Westphalia, May 1815
A week passes, or more, and Sporco and I are locked inside Vilder’s carriage. For the first few days the vehicle climbs vertiginously, dropping at intervals, only to ascend again, higher and higher. The altitude, and the speed at which Braune tears round every bend is sickening enough, but with my wound, and the process of mending, I sink into a state of near hallucination. I’ve been struck by a bullet a handful of times in my life, all long ago, during the years my master and I trailed armies. I’d garner my strength to limp to a safe place, where I’d collapse, the battle a whirring dream around me. And afterwards, I woke, not happy to be alive—but almost the opposite: terrified of eternity.
Once we peak the mountains, we shoot down at nerve-shredding speed, Braune whipping the horses to the bone. We travel northwards still; I can tell by how light slithers across the floor. Maybe once or twice a day we’ll stop briefly. There are shouts to farriers, hurried rehorsing. Braune unlocks one of the doors, pistol in hand, checks we’re alive, slops down a bowl of water and a handful of scraps, before locking up and setting off again.
As we pass from the mountains on to the lowlands, the realm of Saxony I presume, the smells of the countryside change: alpine scents giving way to beech, privet, primrose and forest lichens. Many times, heralded by distant ditties of bugles and pipes, we pass tramping battalions, an army marching north. Through the scratched glass, we pass flickers of uniforms, muddy faces and blank eyes, until we speed away from the thump of feet.
I expect Sporco to be disturbed, at the least, by our change in circumstance, but he adapts to it well. Such is the nature of dogs, to trust. I wonder if he’s forgotten I told him Vilder was evil, or careless of it. In either case, I’m glad of it: whatever Vilder has in store, there’s no point in Sporco suffering fear until it happens. And besides, he’s fed well, kept comfortable and he’s aware of a purpose to what’s happening. He has no inherent need to understand it. And I’m at his side. We are ‘the pack,’ as he insists on calling us.
At dusk, after two weeks of travelling, we peel off the road and halt.
‘What’s happening?’ Sporco says, putting his paws on the ledge of the window.
Looking out, I can see a mansion, a medieval edifice perched on the crest of a hill. Above a portcullised arch, there’s a stone escutcheon emblazoned with the all too familiar insignia: three towers below a crescent moon. I had expected a larger building. It is only when Braune dismounts and shoulders open the iron barriers, do I realize it’s a gatehouse. From either side of it, boundary walls snake into the distance. It’s bleak terrain, crags and tors, thorny shrubs and wind-slanted firs.
We crunch through the arch and set off up the drive, almost immediately entering a wood: a crowded gloom of oak and elm, of squat trees and deformed shrubs. The path is overgrown and low-hanging boughs whip against the side of the coach. The woods go on and on, wheels jerking against ruts in the road. We leave the deciduous trees behind, the path straightens and we accelerate into a matrix of conifers, to an echo of hooves and flickering pins of evening light. We travel through it—for miles it seems—until the echo suddenly stops. Sporco’s ears lift.
We’ve come out into an expansive plain, as barren as the woods had been choked, a droughted prairie, vacuum-quiet, dusty earth, balding patches of heather and bull grass. An immense dried-up lake snakes to a palace in the distance. Even in the vanishing light, I can see it’s immense, its front an infinite blockade of brick stretched between three towers. On one side, the building sags, making the central tower lean in at an angle.
Braune unlocks our compartment and wrestles chains round our necks.
‘Here,’ says Vilder, snatching them from him and yanking us from the coach. He loops the tethers tight and crouches to study me, feeling my side where the flesh has all but mended. Sporco watches him, with a hopeful sway of the tail, before Vilder pulls us up the front steps into the hall. My heart races: there’s a trace of something clear, of my master, the barest atom of him, so elusive, it’s gone immediately. ‘De la Mare,’ Vilder shouts and his voice takes time to echo back to us. A life-sized portrait of Aramis looks down on us, more war-like than I remember him, on horseback and silver breast-plated. Sporco takes in the space, ears out and eyebrows lifted, excited by its dimensions, by the sheer height of the many columns of red marble and jasper. He’s tiny against them, and I recall that it was just a few weeks ago that he gingerly entered La Perla’s apartment and thought that was amazing.
