August 1627
We were woken by pounding on the front door of our quarters.
‘Doctor, are you there?’ came the voice of our footman. My master shot up, hurried down to the hall and unbolted the door. ‘I’ve been told to fetch you,’ the footman panted. ‘A gentleman awaits you at Dam Square.’
‘Who?’
‘I was given no name. His driver couldn’t get through by road, so came on foot and asked for you to come urgently.’
My master pulled on his boots and threw a coat over his nightshirt. ‘Wait here,’ he started to say to me, but I was already outside.
The three of us hurried along the Herengracht. It was the dead of night, not a soul on the streets, hot still and the moon so large and bright it cast gigantic shadows of the cranes battalioned about the city. We’d been in the region for a number of years, first at the Dutch court in The Hague and latterly in Amsterdam itself, on the staff of a merchant’s family, traders in iron ore and weaponry. I wondered at first why my master had chosen to work for such a clan—they were not of royal stock, and the head of the household was a brute—and in a city that was, in that era at least, scant of charm, being little more than an immense building site. But soon I saw what drew him: the fantastic wealth of the place opened all the doors that interested him. ‘Here are great minds,’ he proclaimed once, leafing through sketches in the studio of a young artist. They were grisly beyond belief, illustrating an anatomy class: a coterie of gentlemen watching as a cadaver was cut up to its very sinews and bowels. ‘Science and art—you see, my champion, how they become one?’
We came into Dam Square and my master stopped dead, eyes snapping to the carriage in the centre. There were dozens of other vehicles scattered around for the night, but it had a quality unlike them, drawn from another realm, from another age, it seemed, one of dark and glittering make-believe. On high, slim wheels sat a titanic, spellbinding jewel of smoky-brown quartz. It seemed to capture all the moonlight in the square, only to vainly repel it back. Four black mares, as immodest as the coach, panted from a journey, whilst a man stalked back and forth in the arcade beneath the weighing house.
‘We are here,’ my master called to him.
The man stopped and swung round, peering about the square, before seeing us.
I tingled hot and cold as he advanced. Broad-chested, the moonlight clamouring to his face, heavy brow, broad nose, a mouth that was cruel and fascinating. Vilder. A man who I’d met only once, but never forgotten.
‘A curse on this city,’ he said, flicking his gloves at a half-constructed street going off from the square. ‘What is the point of roads that you cannot travel along? An hour we’ve circled these damned canals in search of your residence only to arrive where we started.’
‘There is a back way. If I had known—’
‘Give me no back ways! We risked our lives to get here. Amsterdam is enemy territory for us.’
‘Enemy territory?’ said my master, baffled.
‘Protestants,’ Vilder snapped by way of explanation, though it bemused my master even more. ‘Only a fool like you would bury yourself in a hole such as this, this ill conceit of land dredged from the bog, this swamp peopled solely by parvenus, by glorified sellers of tar and hemp. A curse on it!’ As his words echoed around the houses of Dam Square, a window opened and a voice called for quiet. ‘Arrivistes. Nouveau riche!’ Vilder swore back at it, before going over to a fountain to drink.
His clothes were streaked with dirt, yet they dazzled all the same: pearl-grey doublet slashed to silken jasper at the sleeves, wide-brimmed hat pinned on one side, as it had been in London, with an ostrich feather, and his magnificent hair spilling to his shoulders like poured ink. He had a dagger sheathed against his hip, its hilt studded with jewels. I was struck, as I had been twenty years before, by how masculine he appeared despite the finery. His sense of style, laboured in others, was effortless and unstudied. In Whitehall he’d so intrigued me that when he’d stolen away at dawn, I’d followed across the frozen Thames, in spite of my fear of breaking ice. His presence had made my blood purr under my fur. In Amsterdam, almost instantly, I felt differently: he seemed to me bad-tempered, unpleasantly arrogant—and quite possibly dangerous. As he turned to the light, I noticed the stains on his tunic were not dirt, but blood, smeared across his side pocket. My master saw it too.
‘I need your help,’ Vilder said, before pointing his index fingers skywards to re-emphasize. ‘I need your help.’
‘Are you hurt?’
