‘Huh? Where are you—?’
‘I? The opposite way.’ I nudge him on to the bulwark of the ship. ‘Keep down and you’ll be in the city in no time.’ Vilder’s carriage has already overtaken a portion of the army.
‘And you—?’
I make sure there is cool formality to my tone. ‘Goodbye now.’
‘I’m coming with you!’ he barks, jumping back ashore, see-sawing from his front legs to his back. ‘Adventures, huh? Off to the realms, are we?’
‘No!’ My growl is sharp and this time I bear my teeth.
His eyes fill with surprise and at once I recall the beginning of his life, his abandonment on the pontoon. ‘But—are we not a pack?’
My ears stick up in surprise. I’ve given him no reason to think that. It’s ludicrous. We’re strays from the same corner of a city, that’s all. I want to tell him that I’ve had hundreds of friends, thousands perhaps, all gone now, and I’m not looking for more.
‘Vai! Out of the way!’ comes a voice and men heave a giant clock to the edge of the water to be loaded on to the ship. It’s as tall as a man, and its gold columns and finials support not one but three clock faces in an intricacy of machinery, dials and symbols. It’s the sort of piece that would have fascinated my master. ‘What a miraculous thing,’ he’d say. ‘You see, my champion, the ingenuity of men.’ When we were together, clocks used to be inelegant and ungainly, even those owned by kings, but this is an object that seems to come from a halcyon future, and it reminds me—with a shock—how plain I’ve become in the last decade, not caring, as I used to—as my master always did—about invention and beauty.
The battalion drums are calling me. I hover as Sporco still white-eyes me. Damn him, let him come. I’ll find him a place to stay once we’re away. ‘The journey may be long, you understand? You can’t nag me. If you do, I will leave you without a thought. You understand all this?’
‘Yes, understood, sir. The pack, eh? Off to the realms!’
I spot, near the back of the cavalcade, a pontonier’s wagon, lengths of wood sticking out the rear. ‘Up there, quickly!’ I nudge Sporco. He jumps, surprisingly agile, and disappears under the awning. I leap after him, feeling my way. Much better to travel in a cosy pontonier’s wagon, with the smell of sweet pine, than one full of gunpowder, terrified of every bump in the road. I nudge aside the awning to see the view. We crank through the scruffy outskirts of the town, crest an escarpment and roll into open countryside. It’s been overcast all day, but the murk dissolves and needles of spring sunshine peek through. I’ve been so used to the stink of canals, of damp stone and salt-sea, that the freshness of the air enlivens me.
Vilder’s carriage is tucked behind the cavalry, unable to overtake and has fallen into the same rhythm. We wheel through a wood, crown another peak and striking views open before us: a broad valley misted with wild flowers, cloaked here and there with dark emerald forests, a sinuous river twitches through it and a range of purple mountains in the distance. The sky is clear azurite overhead. After so many years of flat land and plain sky, the sight is riveting and I turn to Sporco—but he’s already sitting up speckled in sunlight. A creature that shambles through life, noisy with everything and nothing, is at once curious and admiring, silent even. I’m almost envious of him, of his chance to uncover the world’s surprises for the first time. I’ve all but forgotten the sensation.
‘Who is that man?’ he asks with a nod to the smoky-quartz carriage.
How can I explain Vilder? The decades we spent on edge, my master and I, never able to feel calm, dining in the corners of inns, eyes always on the door, on who came in—and how we might escape. For fear he might have found us.
‘He is evil,’ is all I say. ‘He will kill you as good as look on you.’
6
AMSTERDAM
August 1627
We were woken by pounding on the front door of our quarters.
‘Doctor, are you there?’ came the voice of our footman. My master shot up, hurried down to the hall and unbolted the door. ‘I’ve been told to fetch you,’ the footman panted. ‘A gentleman awaits you at Dam Square.’
‘Who?’
‘I was given no name. His driver couldn’t get through by road, so came on foot and asked for you to come urgently.’
My master pulled on his boots and threw a coat over his nightshirt. ‘Wait here,’ he started to say to me, but I was already outside.
