Salamander by Thomas Wharton Page A

unless it were his own at the gambling table or the brothel, ruthlessly punished. Finally, at the age of seventeen, when it seemed to me my life was already over, I was suddenly free. Michel had already had our sisters tucked safely away in convents and now he wanted me out of his sight, too. So I was sent to Paris, to the Jesuit College, to begin my studies for the priesthood.
    There, he discovered Versailles. Or rather, like so many exiles before him, he was caught by it as if by gravity, and revolved in that glittering orbit like a grubby coin circling a collection plate. Before long, his greatest ambition was to become confessor to the true power in the realm, the king’s mistress.
    – Things did not turn out that way, Flood said.
    – Fortunately, they did not. I soon discovered I was not cut out to be another painted lackey, scurrying to the palace every morning to witness the awesome spectacle of the royal toilet. Dukes standing at attendance with towels, while others vied for the honour of holding his chamber pot. The great achievement of Versailles, I saw, was to make time turn in a never-ending circle around the sun of ceremony. But it was a false eternity, an illusion inviting its own demise. I turned away from it, and began to write. And since one cannot expect people to read a book of blank pages, I wrote a novel.
    While the Abbé was telling his story, light flakes of snow had begun to fall. The two men looked at one another, shivered and went inside, laughing and brushing the snow from their hair.
    – You must have overcome your dislike of print, Flood said. You know so many of the Count’s books so well.
    – Of course, the Abbé said. Within every book there lies concealed a book of nothing. Don’t you sense it when you reada page brimming with words? The vast gulf of emptiness beneath the frail net of letters. The ghostliness of the letters themselves. Giving a semblance of life to things and people who are really nothing. Nothing at all. No, it was the reading that mattered, I eventually understood, not whether the pages were blank or printed. The Mohammedans say that an hour of reading is one stolen from Paradise. To that perfect thought I can only add that an hour of writing gives one a foretaste of the other place.
    – What are you working on now? Flood asked. To his surprise the Abbé’s face darkened.
    – Don’t you know, Mr. Flood, that is the one question you must never ask a writer?

    Irena was always the first member of the household to awaken. Long before the servants had begun their daily circumnavigations she would open her eyes. The sun would not yet be up, and since she had never overcome a childhood fear of the dark she would quickly light a candle.
    This morning, as always, her bed was back in its chamber, motionless for the moment, and in the stillness she could listen to the rest of the castle. All around her, the clock ticked. Far below, the boilers rumbled. All sounded as it should.
    She rose in her shift, pulled on a morning gown, and hurried on bare feet through the corridors, to a tall oak cabinet set into a niche. Slipping a small brass key from her pocket, she stepped up into the niche, unlocked the cabinet, swung open its narrow doors, and gazed upon the tarnished silver of her mother’s face.
    When she was a little girl Irena had asked her father where
the poor Countess
was that the nurses often talked about in sad whispers. The Count told her that her mother had died bringing her into the world. On Irena’s twelfth birthday he brought her to this cabinet and revealed his gift, the first of the automatons fashioned by the Venetian metallurgist: a mother of polished steel and brass. The creature shuddered to life, whirring like a startled pheasant, tilted forward, and spread its arms wide to take the girl into its embrace. Irena screamed, bolted in terror, and could not be made to go near the thing again, despite her father’s command that she do so. Eventually the Count