Mrash again gestured to the window. “My lordship, look,” he said. Added, “There cross the alley, on the roof of old Baron Johan house. On the ridge o’ the roof, by the chimbley; look, sir.”
Eszterhazy looked; shielding with his hand against the obscuring reflection of the gaslight on the window glass, straining his eyes, wishing—not for the first time—that someone would invent a light, a quite bright light, which could (unlike the theatrical limelight) be cast up or across, across a distance. Well. Meanwhile. Meanwhile, something flapped in the wind, there on the rooftop, on the ridge by the chimney. “What, Mrashko? Some old clothes? Carried by wind—eh?”
“Nay, my lordship,” Mrash said. “Clothes, yes. Old or new. But I doubt the wind be that strong tonight to—No matter. That be a cloak and a full suit of clothes, sir, and I be a veteran of more nor one war and I’ll tell thee what, Master: inside the suit of clothes does a dead man lie.”
Mrash was hired to perform only the duties of a man-cook, but Mrash was no fool, he had indeed been in more than one war, nor had he spent all that time cloistered in the cook-tent; nor had his eyes been worn by much reading. His master said, “Sound the alarm.” In a moment the great iron ring rang out its clamor of ngoyng ngoyng mramha mram, ngoyng ngoyng mramha mram. In the very faint glim of the single small gaslamp at the alley’s far end men could be seen running, casting odd and oddly moving shadows. But what was on the rooftop cast no shadow. And it never moved at all.
By and by they came with the hooks and the ladders and the bull’s-eye lanterns and the grapples and the torches. They climbed up from inside the great old house across the alley and then they climbed up the steep-pitched roof. And Eszterhazy climbed with them. (Had he made this climb before? He had . . . hadn’t he?)
“Aye, he be dead. And have been. He’m stiff.” This from a volunteer fireman, a coal-porter by his sooty look. “See how wry his neck? He did fell and bruck it.” And:
“Am these claw marks!” asked another. Answering himself, “Nay, not here in The Town,” meaning Bella. “I expects he somehow tore himself when he fall . . . for fall to his dread death ’tis clear he did, may the Resurrected Jesus Christ and all the Saints have mercy on him and us. Aye. Man did fell . . .”
Dread death . . . Mercy . . .
The very-slightly-odd lordship who lived in the smaller and lower house which faced Turkling Street the other side of the alley, he shook his head. “If so, how came he here?” was his question, almost as though asking of himself. “Here—high above the street on the peak of a house with no higher one to fall from? Dead men fall down. They don’t fall up.”
It was so. There being no more to say to that, they brought the dead man down.
Old Helen, Baroness Johan’s old housekeeper-cook, served them the traditional hot rum-and-water. While they were sipping it: “Sir Doctor. Pardon, sir. The police want to know who ’tis. The late deceased. Can Sir Doctor—living ’cross the lane—tell them who ‘twas and what was doing there?”
Sir Doctor started to nod. What indeed? Had it all been a dream which he had earlier seen as he lay upon his bed? Or “a vision of the night”? Or—His mouth moved silently; then, “The deceased called himself ‘Melanchthon Mudge,’ ”he said. He took another swallow of the grog. It was very strong.
Just as well.
Just as well? Aye, well, add it up. That there were rings which were rings of power was a mere commonplace in the lore of legend. And what Dr. Eszterhazy knew about the lore of legend was more, even, than he knew about anything in which he had ever been granted a degree—though who would grant him a degree in it? The thumb-ring of Duke Pasquale (which Duke Pasquale? did it even matter?) was a very late entry into the lore of legend, and had come to Eszterhazy’s attention only yesterday, as it were. How had Melanchthon Mudge learned of it?—whoever “Melanchthon Mudge” really was? hunted down as though by a leopard and killed as though by a leopard and left high up aloft as though by a leopard. What had he done for the third Napoleon of France and the second Alexander of Russia and the first and last Amadeus of Spain, all men of subsequent ill-fate, that they should have given him (doubtless at his request) portions of the time-scattered Pasqualine jewels? Nothing very good, one might be sure. (Was it all adding up? Well, one would see. Get on with it. Go on. Go on.)
Was the power of Duke Pasquale’s ring that it gave one a capacity to turn for a while into an animal, a beast, a wild beast? Well could one imagine the glee of roaming wild and free of human form—Well. And once again he marveled at what must have been the long, long restraint (if this were all true) of the self-imagined Royal couple in never having made use of the Pasqualine ring. Never? “Never” was a longer word than its own two syllables; never? Surely neither of them, old King, old Queen, would ever (never) have used it for mere glee or mere power. Only an inescapable need for defense, for self-defense, the defense of Eszterhazy and the house of Count Cruttz and perhaps of that whole great city of Bella (. . . a leopard shall watch over thy cities . . .) against the great evil thing, the vengeful and killing thing which called itself Melanchthon Mudge, could have impelled them to make use of it. If this were all true: could this all be true? all of it? any of it?—for, if it was not, what was the other explanation? If there was another explanation.
Try as he might, as he added all this up, Eszterhazy could think of no other explanation.
A dozen frontiers were being “rectified.” A dozen boundaries were changing shape, none of them large enough to show upon a single map in an atlas; but, as to matters of straightening here and bending there, here a square mile and there some several kilometres: a dozen frontiers and boundaries were changing shape. And for every quid a quo, with dust being blown off a thousand parchment charters. In order to assure that a certain area in the Nigois Savoy be restored to its natural outlines, it was necessary to compensate . . . to, well, compensate two municipalities, one diocese, and . . . and what was this! to compensate the heirs of the fourth marriage-bed of the august Duke Pasquale IIII, in lieu of dower-rights, rights of conquest, rights of man, rights of women . . . rights.
What cared the historians and the cartographers? and for that matter, what cared the minor statesmen around this particular “green table,” for the right or plight of the heirs of the fourth marriage-bed, etc.? nothing. Save that if it were not taken care of, then neither could other boundaries and rights be taken care of, and a certain sand-bar in the Gambia would remain out of bounds and no-man’s-land, to vex the palm-oil and peanut-oil trade of certain citizens of certain Powers.
“So, you see, Doctor,” said Stowtfuss of the Foreign Office of the Triune Monarchy, “you were quite right in your suggestion and we passed it on and they passed it on; and, now, well, the King of the Single Sicily is still not really King of the Single Sicily and never will be . . . a good thing for Sicily, and a better thing for him. But now at least he can pretend his pretensions at a healthily higher standard of living. A tidy little income, that, from the old estate in the Nice-Savoy.”