‘You will know, of course, which ancestor is referred to,’ said the lawyer respectfully, folding the paper when I had handed it back to him.
‘My paternal ancestor. My grandfather’s great-great grandfather, I believe, Sir.’ I felt a fool and a rogue.
‘Well, Sir, and you know well enough where he travelled. You have been to those regions yourself. With your partner.’
‘Of course, Sir,’ said St Odhran. ‘You have seen the maps and such.’
‘Which convinced my Client. These other questions, you will appreciate, are merely those drawn up by myself, in my capacity as a lawyer. We’re a cautious breed – more cautious than adventurers such as yourselves.’ And I believe he attempted to utter a laugh.
The deception was growing less and less to my taste and I was divided between making my own confession and so betraying St Odhran or keeping silent. Needless to say, I kept silent, and felt myself a worse coward. Some silly nobleman no doubt had collected a great many old books and cobbled from them a theory which could be disproved by rational argument in a flash. Who was I to destroy their dream? I argued. They would learn their own folly when I disappeared with their gold!
‘Aha, Aha!’ St Odhran chimes like a Cathedral steeple. ‘The Mittelmarch. Just so. And that’s why the expedition shall require the building of a new ship. Our old vessel, the aerial boat we flew the other week, is neither large enough nor strong enough for the journey!’
‘I understand that, Sir. I was about to come to the question of capital. First I must know how long the ship would take to build.’
‘It depends, Sir, upon the craftsmen employed. For the hull, the best are in Bremen. The canopy should be made in Lyons. The rest could be constructed here in Mirenburg. But it will take, as you’ll understand, a matter of months.’
‘You would be ready, say, by September of this year?’
‘Very likely, Herr Doctor-Lawyer. But the craftsmen of Bremen and Lyons will require money in advance as proof of our good faith.’
‘I understand. How would the money best be sent abroad? By draft? By note?’
‘I have not enquired, Sir, but could have that information for you within a few days.’
‘They are the best, these Bremen people?’
‘As good as my native Scottish shipbuilders, aye. And it would not be practical to deal with those at present. Hitherto, of course, the Bremeners have only built for the sea, but the lines of their ships are ideal for aerial voyaging. The air must flow –’ a mysterious gesture with both hands – ‘so. The oars must pull, thus –’ a kind of paddling movement – ‘and the sails have to be rigged on leaning masts at an angle of at least forty-five degrees, so –’ a geometrical representation, palm to palm, ‘and then there are all the subtler engineering problems, though we’re fortunate in having the services of an ideal architect who has worked in his time for both British and Dutch navies. He’s at present on the way home from America where he has been advising the government there on the most suitable designs of ships for their needs.’ And so St Odhran pealed on in this by now familiar mode, a musical invention which built upon the simplest of melodies to provide dazzling complexities stimulating the listener’s imagination. In other words, the listener’s own picture was painted in the shining colours St Odhran provided. By seeing what they wished, they also saw what he wished them to see. ‘They are the Orchestra,’ he had told me earlier, ‘and I am merely the Conductor.’
When he had completed his performance I was almost as impressed as the sober-faced lawyer across the desk. St Odhran assured the Lawyer-Doctor that our ship would not only sail into the Mittelmarch, crossing barriers impossible to negotiate by land or sea, but would be ideally equipped for any eventuality. He made sly references to ‘the illustrious gentleman’ and ‘your noble Client’, as convinced as I that Mirenburg’s ruler was the person giving us this backing. Why the Prince should outlaw Secret Societies dedicated to similar claptrap as we were selling and yet be impressed by our claims I did not bother to question on the basis that frequently it was possible for an enthusiast to embrace one ludicrous notion while vehemently attacking another which was quite as ludicrous. Human nature explained everything for me in my mood of cynicism.
As we returned to Mladota Square in our new-hired carriage, St Odhran had the weary air of a great actor who had satisfactorily given a difficult part to an appreciative audience. ‘The launching of our Society is to be easier than I’d guessed,’ he said.
For my part I had grown anxious. It was one thing to cheat a burgher or two, but quite another to cheat an illustrious Prince. I believe that it was from then that I began to experience a recurrence of my nightmares.
