Packs of humans are hustling about the port. All of them are dissemblers, tricksters, keeping secrets from each other, saying one thing and meaning another. There is a gentleman in a top hat and cravat making a young lady laugh, when doubtless he’s married to someone else. A well-to-do lady and a fishwife converse, all smiles, when truly they think little of each other. I am happy to be a dog, to be simple at heart. Those of our species may not have skill—we’ll never produce music, or instruments to see the stars—but we are constant.
I shoulder through the crowd, not caring who I knock into and march to the end of a pier. The moon is full and seems to look back at me, and at the humans about. It strikes me how content it is to be alone, on its eternal journey, and how I could learn something from it: to be solitary too. To live only for myself. In Brussels I dreamt the city had magically gone silent and the streets emptied, but now I imagine an entirely virgin world, populated only by animals, no cities, houses, fields, roads, ships or candlelight. I drift the oceans on a raft, wherever the winds take me, in daylight or moonlight from warm-winded tropics to the crisp china blue of the northern seas. There are no ports or harbours or lighthouses, just empty beaches, banks of bull grass and realms of untouched country beyond.
But even as the fantasy puts its wings around me, a nagging feeling draws me back to the room.
Vilder sleeps in a corner, holding a bandage to his wound, whilst my master lies unmoved.
Return to me, I find myself saying. I have not the strength of the moon. My heart can withstand no more. I have nothing in the world but you. Return, my beloved.
19
VALENTYNE
Antwerp, June 1815
A snap of fingers wakes me. It’s daylight and I’m in the corner behind the bed and Vilder is standing by the open door motioning at my master. The coverlet rustles and my master’s arm lifts shakily from it, palm bending to shield his eyes against the light.
‘Where?’ he mumbles, twitching back the blanket and sitting up very slowly, facing the windows. Vilder nods at me and withdraws before remembering something. He reaches round to the nightstand, picking up the stone he’d incised from his flesh last night and pocketing it, before retreating to the landing, leaving just his shadow slanting across the door. Valentyne’s feet tremble to the floor. He sits, head bobbing, an old man—centuries old. A breeze catches the curls on the top of his head and for a while he doesn’t shift, just tilts his head to the occasional call of a gull. I should go to him but I cannot. I cannot move from my hiding place. Nerves pin me there.
Valentyne pushes himself up from the mattress, and drops down again. He drives harder, launching to his feet, steadying himself before limping over to the harpsichord between the windows, his back to me, and resting his weight against it. ‘Harpsichord,’ he says, and I can just make out the corner of his eyes crinkling in a smile as he smoothes his hand against the veneer. ‘How long it has been?’ He aims his index finger and pushes firmly on to a key, producing a ringing cloudless note. ‘Ah,’ he gasps. ‘There you are. Music.’ He plays a chord that makes my heart jump. He picks up a stray stem from the top of the harpsichord and smells it. ‘And jasmine too. How fortunate.’ He turns and shuffles over to where the tapestry hangs, whilst I timidly slip under the bed along the opposite wall to the corner below the window. Vilder remains hidden like a thief behind the doorframe, watching his sibling.
‘How sublime,’ Valentyne says, lifting his hand to brush the neck of a peacock, before tracing his fingertips along the line of hanging boughs. ‘Yew, sycamore, willow. English trees, but orchids grow between them. And, look, there are lotuses in this forest pool. How enchanting.’ Valentyne goes to the nightstand by the door and picks up the pan and inspects it with his nose. On the point of putting it back, he suddenly freezes, aware of something behind him, something terrible perhaps. He tries to straighten his crooked back, broaden his shoulders, but he’s a shrivelled husk. He turns anyway, to face whatever is lurking. The sunlight blinds him and he shields his face again with his palm. He runs his worried eyes around the room, from the bed, along the wall and finds, in the corner, a dog sitting upright. In his fright he almost falls and has to steady himself against the nightstand.
Go to him, I tell myself, but I’m still unable. I take a single step forward and sit again.
