‘What’s to stop me cutting the sheet and sending you to your death?’ Florian said, desperation in his eyes.
‘You haven’t got the guts,’ Pegel said simply and began to lower himself down the wall.
At the end of his rope, he hesitated. It was still perhaps ten feet left to fall, then a long sloping roof leading into one of the internal courtyards. He found himself wondering what would be better, to further injure his right leg, or to risk his left and aim to fall on that side. He closed his eyes and let fate decide. He landed on his side, then slid down the deep slope of the roof. Even as he fought for a grip on the tiles he felt a certain peace. It was as if he was watching the whole from above. I wonder what will happen now? some calm, mildly interested voice asked in the back of his head as he tumbled forward, his chin scraping and bouncing, the wounds on his hands opening up. He rolled off the guttering and something hard struck him at the base of his skull.
My child,
This is a love story. I know that when you have read these pages you will understand this. Love gave me life, love took it away. Love gave me the power I now have. With it, I serve love.
Your mother and I were married to join two houses, two estates, never two hearts. She was a good wife to me in the brief years of our union and I grieved for her sincerely, though I could not then understand the fierce passion of loss that you felt as a child. How can one imagine what one has never felt? I thought you weak and unreasonable and I fear you must have seen that, must have felt it. I hope others were more generous to you than I. Is it any comfort to you to know that I have experienced all the horrors of grief since then? And in feeling them have thought of you?
I remember your delight in my automata; the minutes we spent watching them together were the happiest we had as father and son, I believe. It was such a pity that you never would understand that these little wonders were far too precious for a child to touch. In time, had you been obedient, I would have let you turn the key, or start the mechanism. To steal the little walking figure I imported from Spain and all but destroy him in your attempt to see how he moved was not a crime I could forgive. But I regret that sending you away deepened the rift between us.
Do you know your step-mother pleaded for you? Not that she was your step-mother then, simply a widow of narrow means living on the charity of our neighbour, some cousin of hers. She heard of your crime, and of your punishment, borrowed a horse and rode alone up to my gate to try and convince me that your foolishness was a sign of a curiosity to be encouraged. She did not manage to do so. I see her now striding back and forth across the room, in a passion that a weakling child such as you be sent away from those he loved. I should have been shocked, disgusted even by such a display, but instead I longed for her to stay. You went to school the next day, and I went to her. For the first time in my life I tried to please a woman. We were walking in her cousin’s gardens the first time I made her laugh. It was not that first day, or even in that first week. I cannot remember how, only that it was against her will, angry as she was still for my treatment of you. Grieving as she was for the wrongs done to her. But I remember the surge of joy I felt at the sound, at my victory. That simple little wedding day we shared was the happiest day of my life. I think you liked her. You would have loved her.
It is a matter of regret to me that you never knew your step-mother. I hope you believe me when I tell you it was through no fault of hers. She often suggested you return from school or take some visit with us rather than with your mother’s relatives. In truth I was jealous. Any look, any smile of hers that fell not upon me I felt lost, stolen from my store. I did not want her to try and win your affection, I did not want to see her affection spent on you. Such a terrible happiness is love. Such an impossible gift to bear. At that time I was even glad rumour had driven her from court, because it led her to me. She knew she had been conspired against, though she did not know who had done so, and suspected it was because some of those close to the Duke had seen he favoured her. Fools. She would never have accepted Ludwig Christoph as her lover. She was too noble, too good. They slandered her, destroyed her reputation and separated her from her son for nothing.
Her pregnancy delighted her. She talked of giving you and her own boy a brother or sister to care for. I convinced myself it would change nothing if the child lived. The house was large enough, the household had servants enough and the village wet-nurses, but perhaps one corner of my mind hoped from the beginning it would not survive. I did not wish to see her love divided; how could I accept only a share of her heart, when the whole was not enough? Yet she flowered as she grew, took delight in the child’s quickening. She was seated at her sewing when she felt it first, that strange stirring beneath the skin. Life somehow appearing within her, trapped within her belly some flame, some spark. We reach towards these images of fire when we talk of life; how dead wood stirs into sound and movement, and she cupped it in her hands and gasped. Such a simple thing to women, but what sacrifice, what learning, what bargains with devils and angels it requires from a man.