The three of us hurried along the Herengracht. It was the dead of night, not a soul on the streets, hot still and the moon so large and bright it cast gigantic shadows of the cranes battalioned about the city. We’d been in the region for a number of years, first at the Dutch court in The Hague and latterly in Amsterdam itself, on the staff of a merchant’s family, traders in iron ore and weaponry. I wondered at first why my master had chosen to work for such a clan—they were not of royal stock, and the head of the household was a brute—and in a city that was, in that era at least, scant of charm, being little more than an immense building site. But soon I saw what drew him: the fantastic wealth of the place opened all the doors that interested him. ‘Here are great minds,’ he proclaimed once, leafing through sketches in the studio of a young artist. They were grisly beyond belief, illustrating an anatomy class: a coterie of gentlemen watching as a cadaver was cut up to its very sinews and bowels. ‘Science and art—you see, my champion, how they become one?’
We came into Dam Square and my master stopped dead, eyes snapping to the carriage in the centre. There were dozens of other vehicles scattered around for the night, but it had a quality unlike them, drawn from another realm, from another age, it seemed, one of dark and glittering make-believe. On high, slim wheels sat a titanic, spellbinding jewel of smoky-brown quartz. It seemed to capture all the moonlight in the square, only to vainly repel it back. Four black mares, as immodest as the coach, panted from a journey, whilst a man stalked back and forth in the arcade beneath the weighing house.
‘We are here,’ my master called to him.
The man stopped and swung round, peering about the square, before seeing us.
I tingled hot and cold as he advanced. Broad-chested, the moonlight clamouring to his face, heavy brow, broad nose, a mouth that was cruel and fascinating. Vilder. A man who I’d met only once, but never forgotten.
‘A curse on this city,’ he said, flicking his gloves at a half-constructed street going off from the square. ‘What is the point of roads that you cannot travel along? An hour we’ve circled these damned canals in search of your residence only to arrive where we started.’
‘There is a back way. If I had known—’
‘Give me no back ways! We risked our lives to get here. Amsterdam is enemy territory for us.’
‘Enemy territory?’ said my master, baffled.
‘Protestants,’ Vilder snapped by way of explanation, though it bemused my master even more. ‘Only a fool like you would bury yourself in a hole such as this, this ill conceit of land dredged from the bog, this swamp peopled solely by parvenus, by glorified sellers of tar and hemp. A curse on it!’ As his words echoed around the houses of Dam Square, a window opened and a voice called for quiet. ‘Arrivistes. Nouveau riche!’ Vilder swore back at it, before going over to a fountain to drink.
His clothes were streaked with dirt, yet they dazzled all the same: pearl-grey doublet slashed to silken jasper at the sleeves, wide-brimmed hat pinned on one side, as it had been in London, with an ostrich feather, and his magnificent hair spilling to his shoulders like poured ink. He had a dagger sheathed against his hip, its hilt studded with jewels. I was struck, as I had been twenty years before, by how masculine he appeared despite the finery. His sense of style, laboured in others, was effortless and unstudied. In Whitehall he’d so intrigued me that when he’d stolen away at dawn, I’d followed across the frozen Thames, in spite of my fear of breaking ice. His presence had mad
e my blood purr under my fur. In Amsterdam, almost instantly, I felt differently: he seemed to me bad-tempered, unpleasantly arrogant—and quite possibly dangerous. As he turned to the light, I noticed the stains on his tunic were not dirt, but blood, smeared across his side pocket. My master saw it too.
‘I need your help,’ Vilder said, before pointing his index fingers skywards to re-emphasize. ‘I need your help.’
‘Are you hurt?’
Vilder’s eyes seemed to warm with loathing, before he said: ‘Not I.’ He nodded at the carriage. ‘Aramis.’ Then: ‘My caprice.’ He dropped the phrase pointedly.
My master had been steady until then, but at once atoms of anxiety sweated from the backs of his hands. ‘Of course I shall help. Let me see him.’
Vilder caught him by the arm. ‘Be quiet, won’t you? He is sleeping at last. Three days from Grol—’
‘Grol?’
