Mortal Fire Read online

  “Our… understanding of the medieval and early modern mind is largely based upon our interpretation of history through our own experience. It is almost inconceivable to us, that the purposeful infliction of pain by one person on another, was done with the intention of saving their soul.”

  I progressed from the Albigensian Crusade through the evidence of the trials during the period of inquest and inquisition in the Spanish kingdoms, and then into the witch hunts of seventeenth-century England and the new colonies in America. Finally, I drew the lecture together on a theme that had haunted me all my adult life.

  “As our knowledge ever increases with the discovery and interpretation of new historical material, and in our search for greater understanding through scientific advance and cultural cross-reference, we are at risk of ignoring the motivations that lie behind the actions of individuals, and in so doing, forgetting that within each monster, lies a man.”

  To illustrate my conclusion, I chose a fantastical scene captured in a photograph of a fifteenth-century Doom wall-painting from a church in the Swiss Alps. On the screen high above my head, the standard fare of medieval monsters preying on the sinful was displayed in all its polychromatic glory. But in the right-hand corner, a lone creature gazed balefully as from his torn body – from chest to belly – stepped a new-born man. As a depiction, it begged as many questions as it answered.

  It was over. Not a murmur came from the crowded seats before me. Heat from the spotlights bore down on the top of my head and the overhead screen went blank as I switched off the power to the display and waited for a reaction. A sudden whoop emanated from the front row, followed by a wave of sound as the audience stood, breaking into a wall of applause. Abashed, I barely remembered to smile in response and needed saving by Elena joining me on stage and giving me a big hug.

  “You did so great!” She squeezed me again, beaming, with Matias behind her, laconic as usual.

  “Not bad for a newcomer, despite the content,” he drawled.

  “I kept it simple for you,” I shot back, recovering rapidly. Then Professors Gerhard and Abrahms were shaking my hand, congratulating me, and Aydin, smiling shyly.

  “I’m sure glad I didn’t have much breakfast,” Sam called over Elena’s shoulder. “It might’ve been embarrassing, not to say messy!”

  I grinned back at him. “It wasn’t that graphic – you should have seen what I left out!”

  Relief ran through me and I began to gather my things, thanking strangers as they came up to congratulate me on a riveting lecture. The Dean made comments to a small, dark-haired man next to him, who nodded in agreement and, to my relief, neither looked disappointed.

  Beyond the smiles and handshakes I kept raking the back of the auditorium, now awash with light, looking for the figure of the doctor; but the theatre was already nearly empty and he had clearly gone. Regret flickered briefly, then Sam asked a question.

  “What happened, Ginger? I thought you’d forgotten your lines or something. What were you looking at?”

  I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Nothing – I just lost my place, that’s all.” I concentrated on finishing putting my things away in my briefcase.

  “Looked like you were staring at something,” he insisted. “I thought you looked scared there for a moment.”

  “Sam, is it usual for the Dean to appoint a mentor to new staff – or visiting lecturers?”

  He shrugged. “Not that I know of. Why – would you like me to offer, maybe?” He grinned hopefully. I shook my head and picked up my bag.

  “Time for food,” Elena interjected, giving me a swift look. “Come on, I’m starving. You are paying, Matias.”

  “Your generosity is overwhelming, Elena,” Matias replied caustically. “Coming, Sam?” Sam slewed a grin in my direction.

  “Naw, I’ll wait ’til our date on Friday, thanks.” His raised eyebrow promised more than he said, and Matias and Elena glanced at me, a look I studiously ignored.

  “Well, we’d better go then,” I said briskly, making my way towards the exit. “Bye, Sam,” I said over my shoulder.

  “Yup,” he replied.

  Elena caught up with me. “Staahl?” she whispered and I nodded in reply.

  The college maintained several places to eat, depending on your status, your preference and your pocket. Elena had indeed been most generous with Matias’s wallet and we ended up in the senior lecturers’ dining-room. Although considerably smaller than the staff dining-hall, the dark oak panelled room was much quieter, and we found a table to ourselves.

  Matias ordered a bottle of red wine to share.

  “Is that going to be enough for you?” he asked doubtfully, eyeing my small portion of pasta salad when it appeared in front of me.

  Elena answered before I could. “Emma doesn’t eat much; I am always telling her ‘eat more’, but she just picks, picks, picks.” She stabbed at bits of rice on her plate to illustrate.

  “I’m not used to American-sized portions; give me time and I’ll be wolfing a herd of cattle before breakfast.”

  Matias laughed. “Don’t take any notice of Elena; she eats for Russia.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him, chewing a piece of beef.

  “Talking of eating,” I said, spearing a cherry tomato and watching it explode in a mass of seeds and juice, “Did you really find the lecture too violent?”

  “No, I was only kidding,” he replied. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I just wondered, that’s all.”

  His knife hovered over his plate. “If it’s one thing I have learned about you, Emma, it is that there is always a question behind the question; so I repeat, why do you ask?” He fixed me with his dark-grey, shrewd eyes so that I writhed and felt obliged to answer.

  “It’s only something Dr Lynes said the other day in the library about it not being too gruesome for the audience. I didn’t think it would be so well attended,” I muttered, as if that excused it.

