The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER FOUR: THE BOW

By ten o'clock on Saturday morning, the empty lot on Tannery Row looked like a coronation. White marquees stood where the chapel had been. A brass band in red jackets played on a square of fresh turf, and every camera in Brookhollow had found a place along the rope. A platform faced the street, dressed in blue velvet, with a ribbon stretched across the front and a pair of silver scissors waiting on a cushion.

Barclay Hatherley stood at the foot of the steps, broad and grey and smiling, shaking the mayor's hand for the photographers. Rowland stood at his elbow in another pale suit. Maren stood behind her father in a plain grey dress and said nothing to anyone. Once, when the band paused between tunes, her eyes went across the road to the Whelans' gate, and then away.

Zane was standing at it anyway.

He had read her message a dozen times. He knew exactly what Rowland wanted. He also knew what it would mean to hide inside his father's house while the Hatherleys threw a party on its doorstep, so he stood at the gate with his hands resting on the top bar, and he waited.

Ivan stood beside him. The doctor at the clinic had put his arm in fresh plaster the day before, and he wore it like a medal. Rosa had begged them both to stay indoors. Ivan had told her it was his gate and he would stand at it if he liked, and that had been the end of the conversation.

Rowland saw them during the mayor's speech. He leaned toward the reporters at the rope, still smiling, and pointed across the road.

"If you want some colour for your pieces," he said, loud enough to carry, "there it is. Zane Whelan, the boy who ran from Larch Tower, home at last. And the old man who would rather hold back a whole city than take a fair price for a pile of bricks."

The cameras swung round. Shutters clattered like hail on a roof. Ivan muttered something under his breath that Rosa would not have liked, and Zane laid a hand on his good shoulder and kept his own face still. He didn't scowl, and he didn't shout. He gave them nothing to print. After a minute the lenses drifted back to the platform, disappointed.

Benedikt Ostrander rose to speak at half past eleven.

He was a tall man, silver-haired and unhurried, in a dark coat cut so well that it seemed to have been made around him. The crowd went quiet for him in a way it had not gone quiet for the mayor. He spoke without notes, in a low, pleasant voice that made people lean in, about light and glass and the kind of city that deserved to be looked at.

He was halfway through when he glanced up, past the cameras and the rope, and saw the man at the gate.

He stopped speaking.

The silence stretched. Somebody in the band shifted and a cymbal whispered against its stand. Barclay Hatherley's smile stayed exactly where it was, but his eyes moved to his son.

Ostrander stepped down from the platform. He walked through the gap in the rope, across the road and straight past the cameras, while every lens in Brookhollow turned to follow him. Rowland hurried after him, three steps behind, wearing the uncertain smile of a host whose guest has wandered off toward the kitchens.

Zane's left hand closed on the top of the gate.

Ostrander stopped in front of him. Then, in the middle of Tannery Row, with the mayor and the band and half the town watching, the president of the House of Ostrander bowed to the bricklayer's son. It was a low, formal bow, one hand flat across his chest, the way the old diamond houses bowed to the fields that fed them and to nothing else on earth.

"Foreman," he said quietly. "Nobody told me you were in the country."

Zane inclined his head, nothing more.

The crowd heard none of it. It only saw the bow, and the photographers caught it from every side, the silver head lowered and the dusty man at the gate standing straight. Ivan stared at his son as if he had never seen him before. Rowland, three steps behind, heard every word, and the smile drained slowly out of his face.

Ostrander straightened, turned and walked back the way he had come. He climbed the platform, laid his hands on the lectern and looked out at the crowd.

"Forgive me," he said. "The House of Ostrander will need some time for reflection before it goes any further with Riverglass."

He left the scissors on their cushion and the ribbon uncut. His car was gone before the band thought to stop playing.

By evening, two of the banks behind Riverglass had telephoned Hatherley House to ask for a meeting with Barclay on Monday morning. Neither of them said why. Neither of them needed to.

Every paper in the region ran the photograph. None of them could explain it. The headlines tried their best, and the best they could manage was a question: who is the man at the gate?

In the study at Hatherley House, Barclay threw the evening edition onto the desk in front of his son.

"Explain it," he said.

Rowland looked at the picture. He had been standing right there, close enough to see the dust on Zane's collar. He had heard every word.

"He called him Foreman," he said.

"Foreman of what?"

Rowland opened his mouth and shut it again. He had no answer. He didn't even know where to begin looking for one.

Maren stood by the window with her arms folded, and she didn't look at her brother or her father. She was looking at the photograph on the desk, at the man's left hand on the gate and the little finger that stopped short. She hadn't taken her eyes off that hand since it closed on the bar that morning.

At ten o'clock that night, in an office on the top floor of the central police station, Superintendent Mortlake took a faded file from his bottom drawer, uncapped his pen and signed a warrant for the Larch Tower manslaughters.