The Pierced Heart: A Novel Read online

  There is a contrariness in Charles—a reluctance to accept no for an answer—that has stood him in good stead in his chosen profession almost as often as it has landed him in trouble, so it will not surprise you to hear that he is now making a mental note to enquire about the Baron’s business when he sees his host at luncheon. But when the servant opens the door to the vast blood-red dining-room Charles sees at once that a table that could easily seat two dozen is set now only for one. Candles are lit, even though it is scarcely past noon, and the heavy brocade curtains are drawn. The servant has already closed the door behind him, and of other servers there is no sign, so Charles helps himself from the rather ostentatious silver-gilt tureen, and then eats in a combination of silence and frustration. When he finally pushes the plate away and gets up, he realises the Baron is standing silently in the doorway behind him. How long he has been there, Charles has no idea.

  “You have already eaten, Freiherr Von Reisenberg?” asks Charles, somewhat wrong-footed.

  The Baron shakes his head. “I rarely dine during the day, Mr Maddox, and confine my diet always to a strict vegetable regimen.”

  Which might explain, thinks Charles, both the pallor of his skin and that slight tremor he notices now in the Baron’s hands.

  “It occurred to me,” continues Von Reisenberg, “from your remarks earlier this morning, that you might be interested to visit my collection.”

  “I thought I had already done so—”

  The Baron is already waving his hand. “I do not speak of the library—it is a bauble, an affectation—”

  Charles raises his eyebrows—to judge only of the few treasures he glimpsed that morning, the Von Reisenberg archive is worth a King’s ransom, and a scholar’s rapture.

  “Do not mistake me,” continues the Baron. “I have a just appreciation of the value of the volumes I am fortunate enough to possess, but that value—to me—is largely sentimental. I believe that is your English phrase?”

  Charles nods. “Sentimental value, yes, that is the phrase. Because they belonged to your father.”

  “Quite so. Whereas my own collection is of quite another order, and quite another value. I rarely invite visitors to see it, and never on the strength of so slight an acquaintanceship, but it seems to me that you are of a cast of mind—and an intelligence—as might appreciate its worth.”

  Charles is well aware that he is being flattered, and part of his mind notes how very skilfully the Baron has both gauged and engaged him. But there is another part of his mind that wonders what exactly this curious man might be hoarding in this extraordinary and seemingly half-empty house, and whether it might have some bearing on the task he has been sent here to achieve.

  He casts his napkin down on the table. “I should be honoured, sir.”

  They proceed from the dining-room up the stairs, and Charles assumes for a moment that their destination is the door he saw the Baron lock so carefully a few hours before, but no—he is led to another larger entrance on the farther side, to a room exactly above the library, and of exactly the same height and grandeur. Only this is not a library. Indeed the only space it resembles, in Charles’s experience, is the magnificent North Gallery of the British Museum, where more than a thousand specimens of minerals, crystals, metals, and geological ores are displayed, catalogued from Achmite to Zunder-ertse, and offering the captivated visitor—as Charles well knows—everything from a chunk of meteorite known as the “celebrated Yorkshire Stone, weighing 56lbs, which fell near Wold Cottage, in the parish of Thwing, in the East Riding,” to samples of hydrous oxide of iron, “among the most remarkable varieties of which species are a shining brownish-black variety used as hair powder by the Bootchuana natives beyond the Great River in South Africa.”

  The British Museum boasts four galleries the size of this room, but the Baron’s is as crowded and as carefully curated as any one of them. There are tables bearing scientific instruments, some clearly antique and probably of immense value, and others with the stains of recent use, including one microscope that still bears a slide covered with some thick reddish residue. There are cabinets of the Baron’s own mineralogical specimens, each one scrupulously labelled in Latin, German, and (in rather smaller lettering, it must be said) English; and one whole case of precious and semi-precious stones which are larger than any Charles has ever seen in Bloomsbury—soapy rose quartz, the square spikes of a deep purple amethyst, and a frost-opaque diamond the size of Charles’s fist. And rather more unnervingly, a case of human body parts jarred in ethanol—greyish brains like fossilised coral; two hearts cut carefully in half, one healthy, one diseased; a shrivelled penis and testicles; and a deformed foetus that has Charles turning away and quickening his pace. At one end of the room the wall is hung with framed prints that look from a distance like conventional landscapes—wild sceneries beset by storms, and ruined towers standing against glowering clouds. But as Charles draws closer he realises that the pictures are not landscapes at all but industrial sites—the towers are furnace chimneys, and the clouds the belch of smoke and sooty tar. He glances back at the Baron, a question in his eyes, but his host merely gestures him, by way of explanation, towards another series of tables ranged along the windows. When he approaches the first of them, Charles is at a loss to know what he’s looking at—there’s a kidney-shaped glass retort, some sort of burner, a few scraps of rust-coloured wood, and a ceramic bowl containing a waxy colourless substance, crumbling white at the rim. Then he notices a diagram propped at the front of the table, but the writing is so small he cannot see to read it in the dim light. He reaches up—without even thinking—to raise the blind, but finds his hand at once stayed by the Baron’s dry and surprisingly forceful grasp.

