Tomorrow

by Damian Dibben

  ‘I—’ His cheeks dimpled as they always did when he was unsure how to answer. ‘We arrive from Denmark. Before that Florence. A short stay in Madrid. And more—’ He gestured. ‘To travel is to live, is it not?’

  I’m not sure if Margaret agreed, but her smile did not falter. ‘And now?’

  ‘Whitehall? If there is need of my services, lowly as they are. I have thirsted for London, above all places.’

  Her delight was clear to see. ‘I could play the coquette, but I shall not. I have missed your remedies too greatly and I have more need of them than ever. I will find employment for you. New dynasty or not, you will note I still carry the keys. Come in, come in, you and your gracious companion—this chill is maddening.’ She motioned for us to enter, but my master paused.

  ‘Tell me first, did a gentleman come looking for me these last few years?’

  ‘A gentleman?’

  ‘By chance. I do not expect it, but you always followed so carefully the comings and goings—’

  ‘I recall no one. Is there some trouble?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ Though my master had brought the subject up, he now seemed to regret it. ‘My former associate in business, of years gone by, a chemyst such as I.’

  ‘Another of you, how thrilling. What is his appearance?’

  ‘Truly it is of no matter. He visited me here once, long ago, and I thought you might recall, but—forgive me. The long journey. I am at sixes and sevens. And you are right about the weather—lead the way.’

  Margaret steered us round a cloistered quadrangle. The castle at Elsinore had been plain in comparison to Whitehall, which was a pale mountain range of halls, towers and colonnades, windows brilliant with multicolour stained glass, roofs fluted with a thousand brick finials.

  ‘You heard the news of course? The queen. Four years and I still fancy she will barge through the door and rail at me.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Perhaps, if you had been at court, she would live. She would not be counselled on the matter of lead ceruse. They say it all but poisoned her. Her end, needless to say, was like a piece of grim and fantastic theatre. She ordered the removal of every mirror in Richmond Palace, took to the floor on cushions and lay for days, her fingers in her mouth, like an infant, still wearing that cartoon wig of hers. Eventually she pronounced, “I wish not to live any longer, but desire to die.” And she kept her word.’

  ‘She will not be easily forgotten.’

  ‘No indeed. And then, of course, last November’s episode. Did you hear of that?’

  ‘Varied accounts.’

  Margaret halted, threw her eye around the cloister and held his arm. ‘Unspeakable, unspeakable.’ She had a playful quality that was a refreshing antidote to the long-wintered, wide-sky austerity of Elsinore. She resumed her march through the labyrinth of passages and courtyards, her voice sotto voce. ‘A time of horror it was. In the undercroft they found it, three dozen barrels or more. Pure gunpowder. Here, almost beneath our feet. A bedlam of interrogations followed, appalling torture, court writs and trials. The king himself attended, hidden behind a curtain. Can you imagine the scene? This entire court shredded to nerves. Everyone distrusting the other. Then the executions. Dear me. I would not attend. But the crowds that massed, to witness the dismemberments. Gruesome, gruesome. But imagine if they had been triumphant, the plotters? We’d be on another path entirely.’ We had come into a room with a fire. ‘You left him on bad terms, did you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your associate? I know how feuds develop. A dispute between two glassmakers in the Strand, over formulas, turned so violent one ended up in Newgate. Were secrets stolen?’ she enquired with an air of scandal. My master’s brow corrugated. ‘You poor creature. I’ll not extract it from you. What a gossip I am. Wait here, warm your bones, I shall talk to the powers.’ She lingered a moment. ‘My vanishing physician and his smiling hound. It is extraordinary how unchanged you are.’ And she went.

  * * *

  ‘Let me see you,’ a voice said.

  The chamber we’d been shown into was dim and so over-ornamented with gilding and fretwork I hadn’t noticed the man seated in the corner. A pale, paunchy face mounted over an elaborate lace ruff, heavy lidded eyes, thin beard. His clothes were fine, a complex symmetry of pleated velvet, but he had the fresh rotten smell of cheese. A wolfhound lay before him. She looked round at me and I bid her good day with a bow of my tail. To which she stared back so disdainfully I was embarrassed by myself, before she lay down again.

