The Pierced Heart: A Novel Read online

  Charles remembers the journals upstairs. But he says only, “It is not a subject I have studied.”

  “Have you not?” replies the Baron. “I should have thought that, in our age, there is no higher and more compelling field for any man who wishes to be considered a true scientist.”

  If he intended it as condescension, it has its effect, for there are two spots of colour now, in Charles’s cheeks. Yet the Baron makes no move to apologise, but turns and walks slowly up the room.

  “In the time that has passed since then I have devoted myself to the examination of Mesmerism, which can induce both the stupor of catalepsy and the ferment of hysteria, and of Galvanism, which can seemingly re-animate the dead. And I have returned, again and again, to those mental phenomena that science cannot explain—those states of consciousness that hover between death and life, just as these figures I have collected here mimic the living, but are not so, and disquiet us with the very semblance of breath.”

  He stops now before a case hung—unlike all the rest—with long velvet curtains.

  “Somnambulism,” continues the Baron, “catatonia, lunacy, and the horrors that murder sleep, these, Mr Maddox, have been my study. The twilit region of the dreaming mind that superstition only can explain, and where science has not yet dared venture. That,” he says, as he sweeps the curtain aside, “has been the darkness I have sought to illuminate.”

  Charles recognises it at once—the white-figured woman thrown back over the bed, the grinning monkey-fiend astride her body, and the white-eyed horse leering through the womb-red drapes. Fuseli’s Nightmare—perhaps the most infamous image of the Gothic imagination. Only this is not the painting, or even a print of the painting. It is a copy in wax, sized to the life. As the light from the lamp wavers in the sudden draught Charles has a momentary wild conviction that this girl is actually alive—that her breast is heaving with unfeigned fear. But no. She is animated, only as Minette is animated, by an invisible mechanical heart, as unreal as the demon that bears forever down upon her exposed breast, with wizened fingers that twitch and paw.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THAT NIGHT THE NIGHTMARES return, and brutally. Charles wakes before dawn to the sound of his own voice crying, and bed-sheets sodden with sweat. He lurches up, wiping the tears from his face, and sits a moment breathing heavily. Then he kicks the bedclothes away and goes to the window. The room is cold but he is suffocating—desperate for the feel of clean air on his skin. He throws the shutters open and leans out. The sky is overcast and the river dull, and somewhere close by he can hear the sound of barking. He leans farther out and looks down towards the gate and the causeway. There are lights in some of the windows, as there were when he first arrived, and Charles wonders who is wakeful at this hour. Restless suddenly, and curious, he dresses quickly then slips downstairs to the front door, which he manages to open without difficulty, though it occurs to him that getting back in again may prove more problematic.

  He wanders first to the edge of the river wall, and looks down at the sheer drop beneath, then turns to face the castle façade. No lights there, apart from his own, high above him. He turns his collar up against the chill, and heads for the gate. The barking is louder now, and Charles realises why he saw the stable-boy carrying a dish of meat: The Baron must keep a dog. And a large one, if the noise is anything to go by. A few minutes later he’s making his way down through the archway, a little gingerly, since the cobbles are slippery. He stops at the head of the stone causeway and surveys the view. Horizontal washes of grey and black; water, shore, forest, sky. And closer, a building he didn’t notice when he arrived, just where the causeway meets the river. A graveyard, and a small chapel with a candle burning in an arched window. There is the barest line of pewter in the east now and Charles starts to walk down towards the road, aware at once how steep the causeway is, and how much skill it must take to get a heavy carriage up here in the snow.

  Charles thinks best when he’s walking, and as his stride lengthens and his heartbeat rises to meet it, his thoughts begin to fall into some order and his mind lifts itself clear of the strange and stifling atmosphere within the castle walls. The Baron is—at least as regards his name and pedigree—everything he claimed to be, and indeed in many other respects far more eminent a benefactor than the Curators can possibly have realised. But every instinct he possesses is telling Charles that the celebrated scientist is not the sum of the man, and he has not yet seen all the castle conceals.

