Salamander (11 page)

– Things did not turn out that way, Flood said.

– Fortunately, they did not. I soon discovered I was not cut out to be another painted lackey, scurrying to the palace every morning to witness the awesome spectacle of the royal toilet. Dukes standing at attendance with towels, while others vied for the honour of holding his chamber pot. The great achievement of Versailles, I saw, was to make time turn in a never-ending circle around the sun of ceremony. But it was a false eternity, an illusion inviting its own demise. I turned away from it, and began to write. And since one cannot expect people to read a book of blank pages, I wrote a novel.

While the Abbé was telling his story, light flakes of snow had begun to fall. The two men looked at one another, shivered and went inside, laughing and brushing the snow from their hair.

– You must have overcome your dislike of print, Flood said. You know so many of the Count’s books so well.

– Of course, the Abbé said. Within every book there lies concealed a book of nothing. Don’t you sense it when you read
a page brimming with words? The vast gulf of emptiness beneath the frail net of letters. The ghostliness of the letters themselves. Giving a semblance of life to things and people who are really nothing. Nothing at all. No, it was the reading that mattered, I eventually understood, not whether the pages were blank or printed. The Mohammedans say that an hour of reading is one stolen from Paradise. To that perfect thought I can only add that an hour of writing gives one a foretaste of the other place.

– What are you working on now? Flood asked. To his surprise the Abbé’s face darkened.

– Don’t you know, Mr. Flood, that is the one question you must never ask a writer?

Irena was always the first member of the household to awaken. Long before the servants had begun their daily circumnavigations she would open her eyes. The sun would not yet be up, and since she had never overcome a childhood fear of the dark she would quickly light a candle.

This morning, as always, her bed was back in its chamber, motionless for the moment, and in the stillness she could listen to the rest of the castle. All around her, the clock ticked. Far below, the boilers rumbled. All sounded as it should.

She rose in her shift, pulled on a morning gown, and hurried on bare feet through the corridors, to a tall oak cabinet set into a niche. Slipping a small brass key from her pocket, she stepped up into the niche, unlocked the cabinet, swung open its narrow doors, and gazed upon the tarnished silver of her mother’s face.

When she was a little girl Irena had asked her father where
the poor Countess
was that the nurses often talked about in sad whispers. The Count told her that her mother had died bringing her into the world. On Irena’s twelfth birthday he brought her to this cabinet and revealed his gift, the first of the automatons fashioned by the Venetian metallurgist: a mother of polished steel and brass. The creature shuddered to life, whirring like a startled pheasant, tilted forward, and spread its arms wide to take the girl into its embrace. Irena screamed, bolted in terror, and could not be made to go near the thing again, despite her father’s command that she do so. Eventually the Count locked the automaton away and forgot about it, and only then, much later, did she come to the niche on her own, when no one else was there to see her. She opened the cabinet, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to be caught by these cold, metallic limbs.

Now it was a ritual for her, even though, after years of neglect, the automaton’s inner workings had rusted and the arms no longer moved when the cabinet was opened. Irena said nothing to her father, not wanting him to know about her secret morning visitation.

She leaned forward and kissed the gleaming forehead, held the immobile hands in hers and felt the warmth of her own body flowing almost imperceptibly into the icy metal, until she could no longer tell where she began and the machine ended. She wondered why it was not possible for that warmth to bring a pink flush of life to cold metal, to light a spark in eyes of glass, as her father had tried to do with the replica of Ludwig. On mornings like this she would stay as long as she dared, listening to her own heart beat against the automaton’s unyielding skin, until she heard the clanking of pots and dishes from far below as the cooks began their day.

And the printer. She closed her eyes and heard it, barely audible amid the clatter of the awaking castle, but there nonetheless, running on its own time, apart from her father’s clocked and precise system. The creak of the press. She felt her heart quicken, and smiled. There was no hiding it from herself here. She would be seeing him soon, when she brought him more of the books he requested. She wondered why his scroll had disturbed her so much. Or perhaps it was his obvious pleasure at having created the thing. Just like her father when he posed a particularly difficult riddle.

– She is beautiful. The image of her daughter.

The Abbé stood just below the niche, his hands clasped behind his back.

– This is not my mother, Abbé Ezequiel.

– But I gather it was intended as a kind of surrogate.

Irena looked away.

– I see I’ve intruded upon your privacy, the Abbé said with a bow, and I will take my leave.

– No, said Irena, swinging shut the doors of the cabinet. You’ve reminded me I should be getting to work.

– Well, at the very least please forgive my crude attempt at flattery. When a man admires a woman, such trite phrases are woefully inappropriate, are they not?

– There was no harm done.

He bent his head.

– You are very gracious, Countess. May I tell you what I admire in you?

– This will be a more refined attempt at flattery, then?

The Abbé laughed.

– It is so refreshing, he said, to talk to someone like you. Do
you know, you must be the only woman I’ve met in my travels who is capable of more than rehearsed coquetry.

– I doubt that. Perhaps you did not give those women enough time. To show you who they really were.

– Well, with you, may I say, very little time was needed. I saw enough right away to incline me to stay and learn more.

