The Stockholm Octavo (33 page)

Chapter Fifty-One
The Cuckoo

Sources: E. L., Mrs. S., Katarina E., R. Ekblad

ON THE SIXTH DAY OF MARCH
I was leaving home for work at Customs when Mrs. Murbeck popped her head into the hall. “A note arrived yesterday, but you came in very late. Have you been at Gullenborg again?” She made a clucking sound and shook her head sadly. “I don't think it wise you stand outside your lady's house at night, hoping for entry. Most improper, Mr. Larsson. You would do better to make an honest appeal to her guardian.”

I had gone to Gullenborg every night for weeks in all manner of disguises, hoping to find egress or someone to pay for it, so far without success. But the gossip about Johanna oozed out through the cracks: the servants feared her knowledge now and pointed to Young Per. Old Cook wanted her jailed, which in a sense she already was: The Uzanne kept Johanna close or safely locked away. I studied Mrs. Murbeck's kind and ugly face, so radiant with concern, so utterly believable. “Perhaps you would make an honest appeal on my behalf,” I said.

“What? Me?”

“Miss Bloom's mistress might see the benefit of surrounding Johanna with a spirit of Christian repentance,” I said. “The Uzanne is very close to Bishop Celsius, and you bring the recommendation of the Great Church, and the Ladies Prayer Society.”

Mrs. Murbeck straightened at this mention of her church group. “I do know every prayer by heart.”

“Yes, and you could bring her news from me.” Mrs. Murbeck wrinkled her nose at this obvious ploy. “If you would agree to act as mouthpiece for both the Lord and me, our indebtedness would be great.” She crossed her arms, hands firmly trapped under the armpits, as if they might snatch my bribe without her permission. “I thought I might teach you to read and write beyond the required catechism. Your son, too, though I might need to use novels to inspire him. It is a small price for the Murbecks to pay in return for the whole world.”

At first I thought she did not hear me, or did not wish to learn, but then her hands fluttered free of their pinions. “Me and my boy literate? Bountiful God!” She actually embraced me, face splotchy with gratitude and tears. “I will go to Gullenborg every night if you wish. We will save more than just Miss Bloom.”

I held out my hand to seal the deal, but she took me in a warm embrace that made me laugh. She wiped her eyes and finally handed over the note that had arrived. I recognized the spidery hand at once. She had returned from Gefle.

“We begin our exchange of services tonight,” I said as I hurried out the door. Mrs. Murbeck's sharp intake of breath meant most definitely yes.

The streets were free of snow in patches where the sun could reach, a sign that there was change in the air. I hurried up the stairs of the gabled house on Gray Friars Alley with real anticipation and stood in the dim entryway, shivering with cold and full of conversation and questions. I knocked with a playful tap. No one came, so I knocked again with a more businesslike hand. Still nothing. I tried once more, this time with the loud and disturbing insistence generally reserved for lawbreakers. The locks finally pulled back with a series of clicks and the door opened, but it was not Katarina who greeted me.

Mrs. Sparrow wore a dressing gown of blue velvet that had been devoured by moths and over that a multitude of shawls. These garments looked as if she had worn them for a week, and their ripe odor confirmed this opinion. Her brown hair was pulled back in a bun, but flat against her skull and shiny with oil, strands of gray here and there. Her face had thinned and was pale as plaster; but she was smiling broadly, her brown eyes large and alight with a fanatic's fire. Her always lively hands were clasped before her chest. “Emil! You are thin as a wraith!” she said; at least her voice was her own.

“Mrs. Sparrow, I have been deathly ill but will fill out again. What has become of you?”

“I have been on a pilgrimage, Emil, a holy one. A fruitful one. Come in, come in!” She tugged at my arm to draw me inside, my breath still forming clouds in the air before me. The gloomy hall was lit only by what daylight made it through the thick curtains that had fallen aside in places. A faint aroma of spoiled food, worn stockings, and chamber pot hung in the chill air.

“Where is Katarina? Has she gone to her marriage bed and never got out?” I asked.

“What? Oh, Katarina. Yes, I told her to go and be married at once. The eight were in place and I sent her to . . . I sent her to . . . I don't remember where I sent her. She cried, I do remember that. And she said she would come back. I only need to send word.”