Vilder’s eyes seemed to warm with loathing, before he said: ‘Not I.’ He nodded at the carriage. ‘Aramis.’ Then: ‘My caprice.’ He dropped the phrase pointedly.
My master had been steady until then, but at once atoms of anxiety sweated from the backs of his hands. ‘Of course I shall help. Let me see him.’
Vilder caught him by the arm. ‘Be quiet, won’t you? He is sleeping at last. Three days from Grol—’
‘Grol?’
‘The war. Have you heard of it?’ he asked like a sarcastic school teacher. ‘The Protestants against the Catholics. We’ve had an inexorable journey. As if the siege was not punishing enough, the wretch must be shaken from his skin by these Dutch roads. Explain to me, will you, how these people who are richer than the gods, these conquering accountants who’ve plundered the treasures of the world, who possess nothing but flat terrain, are incapable of building a level road?’ Vilder clung on to my master’s sleeve, a manic kick in his eye, and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Blood rot. It ravages him. Sepsis. I know it. From a bullet, here.’ He fingered his thigh with his free hand, whilst clenching my master tighter with the other. ‘He should not have it. He is—the operation succeeded. Five years of infernal injections, one every week as we did—which he bore like a saint, a braver man than either of us—and it succeeded. The azoth, as healthy as mine. He has not aged since, younger if anything. See it in his face. And yet blood rot. Make him well, do you hear? You owe it to me. Make him well.’
Vilder let go at last. He sleeved the sweat from his brow and my master quietly clicked open the door. I should have hung back, but my curiosity was too great. The compartment seemed larger on the inside than the out, even with a curtain half drawn across the rear. With its little lanterns and velvet walls of dark chartreuse, it had the feel of a private chapel, the type an overly devout king might hide behind the panels of his bedroom wall for his private salvation. It was lavish—there were even shelves of crystal bottles and porcelain phials held up by little silver hands—but the smell was revolting: lemon cologne gone rotten, ambergris, and the tang of faeces, blood and infection. A sigh rustled against the curtain and fingers dropped into view: pale, waxy and bloated.
‘Ich bin hier,’ came a tired voice.
Unsure what to do, my master looked round at Vilder, who motioned impatiently until my master pulled back the shade. He was met with a stare that was at once timid and imperious. A young officer, a boy it seemed, of almost picture-book beauty—fine-boned, blond-haired, coral lips, powder-blue eyes—lay shivering. I could smell his illness from the street, the necrotic, yeasty, sweet-beer scent of blight besieging his insides. His cheeks were as livid as rain-lashed stone and he was furnace hot.
‘Good day to you, Aramis,’ my master said. ‘If I may call you that?’
‘Der berühmte Arzt.’ His voice was slight, reedy and edged with insolence. ‘At last I meet the great chemyst.’
‘You were shot?’
Aramis passed his hands down the length of his uniform, a splendid road-soiled heap of Prussian-blue silk, towards the bandage knotted round his thigh. Drenched in gore, it was the place from where most of the stench emanated.
‘How is it that you feel?’ my master asked.
Vilder glowered from behind. ‘He feels like death.’
Aramis grimaced, noticing me with a worry of a smile before telling my master, ‘I am burning in ice. But I shall survive, shall I not? Videy tells me so. And you will tell too, the architect of our—of our fortune?’ He frowned pointedly.
‘Of course you shall survive,’ my master promised. ‘We will take you to our lodgings. We’re sorry you couldn’t find them the first time. No more roads. We will make you better.’
My master seemed determined to keep me separated from Vilder. Leading the way from Dam Square to our house on Herengracht, he twice pushed me back and told me to follow behind. I obeyed, but I had only been staying close out of protection, not because I wished to see more of Vilder. In any case, Vilder had no interest in me. He was one of those humans that would not be charmed by my species, who made me feel inferior for being born so.
The moment we arrived back at our rooms, my master put me in the bedroom. ‘You wait in there.’ I tried to follow him out again. ‘Get in,’ he said sharply and closed the door behind him. But the latch did not turn and I had a view of the workroom. He hurriedly cleared a table, threw a blanket across it and lit the lanterns.
