‘A tonic?’ my master asked.
‘Yes, with a dash of—’ Vilder shrugged ‘—some opiate or other. Laudanum if you have some?’
My master seemed unsure. ‘Are you ill?’
‘Do I need to be?’ My master lit the candles on the stand by the door and I crept forward to see the visitor closer, but he went to the window and became a silhouette. ‘Come now, don’t look at me like that,’ he said to my master. ‘A tonic would make me happy. Is that not reason enough?’
My master set about concocting a brew, first stoking the furnace, before collecting phials from his shelves and measuring out ingredients. Though he seemed reluctant to be doing it, he kept his tone friendly. ‘London, you will see, is greatly altered. It is as Florence once was. There is zest here, enquiry, and such thrilling science that sometimes I cannot sleep with sheer excitation.’
‘Scientists?’ Vilder laughed. ‘We are the most ill-gotten creatures of them all. The fool kings.’ He nodded at my master’s preparation. ‘Why not put some hemlock in too?’
‘What?’
‘I’m joking with you, dear fellow.’ Vilder chuckled again and turned to look out from the window. A pale winter sun slipped behind the forest of ship masts on the Thames. With the visitor’s back turned my master quickly hid his red velvet wallet under the worktable pans. It was his only truly precious possession, containing two objects: a hexagonal glass phial with a dash of grey liquid in the bottom and a tortoiseshell case, the size of a snuff box, containing a quantity of grey powder with no odour at all, like dry dirt. I’d only seen him look at the things, checking they were there, but never once using them. I would learn later that this substance, in raw and liquid form, jyhr as it was called, would play a profound part in my life.
‘Do you know how those people became rich?’ Vilder said, tapping the top of his swagger stick on the window pane. ‘The sea traders and the sugar hagglers there, where their wealth came from?’
‘From foreign lands?’
‘From death. It came from death.’ He half turned his head to my master, and back again. ‘The great plague of two centuries past, and all those since. The ruination of the species. The world diminished of people, but still bursting with treasure: iron, copper, gold. A void left just at the moment of new invention. And who better to fill it, to capitalize, than merchants and spice men?’
‘A sombre subject, no? After all this time.’
‘And the plague not only made people rich, it made them clever.’ He deepened his voice ‘“If I—everyman—am to suffer an horrendous end, to be eaten alive by buboes in my groin and armpits, whilst my skin turns as black as tar, if my life will end that way, I must surely make something of it first. What if there is no paradise? What if this frail body is all I have?” Would Michelangelo have picked up his chisel otherwise? Would Euripides or Plato have recorded their thoughts? Or Spenser or Donne put ink to paper? Their endeavour to cheat mortality.’
‘Have you come all this way to talk of the plague?’ There was a coolness in my master’s tone that made the visitor turn back.
‘You are right. I have a purpose here and I shall be direct. Return with me to Opalheim. I have a commission for you there.’
‘Opalheim?’
‘You recall the place?’
‘Yes, I recall it.’
Vilder chuckled quietly to himself. ‘How bad-tempered you’ve grown.’
‘I will not go to Opalheim. I will not set foot in that place. It is your home and I do not wish to speak ill of it—’
‘You are speaking ill of it.’
An electric silence. The palace bells rang out. My master shook some powder from a bottle, sprinkled it into the pot and stirred. ‘What commission?’
Light from the furnace flickered against Vilder’s tourmaline pupils, otherwise he was a magnificent shadow. ‘I wish you to perform a conversion.’
‘No.’
‘I would not trust myself with the procedure, otherwise—’
‘Nor should you.’
‘Otherwise I would not be seeking your help.’
‘I say no.’
‘And that is that?’
‘You are as qualified as I. You know how to do it. Do it. I will have no part of it.’
Vilder looked towards me, smiling subtly, and whispered, ‘It seems we’re no longer on good terms, my friend and I. I suppose time does that.’