  My master stepped forward. ‘Sire.’

  The man, King James, as I would soon learn, studied the vellum parchment that my master had given him. He’d inscribed it, in his steady slanting hand, on our passage over the North Sea.

  ‘You were engaged in all of these palaces?’ The king spoke with a cumbersome lisp, his tongue too large for his mouth. Dirt had caught in the lines of his hands, so that only his fingertips were flesh-coloured.

  ‘In all the various courts of Europe, sire. And here at Whitehall too: six years at the service of your cousin the queen.’

  ‘Then you know these halls better than I. Chemystry? Is that the magic that witches use? To make storms from the air?’

  ‘That is not chemystry, sire, with all respect. Chemystry is a science. A sound and logical art. I am no magician.’

  The king looked back at the paper and his head twitched in surprise. ‘And in Persia too? Truly?’

  ‘Indeed, sire. At the palace of Ismail in Tabriz.’

  ‘Persia?’ He was stunned. ‘It is a world away from us. In that realm, for sure there is magic?’

  ‘Mathematics perhaps. Wisdom resides in the very bones of the Persians, sire. Ancient wisdom. There, far along the silk roads beyond the desert, I learnt the specialties of my craft, more than any other place.’ In the years to come I would hear my master talk often of Persia, of Tabriz and mathematics, and he always shone when he did.

  ‘And what age do you have?’ The king shook the parchment. ‘To be in possession of such a curriculum?’

  ‘Fifty—’ my master replied quickly, though it sounded more like a question. ‘Or thereabouts.’

  The king smiled at this and his teeth were as discoloured as his fingers. He pushed himself up and shuffled over to me. He was not old, but weak on his legs, ordinary-looking, like a street seller in fancy dress. He dropped his hand before my nose to let me sniff it. Out of politeness, I took in a draught, but it tanged of ink phenol and faeces. ‘Welcome to Whitehall,’ he said to my master, signalling that the interview had been successful. ‘You and your hound.’

  * * *

  ‘The costume box city’ my master called London. I have seen so many places since it’s easy to forget how struck I was by my first true metropolis. Long squares of gabled houses, each a castle in itself, but joined together in miraculous geometrics of glass. And a new universe of odours. After the dull smokeries and fish hauls of Elsinore, the all-pervading rye-starch smell of painted timber, here the air was spiced with exotics: sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, coffee and chocolate. The smell, I would come to recognize, of money.

  And the humans that clipped on pewter cobbles along her avenues and through her colonnades were grand too, with their knowing confidence and froideur. It was the time of cartwheel ruffs, richly sombre fabrics and tall conical capotain hats. Men were bearded, moustached, with hair swept back from the foreheads, some with lovelocks, many with short cloaks draped from one shoulder. And women, bodiced into gowns with high necklines and wings at the shoulders, were just as self-assured.

  As he had been at Elsinore, here my master was always vigilant of new arrivals. In our lodgings, when boats arrived at the palace quay, he’d peer from the edge of the window, studying who came ashore. Or if he heard an unfamiliar voice from the courtyard, or the adjacent suites, he’d cock his ear to the wall. I was certain why: he was anticipating
the person that hadn’t washed up on the silt flats of Elsinore. The eyes of that stranger, the human I hadn’t even met, seemed to stalk us wherever we went, even hanging, I fancied, in the darkness as we slept. I knew nothing more about him, other than that his seeming appearance had been heralded by that intaglio of three towers below a crescent moon.

  A few years into our time at Whitehall, on a winter’s day, we went to visit the frost fair on the Thames with Margaret. In fact, it was her idea to go. She and my master were firm friends, always laughing together and talking over each other, often staying up late, perusing books by candlelight, whilst sharing sweet snacks, marzipan and gingerbreads. I sensed an attraction between them that was distinct from friendship. My master was one of those rare humans who was naturally unmannered around women, innately gracious and thoughtful, yet virile enough to make even sour ones smile. It seemed to me that having Margaret as a companion put a spring in his step. So, at Whitehall, I used to wonder why he didn’t allow their friendship to develop: for it was he, without doubt, that held it back. She was the one always coming up with plans, always holding out her hand for his. In a few years I’d understand his behaviour completely.