There came a shuffle of feet from the hall and the footman and two of his cohorts entered with Aramis and laid him out on the table. I tried to see the invalid in the light, but my master stood in the way and began to undo the bandage. Vilder came in last, taking a measure of the room, just as he had in Whitehall.
‘Bring me brandy,’ he said to one of the men. ‘French if you have it. Cognac ideally. Calvados if you must. Anything but Dutch.’ He dismissed him and the others with a flourish and turned to my master. ‘For decades you refuse to come to Opalheim, as if it were somehow beneath you, and yet here you take a commission with the Van den Heuvals of all people. The villains of Europe. Arms dealers. The bullet I fished from that boy’s leg would have come from one of his factories.’
‘Sssh, Videy, why must you talk all the time?’ Aramis squeezed his eyes against the pain.
‘I will have to cut away your breeches,’ my master said to him. ‘I am sorry; they look fine.’ He went to his chest where he kept his tools. Vilder scowled.
Now I could see Aramis clearly, he must have been more than thirty, and a soldier of rank, and yet he still had the quality of a boy. I felt pity for him. He was fair and athletic, but there was fear in his eyes, made all the more heartbreaking by the impudent face he put on to hide it. He reminded me one of those princes I sometimes met, steely little souls, miniature versions of their fathers, who could command falcons, hunt deer, joust, even go to war, but were boys nonetheless, with boys’ apprehensions and fears.
My master cut down the length of his breeches and carefully peeled the material away, having to tug where blood had glued it to the skin. Underneath the flesh was bloated. My master was taken aback by the rotting-meat stink, but showed no panic in his voice. ‘To be so young and a brigadier already, you must be a fine soldier.’
‘He is exceptional,’ Vilder put in. ‘He was born on the battlefield. At fourteen, he already commanded a cavalry. At fourteen, mark you. Impeccable shot, rides like Apollo, but above all he thinks.’ He tapped his fingers against his skull.
Aramis’s entire leg was discoloured by rot. His thigh, ankle and foot were tar-black, whilst the rest was marbled in dark puce and bronze. Here and there, gas had bubbled up under the skin in blisters.
‘And the badge there—’ my master chatted on, pointing to a gold medallion that hung from a chain on his breast ‘—some honour bestowed on you?’
Once more, Vilder answered on the other’s behalf. ‘White Mountain. He won the battle single-handedly, as good as. A wunderkind. The Catholic League, Tilly, the emperor himself, they owe everything to him.’
My master smiled. ‘I can believe it,’ he said, ‘I have nothing but admiration. I could not summon the courage to go to war.’
‘It is civil of you,’ Aramis panted, ‘to keep my attention, but I am no fool. Gangrene. I see it. My leg, it must come off, no?’
Vilder slapped his palm against the wall. ‘Off? Nonsense.’
My master drew in a breath, as he often did when he knew the answer to something but was unsure how to broach it. ‘Well—in truth—there is every chance the rot will spread if we do not—’
‘Take off his leg? Never. He is a soldier. How is he to survive with one leg?’
‘Videy, please, don’t shout.’
‘No, no, no,’ Vilder said to my master. ‘Do you have any jyhr? Use that.’
‘It will not help his leg.’
‘You have it, though? Liquid jyhr? No matter how dissolved it is. It is that we have come for. Do not play with me!’
My master was cautious in his reply. ‘I have a dose or two, and that, as you say, of a weak grade. I have not used it in years and it has likely lost its strength. But the leg first. I am sorry to be blunt, for both of you, truly. It lives no more and we will do greater harm if—’
‘Of course it lives, you devil. A curse on you. He is converted. Give him the jyhr. That will revive him. Give it to him.’ He yanked back his coat and thuggishly rested his fist against the hilt of his dagger. Gone was the languid mischief-maker of London.
There was a knock on the door and the footman entered with a tray. Vilder snatched it and dismissed him. He poured a large measure of brandy, drank it down and poured another, whilst my master came into the bedroom where I was waiting, went to the casket where he kept his money and valuables and unlocked a drawer. I followed him with my eyes, hoping to catch his attention, to be reassured, but he paid no heed to me. He retrieved his red velvet wallet in which were wrapped the tortoiseshell box and hexagonal phial, still his two most treasured possessions, though neither of which I’d seen him use. He left the little box in the red wallet, which he tucked into his inside pocket and went out with the bottle.
