vries, laughing. 'You're neither one thing nor the other.'

It was - quite possibly - the ugliest dog du Vries had ever seen.

'Where do you come from?' he asked it. 'Are you lost?'

The dog glanced over its shoulder, back toward the walled friary.

Kaspar du Vries smiled. 'I had no idea dogs were so pious.'

The dog didn't growl as such, but made a low rumbling "chuff" deep in its chest.

'It's Pieter, isn't it?' said du Vries. 'I've heard all about you. Where's the boy, eh? Where's Pim?'

The Bridge

German occupied Holland - 1943 / 44

Near the small town of Ahnselm.

On the River Maas.

In the province of Brabant.

The man who called himself Brother Paul made his silent way through the dormitory of Saint Bartholomew's. Two opposing rows of folding canvas cots were butted against the walls of the refectory, minus its dining table and bench seating, rather than the vacated cells of the friars which had fallen into disrepair and were better suited to the spiders, mice, and pigeons that now lived in them.

Too excited to sleep, eleven year old Pim felt a hand squeeze the toes of one foot through his blankets of coarse, grey wool before Brother Paul moved on to wake the others.

There were seven of them. Their names were Muis (Mouse), Lars, Jens, Mattijs, Jakob (Roop), Willem (Pim) and Pieter the dog. They were all under the age of thirteen. Orphans or evacuees. Volunteers. Patriots.

It had been Brother Paul's idea to recruit them for the Dutch Resistance.

Built with bricks of a deep reddish-brown to almost purple colour, the chapel with its adjacent sacristy and bell tower, library, kitchen, refectory, chapter house, cloisters and enclosing walls, the friary was never designed to house more than twenty Dominicans and their Abbe, but with the outbreak of war, and the following invasion, Saint Bart's had become a shelter for the lost, the homeless, and the hungry.

There wasn't an Abbe in residence. The number of Brothers was one. His real name wasn't Paul. And he wasn't a member of any religious order.

Light and dark. Good and evil. The cycle never ended. Vanderbrecht knew this well.

It was a kill or be killed world, where death was as close, and ever-present, as a person's own shadow. That it couldn't always be seen didn't mean it wasn't there. As a boy he’d watched his mother shit herself to death from dysentery. Epidemic in the British internment camps of the Transvaal. But now the British were his allies against the Nazis and their boot lickers in the fascist Volunteer Legion Netherlands.

When Vanderbrecht had first arrived in Ahnselm, it was still possible to catch glimpses of the most wretched of the damned. Those hollowed-out ghosts of men and women, scuttling in the twilight along the narrow streets. But he hadn’t seen anyone wearing the yellow star for at least six months now. They had all been removed, first to the ghettos and then to the camps, where death came not only from disease, or starvation, or a firing squad, but from an open cannister of something called Zyklon-B.

Bas Vanderbrecht had been born in South Africa to Dutch parents. Released from a British internment camp after the second Boer War, Vanderbrecht had mined diamonds in Northern Rhodesia. Managed a tea plantation on the island of Ceylon. Smuggled opium out of China. Fought on the walls of the British Consulate at Peking for the fifty-five days of the Boxer rebellion. Had sailed the Atlantic solo (in a boat he'd built with his own two hands). Rode with the Australian Light Horse to take the Turkish held wells at the battle of Be'er Sheva in Palestine in WW1. And had driven an ambulance for the communist partisans in the Spanish Civil War; where he'd met a brash, bullying American by the name of Ernest Hemingway.

Someone had neglected to tell Brother Paul that a man in his sixties was too old to be running around the countryside in the middle of the night committing acts of sabotage.

Brother Paul had neglected to tell anyone much of anything. He was known to British MI-9 as Fagin. The children who carried out surveillance, gathered information, delivered messages, and risked far more dangerous missions called themselves Bart's Brigade.

With their dirt-smudged faces and their reclaimed clothes, they looked like ordinary children. It was their courage that was extraordinary.

They were lambs who fought like lions.

A boy with fair hair made his slow way through a forest of pine trees toward the railway bridge where it spanned the black ribbon of the Maas, the river lit only by a thin crescent of moon. Pim had been evacuated from Amsterdam. His parents were still there, and - as far as anyone knew - were still alive, though he hadn't had any contact with them for almost a year. His dog Pieter was by his side. Pieter was a medium-sized mutt of uncertain breed. A stray. A mongrel. And Pim's best friend.

Two more boys sat perched like crows on the bridge's wooden trestles. Lars looked up when a hand rested heavily on one of his shoulders and Pim bent down to ask, 'Anything?'