“You might want to send soon, if you can recall her whereabouts; you cannot have guests when the house looks as it does.”

“I am done with guests, Emil. I do not need them anymore.” Mrs. Sparrow started down the hall, and I followed. She stopped abruptly at a walnut sideboard and traced a square and a circle in the grime, the motes of dust dancing through a shaft of light that cut into the hall from a window. She stood looking down at this form for some time, seeming to forget I was there.

“But you need people to survive,” I said at last.

She looked at me with a lunatic's glee. “That I would hear that from you!” She rubbed away the drawing and shook my hand, as if we were meeting for the first time. “Would you join me in a tumbler of brandy, sir?” she said solemnly. “There may still be an open bottle in the main salon,” she said.

“It might do us both some good,” I said, heading for the large gaming room. When I opened the doors, I was met by a blast of air so cold my eyes watered and my lungs ached. The windows were flung open and snow had drifted in, leaving a white powder dusting up against the floor moldings. Chairs had been overturned and glasses broken, carafes of water burst with ice. Lined up near the mantel were seven or eight days' worth of chamber pots, full but thankfully frozen, indicating that Katarina had been gone for a week and no one had been in since. I spied a bottle of Armagnac on a sideboard, and used a linen napkin tossed on the floor to pick it up.

Mrs. Sparrow was gone when I came back, but I could see a flicker of light coming from her bedchamber down the hall. The stove was lit and the room warmer, and thankfully smelled strongly of starch and camphor. A candle burned on the nightstand, gently illuminating a body lying flat out on the bed. The bed was very high off the floor, requiring a set of library steps to get up into it, and so I climbed up to see that it was Mrs. Sparrow, like some pale bishop lying in state. She was clad in a fresh white linen nightgown and matching robe, extravagantly trimmed with lace. She wore a nightcap bedecked with satin ribbons and embroidered with snowdrops. Her feet were hugged by the most exquisite white tricot slippers, edged with grosgrain ribbon and embroidered with birds and branches.

I pulled a straight-backed chair next to her bed and sat, but she remained silent. “Such exquisite nightclothes,” I finally blurted out.

“Long ago I saw a vision that I would die in bed,” she said matter-of-factly, her eyes still closed. “I wish to be well dressed when my body is found.”

“Are you ill, Mrs. Sparrow? Should I call for a physician? Or a priest?” I climbed up to feel the pulse in her wrist.

She sat up and grasped my hand. “I am not ill, Emil. I go every night to bed like this, for every night might be my last. But in truth this night
is
the end of something: my Octavo is complete and the event is in motion.” She told me it began to fall into place on Twelfth Night, when she finally paid attention to her Teacher: her richly costumed visit to the Opera opened the door to Gustav, who arrived for the final scene and received her in the royal box. Gustav invited her to the Parliament in Gefle, where they would confer. “The sleigh ride was two long days, cutting through a blank white landscape that inspired the Sight. I was filled with visions; the Northern Lights dancing in patterns I deciphered every night, the wind in the empty black branches whispering of the infinite eight. But, Emil, what followed this mystic landscape was a test of my resolve to reach my Companion. I went daily to the freezing chambers where the delegates met, past icicles of frozen vomit that hung from the windows of the hospitality halls. There were few women present but for prostitutes and servants. I was scorned and spat upon, threatened with arrest. The streets were thick with soldiers, tense with talk of assassination. I was suspect and detained. But he saw me, finally. He saw me. And we were reunited.” She adjusted her nightcap and wiped at her eyes, tears of happiness escaping from the corners. “Gustav promised to see it through to the end.”

“What end?” I asked.

“The end of my Octavo. My Key is set to open the door! Gustav ordered Axel von Fersen to set off from Brussels, carrying the papers of a diplomat bound for Portugal. Von Fersen will go into the Tuileries and come out with the king and queen of France.”

“You make it seem like child's play,” I said, “even if von Fersen would give his life.”

“Von Fersen is the perfect Key. Love opens all doors.”

“Does it, Mrs. Sparrow?” I stood and shut the door to keep the warmer air inside. “And what of the threats to Gustav here in the Town—the Patriots, Duke Karl, The Uzanne? The rumors of assassination are incessant, and I know of one plot that may succeed before von Fersen even reaches Paris.”

