I went outside, crossing the gardens to the river. There were steps leading down to a landing pier and a dog, wet through, was worrying back and forth at the water’s edge. There had been heavy rains for days and the river was swollen almost to the tops of the banks and moving fast. The distressed animal, a smooth-haired lurcher, had bruises and cuts, as well as heavily drooping teats. She must have given birth only recently, but there was no sign of any puppies. I hurried to her side, seeing what I could do to help.
‘I’ll drown, I’ll drown, I’ll drown,’ she mewled over and over and kept brushing her paws against the skin of the torrent, until she stepped off the pier and slipped below the surface.
‘No!’ I barked, jumping straight after, astounded by the speed with which the current took me. Her head came up in the swell; face placid, it turned with the surge and vanished again below the waves. I kicked hard and stretched out my body, gaining on her quickly. I bit into her leg, to pull level, then got her by the neck, turned against the flow until we bashed the river wall, tumbling along it. More steps flew by. They were slippery with algae, but a wave of water spilled on to them and I lunged with it, bunching into the corner where the steps met another pier head.
The poor dog shrieked as I pulled her from the river and dropped her on the steps. She lay there panting and I set about licking her, not just to dry her, but to reassure. She was young, no more than three. Her face was almost shockingly elegant and balanced. Her eyes were the colour of desert sand, striking against the dark, smokey lines of her lids, and when she looked at me I was too shy to hold her gaze.
‘Did you—? Have you—?’ I began, but stopped myself. If she had lost her babies, she wouldn’t want reminding of it. She lowered her satin lids to cover her eyes and remained there, lying still, creamy brown against the night. ‘Do you—do you have a home?’ She made no reply and there was just the sound of the river pouring by. Eventually, she took in a gulp of air, turned and went up the steps. ‘Where are you going? Home?’
She flitted across the expanse of garden, which was all ornamental grids and patterns, avenues of yew and topiary sculptures that looked bizarre in the half-light. ‘You’ll find it hard to leave that way. There are walls all around,’ I said, catching up. Pins were pricking under my fur, just from being close to her. I took secret sniffs of air but couldn’t place her aroma; there was so much mystery to it: sandalwood, marula, jackalberry. And more: the shiver of balmy winds, warm-wet, south seas, palm, coconut and sugar cane. She was distant, a stranger, and yet I felt entirely familiar with her, as if in some other world that ran secret to my own we had always known each other. ‘Where are your babies?’ The question came out of me before I could stop it.
At first I thought she hadn’t heard me—I was glad of it—as she carried on padding the garden paths with little crunches of gravel. She circled a flower bed and stopped, half shrouded in a thicket of rhubarb. ‘Drowned,’ she said. I could only see the back of her head. What an exquisite shape it had. ‘Thrown from a ship, this morning. All gone.’
This morning! How long had she been haunting the riverbanks? They would have drowned almost instantly, tiny packets of fur carried seaward. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
Now with a purpose, I steered her to the entrance of our lodgings, keeping my tail erect, so she could see I was strong, whilst inside I spun, my mouth turning dry and my eyeballs ticklish. I found her some scraps from the kitchen, half a pasty of deer and some fish skins, and after she’d eaten them I led her upstairs. She glanced at the statues pedestalled up the staircase, familiar with grandeur it seemed, and I imagined possible histories of her life: aristocratic lineage, reared on a plantation, an island of sugar cane and flowers in a faraway sea, well travelled since. I gave her my basket, plumping up the blanket before nodding for her to get in. ‘Will you tell me your name?’
‘Blaise,’ she whispered, as if it were cursed. When she saw me glance at her chest, at her engorged teats, she said, ‘I wanted to go with my babies. They were my home. I’d not expected them.’ She shot a glance down between her legs. I was too polite to inspect it, but I sensed, then or later, some long-ago trauma. ‘Hadn’t yet opened their eyes, poor souls. Better perhaps, to not have seen the cruelty—’ Her jaw shook. ‘But to kill oneself is—’ she couldn’t find the phrase ‘—uncourageous? So I must thank you.’ She didn’t seem to mean it. Desert-sand eyes stared straight at me, so unflinching; I could have crumbled to dust.
