Imogen Robertson - Circle of Shadows

‘Not fair, Mrs Westerman. This is not Ovid, you know. This is medieval Latin. Quite different.’

‘Can you translate it?’

‘Well, the fact that it’s nonsense doesn’t help either. Let me see. Blood, life. That’s fairly simple: blood is life and by this blood can life be summoned from the other … region, maybe? Realm perhaps. Does that sound likely?’

‘It does. Can you read any more?’

‘To fasten the spirit within the statue use this seal and the … incantations … to … I think these are names of spirits. Do you want the list?’

‘No.’ She took the book back from him and frowned over the symbol. It was based on the Star of David — she had thought at first that explained her sense of familiarity with it, but there was something more to it than that. She had seen this before somewhere, or something very like it, with its intricate mix of curls and lettering, circles within circles. So much more esoteric, more learned than the folk magic she had encountered in the Lake Country. But then this was magic for the scholar, to dazzle the rich and reading classes, and thus it needed to be steeped in all these layers of learning. If too many people understood it, it would seem cheap; just as they collected the complex and rare in their cabinets of curiosity, or paid enormous sums for the delicate complications of Mr Al-Said’s automata. She straightened and looked at the picture again. That was where she had seen it, pinned to the wall in his workshop among the keys, brass discs and paper faces!

‘I must go up to the village.’

‘Do you wish me to come with you?’

‘No, and Crowther should rest. I shall ask Rachel.’

‘Very well, but you must take mercy on me at some point. Guarding a sleeping man is very dull work.’

Michaels had spent the night at the house of the priest of Oberbach, having seen the girl’s body laid in one of the side-chapels of his church. As dawn broke he mounted his horse and the priest handed him the reins.

‘However she died, Mr Michaels, you have done a good service to her soul in bringing her here. She rests with God now.’

Michaels ran his fingers through the horse’s mane. She shifted and tossed her head a little. ‘I don’t know how well she will rest, Father. It seems she was much caught up with things of darkness.’ The birds were acclaiming the day, and around the neat garden of the priest’s house flowers opened, insects moved from bloom to bloom. Spring was opening up, full of the promise of summer coming.

‘Be that as it may, I believe in a God of mercy, Mr Michaels. I shall pray for her.’

Michaels touched his fingers to his hat, and turned his horse out towards the road.

The Al-Said’s were early risers. Their breakfast had already been cleared away and they were at their twin workbenches when Rachel and Harriet arrived. Sami was using the smallest pair of tweezers Rachel had ever seen to add plumage to a bird an inch long; his brother was working opposite bent over a miniature lathe with a file in one hand. They welcomed the sisters, and Sami set about making tea while Harriet explained why they had come.

Adnan plucked down the paper with the design and looked at it. ‘Peculiar how, when one has had an object around for a little while, one ceases to see it. I am very sorry, Mrs Westerman, but I do not recognise it.’

‘I do!’ Sami took it from his brother’s fingers. ‘It should be with my papers rather than yours, Adnan. Such a curious thing — I meant to try and find out what it signified, but we’ve been so busy making bird-cages for every woman in court. The gentleman who paid us so much for Nancy wished it to be painted on her body, under the clothes. I think he must have commissioned something from Julius too, you know, Adnan, because I saw the same symbol on his wall. I meant to mention it to you.’

‘The metalworker?’ Harriet asked.

The brothers nodded.

‘And who is Nancy?’

Adnan lifted his shoulders. ‘My brother names all our automata, Mrs Westerman. He refers to the walking model we made last year, which was named after a young woman who refused to dance with Sami once in London.’

Harriet put her hand to her forehead. ‘I … Can you tell me more about this walking automaton? Who bought it?’ The two brothers frowned. It was a strange effect; Sami’s face was more rounded than Adnan’s, his nose smaller, but the frown was exactly the same. Harriet wondered how often her expressions or habits made it clear she was Rachel’s sister.

‘It grieves me to say, Mrs Westerman, we cannot tell you the name of the person who commissioned us,’ Adnan said. ‘We never met our client. All instructions came by letter, unsigned and by hand through one of the palace servants. We received a payment on instruction, and at the halfway point in our work, and then on completion.’

‘An unusual way of doing business,’ Harriet said.

‘Very,’ Adnan agreed, ‘and not an arrangement I would usually enter into, but I was too tempted by the idea of trying to build what I was asked to create in his letter, and the gold he gave me on account suggested he could pay for it.’

‘It was such a wonderful idea!’ Sami said. ‘An automaton, life-sized, who could dance. Only a madman like my brother would even attempt it, and only a genius like him could achieve it.’

Adnan looked a little embarrassed. Harriet sipped her tea. ‘How on earth did you manage it, Mr Al-Said? It sounds impossible.’

He lifted his hands. ‘Just as the writing boy you liked is the illusion of intelligence, Mrs Westerman, so the dancer is an illusion of willed movement. The figure is a woman, and she has but one dance, a slow minuet. She is wearing a long dress so you never see it, but in truth her feet do not leave the floor. It would be impossible for her to stand if they did.’ He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Like this,’ Sami said. He scrambled into the space between the workbenches and the shelves covered with faces, eyes and brass keys, then he stood very straight with one hand raised, the other at his waist and his nose in the air. Rachel laughed. He wrinkled his nose at her, then resumed the pose and took two slow rhythmic steps forward, his hand still raised as if holding his partner by the fingertips, but he held his foot very low and level over the floorboards. ‘Imagine that under my foot is a wheel,’ he said. ‘It appears as if my leg lifts and carries the foot forward.’ He tilted his head towards his imaginary partner and blinked.

Harriet shook her head. ‘Can she turn?’

Adnan nodded. ‘Have you ever skated on ice, Mrs Westerman?’

‘I have,’ she said.

‘The movement is similar.’ Sami continued his mime, turning as he slid over the wooden floor and took two steps the other way, then he dropped the pose and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, hunching his shoulders. ‘It was cruel, to have us build such a wonder then give her away where the world cannot admire her. Poor Nancy. I miss her.’

Adnan’s eyes were slightly clouded. ‘We shall build another dancer, Sami. We have all the designs — and the money, of course.’

‘We deserved a pension for that work. Though I admit,’ he smiled at Harriet, ‘the gold did help pull the sting a little.’

Harriet was looking at the leather folders piled at Adnan’s elbow. ‘May I see the designs? What did she look like?’

Sami clambered over the worktop and launched himself at a pile of his own papers. ‘Adnan’s designs of the wheels and levers will mean little to you, Mrs Westerman, but let me show you this …’

He became, briefly, a flurry of activity, sorting through his own piles of drawings and sketches, then drew one out. The paper showed the figure of a woman dancing, seen in profile, and another sketch showing her looking out of the paper back at the viewer. It was not a girl’s face or figure. Harriet would guess the woman to be a little younger than herself, and she was not beautiful, but pretty. Gentle. ‘Are these your work, Mr Al-Said?’