“All the more need for urgency,” she whispered. “You must find the last of your eight and push them into place. Then the larger whole is complete.” She reclined once more and shut her eyes. “Do you still fail to see how our octavos connect? The Stockholm Octavo will change everything.”

After some minutes of silence I assumed she was asleep. I tended the stove, then went to her study and wrote a note to Mrs. Murbeck, requesting the housemaid come at once to Gray Friars Alley and bring hearty soup and black bread from the corner inn. I whistled out the window to a boy walking through the courtyard, and he was up the servants' stair in a trice, eager to run the note for a shilling. I went next to the kitchen. The water barrel was full and smelled fresh enough to drink. Katarina had left an oil lamp, a flint, and wood for a small fire set in the hearth. I lit the lamp and the fire and placed the kettle on the hob to boil. The heat and light helped to melt the fear bunching in my shoulders and neck. It was easy to find the teapot, cups, saucers, spoons, and plates, for the kitchen was as organized as a ship's galley. The pantry door was unlocked, and I found tea leaves, sugar, a muslin bag filled with chestnuts in a punched tin box, paper-wrapped rounds of hard bread in a drawer, and a sealed jar of lingonberry jam. When tea was steeped and the chestnuts roasted, I placed the breakfast on a silver tray that was tarnishing on a shelf and returned to Mrs. Sparrow.

It looked as if a late winter gale had swept through the room in my absence and scattered her papers everywhere. She had climbed down from her bier and sat near the small bedside table, leaning into the circle of illumination. Her attention was all on a sheet of paper covered with drawings, mumbling into it with much sighing and sucking. I was now utterly unnerved. “Mrs. Sparrow, you must eat, or Sir Bone Cruncher will join you at your table,” I said in a scolding tone reminiscent of Mrs. Murbeck's to her son. I poured out the tea with trembling hands, rattling the cups and spilling into the saucers, then placed five cubes of sugar in Mrs. Sparrow's cup and handed it to her. “The cupboards are nearly bare; are you dining at the Black Cat?”

Mrs. Sparrow held the cup to her face, breathing in the steam. “I have not been dining at all. The infinite Octavo overwhelms the body and its needs.” She put down her tea untasted. “I want you to see the Octavo as I do, Emil. I have been mapping it out in every which way.” She stood and scurried about the room, gathering up and dropping papers, tapping the pile every so often on the table to keep it neat. “You see, the Octavo connects in so many directions, but at the center of them all is the king of France. Look here, look,” she insisted, and thrust a handful of papers at me, shuffling the rest over and over, as if they were a large deck of cards. The pages were covered with octagons in fanciful combinations—squares, cruciforms, rectangles, pyramids, all of geometry come to play out in mad diagrams. As I leafed through this collection, Mrs. Sparrow retrieved the remaining papers, talking excitedly. “It doesn't matter how you configure the Octavos. There is the cruciform, you see the French king in the transept. In the compass, he is the center point. All kingdoms radiate from him. Ah, the spiral. The source. Oh there are so many many forms, Emil. How can you not see? This is the Divine Geometry, and whatever shape we form, the French king remains the key. He is the center of the center. We revolve around him like planets around the sun. And in the center of the universe of kings is the king of France. This is the world. This is the world now and forever. If the French king goes, our world goes with him. So it looks to be going now, out of its God-given orbit, and we will all be shaken loose.” She dropped her diagrams and began scratching at her scalp with both hands in a sudden fury—whether at her mad thoughts or countless lice I knew not.

“Perhaps one day soon there will be no monarchs at all,” I said, picking up the pages.

This stopped her cold and she picked up her cup, tilting it so a dribble of tea ran down the front of her nightgown. “The world is not ready to rule itself.”

“You think little of people then.”

She considered this and for some moments stared out into the faded blue of the March sky. “I have spent far more sober time in their company than you. People want leaders. They
need
leaders.” I noted that the desire for reform was sweeping through Europe and Gustav himself meant to change the old ways. Mrs. Sparrow shook her head. “It doesn't matter what either of us think. The Octavo forms regardless, and someone will rule, crown or no. The nation's best hope lies with the French king.” She pushed the rest of the papers on her lap to the floor, whispering to herself, “The French king. The French king.”