The Pierced Heart: A Novel (2 page)

After some two hours the carriage slows, and a few minutes later Charles is jolted from his reverie by the sound of hooves on cobbles. A glance outside reveals that they’ve come to a halt before a yellow stucco-faced building, hard by an elaborate ironwork gate giving out over fields now grey in heavy rain. He opens the door, surprised to find Castle Reisenberg so unassuming, but it takes no more than a minute for him to realise his mistake: This building is nothing more than a farmstead, and their stop no more than a momentary pause. But any chance for air and movement is welcome after so many hours constrained. Charles leaps from the carriage and walks out into the wet, much to the amused disdain of several small boys playing with a little grey dog on the farther side of the yard, where wine barrels are
stacked under the open barn and mounds of seasoned timber await the cooper’s croze. There are chickens picking at the grass between the cobbles, and the air smells of wood-smoke. The rain is now trickling down the back of his neck so he turns and makes his way to the door of the house, where the coachman is waiting to show him down the low vaulted passage to a room with a table laid before a fire, and a metal tureen warming on the hearth. The farmer’s wife is withdrawn and wary, and will not meet his eye as she ladles the meat onto his dish, but the food is hot and surprisingly appetising. Some sort of stew, clearly, but flavoured with a dry peppery spice he cannot name. He makes a half-hearted attempt to ask her what it is called—knowing full well she cannot possibly speak English—and is not much the wiser when she mutters something that sounds like “
paprikash
,” before turning to poke the already roaring fire. Charles has by now drained the flagon of rough red wine she had placed by his plate, and gets to his feet to find the privy: If dinner cannot wait for their destination, they must have a good deal more than an hour’s road ahead of them. The journey must have tired him more than he realised, because for once in his life he takes a wrong turn on his way back and finds himself on the other side of the yard, where he can see the coachman and an elderly thickset man in a leather apron talking in lowered but earnest voices behind the coach, as two stable-boys back new horses into the shafts. If he had stayed in the kitchen they would have been screened from his view, but from where he is now Charles can see the urgency of the coachman’s gestures, and the unease on the farmer’s face. Something has clearly unsettled the old man, and Charles sees him cross himself. Intrigued but not unduly alarmed, Charles strides out towards them, intending to thank his host with a handshake and one or two of the kreuzer coins he acquired in Prague, but the man starts at the sight of him and retreats at once to the farm door without a backwards glance. Charles looks to the coachman but he, too, is not meeting his gaze. Charles shrugs, storing the incident away for his first letter home to his uncle Maddox. Then he sets a foot squarely on the carriage step and swings up into his seat.

The sun is already setting and the temperature is dropping fast, and Charles appreciates, now, both the blankets and the brandy he had derided in the warmth of a Viennese afternoon. As they pull away down to the main road the rain begins again, but now it is a thin freezing miasma that speckles the carriage glass and chills the air to ice. It is soon too dark to discern much beyond the faint glow cast by the coachman’s lamp, and Charles can only guess at the lay of the land about them by the scattered lights visible on distant hills, clustered like constellations beneath the strange stars. And as the hours drag by and the sound of the hooves clatters monotonously on, Charles is lulled into that hallucinatory half sleep that dries the mouth, and hollows the eyes, and meddles memory with mirage. He will wonder, afterwards, if it was the effect of the wine, or the oddly metallic-tasting brandy he downed too fast, and if he was dreaming or deluded when he glimpsed the flicker of pale blue lights advancing and receding through the trees; whether the howling in his head was merely farm dogs driven mad by foxes, and not the black-pelted wolves he thought he saw ringed about the road, panting and steaming as the horses reared in terror and his own heart battered against his bones. And then as the beasts closed in and he felt their rank breath hot on his skin—as he heard his own voice crying out aloud, did he really see the pack fall suddenly back into the darkness, whimpering and craven before a faceless figure silhouetted against the sky, and a hand of silent power raised against the moon?