Thus my nights were once again spent in the dream company of my Duchess, with a bull-man snorting his heat into my face and the Labyrinth growing more complicated and the whispering voices threatening, while daily St Odhran was producing more and more fine forgeries – Letters of reputation, together with a whole variety of other testimonials and documents ostensibly emanating from the shipbuilding firm of Linder & Linder in Bremen, offering to construct a hull for the Aerial Navigation Society at a cost of some 27,000 Talers, with T9,000 down, T9,000 to be paid on completion of the main frame and T9,000 on completion of the whole. For 10,000 Talers Messrs Vingleur of Piedmont would weave and make airtight a silk envelope to the specifications given (they had worked for the Montgolfiers) but required half the price in advance. They would charge extra for any insignia, flag or coat of arms which must be incorporated before the final varnishing of the fabric. Mr Markess, the Naval Architect, enclosed plans and looked forward eagerly to beginning detailed work upon his return from America, and so on. The more elaborate St Odhran’s swindle became, the queasier I grew and the worse my dreams. If discovered, we should be exiled at best – probably executed. There would be nowhere in the civilised world we should be able to travel. I had planned to make my fortune with smaller deceptions, more traditional strategies, yet now I was in too deep to escape without betraying St Odhran and revealing the extent of my own roguery.
Oblivious to all morality, to all consequence, my friend continued to sink deeper into this morass of illusion. In further conversations with the lawyer he regrets the lack of ‘inflammable air’ for the powering of our new ship and wonders if this, too, might be purchased. The lawyer makes notes. Contracts are drawn up and at last I must put my signature to them. I feel I am selling my soul to Satan. I can scarcely believe St Odhran’s light and easy attitude to the whole thing. The money we stand to accumulate is too much. I had no ambition to attract the wealth of a nation, merely the fortune of a widow!
And so the time fled by, as unreal to me by day as it was by night. I took to drinking more than was wise and to stalking the streets in the faint hope I should come upon my Duchess. The Winter grew colder. I felt that my spirit was dying within me. I had never experienced such a bleak unhappiness as I knew then. Frequently I thought of taking my horse from the stable and merely riding away from Mirenburg, as much a pauper as I had been when I arrived. I longed for Bek, for peaceful Bek and the security of my family. Yet stubborn, pointless, destructive Pride kept me in Wäldenstein’s capital – that and my misplaced friendship for the Scotch rogue.
On paper, our great vessel began to take shape. St Odhran even went so far as to draw elaborately coloured sketches of the ship’s progress and this contented the more nervous shareholders. I did not dare estimate the amount of money we now stored in our box and only reluctantly, at my partner’s insistence, went out to the Little Field when he visited the shed which had been erected to shelter the old balloon. There, laughing to himself, he deposited the latest bag of Talers, seemingly oblivious of my misery’s origins.
‘This cold weather depresses you, eh?’ he said. ‘No matter. Warm your hands against that gold!’
We made to return to the city. He sang out a cheery word to the guards. ‘Protect my ship, gentlemen, as if it were the treasure of El Dorado!’
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br /> The Little Field lay deep in snow and snow was piled thick on evergreens, on the ornamental shrubs and trees, on the marble statues, on our wooden shed. The sun was thin ivory.
Mirenburg was before us, her white walls and towers shading imperceptibly into the general whiteness of land and sky. St Odhran wore a red cloak and hat but I was in the black I had grown to favour. As we trudged back towards the gates a carriage came rolling through and from the window we saw the fur-swathed figure of one of our patrons, the Landgräfin Theresa-Wilhelmina, all lurid paint and wild, despairing blue eyes, waving to us and calling for us to be careful of the ice underfoot. We had learned that she was moved by whims connected with the predictions of her astrologers and clairvoyants. The whole family was touched by the same disease. Her husband, when not a devoted whoremonger, had dabbled in the Mysteries; his mother had been, scandal said, a full witch and her sister a bestialist, while her nephew was known to run with a set, mostly younger Austrian bloods, who affected to practise Satanism. But our Landgräfin had no interest in the wilder reaches of the superstitious ocean. We bowed and lifted our hats as she went by. Much of the gold in our coffer was hers.