Lars shook his head.

Brother Paul had fallen while securing yet another bundle of dynamite to the bridge's supporting timbers. It was a long way down to the water. There hadn't been any sign of him since.

Lars and Jens were brothers. Always in trouble, but usually clever enough to talk their way out of it.

Pim looked past Jens to where Muis stood, dressed in a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of corduroy trousers, her hair tucked under a cloth cap. The oldest and the only girl, Mouse was nothing at all like her name, and not very much like a girl.

'What do we do now?' Pim said.

Mouse shrugged. 'We go home.'

'To Saint Bart's?'

'It's the closest thing to a home some of us have,' said Mouse.

Mattijs said, 'We should split up. It'll be safer that way. Mouse, Pim, and Pieter. Lars and Jens. Me and Roop.'

Roop was nine. A runaway. He hadn't shared his story with anyone. Mostly because he spoke with a Friesian accent that was thicker than day old oatmeal gone cold in the pot.

Pim asked, 'Where is Roop?'

'Setting the fuses,' said Mattijs. A quiet and serious boy who never smiled.

He checked his watch by its illuminated dial.

'In ten minutes time we're blowing this bridge sky high. Let's move out.'

The Friary

There was nothing like a tank to make people sit up and take notice. The MK IV ground to a halt in the middle of Ahnselm's town square. Kaspar du Vries climbed out of his armoured car and approached the German officer standing in the tank's open cockpit.

Captain Otto Durst acknowledged du Vries with something that might have been a salute and surveyed the quaint little buildings around him.

'This is your nest of vipers?'

'Insurgents,' said du Vries. 'Communists. Traitors. All of them in league with the mad monk and his miniature marauders.'

Durst made a face like a cat's arse. It was typical of the VLN to need real soldiers to do their job for them. 'Leave it with me,' he said. 'We'll have it flattened in a day.'

Mouse, Pim, and Pieter were following the river back to Saint Bart's. It was longer but less arduous than the forested hills, and much less dangerous than using the roads with their troop transports and motorized patrols.

The sun was still rising when Mouse stopped to throw off her clothes and wade into the water. Pim followed, though reluctantly. Pieter had more sense than to brave the early spring chill. They were washing off the accumulated grime of a night spent outdoors when the sound of the first shell exploding carried through the crisp morning air.

Scrambling up the riverbank, Mouse turned and said, 'Do you remember your house in Amsterdam? Could you find it again?'

'Course,' said Pim. 'I'm not a baby.'

'Go,' Mouse told him. 'Take Pieter and go.'

'You'll need my help,' Pim argued.

Mouse yelled at him, 'Go home, Pim! Just go home!'

The orchard at Saint Bartholomew's had rows of pollarded apple trees, their white blossom drifting to where twelve year old Mattijs stood, staring down the wrong end of a VLN soldier's rifle. A second soldier leaned his gun against the base of a tree and reached into the left breast pocket of his uniform. He held out a foil wrapped stick of chewing-gum.

'Here, boy. Take it.'

Mattijs didn't move.

'We make a deal, ja?' The second soldier said. 'You tell us where your friends are hiding.'

'Or what?' Mattijs asked. 'You'll beat me to death with your rifle butts like you did my mother?'

The two soldiers looked at each other. It was all the opportunity Mattijs needed. He pulled a snub-nosed revolver out of the waistband of his shorts, behind his back, and shot them both in the face. He kicked the dead body of the first soldier and spat on the second.

'I only deal in lead,' he said, taking their rifles and ammunition belts, but keeping his .22.

Lars saw the soldier crouched in the shadows of the friary's arched stone gateway. The two boys were lying on their stomachs on the flat roof of the chapel, behind a low brick wall. They were armed with glass bottles full of gasoline, the open necks stuffed with strips of torn rag.

Twelve year old Lars tapped his younger brother Jens on the shoulder and whispered, 'Matches.'

'I don't have them,' said eleven year old Jens. 'You have them.'

'I don't have them,' Lars argued. 'Why would I have them?'

'You had them last,' said Jens.

Lars swore. 'Check your pockets, dammit.'

Jens rolled onto his side to feel the pockets of his shorts. His hand stopped on his right thigh, dipped into the pocket there, and pulled out a thin cardboard packet.

Lars snatched it out of his hand. 'Idiot!'

Tearing out a paper match, he struck it on the brickwork casement, touched the flame to a fuel soaked rag, and hurled one of the bottles overarm.

