Fireworks and Darkness Read online

  ‘Nor have I,’ said Casimir. The confidence slipped out before he could help himself, and Ruth looked surprised.

  ‘It’s not you who’s brought the guard here, it wasn’t your fault,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘They’ll have been watching you ever since Friday night. And the fact that they’re doing that doesn’t have to mean anything. I’ll talk to Christina again and see what can be done. But Simeon must understand: if he tries to run, there’ll be no helping him. He’ll end up in the Undercroft and that will be the end of both of you.’

  And you too, thought Casimir. He didn’t say it, though, but simply nodded and went over to the counter. As he retrieved the key from its hook, Ruth’s eye fell on the letter that Tycho had left earlier. Her lips pursed in apparent recognition of the handwriting.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind if I take it.’

  She reached out a hand to the shelf where it was sitting, but Casimir was quicker. He took the letter and put it into his pocket. For a moment he met Ruth’s eyes squarely. She did not drop her gaze, but she at least had the grace to blush.

  ‘A word of warning, Casimir,’ she said. ‘My cousin is harmless, but unwise. He has been writing to many people lately, including myself. I know what’s probably in that letter. My advice, for what it is worth, is to put it in the fire.’

  Casimir put it back on the shelf.

  ‘I’ll see to it.’

  ‘Do.’

  Casimir watched her go out to her coach, picking her way through the puddles in her fur-lined cloak. The footman climbed down from the back to help her in, and the vehicle turned awkwardly in the narrow lane and drove away. Casimir waited until it had gone, then opened the door and went out into the street. Simeon had said the man who was watching them was in Petersen’s house, opposite, but the windows were still boarded up and it looked deserted as it had since its owner had died three months before. It was possible, of course, that his father was mistaken, but Casimir did not think it likely. With a sense of sadness, he acknowledged that the game had moved beyond him and he no longer knew what Simeon was capable of or not.

  After a while, he gave up and went back inside. On his way past the counter, he noticed that the shelf behind it was empty and that Tycho’s letter was gone. There was, he thought, a faint—a very faint—odour of magic. But it was hard to be certain whether it was stale or fresh, or whether it was simply the scent of unexploded gunpowder, waiting to be set off.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Casimir came back into the kitchen he found Joachim sitting at the table, sorting through a stack of papers. The fire was burning and flickering and there was a familiar crackle of burning paper. As Casimir watched, his uncle tossed a sheaf of dog-eared pamphlets into the flames.

  ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘the price of failure for a writer. If you don’t sell, you burn.’

  Casimir sat down. ‘Where’s Simeon?’

  ‘Out. He left just a moment ago. Don’t ask where he’s gone, I couldn’t tell you. He didn’t volunteer the information and a man of my proclivities knows better than to ask.’

  Joachim cut the twine on another bundle of papers and started sorting through them. They were the remains of his last year’s stock, for he was, ostensibly at least, a travelling bookseller and printer’s agent. Joachim delivered books, newspapers and catalogues to outlying districts, and made a specialty of items too scabrous and seditious to be available through ordinary channels. Every winter, around Christmas, his travels brought him back to Starberg, where Casimir and Simeon had made a habit of meeting up with him for winter lodgings. Except from queens, who could watch from the comfort of their heated palaces, there was not much call for firework displays in the dead of winter. While the Runcimans made stockpiles of fireworks, Joachim visited printers, stocked up on new titles, and delivered private letters whose contents were too sensitive to entrust to normal channels. Most of his time though, was spent renewing the network of information and contacts which was his real business. There was, as Joachim liked to tell Casimir, no money to speak of in books. He might have added, spying was much more profitable.

  Casimir picked some woodcuts up from the table and started leafing through them. Their subject matter would have been enough to land both of them in the Undercroft if seen by the wrong eyes, but Casimir was too used to Joachim’s activities to be really worried. Halfway through the pile his attention was arrested by a familiar face. The woodcut, crudely done on cheap stock, was captioned simply, Invitation to a Royal Wedding. It showed Queen Elsabetta, slightly smudged and literally falling out of her dress, lying on a sofa with her cousin, the Margrave Greitz. The procurator had his pants down, and the queen’s arms were twined around his neck, but Casimir was more interested in a third figure, also female, which was shown creeping up behind them and reaching for the crown on the side table. A bubble was coming out of her mouth: Sister, can I play, too? With its long hair, round eyes and tiny coronet, it was unmistakably Princess Christina.

