The Pierced Heart: A Novel

by Shepherd, Lynn

  If Charles thought this would be a quick dip in and out to pocket the information he’s after, then he knows now how wrong he was. Charles—as you may know—is unusually good at finding his way, and his quasi-photographic memory has stood him in good stead (indeed saved his hide) on more than one occasion. But in a place like this, even he needs a map. Happily, however, there are ranks of fresh-faced young men in freshly pressed uniforms handing out neatly folded floor-plans to anyone who wants one, and within a few minutes Charles is making his way up the stairs towards a sign proclaiming PHILOSOPHICAL, MUSICAL, HOROLOGICAL AND SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS. The crowds here are much thinner, but for Charles, this is like Aladdin’s cave and a magic toy-shop all rolled into one. He knows at once that he must come back—there is so much here it will take a week’s diligence to see it all. So many pioneering discoveries and so many testaments to the human capacity to turn those discoveries to practical use. From envelope-folding machines to oyster-openers, air-pumps to astronomical clocks. He would have come here for the photographic exhibits alone, and despite the urgency of his task he lingers longingly over an array of the latest daguerreotype machines, reading about a recent photographic experiment which claims to prove the “existence of luminous and actinic rays in the solar beam.” Then a man in Exhibition livery announces that Mr Dawson’s talk on “The Principles and Applications of Electro-magnetism” is about to begin, and Charles is drawn along in the wake of a cluster of sombre-looking gentlemen towards lines of chairs placed theatre-like for the lecture. After a few minutes of introduction, Dawson invites his audience to join him at a case of scientific instruments, so that he can point out some of the many uses of this marvellous and still mysterious phenomenon, from medical galvanism to a new electrical telegraph already in use in parts of Saxony. And then he turns to the assembly and asks if they would be so good as to follow him to the adjoining gallery, where he will demonstrate the creation of electro-static energy. The apparatus in question is a large glass ball suspended between two metal pillars and standing on a wooden plinth. It is positioned close by the balcony, overlooking the teeming hall below, and as Dawson begins to describe its operation—“a small amount of mercury is injected into a vacuum, such that the glass globe gives off both light and an electric charge when set in motion”—Charles’s eye is drawn down and across the crowd to a tall figure in a dark coat and a top hat. And as he watches the man move away in the direction of the Prussian court a fist of ice closes about his chest. It cannot be—surely—it cannot be. It’s too far away to see his face, and the man has his back towards him, but the gait is the same, the height is the same—good God, the man is even holding a small sunscreen to his eyes, to ward away the sunlight streaming through the glass.

  Charles extricates himself from the group and makes his way, his heart and pace quickening, down the stairs and out into the nave. He can still see the top-hatted figure, but he’s yards away now. He tries to push through the throng gathered about the hydraulic machinery, but the press of people is too packed—elderly ladies leaning on sticks, little children dawdling, distracted mothers not looking where they’re going. By the time Charles reaches the Prussian court there is no sign of his quarry. He stands there, out of breath, looking up and down—half the men in the place are wearing the same hats, the same dark coats, but none walks as he does, and none carries a sunscreen, even inside. Charles curses under his breath, though not quietly enough, it seems, for a fat and sweaty-faced clergyman gives him a look of rebuke and hurries his dowdy wife and daughters away. And then Charles spots the man again. At the far end now, moving towards the tiered fountain, where refreshments are on offer and food is served. The crowds are thicker than ever here—it’s gone noon now—and Charles strains through the queuing hordes like a man drowning, desperate to keep his man in sight. But now the tall figure is no longer moving. He’s standing, the face turned away and the back bent, and as Charles draws level and grips his arm, forcing him round, there are murmurs of shocked outrage as the elderly man gasps and nearly loses his footing, and his little padded sunscreen clatters to the ground. And then Charles is backing away, his face red, mumbling an apology, stammering something about mistaken identity. Because this is not who he thought it was, and he has never seen this man’s face before.

  By the time he has returned to the stairs and the second storey, there is an official standing at the entrance to the scientific galleries, and a coiled red rope barring the way. His Royal Highness is visiting that part of the Exhibition this afternoon, explains the functionary, and the galleries will, in consequence, be closed to the public until six o’clock this evening. Charles starts to say something about it being an urgent matter and police business, then flushes, self-conscious, when the man asks for his name and rank.

  “I am here on behalf of Inspector Rowlandson, of Bow Street.”

  “But you are not, in fact, an officer of the police?”

  “No, but—”

  “In that case, sir, I will have to ask you to leave. Or else return with some official confirmation of your business here. You can appreciate, I am sure, that when members of the Royal family are in attendance we must exercise the utmost vigilance. We cannot afford to allow vagrants and hoi polloi to come wandering in here willy-nilly off the street.”

  This last is said with a somewhat contemptuous glance at Charles’s rather unkempt clothes, and a noticeably firmer grip on the rope.