‘Pull up his shirt and clean his skin,’ he said to Vilder before going in search of something else.
They carried on talking, but their voices became a blur, as I’d seen the scar on the side of Aramis’s abdomen. It was in the same place as my master’s and mine, in the hollow above the hip bone, but where ours were neat and crescent shaped, his was a misshapen knot of bruised and livid skin.
My master returned with a plate of instruments. He inserted a quill tip into the hub of a syringe, before siphoning droplets into the chamber. He heated a blade in the yellow part of a candle flame, before saying to Aramis, ‘I suppose you shall be used to this by now. Be brave.’ He incised the scar with the blade and drove the nib of the syringe into the cut, squeezing the piston. Aramis squealed. An uncomfortable pang heated me from inside, an obscure memory turned over to the light: being taken from a burrow, from the pockets of warmth nestled around me, carried through the air, wild wind, arriving at the castle by the sea, then upstairs to the workroom, fog pressing to the windows as my master held me fast against the sharp pricks in my side. Of course I understand it all now: taken from my litter, still with my eyes closed, to Elsinore, my first home, the gruelling medications administered over and over again.
Aramis seemed to calm, and soon drifted into sleep. They waited. The sun rose and gradually a bank of light crept up the far wall. Vilder leant against the wall behind his lover, swigging brandy. He was not tactile with Aramis, but rather offered virile encouragement, as a coach might a prize sportsman. ‘Come, come, you shall be well,’ or, ‘You shall improve, I guarantee.’ But Aramis worsened. He grew hotter than ever, trembling so his knuckles drummed against the table, chest wheezing up and down in ragged crackles. When he spotted me in my hiding place behind the door, he blinked, half smiled and his breathing calmed for a moment, only for him to drift off once more. The day ticked by; hammers pounded from the construction sites of the city, and heat boiled up from the canals, seeming to press all the air out of the room.
‘All will be well, all will be well.’ Vilder tapped his knuckle against the patient. ‘Soon we shall be back in Opalheim. Think of the lake there. You are always nagging me about taking a picnic beside it. We shall do it. No, better, we shall hold a ball. Yes. In my father’s stateroom. Ha, that would be revenge on the miser. In his stateroom where he liked to play king, the glorified coal miner he was. Richer than Croesus, but what a miser my father was—with his heart as with his money. A curse on the old devil. We shall dance in his hallowed stateroom. Us and all the reprobates of Europe. We’ll open the shutters, clean the murals and dance. Enough of this now, Aramis. You must get better.’
I grew almost insanely agitated by his bullish behaviour. Hours later, when Aramis had grown so delirious with pain that his mouth had set into a rictus box, did Vilder hang his head and say to my master, ‘Take off the cursed thing. Take off his leg.’
My master prepared the operation, choosing instruments, setting them out, before touching more drops of jyhr into Aramis’s mouth. When the soldier looked to me, my master noticed the door ajar. I thought finally he would give me a pat of comfort, but he just shut me in, and this time the latch drove home. I was glad for it. If I had been able to watch, I would have done, but from the moment I heard the first shriek I nudged open the windows so the noise of the hammers would drown it out. They must have put a leather in Aramis’s mouth, for the screams became whistles. I climbed on to the bed, pushed my head beneath the blankets and pressed my front legs hard against my ears. I tried to concentrate on the sound of my breath, on the warmth of it in my cocoon, and ignore the crack of metal against bone.
I was half aware of shouts getting louder, of someone knocking from the hall, and my master sending them away. More screams and banging, more people coming and going. In the end there was silence. I came out from my hiding place and cocked my ears to the room, but there was no sound at all. I waited by the door until it opened and my master came in to fetch the coverlet from the bed. Aramis’s face was pivoted towards me, no longer frantic but unanimated, with round blanks of glass where his eyes had shone. He was dead.