  ‘That’s sick,’ he said, not altogether disapprovingly.

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it,’ Joachim agreed. ‘I’ll have some new ones soon, if you’re interested.’ He took the picture from Casimir and divided the rest of the woodcuts carefully into two neat stacks. One, he tied up with twine and put back into his pack, along with several wax-sealed letters. The rest, including the questionable picture of the queen, he tossed into the fire.

  ‘Better to play safe if the leeches are onto us,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Simeon to pay me back in drinks when he’s himself again. Ah, dear old Starberg! How I love it. There’s nothing in Ostermark to quite match it for atmosphere. The cold, the stink, the Queen’s Guard at your back every step you take: I sometimes wonder why I ever leave.’ He leaned back in his chair and stretched. ‘Now. You and I have some catching up to do. What’s this I hear about Circastes?’

  ‘It’s nothing, really,’ said Casimir awkwardly. ‘I’m almost back to normal. It was more an accident than anything else.’

  ‘An accident? I can see why the charming Ruth told me to talk to you,’ said Joachim. ‘Don’t play games, Cas. You forget, I was there when this happened to your mother. Do you really think I’m going to stand back and watch it all happen again, just because you don’t want to talk about it? I want you to go right back to the beginning. Take your time. And remember, if you don’t tell me everything, I’ll find out anyway.’

  ‘Circastes attacked me in the park,’ Casimir began reluctantly. Then he stopped. The enormity of what he had experienced, of what he was still experiencing, pressed so closely he did not know how to put his feelings into words. He blurted out, ‘He got inside my head. It was horrible,’ and as he spoke, the whole shuddering awfulness of Friday night came rushing back. The mist on the lake, the rain, the smell of the fallen leaves in the park, and Simeon walking towards him through the firework smoke with his firepot swinging at his side. And then the pull from the machine, the smell of the magic competing with the waft of gunpowder, and the numbing shock of the moment when his neck had snapped and for a few seconds he had died. Casimir began to shake. He had not thought he would be able to describe what had happened to anyone: not the fear, nor the panic, nor the sense of powerlessness and incredulity as his body had hit the ground. But now, after the two worst days of his life, the words came, almost tripping him up with the intensity of reliving the experience, and though he almost broke down completely when he came to the description of what had happened when he fell from the machine, he did not leave anything out. Joachim listened intently, not interrupting, but merely interposing the occasional question when he did not understand. But his face grew increasingly drawn as the account progressed, and at last, when Casimir had finished, he said,

  ‘And Simeon? Has he said anything at all to you about this?’

  Casimir shook his head. ‘No. Hardly anything. He just told me who Circastes was and how to avoid him, and he didn’t even want to do that.
I think he only told me because he had to. But the worst of it is, he’s been acting really strangely. One moment he’s normal, the next he’s biting my head off. And he’s been using his magic for all sorts of things, like making lights and fetching letters. He’s never done that before. It’s like some sort of stopper’s come out of a bottle and the magic just keeps spewing out.’

  ‘Perhaps the bottle’s had the stopper in it for too long.’

  ‘But Simeon says magic is wrong.’

  ‘No doubt. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t use it when he has to,’ said Joachim. ‘Cas, you’re not going to like this, but try and look at this from Simeon’s point of view. He’s been staving this crisis off since he was seventeen. Do you really think a man that desperate wouldn’t use the one truly effective weapon he has at his disposal? I can assure you, he’s not evaded Circastes all these years by putting on a uniform and hiding in the artillery train at the bum end of the Ostermark army, or by doing a flit to the next town every six months either. Of course he’s used his magic. He wouldn’t have survived five minutes if he hadn’t.’

  ‘I never realised,’ said Casimir miserably.