  By the time the sun is up Charles has covered the best part of five miles through the forest and he’s just wondering if he should turn back, or hope to come upon an inn, when he sees a wisp of smoke rising above the trees. It’s not an inn, as it turns out, but a farmhouse, though Charles doesn’t anticipate much difficulty in obtaining breakfast in exchange for a few kreuzer. But the old woman who comes to the door is at once wary, and turns to call within the house. She has a small fair-haired child on her hip who must be her grand-daughter, and Charles is struck at once by her resemblance to Betsy, Nancy’s little daughter. Nancy who was until very recently a prostitute, but who’s helped him now on two of his cases, and looks likely to take Molly’s place in his uncle’s kitchen. Though not—and he is absolutely intent on this—in Charles’s bed. If he cares for Nancy it is not that kind of care, and in any case he is terrified of ever enduring such an experience again—of ever opening himself up to such shame and bitter self-disgust. If the pretty Flemish daughter in the train had only known what revulsion he felt even looking at her, she would have—

  “You are staying at the castle?”

  Charles starts. There is a man before him now, a man far too young to be the woman’s husband. And in any case, he is no peasant; his English is impeccable.

  “Yes,” says Charles, eyeing the man’s starched shirt and dark coat, both of them far better pressed than Charles’s own. “I am indeed staying at the castle. I am a guest of the Baron Von Reisenberg.”

  If he expected that name to open doors—or at least this door—he discovers his mistake at once. The old woman gasps and begins to mutter and cross herself. But the man turns to her and speaks a few words gently in German, and eventually she hoists the child a little higher on her hip and disappears into the house, all without once looking directly at Charles.

  “Please,” says the man, standing back to make way. “Come in.”

  Charles is shown into the farm kitchen, where herbs are hanging drying from the eaves and a large dog is lying asleep before the fire. The woman is at the stove, her back to the room, and of the little girl there is now no sign. The man shows Charles to the table and pours him coffee from a painted china pot. An empty plate smeared with fat suggests that he himself has already breakfasted. “My name is Sewerin,” says the man, “Dr Jonas Sewerin. I am the medical practitioner for this area. I was called here last night to attend a patient.”

  “Charles Maddox,” replies Charles, rising quickly and extending his hand. “I am on a visit of business to the Baron.”

  But the man is already nodding. “I am aware of your name, and of your visit, even if I do not know its exact import.”

  The old woman comes to the table and slams down a metal plate of eggs and meat, and a heel of dark sinewy bread speckled with thin black seeds. Again, she will not meet his eye or speak, and Charles is surprised that the Baron’s tenants—for that is surely what this woman must be—show so little courtesy to one of his guests. But seeing his face, Sewerin forestalls him.

  “You must remember, Herr Maddox, that this is an isolated and unsophisticated part of the country, where the people have little to do but gossip, and the unknown gives rise not to curiosity, but fear.”

  Charles picks up his knife. “Are strangers such as myself really so rare?”

  Then suddenly, without warning, there is a horrific scream from somewhere upstairs—a girl’s voice but half animal, terror-stricken. The old woman turns to Sewerin, her eyes wide in panic, and the doctor is on his feet at once.


  “You must excuse me—”

  But before Charles can reply, he is gone.

  The screams go on and on, muffled one moment, piercing the next, and eventually Charles gets up from the table, feeling that at the very least he should offer Sewerin some assistance. The dog lifts its head and growls as he passes, but makes no move to stop him, and Charles encounters no-one else as he makes his way up the narrow wooden stairs. There is a door half-ajar at the back of the house, and he can see Sewerin bent over a female figure writhing on the bed, and the old woman on her knees at his side. Tears run down her face, and her lips move in silent and desperate imprecation. And when Charles pushes open wide the door he sees that the young woman’s eyes are rolled back white in her head and there are flecks of blooded foam about her mouth and neck. Sewerin is attempting to administer some sort of sedative, but the girl’s body racks and bucks like a wild animal betrayed, and there is already an ugly scratch across the doctor’s cheek.

