Test tubes stood in a rack beneath the window sill, each with a cork stopper. She picked out one filled with a clear fluid; to anyone else it would look like water.
‘The elixir of life,’ she whispered in hope and, slipping the test tube into her pocket, she left by the same door. She had a second journey to make that evening.
After fetching a coat, she commanded a guard to open the Palace gate for her and was soon pacing along the cobblestoned lanes of the old city among a steady flow of men and women heading homeward after their day’s work. Asking directions whenever she became lost, she soon found the house she was looking for.
Joachim’s mother gasped when she answered the knock at her door. ‘It is too late,’ she told the Princess.
For a moment Agneta though she meant Joachim was already dead. But no. The doctor had recently left, shaking his head. ‘He will die during the night,’ had been his parting words to Mrs Tannislaus.
‘Maybe not,’ said Princess Agneta and she followed Joachim’s mother to his bedside.
He was too ill to recognise her; too weak to sit up or even turn his head.
‘Help me,’ she said to Mrs Tannislaus and, with his mother forcing his lips open, she emptied the contents of the test tube into Joachim’s mouth. Down they went in a single gulp, making him cough. His wasted body barely had the energy even for this. Then he became still again and Agneta stood up.
‘What did you give him?’ asked Mrs Tannislaus, who didn’t seem sure if the Princess had come to save her son or to poison him.
‘A medicine we discovered together,’ Agneta said. ‘It seemed to work on …’
She did not explain any further in case Mrs Tannislaus became angry. The Prince had treated her son like a rat in a cage, and it might seem to her that his sister, the Princess, was now doing the same.
There was nothing else Agneta could do, but she could not bear to leave no connection between them. In desperation, she slipped a ring from her hand. The stone was pretty but not precious – an amethyst that had caught her eye years ago. She preferred it to the emeralds and diamonds a princess was expected to wear. The ring would not fit on any of Joachim’s fingers but the smallest on his left hand, so that was where she placed it.
‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Send word to the Palace, whatever happens. Please, I must know.’
But the following day was Princess Agneta’s wedding day and when Mrs Tannislaus delivered her message at the Palace gate, it became lost in the excitement of the occasion. A special train took the bride and groom to Bohemia straight after the ceremony, and by the next day they had arrived at the Duke’s home. Here, his language was spoken, not Agneta’s, and the only news of Montilagus came in letters from her family. Needless to say, none mentioned the young scientist and her own letters to Joachim’s mother were torn up on the Duke’s orders. Agneta did not know whether he had lived or died.
Joachim Tannislaus recovered from his illness, much to the delight of his mother and the puzzlement of his doctor.
‘I left him for a dead man on that last afternoon,’ the doctor told his colleagues afterwards. ‘Remarkable. A touch of the miracle about it, if you ask me.’
Within days, Joachim was back on his feet. By then, Princess Agneta was married and already in Bohemia, which was a different kind of death for poor Joachim. The ring she had slipped onto his finger reminded him of their love and how they had been forced apart so cruelly.
‘She gave up her happiness to buy my life and my freedom,’ he said to his mother, who didn’t know what he was talking about.
Heartbroken, he told himself that his and Agneta’s love had been doomed from the beginning – what commoner could ever hope to marry a princess? – yet during the night he packed a bag, determined to follow her to Bohemia on the morning train.
At the station, he was intercepted by a captain of the royal guard whom he’d known at school.
‘The Prince and the Duke guessed you would try to follow Agneta, Joachim. You will be arrested the moment you set foot in Bohemia,’ the captain told him bluntly. Then, with the gentleness of a friend, he said, ‘Do not make things hard for her. If you truly love Agneta, give her a chance to make a new life for herself.’
‘A life without love,’ Joachim snapped in reply, but he returned to his mother’s house with the captain’s words in his ears. He twisted the unfamiliar ring on his little finger, wishing it was a wedding ring instead. If you love her … give her a chance … There was wisdom in what his old friend had said. Hadn’t he told himself their love was hopeless?
The days passed and Joachim grew as strong and healthy as he had ever been, in body, if not in heart and mind. Two weeks after the Princess had emptied the test tube into his mouth, he walked briskly along the streets of Montilagus, not towards the Palace but to the university. This alone put a spring in his step. To fight the ache he felt for Agneta, he would get back to his experiments – and now he had a new goal. With more research, the medicine that had saved his life might become a great boon to mankind.
The professor of science met him at the door of the laboratory. ‘I’m sorry, Joachim. There is no place for you here. The Prince forbids it.’
Until that moment, Joachim had felt mostly sadness. Now he was angry. To bar him from the university was the cruelty of a powerful man driven by his lust for gold. Edvord was determined to force him back to the Palace and the false research of Augustine Rey. That night, Joachim again packed a bag. Instead of waiting for the morning train, he kissed his mother and began the long walk through the mountains to Germany. There were other universities, and a scientist of his reputation would be welcome in any of them. At least, that was what he told himself as he followed shepherds’ tracks and hitched rides on hay wagons. But when he sent letters asking for employment, every university found a way to say no. After a year, he realised it was pointless to go on. Prince Edvord had used his influence to close all the universities of Europe to him. If he hoped to continue as a scientist, he must sail to America where the Prince’s arm didn’t reach.