‘Tomorrow? Is it you?’ A bolt through me. I’ve waited a hundred and twenty-seven years to hear him speak my name. ‘My Tomorrow?’ I cannot breathe or see or hear, and the smell of him, dormant when he was sleeping, is almost unendurable now—midnight in a tall forest, stiff parchment paper and a whisper of pine sap.
He shakes his head and when he tries to speak his voice is striped and broken. He marshals himself. ‘Pardon me. I—I thought you were my dog. I had one like you. The same—’ he fingers his brow ‘—light patches here and on his belly too. Like yours. Tomorrow he was called. He was hope itself. I don’t know where I am,’ he says, eyes muddling. ‘Close to the sea...’ He motions towards the windows, trailing off and becoming lost in thought. ‘The battlefield. Where is this place? Which room is this? The harpsichord, the tapestry. Whose bed is that? The battlefield—such a ringing in my head.’ For a moment he panics, fidgeting his fingers, but once he leans against the bedstead he calms again.
‘I am sorry, you must think I am mad. You look so like my Tomorrow, you see. The same light-coloured brow. He was the finest creature. The wisest. I have lived four centuries, you see,’ he says, adding conspiratorially, ‘There’s no harm in telling you. And the people I have met—’ he makes a dismissive gesture with his fingers ‘—my champion was nobler than them all. His heart you see.’ He fingers his chest. ‘He came with me, you know, uncomplaining, at my side, everywhere, on my crusades. I gave him no home. I took him as a puppy, the size of my hand he was. Four weeks old, or less, I took him from his mother and—She was a fisherman’s dog in Elsinore, an honourable giant she was, like her son. And I gave him no home. How it has shamed me for a hundred and thirty years, my selfishness. From city to city to city. And then the wars, for my sins. And he uncomplaining at my side. How patiently he came, my champion, how uncomplaining. No home, the poor wretch. You think I am mad. You look at me as my champion did when I was foolish. And I was often foolish.’ He freezes, his face going blank for a moment, like a beach before the tide rushes back in. ‘That my champion thought I deserted him, that is what torments me most. Desert him? My virtuoso? The cathedral,’ he mumbles, ‘the battlefield. You find me mad. I talk too much. Well, I have been alone you see. You are so alike, truly. Who is your master? Does this room belong to him?’
I step forward out of the glare of sunlight and look up into his eyes. Now surely he recognizes me. He peers down closer—and sees my scar. The shock is so great, his chin judders, his head jerks back in panic and he loses balance, skidding to one side before collapsing on the floor. I rush to him. ‘I dream, I dream, I dream,’ he pants, reaching out his fingers. He hesitates before laying his hand on my head. He pulls me across the floor, clamps me to his chest and though he is thin and the bones of his ribs press against me, I can feel a power within him like a chasm opening, a magnificent canyon, a place of profound and exquisite refuge. ‘My Tomorrow? I have found you?’
Vilder has come to the doorway. When my master sees him, he lets out a choke of fright and stumbles to his feet, trying to shield me behind his legs, but clownishly slip-sliding.
‘I come as a friend,’ Vilder says, helping him up before standing back again. ‘I found you at Waterloo, we found you, brought you hither and nursed you.’
My master shakes his head, looking from me to his brother and back again. ‘I—I understand nothing.’
‘Well—’ Vilder takes in a breath and lets it out again ‘—I went to Venice in search of you, and found your dog instead. You are reunited. And recovering. That is all that matters.’ He clears his throat and straightens his collar. ‘I do not expect t
o be forgiven, Valentyne. Not ever. On that I am set. But I will do your bidding in whichever way you choose. Tell me only where you wish to go and I shall convey you there.’ My master listens carefully, his palm resting on my skull. ‘No apology will suffice. The devil could reverse every ill in the history of the world, before I could redress my crimes. I love you, brother.’
Vilder’s pupils dilate, as surprised by the phrase he just uttered as if diamonds had fallen from his mouth. He blushes. ‘I will give you time to think, and to enjoy your reunion and I’ll return tonight to hear your orders.’ He exits, passing the innkeeper, who’s watching again from the landing. ‘The cardinal has worked a miracle after all.’ A moment later, the front door slams shut.