She curled up and slowly lowered her satin lids. For a while I stood, too dumbfounded to move, almost feverish from her perfume. Of course I’d mated in the early years, on our first trip to the realms—brief, friendless trysts with army dogs, farm dogs, the irrefutable draw of glands, a tiny frenzy, uncomfortable for both, then the locking together, sharp and sore, before the relief of freedom again. Better to be friends with dogs I would think afterwards, though a month later I could be drawn to the act once more. A mate? A friend? Blaise was neither.
Needless to say, the queen’s dogs took exception to her from the outset. ‘Where are your children?’ asked Mitte on the first morning, censoriously sniffing Blaise’s drooping teats, before adding, for her entourage’s amusement, ‘Unable to care for them, I suppose.’
I was twice the size of any of them and four times as strong, and sent them on their way that day and all that followed, though they carried on their gossiping from a distance.
‘Leave them be,’ Blaise would say whenever they attempted one of their infantile pranks or stole her food. ‘They are the unlucky ones, not us. We are explorers you and I.’
She was right. The city of Oxford that summer—barricaded from the outside world, and so surreally peopled by the homeless court of England—became our personal realm. We filled our days with adventures. We broke into other colleges, All Souls, Christchurch, Magdalene, each a little walled kingdom in itself and so suddenly deserted that little tokens of life lay everywhere, books open, maps unscrolled, quills in ink, and essays half written. We played games in secret corners of the garden or sat side by side on the pier watching the little ships arriving—miniature versions of the ones in London—and unloading their cargoes. One night, the King’s Men stole into town, a theatre troop who’d been forced into exile too, appearing like spies, hooded, cloaked and weighed down with tales of ‘the grim theatre the war.’ Their arrival threw the court into a collective state of nostalgia. ‘They put on Antony and Cleopatra,’ the queen pronounced to her entourage as dramatically as if the players had brought a cure for death itself.
I took Blaise to see it in the medieval hall of Merton College, finding a spot at the very front of the stage. The candlelit room was hazy with rose incense and haunting and mysterious music from lyres, tambourines and cymbals played as a prelude to the action. It was a story about an Egyptian queen’s doomed love affair with an old soldier. I had no notion how Blaise would react to this odd human invention, ordinary men assuming the mantle of other people, great people inhabiting unexpected realms—but she was bewitched from the start. There was something in Antony’s manner, his shrewdness, his softness and mischievous sense of humour, that reminded me of my master. And the queen—though portrayed by a beardless adolescent boy—was dazzling, even to me, quick-tongued, mercurial, imperious and beautiful. I had the sense that war had sharpened the craft of all the actors, made their performances more urgent and real. When, at the climax, Cleopatra took a snake from a casket and pressed it to her breast, Blaise jumped up upon the stage to stop her and I had to pull her back.
Blaise’s sense of humour always took me by surprise. She’d impersonate members of the generalissima’s entourage, and not just the dogs, the humans too. (No wonder she enjoyed the King’s Men.) She caught brilliantly the obsequious, priggish Denbigh, and the bumptious Davenant, with his syphilis-ruined nose. And she loved practical jokes. I recall a prank she played on the ever-spiteful Mitte. A galleon, bringing m
ore of the queen’s possessions, had been too large for the upper Thames and ran aground, drawing the entire household, courtiers and staff, to the banks of the river, some distance from Merton College. Only Mitte had not noticed, as she had been taking her morning ‘slumber’ on her mistress’s pillow.
‘Have you heard?’ Blaise said, rushing into the bedchamber and waking her. ‘The humans are all gone.’
‘Gone?’ said Mitte.
‘They’ve boarded ships and left the country, to escape the war. They’ve gone to Egypt.’ How I loved her quick wit and sense of the ridiculous.
Mitte screwed up her face. ‘That’s nonsense.’ But she had such an insecure nature, she deemed it might be true and ran about the palace searching for people. Finding none, not even servants, she returned to us.