  The Thames had frozen over entirely, enough for horses and carriages to be able to travel along it all the way from London Bridge to Westminster. Here and there, ships had been encased in ice, their masts bare like winter trees. Hordes of people, red-cheeked and wrapped up to the eyes, bustled between the attractions—archery, bull-baiting, skittles and see-saws—whilst children skated about or pulled each other in sleighs. My human companions were thrilled by at it all, but I felt uncomfortable on ice, though I tried to keep it a secret. I never liked, not even today, the intense squeeze of cold against my paws, the odour—like sharp peppermint I always thought—and worse than all, the fear it might break at any time.

  ‘Look, let us buy hats,’ my master said, alighting on a stall. ‘I know this gentleman. The Masque of Queens, that was you?’ he asked the elderly stallholder, who replied with an ancient crinkle of a smile. ‘The man is a genius, Margaret, a milliner. We shall have one each.’

  ‘Not I, not I,’ Margaret begged, but in no time he’d paid for two and crowned her with a headpiece of plumes in parrot colours, and himself with a turban studded with a glass ruby.

  ‘You shall be the Queen of Amazons, or some such, and I the Sultan of Arabia.’ It was so entertaining I barked, and forgot all about my fear of ice. My master loved putting on costumes. Whenever players came to a palace, he’d follow them round in an almost intoxicated state, only to become tongue-tied if any of them actually spoke to him. Once an earnestly drab playwright came to our rooms in Whitehall and questioned him for hours about his work. During the interview my master was so star-struck, he seemed to forget how to speak, but for months after he boasted to anyone who’d listen: ‘Did you know, Mr Jonson is writing a play about me? I shall be famous the world over.’ (Unfortunately, when we saw the piece, he was shamed by the portrayal of a con artist masquerading as an alchemyst and slipped out of the theatre before the final song.)

  We went on to watch a troupe of dancers. To the fast running of fiddles, they reeled in figures of eight. My master started to tap his feet as he always did when he wanted to join in. He loved dancing as much as dressing up, though in my opinion he was best left out of it, as he was inevitably the clumsiest on the floor. When one man stepped away, leaving a space, I thought he’d join in—but something at the edge of the river had caught his attention. The light dropped from his face, like a block of snow falling from the eaves of a house. His nostrils flared and a keen odour—of hysteria I fancied—lifted off him.

  ‘We should return. This is meagre entertainment.’ He set off hurriedly, not even making sure we followed. I tried to see what had stirred him so, but a group had pressed in behind us. He was so distracted that he slipped and knocked into one of the dancers, sending her off balance. She fell but my master didn’t apologize or help her up, as he normally would, but forged on. ‘Quickly,’ he snapped. He’d dropped his turban and I was about to rescue it when he shouted again for us to ‘hurry up.’ With the happiness apparently gone from our day, the rabble seemed shrill and disobliging now, with all their clattering patterns, and I began to feel nervous again of the ice breaking, imagining how cold and dark the river would be underneath. We came to a clearing and my master stopped dead and swore under his breath. ‘Why do I run? Face him.’ Margaret was nonplussed, as grimly he turned his body about. ‘How long has he been watching?’

  That was when I saw the lone figure standing on the steps of the Embankment, his black cloak picked out against the snowy city. He came down on to the river and advanced towards us at a measured pace. Even at a distance, he was striking: broad-shouldered, confident, gliding swan-like across the ice, at a different speed from the masses swarming about him, with a different quality, in a different universe from them.

  ‘The gentleman you’d been expecting?’ Margaret asked, her wits always about her. ‘Your once associate? Is there cause for concern?’

  My master made no reply, just shoved me behind his legs. The stranger halted some yards short of us and held out his palms.

  ‘So I find you in London?’