– I’m glad. But now I should be getting on with my chores …

The Abbé stepped forward.

– At the risk of offence, let me tell you, Countess, what it is I’ve learned. You are most pleasing to look upon, but vastly more important, you are the most intelligent woman I have ever met. If my awkward declaration offends, let me excuse myself by admitting that I would be more at ease with a woman whose mind did not continually surprise me. And yours does. Surprises and delights me, challenges me. I can only confess that you’ve crumbled all my defences.

Irena locked the cabinet doors. She turned to face the Abbé.

– It wasn’t a planned attack, she said coldly. I’ve enjoyed the conversations we’ve had, certainly …

– That is precisely the point, the Abbé said. We’ve begun without the usual tedious moves and countermoves.

– Begun what?

– You and I, Countess, have the opportunity to be what few men and women dare to be in this painted, mercenary age.

– And what is that?

– Friends.

– We are that already, I had thought.

– True friends who speak candidly to one another, keeping nothing back. Baring their hearts.

– Abbé Ezequiel …

– Countess, I am speaking of feelings that rise above our differences in other matters. Believe me, I am well aware of your reservations concerning the ideas put forth in my novel.

– Tell me, then, do you believe your own theory of the soul?

– Were I not here, your father would find someone else to encourage him. Like the Englishman, for example. Perhaps you should ask Mr. Flood how long he plans to spend trying to print an infinite book.

– It is not my place.

– I agree. This is not your place at all.

He turned and walked to the nearest window.

– You belong out there, he said. In Paris, Vienna, Milan. Your place is among men and women who think and act and change the world, not here in this madhouse.

– That is not what I meant, Irena said.

– Then let me state more plainly what I meant, the Abbé said, facing her again. I have inherited my brother’s estate in Quebec, and I must return there before the government or the Church tries to appropriate it. So as you see, I have no intention of further encouraging your father’s dreams. On the contrary, I have dreams of my own. Dreams which can only become reality with your help.

– I don’t understand.

The Abbé stepped up to Irena and took her hand.

– Countess, in the months I’ve spent here I have come to see that with you as my confidante, my intellectual sparring partner, my severest critic, I might accomplish a truly great work.

Gently, Irena slid her hand free of the Abbé’s grip.

– Is this a declaration of your feelings, Abbé Ezequiel, or are you simply looking for an editor?

The Abbé frowned.

– I am thinking of a coupling of minds, yes. But I also dare to hope our concord would be ratified as often as possible with communion of a more physical nature.

– Abbé, you are a handsome man, and a fine writer. But as any reader will tell you, there’s no accounting for taste.

The Abbé stepped back. Muscles pulsed in his jaw.

– This has nothing to do with taste, he said, his voice trembling. I am speaking of love. The divine madness.

Irena lowered her eyes.

– I am truly sorry, but if it is a divine madness, I do not share it.

The Abbé recovered himself, took a deep breath, and bowed.

– So it must be. To spare you any further embarrassment I will leave for Vienna this very afternoon.

– You tell me, Irena said, that you cherish honesty above all. I am only telling you what I think you already know. That this is not really about me.

She turned from him and locked the cabinet. The Abbé stared at her.

– You mean to imply, he said slowly, that my regard for you is feigned. Or perhaps you think that I offer you this chance for freedom out of pity.

Irena faced him, an angry flush darkening her pale features.

– Pity?

– A writer learns to be observant. I’ve watched you. The way you walk. The way you rise from a chair. I’m curious to know how old you were when the disease struck that crippled you.

Irena slipped the key back into her pocket. She stepped down from the niche.

– No, I don’t think you pity me. I think you were looking to distract yourself from something else, something that you hoped I might help you forget, at least for a while.

– What a novel idea. Have you mentioned it to your friend the printer? I’m sure he will be impressed, as he always is, with your keen insights.

– I don’t know what it is you really want, Abbé Ezequiel, but I sincerely hope you find it. You seem to me to be a very unhappy man.

He closed one eye and peered with the other through the narrow glass panes. He could see her, sitting motionless at a table, writing. She was wearing spectacles. He had not known she wore spectacles.

His blunt fingers awkwardly plucked at the tiny latch and finally succeeded in opening the window. Carefully he reached in a hand and gently touched the little porcelain figurine.

He withdrew his hand and stepped back from the display case, marvelling and strangely saddened at the same time. The entire castle, in miniature, down to the last detail. There was even a crank at the base of the model for setting its walls and floors in motion.

He froze, suddenly aware that something around him had changed. He had been so absorbed in the miniature that he had forgotten the real thing, and in a moment he realized that the castle had
stopped
. The walls, the floors, the roving furniture frozen and silent. The stillness sent a tremor of dread through him, as though he had just been told someone had died.

He hurried to the edge of the gallery, fighting the urge to
call out and see if anyone was there to answer. On the level below him, Irena was kneeling on the bare floor of an aisle between two shelves, holding a large cloth-bound book, her gown spread around her like a cataract of pale blue silk. At first Flood imagined that she too, like the castle, had somehow come to a halt. Then her hand stirred, turned a page, came to rest again. The look on her face was one of guileless concentration.