“
Herr Maddox! Herr Maddox!
”

Charles starts up and looks about him wild-eyed. The coachman is staring at him through the window, and Charles reaches over and winds it down, all too aware that his hands are trembling. The man looks at him narrowly, then signals for him to get out of the coach. The
sky is clear now, and the moon high above the forest, but of man or wolf or even dog, there is no sign. The coachman is speaking to him again, and from his gestures and pointing fingers Charles eventually realises that they have stopped at the head of a sharp decline, and the man wants him to walk down to help spare the horses. For the next half an hour Charles trudges behind the coach as the horses slither and jerk in the mud, and the rain collected in the wheel-ruts flickers ghastly reflections up onto the overhanging trees. As his ears become attuned to the silence, Charles can hear small animals moving in the dark, and once, he is sure, a deer plunging away into the shadows. Then as the near horse suddenly loses its footing and the harness clatters against the side of the coach, a huge white owl swoops noiselessly down, barely a wing tip away, ghostly with its wraith-enormous eyes.

The lower they descend the colder it becomes, and the damp air thickens with tendrils of mist that hang in the air like flaws in ice. And then they turn a final bend and the trees open to reveal the long black curve of the Danube, glittering in the moonlight. The coachman brings the horses to a halt and opens the door for his tired and shivering passenger. The last stretch of the journey follows the bend of the river along a wide and wooded shoreline until Charles sees a high promontory jutting out into the water, and above it an immense baroque
schloss
standing foursquare, its steep roof soaring to a tiered tower crowned by an onion dome. A few minutes later they are approaching a narrow stone causeway, barely wider than the carriage, which ascends forty feet or more to a vast arch cut directly into the cliff, overlooked on either side by the circular turrets of the gatehouse above. Here and there lamps are burning in the turret windows, but when they emerge on the other side of the archway Charles can see not one single light in all the castle’s smooth and closed façade.

The archway opens onto a paved courtyard where the castle overlooks the river, dropping sheer below. The carriage comes to a stop by a huge
oak door studded with nails and surmounted by a weathered stone crest. A smaller door has been cut into the wood, which puts Charles suddenly in mind of the college gates he saw in Oxford, and as the coachman unstraps his bag and lifts it down, the inner door opens. Charles is not sure, at first, if he is in the presence of his host, but when the figure in the doorway clears his throat and welcomes him softly in excellent though heavily accented English, he is no longer in any doubt.

With all that we will discover of this man—and all he will be to this story—we will pause, here, a moment and allow Charles’s first impressions to have full sway. So what is it he now sees, as the high clouds shred across the moon, and the wind echoes wildly about the high walls? A tall man, taller than Charles in fact, if he were not slightly stooped. A long dark coat of some heavy matte material that reflects no light. An antique lamp swinging from one hand, the wick cut low and the flame guttering. A high forehead and thin silver hair wisped about the ears. Yet these are but details. What draws and holds the gaze, is his face. The extraordinary pale eyes, heavy-lidded and ashen-lashed. The head too small—surely—for a man of such a height, and the bones of the skull painfully visible under skin stretched so white Charles wonders for a moment if the Baron is an albino. And when he holds out his hand the fingers Charles takes briefly in his own are as wan as a corpse an hour old.

Charles bows. “Freiherr Von Reisenberg.”

“I am pleased to welcome you to my home, Herr Maddox,” the Baron replies, his voice still low, as if he suffers from the night air. “I know you come here on a visit of business, but I hope, nonetheless, that you will lack nothing while you are with us, and that when you come to leave, you will take with you all that you come here to seek.”

It is no doubt the result of learning the language in academic fashion
and rarely speaking it, but the formality of the Baron’s speech has a curiously distancing effect, and as Charles follows him into the lofty stone-paved hall it is as if those few paces across the threshold have borne him centuries back. Here, as outside, no lights are burning, and in the weak glow of the silver lamp Charles wonders again, with a jerk of unease, if his eyes are once more deceiving him, for as the swing of the lantern throws shadows like blackened branches spiking across the walls it seems for all the world as if the great room has been built inside the forest that presses close upon the promontory on every side. And he is sure—
sure
this time—that he can see the glitter of animal eyes, and the shape of figures in the darkness, hunched and hooded—

He checks his pace a moment, but the Baron does not turn or slow, and as he rounds a corner ahead and the dark pours back, Charles makes haste to catch him up. They follow a narrow passage to a flight of steps, then ascend a long spiral stair of worn and pitted stone, and Charles finds himself at last, breathless with the climb and more than a little unnerved, in a small, windowless octagonal room ringed by bookshelves and lit only by the fire in the grate. A door opposite stands open onto a bedroom where a great carved four-poster has been warmed and turned, and a bottle of Tokay wine and a plate of cold cuts and cheese is awaiting him.