My master sets about inspecting me, as giddy as a child probing a wrapped parcel on Christmas Eve. ‘How is it you’ve survived, my champion? And not a day older.’ In answer to his question he gently fingers my scar, touching the stone beneath, on which a drift of guilt passes over his face. ‘Let me get my bearings. Come with me to the window. I dare not leave your side.’
We stand together, I with my front paws on the ledge. Vilder is drifting through the quayside crowds to the pier, not swift as he usually is, but in a deadened trance. The ascending sun casts a gilded tulle over the harbour. I notice our harpsichordist greeting a band of fellow musicians disembarking from a ferry. Some of them take instruments from their cases and launch into an impromptu song that draws a crowd around them. Nearby, as harbourmen are unloading a giant wicker crate from a ship, a brace of peacocks escape from it.
‘Look,’ my master says. Having just regarded the likeness of the birds in the tapestry, it’s surprising to see them in the flesh. At once a pair throw open their tails in a fan of emerald and turquoise and a cheer goes up. Only Vilder stands out: he gazes at the scene blankly, as a murderer might regard a crowd before his own hanging.
He returns before nightfall, but my master does not let him into the room, rather receives him on the threshold.
‘Oysters,’ Vilder says, setting down a crate. ‘The bold ones you like.’
Valentyne replies in a friendless tone. ‘I assume you have money. Would you leave me some?’
‘Of course.’ Vilder hands over his purse. ‘Take it all.’
Valentyne removes a brace of notes and gives the wallet back. ‘When I am fit again to travel, I shall leave Antwerp. For where I shall not tell you. It hardly needs to be said I have no desire for you to find me. Ever.’ Vilder is about to reply, but my master cuts him short. ‘I have thought about what you said, and you are right: the devil could reverse every ill in the history of the world before you could redress your crimes. You told me you desired not to be forgiven. Well, I grant your wish.’
Vilder complies with a little nod and I have a vision of what he must have looked like as a child. For a while there’s silence between them, until Vilder turns to go. He stops at the top of the stairs. ‘He waited. In case you hadn’t understood. Tomorrow. He waited for you, at the cathedral in Venice. You need to know that.’ Beneath his jacket there’s a stain of blood on his shirt at the side of his abdomen. He stares down at me and there’s respect in his gaze. How curious, after all this time, that he looks at me the way I first wanted, that I’ve finally impressed him.
‘Tomorrow we begin again,’ he says. ‘That is your phrase, is it not?’ And he goes.
* * *
We find London unrecognizable and I must remind myself that a century and a half has passed since we left it on the day they boned the neck of the king. London Bridge, once an old friend, a frantic, boisterous muddle of buildings strung across nineteen uneven arches, is nude now, its tenements and halls long gone. Decrepit and unloved, whole chunks of stone have come away from the base. But there are new bridges, at Blackfriars and Westminster, and more beyond, bold symmetries of stone that could be made of air and light, coaches sweeping across them to the swishing of whips. Indeed, carriages are everywhere, ten times the number there used to be, giving the impression that the very ground of the metropolis is in constant motion.
The old medieval cathedral up on the hill has vanished, replaced by a domed palace of white marble that truly could be twinned with mine in Venice. On either side of it, stretching far to the west and east, a showy battalion of a hundred more churches, halls and banqueting houses. My master was always bewitched by the aliveness of cities, the transformations they would go through, but this panorama has such focused confidence, such self-regarding swagger, as to make him timid. Traipsing up a brand-new boulevard he looks scared and keeps apologizing for getting in the way of people, though they ignore him, no time to spare. The streets that once reeked of gunpowder now smell of oil and science and gin. We get lost and find ourselves marooned on a building site of an immense crescent, being shouted at by labourers and engineers, until eventually we muddle our way to a familiar gatehouse.
‘At least St James’s still stands. Do you remember, my champion, our time here? Or was it here? I’m disorientated. Is this all there is of Whitehall?’ When a guard struts out, chin butted up unsociably, he says, ‘May we speak with the lord steward of the household?’
‘The lord steward?’ the man repeats in a mocking tone, glancing at the ill-fitting suit Valentyne bought in Antwerp.