As we turned to watch her carriage go by I saw to my surprise four riders approaching. They looked as if they had been on their horses all night. I recognised them almost at once as the young Radicals who had saved me in my flight from Montsorbier. I was delighted to see them and wondered what had befallen the rest of their party.
‘Good morrow, gentlemen! Do you remember me?’
The four were scarcely able to lift their heads, so weary were they. Stefanik looked at me from the depths of a haggard face. ‘Aye, Sir. Of course I know you.’ His voice was almost a whisper. A flight of crows spread themselves, croaking and complaining, into the sky and scattered, their noise all but drowning his words. This was no time for conversation. I directed them to The Martyred Priest with the suggestion we dine there together. They were glad of this and promised to do as I proposed. Their Company was now two short and their clothes and weapons no longer so neat. Indeed, only one of the Poles – Stefanik himself – still had his Brown Bess. It had taken only a matter of weeks for him to be robbed of his air of innocent enthusiasm, his youthful superiority. Doubtless they had gone to Paris and found all I warned them of to be true. They rode on ahead of us, St Odhran looking a little disturbed, wondering aloud if perhaps it was good that we should be seen in the company of radicals, now that all the sheep of Mirenburg’s Bourse were beginning to bleat for their chance of acquiring grazing rights on our Bubble. I dismissed his fears.
With each successful fraud St Odhran grew more cheerful, more sure of himself, for he estimated his worth according to his ability to deceive the world. For my part, I was merely astonished at how men and women would throw off all sense when confronted with an appeal to their inner-selves: the prospect, no matter how unlikely, of their dreams being made concrete. Promise a man a cheap interest in a timber mill and he shows instant suspicion; but promise him immortality, eternal fidelity from his mistress, a glimpse of El Dorado, and treacherous hope will always trap him. Thus old men are turned into fools by clever doxies and widows into wet-eyed girls by handsome rogues: yet these are the same who count their change in the button shop and study a servant’s accounts to the last fraction of a pfennig, who are sceptical of the existence of the next valley, let alone the next world, and doubt the need of the blind beggar in the street. Indeed, it’s fair to say that the more cautious and miserly the person, the more easily they’re lured to a greater folly.
Pausing at the Chevalier’s breezy insistence to celebrate our successes with a glass or two of gin and water in a riverside Ordinary, we made our way finally to our headquarters. In the large taproom of The Martyred Priest my four young friends were warmer and less travel-stained than earlier and I cried ‘Halloo’ (for I was slightly drunk) and brought forward St Odhran to be introduced. They were rueful and a little shy, for they had lost more than two of their company; they had also lost some of their enthusiasm for the Commune and had to say that my warnings of Paris had substance: but they were otherwise remarkably undaunted. They’d find their Utopia yet, they said. ‘Where?’ asked I. ‘South America,’ replied Krasny, the native Mirenburger.
‘Peru?’ St Odhran wanted to know. ‘Colombia? What do you hope to find there?’
‘We mean to begin a new civilisation, Sir, based on fair principles.’
‘All you’ll find, boys, is disease. And dying Indians. She’s short of gold, moreover, that sub-Continent. Not what she’s cracked up to be at all.’ He said this most feelingly, as if the entire land once conspired to betray him.
‘We’re disinterested in gold, Sir,’ said pale-haired von Lutzov, grown gaunt since his adventure began.
‘You’ll not be after a year,’ promised the Chevalier, munching a trotter. ‘What Sylvania, what Golden Paradise, shall bloom amongst the deadly vines and monstrous snakes, the swamps and unnavigable torrents, the strangling forests and gigantic birds of prey, where Indians lurk in the shadows of your stockade, ready to kill you for the colour in your kerchief, with little poisoned darts you neither hear nor see – nor yet even feel, until you’re threshing!’
‘You’re rhetorical, Sir, but unspecific.’ Von Lutzov was offended.
‘Specific enough,’ muttered St Odhran, and fell silent.
