Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  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.

  As if her slight motion had started the castle working again, metallic banging and hammering began to drift up from the lower floors.

  Irena glanced up, saw Flood leaning over the rim of the gallery and rose hastily to her feet.

  – The fusee went out of alignment and threw everything off schedule, she said. The engineers have had to stop the entire works in order to get at the problem.

  – Your father must be displeased.

  – He is away, she said. On business in Pressburg.

  – This quiet is unnerving, he said. I’ve become so accustomed to the constant noise.

  – I think the silence is beautiful, Irena said, sliding the book back into place on the shelf and brushing at her gown. It’s like the enchanted castle in the old stories.

  She climbed up the ladder to where he stood.

  – May I ask what you were reading?

  – An old encyclopedia, she said. It’s called the Libraria Technicum.

  – I know it, Flood said. I worked for a while with the man who printed it. Synonym Wilkins, we called him. Did the Abbé recommend it?

  – The Abbé has gone. He left last night, in the coach with my father.

  – He told me he might not be staying much longer. I don’t think he was happy with the … clocks.

  – He didn’t tell me so. I hope he will find the clocks more to his liking at his next destination.

  – So what did you find in old Synonym’s encyclopedia?

  She told him she loved books from places she had never been. Reading the Libraria Technicum she believed she could hear, behind or within its dry, technical sentences, the bustle of the port of London, the cry of the gulls, the ever-present rattle of carriages through the busy streets. She had always wanted to know if her image of the City of the New was in any measure accurate. She had heard so many wonderful tales about London.

  – The people of highest and lowest class mingling together in the streets, greeting one another without ceremony as fellow citizens.

  He said that it was true everyone mingled in the streets, but it was not because of overflowing love for one’s fellow man.

  – It’s the result of cramming so many people into such a small space.

  Wasn’t it true, though, she asked, that the city was full of surprises? It was said you could find anything there.

  He told her that if she wanted to know what London was like, the castle would give her a good idea.

  – People are always in motion there. No one stays in one place for long.

  – Here the walls and ceilings and floors move, she said, and the people stand still.

  He looked into her eyes and at that moment a truth that he should have seen right from the beginning became clear to him. The castle, the automatons, the clockworks, all of this was her father’s system and functioned by his rules, but Irena had her own system, quietly running on its own inside the Count’s. He was not sure why she had disabled the great clock, but felt a rush of hope that she had done it to bring about this encounter with him. Feeling the colour rising to his face, he turned to his press and saw that Ludwig had wound down at the bar.

  – And you, Mr. Flood, she said. How do you feel about the clocks?

  He hesitated, and was aware again of what seemed an unearthly stillness.

  – I like them at the moment, he said.

  By dinnertime the problem with the castle’s machinery had not yet been resolved. The servants were thrown into confusion by the change in their routines, and so Irena herself saw to some of their tasks. Later that evening she brought fresh candles to replace the guttering stubs on Flood’s work table. As she approached, a gust of air followed in her wake and overtook her, blowing out the flames and plunging the room into blackness.

  – Wait a moment, he said.

  She heard his chair scrape on the floorboards as he pushed it back. A moment later she saw a fuzzy patch of faint green light bobbing in the darkness, approaching her.

  – What is that? she whispered.

  His face swam closer to hers. The pale green glow came from a sheet held in his hand.

  – I’ve coated the paper with a tincture that absorbs not only ink but light.

  Now she could see his hands and his forehead as well, which also faintly luminesced.

  – A book you can read in the dark, she said.

  He held the paper to the dying spark of a candle and it crackled into sullen flame. She quickly relit the other candles and smiled over the bouquet of light she was handing him. As the paper burned up she saw through the green flames the image stamped upon it, melting and writhing. She asked him if he had chosen the phoenix as his symbol for just such moments.

  – Salamander, Flood said.

  – What?

  – The creature is supposed to be a salamander.

  The little dragon that dwells in fire, he explained, without being consumed, was a reassuring thought for people who work with paper. Originally he wanted a chimera, but the engraver he hired had gotten his mythological beasts confused.

  – We have them in
the castle, she said. The real sort of salamander, I mean. In the underground crypts, among the gears, where it’s dark and damp.