  “I would ask you not to let in the light,” he says softly. “I find it—distressing.”

  Looking at him at such close range, at those pale eyes and the red marks on the flaking pallid skin, Charles wonders for the first time if the man has some sort of medical condition—something exacerbated by his monkish diet that renders him sensitive to the sun, and accounts for the rasping hoarseness in his throat. A disease such as xeroderma pigmentosum will not, of course, be discovered for the best part of a century, but Charles has seen patients suffering from lupus before, and deliberates whether to mention it—after all, what kind of medical care can be on offer here, so many miles from civilisation? But before he can find words of sufficient tact the Baron begins to speak again, and the moment has passed. “This particular display documents a discovery of some note achieved by means of a process termed dry distillation. This involves—in simple terms, you understand—the heating of a solid material to produce a gaseous substance, which is then, in its turn, rendered solid by the action of water, or of alcohol. Hence the items you see here. The diagram before you sets out the various stages of the experiment—the heating, the separation of the various residues, and so on. And, of course, the final result.”

  Charles looks closer at the ceramic bowl. “It looks a little like paraffin wax—”

  “It should do so, for that, indeed, is what it is. From the Latin parum affinis, meaning ‘lacking affinity,’ because this particular wax—”

  “—does not react with other substances. Yes, I know,” says Charles, a little too quickly. But he is impressed, despite himself: For all his ancestry, the man does seem to have devoted himself to serious study. “So this part of your collection is devoted to the re-creation of scientific discoveries?”

  “It is dedicated, Mr Maddox, to the re-creation of my scientific discoveries.”

  “But I thought paraffin was invented by a Scotsman—Christianson, or some such name—”

  The Baron’s eyes narrow. “Robert Christison’s work succeeded mine. The invention was, without question, my own.”

  Charles stares at him, and then at the line of baize tables and then, once more, at the man before him, all his condescending preconceptions crashing about him. How did he not know this? After all, it would hardly hav
e been that difficult to find it out. He curses himself silently—why on earth didn’t he research his host in London when he had the chance—why was he so stupidly arrogant as to assume that no aristocrat could ever be renowned for anything other than his lineage?

  “Am I to understand,” he says slowly, “that all of these displays relate to your own inventions?”

  “Most of them concern my experiments with coal tar, and the useful substances that may be obtained therefrom. I am sure that you will come upon some of them, even in England. Creosote, perhaps, or pittacal?”

  “Pittacal?” says Charles, his head still spinning.

  The Baron smiles. “I see you are no linguist, Mr Maddox. The name derives from the Greek for ‘tar’ and ‘beautiful.’ It is, I confess, a rather charming tale. I had succeeded in creating creosote some time before, and one of my farmsteads having at that time a persistent problem with stray dogs, it occurred to me that its strong odour might be efficacious in deterring them, if painted onto the wooden gates. I was not, as it happens, correct in this assumption, but by happy accident I discovered that the reaction of the dogs’ urine with the creosote produced a stain of the most remarkable dark blue.”

  “Serendipity,” says Charles, who is indeed no linguist but is, all the same, rather well read in his native tongue. “A ‘happy accident.’ ”

  The Baron bows. “Quite so. And thus—after various refinements to the process—I invented pittacal. The first dye made by man to be produced for widespread sale. It has, indeed, financed much of my subsequent work. As you will see.”

  For the next hour the Baron conducts Charles on a tour of his accomplishments, from the antiseptic, to the perfume base, to the bright red dye, pointing out the little triumphs of each discovery, the specific challenges of each process. The pictures, Charles realises now, are of the factories and ironworks the Baron has established across large tracts of the Austrian Empire: The man is clearly not merely an eminent scientist, but a hugely successful industrialist, and Charles can scarcely imagine the wealth that industry must be earning. It occurs to him that the over-elaborate dinner service he had dismissed as silver-gilt—and therefore rather vulgar—may well, in fact, be solid gold.

  By the time their perambulations are concluded the setting sun is flaming the Danube into a glitter of molten topaz. Charles is just starting to wonder when dinner might be served when the door opens and a man in small wire-rimmed spectacles and a long dark coat makes his way briskly towards the Baron. It’s the first time Charles has seen anyone in this house move at such a pace, and he is intrigued to see what can have provoked such urgency. The man bows stiffly, then takes the Baron aside. Charles affects to be engrossed in the method for producing a particularly evil-smelling oil the use of which he has still not fully grasped, but he takes care to stand where he can observe the faces of the two men. They speak in German, but that’s hardly a surprise, and in any case Charles doesn’t catch any more than a stray word or two—something that sounds like Leiden, which Charles guesses may be a reference to the town—but there is no mistaking the anxiety in the bespectacled man’s eyes. After a few moments’ earnest discussion the Baron returns to Charles’s side and begs leave to absent himself for a few moments.

  “An unexpected visitor requires my presence.”

  “A Dutchman, I gather.”

  The Baron frowns; then his face clears and he smiles briefly. “A ‘person from Pörtschach,’ in fact. But I hope his intervention will be of significantly less import than that famously endured by Mr Coleridge. Should you prefer, I can have a servant escort you down to dinner directly.”