  ‘No reason why you should,’ said Joachim. ‘Simeon is secretive by nature, and he knows how to cover his tracks. I remember the first time I found out what he was. We were in the army and sharing a tent, and I surprised him one night putting wards on the canvas. Yet if I hadn’t come back off guard duty at that particular moment, I would probably never have found out. Simeon reckons small spells that are continuous and don’t require much energy can pass for years more or less unnoticed. And let’s face it, Cas, your work is full of funny smells. This shop stinks. A little whiff of something extra wouldn’t make much of an impression.’

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ objected Casimir.

  ‘Isn’t it? The fact is, you’re so close to it, you’re past noticing. And for that matter, I’ve often had my doubts about some of Simeon’s fireworks. Think of those girandoles that levitate off their poles, and the way his set pieces move as if they’re almost alive. Then there’s the colours no other firework maker can get, the blues and greens—’

  ‘That’s not magic, that’s chemicals,’ said Casimir defensively. ‘Barium for green, zinc for blue. Anyone could do it if they knew the mix.’

  ‘I’ll bow to your professional opinion,’ said Joachim, ‘but in any case we’re straying from the subject. What I’m trying to tell you is this: whatever Simeon may say, he has made his choice and he cannot walk away from it. The magic is part of him. It’s in his blood and his bones by his own resolution and he is fooling himself if he says he can live without it.’

  Casimir took this in. ‘Joachim. Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you ever see my mother?’

  ‘Now, there’s an interesting question,’ said Joachim. ‘What makes you ask after her all of a sudden?’

  ‘Nothing. Just curious, I suppose.’

  ‘She’s been gone eight years and you’ve never been curious before. Never wondered where she was, what she was doing? Never thought to ask me how she was getting along?’

  Something in his tone stung Casimir’s already lacerated nerves. ‘Of course I wondered about her. She’s my mother. But Simeon would never have let me ask you, so there wasn’t any point. Anyway, did she ever ask about me?’

  ‘No. Never,’ said Joachim, flatly, and he went on, with a glance at Casimir’s shocked expression, ‘believe that, Cas, with all your heart. I could tell you a lot of things about your mother if I wanted to, and any or all of them could be true. But I am never going to tell you where she is. Simeon has ways and means at his disposal. If I told you, he’d winkle it out of you in an instant.’

  ‘He could winkle it out of you, too.’

  ‘He could,’ Joachim agreed. ‘But I promise you, he won’t.’

  He stood up, picked up his topcoat, and put it on over his leather waistcoat. Then he pulled a battered hat down over his eyes and slung his pack over his shoulder.

  ‘I have to go out. I’ve got people to see and messages to deliver. We’ll talk some more when I come back. If you could go out to the front and create some sort of diversion, it’d help.’

  ‘All right.’ Casimir pushed back his chair. At the passage doorway, he paused and looked back over his shoulder. ‘Where exactly are you going?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Joachim reprovingly. ‘That would be telling.’

  Casimir fetched a rag and a bucket of water from the workshop and took them out into the street. For ten minutes or so he made a play of cleaning the shop windows, which were in truth extremely dirty. He felt jumpy. While Joachim was prone to embellishment in the interests of a good story, he knew that he never dramatised risk. If he wanted a diversion while he got away, the chances that he needed one were very good.

  Across the street was Petersen’s place, where Simeon had claimed someone was watching. It looked much as it had for the last few months, ever since its owner had died and the fever commissioners had boarded it up. Casimir went out into the middle of the street to empty his bucket into the gutter and get a better look, and a figure in the familiar black and scarlet uniform came out of another building along the street. It could easily have been a coincidence, but Casimir knew it wasn’t. The leeches were trying to frighten him; they wanted him to know he was being watched. Casimir went back inside to eat a belated, solitary lunch and sew Princess Christina’s gold ring into his pillow for safekeeping. Then, since he had nothing better to do, he went into the workroom.