Vilder sat in a chair, legs crossed, blankly watching my master arrange the coverlet over Aramis’s body. ‘Leave the face,’ he said plainly.
Instead, my master set about mopping up the dark slick on floor below the table.
‘Shall we take a walk?’ Vilder asked when he was finished. ‘It is a feast day, is it not? I am sure it is.’
My master was perplexed. ‘Walking? Now?’
‘Yes. Get out of this sickroom. I can’t bear to look at all your apparatus a minute longer. I need air.’
‘But—where do you wish to go?’
‘To the street. Anywhere.’
‘And what about—’ My master motioned towards the table.
‘Aramis?’ Vilder said. ‘I don’t think he’s up for walking.’ He stood up malevolently, once more brandishing the hilt of his dagger.
‘Of course, as you wish.’
My master was about to lock me in again when Vilder said, ‘You can’t keep him shut in all day. Bring him. I know how you like a creature at your side.’ It was the first time he had properly looked at me, and I could tell he did not realize it was I he had met before.
We trailed through the afternoon crowds up the side of the Amstel. It was impossible not to recall the frost fair in London, for, as well as the three of us, it seemed the same cast of jugglers and entertainers peopled this alternate version, though now there was heat in place of the cold. Vilder was apparently fascinated by it all and kept pointing things out to my master. ‘Here come the guildsmen. How proud they are. And these creatures here with wings.’ My master, unsure how else to reply, smiled and nodded where it was due, every now and then shifting a glance towards me. We were both thinking the same thing: that a corpse lay in our darkening workroom, its leg half hacked off—the old part of its body dead, and the new part, the army of black, marching on to victory.
On we went into the brand-new part of the city. Beyond the old perimeter wall, where marshes and slums of timber shacks had become stately crescents of canals and double-fronted mansions, vast buildings waited to be filled with the self-regarding families of merchants and bankers—those black-clad, God-fearing humans who must surely have been secretly bursting with joy at their good fortune. Lamplighters appeared with their ladders and began illuminating the new bridges until the whole quarter sparkled. I had been, at best, unsure of Amsterdam, but on that peculiar evening, as we toured those unoccupied streets, the toy houses waiting to be filled, I, my master and the man who would soon become my enemy, I began to see the city in a different light. It had changed. Without my noticing it had alchemized from a base thing to something valuable.
We double backed towards the festivities, until we found ourselves in Dam Square, in precisely the spot we had met Vilder the night before.
‘I shall take him to Opalheim,’ he said.
‘Of course. Shall I—should I accompany you? To assist?’
‘No. You are not welcome. Our association is over. I regret searching you out in the first place.’ He spat on the street. ‘Is there an ice house in the city?’
Whilst he thought about how he should reply, my master studied his fingertips. ‘Yes, there is a place.’
‘Arrange for ice to be brought. And a crate of some description. Not a coffin, they’re abominable, as pretentious as the merchant classes that like to be put into them. This city is peopled by coffins, walking ones. A plain crate will do. I will pack him in it, take him to Opalheim, and entomb him in the family crypt.’
‘Vilder—’
‘Do not speak as if we are friends. Take your hand off me. We are not friends.’ He took a pause before speaking again. ‘Do you think what you do is important?’
‘What I do?’
‘This part you play around the grand houses of Europe. The sage. Progressing from one gilded cocoon to another.’ Vilder’s tone had a newly malign and sarcastic edge. ‘For what? Potions for lovesick princesses and incontinent dukes, back salves and gout treatment for minor royalty? Good fortune for the already fortunate. And I can’t guess what you might prescribe for the Van den Heuvals. Are there cures for bad taste? Do you consider it a good use of your time, of the endowment you bestowed on us, the gift of long life? Well, has it been important, what you’ve done?’
My master did his best to keep his tone friendly. ‘All great houses have their share of the ridiculous, granted, but they are also centres of learning. They are magnets for the enlightened.’
‘Yes, yes, you “learn” of course. You gather information. You enlighten yourself. And then what? Who do you help with all this intelligence? Huh? Whilst the world tears itself apart beyond the walls of your sanctuaries? Whilst men die on battlefields?’ He jabbed my master’s shoulder, once, then again harder.
