Tomorrow

by Damian Dibben

  * * *

  On a plateau just west of the palace I sit with my master as he collects wood for the pyre one branch at a time, silent, mirthless, single-minded. The surprise of death is as shocking today as it always is and I wonder if I will ever get used to it. Memories of Blaise spool back—You’ve been my life—before the last rattle. And Sporco too. I can’t consolidate the vision of his single glazed eye staring from under clods of soil, with the golden-haired rascal who, at a Paduan ball, barged through quadrilles of dancers, threw his head back and let out a great bellow of delight. ‘The realms, the realms!’

  Later, my master comes out with the weighty bundle: Vilder wrapped in a blanket. De la Mare and all the other people of the house pour out to watch. I am at the front, tail high out of respect. My master shoulders the body on to the pyre, straightens it and ignites his torch. I can’t help but remember the beginning of my life and the body we found on the shore.

  Now, as then, Valentyne sets it alight.

  22

  TOMORROW

  London, 1833

  There’s a loud cheer behind the double doors of the debating chamber before they’re flung open and the lords pour out. My master gets to his feet expectantly, watching from the shadows, as the noisy tide flows past, black jackets, loosened bow ties and rumpled white shirts. ‘More happy faces than displeased ones,’ he whispers to me, ‘a good sign.’ He spots someone he knows and waves—a man who has often visited our house.

  The man finishes his conversation and comes over. ‘Victory,’ he says to my master. ‘Resounding.’

  My master claps his hands together. ‘You hear that, my champion? This will be a day to remember. 28 August 1833. A great day.’ The gentleman is nearly carried away with the others, but my master holds on to him. ‘But wait, the terms?’

  ‘Paid apprenticeship of four years in the case of domestic, and six for field hands. Full emancipation for those under six.’

  ‘And compensation?’

  ‘The West Indian planters to receive twenty million.’ He raises his voice over the swelling victory chants. ‘Well, they may have it, with pleasure; they have sweated for it in their own way, in the heat far from their homes. They may have it if it makes them happy. But for now, in all the British realms, from here to India and beyond, we may curse those men who call their fellow a slave. Come and join the celebration.’

  ‘No, no,’ my master says, stepping back to the shadows. ‘So much to do. We’re closing up the house.’

  The man puts a hand on each of my master’s shoulders and looks him in the eye. ‘Though few may know it, you have helped our cause enormously, sire, and I give you thanks.’ He raises his voice over the din. ‘The United States next, but they must surely follow.’ He goes back to his compatriots, and my master, his entire body a smile, slips away unnoticed.

  By the following morning, we’ve packed up our house and I watch from the front door as our trunks are loaded on to the roof of the cab. ‘To Opalheim at last,’ my master says, patting my head, rushing to finish the last of his business. It seems an age since we left for London, nine years almost, my master in a permanent state of busyness since the very minute of our arrival. Years of summits and meetings and conclaves, endless cabals of gentlemen talking long into the night: brandy and port, cigars and burnt-out lanterns, wives frustrated in hallways, children listening from landings, as bad tempers flare up in the silk-lined salons below, resolutions sworn, walk-outs threatened, truces made, broken and made again. A decade of diplomacy, of winning over, of clawing up and down the country, of shivering through the ports of the north, timid of their scale and the tough new breed of harbourmen, my master interviewing and inspecting and asking and teaching.

  And how the world changed in those years. The cloth mills began to purr first, with modern thrums and endlessly repeating taps. The engineers came next, with maps and measuring instruments, and then armies of dirt-faced workers dug in their spades and veined the country with canals. It’s been the age of confidence and pushing forward, of coal smoke and blast furnaces, of steam power, machine tools and rolling mills. ‘Smells of the future,’ my master calls the new scents that singe the air: acids, potash, bleach and concrete. A million more countrymen have flocked to the city, keen to be part of the untameable adventure, even as they’re packed like hauls of fish into slum tenements. There’s greed for growth, and in keeping with it the silhouettes of humans have broadened, men with bullyish bread shoulders, women with giant gigot sleeves, all the better for pushing to the front. Most startling of all is the ‘travelling engine’ we went to visit in a city where long red chimneys broke the skyline in place of church spires: a living machine that speeds along iron tracks, making the fields shake. I was hesitant, but my master was in awe of course. ‘I am a fool for invention.’