  “Can I help?” says Charles, moving quickly to the bedside. “I have had some medical training—”

  But as he takes hold of the girl’s flailing hand the old woman leaps to her feet and seizes his arm, tearing at his clothes, shrieking and babbling as wildly as her daughter.

  “Do not touch her!” barks Sewerin. “If you wish to assist me, leave this room at once.”

  Charles gapes at him a moment, but then loosens his hold on the girl’s hand and departs.

  It is more than half an hour later when the doctor returns to the kitchen, his face pale and beaded with sweat. He leans against the door-post for a moment, then sits down heavily at Charles’s side, and takes out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

  “I owe you an apology, Herr Maddox.”

  Charles looks at him coolly. “You have every right to treat your patient as you see fit. It is no concern of mine.”

  “But that does not excuse my discourtesy. Please allow me to explain. As you have seen, Frau Hirte’s daughter suffers from a severe disturbance of the mind—”

  “That much was obvious,” says Charles dryly.

  But Sewerin persists. “She has been subject to fits of this nature since she was a small child, but they have grown much worse since the birth of her own daughter. Indeed these episodes have deteriorated so far that she now spends most of her wretched life either curled up like a beast in pain, or subjecting those about her to an unjustifiable violence.”

  Charles shakes his head. “I do not believe that anyone suffering from such a condition can be held responsible for their behaviour, and therefore the question of blame, or indeed ‘justification,’ does not arise.”

  Sewerin nods slowly. “You are indeed enlightened. The folk hereabouts are pressing for Agnes to be committed to an asylum. They say she brings the evil eye, and will blight their crops and make their animals barren. The Hirtes can no longer risk allowing her to wander freely—they have had no choice but to lock her in that room.”

  Charles thinks of his own uncle, condemned to a life suspended between the light and the dark, reason and madness. His health had been better in the weeks before Charles left England, and the old man more like the mentor Charles has loved and emulated since he was a boy, but who knows if Charles will return to London to find him—as he did once before—screaming obscenities and soaking in his own urine. And even further back, even further hidden, is that last memory of his mother as they carried her weeping away, clawing at the walls, tearing at her own hair, and crying piteously for Elizabeth, the daughter she had lost—that little three-year-old sister Charles should have been watching that day in the crowded Windsor street, but whose hand he dropped, and whose tears he ignored, turning a moment of boyish carelessness into a lifetime of self-reproach. Because she is lost and will never return, and he can never be forgiven for it.

  “Such superstition is nothing but a savage and benighted barbarism,” he says curtly now, turning to his food and tearing brutally at the hunk of bread—a gesture that does not escape the doctor’s appraising eye.

  “I can only agree,” replies Sewerin, “but these people have not the education necessary to drive that night away. And when they see Agnes Hirte’s condition worsen with each full moon, you cannot wonder that they submit wretches such as she to the barbaric rituals of exorcism, or shun them as lunatics—”

  Charles sits back and casts his knife clattering on the plate. “But surely you can disprove such nonsense—show them that the phases of the damn moon have nothing whatsoever to do with her illness—”

  “If I could do it, I would, believe me. When I first came here I had the same thought as you. I had all the exuberance of a young man newly qualified. I will edify them, I thought, I will single-handedly banish the evil of centuries of ignorance. And so, for those first months, I kept a diary each time I was called here, chronicling Agnes’s condition, but the longer I made my notes the clearer it became: There is no question about it. The fits are indeed worse when the moon is approaching the full. That is why I was called here yesterday, and why I will return this evening, and for the next two nights, until this month’s menace is past, and Agnes returns once again to that silent, whimpering creature who is a danger to no-one.”

  They sit, not speaking, until there are sounds overhead and the doctor is shaken from his reverie.

  “I have given you my apology, but not my explanation.”

  “Please, Dr Sewerin, you need trouble yourself no further. The morning is growing late and I must return to the castle.”

  “But that is exactly why I must explain,” says Sewerin, with surprising vehemence. “When I instructed you so impolitely to leave the room, it was not through any lack of appreciation for the help you were offering—God knows, for my own part, I should have welcomed it. No, it was because I knew what effect your arrival—your very presence in that room—would have on old Frau Hirte, who is herself in fragile health. You must have seen it, surely?”

