Fireworks and Darkness Read online

  For Peter and Elizabeth

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Dedication

  Genealogy

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Author’s Note

  Glossary Of Firework Terms

  About The Author

  Copyright

  GENEALOGY

  CHAPTER ONE

  At six o’clock precisely the lamplighter filled the lamp outside the firework shop at the end of Fish Lane, trimmed the wick, and set it alight. The oily flame glistened in the puddles in the gutter and picked up glints in the red and gold lettering above the door. Simeon Runciman, the writing read, Master Firework Maker. Through the open door the interior of the shop was a perpetual Christmas, alive with gold and silver paper and glowing with hoppers of stiff red crackers. Rockets hung in bunches from the ceiling, and behind the bottle panes in the tiny window was a toy cannon, a stuffed crocodile and the firework boy.

  The firework boy was not usually to be found in Simeon’s window. He was part of a firework display which had been commissioned for Queen Elsabetta’s forthcoming marriage to her cousin, the Margrave Greitz, and was in the nature of an apprentice-piece. It was now seven years since Casimir had started working with his father, and, since it was generally acknowledged that this was the proper term to learn a trade, six months before his fourteenth birthday, Simeon had set him the challenge of making a set piece by himself. Casimir had made every firework from the coloured matches to the catherine wheels, to the redskinned crackers that burst their skins like sausages on a fire, as well as the mechanism that would make the structure come to life when it was set alight. All this had taken him four months of working at night after the shop was closed, then there had been three days to cut the life-size shape out with a hacksaw and another four to drill the holes for the coloured matches which defined the features. Finally he had painted the boy’s shirt and trousers red and blue and his hair and eyes dark brown. Casimir worked with fireworks every day and ordinarily he did not find them wonderful in the least, but for him the firework boy was the most remarkable thing in the shop. Whenever business was quiet, on the pretext of cleaning the windows, he could not resist going out into the street to look at him.

  Ten minutes after the lamplighter had lit the last lamp and disappeared around the corner Casimir left the shop and locked the door. From force of habit, he paused to bang on the window, but this evening, since he was in a foul mood, he did not wait as he usually did to see the crocodile jump on its string. It was raining, he was running late for a display, and because the shop had been busy with the Christmas rush, he was having to miss his dinner.

  ‘Sodding fireworks,’ he muttered. ‘And Ruth too, the stupid cow.’

  Casimir hitched the rockets he carried a little higher on his shoulder, adjusted their oilcloth covering and set off down the street. He was a gangly boy with a wide mouth, hazel eyes and a shock of dark auburn hair that refused to stay in place when it was combed and dangled in his eyes when it was not. His colouring had been inherited from his mother, and Casimir hated it, for in Ostermark, where most people were light-haired, it made him look like an exotic bird that had somehow forgotten to fly away for the winter. He had actually been known to frighten people, emerging unexpectedly from the dark recesses at the back of the firework shop, and even Simeon, in one of his rare jokes, had once compared him to a human roman candle. Of late, as his father’s notoriety continued to grow, being recognisable had been more of a trial than ever. Simeon was a poet, a philosopher, and had been a gunner in the Ostermark Royal Artillery before turning firework maker. In the distant past, before Casimir was born, he had also been a magician.

  At the end of the street Casimir left the Scholars’ Quarter, passed the cathedral, and turned towards the palace and the River Court. Lights burned in the windows of the government offices that clustered around the palace buildings, and because Queen Elsabetta was in residence the carriageway into the River Court was lined with guards, standing to attention like sodden bees in their black striped uniforms. Casimir produced his pass, which granted him entrance to the palace grounds, the River Court, and the treasurer’s house. He handed it to the man on duty and was checked through, though the sergeant made him wait in the rain outside the sentry box, he supposed, out of spite for having to stand out in the weather himself.

  At last the man stamped his pass and let him go. Casimir put the dripping piece of paper into his pocket and followed the cobbled sweep around to the back, where a long wide tunnel formed the mews and delivery entrance to the palace and the adjacent buildings. He made his way along the tunnel to the treasurer’s house where he stopped and banged the knocker on the servants’ door. Nobody answered. Casimir waited a moment longer, then pushed it open and went inside.

  ‘Hello?’

  A small page in livery was sitting on the passage floor, eating hot chestnuts from a paper. The smell wafted up with the steam: sharp and charcoaly, making Casimir’s stomach lurch. He had eaten nothing since lunch, and since he was currently at a stage when everything he ate seemed to disappear into a bottomless pit, any food, any time, was welcome.

  ‘Want some?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Casimir popped a nut into his mouth: it was hot, floury and as good as it was inexpressibly inadequate. ‘Do you know where Simeon Runciman is?’

  ‘I’ll go and ask. Here, you can eat them, I’ve had enough.’ The boy dusted his hands off on his breeches and disappeared along the corridor. Casimir leaned against the wall to wait, juggling the hot nuts in his hands. Noise and cooking smells wafted from the kitchen at the end of the passage and footmen in aprons hurried back and forth, preparing for the party that the Margravine Ruth Winterhalten, the treasurer’s widowed daughter, was giving for a brace of her aristocratic and artistic friends. But the page did not return, and, after a while, when he had finished the nuts and no one seemed to show any interest in him, Casimir picked up his bundle and went to look for his father.

