Imogen Robertson - Circle of Shadows

‘I will always dance to my own tune, Crowther. Your best hope is that they will not diverge. Now be not downcast, my friend! There cannot be many here who have the knowledge and wit to make that poison and who had the opportunity to treat the mask. Trust my expertise on that: whoever made that drug was instructed by an adept.’

Having Manzerotti address him in such warm and encouraging terms was as much as Crowther could bear, and without speaking again he turned away, and left him among the other exotics gathered together to amaze and confound in the Duke’s chamber of wonders.

Jacob Pegel was seated in the little square by the river with a book in his hands enjoying the spring sunshine and feeling generally content. The corner he had chosen was out of the general run, but easy enough to find, and found he was, by the succession of dirty-faced boys who formed his army. They came to him with paper offerings, and news of where the paper was collected from and to whom it was to go. Only one note was sealed carelessly enough to allow its contents to be read without leaving a sign it had been tampered with. Pegel noted down its contents — again nonsense groups of five letters — then in front of the nervous-looking messenger charged with carrying it from one side of the town to the other, dropped it at his feet, and stood on it squarely.

‘Sorry, son,’ he said to the boy, who was looking at him outraged. ‘But you get an extra shilling for it, in case they box your ears for dropping it.’

The boy took the coin and shrugged. It was a fair price for a beating. Pegel examined each letter carefully, made some notes, and then returned them to the messengers, who left with extra pennies in their hands. With their help Pegel traced the passage of the news of yesterday’s attack through the town. It fluttered through the Law Faculty, among half-a-dozen philosophers, and circled via a couple of the more prosperous tradesmen to the Vice Chancellor himself. It circled once more, then fell softly on the doorstep of a house not far from Pegel’s own, and the name on the note was not one with which Pegel was familiar. Dunktal . Interesting. The letters were all sealed, most with that curious mark of the owl. Pegel made more notes in the back of his book. Wrote down each name and direction and drew lines one to the other. By the middle of the afternoon he thought he had a fair idea of the names of Florian’s secret friends and, roughly, the hierarchy of the organisation. In his experience, bad news travels upwards like a bad smell. The small boys who chose to play outside Dunktal’s door reported that though the news had entered the house, it travelled no further forward. Jacob put his notebook into his pocket and sauntered down towards Herr Dunktal’s front door.

Though she had spent as yet only one day in Ulrichsberg, the sense of relief Harriet felt when they passed out of the town was considerable. The road they followed wound upwards along the path cut by one of the tributaries to the Neckar, climbing into the hills until the placid river by which they had started their journey had disappeared, and become a distant sigh in the valley below. On either side of them the forest stretched away, broken from place to place with columns of dark red sandstone; their edges softened with mosses and ivy, their silhouettes broken by new birch leaves. Scents of earth and water filled the carriage. Graves, freed from the palace, looked positively cheerful. Harriet glanced at Rachel, remembering their conversation of the previous evening and wondering if she had said everything she should have done.

Harriet remembered the first weeks of her own married life vividly, and with a certain amount of shame. She had loved James, and felt she knew him when they wed, but she recalled only too well the strangeness of first encountering the physical being of her husband outside the drawing room or the ballroom. The scent of him had been foreign, the sight of him stripped back to himself alarming. The physical side of marriage she had learned … to appreciate. She had been lucky. James had travelled the world before he met her and, he told her some months into their marriage, had once been the lover of an older woman, a widow. Though the idea that he had been as intimate with another as he was with her had troubled and scratched at her, she also recognised its advantages. He came to her bed wise, patient and kind. His strangeness became familiar, his touch sought after, valued.

She had assumed that Clode, so handsome a young man, would have entered into marriage as experienced as James. She felt she had to blame herself. She had chosen to forget that Clode had been raised in a much more limited circle, and was rather younger than James had been. She had also ignored the slight prudishness in Clode’s nature, and in Rachel’s. It had been a choice. Rachel had still been angry with Harriet for continuing to involve herself with the investigations of murder even in the weeks leading up to the marriage, and Harriet had found it impossible to do her duty and talk to her sister about physical love. Her cowardice had done Rachel and Daniel a disservice. After three months of marriage Daniel thought himself a brute, and Rachel judged herself as unnatural. Their affection was clouded by fear and embarrassment. Now they were separated by the horrors of the Carnival night.

Harriet remembered Rachel’s face, turned away slightly as she drank her tea the previous evening. ‘Two nights before the Carnival, I asked him if he had never taken a lover in the past,’ she had said. ‘Harry, he was so angry with me. He asked if I thought he should take one now, as I was unwilling to perform my duties as a wife with good grace.’

‘Oh, my dear.’

‘That evening we were in company with Lady Martesen, and I know nothing passed between them but common courtesy, but I was so jealous. I stormed and cried and all but accused him of making love to her in front of me! He reassured me, and I was in such a passion I wouldn’t listen to him. Then, well …’

‘You can tell me, Rachel.’

‘Then it was a great deal better. But we were angry at the time and oh, Harriet, I was so confused the next day. I felt as if some sort of monster had been released, in us both. And I was frightened by it, and Daniel would hardly look at me, and then we went to the Carnival …’

‘Did you notice the preparations in town?’ Graves’s voice called Harriet from her thoughts and back into the carriage.

‘I did,’ she said, passing her hand over her forehead. ‘The Princess’s reception should be magnificent.’

‘Poor girl,’ Rachel said. ‘She is only fifteen, you know, and has never met the Duke.’

Graves crossed his long legs and stared out at the passing forest. ‘And now she will arrive in this murderous court with Manzerotti to sing her welcome.’

‘She is trained for it,’ Harriet said. ‘She will have wealth, power, influence.’

‘Do you envy her, Harry?’

‘No, Rachel. I do not.’

Castle Grenzhow was a structure from a less frivolous time. It brooded high over the river valley and watched the narrow road askance through thin windows. Only the eastern part of the castle had been maintained. The tower to the west had crumbled to a rotted stump, and beside it the remains of the manor house had dwindled to walls without floors or ceilings, a stone staircase that opened on empty air, halls of weeds and grasses. All was in pinkish stone.

The single track that led to the gate could be observed by the castle’s remaining guardians throughout its last curving, climbing mile, and those in the carriage could feel themselves watched and waited for.

The castle, Harriet discovered when the carriage drew into the forecourt, had a more numerous population than she had at first thought. She had imagined Clode alone in a tower with one crooked guard to lock and unlock the door to his chamber. Instead the surviving part of the castle showed signs of being a thriving little community. There were several men on the gate and in the yard, and more supervising a work-party down the slope. In the work-party were perhaps a dozen men wielding pickaxes, all dressed in plain uniform work-clothes. She could not help looking into their faces with alarm, and felt Rachel’s hand brush her own.