Salamander (4 page)

Irena recovered, but the legacy of the illness, or the cure, was a weakened spine that left her unable to hold herself upright. Without the support of a pillow or someone’s arm she would collapse like a cloth doll. Eventually the Count had the girl fitted with a corset of steel bands, hammered into a poised, properly feminine shape by the castle blacksmith.

It was also at this time that the Count realized Irena was old enough to read and write, and so might be of some use to him
in his never-ending work. One morning he had her brought to his study.

He handed her a small Bible.

Read some of that
.

Yes, Father
.

She opened the book and then looked up.

What shall I read?

What you find there
.

He listened while she read from Deuteronomy, with quiet confidence, never once faltering.
The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law…
. He stopped her after a few minutes and gestured to the quill, inkhorn, and paper that sat on his desk.

Now write it out
.

She set the Bible down, picked up the quill, dipped it in ink and began to write. After a moment he noticed that she was not looking at the book.

You know the entire passage by heart
.

Yes, Father
.

You must have read it before
.

No
.

He tested her and found that she was telling the truth. And so Irena became the permanent replacement for the string of secretaries who had attempted to live up to the Count’s expectations and had either been dismissed in a downpour of abuse or had seen such a moment coming and fled in the night.

A quiet, serious child, Irena had, not surprisingly, grown into a quiet, serious young woman. She did not greatly resemble her mother, the Count was relieved to see. The memory of the beautiful young woman to whom he had scarcely spoken
during the long years of his campaigning tormented him. Irena had the same thick russet hair tinged with gold, but her eyes were sea-green rather than topaz, and her face, no matter how closely he scrutinized it while she wrote the letters he dictated, remained out of focus, difficult to see.

When she was seventeen, Irena accompanied her father on one of his infrequent visits to the Imperial Court. No matrimonial offers materialized, but at a grand ball an elderly Hungarian noblewoman took Irena aside and told her to be thankful for her unusual looks.

Ours is the sort of beauty that attracts unusual men, who are of course the only men worth knowing
.

In his lucid moments the Count was aware that Irena’s unmarried state had more to do with the quality of the young men who were dragged by their avaricious fathers to the castle in the hope of a hefty dowry. Not one of these potential husbands read anything other than the numbers on playing cards, and that, in Irena’s eyes, was a fatal defect. They talked of hunting, horses, and war, and when these thin rivulets of conversation dried up, they talked not at all.

In the end, when it came to his only surviving child, the Count found himself powerless to enforce his will, and so Irena remained unmarried at the worrisome age of twenty-four.

She was rarely seen without a book in hand, and in the evenings the Count would often find her motionless near a lamp or a candle, stealing a quiet moment of reading before resuming her unending duties.
My little moth
, he whispered to her affectionately when he found her like this.
Always hovering near the light
.

As the library grew, Irena submitted her report on the
shipments of books to her father, who approved or rejected each item and then allowed Irena to arrange the chosen few on the shelves, according to his deliberately arcane bibliographic system.

Almost every day shipments of books arrived from near and far. While unpacking a crate sent from Boston, Irena discovered that one of the books had been hollowed out inside, and within, another smaller book lay nested. The outermost cover was engraved with a title.

A Conjectural Treatise on Political Economy
.

Irena opened the cover of the inner book, and found within its cavity yet another book even smaller, and within it, another, and yet another within that, reminding her of the dolls-within-dolls crafted by the local village toymaker. The innermost volume, its soft leather cover slightly curled, rested snugly in her palm like a tiny seashell. Only with the aid of a magnifying glass was she able to decipher the single sentence which made up the entire content of the smallest book.

The great do devour the little
.

Dutifully Irena took this object of ingenious trickery to her father.

It’s a joke, a pun, a riddle
, he cried.
But not even the hairsplitters from the Imperial Court would disqualify it as an actual, functioning book
.

Irena handed her father the printer’s catalogue, where his other books, both finished and projected, were described.

The Count turned the pages with an impatient flick of his finger, his eyes darting up and down the neat columns of print.

My magnifying glass, quickly
, the Count said.

On the last page of the
Conjectural Treatise
he discovered the microscopic publisher’s imprint, under the device of a phoenix amid flames.

Write to this fellow
, the Count ordered his daughter.
We must bring him here
.

The river was as still as glass on the wintry night that Nicholas Flood approached the island. The castle, perched on its slick wet rock, seemed to ripple like a watery reflection in the heated air from the barge’s brazier, so that it looked to Flood as though reflection and castle had changed places.

He felt his breast pocket, where he kept the letter Countess Irena had written to him, folded in a cream-coloured envelope with a seal of red wax bearing the impression of the Count’s odd coat of arms, a ribbon twisted into a loose knot above two crossed swords.

Dusting the snow off his hat, Flood jumped from the deck of the barge and climbed the wide stairs to the portico, his ascent watched from both sides by a row of winged stone lions with the faces of women.