  “I took it merely for a quite understandable fear of strangers—a wish to keep her daughter’s condition private—”

  “And that is indeed part of it. But you represent a far greater fear—a far greater dread. You are an educated man,” continues Sewerin, pouring more coffee, “and therefore, no doubt, well able to understand the many scientific advances the Baron has made. But you must also appreciate that such things are beyond the comprehension of the people hereabouts. And the way the Baron behaves—it is inevitable that it should arouse suspicion.”

  “I’m sorry, I do not understand.”

  “He is seen often walking by moonlight, and more than once in the graveyard just beyond the castle walls. Some say they have glimpsed him there in the company of young women—some of whom have later disappeared, or sickened to a pale and inexplicable death. It is whispered that he is a necromancer and nosferatu, one of the accursed cohort of the Undead, and that he preys upon these young women, bringing their immortal souls to the same forsaken condition as his own.”

  Charles stares at him. “But surely, she cannot possibly have believed that I—”

  “She saw the mark upon your neck. She thought you, too, were an Undead.”

  Charles’s hand is at his throat at once. “But it’s just a scratch—I don’t even know how I got it.”

  Sewerin shrugs. “I did not say it was rational. Only that it is what these people believe.”

  Charles gets to his feet and walks to the window, hardly knowing what he does. So much makes sense now. No wonder the old woman started back from him as if from a fiend; no wonder those people at the farmstead crossed themselves when they heard the Baron’s name.

  “Only last month,” continues Sewerin, “another young woman disappeared when she and her brother were on a visit here from Holland. One morning the young man discovered the window open and his sister’s bed empty. She was found some hours later at the foot of the castle battlements, her body broken and the marks of teeth about the neck. The work, no doubt, of some wild animal, but you can
imagine the terror that spread like wildfire hereabouts. And her body was scarce cold in the ground when the corpse of a local child was discovered horribly mutilated only a few yards from the grave. Within a few days the tomb had been opened and the corpse desecrated in the most horrible manner.”

  There is a pause.

  “Where did they come from?” says Charles eventually.

  “I do not take your meaning.”

  “The Dutch girl and her brother.”

  Sewerin looks puzzled. “From Delft. But why should that—”

  “When I was with the Baron last night he received an urgent message calling him away. The man who brought it was not a servant, and was clearly agitated. I heard him mention ‘Leiden’—”

  Sewerin opens his mouth to reply but is drowned out by the sound of hammering on the door, and when it bangs open a moment later Charles recognises the coachman from the castle. He stands there, stamping his feet and clapping his gloved hands together, even though the day is not cold and the sun has risen.

  Charles turns in apology to Sewerin. “It seems my presence is required.”

  Sewerin bows. “I am glad to have made your acquaintance. I hope our paths will cross once more before you return to London.”

  Charles moves towards the doctor and offers his hand, and as Sewerin takes it he draws close for a moment and drops his voice. “I advise caution, Herr Maddox, and care. I believe that what you overheard was not what you assumed. The word leiden, in German, means ‘affliction.’ Or ‘suffering.’ ”

  Charles looks him in the eye for a moment, then nods briefly. He follows the coachman out into the morning air.

  Charles sits at the carriage window as they make their way back to the castle at a canter, equally puzzled at why the Baron should be so eager to retrieve him, and how he can have known where to search. The idea that he may have been watched, or even followed, is initially ludicrous, but by the time the coach slows down at the foot of the causeway, Charles is not so sure: If what Sewerin told him is true, he can well imagine why the Baron would not want Charles—or the Curators—to discover it. The horses are already straining up the slope when Charles remembers the story about the graveyard and slides down the glass to look. Up above, on the roof, something catches the sun and flashes in the light, but the graveyard is buried deep in the shadow of the castle, and the lamp is still burning in the little chapel window. And Charles can see now, even at this distance, that there is one grave far more recent than the rest, its watchful stone angels unweathered by age, its old earth newly turned and untouched by green, and a scatter of white flowers that are only now fading to brown decay.