‘The war. Have you heard of it?’ he asked like a sarcastic school teacher. ‘The Protestants against the Catholics. We’ve had an inexorable journey. As if the siege was not punishing enough, the wretch must be shaken from his skin by these Dutch roads. Explain to me, will you, how these people who are richer than the gods, these conquering accountants who’ve plundered the treasures of the world, who possess nothing but flat terrain, are incapable of building a level road?’ Vilder clung on to my master’s sleeve, a manic kick in his eye, and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Blood rot. It ravages him. Sepsis. I know it. From a bullet, here.’ He fingered his thigh with his free hand, whilst clenching my master tighter with the other. ‘He should not have it. He is—the operation succeeded. Five years of infernal injections, one every week as we did—which he bore like a saint, a braver man than either of us—and it succeeded. The azoth, as healthy as mine. He has not aged since, younger if anything. See it in his face. And yet blood rot. Make him well, do you hear? You owe it to me. Make him well.’
Vilder let go at last. He sleeved the sweat from his brow and my master quietly clicked open the door. I should have hung back, but my curiosity was too great. The compartment seemed larger on the inside than the out, even with a curtain half drawn across the rear. With its little lanterns and velvet walls of dark chartreuse, it had the feel of a private chapel, the type an overly devout king might hide behind the panels of his bedroom wall for his private salvation. It was lavish—there were even shelves of crystal bottles and porcelain phials held up by little silver hands—but the smell was revolting: lemon cologne gone rotten, ambergris, and the tang of faeces, blood and infection. A sigh rustled against the curtain and fingers dropped into view: pale, waxy and bloated.
‘Ich bin hier,’ came a tired voice.
Unsure what to do, my master looked round at Vilder, who motioned impatiently until my master pulled back the shade. He was met with a stare that was at once timid and imperious. A young officer, a boy it seemed, of almost picture-book beauty—fine-boned, blond-haired, coral lips, powder-blue eyes—lay shivering. I could smell his illness from the street, the necrotic, yeasty, sweet-beer scent of blight besieging his insides. His cheeks were as livid as rain-lashed stone and he was furnace hot.
‘Good day to you, Aramis,’ my master said. ‘If I may call you that?’
‘Der berühmte Arzt.’ His voice was slight, reedy and edged with insolence. ‘At last I meet the great chemyst.’
‘You were shot?’
Aramis passed his hands down the length of his uniform, a splendid road-soiled heap of Prussian-blue silk, towards the bandage knotted round his thigh. Drenched in gore, it was the place from where most of the stench emanated.
‘How is it that you feel?’ my master asked.
Vilder glowered from behind. ‘He feels like death.’
Aramis grimaced, noticing me with a worry of a smile before telling my master, ‘I am burning in ice. But I shall survive, shall I not? Videy tells me so. And you will tell too, the architect of our—of our fortune?’ He frowned pointedly.
‘Of course you shall survive,’ my master promised. ‘We will take you to our lodgings. We’re sorry you couldn’t find them the first time. No more roads. We will make you better.’
My master seemed determined to keep me separated from Vilder. Leading the way from Dam Square to our house on Herengracht, he twice pushed me back and told me to follow behind. I obeyed, but I had only been staying close out of protection, not because I wished to see more of Vilder. In any case, Vilder had no interest in me. He was one of those humans that would not be charmed by my species, who made me feel inferior for being born so.
The moment we arrived back at our rooms, my master put me in the bedroom. ‘You wait in there.’ I tried to follow him out again. ‘Get in,’ he said sharply and closed the door behind him. But the latch did not turn and I had a view of the workroom. He hurriedly cleared a table, threw a blanket across it and lit the lanterns.
There came a shuffle of feet from the hall and the footman and two of his cohorts entered with Aramis and laid him out on the table. I tried to see the invalid in the light, but my master stood in the way and began to undo the bandage. Vilder came in last, taking a measure of the room, just as he had in Whitehall.
‘Bring me brandy,’ he said to one of the men. ‘French if you have it. Cognac ideally. Calvados if you must. Anything but Dutch.’ He dismissed him and the others with a flourish and turned to my master. ‘For decades you refuse to come to Opalheim, as if it were somehow beneath you, and yet here you take a commission with the Van den Heuvals of all people. The villains of Europe. Arms dealers. The bullet I fished from that boy’s leg would have come from one of his factories.’