He looked back once at the Slovak boatmen already busy
unloading the crates of his equipment onto the pier. He had travelled with them for days up the placid Danube and then the foaming, sinuous Vah. Not knowing a word of their language, he had shared their leathery bread and thin, over-peppered cabbage soup, hummed along to the sad and lovely melodies they sang in the evenings. They had not been curious about his unmarked crates, and now hard at work ridding the barge of them, the men did not spare him a glance. By climbing these stairs he had vanished to another plane of existence.

The Countess Irena met him in front of the doors with what she told him was the traditional offering to favoured guests, a glass of
slivovice
and a kiss of welcome. The colourless plum liquor burned pleasantly as it slid into his belly, warming his chilled and weary body. But the brief touch of this young noblewoman’s lips left his wind-scoured cheek throbbing with another sort of heat. Irena herself seemed undisturbed by this sudden intimacy, and calmly ordered the clustered servants to see to Flood’s baggage.
That is how she kisses every guest
, he decided.

– How was your journey? she asked him in faltering English as they passed into the torchlit entrance hall. Their shadows rose above them into a loft of darkness.

– Uneventful, Flood answered. The way I like them.

He did not speak of the dreary voyage in the Count’s strange ship, an antiquated argosy that had taken him circuitously by sea to the mouth of the Danube. It was less dangerous and less costly, the ship’s captain had explained, to pass through the eye of the Ottoman Empire than to attempt an overland journey across the plague-stricken, robber-haunted roads of the continent. The Count, he also learned, was something of an inventor and had installed a system of steam-driven winches
that controlled the braces and the halyards. This meant that only a skeleton crew was needed to man the ship, and so Flood spent most of the journey in solitude, feeling as though he were sailing alone to the end of the world.

– My father has shut down the castle’s machinery for the night, Irena said.

She led Flood through a dark and tortuous passageway where votive candles glimmered from niches in the walls. Irena’s blue silk gown rippled in the changeable light like water. They climbed a curving staircase which caused Flood to stumble. When he glanced down at his feet he saw the reason: the height and width of each stair was decreasing as they ascended.

They went along another tunnel of fitfully illuminated blackness. When Irena spoke next she turned to look at him, her pale aquamarine eyes reflecting the candlelight. She seemed to him like one of the flames taken human form.

– My father wishes you to be comfortable, she said. Be prepared, however, for a few surprises in the morning.

They had apparently arrived at his chamber, although he had not noticed a doorway and saw only a bed and the indistinct shapes of panelled walls.

– May you have a restful night, Irena said. She lit the torch in the sconce attached to one of the bedposts and left him.

Even after Flood had undressed and sunk with relief into the depths of his vast, chilly bed, he kept putting a hand to his cheek in amazement. Finally he sat up, dug her letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and smoothed out its soft creases.

He had answered her letter on an impulse. He hadn’t needed to. His painstakingly crafted, expensive novelties sold well, leaving him with no desire to crank out the heaps of pamphlets, travelogues, and fat novels that a growing reading public clamoured for. Every year he sent a catalogue to the Frankfurt book fair, boasting of new wonders to come. Impossible books that he could not imagine creating. And yet somehow he always found a way to turn his mad ideas into actual books that could be held in the hand.

No, he hadn’t needed to come. But here he was. Transported a thousand miles from home by a letter.

Who was she?
he had wondered the day he first read her elegant greeting. To conjure up a Bohemian countess, he resorted to the little he knew of the nobility, a patchwork of fact and conjecture that had been sewn together more out of reading than experience. From the remembrance of some of his more salacious commissions he constructed a haughty duchess, a soft white body armoured in boned taffeta. A stabbing glance of disdain giving way to purrs of delight once blood had been drawn.

He folded the letter, tucked it back in its envelope, and blew out the candle.

Lying awake in the dark, Flood thought back to what she had said about the castle’s machinery. He remembered the bizarre ship, with its wheezing steam pipes and squealing pulleys, and he guessed that something similar awaited him in the morning. Closing his eyes and squirming deeper into the bedclothes, he remembered with drowsy amusement how
soundly he had slept on that voyage, lulled by the ever-present vibration of the machines. Before he left London he had consulted Bostridge’s
New Orthographical Atlas
for the location of the River Vah and found it at last, after his finger had made a meandering peregrination over mountain ranges and through forests,
there
, an inky rivulet issuing from the remote Carpathians. The nearest large place name on the map, he had been delighted to see, was the city of Pressburg. This seemed a good omen, although the Count’s ship, at his first glimpse of it on the Thames dockside, dampened his enthusiasm for the adventure and gave him his first doubts.

He closed his eyes, exhaustion plunging him swiftly towards sleep. Through the halls of his dreams stalked a red-haired young woman in a white shift. He followed her down a tunnel lined with sphinxes, while all around them some vast hidden engine rumbled and throbbed.