  On the point of mounting the cab, a lady cries, ‘Valentyne.’ Anne, alighting from her own carriage of amethyst blue, hurries across the street.

  My master is taken by surprise, embarrassed apparently. ‘Did you not receive my letter?’

  ‘I did and set off the moment I read it. How shameful of you to disappear without my permission.’ Valentyne blushes, to which the lady laughs. ‘I am playing with you, dear man. Well, partly.’ Anne has brought perpetual sunshine to our stay in London. She’s bright and clever, and never stops smiling, except for when she encounters injustice or poverty on the streets. Then she intervenes. Many of the other society ladies look on her and smirk behind her back, mistaking her optimism for foolishness. She notices. ‘All is well,’ she asides to me, hiding her dismay. ‘The kind humans far outnumber the cold-hearted ones.’ She’s tiny and rare like a forest flower, but her scent has the everlasting vigour of granite.

  ‘So you return to your angel’s lair,’ she says with a smile, ‘wherever that may be. In the mountains of the Rhineland is all I wheedled out of you. But you shall come back soon, shan’t you? I cannot survive London alone.’ Before Valentyne has the chance to answer, an exciting notion takes hold of Anne. ‘Or perhaps I could visit you in your domain?’

  My master is one of those humans incapable of lying, even in his face. ‘Oh,’ she says, reading it perfectly. ‘I see.’ Valentyne fumbles for her hand and she lets him take it, even as her eyes redden. ‘Men are thus,’ she adds sotto voce.

  ‘What did you say?’

  She straightens her hat and puts back her smile. ‘Just farewell. Just—that it has been the most uncommon pleasure, Valentyne, to know you.’ She runs her warm fingers down my back. ‘Look after him, champion.’

  We mount the cab, but my master gives no command to leave. He watches from the edge of the window, as Anne exchanges kind words with her chauffeur, before installing herself, her picture-book face making a final quizzical appearance in the window. When her coach sets off, Valentyne quickly reaches for his door handle and half turns it, but stops himself. He keeps his hand clenched on it until she’s rounded the corner and vanished.

  All the long journey home, he’s impossible. He speaks not a word to me, barely offers me a glance, and certainly no pats of commiseration; he may not know it, but leaving Anne has upset me too. He’s short-tempered with everyone, fellow travellers, farriers and ferrymen, making me ashamed to be his companion. He complains about food, how he can’t sleep, how the suspension’s ineffective, even how summer has come too early.

  Coming down the drive to Opalheim, from the forest into the open valley, the lake is in riotous health, fringed with wild flowers and canopied by matrices of darting birds. The gardens have matured to a multicolour splendour and the house, in spite of its scale, has the sunny, unruffled aspect of an old friend.

  It is my home, the place to which we return, the place my master can never deny.

  This alone is cause for celebration, but my master barely glances up. As soon as we enter, he tosses his hat and gloves on the table and stalks through the building straight to
the chapel. The stained glass has been fixed and cleaned, and the effigies too. The man is as gaunt and unwelcoming as ever, and Aramis is unchanged, but the lady, beneath her veils, has a radiance in her face that could not be gleaned when the statue was dirty. Valentyne glares at them vindictively—his father, mother, the lover of his brother—defying them, it seems, to come back to life. He even throws malicious glances at the air, challenging—I’m sure—Vilder to reassemble from the vapour and return to existence. He repeats Anne’s words, ‘Men are thus.’ I exit and leave him to his ill temper.