Jens raised his head above the brickwork to watch the bottle spinning end over end toward its target. The crouching soldier raised his rifle and fired. The first bullet chinked off the low brick wall. The second entered Jen's left eye and blew out the back of his skull.

'Roop, roop, roop,' said Mattijs. 'That's what you sound like.'

Jakob's face flushed scarlet and his hands curled into fists. 'No, I don't!'

'Yeah, you do.'

The youngest and smallest, nine year old Roop hated being teased about his accent, and he was always ready for a fight, even weighed down with twin ammunition belts crossed over his narrow chest and a rifle slung over each shoulder. Mattijs stepped in and rested his forehead against Roop's. The two of them stayed that way, looking into the other's eyes.

'God help me,' breathed Mattijs, 'but I love you, you crazy little bastard.'

Roop grinned.

Mattijs took a step back and turned, waving for Roop to follow him.

'Come on,' he said. 'We have to find the others.'

Mouse climbed over a drystone wall into the friary orchard, last year's windfall spoiling in the long grasses and numerous weeds. It didn't take her long to find the bodies of the two dead soldiers, not far from the cider house, and where Mattijs was, Roop would be. The pair had become inseparable.

Making her way through the rows of apple trees to the gated wall that opened onto the kitchen garden, Mouse could see Lars scrambling down off the chapel roof.

Jens must already be on the ground, she thought. The concussive barrage of tank shells exploding in the nearby town hadn't stopped, great clouds of dust and sulphurous yellow-grey smoke rising into the air. Brother Paul would want them to help the people of Ahnselm. Mouse just didn't know how. She had to find Mattijs. If anybody could get them out of the hell Brother Paul had dragged them into it was God's fallen angel. A virgin boy with lifeless eyes and a stone-cold heart. Mattijs; who was inexpressibly cruel. And so beautiful it was hard to look at him without wanting to cry.

Angry at herself, Mouse swiped at her tears. 'Crying isn't going to help, goddammit!'

Lars was running. Not thinking. Not feeling. Not able to feel. Not yet. He could hear a truck, loud and getting louder, coming closer.

Outside the friary wall, next to the road, was a yew tree, tall with spreading branches. Lars ran to the yew and climbed to a branch the truck would have to pass beneath. He had the machine gun he'd taken off the badly burned body of the dead soldier slung crossways over his shoulder and chest. And in the pocket of his coat was a hand grenade. When the truck, a troop carrier - one soldier driving, another riding shotgun, more in the back under the canvas cover. When the truck was directly under the branch where Lars was sitting, he pulled the pin from the grenade and jumped. He landed on the roof of the cab. There was only time enough to lob the live grenade through the open window of the driver's side door. No time to think. No time to be frightened.

Light. Heat. Sound. Mattijs and Roop had seen Lars fall from the sky. The front cab of the troop carrier disintegrated and burst into flame. The truck veered off the narrow road and rolled onto its side. A soldier was screaming. Another crawled out of the back of the truck and collapsed. There might have been others. They didn't stop to count them.

Mattijs looked at Roop. 'Give me one of those rifles.'

'You stay here.' Mattijs told Roop, pushing the younger boy toward his canvas cot and fussing around him like an old mother hen. 'Get some sleep. I'll go look for Mouse and Pim. They should be back by now. Then we need to go.'

'Go where?' Asked Roop.

'Somewhere that isn't here.' said Mattijs.

'Is Brother Paul really dead?'

'Maybe. I don't know. But we can't wait around to find out.'

'You won't leave me, will you?'

'No,' said Mattijs. 'I would never do that.'

Mouse blocked the stairs leading up to the bell tower, with its view of the chapel roof. 'I told you to go home.'

Pim stared back defiantly. 'You don't tell me what to do.'

'This isn't a game,' said Mouse. 'You could be killed. Don't you understand that?'

Pim tried to push past her. 'Who's up there?'

'Jens.' said Mouse, pushing back. 'He's dead.'

'And Lars?'

'Alive... The last time I saw him.'

Pim said, 'There was an explosion. I heard rifle shots.'

'Mattijs and Roop are here,' said Mouse. 'Somewhere.'

'How did du Vries find us?'

Mouse had her suspicions but didn't voice them. Not everyone hated the Nazis. Hitler had as many admirers as there were those who denounced him.

'What do we do now?' asked Pim.

'We keep fighting,' said Mouse. 'But not here. Ahnselm is gone, and the friary isn't safe any more.'

'Brother Paul might come back.'

Mouse thought about this for a moment. 'I don't want to be here if he does,' she said, but gave no reason.

Pieter began to bark some minutes before Mouse and Pim heard the sound of an armoured car approaching.