  “A little bit of gore is just fine before lunch; it gets the appetite going.”

  Matias purposefully cut into the near-rare lump of beef on his plate and bloody meat juice oozed faintly red and pooled around the dauphinois potatoes. “And anyway,” he continued, “Matthew should be used to it – he is a surgeon, after all.”

  Something jangled in my memory, “Matthew?” I said. “Matthew Lynes? Is that his name?”

  Both he and Elena looked up at the tone of my voice.

  “Yes – Matthew. Why?” he asked.

  I couldn’t say what it was that tugged at my memory, but somewhere deep down inside the acres of unimportant facts I stored away over the years, I knew it to be significant.

  “It reminds me of something I’ve heard before, but I can’t remember where – or what.” I ate a piece of pasta thoughtfully then shook my head as the memory refused to be retrieved. “I suppose it’s a common enough combination or it sounds like another name perhaps; I don’t know.”

  Idly, I tried to see how many pieces of pasta I could get on the tines of the fork and managed four, the last one falling off and rolling towards the edge of the plate. Elena sipped at her wine, a mischievous glint in her eyes.

  “Matias, you work with Dr Lynes sometimes – what do you think of him?” She winked at me and I frowned at her in return.

  Matias dissected his steak with precision. He stopped, giving greater consideration to the question than either I or Elena anticipated.

  “Matthew’s a very quiet man, intensely private, dedicated and quite brilliant; I’ve never met anyone like him. He does a lot to help out at the hospital and the med centre, but you wouldn’t know it; he’s very modest.”

  He sounded in awe of him although he must have been older by some years. Elena seemed just as intrigued.

  “Don’t you find him cold? Nyet, not cold… ah!” And she waved her fork in the air as she grappled with the language before rattling off a word in Russian to Matias.

  “Aloof?” he said.


  “Yes, yes, a-loof,” she repeated. “Do you not find him a-loof?”

  Matias leaned forward, and picked up his glass. He swirled the contents around the bowl, examining the glowing colour in the light, thinking, then shook his head, slowly.

  “Not aloof, no. Sad – remote, even – but not aloof. He’s always very polite and correct, and I’d say that he’s self-contained, but I don’t find him arrogant or anything like that. But sad, yes.”

  I stopped eating. What he said chimed with something I had been mulling over since I first met him.

  “Yes,” I said. “But why?”

  Matias paused, uncertain whether he should continue then, seeming to make up his mind, he put his glass down on the table with deliberate care.

  “Matthew has every reason; he lost his wife a few years ago – a car accident, I think.”

  My skin ran cold.

  “I didn’t know,” Elena murmured.

  “No, not many people do – he doesn’t talk about it. It’s only because you asked, Emma, that I’m telling you now. And it’s not for public knowledge, either.” He fixed a stern eye on Elena, and she nodded wordlessly. I found my voice.

  “When did it happen?”

  “It must be five – maybe six – years ago, I’m not certain; he’s never said and I’ve never asked. Before he moved here with his family, anyway.”

  “Family?” The cold was replaced by a flash of heat to my face. I realized how little I knew about him but, in that instant, how much it seemed to matter that I did. I grabbed my glass and gulped wine in sudden confusion, and the discordant roar of voices in my head became a muted murmur once again.

  “Emma? Did you hear what I said?” Matias asked.

  “What’s that? No, sorry.”

  “I said, Matthew lives with his family, from what I can gather. I’ve met his father and his niece briefly – and one of his nephews; they help out with the research sometimes.”

  I didn’t give him a chance to finish; the wine did a good job of loosening my grip as well as my tongue.

  “He’s a widower?”

  “Shhh, you’re shouting!” Elena shushed me. Several other diners turned to look in our direction.

  “A widower? He’s not old enough,” I repeated in hushed tones, leaning forwards over the table. “He can’t be much more than thirty.”

  “About that, I think,” Matias confirmed; “but I didn’t think there was an age limit on dying. And – if you would let me finish…?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I was going to say that he doesn’t have any kids, that’s all. I’ve known him some time but I don’t know much else. As I said, he’s a very private man – keeps himself to himself.” Matias sat back, running his hands through his unruly hair, making it stick up in erratic tussocks. He looked from me to Elena and back again. “Why are you two so interested, anyhow?”

  “No reason,” we both said at the same time and for once Elena did me a favour and let the matter drop. We continued to eat in the silence of our own thoughts and Matias ordered coffee as Elena consumed a wedge of cheesecake with gusto.

  “Did you finish that already?” she said, eyeing my barely touched food a few minutes later.

  “You have it.” I pushed it towards her, my appetite evaporated, to be replaced by an unpleasant gnawing sensation. Matias said something to Elena, but I stopped listening. I couldn’t get my head round what I had heard and why it should bother me so much. I drank half the coffee to offset the effects of the wine and the hollow feeling inside intensified. My head buzzed and my ears hummed with the air-conditioning. Something nagged away just out of reach and, hard as I tried, it eluded me. Conversations tables away sharpened, intruded, then Elena shook my arm.

  “Em, what do you think you will wear?” I gathered my mind and brought it back to the table.