‘They left solemn instructions.’ Blaise continued with her mischief so convincingly I could almost have believed her myself. ‘We must rule, us dogs, until it’s safe for them to return. We shall have a court and a parliament. And, Mitte, this is the part that thrills me most, you shall be queen.’
‘I?’
‘Who else? You have the finest figure, the silkiest ears and the most bewitching odour in all the court.’ This, in particular, set me off, as Mitte smelt as plain as rust. ‘Everything pronounces you as regal.’ Mitte caught her reflection in the mirror, and her trepidation turned very slowly to pride—until the doors opened downstairs and the humans returned. ‘There they are, back from Egypt!’ said Blaise, and Mitte bit her and ran off. Blaise looked at me, before doing a little ballet of merriment.
My master was quite as bewitched by her as I was, though I don’t think he ever fully understood how diverting and unique she was, as her manner appeared so quiet. Our indivisible bond seemed to make my master proud, as if he had played some part in it. In a way he had. Putting aside the heartbreaking fact that he’d never allowed himself to let love fully bloom, for four decades I’d watched him being enthralled by women. When he fell for a certain lady—such as he had for Jacobina—however much he tried to keep his feelings hidden it was as if he’d discovered a secret that no one else had noticed; like an explorer coming across a lost city. He could have just mated with them, taken ‘carnal pleasure’ when he wanted it, as so many men do, but the notion was alien to him. In him, physical attraction was rooted in a bedrock of greater things, of respect and kindness. I wondered, given his stance of remaining unmarried, if he would have preferred if I had followed his example with Blaise. But he seemed to encourage me. In any case, it wouldn’t have mattered: as not even he could have stopped me from loving Blaise.
Every night we slept bundled up as one, I in the deepest sleep of my life. We talked little, there was no need for it; a universe of things seemed to exist between us already. Very occasionally I had a yearning to know more details of her past: who had been the father of her babies, where her homeland was, and if she’d had a master. But I was also happy not to know these facts, and she, I believed, was relieved not to be reminded of them. And besides, we wanted for nothing, and the world was greater for both of us than the one we’d lived in before.
In the winter, suddenly Oxford fell into chaos. A mob of parliamentarians was spied advancing towards the town’s main gates, and our soldiers quickly armed themselves and sprang into action. A battle erupted and the whole night the endless tap, tap, tap of muskets and explosions of fire came and went with the wind, until finally the enemy was repelled. It turned out to be little more than an opportunistic attempt by a few dozen soldiers, but it was enough to frighten the court to action. By morning courtiers were rushing to and fro in urgent conversation and the king appeared in battle garb, his face shot with fear. He and the queen had a raw conversation before he departed, looking back one last time with gull’s eyes. For hours after he’d gone, the queen strode back and forth, the hem of her gown hissing against the cobbles, Mitte fretting at her side, until, before dawn, we were all rushed to the courtyard and corralled into waiting carriages. As soon as we’d siphoned through the gates, a crowd engulfed us. A man glowered through the window of the carriage, face like a blood orange, as the carriage was rocked from side to side. Our driver fired a warning shot and we picked up speed and tore out of the city.
‘Is there anything more unnatural than civil war?’ one of the queen’s courtiers pondered out loud. He was a sly sycophant who reeked of violet and musk and I’d taken against him from the outset.
My master was not often rude to people, but he replied sternly: ‘Every war is a civil war. Does the fact that armies come from different realms make the fight between them more natural? We all occupy the same realm, sir: it is called humanity.’ As soon as the carriage made its first stop to change horses, at an inn south-west of Oxford, my master, Blaise and I got out. ‘I’ll not travel with those fools. We shall make our own way.’
He waited for the entourage to roll on, the whining of the queen’s dogs to fade in the mist, then purchased a horse from the local ostler, a grey mare—not young, but sturdy. He turned his cape inside out, torn lining disguising his court clothes, tied it tight, and the three of us bundled up, Blaise in a saddlebag, I snugged in my master’s lap and we headed south. The road, flat when we’d come to Oxford, was beaten by boot-steps, ridged from cannon wheels, and the debris of armies lay everywhere.