‘I mean to say—whoever might be responsible for employment in this household. If there are situations vacant, I mean to say.’
The official that comes to meet us, more than three hours later, is barely older than an adolescent, and as inhospitable as a viper. He does not invite us in, but interviews my master on the pavement, bemused by his talk of chemystry and medicaments and actually laughs out loud when Valentyne asks ‘for an audience with the king or queen.’
‘In Berkeley Square there is a clairvoyant who is now an herbalist,’ the viper offers. ‘Perhaps try there. Good day to you, sir.’
My master takes the rejection, and the all the ones that follow at the back entrances of grand houses all about the city in seemingly good spirits, keen to prove to me, as much as to himself, that all things have solutions. But in truth he’s disheartened by the unfriendliness of the new breed of Londoners, by the sheer volume of change, by the flaunting of greed, the belching of chimneys and, as my master puts it, ‘the greater than ever gulf between those who have and those who have not.’
In the end we have a little turn of luck. A gentleman cartographer, who takes an interest in my master’s knowledge of the far-off regions of the continent, in particular the ‘inscrutable Arabic peninsular,’ offers us a position and lodgings. He lives with his rowdy family in a townhouse in a newly minted square close to St James’s. ‘A home for my champion at last,’ my master declares, breaking open the door of the little mews house tucked behind it, finding a bare room that smells as damp as my den in Venice.
The time we pass there is not unhappy, due in large part to the warmth of our hosts. The cartographer’s six children are enquiring and mischievous, and treat our house as a home from home. My master greatly enjoys their visits, but sometimes, when one of them shows an unexpected kindness, or falls into a soft sleep on our settee, a sadness sets in.
We go to visit the new cathedral (going up the steps and entering the bronze doors, both of us stay riveted together) and study the tombs there. ‘“John Donne, 1631,”’ my master reads. ‘And here Van Dyck. Do you remember how he put you in the forefront of his portrait, whilst I was obscured behind a chestnut tree, and then scrubbed out entirely?’ After St Pauls, we drift up river to Westminster, to view the memorial stones there. ‘Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Oliver Cromwell. Can you imagine the conversation they’re having?’ Visiting churchyards to see who has died, and how long ago, and if they were once friends, becomes a compulsion.
After three years, my master having distilled what he could from the ingredients of new London, buying all the usual medical paraphernalia and a new holdall, such as we used to use in
our campaigns long ago, and inscribing it with the symbol of the snake and the rod, we pack up and leave. Despite all his protestations, I knew we would.
We arrive in Portsmouth in the rain and slosh through muddy alleys to the naval encampment at the harbour, where my master starts up a conversation with a lieutenant. ‘A ship sets sail at dawn,’ he calls to me over the gale, careful of avoiding puddles that lay everywhere. ‘To Africa, Xhosa. It is not as far as it sounds and they need doctors.’ I sit and look at him very directly, to show resolutely my disapproval of the plan he’s proposing, to begin his crusades again, and in such an extreme manner. ‘It’s just the rain,’ he says to me. ‘So tiresome.’ A platoon stamps past, knocking him, and he sinks into the mud. He holds his leg up and lets the water pour out of his boot. ‘Just the rain. Tomorrow our affairs will be better.’
I wish, more than ever in my life, for human speech. I would say, ‘Enough.’ I would shout, ‘No more. I will go no more!’
He watches a sergeant hustle the platoon on board, looks around at the grim packs of young men that litter the docks, down at the rivulets of red dye that run from new uniforms—and he does not need me to tell him. ‘What do we do here with these soldiers?’
And then, he begins to weep.
‘This is not the place we should be.’
20
THE INHERITORS
Opalheim, Westphalia, spring 1818
We stand before the gatehouse, my master staring up at the stone escutcheon above the arch. Three towers below a jewel-like moon. It was not an easy journey here: a nauseating sea passage followed by a relay of stagecoach trips, thrice put on the roof with the luggage, nights in lacklustre inns, surly proprietresses and bed-bugged mattresses—and then a day and a half’s walk from the turnpike. But now at last the temperamental spring weather seems to have tired itself out and warmish sunlight has broken through the clouds.
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