Imogen Robertson - Circle of Shadows

Graves was silent for a moment. ‘You know, Clode, if this plot against you had succeeded, we would have refused to renegotiate the bonds and demanded the repayment of the principal.’

‘That would have been foolish.’

‘Probably, but we would have done it. It might have been an embarrassment to Maulberg.’

‘You think a group of revolutionary Freemasons has been plotting against me, Graves?’ Clode shook his head. ‘It seems unlikely, though between the wedding and the death of their Chief Privy Councillor last year, I do not think they know what money is in the Treasury at all. It is said round court, he once told the Duke, if he wished to put on the Carnival he had planned, he would not be able to feed himself the next day. And now that wise hand is removed.’

‘What was his name?’ Harriet said sharply.

Clode looked at her curiously. ‘Count von Warburg, I think.’

‘How did he die?’

‘There was a fire.’

Pegel stood in the room in which he had seen the gentleman writing, and thought. If he was correct in his assumptions — and he was sure he was — the message he had sent had travelled upwards and come to a rest in this place. Therefore here was the top of the tree, and it was very interesting Dunktal had not sent a message to some other town. Did he have any masters? That was just one of several rather pressing questions.

If there were crucial papers here, and that was what Pegel had come in to search for, Dunktal would not be so stupid as to leave them loose on his desk. He thought of Florian’s terrible sincerity, his idealism. Did that extend up the organisation too? If so, and given the apparent love of secrecy and symbols, all these codes and owls, it was possible the gentleman would leave the papers somewhere clever. Pegel had discovered that life was easier when people tried to be clever, since it often made them obvious. A clever code was far easier to break than a random one, a clever hiding-place much easier to find than an unlikely one. He would have to assume that this gentleman would want his putative papers to hand. That meant this room. Good. Now for the clever bit.

The walls were lined with books — Lord, these radicals loved to read. Pegel stood very still, letting the details of the room shift and settle in his mind as he panned his impressions for gold. There it was. On the bottom of the bookshelf, crushed into the corner by any number of volumes on law, was a large, elderly-looking Bible. If Florian was anything to go by, these people were not religious. Perhaps it was an heirloom of the family? Then surely it should be on display downstairs in the public rooms, not tucked up here. He teased it out of the shelf towards him and considered. It was certainly lighter than it should be. He picked it up and cradled it between his forearms.

‘Open Sesame!’ he said in a deep voice, then gave a soft whistle. It was hollowed out and a thick stack of letters and papers lay in the nest cut out for them. He grinned, considered, set the Bible down on the desk, then spent five minutes giving the room the look of a place speedily ransacked. He pulled out the desk drawers and scattered the papers, yanked out a random number of volumes from the upper shelves and dropped them all so their spines snapped. The pages that had been loose on the desktop when he entered, he threw over his shoulder.

His ransacking done, he sat down on the floor with the papers from the Bible and sorted through them. Some were letters in plain language. Of these he noted down an idea of the contents, and names used; these were mostly classical pseudonyms, but one never knew where these things might lead, and each one was addressed to Spartacus. So Spartacus is Dunktal, he thought. The signatures were similarly unlikely, though Pegel grinned, his eyebrows raised, to see letters apparently from some of the Muses of Antiquity. For Muses, he couldn’t help thinking, they wrote ugly sentences. Some pages seemed to be instructions on the recruitment and training of members; others some of the central tenets of the organisation. He whistled silently and made notes. Several sheets were in code and there were three longer documents that seemed to have been written by the same hand, and bearing the same date. They must be copied exactly and there was no way of knowing how much time he had. He set down his notebook, picked up the coal-scuttle and emptied its contents down the stairs then shut the door, wedged a chair under it and opened the hatchway into the attic.

Thus, as prepared as he could be, he settled down to his work.

‘An alchemist?’ Crowther said coldly.

‘Yes,’ Krall replied, and knocked again. ‘He is a good man. He was an apothecary.’

‘The drugs used on Clode are of a sophistication-’

‘Bugger off!’ The voice sounded from deep within.

Krall rattled the handle again. ‘Open up now, Adam, or I will break down the door.’

‘I said, bugger off!’

Crowther looked around the square while negotiations continued. So even in a city as new as Ulrichsberg there were places that could look neglected. The house at which Krall hammered so vigorously looked like a crabbed old woman surrounded by spring brides. Its windows were thick with filth, there were tiles loose and greenery sprouted from the gutters. The paint on the half-timbering was peeled. The houses on either side showed what it should have been and it seemed to hunker and slump between them, neglected and resentful. Above the door was a faded emblem of a unicorn.

Krall began to count slowly down from ten and a new storm of expletives erupted from behind the low door. Crowther was a little gratified to realise how many of them he understood. He had always thought German a pleasing language to swear in. It had the proper supply of consonants. The unseen owner of the house was proving himself to be an inventive user of the linguistic tools to hand.

As Krall reached ‘Five’ there was a screech and a wrench and the door opened. The man who appeared behind it was an elderly, stooped creature whose eyes were made huge by a pair of smeared glasses. He peered at Krall over them and sneezed, then kicking the door open a little wider against some resistance, spoke.

‘Come in then.’ Noticing Crowther for the first time, he paused. ‘Who’s your pet?’ He spoke clearly enough, but under his words was a faint high wheeze; it was like a slow puncture in an organ bellows.

‘This man is Mr Crowther.’

‘Foreigner?’

‘English.’

‘Explains it,’ he said, then tramped off into the gloom of the house. Krall and Crowther followed.

The ground floor of the building was one low, continuous space but so cramped with old furniture and broken oddments that the man in the eyeglasses had to lead them down a narrow path between the tumbling piles. It was like a junk shop in a corner of the docks somewhere, a place where lost remnants of better places went to die. Crowther saw chairs, dressers, tables upended and balanced on half-opened packing cases; portraits thick with grime set at an angle and half-hidden by the skeletons of chandeliers. Their guide had now scurried ahead of them, more sure-footed and confident among the wreckage.

Krall said quietly, ‘Twenty years ago, Adam Kupfel — Whistler, as he is known now — was a rich enough man. He was an apothecary, and had a house outside Ulrichsberg worth envying. Now he lives in what used to be his shop, surrounded by the wreckage of his old home.’

‘What happened?’

Krall sighed. ‘He turned alchemist, and that turned him.’

‘How?’

‘He always had a liking for all old books, and he found a thing in one of the bookshops of Leuchtenstadt one day — an old volume full of woodcuts and patterns and spells. It took some sort of hold on him. He spent all his money on similar works and turned the apparatus of his trade into a means of searching for the Elixir of Life.’