  Charles turns away, as much irritated with himself as with the man. He’s wasted all that time—he should never have allowed himself to be side-tracked. He wonders for a moment about finding Sam and coming back together, but by the time he finds him it will probably be nigh on six anyway. He goes back down the stairs, more slowly this time, feeling the ache in his leg at every step, and then stops at the entrance to buy a catalogue. At least he can narrow the search by going through the list of medical exhibitors. And as he makes his way to the exit he sees the Royal party entering by an adjacent door. A line of sober-suited courtiers, and in their centre, the Kubla Khan of this whole affair, resplendent in a short red jacket, blue sash, and tasselled gold braid.

  The clock is chiming two as Charles enters the Buckingham Street house. When he opens the drawing-room door his great-uncle is asleep in his chair by the open window. Even now, when he has no clients, and no callers, his clothes are as immaculate as they were when he counted Royalty among his patrons, his stock white, his blue coat new-brushed, and his waistcoat—always a weakness of his—embroidered with silken flowers. On the sill Thunder the cat is stretched motionless to his full length, his whiskers twitching every now and then in the gentle breeze that lifts the muslin curtains. Charles takes a seat and a newspaper, and waits. Perhaps the old thief taker still has some sixth sense and will perceive another presence in the room; the cat certainly does, for he suddenly opens his eyes and rolls languorously onto his back before standing up, splaying his toes, and arching his spine into a perfect parabola. Then he folds his paws neatly invisible beneath him and sits back down into a hen-like (or zen-like) repose.

  “You have been out?” says Maddox then, his voice still thick with sleep. His malady has retreated of late, and his mind returned to almost the mastery he once commanded. The old man still tires easily, and becomes irascible as the evening draws, but it is early in the day yet.

  “I went to the Exhibition.”

  Maddox raises an eyebrow. “You have leisure for such a visit? I had thought you were assisting young Mr Wheeler on his case.”

  “I was—I am. I went in search of a possible lead. A piece of medical equipment that might explain the marks found on the bodies.”

  “And you did not find it?”

  “I was—distracted. I thought I saw someone I knew.”

  There is a pause, while Maddox watches. Watches and waits.

  “I thought I saw the Baron Von Reisenberg,” says Charles eventually, avoiding his uncle’s eye. “Which is patently ludicrous. The man is half a continent away. It’
s that damn O’Riordan and his preposterous vampire nonsense.”

  To which his uncle—who has seen that look on Charles’s face before—nods quietly, then waits a minute, then two, before speaking again.

  “You have not told me very much of your sojourn in Austria. But I have gathered that all did not go well. Or not, at least, as you expected.”

  Charles sighs. But it is time, after all, that Maddox should know. It takes some minutes to tell that tale, and when it is finished Maddox does not reply at once, but sits, fingertips joined to fingertips, looking at his great-nephew.

  “You did not consider informing the authorities?” he says eventually.

  “I didn’t think they would believe me. And I wouldn’t have blamed them. It was all so bizarre—so implausible—and there was nothing I could offer by way of proof. Even the doctor who assisted me could offer only supposition, nothing more. It was inconceivable, in those circumstances, that my word would be credited against that of a member of their own nobility. I decided that all I would achieve by such a step was a delay to my departure.”

  “And now?”

  “I have finished the report and will send it to Oxford today. But I have told them only what I have ascertained as to the Baron’s lineage, and nothing more. Because there is nothing I can prove, and they would only think I had gone insane. Sometimes I think I was insane for a while—confined in that infernal place, with the mad, day after day. And then this afternoon—when I thought I saw him—”

  He gets up awkwardly and walks to the window. “Even now, I have scarcely any memory of the day before I was incarcerated—images of the attack come to me only fitfully, like the half-glimpsed hallucinations of fever.”

  But what Charles does not say, even to Maddox, is that despite the acute pain he still suffers, he is terrified to resort to the only medical relief available; for laudanum was what they gave him in the asylum, and laudanum, even in strictly analgesic quantities, brings on bad dreams, and makes malicious mirages of whatever unwholesome fears the mind can feed it.

  “All I have,” he says at last, “is five characters in my own handwriting, and I have no idea why I wrote them.”

  He pulls his notebook from his pocket and hands it to Maddox, who takes it and opens it a little clumsily to the last entry. Below a paragraph of rather untidy notes on the Baron’s maternal ancestors there is one line:

  BEM 47

  “The numbers refer to a date?” says Maddox, after a moment.

  Charles shrugs. “I don’t know. It might mean something. It might mean nothing at all. And yet even now I cannot shake my mind free of the conviction that I had discovered something—or was about to discover something. Something that might explain why the Baron was so intent to remove me—to silence me. And yet even that might be nothing more than the perverted logic of paranoia. In fact there was one officious little bureaucrat in Vienna who suggested that the whole damn episode might have been merely some macabrely laughable error by the Baron’s coachman—that he might have taken me to the asylum by mistake, when it was the hospital that was intended all along. He kept saying it was the only rational explanation.” He laughs, bitterly.