And there was the matter of her first child. Oh, if I have sinned against you, my son, how much more did I sin against that poor boy. She was desperate to bring the child home. She was sure his constitution was weak, that he would not survive without the care of his mother. I told her I had written to the Duke to request the boy be allowed to live with us. I told her I had petitioned him in person. I told her he wanted the child to complete the year at the school. I told her I would petition again. I did none of this.
In truth nothing prevented me from collecting the child on the first day of asking, except that I did not want him here. I grieved to see her suffer, I suffered just as much to deny her, but it still seemed in the passion that held me, preferable. There was an outbreak of fever at the school. If then we had heard of the danger perhaps I would have finally relented. I do not know. The officials at court were informed, but no one there thought to get word to his poor disgraced mother, and the first we knew of any illness in the place was when one of the teachers made the journey to my home carrying the news of his death and his few possessions. Can I describe that day to you? She had not been allowed to write to him, by order of the Duke, though I discovered she had managed to bribe Christian to convey to him the occasional note. They were love letters. Love letters that showed a depth and strength of feeling never present in her affectionate manner towards myself. I think my dislike of him deepened to hatred then. I am ashamed of that. The letters told him of our marriage and promised, with what fervour it was promised, that his mama was coming for him very soon. How did I know these things? How did I come to read them? Because the child had stored the letters in the lining of his Bible. Each one had been folded and unfolded, reopened and reread so many times they were in danger of falling apart. The teacher had found them, and thought they should be returned. I cannot say if that was a kindness or a cruelty. It is strange how the simple fact that the fold in a piece of paper has worn through almost to nothing can tell so clear the story of a boy’s hope, his loneliness, his longing for his mother.
Her despair was complete. But she would not let the man leave until he had given up the last, briefest, most incomplete memories of her child. Such was her hunger to hear his name, even the story of his illness and death was longed for. He and the teacher had said their prayers together, and he said that if he did not recover he would join his father in heaven and wait for his mama there. She covered her face when she was told that, and I saw the man look at her with wondering eyes. He thought, of course, that she was a whore and would be spending eternity in hell for her sins. I wonder if he told the child that before he blew out the candle and left him? By morning her son was dead.
The pains came upon her the next day, far too soon. Four and twenty hours after they began the accoucheur came to me again, less sanguine, more severe. I did not let him speak, but went to her at once, past the tutting maids, the outraged nurse. She was whiter than the linen on which she lay, h
er hair loose about her and soaked in her sweat. The light in her eyes was too bright. She used all her strength to speak to me. She took my hand, she swore her love and she begged me to make her doctors save the monster that was killing her. My last words to her, and hers to me were of love. In the antechamber I told the doctor to destroy the child if there was any chance that doing so would save her.
It was probably dead already. The cord was wrapped around the neck, but it would not go alone. Cheated of its own life it took hers. The nurse lied to her, she said. Told her as she bled out her last that she had a healthy child and needed only to rest. The woman meant to comfort me with a vision of my darling going happily to her rest. A fiction. My wife was no fool. She knew she had brought forth death and it had fed on her. This is what they did. Those little schemers, those poisonous diplomats with their lies, their slanders. They killed her son, they killed her daughter, they killed her.
They tried to prevent me entering the room. A butcher’s den. Doctor and nurse bloody to their elbows, and the bed crimson, rags soaked in blood across the floor, basins full of red water. Her nightgown soaked in it. I threw them out and would not let them touch her till morning, but sat by her side, her head cradled in my arms begging her to open her eyes. I promised everything, I swore everything, I prayed that I would go mad, and for a while I feel I might have done so cradling my dead love, my dead self in that bloody chamber.
