Circle of Shadows

VI.2

Michaels had spent the night at the house of the priest of Oberbach, having seen the girl’s body laid in one of the side-chapels of his church. As dawn broke he mounted his horse and the priest handed him the reins.

‘However she died, Mr Michaels, you have done a good service to her soul in bringing her here. She rests with God now.’

Michaels ran his fingers through the horse’s mane. She shifted and tossed her head a little. ‘I don’t know how well she will rest, Father. It seems she was much caught up with things of darkness.’ The birds were acclaiming the day, and around the neat garden of the priest’s house flowers opened, insects moved from bloom to bloom. Spring was opening up, full of the promise of summer coming.

‘Be that as it may, I believe in a God of mercy, Mr Michaels. I shall pray for her.’

Michaels touched his fingers to his hat, and turned his horse out towards the road.

The Al-Said’s were early risers. Their breakfast had already been cleared away and they were at their twin workbenches when Rachel and Harriet arrived. Sami was using the smallest pair of tweezers Rachel had ever seen to add plumage to a bird an inch long; his brother was working opposite bent over a miniature lathe with a file in one hand. They welcomed the sisters, and Sami set about making tea while Harriet explained why they had come.

Adnan plucked down the paper with the design and looked at it. ‘Peculiar how, when one has had an object around for a little while, one ceases to see it. I am very sorry, Mrs Westerman, but I do not recognise it.’

‘I do!’ Sami took it from his brother’s fingers. ‘It should be with my papers rather than yours, Adnan. Such a curious thing — I meant to try and find out what it signified, but we’ve been so busy making bird-cages for every woman in court. The gentleman who paid us so much for Nancy wished it to be painted on her body, under the clothes. I think he must have commissioned something from Julius too, you know, Adnan, because I saw the same symbol on his wall. I meant to mention it to you.’

‘The metalworker?’ Harriet asked.

The brothers nodded.

‘And who is Nancy?’

Adnan lifted his shoulders. ‘My brother names all our automata, Mrs Westerman. He refers to the walking model we made last year, which was named after a young woman who refused to dance with Sami once in London.’

Harriet put her hand to her forehead. ‘I … Can you tell me more about this walking automaton? Who bought it?’ The two brothers frowned. It was a strange effect; Sami’s face was more rounded than Adnan’s, his nose smaller, but the frown was exactly the same. Harriet wondered how often her expressions or habits made it clear she was Rachel’s sister.

‘It grieves me to say, Mrs Westerman, we cannot tell you the name of the person who commissioned us,’ Adnan said. ‘We never met our client. All instructions came by letter, unsigned and by hand through one of the palace servants. We received a payment on instruction, and at the halfway point in our work, and then on completion.’

‘An unusual way of doing business,’ Harriet said.

‘Very,’ Adnan agreed, ‘and not an arrangement I would usually enter into, but I was too tempted by the idea of trying to build what I was asked to create in his letter, and the gold he gave me on account suggested he could pay for it.’

‘It was such a wonderful idea!’ Sami said. ‘An automaton, life-sized, who could dance. Only a madman like my brother would even attempt it, and only a genius like him could achieve it.’

Adnan looked a little embarrassed. Harriet sipped her tea. ‘How on earth did you manage it, Mr Al-Said? It sounds impossible.’

He lifted his hands. ‘Just as the writing boy you liked is the illusion of intelligence, Mrs Westerman, so the dancer is an illusion of willed movement. The figure is a woman, and she has but one dance, a slow minuet. She is wearing a long dress so you never see it, but in truth her feet do not leave the floor. It would be impossible for her to stand if they did.’ He shrugged his shoulders.

‘Like this,’ Sami said. He scrambled into the space between the workbenches and the shelves covered with faces, eyes and brass keys, then he stood very straight with one hand raised, the other at his waist and his nose in the air. Rachel laughed. He wrinkled his nose at her, then resumed the pose and took two slow rhythmic steps forward, his hand still raised as if holding his partner by the fingertips, but he held his foot very low and level over the floorboards. ‘Imagine that under my foot is a wheel,’ he said. ‘It appears as if my leg lifts and carries the foot forward.’ He tilted his head towards his imaginary partner and blinked.

Harriet shook her head. ‘Can she turn?’

Adnan nodded. ‘Have you ever skated on ice, Mrs Westerman?’

‘I have,’ she said.

‘The movement is similar.’ Sami continued his mime, turning as he slid over the wooden floor and took two steps the other way, then he dropped the pose and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, hunching his shoulders. ‘It was cruel, to have us build such a wonder then give her away where the world cannot admire her. Poor Nancy. I miss her.’

Adnan’s eyes were slightly clouded. ‘We shall build another dancer, Sami. We have all the designs — and the money, of course.’

‘We deserved a pension for that work. Though I admit,’ he smiled at Harriet, ‘the gold did help pull the sting a little.’

Harriet was looking at the leather folders piled at Adnan’s elbow. ‘May I see the designs? What did she look like?’

Sami clambered over the worktop and launched himself at a pile of his own papers. ‘Adnan’s designs of the wheels and levers will mean little to you, Mrs Westerman, but let me show you this …’

He became, briefly, a flurry of activity, sorting through his own piles of drawings and sketches, then drew one out. The paper showed the figure of a woman dancing, seen in profile, and another sketch showing her looking out of the paper back at the viewer. It was not a girl’s face or figure. Harriet would guess the woman to be a little younger than herself, and she was not beautiful, but pretty. Gentle. ‘Are these your work, Mr Al-Said?’

Sami shook his head. ‘No, the drawings came with the commission. Then the talisman you noticed. That was to be painted on the front of the torso, but out of sight, under the clothing, as I said.’

‘The clothing too was specified,’ Adnan said. ‘In fact, it was provided. It came with the money and the notes as to what the model was to do and how.’

