Free Gretel and the Dark by Eliza Granville Page A

offering friendship?Benjamin felt drawn to him, and yet something in the fellow’s eyes suggested he would not think twice about plunging the flaming brand into anyone that got in his way.
    ‘Hair colour?’ repeated Hugo.
    ‘What?’ Benjamin looked at him, confused. ‘Oh, hers … it’s sort of golden.’
    ‘Might be, in that case. Apparently, those at the Thélème have very specific requirements. The stamp of Jerusalem isn’t favoured there.’
    What was that supposed to mean? Benjamin tried to get his fuddled thoughts in order but the atmosphere had changed again and he saw that Hugo’s attention was elsewhere. Or rather, it was everywhere, for the journalist had returned to work. His eyes darted here and there, sizing up customers, lingering on one, dismissing another, his head turning this way and that as he homed in on a dozen or more conversations. For the most part his face remained impassive, though occasionally his lips twitched and once he scowled.
    Others had now begun pulling chairs and stools up to the table, moving in close with the air of those with weighty secrets to impart. Try as he might, Benjamin couldn’t make out a word until a woman joined them, stiff and prim, radiating respectability, tightly buttoned from her high neck to her well-polished boots. Disapproval of her surroundings had tightened her mouth into a thin, reptilian slash. Her refusal of a drink was accompanied by an expression of such intense disgust that the proffered liquid might have already been filtered through somebody else’s kidneys. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot from crying, perhaps even from tears unshed. She drew her shawl more tightly round her meagre bosom as she took in the plunging décolleté of the powdered and perfumedwoman at the fireside, who was now lifting her skirts to warm her haunches.
    Benjamin found the prim woman’s presence incomprehensible. He watched her pale fingers agitatedly screwing a fold of skirt into tight knots as she spoke; saw Hugo’s face become grim and observed that he, like the snot-nosed boy, who was now wide-eyed and nervously licking his lips, was hanging on every word. The woman grew steadily more agitated. At one point she stopped and covered her face with both hands as if unable to continue. After calming herself, her voice became harsher, more distinct, and Benjamin caught a single word: Hummel. It was a name that had preoccupied Gudrun over the past weeks, for Juliane Hummel was branded Vienna’s most monstrous and unnatural mother. Twelve months ago she and her husband, Joseph, had received a police warning concerning the mistreatment of their four-year-old daughter. A year later, the child was dead. Already the papers hinted at unimaginable levels of cruelty and neglect, but the official cause of death was blood poisoning, and premeditated murder had yet to be proved. Evidence or no evidence, Gudrun wanted to see the pair of them flogged and hanged. Thinking to take home some sensational titbit, Benjamin dragged his chair further away from the noisy altercations at the fireside.
    ‘They often left Anna at home all day,’ the woman said, through bloodless lips, ‘locked in a filthy shed without food or water. I used to push bread and little cakes through cracks in the door. When Juliane caught me, she got him to nail boards over the gaps. I saw her hit the little one’s hands with a red-hot poker and laugh while she did it.’ She looked down at her own hands, as if surprised to find them unscarred. ‘They tied her, naked, to a tree – like a dog – and put a little dish of food downfor her, just out of reach. One bitterly cold winter day they made her stand in a tub of cold water from dawn until it grew dark. And when they beat her, they muffled her screams with rags tied round her head, thinking we wouldn’t know what was going on.’ Every last vestige of colour drained from the woman’s face as she clutched Hugo’s sleeve. ‘They meant to kill her.