  Casimir had never been welcomed at Ruth’s house. On the rare occasions when he visited he usually found himself left to kick his heels in the kitchen while Simeon was entertained upstairs. Casimir knew Ruth liked to have Simeon as a lover to prove how daring she was, for his ideas were generally considered extreme, and his poetry difficult to understand. What Simeon saw in Ruth was harder to fathom. Since his father was not given to confidences Casimir knew he was unlikely to ever find out, but he was not averse to snooping around when the opportunity presented itself. Upstairs, he found his way into an entrance hall filled with mirrors and crimson draperies, a richly carpeted main staircase leading to the upper storeys, and a door opening onto a book-lined study. On one wall was a huge oil portrait of Queen Elsabetta and her half-sister, Princess Christina. The princess was guest of honour at this evening’s gathering and Casimir, who had no particular opinion of royalty, particularly when it was making him miss his dinner, turned his back on her and stuck out his behind. As ill luck would have it, at that very moment a door opened to his left and out came a youngish woman in a brocade evening gown. She was thin, blonde, and of medium height, with slightly rounded shoulders. When she saw what Casimir was doing, her face set into an uncompromising frown.

  ‘Casimir! You’re late. Simeon’s been waiting for you, where have you been?’

  ‘Working. The shop doesn’t close until six. It was busy and I couldn’t get away.’
r />   ‘Don’t be ridiculous. All you’ve got to do is put a closed sign up and shut the door.’ Casimir said nothing and she looked at him sourly. ‘What are you doing upstairs with those rockets anyway? They’re filthy, Casimir, and so are you; take them outside at once. No, not the main staircase. The back stairs. Down the corridor and turn left. Your father will be with you shortly.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Casimir shouldered his rockets and gave a mock salute. Then he went, not because Ruth had told him to, but because he knew that if her steward saw him there would be trouble. Deliberately or otherwise, he had forgotten to wipe his feet, and had left a trail of mud and water the entire length of the hall carpet.

  Outside, Casimir crossed the mews, noting that a number of coaches had now arrived. The drivers were jostling for the best places in the stables, and their loud voices echoed in the enclosed space and followed him down the tunnel to the gate which led out into the grounds. Simeon had set up the bulk of their display earlier that afternoon in the park behind the palace, and the loaded firework mortars waited under cover a few hundred yards away across the squelchy grass. Casimir pulled back the canvas sheeting, unwrapped his rockets and set them ready for launching on the nails. It had stopped raining, but the mist was thickening on the ground and over the lake; and even in his leather coat and trousers his arms and legs were numb with cold. Casimir filled the fire buckets and checked the firework shells Simeon had loaded into the mortars. Then, with a glance at the sky, he dragged the canvas cover back over the lot.

  It was a small, routine display, the sort Casimir and his father had put on hundreds of times for weddings, birthdays and festivals in towns all over Ostermark. Two weeks from tonight though, the park would be the scene of the greatest firework display Simeon had ever designed: a pyrotechnical extravaganza employing dozens of painters, carpenters and powder makers and costing a queen’s ransom to mount. There would be a bonfire and thousands of fireworks, a waterfall streaming golden light, a winged horse which flew on a wire above the trees. In the clearing between the lake and the pine grove the queen’s carpenters were building what Simeon called a firework machine, an enormous scaffold in the shape of an ornamental archway which would form the backdrop to the main part of the display. When lit, it would blazon the arms of Queen Elsabetta and her new husband in catherine wheels and coloured matches, while hundreds of white doves were released from the back through cascading showers of silver rain.

  The trees would be filled with dragon lights and coloured lanterns. There would be musicians and conjurors and stalls selling hot food. The lake would swim with water globes shaped like birds, letting off clouds of luminous, perfumed smoke. In the palace itself the festivities would last throughout the night. Ruth would be there as lady-in-waiting to Princess Christina, accompanied by her father the treasurer. Casimir supposed he should be grateful that Ruth had used her influence to get them the display, but he still hankered for the days when he and Simeon had roamed at will from city to city, and couldn’t help wishing Ruth would refrain from interfering in every aspect of their lives.

  A whistle sounded in the darkness to his left. Footsteps crunched on the gravel path and Casimir turned. A man holding a lantern was heading towards him. He was dressed in the black and yellow uniform of the Household Guard and carried a long doublepronged pike over his shoulder. The guard left the path and came over to where Casimir was standing.

  ‘Papers, please.’

  Casimir felt once more for his pass. The guard checked it over by the light of his lantern, made a mark on it with a pencil and handed it back to him. His breath made little clouds of vapour, like a dragon.

  ‘Display tonight?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Casimir, and added, ‘it’s for Princess Christina. She’ll be watching, up there, in the house.’

  ‘I see.’ The guard was unimpressed. ‘What time do you plan to begin?’

  ‘As soon as my father gets here. We’re starting early because of the weather. You can watch if you like.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve got to be at the next checkpoint in seven minutes. But I’ll look out for it over the trees. See you later, maybe.’