  Maddox closes the book and hands it back to him. The pallor of his nephew’s cheeks and the shadows under his eyes explain themselves now. Maddox had encouraged the trip to Austria, thinking Charles needed distance and detachment after Molly’s death, and that lingering in this house, and this room, and speaking to no-one of what had happened, as Charles had been doing for the best part of two months, was no way to achieve it. And when he returned from Europe bearing, it seemed, an even greater burden, Maddox had considered breaching the young man’s silence but postponed the moment of it, and I will not be surprised if you conclude, as a result, that he and his great-nephew resemble each other in more ways than their mere appearance, and share not only an acute intelligence, but that same fearsome privacy of personal feeling that we have seen in Charles already.

  Maddox shifts in his seat now, clearly hesitant. “When you spoke of the Baron just now—were you really implying—”

  Charles laughs sardonically. “That he is a vampire? Now you are probably thinking I have gone insane! No, you need have no fear, dear Uncle. My wits are not so far wasted. But there was no question that the villagers near the castle lived in fear of him. One crossed himself at the mere mention of his name, and an old woman shrank from me in terror simply because she saw a tiny mark on my neck. I had not understood its full significance until yesterday, at the Library.”

  Maddox studies him. “There is still something there. How odd. After all this time.”

  Charles’s hand is at his throat. “It’s just a scratch. It’s nothing.”

  Maddox nods. “And yet, one can understand why an illiterate peasant woman might have drawn the conclusion she did.”

  “The man has only himself to blame,” retorts Charles angrily. “If he did not behave in such an erratic and unaccountable fashion he would not invite such gossip. But however peculiar his conduct, you and I both know it must have some logical or medical cause, and all the rest is nothing but superstitious drivel.”

  “You believe him to be ill?”

  Charles nods. “I wondered more than once about lupus. That might account for the lesions on his skin, and his distress in the presence of bright lights.”

  Maddox considers. “I recall, likewise, many years ago, conducting a case on behalf of a gentleman whose brother suffered from exactly those symptoms. Though in that case the young man was also affected by an extreme blanching and recession of the gums, which gave him the most unfortunate, and indeed lupine, appearance. More relevant, perhaps, in this instance, his condition had also rendered his urine a deep purplish red, such that to the untrained eye, he might well have been thought to express blood. The same curious disorder was said to afflict the third King George in his madness, and my client’s brother was also unpredictable and eccentric on occasion. But neither he nor our late monarch—living as they did in a civilised and enlightened society—was ever accused of being an evil spirit of the unquiet dead. Yet in a wild and isolated region of Austria, amid a populace prey to the worst excesses of superstition? If the Baron does indeed suffer from the same unfortunate disease, he will not have been able to conceal it entirely, and one might well imagine the rumour promulgating among the ignorant that a man who excretes blood must, perforce, be ingesting it. For a man of science, such as you describe him to be, the irony is almost exquisitely apposite.”

  Charles scowls. “I do not take your meaning.”

  “Because those peasants are only doing—in their own primitive way—what he himself does. What you and I do.”

  “Which is—?”

  “Applying the principles of logic and observation.”

  “My dear uncle, you can’t seriously be suggesting—”

  “Oh, I do not say that it is a reasoned or a systematic process of thought they undertake. Merely that, at heart, it is the same: We are all seeking an explanation for what we observe, whether from superstition or from science. Indeed, have not some of our greatest advances stemmed from precisely such a procedure, even—or most especially—when the forces at work are invisible to the eye? We disdain the ignorance of those peasants at Castle Reisenberg, but in past centuries one would have been persecuted, or worse, merely for positing the existence of forces as powerful, and as apparently magical, as magnetism or electricity. And think of the ability we now possess to capture a living likeness on a plate of glass, or dull the senses to such a depth that surgery may be performed without pain. Our forefathers would have deemed such things the stuff of necromancy. And with good cause. And that being the case, could there not be other phenomena that we condemn now as childish superstition, which might one day prove to have no less a basis in science? Even the alchemist’s elusive goal might one day prove within our grasp.”

  Charles has by now turned to look at him, remembering how the Baron had said something almost exactly
the same. “But you’re not saying you actually believe in vampires, and the Undead, and all the rest of it?”

  Maddox shakes his head slowly. “Clearly not. No rational man could believe it. I merely observe that for all the discoveries that have been made since I was a boy, it seems to me all we have thus far learned is how much we do not yet know. And nowhere do I believe that to be more apposite than in relation to mankind itself, and the powers and terrors of the human mind.”

  The room is silent then, but for the ticking of the French clock, and the ripple of the curtains in the heavy air. And at last Charles stirs and rouses, as if shaking his mind free from memory.