‘You think they aimed to kill me?’ Clode said slowly, looking up at his friend.
‘Don’t be a fool. Lord, I’ve entrusted my ward’s fortune to a babe-in-arms. Think, Daniel — if Colonel Padfield had not broken down the door, you would have died on the floor in your own blood. It was the merest chance saved you. Someone meant you,’ he released his grip to point at Clode fiercely, ‘you — to die there. Now who?’
Clode looked across at Harriet. ‘Is this your opinion too, Harriet?’
‘Yes. In all particulars,’ she said very calmly, ‘and Crowther’s too.’
Clode shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself again. ‘Very well.’ Then he lifted his head and looked at Harriet. ‘You and Mr Crowther are come like angels to deliver me, Harriet.’ The corner of his mouth twitched, and she saw something of his former self trying to return. She only smiled in reply, trying somehow in that smile to show both her faith and her sympathy.
‘Do you have pen and paper?’ Graves asked, looking about him. ‘I shall act as your scribe.’
‘No, Graves. Dear God, only years of close study have taught me to read your hand.’ Clode sighed deeply and shook himself. ‘Let Rachel write while you play drill master with my memory. But Manzerotti?’
Graves crossed his arms and tossed his hair back from his forehead. ‘Our concerns are with what happened before that devil arrived. Perhaps we will have a chance to shoot him later. Very well, let us begin. What are you looking at me like that for?’
‘I think I am glad you are come, Owen.’
Graves looked a little shy. ‘I promised your mother that I’d look after you. And Susan. If you come back all wan-looking and destroyed, it will only make her passion for you stronger, you know. I want you fat and balding before my ward is out on the marriage market, otherwise all men shall be compared to you and be found wanting.’
‘And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ Daniel said.
‘No, we damn well wouldn’t.’
The cell became a hive of activity. Harriet asked the guard at the door to send them up something to eat, then turned to see the younger people preparing to set to work. It was a moment where she felt the difference between them. They seemed eager, revived. She knew there was something desperate in their sudden energy, but thought it better they exhaust themselves. It would do them all good. They were preparing a sheet for each day that Rachel and Clode had been at court, then some fierce discussion ensued if it would be better to instead have a sheet for each personage encountered. Harriet felt weary, and wished for Crowther.
III.5
Pegel watched the house of Dunktal all afternoon. He thought of Florian coming to find him, then leaving disappointed, and felt a slight shiver of regret. However, his job was to follow the trail and this was where it had led him. A house that suggested prosperity, but not great wealth. There was a man in a green coat working at the window upstairs. It took an hour before Pegel recognised him as one of the men he had seen leaving the back room of the bar in Leuchtenstadt where he had first set eyes on Florian. He had left some hours before the others, so Pegel had not thought him important. It seemed he had been wrong.
He had expected some activity, some stirring within — but nothing came. The news of the attack on Florian did not seem sufficient to scare Dunktal into the streets. Jacob consulted his notebook again. The message had reached Dunktal, Dunktal had sent messages back, but none forward. Pegel wanted very much to get into that upper room where the man was working so assiduously, but he might be there for hours, days even. He needed to alarm one of the lieutenants enough that Dunktal would need to provide reassurance in person. He looked at the list of people who had sent to Dunktal. Three. Two men and a woman, the wife of the Head of the Law Faculty. She lived on Charlottenstrasse. Now these friends of Florian obviously liked to think of themselves as the noblest of men. If a woman were threatened, surely Dunktal would not only send a polite coded note. He would go there himself — ideally in such a hurry he would forget to lock his door. But what manner of threat should it be? Nothing like the attack on Florian, of course, but it had to look as if it came from the same source. One of the odd little books of alchemy and allegory the Rosicrucians claimed as their manifesto would do nicely. Sent with no note. He tapped his pencil on his teeth and hid away his notebook, then sauntered up the road until he found a bookseller who had what he required, a cheap printing of The Chemical Wedding. He had it wrapped and then found a boy at play among the gutters and handed it to him. ‘Fourpence to deliver it,’ he said. The boy looked suspicious. ‘And if they try and get you to say who sent it, tell them a man in a brown coat with a yellow wig. I’ll be by and listening. Do as I tell you and there’s another fourpence. Deal?’
The boy put out his hand.
It worked just as Pegel had hoped. The boy handed over the package to a manservant who disappeared back into the house on Charlottenstrasse. The boy began to slouch away, then the door was pulled open and the manservant re-emerged and made a dash for him, catching him by the collar and lifting him almost off the ground. Pegel heard the boy whine out, ‘Yellow wig,’ then watched the gentleman look about him before striding back into the house. When the door was shut, Pegel beckoned the boy over and gave him the promised fee, then trotted back to his post outside Dunktal’s house. The same manservant from the house on Charlottenstrasse arrived soon after him and was admitted. Five minutes later, and he and Dunktal were off again, and walking at a cracking pace.
The manservant had left first, with his hat pulled down hard over his wig, then Dunktal followed, locking the door behind him and tugging at the latch to check it held. Pegel reckoned he had maybe an hour.
There were too many comings and goings on the street to risk picking the lock on the front door, so Pegel slipped into the yard and up the back staircase. It was a risk, certainly, but the veranda had a low bowed roof on it which gave him some shade, and at this time of day most people’s business faced forward, onto the street. There was a stout lock on the back door too, but Pegel was prepared for that. He pulled a long iron bar from under his coat and fitted it into the padlock. The only worry was the wait until he heard the rattle of a coach passing by, then he pressed down hard, and the snap of the lock was lost in the sparking rattle of iron wheels on cobbles.
District Officer von Krall did not keep Crowther waiting long, for which Crowther was grateful. He had underestimated Manzerotti’s ability to shake him. He sat at his desk for some quarter of an hour trying to concentrate on what the castrato had said about the drug on the mask and recall what he knew of datura. Very little, he had to admit to himself. The only story he remembered with any clarity was of a doctor who had served in the American wars. He reported a case of a family, found by their neighbours sick and raving in the road in front of their farm. They claimed to see visions of Christ descending. Luckily their neighbour fetched a doctor as well as a priest. The latter prayed with them, while the former interrogated their maid of all work. The youngest girl in the family had been sent to pick greens for their midday meal, and the doctor found alongside their neat rows of vegetables a thorn-apple bush. Datura Inoxia. The doctor had done his best, but the little girl could not be saved.
The knock at the door came and another of the ubiquitous footmen bowed the District Officer into Crowther’s chamber. They exchanged slightly awkward bows, then Krall sighed and lowered himself onto one of the armchairs.