Joachim’s anger deepened and soon it was to double. He had taken work in a newspaper office to raise money for his fare to America. One morning, as he helped the editor set out the front page, he saw a small article to be included near the bottom. ‘Duke Loses Second Wife’ said the headline. That was how Joachim learned that the woman he loved, the woman who had given him the amethyst ring to remember her by, had died in far-off Bohemia. She appeared to waste away and doctors were unable to find the cause, he read in the final paragraph. But Joachim knew what had killed her, and found himself stirred by thoughts of revenge against her brother.
In dreams he would see himself with a dagger in his hand and Prince Edvord at his mercy. Always at the crucial moment he woke in a cold sweat. He wasn’t ready yet; he must build his courage.
Instead of sailing to New York as planned, Joachim settled in Munich and took a job teaching boys in a well-respected school. To ease his mind, he remained in the school’s laboratory after lessons each day and began to experiment in search of the panacea he and Agneta had hoped for. With little money for expensive chemicals, however, progress was slow. He was also without the books Augustine Rey had collected, which meant he had to start at the very beginning and test his results on rats captured for him by his students. But the work was good for him. While he fiddled and discovered, his dark dreams no longer tormented him and, even though the flames of rage he felt towards Prince Edvord never died entirely, he made no plans to visit Montilagus.
Joachim was not one to shut himself away completely. Although he still grieved for Agneta, he began to enjoy a tankard of ale with the other teachers on a Sunday afternoon. Some of them were married and had put on weight thanks to their wives’ generous cooking. Joachim was often a guest at their tables and he joked that these women were determined to fatten him up like their husbands. Yet his body never changed and his hair remained as blond as ever. His handsome face drew longing looks from the
prettiest women in Munich, although he was too busy with test tubes and formulas to notice.
Before he quite knew where the time had gone, ten years passed. Then his school risked a scandal by employing its first woman teacher. This was Mademoiselle Dupain, who was to teach French to the boys. The cheeky rascals soon learned her first name was Michelle and many dreamed they were in love with her, although more for her disarming smile than her beauty. She was a modest young woman who did not bother much with expensive clothes or the latest hairstyles.
Joachim liked her from the first day they met and they often sat at the same table during the midday meal. She was amazed to learn he was approaching forty years of age.
‘But there’s not a line on your face nor a grey hair on your head,’ she said. ‘You could pass for a man ten years younger.’
Joachim laughed at such compliments, and found ways to return them without embarrassing her. To his surprise, he enjoyed doing it and thought of her sometimes while he sat watching liquids boil in their beakers. She would blush when she found him looking at her, and although boys are not as prone to gossip as girls, smiles and whispers were exchanged among the students. By the end of Mademoiselle’s first year, there could be little doubt. She was in love with the handsome science teacher.
And what of Joachim? Was he in love with Michelle Dupain? He sat one night in his lodgings near the school pondering this very question. Agneta was still with him – as the ring on his finger ensured. It was her face he looked for in crowded streets, even though she had been in her grave for ten years. But Michelle had won his heart also, enough for them to be happy together. There would be children and a proper home instead of this dreary room where he did little more than mark papers, cook his supper and go to bed.
‘I’m lonely,’ he told the silence about him. ‘It’s time I was happy again.’
On Sunday, he would invite Michelle to walk with him along the riverbank. In the pretty park that looked across the water to the great cathedral, he would ask her to marry him.
He set off for school the next morning with the same light step that had carried him to the university in Montilagus ten years before. A new life awaited him, a life filled with love once more, and somehow this turned the grey skies blue and the drizzling rain into sunshine.
Over lunch with Michelle, he suggested a walk on Sunday and she accepted eagerly. Then, with lessons done for the day, he settled onto a stool in the deserted laboratory. A line of cages housed the rats he used to test his discoveries. Down through the years, boys had volunteered to feed the rats and clean the cages, for which he was grateful, even if they did occasionally let one escape. The escapees didn’t wander far though – schools make a fine home for rats, especially a boys’ school where scraps of food were tossed about carelessly. On that afternoon, Joachim saw a rat nosing about near a bowl of poison placed in the corner by the janitor. He knew it was one of his thanks to the metal ring clipped around its front leg.
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ he called and the rodent turned to face him, its ears twitching. But a rat is a creature of instinct, and with one eye on Joachim this one continued towards the poisoned pellets.
‘Shoo,’ cried Joachim, and rising from his stool, he picked up the bowl of poison and placed it on the bench beside him. ‘You’d be safer in with these others,’ he called to the rat, which had vanished for the moment. Fetching an empty cage, Joachim baited it with a biscuit and set a trip-wire to hold the door open. He had been back at work for half an hour when the crash of mesh and metal told him his trick had worked.
‘Now then, let’s have a look at you,’ he said, donning gloves in case the little devil tried to bite him. ‘You’re certainly healthy enough. The boys feed you well whether you’re inside a cage or not.’