On the third push, my master said, ‘What is it you are trying to say, Vilder? That you’re heroic now, because you had a lover that was a soldier?’
In a flash Vilder drew his dagger. I barked and would have snatched it in my teeth, but my master motioned me back with a snap of his fingers. He seemed to know exactly how to behave, that this was not the first time he’d faced his companion’s anger.
‘I never sought to be heroic,’ Vilder shouted. ‘That was your game. Well, once upon a time anyway. I have always had the courage to own up to my shortcomings.’
‘Come now, put your dagger away.’
‘You took me down this road remember? You are the reason I am here.’
‘No. Absolutely not. We were equal in that matter. We decided together.’
‘You took me down the road and left me stranded.’ Vilder clenched the dagger tighter, but kept it at his side.
My master nodded, and his tone was entirely placatory. ‘My friend, we are both overwrought. Let us leave this for now, I beg you.’
A guard at the doors to the town hall, having heard raised voices and seen a drawn dagger, came over. Vilder sheathed his blade and said to him, ‘Don’t worry, I’m leaving this swamp.’
From that moment, barely a word was exchanged between the two men. My master made the necessary arrangements, and by the following morning Aramis had been packaged up and loaded into the carriage. They couldn’t fit the box lying down and had to sit it up against the seat, which made for a surreal sight. When my master saw the coach was about to leave, he went out to say goodbye, but Vilder still refused to talk to him. Rather he gave word to his driver and they set off through the gates.
I had never seen my master so distracted as he was that day, sitting down only to sigh and stand again, endlessly tugging his hand through his hair. I trailed him as he worried back and forth about our rooms, groaning, mumbling to himself, occasionally halting to regard the scrubbed-down table where Aramis had lain. At one point, he picked up the bottle of jyhr and warily studied it, before putting it in his trouser pocket. ‘What have we done? We have not done well. What have we done?’ In the evening he called for wine and drank cheerlessly, until his pupils desiccated and he fell asleep in his chair.
Past midnight, I heard a carriage creep along the lane behind the house and stop. It was not unusual for vehicles to come so late, but I had an uneasy presentiment. It was too dark to see anything from the window, but I heard the coach door thump and low voices. My master’s eyes flicked open and he tilted his head to the sound.
‘Who is that?’ I was so frightened I barked. ‘Sssh.’ He craned his ears, but there was silence now. He went into the workroom. The moon cast an extravagant shadow across it. Just as he turned back to the parlour, a knock came on the door and the fur on my neck lifted.
‘Yes?’ said my master.
Our footman put his head round, and we were relieved until he said, ‘The gentleman. He returns.’ He was bewildered and shaken. ‘Upstairs.’ He indicated the principal part of the house where our employers lived.
‘Thank you.’ My master went up the little flight of steps and along the passageway into the great hall. I followed on his heels, certain that he would send me back, but he didn’t. I had always found the mansion forbidding, all dark, creaking mahogany and austere dressers of blue and white china that was never used—but that evening it was more uninviting than ever. A staircase, raked at an unkindly steep angle, led to a landing of many identical doors. Our patrons were fastidious at keeping them closed, but one of them was ajar, the library, and flickers of firelight came from within. A fire, on such a hot night. We ascended and entered the mausoleum of a room that looked on to the Herengracht. Shelves of fanatically organized books towered to the ceiling. Whoever had lit the fire had apparently gone, as the room was empty. My master turned, and I must have made a sound, when I saw the figure sitting at a table in the corner, for he stopped, and saw it too.
Vilder was turning the pages of a book. For a moment a charged stillness shook between us.
‘What are you doing here?’ my master ventured, glancing at the hearth.
‘I had travelled some miles before something grave occurred to me. I have a question, a pressing one.’
‘That is all very well, but return to my rooms at least?’
‘No. I like it here. Amongst all this clever writing, which nobody reads, all this enlightenment.’ He held up the book. ‘I found this, or it found me. Ajax, Sophocles. I was looking for a particular passage—’
‘Vilder, let us take our conversation elsewhere. We will be discovered here at any moment.’