Florian put aside another page with shaking fingers. ‘Oh, God, Father! What is this?’
VI.9
Pegel was seeing stars. Real stars. It had grown dark. He thought they were pretty. Sometimes he became so obsessed with the mathematics of their movements, the steady passage of the planets amongst them, that he forgot that they were also very shiny. After a while it occurred to him that this might not be the best use of his time, and he began to grope about him in the dark. He could see the shadow of the roof from which he had fallen. It was not far. The back of his head was very tender; he felt the place that hurt most. It was sticky with blood, and he realised he felt rather sick. What had he landed on? His vision swam a little. The woodpile? No, bundles of straw and twigs, with a frame of logs on top of it. His head had hit against part of the frame when he fell. He raised himself up. He was still a few feet off the ground. He slithered down from the heap as quickly as possible before stumbling away a few steps, sat down smartly as his ankle failed, then slithered away until he found his back against a wall. He was in an internal courtyard, stone walls on all sides, stone flags on the ground. He had been lucky to have had his fall broken. But what was this bonfire? He thought of the frame on top of it and struggled to get some sense out his pounding, spinning brain. Florian had said Kastner was his step-mother’s name. He tried to remember every detail about the murders Manzerotti had seen fit to tell him. Ritual. Some sort of revenge? A woman drowned, another with earth in her mouth. Every one of the circle in Maulberg bar Swann murdered. Swann … Wimpf had just accompanied another guest here. Christ! Jacob had a nasty suspicion that he’d just been saved by falling into Swann’s funeral pyre.
Krall returned to the palace in a grim state of mind, but satisfied that the deaths of Countess Dieth and Adolphus Glucke would be thought natural. Glucke’s servants were loyal to Maulberg, and the housekeeper had been firm in her agreement. ‘Can’t be how he’s remembered, can it, dying that way? If we say it’s a fever, people will remember the good of him.’
Krall found Swann’s chamber empty and then had a few minutes of conversation with Colonel Padfield that left his mind swimming. He made his way to the private parlour of the English, where he found Mr and Mrs Clode and Mr Graves in a state of some excitement and waiting for the return of Mr Crowther and Mrs Westerman. He was glad to see the young Englishman free and said so. They shook hands, then he shook his head over the mysteries behind these murders and wished aloud that he was able to tell Clode who had done him such harm. The English pounced on him with a flurry of information. He was so far flummoxed that he found himself lighting his pipe without asking Mrs Clode’s permission. Count Frenzel? A second wife? Blood rituals?
‘Where is Frenzel?’ he asked.
‘Returned to his estate, so Herr Kinkel tells us,’ Mr Graves said.
‘Strange,’ Krall said, and drew on his pipe. ‘I know he spends much time there, but the Duke is only married an hour. What of Swann? Where is he?’
‘He received an offer of sanctuary from Gotha,’ Rachel said.
‘Did he now?’ Krall folded his arms and tapped the stem of his pipe against his sleeve. ‘That got here awful quick.’
The door opened and Mrs Westerman and Mr Crowther appeared. There was colour in Mrs Westerman’s face, and Crowther looked a younger man than when they had first met.
‘Frenzel!’ Mrs Westerman said, and everyone started speaking at once.
Black years. Comfortless years. Years where my only company was her grave. I buried her with my own hands in my own grounds, refusing to share her even with God. The monster I would have burned, but little Christian begged me to lay the stillborn infant in the ground with her, and so I did. The household dwindled. I shut up the east wing, left all my expensive toys to rot and waited to die. For four years I waited in this tomb. Then she came. A common little trickster in a dark blue dress, but I realised that night that Antonia had chosen her. Florian, the things she knew! But then she would try to worm her way in between Antonia and me, saying things that were nonsense. The frustration then! Waiting for Antonia to speak. I did not understand, and in the darkness of my heart asked Antonia why she had chosen this sharp-eyed fool as her way of speaking to me? Then little Beatrice showed me her book, a scrap-book of images, designs, incantations copied in her schoolgirl hand, pages cut from Renaissance grimoires, and I understood. Antonia had been guiding her. I dreamed of my wife sitting over the little schemer by candlelight in the cave of some forgotten mage whispering to her when to turn the pages, what passages and diagrams to copy down. During her third week here I found the book of poisons. It was written in another hand, but she had added her little notes of explanation. I saw it all. Antonia had given me everything. Now I just needed to get rid of the girl. Again, she made it so simple for me. Antonia inspired her even to her death.
