The Prisoner's Dilemma (5 page)

‘Elizabeth. Please tell Lord Dunbeath's messenger that I am obliged to travel south to the Borders for a short time but that I shall come up to Caithness when I am free after that.'

He thought for a moment.

‘Please have him pass on my compliments to the earl and let him know that I should be with him in a month or so to play his new game with him.'

* * * 

James McLeish had walked to a high point in the dunes before he turned to look back at the lighted observatory. By moving away he had given himself a better angle from which he could see some of the room and he now watched as Dunbeath's head moved about it, bending forward occasionally as if searching a table top.

Was he looking for something, James thought bitterly to himself? A telescope, perhaps? His lips moved in a muttered vow as he looked again at Dunbeath.

‘You bastard. I shall never forget you. Never. Not a day nor an hour will go by that I shall not be thinking of you. Believe me, the time will come when I shall pay you out in your own coin. Though I may have to wait fifty years, you will know me yet.'

Then he turned and walked back towards the village.

* * * 

Elizabeth tripped briskly back to where Gordon McKay was finishing the supper she'd given him and passed on the reply that he should take back to the Castle of Beath the following morning. She then returned to the dining room with the port and fruit and removed the cloth.

David Hume and his new friend sat in a comfortable silence as they cracked walnuts and sipped their port. These were the moments that Hume treasured most. To sit with a questioning and intelligent companion and press each other on the workings of the human mind was the greatest of his many pleasures. He looked at Adam Smith's ingenuous face, apparently turning over some stray thought in his mind. He looked at the good fire in the grate as it flickered its frantic shadows over the daub green of the panelling. He saw the deep red of the port, the peel of the oranges where the long loops had fallen amongst the dark shells of the nuts. He saw the light catching his fine crystal and the candles the colour of aged beef fat, all set against the patina of the table's surface. He loved these scenes with their rich palette of soft tones. They reminded him of the paintings of the Flemish masters that he had studied so closely in France and he saw in them all the flashes of insight and dark mysteries that so fascinated him when he looked at the twists and turns of human nature.

Adam Smith broke the silence.

‘This Earl of Dunbeath, Mr Hume, did you know him well at the university?'

Hume nodded.

‘Neither of us was there for long but indeed there was a time when I would have said I knew him as well as any. He was a great trial to his professors. A very fine mind indeed, but a troubled one. No doubt you know he is the clan chief of the Urquhain? A strange tribe of men they are too. He was much affected by the curse he had inherited from his ancestors, a great weakness of character known as the Urquhain Rage, a mania that was much admired in battle but leads to trouble in peace. Many people view it as little more than arrogance and impatience, however, and I'm afraid it's true that my friend suffers greatly from both.

‘You'll have heard of the family, of course, hugely rich but constantly at war with the world. And themselves. The earl hadn't inherited when I knew him. He was known as the Master
of Somewhere-or-Other, some ancient title, and he was as wild as they come. There was much drinking and fighting, I'm afraid, and the authorities despaired of him. For a time he was brought to a calmer state by the daughter of one of his tutors but she rejected him and this seemed to bring on some kind of mental collapse. He went back to his family and never returned to the university. I left soon afterwards myself.

‘A few years ago I heard that his father had died and that he'd inherited. And then no word but a series of sad rumours about his increasing bitterness and isolation. He retired to a gloomy castle he has in the far north of Caithness, the old family seat. Apparently he lives there alone and without servants. The richest man in Scotland and no servants! He is never seen at his other houses. God knows there are enough of them – many of them have come through the fabulous marriages the Urquhain have always made. Glenlochlan is his. And the great house at Nairn. That huge palace you'll no doubt know at the far end of the Royal Mile, near to Holyrood, that is an Urquhain house too. A great mansion in St James's in London, of course. All staffed, yet he never goes to any of them. His factors' letters go unanswered and the estates, some people say they run to two hundred thousand acres, are all in a sorry state.'

Adam Smith had listened to Hume's story with great interest.

‘I have heard something of this earl. Is he not involved with astronomy?'

‘Involved, Mr Smith?' replied Hume. ‘He's obsessed. It is his ambition to unlock the clockwork of the universe. He intends to be the first person to accurately determine longitude at sea. In the process he is set on winning the greatest scientific prize of this and, I'd wager, any other generation, the secret of navigation.'