  – It sounds a lot like London. The sort of climate where printers thrive.

  – If that’s so, she asked, why did you leave?

  He felt his face burn.

  – I can’t resist a challenge.

  – We can move you to the crypts if you wish, she said with a smile.

  She left him, and Flood went back to his platform. Instead of sleeping he worked fitfully through the night, dozing off and waking again with a start, until he suddenly found morning in full possession of the castle. Djinn appeared at his side, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Flood rose stiffly from his chair. His head swooped, and he had to clutch the table edge to keep from toppling over. When had he last eaten?

  He patted the boy on the shoulder.

  – Let’s see if we can’t find something for breakfast.

  As they followed the smell of baking he went over his conversations with the Countess. Something had been nudged to life inside him. Something for which he did not yet have a name. He was in love with her, of course, but there was something else. Something more …

  He and the boy finally tracked down a tray standing unattended near the kitchens, loaded with baked goods and coffee. They helped themselves, grinning at one another as they stuffed rolls into their apron pockets, and then sat together at the bottom of a curving staircase to eat their ill-gotten gains.

  I like her, he thought. That was it. He looked at Djinn, sleepily chewing his buttered roll, and a laugh bubbled out of him. The boy glanced up quizzically.

  – Good?

  Djinn nodded.

  – Yes, it’s good, Flood said.

  That morning, as the printing platform rolled past a row of narrow pier glasses, he caught sight of his grinning face, dyed to a bluish swarthiness with ink. The sheen of sweat on his brow. His neck and arms, muscled like a bullock-driver’s from years of heaving the bar. His stained apron and holey stockings.

  Look at yourself.

  The days and months and years of apprenticing, the fluid dexterity he’d had to develop as he moved from one step in the process to another, the gallons of ink that he’d no doubt absorbed into his skin, all of it had turned him into a sinuous, oily creature best suited to the dank dungeon of a print shop. People came to him for what they needed, they bantered with him, exchanged jokes and gossip, politely ignored the reek of the urine he used to soften the leather ink bats overnight. He was a good listener. People had always confided in him, told him family stories. Secrets.

  They would haggle amiably over the price until they saw he would not budge an inch, and then they left, with or without their commissions engaged but always with a smile, usually not to be seen again, unless he caught a glimpse of them frequenting some other printer’s shop.

  Unlike the handsome Abbé, he had never been pursued by any woman, let alone a continent of them. He was almost thirty, and the one amatory interlude that had embellished his life thus far had been with the woman who came into his shop early one morning and asked him what he sold besides books. As he began to run through the stock — prints & mariners’ charts; journals & pocketbooks; embroidered letter-pouches; bills of lading & shipping paper — she slipped off one glove and ran a slender white finger along the surface of a ribboned stack of envelopes – best gilt, black-edged, post & plain writing paper; sealing wax & wafers – she unpinned her hat, shook her hair out, and began to tug at the strings of her bodice … ink & ink powder … scissors & penknives … bookmarks & booksnakes…. He never found out the woman’s name or anything about her other than the obvious fact that her passion was aroused less by his charms than by stationery. He looked at his trade with new eyes after that day, aware of just how many solitary women frequented his shop. But after that one frantic encounter, half-clothed atop his desk amid spilling paper, life went on as before.

  He was a printer’s son, a printer’s grandson and great-grandson. Despite the notoriety of his creations he was simply a tradesman. The wealthy were the only people who could afford his books, and yet he did not know them. He was appreciated best when unseen, like one of the cogs that moved the hands of the immense clock. Or the pumps and gears down in the crypts where Irena had said she’d seen salamanders.

  He wound up Ludwig and got him started on a fresh batch of sheets. The printing platform appeared in another mirror, one with a flaw in the glass that caused his reflection to elongate and ripple slightly, as if he had turned to water.

  It was as if she were still there before him. The air stirred faintly by the sweep of her gown as she turned. Her slender neck as she reached up to light the candelabra. He saw himself drawn towards a fountain of white flame. Crawling out of cold muck, his hands reaching into the light, to replenish himself in that fire.

  – Salamander, he said in a louder voice.

  – Alam, came the buzzing echo from Ludwig. Djinn’s head shot up from his tray of type.