‘By what means shall you travel to South America?’ I asked.
‘By ship, Sir, probably from Venice or Genoa. We’d charter your vessel and go by Air, but I doubt we could afford it.’ Young Stefanik spoke.
‘You’ve heard of that?’
‘In Prague. And here, of course, where the whole town has the news.’
I feared that the more the world heard the sooner it would understand our fraud. The road back to Bek was narrowing. Soon it would close for me altogether. I attempted to cauterise the pain in my heart. I was like a surgeon who must open up his own body, trying to retain objectiveness as he took a scalpel to his infection. What continues to push me in this direction? Surely it must be more than it seems; or is it just a fascination for the unexplained permutations of my own character, as if I’m carried along by the plot of a sensational tale, mesmerised by the progress of my own destruction.
Sergeant Schuster had joined us halfway through this exchange. He made a motion with his hand, wanting my attention alone. I excused myself and crossed to his counter. He had a sealed letter addressed jointly to St Odhran and myself. I asked him who brought it. ‘A street boy,’ he said. ‘My wife received it.’
The hand was educated, foreign, a little familiar. Perhaps it was from the Landgräfin. I broke the seal. The note inside was simple enough and was not signed:
The inflammable air you require for your ship is now available in this city and shall be supplied to you whenever you wish. No price is asked save that you agree to provide a short passage to the donor and the donor’s servant at a time of their choosing. A messenger will call for your reply tomorrow.
St Odhran came up, still expressing impatience with the young idealists. ‘What’s this?’
When he read the letter he frowned. ‘Hydrogen! What excellent fortune, von Bek.’ He meant, of course, that we should be able to make off with our stolen money in even swifter time, for the gas was as easily used to inflate our existing ship as it was to fill the one as yet unbuilt. I knew the outlines of his plans but not the details. At some time we should make a ‘practice ascent’ and become ‘lost’. ‘We must accept this offer,’ he said. ‘Who proposes it, I wonder? Mirenburg’s presently as full of alchemists as fleas on a dog. It could be any one of them.’ He turned the letter this way and that. ‘Only a Master would have both the equipment to manufacture that volume of the gas as well as a means of storing it. He’s probably easily identified. Johannes Carithianus most likely, who is also very rich and has his own estate ten miles upriver. Or Marcus van der Geet, who came here twenty years ago from the Low Countries. Like many, he chose Wälden
stein because of her traditional encouragement of Scientific enquiry. Or it could be one of those who visits the city for this mysterious conjunction of theirs.’
‘Whoever he is,’ said I, ‘you had best write our answer. I’ll abide by it. But I dislike the idea of making vague bargains with anonymous alchemists.’
‘The bargain suits me, since the gas shall be delivered before we’re called to keep our side. It’s all to our advantage, von Bek.’
I shrugged. The Scot was the steersman on this voyage into deception and damnation. My will had been left behind somewhere between Paris and Prague. What remained of my resolve was used to keep me sane when the nightmares assailed me. I feared that uncontrollable chaos might result from St Odhran’s euphoric decisions. I was fearful, while at the same time in some wise elated with myself, as if I welcomed the inevitable consequences, the vengeance which Fate must bring.
Meanwhile our quartet of idealists continued to discuss the immorality of war, the natural goodness which the invention of money and private ownership of land stunted or corrupted in us all. I felt near jealous of them, regretting the loss of my own innocence while wishing I had possessed some measure of St Odhran’s pragmaticism when I had been their age: then perhaps I should not have swung so easily from one pole to the other and found myself in my present moral predicament. Suddenly I realised that I was trembling, close to swooning. I felt as if I had been poisoned, but more likely I was merely the victim of sleeplessness and disturbed conscience. I decided that I must try to rest and was about to bid goodnight to my young friends when I looked towards the door and saw something which made me fear that I was, indeed, going mad, making phantasms from my own imagination.
Framed momentarily in the white glare, surrounded by grey smoke which rushed to escape from the taproom, banging snow from cape and hat and stamping mightily upon the floor, was the tall, slender figure of my Nemesis!
The City in the Autumn Stars Page 16