‘And no doubt win the Government's Longitude Prize,' said Smith drily, ‘and the £20,000 that goes with it.'

‘Very true, Mr Smith, very true. But the Prize means much
more to him than the money. Dunbeath must be worth twenty times that already. No, the real prize for him is glory. Glory for himself, glory for the Urquhain clan and glory for Scotland. I never met a man with a greater dislike of the English. I know Dunbeath and I know he won't rest until he's won this prize. He can see a day when the start point for all navigation, the prime meridian, will run through the home city of the person that solves the problem. And for Dunbeath that has to be Edinburgh. It would be where East meets West, where half the world shakes hands with the other. Where else should that be but Edinburgh, the greatest centre of learning of our age? He would rather die than see the honour go to London.'

Smith laughed for the first time that evening.

‘How very, very interesting. I look forward to hearing about your visit and Lord Dunbeath's game. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to write to me while you're there?'

‘I most certainly shall,' replied David Hume, raising his glass to his new friend. ‘You have my word on that.'

If the winter was harsh at the Castle of Beath this February, the thermometer was yet lower still, fifteen hundred nautical miles away in the south eastern Baltic, and it was there that the port of Königsberg lay huddled under a heavy blanket of snow.

Snow, rain or fine, however, trade was the lifeblood of the great city and trade would flow through its veins whatever the heavens might bring. The port sat on the banks of the mighty River Pregel and this great waterway washed around the two islands that formed the centre of the city before it drained into the vastness of the Frisches Haff, the more westerly of the two lagoons that connected Königsberg to the coast. From this enormous lake, ships would pass through a narrow gap in the long sandy spits that enclosed the lagoon, and from there out into the Baltic. It was this extraordinary natural position that gave Königsberg the most blessed of its attributes for it ensured that the port was ice free all year round. Unsurprisingly the city fathers took full advantage of this, and as Prussia's merchant elite, they made certain that the great trading centre was open for business at all times. Now, in this fierce winter, teams of men could be seen labouring around the clock to clear snow from the roads and lanes that led to the quays.

The people of Königsberg were as proud of the city's past greatness as they were of its current prosperity. For centuries it had been the capital of the monastic state of the Teutonic order, and although successive port masters had repeatedly modernised the warehouses and wharves that lined the riverbanks, the burghers themselves preferred to leave unchanged the extraordinary medieval heart of the city.

Three men now walked away from the forest of masts at the main quay and headed towards this ancient centre. They made their way across the first of the famous seven bridges that connected the islands to the mainland, and from there on
towards the Great Square, their bodies hunched against the harsh north-easterly that blew down from the Gulf of Finland. Slowly they passed the baroque beauty of the Marienkirche, then crossed the square itself and turned with relief into the relative shelter of the warren of ancient streets beside the Rathaus, the magnificent City Hall.

Two men flanked a far larger man that walked between them, padding along with a strangely deliberate tread, deep in thought. The outer two had the air of an escort although they wore the sailors' standard clothing of a thick jacket and heavy sea boots. Like so many of their kind on the quayside, they rolled unevenly as they walked, clearly less certain of a street under their feet than a deck.

But it was the central character that took the eye. Alexis Zweig. A sea captain.

Not only was he taller than his companions but he was far more powerfully built. Unlike most men of such stature, however, he wore his scale with such a relaxed air that his physical presence seemed more latent than actual. If one had to guess at his age, he looked to be in his early thirties but he carried about him a far more timeless sense of authority. Now, in response to a tiny gesture of command from him, the little party tacked at a junction of two lanes and turned to have the bitter wind at their backs: running under full sail they would have said.

As Zweig and his men made their slow way under the oriels and jetties of the ancient city, the crowds and traffic seemed to part in front of them in a kind of unspoken homage. Some that passed them glanced at Zweig with undisguised respect and some others even raised a hesitant hand in greeting. He seemed not to notice. Or if he did, he made no reply.

As they went by, a few looked back and whispered to each other: ‘That was Zweig! Did you see him?' Then they would walk on, their heads coming closer together in the universal gesture of gossip, retelling the news of whatever latest coup he was said to
have conjured. Most of the rumours about him were nonsense, of course, but some were more accurate. It was certainly true that he had come from nothing and yet had risen like a meteor to be the youngest captain that anyone could recall in Königsberg. And it was common currency that he had rewarded his early investors tenfold. It was said of him that he would trade in anything and stories of the way he'd secured the lumber contract for the great Winter Palace at St Petersburg and then negotiated a supply deal with the local amber mines, were spoken of with awe. Another masterstroke had seen him somehow manage to buy the rights to an extraordinary new paint that he'd named ‘Prussian Blue' – and had then cornered the European market for it.

