The Pierced Heart: A Novel Read Free Page A

already dined,” he continues, “and will not, therefore, join you. I am cognisant, likewise, that you have had a long journey, and would no doubt prefer to sup in privacy, and retire at a time of your own choosing. I anticipate much pleasure in making your acquaintance, but will reserve that gratification for the morrow, when you will be rested. Should there be any comfort I have omitted to provide, do not scruple to ring for one of the servants. They have beeninstructed to assist you in all you require. And now, if I may, I will bid you good night.”
    And with that he bows once more, and retires. The air in the room swirls, then settles, leaving a faint scent of something acidic, chemical. Charles turns up the lamp, and starts to wander about the room as he discards his layers of clothes. The shelves are stacked with scientific books and journals, most of them in German, but a surprising number in English, as well as French. There are books of geology and botany, chemistry and metallurgy, physics and cosmology, as well as a large section—most of these in German—on human anatomy and physiology. Charles pulls out a volume or two in English and goes to place them by the bed. Then he sits down at the small table and starts upon his food.

     
    The following morning he wakes late. It is the first time in weeks that he has not dreamed of her—the woman whose face he cannot recall without shame, and the sick falter of a terrible self-reproach. The woman who served in his uncle’s kitchen and shared—however briefly—Charles’s bed. The woman who would have borne his child, only Charles did not know that until it was far too late, and both mother and unborn baby were dying before his eyes. He cannot summon Molly now on any day but that last, as her body slipped into oblivion and her eyes swam with tears of incomprehension and despair while her blood ran cold on the freezing stone floor. And as for that other face—his child’s—it hovers at the fringes of his unconscious, ever present, but never fully seen, never quite close enough for his dreaming hand to reach.
    But last night, he did not dream, and now he lies staring at the ceiling in blank terror, utterly unaware of where he is. Then his eye lights on the coat hooked over the back of the chair, and when he reaches out a hand he finds the old copy of the
Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London
he fell asleep over the night before, having tried—and failed—to decipher the tiny annotations pencilled thick about an article titled “On the Mutual Relations of the Vital and Physical Forces,” by one William B. Carpenter, MD, FRS. He sits up and realises that the fire that should have died by now is bright and well stoked, and the table that bore an empty bottle and the remains of his supper now carries a tray of breakfast and a pot of coffee. Someone has been into the room while he was sleeping, and Charles looks quickly about him—a reflex he immediately recognises to be ridiculous, since there is clearly no-one there now. He disentangles himself from his bedding, slightly pink about the cheeks at what the maid might have seen, and makes his way to the washstand, where he douses his head and neck in water and looks about for a mirror. Which, rather oddly, he cannot find, either there, or anywhere else in the room. He shaves as best he can without one, since it’s not an article he ever carries with him, then dresses and pours himself a cup of hot thick black coffee before going over to open the shutters, scratching absent-mindedly all the while at a little raw patch on his neck. The room, he finds, has a view of the river and the wooded bank beyond, and from his elevated eyrie he can see the cormorants on the water wheeling and squawking in the gusting wind, and three storeys down the creeper-covered wall, the paved courtyard before the castle door, where a lad in a red cap is carrying what looks like a plate of offal down towards the gate. There’s a small