  – Alam. Does that mean anything? Flood asked the boy. Djinn nodded. He had learned a little English by this time, but out of shyness or some other motive Flood could not discern, preferred to speak to the printer by way of his craft. His insect fingers scuttled across a tray of italic type and in a moment he handed over his composing stick. Flood spelled out the backwards English phrases.

  Flood thrust the composing stick back into the boy’s hand.

  – I am not your lord, he said.

  Love is always a conspiracy against some part of the world. In the end, Flood could not doubt what had passed between the two of them the moment Irena looked into his eyes and he guessed that she herself had stopped the castle clock. He would draw near the flame.

  Setting aside the book of mirrors, he began work on a small octavo volume, the text an old sermon taken from his stock of waste sheets. The sectarian preacher in London who’d commissioned the work had fled the country, and so Flood had been forced to break up what he had already set in type and find another use for the already printed pages.

  He inked the formes in a kind of delirium, laughing and humming to himself. He prayed the Count would not appear unannounced and see the idiot grin on his face. As he stitched the signatures together his hands shook.

  When the secret book was printed and bound, the word Desire gold-tooled on its spine, he tucked it away with the seventeen-volume Libraria Technicum. In order to make his interloper fit on the shelf, he had to remove the seventh volume, Helix-Longitude, which he tucked away in the concealed compartment of his type-cabinet, the place he always kept dangerous manuscripts.

  In the morning the requested cases of new type arrived from Venice, along with a tarnished spoon, and a letter.

  I’ve already been to the Count’s giant orrery. The only reason I might be tempted to return would be to see the Countess again. However, I will simply ask you to give her my good wishes.

  I trust the cases of type are as ordered. The other enclosed item is my response to your comments about infinity. My father always used to say, The spoon tastes not the broth.

  Regards,

  S. Kirshner

  She stood beside him, her hands cupped together, waiting until he swam up out of his thoughts and became aware of her.

  – I didn’t hear you, he said, rising from his chair.

  – I know, she said, nodding to the lines and angles he had been drawing. You were in the land of geometry. I found something down in the cellars. Something I think you’ll like.

  She lowered her hands to the desk and opened them. On her palm sat a small, shiny creature, like a frog but with a tail. Its S-shaped body a glossy black speckled with bright yellow spots. He realized he had never seen a real, living salamander.

  – She’s a beauty, he said. Or is it a she?

  – I’m not sure. We have Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, but it wasn’t much help.

  – Oh, yes. The Swede who’s invented categories for all living things.<
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  Irena nodded, her eyes brightening with amusement.

  – He suggests animals be classified on the basis of whether or not they have breasts.

  In the silence that followed they both examined the creature intently.

  – She led me a merry chase though, Irena finally said, stroking the salamander’s back. They live among the steam engines and the gears, where the dungeons used to be.

  – It’s not moving, Flood said. Is it … ?

  He extended a tentative finger. Before he could touch it the salamander writhed out of Irena’s palm onto the desk and disappeared into a surf of loose paper.

  – Where did it … ?

  – There –

  – Got you!

  Flood’s hand rose with a flourish. Between his thumb and forefinger was a short stub of yellow-and-black tail. He grimaced.

  – I’ve dismembered the poor thing.

  Irena shook her head.

  – She’ll grow herself a new tail. If you’d pulled off her leg she could grow that back, too.

  – Not even the mythical salamander can do that.

  – I read about it, in Pliny.

  She closed her eyes.

  – An … insectivorous batrachian, that springs from some unknown Source, appearing during great Rains, or, according to ancient Authorities, arising from the Midst of the most ardent Flames. When seiz’d by their Enemies, these Creatures elude Capture by leaving a Leg or a Part of their Tail behind, the Missing Extremity soon replaced by the growth of another –

  She broke off as the salamander emerged. Flood gently scooped the creature up and returned it to Irena’s hands.

  – I should take her back where I found her.

  There was a stutter of gears as the castle started into motion again, a hiss of steampipes venting, a long groan of metal against metal, and then silence. Irena leaned over the balustrade of the gallery and peered down into the depths.

  – Has your father returned, Countess?

  – I am expecting him any day.

  – Do you ever leave here?

  – My father trusts only me to maintain things in his absence. At least until the day he perfects his system.