  I pad the corridors, only half observing how changed they are from the doomy, decrepit passages I first encountered. The work that Vilder started is complete, as much as it can be in such a place, everything correct and clean. I long to enjoy it, but I’m angry with Valentyne for reneging on his promises, for taking up new crusades. Politicians and generals are all one to me.

  I cross the hallway and there’s the sound of a door opening high above. I peer up and in the gloom of the top-floor landing stands a man I recognize, though only just. De la Mare, stooped and ancient, hair gone, chest wheezing up and down. I greet him with a sway of my tail and he proffers a little bow in return, before retreating once more to his attic room.

  I’m drawn to the banqueting hall, our once prison. The windows are thrown open and great blocks of light stream through, warming the floor, whilst making it as ethereal as clouds. I could be walking in the air, through the colours of my master’s paintings, through the scenes of his life. I go to the window, stand up with my paws on the ledge and watch a gardener carefully wade out into the lake to tend to the water lilies.

  I hear my master enter, but make a point of not turning round. Then he’s at my side, watching the gardener too. I look up—I can’t help it—at his blank face colouring amber against the sunset and at once, nonsensically, I think of the chapel, not as I’ve just seen it, but my first encounter, when bats slapped their wings in the darkness and the tombs had a dreadful quality. Vilder’s demise was proof that my master and I are not guaranteed, that we may not last. At once all my gripes come back in a torrent: the wars, the waiting, the winters, the losses, Sporco and Blaise and all the others.

  My master lays his hand on my head and when he talks there’s such plainness in his voice I think at first he’s saying something mundane. ‘My champion, who every day is led into battle with his troubles—and every day wins the fight. What was it I said that Christmas Eve, when the young chaplain came to hear my admissions? I said you were my soul. No. Much more. You are the soul of all men. The most unexpected creature.’

  He holds his hand there, as he did each day of the decades we shared together, and a bolt of hot pleasure sprints through me. All my gripes and vexation evaporate and there is a forceful setting-right in my head. I’m reminded he always put me first, that he spent a hundred and twenty-seven years pining for me in a prison, a hieroglyph of Tomorrow for every day I was absent, that as soon as he could, even as madness ravaged him, he limped across Europe to find me.

  My master says, ‘Do you think I should ask her to visit? Anne.’ My tail, which had been sweeping the floor, stops dead. My master smiles uncertainly. ‘Tell her our obscure secret?’ Some moments pass before he speaks again. ‘We will have to think about that. Think very hard.’

  I don’t know the answer to his question either, but the asking of it reinvigorates me more, and at once I look forward to our return to the world, to our quest—wherever the next may be. For what point does life have if it is not an adventure?

  How lucky I have been. What a fortune I have still. I could have perished centuries ago, after a handful of ordinary years—having never seen the realms. I remember Vilder’s finger on the picture of the river the moment before he died. ‘I have not been,’ he said, the wilt of regret in his eye, a regret that went far back, a regret that he hadn’t been as strong as his brother, that he hadn’t had the fortitude to embrace the life he’d been given.

  There is the great lesson. There is no sense in burning for the past. No reason to fear the troubles that might come. No reason to fear them today.

  My master’s hand is on me. The lake before us.

  And tomorrow—tomorrow we begin again.

  * * * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Clare Conville for all your inspiration and intelligence. To Jess Leeke and Jill Taylor and everyone at Michael Joseph and Penguin, it’s been an absolute pleasure so far. And great thanks to Peter Joseph at Hanover Square Press and HarperCollins for your general brilliance—and to Emer Flounders, too.

  Closer to home, I’d like to thank all the Southalls for creating paradise, and to my partner in crime in all matters, Ali. My final word is to Dudley, and all the dogs—our friends, muses and guardian angels.

  ISBN-13: 9781488080555

  Tomorrow

  Copyright © 2018 by Damian Dibben

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5H 4E3, Canada.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.

  www.Harlequin.com