He was curious to know which experiment the rat had been a part of. From the beginning, he had numbered the metal rings and recorded the numbers in a special ledger alongside the formula tested. He opened the ledger, then held the rat’s front leg as gently as he could to read the number. ‘Thirty-six,’ he murmured.
With the rat back in its cage, he opened the ledger at the most recent page. These numbers were all in three figures, which was only to be expected. Over the years, hundreds of rats had lived and died in the laboratory. He flipped back through the ledger until he was only one page from the front. There it was, No. 36, with a brief note to say it had escaped and, in a column nearby, the date.
‘No,’ he said, frowning. ‘There must be a mistake.’
He went back to the cage and checked the metal ring again. It was definitely thirty-six, without any sign that another number had worn away. Staring at the ledger again, he tried to make sense of what it told him. He knew that rats rarely lived more than two years and never more than three, yet this one had been used in an experiment seven years ago.
‘Very strange.’
There would be an explanation, of course. That was the role of the scientist – to find reasons why the unusual occurred. They always began by looking at the evidence because science was not guesswork and superstition. He examined the rat more carefully and saw that its fur was sleek, its eyes clear and the skin around its snout was smooth and pink. Summing up, he murmured, ‘You don’t seem to have aged at all.’
Until he said that, he’d still suspected there had been a mistake in the ledger or with the number on the metal tag. But those words changed everything.
When their meaning slammed into him, he dropped the rat. It fell onto the bench and immediately leaped to the floor, scampering out of sight in the blink of an eye. He wouldn’t see it again. It didn’t matter.
He hurried out of the laboratory and along the corridor to the bathroom. There, he stood before a mirror and examined his face the way he had examined the rat. Hair sleek and golden, his skin pink with the bloom of youth, no folds or droopiness around his eyes, no crow’s feet at the corners. You could pass for a man ten years younger, Michelle had told him. Ten years! Oh God, no.
He raised his hand and the amethyst on his finger was reflected in the glass. ‘You saved me all too well, my darling,’ he said, then let his head fall forward in misery.
People would notice. They already had. Michelle wasn’t the only one to comment on his uncanny youth. What a hell his life would become if they guessed the truth. Word would spread; he would become a freak, like the bearded lady in a circus. Worse still, thousands would want to be like him. They would hound him for the secret, and to get hold of it they would threaten those he loved.
Michelle! He was planning to marry her. She loved him, and in time he hoped to love her as much as he had loved Agneta. But was it fair to marry a woman when you could not grow old with her, be her companion through the years, all the way to a rocking chair surrounded by your grandchildren?
Joachim went back to his laboratory, collected all of his papers and ledgers and burned them in the furnace where the janitor disposed of the school’s rubbish. There must be no record of what he had stumbled across – except for his own body. Then he took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote his resignation for the headmaster.
On Sunday, he walked with Michelle in the luxuriant gardens by the river, but their conversation did not go the way he had intended earlier in the week. It was heart-rending for Michelle also. Instead of the proposal she was expecting, she heard that Joachim was leaving Munich.
‘I don’t know why you are doing this,’ she told him desperately, ‘and I don’t know how I will live without you.’
Joachim tried to turn his face into stone and began to walk away. A lesser woman might have let him go and later complained to her friends about the hard-hearted man who’d deceived her. Not Michelle. She followed him along the riverside path, even when he hurried his step, until finally he had to turn and face her.
‘You are pretending, like an actor on stage,’ said Michelle, ‘but I can see the love in your eyes, Joachim. I don’t care what you have done, or what secret you are hiding. Nothing can steal
away the love we feel for each other. You must tell me the truth.’
Until now Joachim had imagined he loved Michelle less than Agneta, but when she spoke to him this way, his heart broke inside his chest. Barely able to stand, he had to take her arm just to reach a bench close by. There, with her hand clasped inside his own, he told her of the false science Prince Edvord had demanded of him, of the discovery he had stumbled upon and how Agneta had used it to save him.
When he’d finished he looked towards Michelle expecting to find insult in her eyes. ‘You must think all of this an outrageous lie,’ he said.
‘No,’ she replied sadly. ‘It’s because your story is so far-fetched that I believe it. Besides, barely a day passes without a teacher telling me you haven’t aged in ten years. And your skill with test tubes and chemicals is greater than any school teacher’s.’
Then Michelle surprised him a second time. ‘You are right to end our romance. It is the honourable thing to do and that is another reason I believe you. You are an honourable man, Joachim. You have guessed what our future would be like, and you love me too much to let me endure it. And every day, when you saw me grow just a little older, you would remember the torment you are condemned to. I couldn’t bear to watch such hurt in my husband’s eyes, either.’
Such insight and such kindness made Joachim love her even more. Now he felt doubly deprived by what had happened – first Agneta, now Michelle. An old anger suddenly surged through him, the rage he hadn’t felt since he’d learned of Agneta’s death.
‘What it is, Joachim?’ asked Michelle. ‘I can see a change in your face, one that makes me afraid for you.’
‘Prince Edvord,’ he said, seeing the man’s face before his eyes as he spoke. ‘This is his fault. I should have taken my revenge when Agneta died, but I stayed here in Munich. This time I will go to Montilagus and, the first chance I get, I’ll …’
Disappearing Act Page 9