Eventually, we came across a regiment billeted on the edge of a town. I was too distracted to notice even which side they were on: the way humans divided into factions made less sense than ever in my life. Muskets were being passed out to a line of troops—that grim, mechanical ceremony—as a sergeant drilled, breath firing out puffs of frozen air, and I could tell a battle was afoot. I longed for words, to beg my master to resist the call. I could not bear to take Blaise to war. He was lost in thought a while, fidgeting his fingers against the buckle of his holdall, until he unclasped it and took out the phial of liquid jyhr. It was half full.
‘No,’ I barked. ‘No!’ Loud enough for some soldiers to turn round.
But my master was not looking their way, he was staring at Blaise.
‘My champion, and his paramour,’ he said, doffing his hat to us. ‘We shall not join this fray. The English choose to tear each other apart. But we have other business.’ He placed the phial back in the holdall, took up reins once more, turned the horse about and set off in the other direction, without even a glance back at the army.
We rode into the wintery heart of England, leaving the trails of saltpetre and hot iron, travelling day and night, over hills and through valleys, into a forgotten corner of the land, of hay-rattle moors and wild ponies. Blaise gazed at it in that special way of hers, intrigued by everything, but not surprised. We came across a river that chattered across the country, and we followed it. It took us through copses of beeches, trees that bent towards each other as if secretly conferring. And we found, miraculously, an old cottage, a slate-walled croft, home to someone once, but long abandoned. Tantalizingly the front door hung from a hinge, wide open, a sociable eddy of breeze inviting us in.
My master repaired the ceiling, fixed the chimney, swept out dust, ripped ivy from the window frames, repaired the few broken pieces of furniture and fashioned new ones from odd pieces of wood and plaited stems. When the work was done, he invited us like a grandee at an opening ceremony. ‘Let us stay here by the river. Us three, untamed in our hearts.’ As he looked at Blaise, a shadow seemed to pass over his face and I wondered what he was thinking.
When summer came he threw open the doors and filled the place with wild flowers: adder’s tongue, archangels and honeysuckle. The three of us spent our days foraging mushrooms and leaves, burdock roots and garlic to roast on the evening fire. In the afternoon, we’d sit by the bank, the sun winking at us from the water, Blaise with her head on my neck. Feeling her warmth, gazing at our secret paradise, a certain peace warmed through me that I’d never known before—or since.
When we’d arriv
ed at the house, my master had stashed his holdall away to make clear he would not carry on his work. One day at the end of the warm season, he fetched it and took out the phial of jyhr. The sight of it sent a shock to my stomach, and to his too I fancied, for at once he was stern. Thinking it signified our return to war, I went to Blaise’s side and sat, glowering at him and making a show of how protective I would be. ‘It will be uncomfortable for a while,’ he said, retrieving his syringe from the bag. ‘But the younger she is, the more chance we shall have.’ That had been his idea all along: to inject her, make a stone within her flesh and a scar without. To make her endure.
He reached out for Blaise and I growled and stood in his way.
‘What’s happening?’ Blaise said, her tail curling under belly.
I didn’t know how to explain, but the notion of what he meant to do seemed as brutal as taking her to battle. ‘My poor champion, I do not arrive lightly at this.’ In Amsterdam, seeing my master dosing Aramis had unearthed recollections of my beginning—of being taken from my burrow, carted to Elsinore, fog pressing against the workroom window as I was injected—but at once those same memories had sharpened into focus and were monstrous. I felt outrage at being snatched from my family—a sentiment I’d never had before. I felt the cuts of the pin driving into me all over again, the lead weight of the liquid pushing through my veins. Memories I didn’t know I had. My master tried again to take hold of her and I bit his hand.
He put the bottle and syringe down. ‘Tomorrow then? Or next year. Or whenever you think is right,’ he said. ‘Or never.’
Over the following weeks, however hard I tried to forget the business, it gnawed at me. Although Blaise was still comparatively young, I found myself worrying about her health. Knowing by then all the signs of impending sickness, I began imagining all sorts of things: that her breathing was becoming shallower, or that she’d lost weight, or was walking slower than usual. It distanced me from her, when it should have had the reverse effect, and she noticed the change.
Tomorrow Page 20