Harriet put her fingers to her forehead as if she could massage the thoughts out of her brain. ‘Provided? Surely … I am alone in suspecting …?’

‘That we were recreating an actual woman? Yes, Mrs Westerman, we suspected that. I am afraid I did not know what to think. An artist paints living people, a sculpture has living models.’

‘But you add movement, does that not make your creations something different?’

Adnan put his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand and gave a lop-sided smile. ‘I do not know, Mrs Westerman. Suppose this is the recreation of a woman lost to our client, or even a portrait bought to compliment her, what harm could it do? It is only an automaton. Even if it is a rather wonderful one.’

She continued to stare at the portrait. It had life in it, even this simple piece of paper. ‘Was there anything else unusual about this commission?’

‘There was hardly anything usual about it. One more element, perhaps; there was a stipulation that there be a gap in the torso.’ He took his turn at his own papers and held out a sheet towards her. It showed a space, neatly measured eight inches by eight.

‘For what could this be?’

‘I asked, of course, since leaving that space made a complicated work more complicated still. The messenger simply said it was required. That was his answer to any question asked.’

‘Who was the messenger? One of the servants of the palace, you said. Do you know his name?’

Adnan pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Wolf, William … no, Wimpf! That was it, Wimpf.’

Harriet’s pace was a little too hot for Rachel as they returned through the garden. She felt a clutch in her stomach and came to a halt.

‘A little sickness, Harry. If we could just sit for a moment?’ She fought the swell of nausea. ‘Talk to me, Harriet, give me something else to think on. Why are you so interested in this sign, the automata?’

Harriet put her arm around her sister’s shoulders and thought of her own times of pregnancy. That strange yellow nausea that came so violently, then left her, that first glorious moment when life stirred in her. ‘That design came from one of the books stolen from Kupfel along with the poison books. Below that was mention of some manner of ritual using blood. Now I wonder at the secrecy with which the model was commissioned.’

‘The servant they mentioned, Wimpf — he is the man who cleaned the secret room for Major Auwerk, is he not?’

‘Yes, though of course he must serve the needs of any number of people at the court during the day.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you believe him, Rachel?’ Harriet asked suddenly. Rachel realised she had been waiting for the question.

‘Manzerotti? That he did not order James’s death? I cannot say. It is plausible, I suppose. Do you?’

Harriet put her hand to her face. ‘I simply don’t know, my love. Part of me feels it does not matter. Whatever I do, whatever revenge I might dream of taking, I can never bring James back.’ She suddenly froze. ‘Oh my Lord …’

‘What is it, Harry?’

‘The automata, the rituals, the blood. There was a sentence in one of those volumes taken from Herr Kupfel’s about fixing a spirit in a statue. But the lady was banished, not killed, it was her boy that died. We must get back to the palace and talk to Crowther and find out about the woman in the picture. Could it be the widow, Frau Kastner, driven from court, and if so, is she alive and where did she go? Are you recovered?’

‘Just a moment more, please, Harriet. My head is spinning.’

The sisters sat together in silence, then, just as Rachel opened her mouth to speak again, Harriet held up her hand. There was the sound of footsteps close by on the gravel and on the other side of the hedge, Harriet heard Manzerotti’s voice; he was speaking in French.

‘You have done very well, you will leave Maulberg a rich man. I think I could have named the names on this list …’

‘How?’ The person to whom Manzerotti was speaking sounded rather put out. It was the voice of a young man.

‘They are dead. All but one of them.’

‘Good God. The Circle of seven? Those closest to power in Maulberg? What a blow to the Minervals.’

‘You sound sorry for them. Do you wish to sit, does your ankle pain you?’

‘It’s not a problem as long as I don’t forget and put my weight on it too suddenly. You should have seen me, clambering all over those roofs like a damn squirrel. Honestly, Philippe, then waking in that muck. Lord, I thought I’d never stop stinking.’

Harriet realised she had never heard Manzerotti’s first name spoken aloud before, she didn’t even think he had one. Rachel’s hand lay in hers; she squeezed it gently.

‘But look here,’ the unknown voice continued. ‘Are these other people in danger?’ They heard the sound of paper being unfolded, jabbed at.

Harriet heard Manzerotti’s soft laugh. ‘Now you have given me their names, yes, I think they are in quite a lot of danger, don’t you?’

‘That’s not what I mean, and you know it.’

‘What is your concern?’

‘Florian.’

‘Oh yes, the young man of whom you have made such exemplary use. A young man at his studies in Leuchtenstadt. No, I don’t believe the murderous hand will reach to him. What the Duke will do to him when he learns he is part of this society, I cannot say.’

‘I want to get him out of Leuchtenstadt.’ Harriet heard Manzerotti sigh and there was a rustle of clothing as he took a seat on the other side of the hedge. She caught Rachel’s eye. Her sister looked uncomfortable. Drained as she was, Harriet still smiled. It was typical of her sister’s strict codes of behaviour that she could feel it was wrong to eavesdrop on the conversations of a spy.

‘You have become sentimental, my boy?’

‘Let me take his name off the list — they’ll never know. And get him to his father’s place till all this dies down. He’s just an infant! All ideals and soft-heartedness, with no idea what he is caught up in.’

There was a short silence before Manzerotti spoke. ‘I think the same might be said of you, Pegel.’

There was no reply.

Then: ‘I shall consider it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Let us return to the palace, Jacob. I would like you to explain what you have been about to a widow of my acquaintance and an anatomist.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I know.’

The footsteps retreated. Rachel looked up at her sister. ‘It rather sounds as if we should be making our way back too, does it not?’

‘Indeed it does. I hope we will hear from Michaels today.’

‘He will have found her trail, Harriet. No one is more capable. But I fear learning what he has found at its end.’