‘Who is it you wish to convert, huh? A lover? Some caprice of yours? You joke of hemlock. It is no joke. And you wish me to put a curse on them, whoever they are? I’ll not. It would be unconscionable in the extreme, immoral, to burden another living thing with it—to find later you’ve tired of them, as you tire of all your caprices. No, I will not do it. You are irresponsible and you give our craft a bad name.’
‘He is no caprice.’
‘Well, I am no fool king.’ The fur lifted from my back: I had never heard my master shout before. He wiped beads of perspiration from his brow and stirred the pan. His hands were shaking. ‘All good, my champion, all good,’ he whispered to me. He presumed I was frightened by the visitor, but I was more intrigued than anything. He was like a character from a play or an opera come to life. From a piece that was full of tension and drama, where murder was in the air, and powerful women and flawed heroes whispered in dark palace rooms. Vilder possessed a quality, in his demeanour, in how he spoke and moved, in the indefinable odours that sung from him, that I’d never encountered before and rarely since. I had no notion if he was brave and honourable—or a villain who took pleasure in enchanting others. The only other human I would meet, decades later, with such a quality of grave extravagance, was Louis, ‘the sun king’ of Versailles.
It was some time before my master spoke again to him. ‘I wish I could help you. Truly.’ His tone was at once conciliatory. ‘You know I would assist you in any other matter, in profound matters if you asked me, but I cannot in that way. You know why. It is the only rule of my life.’ He cleared his throat and funnelled the contents of the pan into a cup and set it on the table.
Vilder heaved a sigh. ‘You’re right. I should not have made the suggestion. The idea took hold of me and—’ Now I know Vilder to be a dissembler, a double-dealer, who’ll say one thing and mean another, but at the time I was amazed by how quickly his irascibility drained away, a seeming penitence in its place. ‘I will think on it no more.’ He took off his cloak and laid it carefully on the back of a chair. ‘I have a better proposal: that we revive our old association. Too many years have passed for resentment.’
Vilder was so gracious, my master dropped his guard. ‘Nothing would make me happier.’ They embraced, only with a little awkwardness, before Vilder sat down and picked up the cup of liquid.
‘Whether you approve of such tonics or not,’ he said, ‘you are the best of all at making them. Perhaps it is a deceit of the brain, but my own medicines never seem to work as well.’ He studied it with his nose and used the tip of his finger to touch a single drop on to his tongue. Immediately his jaw loosened, his shoulders dropped. After it had cooled a little, he drank the rest and sank like warm wax. My master watched him, with distaste I fancied, but when he poured two beakers of wine and they both toasted, their animosity was put away. They talked, more like friends: chemystry, silver mines, Florence, Rome, the dead queen.
Past midnight, both on the cusp of falling asleep in their armchairs, Vilder said: ‘His name is Aramis, my caprice. He is a soldier. And a fine man.’
* * *
I was woken by a tap of metal and a feather of golden light on my eyes. Vilder was retrieving his swagger stick. It dazzled against the dawn light through the window. He swept back his cushion of hair, put on his hat, curled his fingers through the feather. He looked down at the place where my master had hidden the wallet, a sliver of red beneath pans. He smiled, I think, but didn’t touch it. When he noticed
I was awake, he bowed at me, then slipped from the room. My master was still asleep and I wondered if I should rouse him, but I had a more mischievous urge: to follow him on my own. I crept out of the door as it was closing. The shadow of the ostrich feather stole down the stairs and I went after it.
I trailed him out of the palace on to the Thames. Snow was falling and I couldn’t even see the south bank of the river, just an otherworldly swirl of blizzard, of shape-shifting silhouettes of lumbering morning people. Vilder strode across the ice, not slipping nor skidding. There was a moan of wind along the river and the tendrils of his ostrich feather shook against it and would have flown free had the unyielding shaft not kept them in check.
I went in his wake almost to the other side of the Thames, longing for him to turn and see I was there, regarding me in that dark, extravagant way of his, that I might feel his grandeur one last time. In the end, I stopped. Vilder did not turn, nor break his stride, and it was almost painful watching him vanish into the white.