‘Really? By the Van den Heuvals? All the better. I long to be acquainted. We have so much in common. I could discuss mines and metallurgy with them, talk about our dynasties, being born into obscene wealth, the benefits and disadvantages thereof, compare the modern magnate—’ he indicated the room, before turning his hand to himself ‘—with the medieval variety. It would be fascinating. But sadly I have already understood from your footman that the Van den Heuvals are gone for August. We have the mansion for ourselves.’ He shook the book. ‘Have you read it? This short jolt of a tragedy?’
‘Vilder, I implore you.’
‘You know the myth in any case? The soldier Ajax should be awarded for his bravery, but is passed over in favour of the lesser Odysseus. He becomes so obsessed with revenge, he goes mad and hacks to pieces a herd of swine believing they are his enemies and at once his shame is tenfold. I overcomplicate—it is about suicide.’
‘Let this alone now.’
Vilder reads. ‘“Come bright daylight and look on me, for this last time, and then no more. O sacred land that was my home, ye springs and streams and Trojan plains, to you that fed my life, I bid farewell. This last, last word do I, Ajax, speak, and all else I say will be in Hades. And he drives down on to his sword.”’
‘Vilder, believe me, I too am heartbroken about Aramis—’
Vilder laughed. ‘Heartbroken, really? With a caprice you’ve barely met?’ He got up and threw another log on to the fire, and stoked it with a poker. ‘My question. You said something to me in London, something very curious. You said, when I asked for help with Aramis’s conversion, it would be unconscionable in the extreme, immoral, you said, to burden another living thing with a life with no plausible end. It would be a curse, you told me. That is the reason you refused the request. Am I correct?’
‘I do not remember the conversation well, or the words I might have used, but that is my belief.’
‘Unconscionable in the extreme to burden another living thing with a life with no plausible end. I suppose you must have thought, from time to time, how marvellous it might have been, if you could convert one of those sparky women you used to like, to keep as a mate, one of those intelligent, often unattractive ladies you were drawn to, the ones always trying to prove themselves, fighting for their place at court, good markswomen, fast-talkers and even quicker thinkers. Thin little creatures with brave hearts. Who was that one in Rome you fell for? The would-be architect, who was she?’
‘Stop this.’
‘She’d come from the slums of Malta, hadn’t she? To try her hand at the game of society, to make her way in a man’s world. What was her name? Ariadne? She was pretty that one, but for her moustache. No, Adriana, that was it, that’s what she called herself. What rhapsodies you made over her “architectural diagrams,” her “vision.” She’d designed “a hospital for the poor.” What a saviour. You showered her with encouragement, before you broke her heart. Do you think she ended up back in Malta, in a slum? No doubt. You could have had such a prize for all time. But of course you were too honourable for that. “What if it should go wrong?” you always whimpered, if I even began to bring the subject up. Or worse still: “We cannot play god with other people.”’ His voice had been low since we came in, but suddenly he shouted. ‘Why not?!’ The fire took a breath before blazing on. ‘Why should we not play god when he plays us?’
‘Isn’t your behaviour now the reason why?’ my master replied. ‘Is it not proof how things can go wrong?’
‘My behaviour?’ Vilder advanced towards my master very slowly, and I stood at his side, chest out, to show my courage, even though I was terrified. ‘What do you mean by my behaviour? That I suffer, sometimes? That I find it interminable, sometimes? That I wish to burn to death—sometimes?’ He shot a glance at the fire and as it reflected against his face he could have been a demon. ‘Well, have you considered the favour I sought from you would have helped me? But you turned me down, you played god. And in doing so, you have made my situation infinitely worse. You have compassion for the rest of the humanity, why not for me? Deny it all you wish, but you brought me to this pass. You are responsible, not I. You owe me.’ He was so close to my master by then, their faces almost touched. ‘In any case, I veer from the point. My question. This grave principle of yours, to never afflict another living thing? Have you stuck to it?’
‘You know I have.’
‘Really? You have stuck to it?’
‘Yes, Vilder.’
‘And do you not count your dog a living thing?’
Vilder looked at me directly and there was murder in his eyes.
‘What?’ My master floundered, shifting his weight to shield me behind his legs.