  “No,” says Charles at once, suddenly not at all interested in food, and very interested indeed in the identity of the bespectacled man, and the fact that he has not heard the huge castle door open, or caught any sounds of arrival downstairs.

  “I will continue my examination of your gallery, Freiherr Von Reisenberg. There is so much I have not yet had a chance to look at. One rarely has the opportunity to view so impressive and unique a collection.”

  The Baron bows, clearly flattered even if his expression remains studiously impassive. “In that case I shall return as soon as I am able. And I know that in your case, Mr Maddox, there is no need to ask you not to tamper with any of the items I have displayed here.”

  Left to himself, Charles takes a further, slightly brisker turn about the room, and writes a few lines in his pocket-book, to remind himself of any facts he should verify on his return to London.

  He finds himself, finally, before a carved wooden door at the far end of the room, and looks about him quickly before trying the handle, though he has little hope of finding it unlocked. But he is wrong. The door swings open, and for the second time that day, Charles stands astounded at what he sees. But this time it is not wonder that assails him, but a horrified disbelief.

  The room is dark, and the woman is sleeping. One arm flung out above her on her pillow in touching abandon, her bosom rising and falling with her gentle slumbering breath. There is a half smile on her face, as if her dreams delight, and her thin lace nightgown has slipped slightly to reveal a beautiful white breast, its nipple slightly hardened in the cool air. It is a tender scene, its intimacy all the more moving for its very mundanity. Were it not for one thing. The bed she is lying on is inside a glass box, and the woman is not a woman at all.

  She is wax.

  Charles circles slowly around the case, noting the flawless detail—the pale blue veins that seem to run beneath her skin, and the eyelashes inserted, surely, one by exquisite one. He can only acclaim such craftsmanship, but the more he stares the more uncomfortable he becomes with the nature of that stare—the voyeur this model makes of him, and the motivation of the man who keeps it hidden here. He wonders suddenly—before ruthlessly crushing the thought as he feels himself harden in response—how real the body is beneath the bedclothes.

  And then, as the dying sun drops beneath the roll of clouds a last arc of light floods red through the darkened room and Charles sees that there are at least a dozen other waxen figures ringed about the walls, and all of them female. Women stretched languorously on silken couches, their eyes closed, offering their naked bodies to the spectator’s gaze; women in openly erotic postures, golden-haired and blue-eyed, their legs spread and their genitalia monstrous and unnaturally distended, either hairless or covered with what looks like animal fur; young girls smiling serenely with their bellies hollowed out to show the foetus in the womb, or their breasts peeled back to expose the organs beneath. Some mere torsos, others headless, and one, knees bent and open, whose heart has been emptied from her bones and laid, glistening, on her own belly.

  However impressed he had become, these last few hours, with his host’s achievements, there is nothing that can justify what Charles has discovered here—no scientific objective, however high-minded, that can make this chamber of horror anything but pornographic and obscene. Charles is no ingénue, he’s been present when living women were cut open to free an unborn child, or the dead dissected in the interests of instruction, but it has never occurred to him that someone would want to mimic such things for the sake of a private and perverted gratification. For that is surely what this is. Because he notices now as he did not at first that the glass case surrounding the sleeping girl has a door with a little silver lock. And since she cannot get out, there is only one other purpose it can possibly fulfil.

  “I see that I was wrong. Your curiosity, Mr Maddox, has out-run your courtesy.”

  Charles spins round to see his host standing at the door, his antique lamp once again in his hand.

  “I did not give you permission to enter this room.”

  “The door was unlocked—I thought, that is to say, I assumed—”

  He stops, his face red. There is no word for what he is doing that does not give him away. And the Baron might well counter that even if he has been invited here to verify, he has certainly not been licensed to spy.

  The B
aron watches him a moment, then pulls his coat about him as if he feels the cold. And it is indeed chill in this high unheated room. Then he walks slowly towards the waxwork of the sleeping girl. “One of the glories of my collection,” he whispers, placing his hand briefly on the glass, where it leaves no mark. “Her name is Minette. One of the great chef d’oeuvres of the master ceroplast Philippe Curtius. Crafted in France in 1766, and fashioned—so they say—in the likeness of a mistress of Louis the Fifteenth. There is another—not so fine—in the exhibition of Madame Tussaud, in London, which employs, likewise, a hidden clockwork heart. I had assumed a man such as yourself would have seen it.”

  “I have no taste for the grotesque,” replies Charles, a little sharply.

  “No more have I,” says the Baron in an even tone, watching Charles all the while. “I can assure you I have not acquired and displayed these things for that reason, but for what they illustrate—what they ape.”

  “I do not understand you.” Charles’s voice is cold now, his revulsion near the surface.

  And something of this the Baron clearly senses, but when he speaks again it is in tones not of self-justification, but of self-possession. “You may have noticed, earlier, that the sequence of my chemical discoveries ceased some fifteen years ago. It was then that I turned my attention to other fields of science. And most especially, to the science of the human mind.”