Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  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.

  A Book Impervious to Fire

  Knives from Persia

  Memoirs of the Sibyl at Cumae

  A book of mirrors is in the works at this time …

  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.

  “Vitam Mortuo Reddo”

  N. Flood, Printer and Bookseller London

  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 l
etter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and smoothed out its soft creases.

  To Nicholas Flood, printer and bookseller, from the Countess Ostrova,

  Dear sir, It is with pleasure that I discharge the office appointed to me by my father, in offering you the following terms of employment….

  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.

  He awoke to find his mattress shuddering beneath him. Fearing some calamity – an earthquake, a flood, a peasant revolt – he parted the heavy crimson curtains. His chamber, if there had indeed been one, had vanished and his bed was moving along a curving passageway into a spacious hall, gilded and corniced, lined on one side with deep window alcoves pouring ice-light. From a vaulted firmament of cloudscape and cherubs hung a chandelier, a bloated glass spider. A tall pier glass stood between each alcove, and in the sudden bedaz-zlement of reflected brilliance Flood did not at first see the elderly man in an old-fashioned campaign wig and hussar’s uniform, sitting at a table giving orders to a small group of liveried servants. The old man glanced at Flood’s bed arriving and clapped his hands twice sharply.

  The assembly broke up. Servants and their wavering mirror-twins hurried towards one another and then all these moving bodies, both real and reflected, vanished with a ripple as concealed doors silently opened and closed like the valves of some giant undersea creature. The old man, alone now in the centre of the great hall, beckoned to the printer, who still had not emerged from his refuge behind the bedcurtains.

  – Good morning, Mr. Flood. Welcome to Hrad Ostrovy. I trust you slept well. No need to be alarmed. All is functioning as it should. Come, join us for breakfast.

  Flood ducked back behind the curtains, searched frantically, and then stuck his head out again.

  – Your Excellency, I haven’t got my clothes.

  The Count raised a finger.

  – Yes. Just a moment.

  A panel in the ceiling above Flood’s head slid open. A wicker basket was winched down to him by unseen hands. He took the basket off the hook from which it hung and found inside it his clothing, discarded in a heap at the foot of the bed last night and now cleaned, pressed, and perfumed. By the time he had hurriedly pulled on his shirt, waistcoat, breeches and stockings and had climbed cautiously down from the bed, the Count was hunched over the table, busily attacking his breakfast.

  Irena had joined him, Flood was alarmed to see. And a man somewhat older than himself, strikingly handsome, wearing the skullcap and black cassock of a cleric, his long raven hair tied back in a queue.

  The Count greeted Flood this time with a hearty grunt and offered him a less opulent and noticeably shorter chair than his own.

  – I gather you were still asleep when the shaving machine stopped by your bed. That would have been … six-forty-five, by my reckoning. You didn’t hear the bell?

  – The bell? I –

  – You’ve met my daughter, the Count said.

  – Good morning, Mr. Flood.

  – And this is the Abbé de Saint-Foix, from Quebec.

  – Of course, Flood said, startled, the name immediately familiar to him before he knew why. The writer of – what was the book called? He had never met anyone quite this famous, and all at once found himself red-faced and groping for words.

  – All Europe, he tried, is talking about your novel – how do you address an abbé? – Monsieur.

  The Abbé acknowledged the compliment with a smile and a barely perceptible nod of his head.

  – Have you read the Abbé’s book? the Count asked Flood.

  – Not yet, Excellency.

  – Well, I have. I never read made-up stories, as a rule. They are, to my palate, mere concoctions of spun sugar, but since the Abbé’s conte philosophique speculates on ideas of interest to me, I made an exception.

  The printer sat down, disoriented and still dazed with sleep. As he turned at the sound of his bed trundling slowly back down the way it had come, a wheeled tray laden with dishes rolled up beside him. Numbly he took a platter heaped with pig trotters, spiced eggs, and an assortment of braided, looped, and knotted pastries. The tray clattered out again.

  Flood glanced cautiously at the Count, intent upon the pastry roll he was buttering. Conscious of the fact that he had not yet washed or shaved, the printer could not bring himself to look directly at Irena. Out of the corner of his eye he took in her primrose-coloured morning gown, the lace cuffs embroidered with tiny silver violets, her quilted white satin petticoat that flashed in the light as she reached across the table to pour her father some coffee. Catching sight of his dishevelled hair in the polished silver coffeepot, he thanked Providence that at least he was in clean clothes. Mumbling a quick grace over his food, he picked up a knife and fork and began to push things around on his plate, still too overwhelmed to dare plunging a utensil into anything.

  He was so dazed he almost did not hear the Count asking him the same question Irena had asked the night before. He stammered a polite reply.

  – And what did you think of my ship?

  – It took some getting used to, Excellency.

  – Did it? I confess that answer surprises me, coming from someone like yourself.

  – It does?

  – Light am I, the Count intoned, yet strong enough to carry a man away. Small am I, yet within me multitudes sleep, waiting to be awakened. Silent am I, yet my words cross great distances and never falter.

  – A book, Flood said after a moment’s thought.

  – Not long ago, the Count said, brushing at the flakes of pastry lodged in his moustache, I purchased a library from a retired colonel in Boston. One of its volumes was a book of yours.

  Another panel in the ceiling opened and a servant in red livery appeared on a descending platform, vigorously brushing a pa
ir of knee-length riding boots. He caught Flood’s eye and, with a lopsided grin that spoke of resignation in the face of madness, disappeared through a trapdoor in the floor.

  The Count dug in a pocket of his dressing gown and pulled out the Conjectural Treatise on Political Economy.

  – I’m sure you recognize this.

  Flood nodded.

  – One of my first commissions. For a philosophical society in Dublin.

  – Well, somehow or other it found its way to New England. I would be willing to wager that your so-called philosophical society is in reality a revolutionary cabal. With chapters on both sides of the Atlantic.

  – I would know nothing about that, Flood said. I print what I am asked to print. What people do with the books after they leave my shop is their own business.

  He quickly bit into a bread roll, alarmed at the resentment that had slid into his voice.

  – Of course, the Count said. What goes on in your nation’s disgruntled colonies concerns me very little as well. To tell you the truth, I was surprised to learn that there are such things as libraries in the American wilderness. I had always thought it inhabited only by painted savages and woodsmen.

  While he was speaking, the Count had been removing each nested volume, until the innermost book sat in his palm.

  – The great do devour the little. Ingenious.

  – Excellency, I am –

  – Indeed you are, Mr. Flood. A clever man. My daughter will tell you of my delight when I first saw this.

  Flood raised his eyes to Irena.

  – We were both very impressed, Father.

  – And now, said the Count, at last – he closed his hand slowly around the tiny book – you are here. And I will tell you why. I am building a library like no other. A library of one-of-a-kind volumes, oddities, editions consisting of a single, unique copy. But there is yet, in spite of all my efforts, one book that has always eluded me. Rather than continue to search in vain, however, I’ve decided to have it printed for me.

  – You have the manuscript.