Mattijs was sitting comfortably in an upholstered and high-backed chair near one of the two tall windows of the library when Major du Vries stopped in the room's open doorway, with his pistol in his outstretched hand.

Not looking up, Mattijs read from the book in his lap, 'Suddenly from the direction of the water came a sound of violent scuffling, and next instant there broke upon our ears a succession of the most awful roars. There was no mistaking what they came from...'

'Only a lion could make such a noise as that,'* quoted du Vries. 'Are there other lions here?' he asked. 'I see only one such beast. And a small one at that.'

'You don't need to worry about the lion you can see,' said Mattijs, 'but the one you can't.'

As if a bullet from an unseen assassin was the least of his worries, du Vries merely shrugged and asked, 'Where is Fagin?'

'Dead,' said Mattijs. 'He fell in the river and drowned.'

'That is - unfortunate,' said du Vries, stepping further inside the library.

Resting the hand holding his gun on the back a chair opposite, and a twin to, the one Mattijs occupied, du Vries said, 'You must be a slow reader. You've yet to turn a page.'

In answer, Mattijs raised the short barrel of his revolver above the fanned copy of King Solomon's Mines. Just then, du Vries's driver, a pimple-faced corporal, appeared in the doorway, clutching a handful of Roop's collar.

'Ah,' said du Vries, smiling. 'It's our littlest fish. Jakob, isn't it? Tell me, Jakob, where is the man you call Brother Paul?'

Corporal Kirke was the son of a farmer. He had a farmer's hands. When Roop refused to answer du Vries, Kirke gripped the boy's head with both hands and, with a sudden violent twist, he snapped Roop's neck.

In the time it took Roop to fall to the floor, dead, Mattijs had leapt to his feet and had head-shot Kirke, du Vries had shot Mattijs - the bullet shattering his right clavicle and deflecting down at an angle to tear through his left lung - and Mattijs had shot du Vries in the face. Twice. At close range. It happened so quickly, the gun smoke was still rising toward the library ceiling.

It was mid-afternoon and the weather had become unsettled, low cloud and light rain, and the temperature falling by several degrees. With Mouse carrying Roop over her shoulder and Pim helping Mattijs. they exited the library and moved as quickly as they could along the hallway next to the stairs, past the old Abbe's rooms that had also been Brother Paul's, out through the front door and down the steps, to cut across a corner of the cloistered quad into the rectory. Mouse laid Roop down on his folding canvas cot. She put a rifle in his hands, thinking he looked like a small child hugging a favourite toy. Which (she supposed) he was.

Mattijs pushed Pim away. 'I'm alright.'

But then he sat on the floor, with his head between his knees, and coughed up still more blood. He offered no explanations and wanted no sympathy.

'Get out,' Mattijs told them. 'Go before... Soldiers come... No time.'

That he would use the .22 to take his own life after they had gone went unspoken.

Mouse, Pim, and Pieter ran from the rectory, through the kitchen to the door that led to the walled garden, from the walled kitchen garden to the orchard, and from the orchard to the fields and wooded hills that lay beyond it, where they could hide.

Mouse knew people who would help them.

The man who had called himself Brother Paul made his slow way to the dormitory in what had been the dining hall at Saint Bartholomew's. The fire hadn't reached the rectory, both it and the kitchen being in a separate building to the chapter house and library.

He found Roop lying on his cot, curled up and clutching (of all things) a rifle. Sitting on the floor, beside Roop's bed, Mattijs was slumped in a pool of his own blood. He still held the snub-nosed revolver.

Vanderbrecht prised the gun gently out the dead boy's hand. He sat on Mouse's low cot, running his fingers over the blanket of coarse grey wool, remembering how he'd stood over the sleeping child to lift her in his arms, and had then carried her back to the Abbe's private rooms. What he had done to her there was unforgivable.

He checked to see if the gun was loaded.

"And still the man hears all, and only craves."*

Put the barrel of the gun to his temple.

"He may not shame such tender love and stay."*

And squeezed the trigger.

^~

The girl and the boy with fair hair walked the streets of Amsterdam. The boy's dog was by his side.

It was the ugliest dog I had ever seen.

*H. Rider Haggard / King Solomon's Mines

*Robert Browning / Childe Roland

There were eleven of us in the ship's boat: all that were left of the crew of thirty-two who had sailed with the whaler "Carrickfergus" out of Albany on the third day of August - 1891. I was the youngest and ship's boy; Dan Wellness my name, an orphan and bastard born. The others were Meldrew, Anders, Gray, Piers, Fircombe, Crabbe, Morris, Fitzwilliam, O'Rourke, and the Chinese cook, (who I knew only as) "Biscuit".