  ‘See you,’ said Casimir.

  The guard picked up his lantern and went back to the path. Since Casimir had nothing else to occupy him, he stood for a moment following his passage through the darkness. The gravel path led past the lake and the half-built firework machine into a small grove of pine trees, and the whistling wafted back in snatches over the water. But as the guard neared the firework machine, something extraordinary happened which Casimir might not have credited, had he not in the past been witness to much stranger things.

  As the guard’s footsteps grew fainter, his whistle did not fade, but grew louder. The snatch of sound strengthened and the notes blurred into a single tone, like threads twisting into a cord. All the hairs prickled on the back of Casimir’s neck and he shivered as if there had been a drop in temperature. A strange sensation rippled through his body and the scene before him contracted like a telescope, focussing his attention on a single point.

  In the shadow of the firework machine stood a man. He was dressed in black with his dark hair tied back in a tail behind his head, and if it had not been for the pale smudges of his face, hands and bare feet, he would probably have been completely invisible. He was so still he might almost have been a part of the darkness. Casimir could not guess how long he had been standing there. It might have been a minute, or it might have been hours. There was nothing about him to say where he had come from, or why.

  With every step the guard was drawing closer to him. Any moment now the two men would see each other and there would be a confrontation, perhaps a scuffle and an arrest. Casimir willed the intruder to withdraw into the shadows, but instead he stood his ground. The guard was almost on top of him, and now Casimir realised it was him, not the dark-haired man who was walking into an ambush. Casimir took a few steps forward and then started running towards the path. He yelled a warning, but his shouts stuck in his throat. The guard passed within an arm’s length of the intruder and went whistling into the dark as if there was no one there at all.

  Now the dark-haired man looked straight at Casimir. He made no attempt to speak or make any other contact, but as their eyes met every muscle in Casimir’s body seemed to lock. His breath seized in his lungs and there was a jolt somewhere in his head, as if someone had opened a drawer in his mind and was rummaging through it. Thoughts, memories, images of his father and himself flashed through his head and evaporated. He saw his mother, his father in his gunner’s uniform and in the firework shop; himself as a small boy, laughing and playing, getting gradually older and older until—

  ‘Casimir!’

  The drawer slammed shut. Casimir’s mind went blank and he sagged and dropped to his knees as if suddenly released. For a few seconds of sheer panic he did not know who he was, or where, or what was happening. Then his sense of reality came trickling back. He was in the park behind the palace. A cold wind was blowing into his face. His hands were trembling and he was sweating all over, but when he tried to remember why, there did not seem to be a reason.

  ‘Casimir. Are you all right?’

  The voice sounded again behind him. Casimir turned. A thin man in a peaked hat and huge, caped, oilskin topcoat was hurrying towards him across the grass. Casimir stood up and wiped his hands on his trousers. The expression on his face must have told his father that something was wrong, for Simeon looked at him sharply and flared his nostrils as if scenting the air.

  ‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just felt dizzy all of a sudden. Maybe I’m ill.’

  Simeon narrowed his eyes. Casimir saw that he did not believe him. His father was about to say something else, but before he had a chance to speak, it started raining again. It was only a light drizzle, but it distracted Simeon’s attention and he looked up at the clouds with an exclamation of disgust.

  ‘That’s finished it
. We’ll have to move quickly or we’ll lose the whole display. Come on, Cas, give me a hand with this tarpaulin.’ He grabbed a corner and started hauling it back, at the same time firing off a list of instructions. ‘It’s a standard set up. I’ll work the rockets, you do the mortars. Five seconds between each flight, alternating rockets with shells. Then the silver fountains and the set piece with the catherine wheels. Roman candles, more rockets, and the big shell with the loud salute last of all. That should impress them. With all this cloud cover to hold the noise in, it’ll sound like doomsday. Have you got all that?’

  Casimir nodded. He put some wax plugs into his ears and dragged his leather cap down over his fringe so it wouldn’t catch fire. He was still not exactly sure what had happened on the path, but he was already forgetting about it. The display demanded his complete concentration; there was no time now to think about anything else.

  Simeon shifted the safety lanterns which gave them enough light to see. Upstairs, the lamps in the treasurer’s drawing room were going out. Curtains were held back and faces watched at the windows. It was the moment of anticipation that Casimir normally relished, but this evening something felt different. He lit his slow match at the firepot and walked over to the mortars. His legs moved jerkily and he wondered briefly if he really was coming down with something.

  Simeon dropped to one knee beside the first volley of rockets.

  ‘Ready?’

  Casimir nodded. ‘Ready.’

  He crouched down by the firework mortar, waiting. Across from him, Simeon touched his slow match to the first fuse. It hissed into life and there was a jolt, a whizz and a streak of light as the bundle of rockets disappeared into the sky. Casimir counted five and touched off his mortar, stepping back neatly before it detonated. The familiar thud and whoosh of the shell and the little flash of heat from the exploding gunpowder reassured him a little. By the time he reached the second mortar, the first volley of rockets was already exploding overhead and he had forgotten there had been anything unusual about the evening at all.