T. Boyle - Water Music

Fanny lay back and dreamed. The candle became the light of the sun, the room spun twice and suddenly she was in a deep lush canyon. Golden fish drifted through transparent pools, pleasure domes sprang up on precipices overlooking the sea, larks floated in the sky and the clouds pursed their lips and whispered nonsense rhymes in her ear. She dreamed. But the breath on her pillow was von Pölkler’s.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the surface. Brooks’ motive in getting Fanny out of London was purely compassionate— he meant to spare her the agony of her lover’s execution. The con artist’s death was a fait accompli. They’d done all they could. Now she must forget. But in point of fact, he hungered to stand at her side while the rope twitched and Ned Rise gagged his last. He burned for it; there was no scene in the world he’d rather witness. The whole thing was so deliciously morbid, so painfully exciting — the doomed lovers parted forever, torn from one another’s arms by the brooding implacable force of the hangman, the distraught heroine throwing herself on the corpse while the crowd casually remarked on the execution like drama critics strolling from the theater. “Aaaah, ‘ee was nothin’, this one. Remember Jack Tate? — kicked like a bleedin’ ‘orse for arf an hour and then made them ‘orrible noises in ‘is throat?” Brooks was titillated, no doubt about it. He desperately wanted to watch her watching the execution. But even more desperately, he was afraid of losing her. Once Ned Rise had passed beyond the pale she would no longer have any use for the Brooks fortune — or the Brooks proclivities. As soon as it hit her, she’d be gone. He knew it.

And so he dosed her with laudanum and hustled her off to Germany before she could have any real awareness of what was going on. Penniless, and unable to speak the language, she would be more than ever dependent upon him. And that was just what he wanted. Fanny Brunch was the most desirable woman he had ever laid eyes on — he was mad for her. She had the soft, pure, angelic sort of beauty that spoke to every fiber of his algolagniac’s heart. With her it wasn’t the mere momentary pleasure of sex, it was an ongoing process of erotic defilement, it was pissing in the pews, jerking off on the altar. She was made for him.

Germany was the obvious place to take her. With the war on, France was out. Ditto Italy. He thought of Greece, but the Mediterranean was nothing less than a floating battlefield — why risk it? No, Germany was the place. Fatherland of the few truly heroic men of the age — Goethe, Schelling, Tieck, Schiller, the Schlegels. And all of them gathered at Jena, the Athens of the modern age. It was too simple. They would travel up the Elbe, through Magdeburg, Halle and Weissenfels, and settle at Jena. He would write great poems that celebrated love, death and pain. He could have Goethe over to tea. Tell Schiller how wrong he was to have let Karl Moor give in — far better to be an outlaw, spitting in the face of bourgeois society. The thought of it — he, Adonais Brooks, an intimate of the great minds of his time, helping mold a canon of drama, poetry and philosophical speculation incandescent with scenes of pain and loss, windswept peaks and tortured youth, a canon of work that would once and for all lay to rest the precious claptrap they’d been heralding in England for the past fifty years. Brooks could feel himself teetering on the verge of a great and emotional future. Then he met von Pölkler.

“You must come out to the estate at Geesthacht,” the Margrave said. “Rest up for awhile.” The German tucked his lorgnette away and looked Brooks dead in the eye, as if he could see through to the inner man behind the flat blue eyes and hint of a smile. “I tink we haff alot in common.”

♦ ♦ ♦

As the weeks passed, each day more hopeless and humiliating than the last, Fanny lost the ability to care. About anything. Life, love, food, drink, sex, the functions of the body and mind. The only thing that pricked her interest was the blue bottle that stood on the shelf beside her bed. Laudanum helped her to dream, to forget what was happening to her, where she was, who these people were. Sex came like an avalanche, smothered in wine and opium. Sex with Brooks, von Pölkler, the girl in pigtails, beet-faced guests, a dog. Legs and arms flailed, smoke rose to the ceiling. Fanny reached for the blue bottle.

After three months at Geesthacht, she realized that she was pregnant. Strange things were happening to her body. She was sick before breakfast. Her liver was tender. Her blood no longer flowed in secret accord with the cycles of the moon. She reached for bottle and spoon, but before the glow came up she felt a stirring in some deep intuitive pocket of her mind, a burgeoning cellular knowledge that suddenly hit her with all the force of certainty: she was carrying Ned’s child. That final desperate night at Newgate came back to her in a flash of revelation, Ned driving at her with a frantic relentless fury as if he could somehow transcend his fate through the urgency of his lovemaking, while she lay there, sorrowing, cradling him in her arms as if he were a lost infant. She looked up at the stone walls of her apartment at Geesthacht. The drug was in her stomach, in her head. She leaned back on her pillow and smiled.

It was a boy, of course. Born on the twenty-fifth of September, 1798. At Geesthacht. Von Pölkler was delighted. He spoke of a system of education he had devised, a system that would inscribe the clean slate of the boy’s mind with precise, orderly strokes, a system that would allow him to achieve an intensely realized state of transcendent native freedom through the rigid application of drill and regimen. He would be instructed in the only two disciplines that mattered: philosophy and the martial arts. This was no ordinary boy, and he would have no ordinary education. No, he was destined to become a new man, a hero for the coming century, the Anglo-German Napoleon. Von Pölkler named the boy Karl. Privately, Fanny called him Ned.

Brooks viewed the whole thing with suspicion and distaste. While it was true that the child may have been his own, despite von Pölkler’s insistence to the contrary, the fact was that it deprived him of Fanny’s company much of the time. At first, of course, the prospect of Fanny’s motherhood excited him, and he did make an effort to explore the various erotic avenues that Madonna and child opened to him — balancing the baby’s cap on his erect member, suckling at the breast, strapping Fanny to the cradle and ravishing her from the rear, making love to a pair of village fräuleins dressed in diapers — but he soon grew bored with the whole thing. Gurgling, baby talk, rattles, the insufferable cuteness of it all. This wasn’t the way heroes lived. He became depressed. Stopped writing. Spent his time arranging cockfights or lying in bed with a bottle of laudanum and a fist-sized chunk of the Margrave’s oriental tobacco. He plumbed the depths of his host’s wine cellar, played billiards until he wore a hole in the felt. His eyes drooped, the beestung lips became so impossibly swollen he looked as if he were perpetually pouting over some imagined injustice, and he developed a habit of tugging at his missing ear. One night he and von Pölkler got stinking drunk and slit one another’s cheeks with a razor — strictly for cosmetic purposes. They wore their thin scars like chevrons.

♦ ♦ ♦

On the eve of the child’s third birthday, von Pölkler arranged a gala celebration: the boy would begin his formal education the following morning. The Mayor of Hamburg was invited, various local dignitaries and minor aristocrats, bankers and shopkeepers. Most declined the invitation, as a means of registering disapproval of the Margrave’s life-style. But those who did come were regaled with dancing, chamber music, a feast of roast suckling pig with plum sauce and Weinkraut, home-brewed black beer, flagons of wine and whatever else they had the imagination to desire. A select few were invited to join the Margrave in a lower chamber once used as a dungeon and still fitted out with all the accoutrements of bondage and torture. There they tasted French champagne, swallowed opium, stripped off their gowns and dinner jackets and let their impulses guide them.