  Ordinarily, there would have been lots to occupy him. For months, Elsabetta’s wedding had kept them working every daylight hour: now, with no guarantee they would even be staying in Starberg, and his hands still in bandages, it was hard for Casimir to know what to do. In the end, he got out a ball of twine and sat winding it around the paper cases of the firework shells. It was a dull and painstaking job and one he normally skived off doing, but this afternoon he found the patient weaving and knotting suited his agitated mood. Each shell was a cylinder, made by winding and gluing strips of stiff brown paper around a wooden form. The cylinder contained circular patterns of crackers, running rockets and stars, tamped down and interspersed with black powder; at the bottom was the priming chamber, which was filled with gunpowder, and a touch-hole through which protruded the fuse. Until they had settled in Starberg and established the shop, Casimir’s experience of shells had been limited. He and Simeon only owned the one small mortar in their window and it was generally more practical for travelling pyrobolists to use rockets. But rockets needed large amounts of gunpowder to carry them into the sky, meaning the space inside for stars and crackers was limited; shells were more spectacular, and could even be designed to burst in a series of different coloured explosions. For the queen’s wedding, Simeon had negotiated with the Master of the Ordnance for the use of as many military mortars as they needed; he had taught Casimir how to calculate the launching charge and the size of the shell in relation to the calibre of the mortar, and how to make salutes by filling the shell with cut reeds packed with gunpowder. And in passing, he had touched on their military applications, telling him how to replace the harmless stars with nails and shrapnel that would tear a man’s head off. This afternoon it occurred to Casimir for the first time that, in doing this, Simeon might have had an ulterior motive. If they left Starberg without their tools, powder and equipment, they could no longer make fireworks themselves; nor could they expect to find work with other pyrobolists, who mostly employed members of their own families. But men who could mix black powder and operate cannon were valuable commodities in any army, and at fourteen, especially with his skills, Casimir was more than old enough to enlist, too.

  Casimir put down his ball of twine. The possibility that Simeon had been considering re-enlisting terrified him. He had no dreams of heroism, no hopes of glory and the prospect of fighting for his living made his stomach curdle. Intellectually, Casimir had always kno
wn that Simeon had killed people. All soldiers had to, at random and without compunction, but most of the time he had conveniently managed not to think about it. Artillerymen were the outcasts in any army. Filthy, notoriously foul-mouthed, shoved to the back of the baggage train where their black work posed less of a threat to their fellow soldiers, they were feared and shunned by ally and enemy alike. Helplessly, Casimir looked around the firework workshop, at the pots of gum arabic, the basket of reeds for the salutes, the apothecary’s scales, driving bench and all the arcane tools of his trade. There were wooden mallets and sharp knives for cutting paper, neat pottery containers labelled Camphire, Quickmatch, Flowers of Benjamin; pots of gaily-coloured paint and glistening paper stars, jars of frankincense and civet for Simeon’s special perfumed water globes. A stack of tiny red rocket caps drooped on the bench, like hats for miniature Chinese. As he looked at all these things it occurred to Casimir that within these walls he had made the firework boy and learned the final mysteries of the craft he had been trained up in since childhood, and that despite Ruth and Simeon and even Circastes, he did not want to leave what he had learned behind. The power to make people laugh and shout out loud with joy and excitement, painstakingly gained over so many years in peaceful towns and villages, at fairs and festivals, was the only magic he wanted to wield. And whatever happened to him now, he knew he did not want to use it to kill people.

  His equanimity had gone and a depression settled slowly over him in its place. For a while Casimir worked on, but it was hard to shake off the feeling that he was wasting his time. In the end the daylight went and he found himself sitting in the dark. Casimir put away his tools and went back to the kitchen. He had put out the fire when Joachim left and had to fumble in the dark for the tinderbox; when he found it, the dampness in the air affected the tinder and it refused to glow. As Casimir knelt to fish some half-burned paper out of the fireplace, yet another anomaly occurred to him: that Simeon, so insistent that their unattended fires always be doused, could nevertheless always get one going whenever he wanted in a matter of seconds. The thought of his father casually using magic to light their fires made Casimir irrationally angry. He suddenly wanted to lash out and defy him, to call Simeon a hypocrite and tell him what he thought of his secrecy. But Simeon was not there. And instead, as if from nowhere, a thought insinuated itself into his head like a snake winding its way out of a wicker basket: that magic was not the only way to light a fire.