‘You heard me. Your dog. It is the same one I met twenty years ago.’
‘No.’
‘Lie. I thought you never lied? Let me see if he has a scar as we do.’
‘Stop this.’
Vilder sidestepped him. ‘Here,’ he purred, beckoning me with little jerks of his fingers. I panted from heat and fear. ‘Come now, let me see. Show me if you have the same mark, your own cursed cicatrix. I bet you have, you sly creature.’
‘Run!’ my master shouted at me, motioning for the open door, whilst blocking Vilder’s way, but the fiend snatched up the book and punched the spine of it into my master’s neck. He gave out a rasp, teetered across the room and fell, the bottle of liquid jyhr tumbling from his pocket. Vilder grabbed me by the skin of my neck and pulled me over the boards, thumping my head against furniture, towards the fire. I flailed, squealing, trying to get away, but his strength was unnatural.
‘There it is, you devil,’ he said, stretching my leg so he could see the mark at the side of my abdomen. He drew his dagger and held it to my throat.
‘Please, please,’ my master begged. ‘Let him go. Hurt me, not him.’
‘No. One life for another. That is fair, is it not? More than fair, for I lost a man, and you a mere dog.’
‘Please, let him go, I beg of you.’
‘One request I made of you. One chance I had, and you denied me.’ Vilder seized me by my front legs and hurled me into the hearth. My head struck the red-hot bricks at the back of it and my master screamed. I gasped, but the air was liquid heat. There was a reek of sulphur as my hair went up in crackles. It seemed the shrieks that echoed up the chimney belonged to someone else, but they were mine. My master came for me, horror on his face, but Vilder fought him back. I tried to crawl free, but the room was turning round, my blood in revolt, and it was hot enough to melt my bones. My master must have broken free, as I saw him seize the poker and strike Vilder in the jaw. There was a crack of bone, the monster collapsed and my master pulled me from the fire.
‘My champion, my champion, do not die,’ he wailed, ripping off his jacket and patting embers from me. I coughed and coughed, but couldn’t get air into my lungs. Vilder was on the floor, motionless, blood lapping from a deep cut behind his ear and I thought his head had come apart, opened like a box at the forehead, before I realized it was his hair that had dislodged. He wore a wig. He had always worn a wig.
I jumped from my master’s arms and ran from the room. The pain of my burns would come later, the blisters beneath my coat and tar in my lungs, but in that moment I was too shocked to feel any of it. My master came after me and I saw him turn the key of the library door, to lock Vilder inside. We ran down the stairs, out of the front door and into fresher air.
‘My champion, my poor champion.’ My master knelt down and hugged me.
Above him, at the first-floor window, I saw that Vilder had clambered to his feet. He unlatched one of the window casements and pushed it open. ‘You run from me, do you?’ With his wig lopsided and one side of his face darkened with blood he looked gruesome, but his voice was precise and carried on the hot night. My master was transfixed and for a moment I thought he might even return to the house, but he pushed me on and we went quickly up the street. As we turned the corner I heard Vilder say, ‘Run then. But I’ll find you—and play god with you yet.’
The sun was coming up and the deserted canals were turning crisp orange against it. Eventually we reached the street where carriages could be hired. My master alighted on one and snapped instructions at the driver, who looked down at me. I’m sure it was not the case, but I’ve always imagined I was still smoking. Realizing he had no money, my master tugged a ring from his finger—a gold band that he had always worn—pressed it into the driver’s hand, and we were motioned aboard. My master very carefully laid me out on the seat, before checking one last time that no one was behind. He slammed the door and closed the curtains. As we left town, heading south, he kept fussing over me and though I was grateful, the pain had begun to set in and I would have rather have been left alone.
He took the red velvet wallet from his inside pocket and retrieved the tortoiseshell box and the remains of the powdered jyhr. ‘We have this at least.’ He’d lost the hexagonal bottle, the distilled jyhr, a large batch that would have taken years to create. ‘But we will survive, my champion, you and I. You and I,’ he said over and over, but all I could think of was Vilder in the window, his wig half off and his sotto voce curse as we had turned the corner—‘Run then. But I’ll find you—and play god with you yet.’