The Midnight Palace - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [20]
‘A few days after Chandra’s disappearance, my daughter Kylian, who was expecting her first child, was threatened by a strange character who emerged from the shadows of Calcutta, a murderer who swore he would kill the wife and descendants of the man he blamed for all his misfortunes. That man, that criminal, was responsible for the fire in which Chandra lost his life. A young officer from the British army, an ex-suitor of my daughter’s called Lieutenant Michael Peake, tried to stop the madman, but the task proved more difficult than he expected.
‘The night my daughter was due to give birth, some men broke into the house and took her away. Hired assassins. Men with no name or conscience who, for a few coins, can easily be found in the streets of this city. On the verge of despair, Lieutenant Peake spent a whole week combing Calcutta in search of my daughter. As the tense week came to a close Peake had a terrifying thought, which turned out to be true. The murderer had taken Kylian into the very bowels of the ruins of Jheeter’s Gate. There, among the filth and the remains of the tragedy, my daughter had given birth to the boy you have turned into a young man, Mr Carter.
‘She had given birth to him – to Ben – and also to his sister, whom I have tried to turn into a young woman. Just as you did with the boy, I gave the girl a name, the name her mother had always intended for her: Sheere.
‘Risking his own life, Lieutenant Peake managed to snatch the two children from the murderer’s hands. But the murderer, blind with anger, swore he’d follow their trail and kill them as soon as they reached adulthood, to wreak vengeance on their dead father, Chandra Chatterghee. That was his sole intention: to destroy every trace of the engineer’s work and his life, at any cost.
‘Kylian died promising that her soul would not rest until she knew that her children were safe. Lieutenant Peake, the man who had secretly loved her as much as her own husband, gave his life so that the promise that had sealed her lips would come true. On 25 May 1916 Lieutenant Peake managed to cross the Hooghly River and hand over the children to me. To this day I do not know what became of him.
‘I decided that the only way of saving these children was to separate them and conceal their identity and their whereabouts. You know the rest of Ben’s story better than I do. As for Sheere, I took her under my wing and set off on a long journey around the country. I raised the girl in remembrance of the great man her father was and of my daughter, the great woman who gave life to her. I never told her more than I thought was necessary. I was naive enough to think that time and space would eventually erase all traces of the past, but our footprints are never lost. When I received that letter I knew my flight had come to an end and I must return to Calcutta to warn you. I wasn’t honest in the letter I wrote to you that night, Mr Carter, but I acted according to my heart, believing deep in my soul that I was doing the right thing.
‘When I realised the murderer knew where we were, I couldn’t leave my granddaughter alone, so I took her with me and together we travelled back to Calcutta. During the entire journey I was haunted by a thought that became increasingly obvious as we approached our destination. I was convinced that now Ben and Sheere had left their childhood and become adults, the murderer had awoken once more from the darkness and was intent on carrying out his ancient promise. And I knew, with the certainty that only comes when one is close to a tragedy, that this time he would stop at nothing …’
FOR A LONG TIME Thomas Carter kept his eyes glued to his hands and didn’t say a word. The only reasonable thing he