‘De la Mare!’ Vilder calls again. When no one comes, he sets off, dragging us behind. Dust is thick on the ground and it’s whipped up into little clouds, making Sporco sneeze. We pass room after room of faded grandeur, uncared-for statues and paintings layered in dust. Hearing someone, Vilder stops at an open door. ‘De la Mare?’
‘Monsieur?’ comes a voice from within.
‘In God’s name! Have I not told you that this room is to be kept closed?’ He pauses on the threshold, hesitant about entering. It’s a chapel of the type that are common in palaces of this size. In a murk of stained glass, there are tombs, a pair of them, railed in on pedestals, life-size effigies of a man and a woman, palms pressed together, humans from faraway times, the medieval epoch.
A gaunt man patters from the gloom. ‘Désolé, monsieur. They’ve made a nest in the ceiling—’ He does a double take when he notices Sporco and I, but says nothing.
‘Did he come?’ Vilder asks.
‘You haven’t found him?’
‘If I had, would I be asking you?’
‘No one’s called, monsieur.’
Vilder hawks up a gobbet of phlegm and spits it on the floor. De la Mare, his retainer I presume, wears a crimson gabardine like a cardinal’s. ‘What’s made a nest?’ Vilder asks of him.
‘Bats. A thousand of them. They must have broken in there.’ He nods to an opening at the base of the far wall where a panel of stained glass has fallen out.
‘Deal with it as you must, but keep this door shut. Understand?’
‘Bien sûr.’
There are no niceties between these men. If anything, the servant—pallid, gaunt and unearthly—is even more unapproachable than the master. ‘Soldiers all the way here,’ says Vilder, ‘the roads choked with them. Why?’
‘You have not heard the news?’
‘What news?’
‘He has fled Elba. Bonaparte. He’s returned to Paris. Pronounced emperor, and so and so on.’ He holds his palms heavenwards. ‘La guerre recommence. The British come, the Austrians, all. A battle is imminent; in Belgium they say.’
‘I want you to write.’
‘Monsieur?’
‘To every king in Europe, every duke, every count, every last pox-ridden baronet, all. One of them will know where he hides. They must return him. To every general too, write. Tell them it is I, Vilder, from Opalheim. Offer them money, gold, whatever they ask for. Every general, mark you. Write to Napoleon too.’
‘Napoleon?’
‘He has fled from Elba, has he not?’ he says in sarcastic imitation.
‘Indeed but—I would not expect him to—’
‘Write! Tell them, to tell him, I have his dog. How absurd the phrase sounds, coming from my own mouth. Curse him.’ De la Mare is entirely bewildered. He puzzles a glance at us. ‘Dog, dog, dog,’ Vilder hisses, raising his palm to strike, but stopping short. ‘Have you never seen dogs before? Go, write, and show me a draft before you send it.’
De la Mare remains. ‘Sire, perhaps you must—?’
‘What?’
There’s a pause. De la Mare is almost too scared to speak. ‘Face the possibility that—’
‘That what?’ Vilder grimaces. I know they’re talking of my master, speaking of him as if he’s alive, and I listen intently.
‘How far could he go—’ De la Mare shrugs ‘—when he can barely put one leg before the other? Or speak, or hear? He has no sense who he is. So you must face the possibility—’
Vilder’s fists are pure knuckle against our chains. ‘That he’s dead? That is your suggestion? You know nothing about it.’ Before the other can reply Vilder slaps him across the ear. ‘If you had not let him roam free in the house, we would face nothing. I told you—’ He stops himself from hitting De la Mare a second time, instead saying, ‘He’s as cunning as he’s dangerous. Well, if he returns, you shall learn your lesson. If he hunts you down and cuts your throat, you shall learn your lesson. The letters. Now!’
This time De la Mare goes. Vilder peers into the darkness of the chapel, pivoting his ear to the wet slap of bats, then turns on his heels. I’m newly agitated and confused as he drags us on through anterooms to a set of double doors, which he shoulders open. A little vestibule leads immediately to another pair in cast iron. He pushes us through them, into darkness, slams the doors behind us and bolts them three times.
The shock of my master’s smell is so overwhelming that my mind seems to curve and warp, like I’ve slipped through time.