‘Sssh, Videy, why must you talk all the time?’ Aramis squeezed his eyes against the pain.
‘I will have to cut away your breeches,’ my master said to him. ‘I am sorry; they look fine.’ He went to his chest where he kept his tools. Vilder scowled.
Now I could see Aramis clearly, he must have been more than thirty, and a soldier of rank, and yet he still had the quality of a boy. I felt pity for him. He was fair and athletic, but there was fear in his eyes, made all the more heartbreaking by the impudent face he put on to hide it. He reminded me one of those princes I sometimes met, steely little souls, miniature versions of their fathers, who could command falcons, hunt deer, joust, even go to war, but were boys nonetheless, with boys’ apprehensions and fears.
My master cut down the length of his breeches and carefully peeled the material away, having to tug where blood had glued it to the skin. Underneath the flesh was bloated. My master was taken aback by the rotting-meat stink, but showed no panic in his voice. ‘To be so young and a brigadier already, you must be a fine soldier.’
‘He is exceptional,’ Vilder put in. ‘He was born on the battlefield. At fourteen, he already commanded a cavalry. At fourteen, mark you. Impeccable shot, rides like Apollo, but above all he thinks.’ He tapped his fingers against his skull.
Aramis’s entire leg was discoloured by rot. His thigh, ankle and foot were tar-black, whilst the rest was marbled in dark puce and bronze. Here and there, gas had bubbled up under the skin in blisters.
‘And the badge there—’ my master chatted on, pointing to a gold medallion that hung from a chain on his breast ‘—some honour bestowed on you?’
Once more, Vilder answered on the other’s behalf. ‘White Mountain. He won the battle single-handedly, as good as. A wunderkind. The Catholic League, Tilly, the emperor himself, they owe everything to him.’
My master smiled. ‘I can believe it,’ he said, ‘I have nothing but admiration. I could not summon the courage to go to war.’
‘It is civil of you,’ Aramis panted, ‘to keep my attention, but I am no fool. Gangrene. I see it. My leg, it must come off, no?’
Vilder slapped his palm against the wall. ‘Off? Nonsense.’
My master drew in a breath, as he often did when he knew the answe
r to something but was unsure how to broach it. ‘Well—in truth—there is every chance the rot will spread if we do not—’
‘Take off his leg? Never. He is a soldier. How is he to survive with one leg?’
‘Videy, please, don’t shout.’
‘No, no, no,’ Vilder said to my master. ‘Do you have any jyhr? Use that.’
‘It will not help his leg.’
‘You have it, though? Liquid jyhr? No matter how dissolved it is. It is that we have come for. Do not play with me!’
My master was cautious in his reply. ‘I have a dose or two, and that, as you say, of a weak grade. I have not used it in years and it has likely lost its strength. But the leg first. I am sorry to be blunt, for both of you, truly. It lives no more and we will do greater harm if—’
‘Of course it lives, you devil. A curse on you. He is converted. Give him the jyhr. That will revive him. Give it to him.’ He yanked back his coat and thuggishly rested his fist against the hilt of his dagger. Gone was the languid mischief-maker of London.
There was a knock on the door and the footman entered with a tray. Vilder snatched it and dismissed him. He poured a large measure of brandy, drank it down and poured another, whilst my master came into the bedroom where I was waiting, went to the casket where he kept his money and valuables and unlocked a drawer. I followed him with my eyes, hoping to catch his attention, to be reassured, but he paid no heed to me. He retrieved his red velvet wallet in which were wrapped the tortoiseshell box and hexagonal phial, still his two most treasured possessions, though neither of which I’d seen him use. He left the little box in the red wallet, which he tucked into his inside pocket and went out with the bottle.
‘Pull up his shirt and clean his skin,’ he said to Vilder before going in search of something else.
They carried on talking, but their voices became a blur, as I’d seen the scar on the side of Aramis’s abdomen. It was in the same place as my master’s and mine, in the hollow above the hip bone, but where ours were neat and crescent shaped, his was a misshapen knot of bruised and livid skin.
Tomorrow Page 9