  “Wear to what?”

  “The All Saints annual dinner, of course, at the end of October. You were not listening again, were you?” She rolled her eyes impatiently.

  “No, sorry. I haven’t thought about it yet. Look, I’m getting a headache, do you mind if I get off now before it gets any worse?”

  “Would you like us to take you back?” Matias looked concerned, already on his feet.

  I needed space to think.

  “Thanks, but I’ll be fine once I’ve had a couple of paracetamol.” I grabbed my jacket and briefcase, pushing the chair away from the table. “And thanks for lunch – it was just what I needed.”

  “See you later?” Elena called after me.

  “OK,” I said over my shoulder as I left the room.

  I reached the seclusion of my flat, shutting the door on the world. My head ached from the unaccustomed intake of alcohol, but the source of real discomfort lay elsewhere. Tossing bag and coat on a chair, I went through to my bedroom and flung myself on the bed. I lay there for a few moments, letting my head settle, then kicked off my shoes and wrapped myself in the duvet, not bothering to rescue my suit from the inevitable creasing to which I subjected it. I stared at nothing in particular and tried to analyse my reaction.

  Learning that the man was no longer married but a widower might have been little in itself; what took me by surprise was the strength of my reaction. Who was I kidding? Matthew Lynes had a quality about him hard to ignore – let alone forget – and not just his looks, although he must be one of the most attractive men I ever laid eyes on. His manner, his voice, the way he spoke, the inflections he used, the way he carved through the muddle in my mind to the very heart of me. My gut flipped and churned and I went to put the kettle on. I retreated to my bed with a mug of tea, feeling the waves of nausea subside. I must have drunk more than I thought; either that or it was the first time I felt sick because of a man. Stupid.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. And he probably wouldn’t speak to me again after today’s blood-soaked lecture. I dreaded to guess what he thought of it, given my undertaking that I wouldn’t rely on cheap thrills to sell my theories. That is, if he thought of me at all. I moaned, rolling myself into a tight ball. What was worse: him seeing me as a purveyor of cheap academia or not thinking of me at all? I wrapped my arms around my legs, squeezing against the intense current of nerves that rolled inside me, the legacy of too much wine.

  But if he didn’t think of me, he wouldn’t have been at the lecture, would he. Would he? Why not, since a rash of other people turned up unexpected and, in one case, unwanted. At the thought of Staahl, I pulled my cross around my chin and toyed with it, the metallic tinge familiar and comforting, and my mind slid back to where it felt safe.

  If I identified just one thing that made Matthew Lynes stand out, it would be his consideration: his quiet, understated courtesy that offered me a drink when thirsty, took the heavy books from me, gave me unspoken and unlooked-for reassurance when I faltered in my lecture, who exuded a rare integrity – qualities I looked for in a man, qualities that mattered. And he was no longer off-limits. Now I understood his reaction to the mention of the crash the evening of my reception, and felt mortified at my unintentional blunder.

  And Sam. Edgy, funny, interesting – and interested. Sam – taking me out on a non-date-lunch-date on Friday. Who broadcast his interest more obviously than a neon sign. Sam – whose two failed marriages should be a warning to any vulnerable female he pursued. I usually went by my instinct and everything about him shouted “No!” I sensed no common ground with Sam but a quicksand on which I could not rely. And without the shared bedrock in which I believed, there could be no way forward. I had lived that lie; I would not do so again.

  I breathed out, determined and resolute once more; I did not – did not – seek any form of relationship while in the States; it made life too complicated when all I wanted to do was work and study and tread water for as long as it took to complete my research. And then I would go home: back to Cambridge, my family and my mundane, predictable and ultimately safe existence that made no demands on me, nor I on it.

  The nausea began to ease a
nd I rolled onto my back, stretching my arms and legs as I did so and pushing the constricting duvet into a tubby, rumpled heap at the end of the bed. I shouldn’t drink; it was a lesson I learned a long time ago to my lasting regret; it made me reckless.

  It must have been after one-thirty because, despite the fact my rooms were on the top floor, I could hear the babble and scuffle of student voices making their way to afternoon classes. I followed their example; the only way to suppress unwelcome thoughts of any kind lay in work.

  I passed through the joint faculty lobby on my way to my room, checking my pigeon-hole as a matter of course. A note from the porters’ lodge waited in the open slot, informing me of a parcel to collect. I stuffed the note in my pocket; it would keep until later.

  Holly surpassed herself, having turned in her synopsis and study plan early, and it waited for me on my desk. The lengthy paper proved her to be a bright student, but I had seen the hopeful glances she threw at Leo, and the way she looked when he put his arm around the girl in the lecture hall. I had seen it before; I experienced it first-hand. “The call of the wild”, I termed it, because once you felt it, it became almost impossible to ignore.

  I made notes for her on separate paper, detailing areas she might find useful in her research, and left it on my desk ready for our next tutorial. A sudden clamour of slamming doors and voices and footsteps outside in the corridor, ended afternoon classes. I had no intention of staying any later by myself; I stuffed the iPod in my bag, and picked up the note from my desk as a reminder to collect my parcel.