As the weeks passed, each day more hopeless and humiliating than the last, Fanny lost the ability to care. About anything. Life, love, food, drink, sex, the functions of the body and mind. The only thing that pricked her interest was the blue bottle that stood on the shelf beside her bed. Laudanum helped her to dream, to forget what was happening to her, where she was, who these people were. Sex came like an avalanche, smothered in wine and opium. Sex with Brooks, von Pölkler, the girl in pigtails, beet-faced guests, a dog. Legs and arms flailed, smoke rose to the ceiling. Fanny reached for the blue bottle.
After three months at Geesthacht, she realized that she was pregnant. Strange things were happening to her body. She was sick before breakfast. Her liver was tender. Her blood no longer flowed in secret accord with the cycles of the moon. She reached for bottle and spoon, but before the glow came up she felt a stirring in some deep intuitive pocket of her mind, a burgeoning cellular knowledge that suddenly hit her with all the force of certainty: she was carrying Ned’s child. That final desperate night at Newgate came back to her in a flash of revelation, Ned driving at her with a frantic relentless fury as if he could somehow transcend his fate through the urgency of his lovemaking, while she lay there, sorrowing, cradling him in her arms as if he were a lost infant. She looked up at the stone walls of her apartment at Geesthacht. The drug was in her stomach, in her head. She leaned back on her pillow and smiled.
It was a boy, of course. Born on the twenty-fifth of September, 1798. At Geesthacht. Von Pölkler was delighted. He spoke of a system of education he had devised, a system that would inscribe the clean slate of the boy’s mind with precise, orderly strokes, a system that would allow him to achieve an intensely realized state of transcendent native freedom through the rigid application of drill and regimen. He would be instructed in the only two disciplines that mattered: philosophy and the martial arts. This was no ordinary boy, and he would have no ordinary education. No, he was destined to become a new man, a hero for the coming century, the Anglo-German Napoleon. Von Pölkler named the boy Karl. Privately, Fanny called him Ned.
Brooks viewed the whole thing with suspicion and distaste. While it was true that the child may have been his own, despite von Pölkler’s insistence to the contrary, the fact was that it deprived him of Fanny’s company much of the time. At first, of course, the prospect of Fanny’s motherhood excited him, and he did make an effort to explore the various erotic avenues that Madonna and child opened to him — balancing the baby’s cap on his erect member, suckling at the breast, strapping Fanny to the cradle and ravishing her from the rear, making love to a pair of village fräuleins dressed in diapers — but he soon grew bored with the whole thing. Gurgling, baby talk, rattles, the insufferable cuteness of it all. This wasn’t the way heroes lived. He became depressed. Stopped writing. Spent his time arranging cockfights or lying in bed with a bottle of laudanum and a fist-sized chunk of the Margrave’s oriental tobacco. He plumbed the depths of his host’s wine cellar, played billiards until he wore a hole in the felt. His eyes drooped, the beestung lips became so impossibly swollen he looked as if he were perpetually pouting over some imagined injustice, and he developed a habit of tugging at his missing ear. One night he and von Pölkler got stinking drunk and slit one another’s cheeks with a razor — strictly for cosmetic purposes. They wore their thin scars like chevrons.
♦ ♦ ♦
On the eve of the child’s third birthday, von Pölkler arranged a gala celebration: the boy would begin his formal education the following morning. The Mayor of Hamburg was invited, various local dignitaries and minor aristocrats, bankers and shopkeepers. Most declined the invitation, as a means of registering disapproval of the Margrave’s life-style. But those who did come were regaled with dancing, chamber music, a feast of roast suckling pig with plum sauce and Weinkraut, home-brewed black beer, flagons of wine and whatever else they had the imagination to desire. A select few were invited to join the Margrave in a lower chamber once used as a dungeon and still fitted out with all the accoutrements of bondage and torture. There they tasted French champagne, swallowed opium, stripped off their gowns and dinner jackets and let their impulses guide them.
Fanny did not attend the party. She lay in bed, the child at her side, counting out drops of laudanum. It was now nearly four years since she’d stepped through the gates at Geesthacht, four years that had accumulated all her loneliness, despair and self-contempt until the combined force of it lashed her like a whip day and night, four years that constituted her season in hell. She was a prisoner. Her future had been throttled on the gallows, her present was a blight.
At first, the child had revitalized her. She came out of her haze, made demands of Brooks and von Pölkler, tried to cut back her intake of medicine. Her keepers acceded to her demands — she was given a degree of autonomy and left alone much of the time — but the laudanum had a hold over her that struck far deeper than any influence either of them could assert. Without it, her dreams turned sour. She saw Ned in his grave, the cerements creeping with worms and insects; she saw her boy, son of a whore, grown into a beast under von Pölkler’s tutelage; she watched herself writhing in the cold dark muck of a riverbed, the current swirling over her like a stormy sky. She started up in bed, wet with perspiration, and was immediately racked with shivers. Her throat was dry, a thousand bright-eyed rodents dug at her insides with quick sharp movements of tooth and claw. She reached for the blue bottle.
Now it was a matter of course. She took seven thousand drops a day, and her dreams were easier. The child slept better for it too. When she first took him off the breast he couldn’t keep his food down and would toss in his cradle, colicky and restless. Frau Grunewald, the ancient midwife who had tended von Pölkler in his infancy, suggested a drop or two of medicine in the boy’s porridge. It worked. And now the medicine was as much a part of the child’s life as it was of Fanny’s own. She didn’t like it. She sensed that the child was starting out at a disadvantage, a cripple, saddled with a special need and a special craving to satisfy it. But then what did it matter? Von Pölkler would take her son away and indoctrinate him until he became a stranger to her. She was powerless to stop him.
As she lay there brooding over it, the laudanum stroking her abdomen with firm hot fingers, the door swung back, and Brooks staggered into the room. His clothes were torn, his face smeared, the eyes drilled into his head. He lurched for the bed, missed his mark and fell headlong into the corner. A moment later there was the sound of gagging — and then he was still.
Fanny cautiously lifted herself from the bed and bent over him. He did not seem to be breathing. She turned him over and listened for a heartbeat. There was none. She crawled back into bed and took a spoonful of medicine to clear her head. Very gradually, something began to bloom there, something compounded equally of fear and exhilaration. Two hours later, when Brooks had grown cold and a faint gray light had begun to peer in at the windows, Fanny lifted a fistful of currency from his waistcoat pocket, dressed the child and crept out into the hallway.
The place was silent. Stone corridors stretched off into darkness, arrases shadowed the walls. She tiptoed down the steps and into the main hall, afraid that von Pölkler might still be at it, red-eyed from debauch — he would stop her for certain, mother of his child. She’d have to reach Cuxhaven — no, be aboard a smack in the North Sea — before she’d be clear of him. But for the moment, all was welclass="underline" there was no sign of him.
The main hall was a shambles. Littered with smashed furniture, overturned tables, scraps of food, the shards of bottles. There was a sound of snoring. Somewhere, someone was groaning. To her left, propped up against the wall, was Herr Meinfuss, the stablekeeper. Another man was asleep in his lap. Beyond them a dark shadow lay frozen against the floor. It was Bruno, von Pölkler’s Alsatian. The dog had been eviscerated, its intestines trailing from the rictus of the body cavity like rotten sausage. Fanny led her son around the carcass and out into the gray light of morning.