She told me Antonia wished to show me to a store of jewels on a waterfall near the borders of my little kingdom. As if Antonia would ever have been bothered with such paltry stuff, but I indulged her and she spent several days ‘preparing to do battle with the spirits’, to recover the treasure. She took me to the waterfall, lit a candle and bade me to be quiet while she summoned her angels to defend her. It was quite entertaining, the girl had learned how to put on a show. Her body went rigid, she tossed her head from side to side and muttered and croaked, calling on the names of the angelic hoards. There was no sense to her cries, her incantations were as like to call spirits to her as the wind. Then she lay still. After some minutes she seemed to awake, weak from her battles. I put out my hand to help her to her feet and enquired as to her health and well-being, all concern and kindness then. She leaned her small weight against me and said, in fading, faltering tones, she knew where the treasure was hid. And so she did. I was commanded to move some stones to one side at the base of the waterfall, and what a surprise! A little store of gems and jewellery. I was a little moved, I think, to see how she invested her small worth in me. Here was her ancient hoard of magical jewels, a handful of trifles, the sort of shoddy and overvalued nothings a Duchess might give to her maid in a moment of weakness. I can give a performance too. I was delighted, amazed by the miraculous wealth and its miraculous discovery. I got down on my knees in front of the little strumpet and told her she was my queen, my goddess, that I would settle on her at once a house for her own use in Oberbach, and that from this day forward I would be honoured to have her as my counsellor in all things. Dear girl, she shook her head, offered her jewels as a free gift, declared I was too generous, too kind, and as she trembled and dissembled I saw the ha
rd shine of triumph in her eye. Her victory. She sat down on the stones I had just moved and turned away, as if overcome by her surprise at my generosity. But I knew she only turned from me to hide her delight. The first blow I struck fell just behind her right ear. She tried to stand, to turn, looked at me and for the first and only time her eyes seemed innocent. The second blow landed on her left temple and sent her sprawling on her front. The third blow might have been unnecessary. It was certainly conclusive. So then I gathered her book, the contents of her pockets, I tore open the linings of her clothes to find what else of value might have been hidden in them.
Antonia was guiding me then, my boy, for it was in the lining of her cloak I found the dried herbs and matter folded in paper and sealed which I discovered I needed for the drugs. Then, when my search was complete, I dug her a grave. It was her suggestion I carried a spade with me on our little excursion, in case the treasure to which the spirits led her was underground. I rested a little, packed up what I had taken from her body, then threw her jewels into the stream.
Harriet found Manzerotti at the centre of a large group of rather amazed young women. It took some time before he could extricate himself.
‘Come to toast the happy bride and groom, Mrs Westerman? Clode is released, the conspirators are under guard, the fountains flow with wine, and good cheer abounds.’
She unfolded the paper in her hand. ‘This is the portrait of Antonia Kastner, the woman slandered by the Minervals. It is also the model for the walking automaton the Al-Saids were asked to build.’ He nodded but said nothing. ‘The model had a Seal of Solomon painted on its torso. A brass vessel with the same seal was commissioned from Julius, and there was a space left in the body large enough to accommodate it.’
Manzerotti was very still for a moment, then he took her by the elbow and led her to a quieter part of the room. ‘The blood … I did not realise I could still be shocked. How exciting. Do you know who is trying to reclaim her from the dead?’
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