I’ve found him, I think in that nonsensical moment, despite everything I’ve just heard. ‘I’m here, I’m here,’ I bark, certain they’ve made a mistake and that really he’s here. I set about the place, bouncing my nose along the surfaces: a fireplace with a furnace in it, long tables, countless piles of parchment, an old four-poster bed. I jump on it: straw mattress, hemp sheets, bolster, coverlet—all of them drenched in his smell. I roll on it all. ‘Here I am.’ I leap down, skirting the walls, nooks and recesses. ‘I’m here!’
‘We’re here!’ Sporco proclaims in agreement, following wherever I go.
Behind an arras, we find a tiny side room, a garderobe, with a stone toilet in the corner, but otherwise empty too.
I hurry back to the main room, which is as high as a cathedral. There’s a whispering gallery right at the top, but no stairs lead to it. I renew my hunt: furnace, paper piles, tables. I spring up on to one: bottles of ink, quills, brushes, the scent-print of his hand everywhere. Down, back to the bed, skirting the walls, the gardrobe. And where I go, Sporco comes too, yapping in delight. ‘Is he here? Where is he? I’m sure he’s here.’
After two more circuits my joy evaporates and is finally replaced by common sense. Of course he isn’t. The fact of my master’s smell but the absence of his person is pure physical pain. I’m losing him all over again. I’m back in the cathedral a hundred and twenty-seven years ago, circling the tiles below the fresco in vain, finding his scarf and nothing else.
Many years ago I saw a boy drop from a cliff. He’d been walking with his father when he saw gulls’ eggs nestled on an outcrop of rock. He clambered over to look. His father was facing the other way when there was a hollow tear; stone scurried and the ground split and slid under him. He gasped and his father ran to help, throwing out his arms, but the chalk dropped, the boy with it, noiseless except for a gentle crack as he hit the shore below. The father let out no sound; the horror was too unnatural. What had been was gone. The certainty of life had reversed; the change was undoable. For all time he would be cursed to live in that fleeting moment. Now, more than ever, I feel like that man, missing not just a part of myself, but all of it. My master was here, but now he is not. As I sink, so does Sporco, bereft on my behalf. He comes and sits by my side, pressing against me and delivers the last words of his commentary. ‘Not here.’
There’s a squeal of wood and a door high up in the whispering gallery opens and Vilder comes in to check on us. He moves differently from before, no longer tense but in a drunken roll, and I see why: he has filled up my master’s hexagonal bottle with more of the pale yellow easing tonic. When he speaks his voice is blurry. ‘Where is he? The creator of our misery. Never mind, he’ll return. Now you are here he’ll come.’ He reels out and locks the door behind him. The last of the evening drips from the high window and all I can hear is Sporco’s breathing.
* * *
I’m woken by dawn light on my face. Sporco is curled up beside me, snoring, his head half buried under the coverlet, his outsize brows twitching in some fast-moving dream. The room is immense. It could be the Banqueting House at Whitehall, that my master and I visited on its opening. This version is even larger and must have been a stateroom long ago, where ceremonies would have taken place or ambassadors welcomed—but now, like the rest of the palace, it’s an unloved ruin.
Although there are twelve windows, six great arched ones below and six square ones above, they’ve been long closed up with iron shutters, all except one, unreachable at the top, where the casing has come away. The ceiling frescoes are as bizarre as any I have seen. Usually—like the ones at the Banqueting House—they’re peopled with far-fetched celestial beings, clouds and chariots, sylphs and immortals. These ones, however, pay homage to a world of industry and metallurgy. A battalion of miners marches through a craggy landscape into a cavern below a mountain, where they dig, unearthing golden light. In others there are molten rivers of silver and mercury, floating ironworkers, furnaces and chimneys, bronze foundries and glassworks.
The principal wall, in which the fireplace is set—which in turn is so colossal it could be the entrance to a cathedral—is patterned with tiers of pale rectangles, where large pictures must once have hung, but which is now marked with thousands of hand-drawn symbols arranged in drifting columns like hieroglyphics.
As I observe it all, looking up from the bed, it strikes me how calm I am. Despite everything, I passed the night soundly. Because my master is alive. He slept in this bed. That is true. He was here. Even now, he is being searched for, waited for, expected. He is somewhere. Alive. After all this time, I am vindicated.