For a moment I was lost in a trance, then the sky must have darkened a shade, as I realized how cold it was, and that I was standing on the ice, almost alone on the river. I turned and found Whitehall vanished, consumed by white, and all of a sudden I felt a keen shame that I had somehow betrayed my master, allowing myself to be charmed by a man who clearly distressed him. I began to return, but the streak of superstition in me—that I always had and still do—made me think, for my disloyalty, there’d be a break in the ice, that a fissure would open and I’d fall through. I imagined the current taking me, and my body tumbling along beneath the bumpy ceiling of ice as I was carried away seawards.
I longed to get back to our room, to my master’s bed, so he knew I hadn’t left him, so I could show I’d never leave him, but it took me ages to cross back to the north bank. I kept having to stop, to summon my courage, shivering on the ice, appalled by how London had been stolen away from me, before marshalling myself to continue. At last the towers of Whitehall began to refigure, and I sped up and kept going.
I tore across the courtyard, up the steps, then drove through the door into our room—and relief. A shape still lay beneath the blanket, and that smell that was vital to me—like midnight in a tall forest, stiff parchment paper and a whisper of pine sap. My master.
I jumped up and he, half dozing, lifted the cover.
‘All good, my champion?’ He smiled, then added, ‘How cold you are,’ before he nodded off once more.
I burrowed down to his feet and lay there, in warmth, wild in my heart.
My home.
* * *
How many years ago was it now, that morning on the river? More than two hundred. In another age, at the beginning of my life. More than two hundred winters have come and gone since then, more than two hundred times the November winds have arrived from the north and humans have put on their furs and hats and lit fires in the streets. I have counted all the winters and always say the new number to myself when the day of the new year comes around. That’s how I know my age—two hundred and seventeen.
The visitor, Vilder, would of course return to our lives, casting a shadow over everything, the man responsible—I have no doubt—for taking my master from me.
I often think of Elsinore and Whitehall and the other courts in which my master worked. I think too of our later years—those after the dreadful events in Amsterdam—trailing armies, the battlefield, the red-mist bone-smash horror of war. The memory of those decades spent together pulse through me perpetually. I dream of them every night, fantasies so vivid and intense, I struggle to believe they’re not real.
As to why I, a mere dog, have lived for more than two centuries, that is a question to which I only have vague answers.
Of course, if I could find him, my master, who was no dissembler, or enchanter, or mystery-man like Vilder. Who was honourable and constant and loyal to his core, a softly spoken angel too modest to ever tell the world how great he was. If I could find him, my beloved, if he is still living, somewhere—I might understand everything.
TOMORROW
1
LOST SOUL
Venice, May 1815,
a hundred and twenty-seven years since I lost him
What a ravishing morning!
For two weeks I’ve been cooped up in my den, watching from the entrance, as it’s rained and rained, and cheerless huddles have sloshed back and forth, all wet hemlines and squeaking soles. But today, the air is newly spun from the Adriatic, and clean again.
‘Buongiorno!’ comes a voice and a pair of boots approach, the porter from the customs house. ‘A surprise for you.’ He crouches and slaps down a pie on the cobbles before me. ‘Torta di fagioli!’ he boasts with a kiss to his fingertips. I pass my nostrils over it. Spinach and beans cased in pastry, only a few mouthfuls missing. The porter, who’s as straightforward as the barrels he unloads all day from the merchant ships, often comes to chat, and sometimes brings me treats, but rarely anything this enticing.
For me? I ask with a studied lift of my brow.
He laughs, scruffing my neck in his giant palms. ‘Si, mio signore, who never leaves his post, who sits all day watching the ships arrive. To your feast.’ He does a comical curtsy and goes.
I press my snout over the torta and inhale. I’ve barely eaten in days and I could wolf it straight down—but I’ll ration myself: a quarter tonight, a quarter tomorrow, enough for a week if I’m disciplined. I come out into the sunshine and cast my eye along the quay: a ship setting sail, another docking, half a dozen crewmen winching crates down to the quay. He is not amongst them. I inspect the cathedral steps: a young priest ascends and slips through the double doors.