We had a barrel of drinking water, salvaged from the flotsam, and another of salted pork. The boat's mast, sail, and oars had all been lost so we drifted, sometimes paddling with our hands, but stopped when Fircombe drew our attention to a monstrous fin slicing through the water toward us.

'Sharks can sense such things,' said Morris, belatedly.

Four days we drifted until, on the fifth day, the boat washed aground on the empty beach of a shallow bay. The land rose afore us in steep embankments of sparse vegetation and tumbled stone, and all of us staggered ashore; wondering at how strangely unsteady the sand was under our feet.

'Marooned,' despaired Meldrew (Master's Mate), 'and nowt the better for it.'

Not all of us were so disheartened. Indeed, there were some who thought our surviving the storm and the sinking of our ship a miracle, and thanked God for it. And we still had the boat, which we could row with oars made of driftwood.

We soon set about exploring. There was wood enough for a fire, and there was a freshwater stream with its own waterfall. We ate wild yams, crabs, mussels, turtle eggs, and the eggs of nesting seabirds. Of inhabitants, native or otherwise, there was no sign.

Out there was the Indian Ocean, its powerful currents had swept as back to the rugged west coast of Terra Australis, where we stood or sat as a group on the coarse, red-gold sand; discussing the likelihood of being rescued.

We had not drifted so far that we were beyond the reach of civilised men. There would be other whaling ships, Malay pearlers, or (perhaps) a trader en-route to the Dutch East Indies.

'Should we light a signal fire and keep it burning?' asked Piers.

'If you want to be speared by the Blacks,' said Fitzwilliam. 'They'll be able to see the smoke 's well 's any passing ship.'

'Build your damn fire,' said Meldrew, 'and if the Blacks come near us, we'll give them the Chinaman.'

The others found this amusing; though I could see no humour in it.

It was Anders and Crabbe who discovered O'Rourke's body the next morning. The Irishman was floating face down in the pool below the waterfall. The back of his head had been brutally bashed in.

'By a rock looks like,' said Crabbe.

'Or a wooden club,' ventured Fitzwilliam. 'Possibly a stone-headed axe.'

'Do you think the Blacks killed him?' asked Morris.

There was no real evidence to support such speculation one way or the other. No murder weapon that we could find, and only one set of footprints in the damp sand at the edge of the pool (presumably O'Rourke's).

That we had not seen any Aboriginals was no reason to believe they were not camped somewhere close by.

'How do we know it weren't one of us?' said Fircombe.

There were shrugs and the shaking of heads. Had one of us hated the man enough to murder him? Knowing O'Rourke, I thought it more than likely.

'However it happened,' said Meldrew, 'we've got to drink that water, so somebody drag the bugger out 'fore he spoils it.'

Two days after the killing of O'Rourke, Morris went off by himself to forage for edible berries or such, and never returned.

Piers later stumbled across his lifeless body of Gray at the bottom of the cliffs, at the north'ard end of the beach, from the heights of which he appeared to have fallen. By accident? No one thought so.

We sharpened sticks to make spears, and those and the knives all sailors carry were our only weapons. Another day passed with no sighting of any ship of any kind. Each of us began to suspect at least one of the others. Tempers flared. Accusations were made and vehemently denied.

Fircombe's neck was broken some time in the night as he lay sleeping.

Piers drowned in a tidal rock pool no deeper than the length of a man's arm from wrist to elbow.

Anders also drowned, seemingly while bathing in the ocean, his corpse washed ashore some hours later.

Fitzwilliam. like Morris, was another who simply vanished off the face of the earth. Certain of his logical conclusion that we were being targeted by wild Aborigines, he set out with the intention of making some kind of peace offering.

"To parlay a truce," was how he put it.

We sat around the unlit fire.

'It's this place,' said Crabbe, picking lice out of his beard and cracking them with his thumbnail. 'It's cursed. I say we take the boat and look for a river. Where there's a river there are people.'

'Aye,' said Meldrew, 'but what kind of people?'

'Farmers,' said Crabbe. 'Loggers. Fisherfolk.'

Meldrew took a coin from his pocket. 'Heads we stay. Tails we go. Agreed?'

Biscuit wasn't asked, and his vote would not have counted any way: him being Chinese and not White. I could see some merit in Crabbe's reasoning and, faced with choosing the Devil or the deep blue sea, I chose the sea.

Meldrew flipped the coin.