the Resurrection Plot by Kate Heartfield

Author:Kate Heartfield [Heartfield, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Media Tie-In, Fantasy, Action & Adventure, historical fantasy
ISBN: 9781839082368
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2023-07-04T09:33:18+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

It was a long journey from Tours to Brussels, with the rail lines cut, avoiding Paris. Simeon took three stagecoach trips, giving a false name to Prussian soldiers at crossroads. He kept his cap low over his brow and said nothing to anyone.

He found Belgium in much the same mood. It was neutral, but it lay between two empires at war. He could feel the anxiety in the way people stared at each other in the street, and then looked away.

Simeon was exhausted by the time he arrived, and knew he wasn’t up to a fight. He took a room near the cathedral at the heart of the city: a simple, clean room, with a bed, a wash table and a chamber pot. Everything a man needed. He even had a book to read; the last stagecoach had kept a basket of them for travelers to leave and take, and Simeon had helped himself to a battered copy of Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris.

Perhaps that’s why the cathedral of Saint Michael and Saint Gudula reminded him of Notre Dame, with its two towers. It stood in a wide square high above everything, a vast stone staircase leading to it. The best way to get to know a city was to climb its highest buildings, or so he’d been taught. It was cold like the day he’d climbed his first cathedral, in Vienna.

Simeon walked around the cathedral, looking for the best place to climb it and be hidden from public view. He paused to gaze at a giant window made of brilliant stained glass, showing a scene of people gathered around a table.

“That’s new,” someone said, and he turned to see an old man in a battered hat, holding a basket full of maps. “Put in just this year for the celebrations.”

“Celebrations?” Simeon asked.

The old man cocked his head, no doubt catching the English accent in Simeon’s French. “Ah, a visitor, are you, sir? You’d be interested in a map.”

Simeon stepped forward politely and took a cheap folded map out of the basket, and handed him a coin. “What celebrations did you mean, sir?”

“Five hundred years since the miracle of the sacrament. Some Jews stole some consecrated host, and when they stabbed it, blood came out.”

“Why on earth would they do such a thing?”

He shrugged. “Who can say? They were burned at the stake for it, the story goes.”

Of course they were. An excuse to murder Jews five hundred years ago, celebrated with beautiful light and color today. Somehow, despite all the work of good people, history and the future felt like a circular trap. Simeon felt ill. He put the old man’s map in his pocket and left without another word and found a spot where the architecture would screen him as he climbed.

It felt good to get his hands on the cold stone, to make his acquaintance with a building he’d never climbed before. From the roof, he looked out over the city and wondered where his enemy was, and whether she was still in Brussels at all.

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