There comes a playful bark and a familiar dog trots across the port. I nudge my treat out of sight. Sporco, as I call him, ‘the messy one,’ a local stray who often hangs about the customs house, bothering for scraps. He’s the sort of creature I might have avoided in that splendid time of my former life, when I was a courtier hound, when I might have found him a little too much of an animal, a slave to mechanical urges, the permanent want of food. But nowadays, I am equal with them all, except in one way of course. In any case, Sporco had a dreadful beginning, which I myself witnessed.
‘Muggy today,’ he says. ‘We’re still in spring, but it’s muggy, no?’
I don’t reply, for it’s not muggy in the slightest. He snouts the air, but doesn’t realize there’s a torta di fagioli sitting right behind me. I observe him down the length of my snout. When he was a puppy, his fur was golden, but years on the street have matted it into dirty clumps. He’s half my size, but has uncommonly large ears that point up quizzically, with tufts sprouting from inside them. He’s scruffy and smells of canals, but fine dark lines around his eyes give him a touch of Arabian mystery. And he smiles, always, like I once did.
‘Ah,’ he gasps. I presume he’s finally detected the torta and brace myself for an argument. From sheer persistence he usually wears me down until I give him half of what I have, or all of it. But something else has caught his attention—the appearance of another dog on the quay, a Dalmatian who passes from time to time with her master, each as sleek and self-regarding as the other. ‘She is dizzying, isn’t she? You see how she wants me?’ Sporco boasts, pushing his chest in her direction and swinging his tail in virile strokes. ‘She’s crying out for me that one.’
He couldn’t be further from the truth; the Dalmatian avoids him pointedly, often sailing past with a quip, ‘What a sad little dreamer,’ or, ‘I thought it was August again and the canals were stinking.’
‘You know where to find me. Don’t be shy,’ Sporco tells her, undeterred, as he is with every lady dog he badgers—and I’ve no idea if he has luck with any of them. He turns back to me. ‘That reminds me. What of La Perla? She hasn’t been by this morning, has she?’
‘No?’
‘Usually she’s been and gone by now,
hasn’t she, her and Beatricia? But you haven’t seen her?’
‘No.’ I make a point of not meeting his gaze, to avoid one of his long-winded musings about the comings and goings of dogs in the morning. Though he is right: she hasn’t been. She and her mistress, Beatricia, almost always take their walk very early. La Perla is a nervy lapdog that has never once left her small city quarter, but who carries herself with such resolute primness, I can’t help but be a little fascinated by her.
‘Is that meat?’ Sporco says, finally spying my torta.
He tries to slip round me, but I block his way. ‘I’ve told you many times, my friend: I don’t eat meat.’
‘Right you are, right you are,’ he says, understanding nothing. He scratches his ear and I scratch mine.
‘How would you like it if someone chopped you up and cooked you?’
At that moment, there comes a soft groaning of metal. The weathervane on the tip of the customs house, a sea-goddess holding out a golden sail, is turning. With it, a curious pang shivers through me, the tiniest twitch of some bygone rapture, intangible and elusive. The sounds of the city seem to fade away, and I stare at the vane, unsure what is so strange; I’ve seen her pivot round a thousand times. Then I realize: she’s not turning with the wind, she’s shouldering against it, as if she had a will of her own. For a while, she holds firm, before there’s a crank and she rights herself once more.
‘Just a morsel,’ Sporco’s saying. ‘I’m half-starved I am. In three days nothing but fish bones. A couple of brutes have been stalking the wharves at night. Surly hounds from the coal yard.’ He impersonates them by pushing out his shoulders and baring his teeth. It’s almost impossible not to find him entertaining. ‘Those wharves are ours by right. There’s a pecking order. It is meat, isn’t it? Can you spare a morsel?’
‘No.’ I nudge my treat to the back corner of my den and set off.
‘Where are you going? Off on your travels?’
‘The torta is mine, you understand?’
Tomorrow Page 3