Brooks gave her a dose of laudanum for the trip to Bremerhaven, then a second, third and fourth dose to calm her nerves as they continued on from there to Cuxhaven and Hamburg. She lay dreaming on her narrow bunk as the ship lurched through a storm in the North Sea, her pupils reduced to slits, the wind soothing her with a chorus of voices. Her nostrils cleared, the fetor of decaying flesh giving way to a breath of the outdoors, azalea and hyacinth, spring in Hertfordshire. Above her, the darkened rafters began to shift and blend, faces clustered like grapes in the shadows, the candle guttering wildly as the ship pitched like a carriage with a thrown wheel. She saw her father, a spring they’d visited in the chalk hills, the clean-swept kitchen of their stone-and-thatch cottage. She was awake one moment, dreaming the next. She vomited and enjoyed it. There were roses in her nostrils. Toward the end she saw Ned, lying in some dark place — a cave — his throat chafed, a linen garment folded across his loins. She saw the gallows again, just as flash, and then Ned was on his feet, gliding toward the mouth of the cave. The light was blinding. There was singing. And then she found herself in Hamburg, at a hotel, sitting across the table from Brooks in a new white silk gown.
“Fanny,” he was saying. “Fanny. Will you look at me, please?”
She looked. He was standing now. There was a man at his side, tall and erect, his mustaches combed out from his face. His eyes were close-set, half the normal size. He was peering at her through a lorgnette.
“This is the gentleman I was telling you about — the one I met over cards last night?”
The man leaned forward and took her hand. “Karl Erasmus von Pölkler,” he said.
She smiled like all the fields of clover in Hertfordshire, she smiled like an idiot. She was thinking of something else.
♦ ♦ ♦
Two nights later she opened her eyes again and found that she was seated at a massive walnut dining table set in the center of a high-vaulted room. The walls were of stone and mortar, softened at intervals by a gloomy portrait or an oriental tapestry. A chandelier blazing with a hundred candles depended from the ceiling like a fragment of the sun. For a moment she was disoriented, the opium settling a deep fog over the backroads of her mind, but then she glanced up at the head of the table and saw von Pölkler raising a glass of wine in toast. Six other guests. Brooks among them, raised their glasses in unison while von Pölkler intoned something in German and seven pairs of eyes fastened on Fanny. Reddening, she stared down at the white tablecloth. A jeweled bracelet flashed on her wrist.
They ate Erbsensuppe, Beuschel and Gnagi, Bratkartoffeln, Fleischvögel and Hasenbraten. There were mounds of shredded cabbage and beets. A dozen bottles of Rüdesheimer. The conversation, in honor of the principal guests, was in a halting, consonant-choked English. “Ve haff. . wery great honor to place. . to place such charmed English mens and vomens here at Geesthacht,” von Pölkler sputtered, the ridge of his high forehead glistening under the chandelier. Fanny bowed her head and ate with a mechanical precision: two bites and a dab at the lips with her napkin. By the time the girl in pigtails and apron brought around the Schwarzwälder Kirsch, Fanny was floating. Brooks, drunk as a skunk, limp from laudanum and semi-articulate as a result of sharing two pipefuls of their host’s oriental tobacco, fell asleep in a puddle of gravy.
After dinner Fanny excused herself. The girl in the apron helped her up to her room. She lay on the bed for a long while, thinking of Ned, her family, the place she’d given up at Sir Joseph’s, the dismal prospect — like wriggling down through an interminable tunnel — of a life with Brooks. She reached for bottle and spoon. Tincture of opium. The stuff was magical, soothing, it was her friend and counselor. She took it like the medicine it was.
Fanny lay back and dreamed. The candle became the light of the sun, the room spun twice and suddenly she was in a deep lush canyon. Golden fish drifted through transparent pools, pleasure domes sprang up on precipices overlooking the sea, larks floated in the sky and the clouds pursed their lips and whispered nonsense rhymes in her ear. She dreamed. But the breath on her pillow was von Pölkler’s.
♦ ♦ ♦
On the surface. Brooks’ motive in getting Fanny out of London was purely compassionate— he meant to spare her the agony of her lover’s execution. The con artist’s death was a fait accompli. They’d done all they could. Now she must forget. But in point of fact, he hungered to stand at her side while the rope twitched and Ned Rise gagged his last. He burned for it; there was no scene in the world he’d rather witness. The whole thing was so deliciously morbid, so painfully exciting — the doomed lovers parted forever, torn from one another’s arms by the brooding implacable force of the hangman, the distraught heroine throwing herself on the corpse while the crowd casually remarked on the execution like drama critics strolling from the theater. “Aaaah, ‘ee was nothin’, this one. Remember Jack Tate? — kicked like a bleedin’ ‘orse for arf an hour and then made them ‘orrible noises in ‘is throat?” Brooks was titillated, no doubt about it. He desperately wanted to watch her watching the execution. But even more desperately, he was afraid of losing her. Once Ned Rise had passed beyond the pale she would no longer have any use for the Brooks fortune — or the Brooks proclivities. As soon as it hit her, she’d be gone. He knew it.
And so he dosed her with laudanum and hustled her off to Germany before she could have any real awareness of what was going on. Penniless, and unable to speak the language, she would be more than ever dependent upon him. And that was just what he wanted. Fanny Brunch was the most desirable woman he had ever laid eyes on — he was mad for her. She had the soft, pure, angelic sort of beauty that spoke to every fiber of his algolagniac’s heart. With her it wasn’t the mere momentary pleasure of sex, it was an ongoing process of erotic defilement, it was pissing in the pews, jerking off on the altar. She was made for him.
Germany was the obvious place to take her. With the war on, France was out. Ditto Italy. He thought of Greece, but the Mediterranean was nothing less than a floating battlefield — why risk it? No, Germany was the place. Fatherland of the few truly heroic men of the age — Goethe, Schelling, Tieck, Schiller, the Schlegels. And all of them gathered at Jena, the Athens of the modern age. It was too simple. They would travel up the Elbe, through Magdeburg, Halle and Weissenfels, and settle at Jena. He would write great poems that celebrated love, death and pain. He could have Goethe over to tea. Tell Schiller how wrong he was to have let Karl Moor give in — far better to be an outlaw, spitting in the face of bourgeois society. The thought of it — he, Adonais Brooks, an intimate of the great minds of his time, helping mold a canon of drama, poetry and philosophical speculation incandescent with scenes of pain and loss, windswept peaks and tortured youth, a canon of work that would once and for all lay to rest the precious claptrap they’d been heralding in England for the past fifty years. Brooks could feel himself teetering on the verge of a great and emotional future. Then he met von Pölkler.
“You must come out to the estate at Geesthacht,” the Margrave said. “Rest up for awhile.” The German tucked his lorgnette away and looked Brooks dead in the eye, as if he could see through to the inner man behind the flat blue eyes and hint of a smile. “I tink we haff alot in common.”
♦ ♦ ♦