“I beg you to excuse me,” says the Baron, turning to face him. The flames cast a golden glow about his features, but the effect is oddly artificial—like a black-and-white film wrongly re-coloured.

“I have myself already dined,” he continues, “and will not, therefore, join you. I am cognisant, likewise, that you have had a long journey, and would no doubt prefer to sup in privacy, and retire at a time of your own choosing. I anticipate much pleasure in making your acquaintance, but will reserve that gratification for the morrow, when you will be rested. Should there be any comfort I have omitted to provide, do not scruple to ring for one of the servants. They have been
instructed to assist you in all you require. And now, if I may, I will bid you good night.”

And with that he bows once more, and retires. The air in the room swirls, then settles, leaving a faint scent of something acidic, chemical. Charles turns up the lamp, and starts to wander about the room as he discards his layers of clothes. The shelves are stacked with scientific books and journals, most of them in German, but a surprising number in English, as well as French. There are books of geology and botany, chemistry and metallurgy, physics and cosmology, as well as a large section—most of these in German—on human anatomy and physiology. Charles pulls out a volume or two in English and goes to place them by the bed. Then he sits down at the small table and starts upon his food.

The following morning he wakes late. It is the first time in weeks that he has not dreamed of her—the woman whose face he cannot recall without shame, and the sick falter of a terrible self-reproach. The woman who served in his uncle’s kitchen and shared—however briefly—Charles’s bed. The woman who would have borne his child, only Charles did not know that until it was far too late, and both mother and unborn baby were dying before his eyes. He cannot summon Molly now on any day but that last, as her body slipped into oblivion and her eyes swam with tears of incomprehension and despair while her blood ran cold on the freezing stone floor. And as for that other face—his child’s—it hovers at the fringes of his unconscious, ever present, but never fully seen, never quite close enough for his dreaming hand to reach.

But last night, he did not dream, and now he lies staring at the ceiling in blank terror, utterly unaware of where he is. Then his eye lights on the coat hooked over the back of the chair, and when he reaches out a hand he finds the old copy of the
Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London
he fell asleep over the night before, having tried—and failed—to decipher the tiny annotations pencilled thick about an article titled “On the Mutual Relations of the Vital and Physical Forces,” by one William B. Carpenter, MD, FRS. He sits up and realises that the fire that should have died by now is bright and well stoked, and the table that bore an empty bottle and the remains of his supper now carries a tray of breakfast and a pot of coffee. Someone has been into the room while he was sleeping, and Charles looks quickly about him—a reflex he immediately recognises to be ridiculous, since there is clearly no-one there now. He disentangles himself from his bedding, slightly pink about the cheeks at what the maid might have seen, and makes his way to the washstand, where he douses his head and neck in water and looks about for a mirror. Which, rather oddly, he cannot find, either there, or anywhere else in the room. He shaves as best he can without one, since it’s not an article he ever carries with him, then dresses and pours himself a cup of hot thick black coffee before going over to open the shutters, scratching absent-mindedly all the while at a little raw patch on his neck. The room, he finds, has a view of the river and the wooded bank beyond, and from his elevated eyrie he can see the cormorants on the water wheeling and squawking in the gusting wind, and three storeys down the creeper-covered wall, the paved courtyard before the castle door, where a lad in a red cap is carrying what looks like a plate of offal down towards the gate. There’s a small vessel buffeting the river current, but the boat and the boy are the only signs of human habitation visible for miles. Charles turns away and sits down to his breakfast, a little concerned at how much of the day has already gone. Half an hour later he emerges from his room and makes his way downstairs. At the foot of the spiral steps he finds an archway opening onto a gallery that rings three sides of the hall. One part of last night’s strangeness, at least, is now explained: The branching shadows Charles saw in the gloom were cast by nothing more uncanny than the antlers and ancient weaponry fixed around the pale walls, and the eyes in the darkness no more than glass reflections from the stuffed heads of huge long-dead dogs, their teeth
bared in a permanent vicious snarl. And as for the figures he glimpsed lurking in the shadows, he sees now, with a quick snort at his own idiocy, that they were only suits of armour, assembled for battle about empty air.