  His smile was so self-assured I tingled. His face was hidden like treasure beneath a wide-brimmed hat with an ostrich feather plume, and by his hair; his ink-black curls tumbled to his shoulders. His face was not cold or pinched like everyone else’s; it shone with a Mediterranean light. He dripped in riches: a doublet of Prussian blue, velvet and satin dropped with pearls; floating collar of Spanish lace (the type that even the most fashionable courtiers were yet to wear); patent shoes that reflected the entire scene; a gold-tipped swagger stick; and an emerald about his neck. Another person may have looked gaudy, or effeminate, but not he. My master, who I’d thought of as handsome, with his large nose, oversized hands and unruly scrub of sandy hair, was diminished in the other’s presence. He stepped forward, inclined his head and spoke the stranger’s name:

  ‘Vilder.’

  The stranger, who was slightly shorter than my master but with a stronger build, stared back, puffs of condensation smoking from his nostrils, apparently relishing the discomfort, before speaking. ‘It is good to see you, sir.’ Then he glanced down at me, eyes as glittering as coal pits, making me almost light-headed. ‘He is yours?’ he asked my master, before turning to Margaret with a slight but vanquishing bow. ‘My old associate is a fool for the species.’ He examined her with a wry twist of the mouth. ‘I like your hat.’

  Margaret had forgotten she was wearing it. I’m sure she longed to snap it off, but she endured, reddening slightly, and gave a comical shrug. There was an uneasy silence; three humans gathered on the ice.

  ‘Have you travelled far?’ Margaret’s voice got stuck in her throat and she coughed, whilst rearranging her collar. ‘Where is it you have come from sir?’

  ‘The Hunsrück mountains. Rhineland. The old country.’ He spoke graciously and smiled often, but his words were gilded with mischief.

  ‘The Rhineland. A place of fairy tales surely?’ Margaret rejoined.

  I had the sense that Vilder was not one to make small talk, but he answered nonetheless. ‘I would travel ten times the distance to hunt down my oldest acquaintance in the world.’

  My master seemed to measure Vilder’s words, as if they contained hidden meanings.

  ‘An arduous journey from there?’ Margaret said. ‘And you have a shared fascination with chemystry? With metallurgy and—and such matters? Where does your interest stem from, sir?’

  Vilder regarded her with sunny disdain, before answering. ‘My parents owned mines, long ago. I inherited. A grimy business.’ He twisted an immense sapphire on his finger in a dazzle of light.

  ‘That would make sense, mines, and the materials that are found in them, for chemystry I mean. And you speak the language like a native.’ She was
a magpie for facts but her persistence was making me anxious, and my master too.

  ‘My mother was English. And on her instruction I was tutored at John Balliol’s college in Oxford.’ He motioned at my master with a flourish. ‘He and I studied side by side—though I was far from a model pupil.’

  ‘Ah, all becomes clear: your connection, the university at Oxford—’

  Vilder interrupted her with a tap of his swagger stick. ‘I so look forward to speaking to you at greater length, but you must excuse us. An age has passed since last we spoke.’ He gestured towards my master and Margaret’s cheeks turned the colour of boiled ham.

  She nodded, mumbling an apology, picked up her skirt, left, realized she’d gone the wrong way, came back and departed in a muddled zigzag, her parrot headpiece going with her.

  For some moments a magnetic silence held the men together.

  ‘I am pleased to see you well,’ said my master at last. ‘When I was in Elsinore I thought—’ Whatever he was going to say, he decided against it. ‘I was most grateful to you for sending my materials. Though I was sorry to return such a grim report. You received it? Did you know the poor fellow who drowned?’

  ‘Not personally.’ Vilder studied my master as a gentleman thief might peer through a jeweller’s window. ‘Well, as the lady noted, I have travelled far in this bitter cold. Invite me to your rooms?’ He nodded towards Whitehall, smirking. ‘The court of the Scottish king.’

  * * *

  ‘May I offer you some refreshment?’ my master asked him as we entered our parlour. Vilder glanced about, noting the shelves of little glass bottles and phials that my master always assembled in his place of work.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Mix me one of your reviving tonics. I have missed them.’ Vilder kept his cloak on but removed his hat. I tried to see his face properly, make sense of the fragments I’d glimpsed beneath its brim—squared jaw, broad nose, heavy brow—but the room was too dark.