His strength was that he was both a fleet owner as well as a natural merchant, charming to deal with, fluent in five languages and conversant in several others; subtle, shrewd and remarkably honest. But his greatest achievement had arisen from the way he'd overcome Königsberg's most notorious shortcoming. The existence of a large sand bar where the lagoon met the city meant that only ships drawing less than ten feet of water could come into its quays. Larger vessels had always been anchored near Pillau at the mouth of the lagoon and merchandise had then been carried out to them from the city in smaller vessels. But Zweig had commissioned the construction of a fleet of large, shallow-draft traders that could moor in town – a market-changing coup that had given him such an advantage that he'd attracted the envy as well as the grudging respect of Königsberg's merchant elite.

Now, as the three men walked through the city on this bone-chilling morning, Zweig's great natural presence was further increased by his striking appearance. Under a wide-brimmed hat, edged with pale ostrich feathers, he wore his hair long and braided as if he was more used to the fashions of southern ports. His features were dark and strangely wild, his eyes like bloodstones,
widely spaced and generally half closed in his complete self absorption. His dress was richly exotic and glinted with eastern silks, heightened by the occasional flash of pearl buttons and silver buckles. Across his shoulders hung a sumptuous swathe of the fur of a rare Siberian bear, held in place at the shoulder by a heavy gold clasp.

This was all mere surface adornment. It was Zweig himself that was so striking and intriguing and although his gaze was fixed downwards on the street, in the manner of one sunk in deep thought, he strolled with an air of such unhurried confidence that he seemed to exude an absolute belief in himself as well as a complete clarity of purpose. Anyone who even glanced at him was left feeling that they were looking at a man whose will would prevail, and would have to prevail for him to continue to exist - however long that might take.

He now moved through the ancient streets with an easy certainty and such a slow, deliberate step that his two smaller assistants had to break stride every few yards to stay alongside him.

One of them now looked ahead and spoke rapidly to his captain. Zweig looked up and saw their destination - a grand townhouse with a metallic trade sign of a giant boot set high up on its brick side. Above it, spelt out in large brass letters, were the words ‘Johann Kant. Leather Merchant'.

But the captain's passage up the crowded street had already been witnessed from inside the house. Kant's daughter, Sophie, had seen them as they'd rounded the corner, just as she'd come onto the small landing of the staircase's return, a half round that projected out over the front entrance. The glass sides of this mezzanine were designed to let light into the stairwell but they also allowed people on the stairs see up and down the street and as Sophie now stood watching through the windowpanes, she smiled with pleasure as she realised that the three men were helming over towards the house. She'd seen Zweig glance up at
their trade sign and it was with a thrill that she realised that they were altering course to make for her father's door.

Sophie had met the extraordinary Captain Zweig only twice but she remembered both occasions well. Such was the strange and powerful attraction she'd felt – and the huge sense of excitement – that she'd lived in the hope of seeing him again. And as soon as possible. On the second of the two occasions, at a gathering of merchants at the Rathaus before Christmas, he had even remembered her name and had paid her some attention. As they'd spoken, she'd been conscious of the envious stares of strangers and the hesitant, half smiles of her friends as they clustered around the two of them, silently watching how she dealt with the famous Zweig, ‘the great man of tomorrow' as they'd called him. As he'd towered over her he'd shown no sign of being aware that they were the centre of such attention and instead had been serious and grave and deeply courteous in the way he had talked. After he'd been called away she was only too conscious of how much she'd enjoyed the glances and compliments of her companions.

‘Of course he's noticed you, Sophie!' said her friend Gretchen when she tried to make light of the meeting a little later. ‘Didn't you see the way he looked at you? You might have been a treasure map, the way his eyes lit up! And why shouldn't he? We all know you're one of the two great beauties of Königsberg. You and the cathedral. But you're only twenty three – you have four hundred years on your side!'