For some moments I cling on to that miraculous fact—before doubts begin to pull me down again. How long was he here? Why did he never come back for me? Determined to stay calm, to remain methodical, I slip down and investigate the room. The furnace within the chimney place is a pitch-black hole where a fire has burnt constantly until recently. My master worked precisely here. His scent flickers off everything like little shocks of static. There’s even a halo of smooth stone where he slid back and forth between worktop, fire and shelves.
Smooth stone. It would take years to shine it so flat.
On the worktop there are stacks of jars and bottles, familiar scents—copper, mercury, bugbane, ambergris—and all the various ingredients he used for his distillations. In the past century, if I caught even a hint of one of these odours, I’d feel a pinprick of happiness at the reminder of him.
I study the hieroglyphics, thousands of clusters, each containing a band of symbols, seven identical ones in each. Seven. Some of the scratched-out symbols have the shape of dogs.
Prickles creep up my spine, from the root of my tail to my neck. My ears stiffen and my throat dries—as I begin to grasp what has happened in this room.
Each mark is a day, each cluster a week, each column a year. My master was counting time. I pad along the wall. Every inch of it, every reachable part, is inscribed with a mark, many in the form of a dog. How many? How many dogs are there? A hundred and twenty-seven years since I set eyes on him.
The gallery door opens, Braune stoops through, throws a bundle over the parapet and goes, leaving a pair of fleshy bones on the floor. Sporco, woken by the noise, un-burrows himself, nose twitching. He bounces from the bed and sniffs around until he finds the treat. ‘Not to be believed,’ he gasps, tail whipping against the floor. He pushes his snout right into them, before taking one in his jaw, shaking it, dropping it, arranging it, tongue unrolling. ‘You see this? Not to be believed.’
I’m too distracted to pay attention. My brain is a souring fog, a sickness of shifting shapes, of things just out of reach, of trapdoors down to fiendish places. I can’t breathe. I stagger back and knock into one of the towers of papers. It lurches, topples and hundreds of sheets spill across the floor, fanning out, a breeze of dust travelling with them. They are drawings that my master has made, hundreds upon hundreds of them, some so old, they’re filament thin.
Heat rises in my throat. The metal door with three bolts, the barred windows.
A prison.
All those years waiting, the mulchy autumns and whetstone winters, the cathedral steps, wishing on the horizon, all my little spins of hope, dozens of them a day, which were dashed over and over. Yet still I hoped. The cheerless pageant of my time alone, losing friend after friend, whilst all the dispiriting places of Venice—the inns stuffed with drunks, the slums and plague pits, the charnel houses and burial grounds—somehow all became markers and reminders of my failure. Alone all that time. The burning in my chest is insupportable, like a red-hot morass that will explode. And for what reason this imprisonment? For master to distil for that monster? To be an addict’s servant? You are the best of all at making them, Vilder had said in Whitehall, having demanded an opiate brew. Perhaps it is a deceit of the brain, but my own medicines never seem to work as well.
Then a new fear comes upon me, more dreadful than all that have gone before, a notion that makes me cold to the bone. I look round at the wall. The markings change from one end of the wall to the other. In the first columns, the marks are clear and strong, but grow shakier and fainter the further they go. The last few inscriptions are feeble dashes—then blankness.
I paw apart the drawings that spilled on the floor, vignettes of our life together: one here from Whitehall, another from Elsinore, Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague. The last picture, which had sat at the top of the pile, is a self-portrait. From the faintness of it, from the thickness of the dust upon it, it must be twenty years old. My master is almost unrecognizable: a frail old man, bug-eyed and haunted. He’s imagined me beside him, straight-backed, ears up, full of life—smiling—even as he stares ahead with the look of death.
I rush at the door and cry, ‘Give him back to me! Give him back!’ Dizzy, sick, skin crawling, nerves snapping, a bruise-indigo gloom fills my head from the inside, before the floor rolls beneath me and I collapse.
When I come to, Sporco is standing over me. ‘What’s happened?’ he says, ears folded back.
Where do I even start to explain? Just one thought remains in my head: I must escape this place. I must find him before it’s too late.