Chapter 12
March 7, 2024 at 11:39 AM
The early English winter morning was marked by calm weather and the absence of fog. Holly Austin was walking along the stone road leading to the village. Small 19th-century houses with neat inscriptions carved on them floated past her. The sun was almost invisible, but its thin rays still filtered through the dense veil of clouds in some places. Cars occasionally drove past Holly, drivers asked her if she needed to go somewhere. She responded with a refusal.
After walking a little more, she found herself in the common square of one of the villages, along which she was walking leisurely. She looked around and kept picking up her pace, sometimes jumping over frozen puddles and mud that had not yet frozen in some places due to recent warm weather. When she reached one of the houses, she knocked softly. A young man opened the door for her, he recognized her immediately. As soon as she ducked into a warm room, he looked around and closed the doors behind her.
“Has anyone seen you?”, Holly shook her head negatively, taking a chair and sitting down at the table next to Arthur. “That's good. Because the weather is cloudy today.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. It was not as much of a hindrance to her as it was to him. Oh, man.
“Arthur, you say that as if you haven't got used to the fact that the weather in England is always cloudy. You should have gotten used to it.”
The guy looked at her incredulously and sat down opposite her. Holly looked at him, he returned the gaze, the girl hesitantly held out a bag with something strange. Arthur snatched it out and looked inside, smiled and giggled merrily.
“I see you got used to it even earlier than I did. Being a real German at the same time,” Arthur teased her.
This guy was sharp-tongued, but he covered Holly well in front of her boss. She did not say anything, just smiled back. Arthur was a nice guy, a little weird, from Germany. He was adopted by a couple from England for four years. Then, having escaped from their custody, he returned to Germany, however, when he started to work on the black market, he came back to England. But for all the time he had not been able to get used to the local weather.
Holly turned away, he is not the one she wanted to see and hear right now. The thoughts of the last few months were running through her head. The black market was restless. Something was going on, but no one knew what exactly. An alarming fear spread like a grey ominous haze. One by one, informants, carriers as well as buyers stopped contacting, they were found dead in sequence. Looking at the tree branches swaying outside the window, she wondered why there was no letter from Ingrid.
Holly was redirecting goods inside England to their market. She worked as a small fry as Arthur was. It could said they were in the same bunch as Ingrid and Wilhelm.
“Arthur,” the girl called him. He turned around, frowning. “Have you heard from Ingrid? I thought maybe she wrote you something,” said uncertainly Holly, knowing that Ingrid was a sore subject for Arthur. He was madly in love with her. After a loud scandal and her public refusal to reciprocate his feelings, Arthur was offended to the core and considered Ingrid a fool, along with her brother. But Holly could not blame her friend. Quarrels within their group were rare, but a certain coldness could be felt.
“No, there has been nothing from her for two months, there's silence from Wilhelm, too. He should have brought us gold a long time ago!”, Arthur began to get indignant. “And Ingrid should have brought money! And she should have checked on you. She does it every month, so what happened? It seemed to me that she had settled in Austria. She seemed to be flying there...” Arthur continued to mutter to himself.
He was not interested in Ingrid or Wilhelm, they were only companions to him. They were something more only for Holly, they were someone like friends, like all of them. Holly thought they were all kind of family or at least comrades, but Arthur did not feel the same way.
“I don't know, no, she probably stayed in Berlin, but I don't know why... To be honest, it worries me,” Arthur got up, poured himself a cup of tea from an iron kettle that had been on the stove for a long time. Then he looked at Holly, took out another mug and poured tea for her too. Holly noted his actions were sloppy and twitchy, but quick. He was in a hurry in general, or he was in a hurry only in front of her. Maybe he was hurt by this story too.
“What exactly is bothering you?”, asked her Arthur. Sipping tea and putting down the mug, he retired to the basement in the house to get books and antiques from there.
“The fact that Ingrid has disappeared from our view so much. She never did that. And Wilhelm is silent. Maybe something happened to them, Arthur,” the girl said with a note of nervosity. “I have a feeling,” she raised her voice, “that it doesn't bother you at all!" she shouted in the direction of the basement where Arthur was.
"Holly, she might show up again,” shouted the guy. “Devil knows what’s happening in Germany right now, besides, if something really happened, we would recognize it. They wouldn't have left us in the dark. Besides, which of the two of us has more contact with Ingrid? You or me?” the guy responded with irritation.
“Yes, of course, you're right about something, but do you know, maybe Ingrid ran away as planned? Do you remember she mentioned it one day?” Arthur rolled his eyes, exhausted, he remembered that day like the back of his hand. After all, she rejected him on that exact day.
“I doubt. Either she's really stupid or immortal. If she decided to run away, it was probably with Wilhelm. But then they didn't have many options where to go,” Arthur was walking up the stairs, breathing heavily.
“I’m trying to recall how the Black Leopard was killed, do you remember?”, Holly said sadly.
“Oh, is this the guy who kept trying to steal jewellery?”. Holly nodded.
She jumped off her chair and ran to the other side of the room to look at the clouds.
“Of course, I understand that traitors need to be punished for their actions, especially when a lot of people can suffer from their truth. There has never been such an atrocity as against him,” she said with a note of bitter disappointment.
Arthur stopped halfway and sighed heavily, realizing that he could not explain everything to her yet. Holly is the youngest of them.
“Although, you know, maybe everything is right. He wanted to turn everyone in, God help him, which one of us needs the truth? That's right, no one,” the girl continued to philosophize, looking out the window again. Clouds always reminded her of the souls of the dead, floating through the sky like a river of the world of the dead. Wilhelm told her about the River Styx and the metaphors associated with it. He, pointing to the sky, always compared clouds to the dead.
“Sooner or later they'll find us all, Holly. It's for our sakes if we’re dead at that time,” Arthur summed up, putting a porcelain vase on the table and addressing the girl. “You see, you're seventeen and you don't understand all the things yet. Just hope for the best, that's all we have left. Yeah. And pray that Ingrid and Wilhelm are okay. We're your only family.”
Arthur quickly walked up to the girl and stroked her head. Then he began to dress to go out, he needed to go to the city.
The girl lowered her head and nodded, agreeing with his words. It was a bitter truth what Arthur had said. Although she herself had never said it or admitted it, it was the truth. Holly, as she put on her coat and jumped into the car, thought about it too. She knew the law of the black market well: once you go over the line, you are unlikely to live a long and peaceful life. Only death could free you from it.
Driving away from the house, Arthur rolled into a large puddle and struggled to get out, splashing the back of the car. They kept picking up speed. Holly pressed her feet together fearfully, she was afraid of driving fast. It seemed to her that she was always in contact with death when Arthur drove about a hundred kilometres.