Sophie was far too spirited to give in to such flattery but even she had been rendered speechless as her friends had laughed and gently prodded her sides in affection. She was, indeed, one of the great sights of Königsberg. Blessed with the beautifully curved brow of a Botticelli goddess, she had a perfect yet intriguing profile, a glorious, full mouth and expressive eyes of the softest green that told their story of her intelligence and independence. Framing her was a mass of rich, dark hair in
which a thousand different colours fought for prominence as it curled and twisted to be released from whatever constraint her mother tried to bring to it. But Sophie Kant was more than simply beautiful. An impression of spirited self-reliance shone from every glance of her eyes and gesture of her body. And it was a secret known only to her family and a few others that an intelligence that matched her beauty was being fed by two of the leading mathematicians at the university who came to tutor her at home, hidden from the criticism of a society that held that women should barely be educated, let alone in the sciences.

Sophie had suffered after the evening at the Rathaus. She may have found Zweig captivating but she'd also been disturbed by the strength of the feelings that he'd unleashed in her. To her dismay she'd realised that she hadn't been able to dismiss him from her thoughts as easily as she'd have liked. She was concerned by this. Was this love, she wondered? Was it the need for possession? The great power of her mind could make sense of most things but these feelings had made her confused.

More alarmingly she'd even found that the fascination of the mathematical texts she so enjoyed immersing herself in no longer had the power to captivate her in the way that they once had. These had always taken her away from the trivial realities of daily life yet she was finding that Captain Zweig was showing a still greater power to distract her thoughts. The previous day her mind had even wandered as she'd tried yet again to tackle Leonhard Euler's famous challenge. The great Swiss mathematician had thrown down the intellectual gauntlet to find a walk through Königsberg that crossed its seven bridges once, and once only. It intrigued her that half of Europe was considering the problem and she'd been determined that it should be an inhabitant of the great city itself that found the theory to answer it.

Now here was Zweig to distract her in person. And she was delighted! Perhaps he really had noticed her.

The little party in the street approached Kant's front door and
Sophie heard a heavy knock as it echoed through the house. She turned to look down to the hall and saw that her mother and father had emerged onto its ocean of black and white stone tiles and were now standing, waiting for the maid to appear and open the door.

Both of them were dressed as always in the sober black of Königsberg's merchant nobility, but although they were still as they waited for the servant to come, she saw that they were unusually ill at ease, and that their features were stressed with anxiety. Sophie was startled by the sight. She'd noticed that they had both seemed distant for some days but she'd pushed the thought away. Now she saw them whisper to each other in urgent tones and her mother unconsciously ground her hands together before reaching up to brush her husband's shoulders.

At last the maid appeared and pulled at the door. Captain Zweig nodded to her in greeting and then left his companions in the lane and stepped into the hall. He removed his hat and bowed to Frau Kant with a show of the greatest sincerity and then gave a brisk salute to Sophie's father. Together the two men walked towards a side door that led to Kant's study and Sophie was still smiling at Zweig's exaggerated politeness when she suddenly saw her mother lift her chin in a fierce, determined gesture towards the closed door. This small, unseen act of defiance seemed to exhaust her because, with a sudden sob, she buckled at the waist and buried her head in her hands.

Sophie gave a small gasp of alarm and hurried down the stairs to take her mother in her arms.

‘Oh, Sophie, Sophie,' her mother wept when she was buried in the soothing embrace, all restraint gone, ‘I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry.'

‘But what is it, Mama? Why are you sorry?'

‘It's the end of us. That man is set on seeing us finished.'

‘What man? Captain Zweig? Surely not, Mama. Whatever can you mean?'

There was no answer as sobs overwhelmed her thin, tense body. Sophie knew that her mother was a proud woman – she and her husband had worked hard to take their place among the elite of Königsberg's merchants. But now all was falling around them. Bit by bit Sophie heard the worst.

‘Zweig was commissioned by your father to bring a large cargo of leather from Spain. The whole ship was his order alone. Papa was advised to wait until the weather eased in the spring but, you know your father, he wouldn't listen. Business is good, he kept saying, the army needs more bridles and harnesses – King Frederick is set on seeing through his fight with the Austrians. We must have more hides now. Zweig was the only captain that would take the journey on. Everyone else said the weather made it too dangerous. But Zweig had Papa sign contracts to underwrite the voyage and …' she faltered at this point as tears overtook her again, ‘…the ship has foundered. Everything is lost. We are due for the money now and we can't possibly find the full amount, even if we sell everything we have. Your father has ruined us, Sophie, ruined.'