Chapter Text
Being a man who traveled but infrequently, Jonathan had the unfortunate habit of forgetting just what it was that travel entailed, every time he set off on a journey. In memory, it all drifted backwards into a pleasant haze, the best parts the only ones that were recalled, while everything that had been somewhat less than fair were quickly consigned to half-memory at best, and at worst, completely forgotten.
It had… it had taken much longer than Jonathan had thought it would, to make it from his home to that place on the map Jonah had pointed to as being the site of Albrecht’s own home. That was certainly one thing he had forgotten about traveling. When you put it all down on a map, everything looked so close together, even those things which had an ocean lying between them. You didn’t think about the terrain, you didn’t think about the wind or the currents of the water, and you did not think about the roads or their quality. You just looked at it, and your inclination was to chart out your path as it would be if you traveled in a straight line, and oh, everything looked so close when you did that.
But of course, travel could not be conducted in a straight line, as Jonathan had regretfully remembered not long after he set out on this errand. Travel could not be conducted in a straight line, and sometimes, it even involved backtracking, if the terrain was hostile enough that the roads were obliged to be quite so undulating and circuitous as to loop around in such a way. Jonathan had remembered this, much to his regret, not long after he made landfall on the Continent, as well as what the roads tended to be like at this time of year, and the delays that could introduce to travel times as well.
Jonathan would not call himself soft, or indolent. Though he was no athlete, he spent quite a bit of time on his feet, quite a bit of time walking, and he had learned over the years how to resign himself quickly to discomfort, and then try as best he could to put it out of mind. That being said, he was not a man who was accustomed to spending all day six days a week for… God, how long had it even been that he’d been on the road, now?… traveling in a coach on less than well-maintained roads, and it had quickly begun to wear on him. Sleeping on the thin, lumpy beds to be found in the roadside inns Jonathan thought most appropriate to his station and the need to stretch out the money he’d been given (considerable, but not inexhaustible, after all) in case he really would be obliged to reside in an inn the entire time he was in Bavaria, after all, had not helped matters one bit. After a few days like that, Jonathan had reached the point where he inevitably went to his bed with a sore back and stiff legs. By the time the first couple of weeks had passed, sleeping lying down in a still place could no longer be a cure for these things, and indeed, the sorry state of the mattresses he slept on only exacerbated his aches and pains, to the point where he was spending the entirety of his waking life feeling like nothing quite so much as a walking bruise.
There were no rail lines in Bavaria. That was something else that Jonathan had discovered, alongside his rediscovery of the perils of muddy roads and horses turning their ankles, alongside his rediscovery of why, just why it was of such vital importance that you lock your door at night if you’re going to be sleeping in an inn. There were no rail lines anywhere in Bavaria, and Jonathan could not ascertain for certain whether there were any rail lines anywhere in Germany at all. His German was serviceable, though as he ventured deeper into the Confederation, he had come to realize that he was perhaps less expert with the language than he had previously thought. In particular, Jonathan did not know what word would be used in German to signify ‘rail line’ or ‘steam engine,’ and though he had led himself and others on a merry dance while trying to figure out just what it was he was talking about, he had never gained the answer, and did not expect to unless he should wind up in one of the larger cities, like Nuremberg or Hamburg, where the population was more likely to be educated in current events and English both.
Perhaps there were no rail lines anywhere in any of the kingdoms and duchies and principalities and city-states that made up what Jonathan regarded more as a hodge-podge than a country, though since he did not need to live in it, he had thought it better to keep his opinions to himself. Certainly, Jonathan had seen no evidence of any when he had crossed the border from France, and the deeper within he dwelled, the more glaring the absence became. He saw no evidence of deforestation or construction consistent with the building of a railroad. He never saw anything he would have recognized as a terminal, not even the most rudimentary wooden platform. No plumes of fast-moving black smoke marred the skies that stretched out pale and cloudy and red and golden and pure, pure, dazzling blue over his head. Jonathan felt sometimes as if he had gone some eighty years into the past, but then, the coach would stop at an inn or a village, and he was obliged to amend his assessment to thirty years.
As Jonathan ventured deeper and deeper into the heart of Bavaria, further away from any of the larger towns and cities and deeper into dense forests, the stronger that sensation of having gone into the past became. He could not point to any one thing that made him think so (well, besides the absence of rail lines, but that was not enough on its own to justify the impression), and the fact that he could not point to any one thing meant that Jonathan often found himself trying to fight off the impression. He did not like to think of himself as a man who looked down on other without good cause, and this felt perilously like doing just that. Better to strive against it, better to keep an open mind.
But still there came the sensation, as if all of history was unraveling around him and the only thing that could even be left was the past. It was, Jonathan thought to himself, over and over again as he stared out the window of coach after coach after coach, the fault of the forests.
Jonathan had never spent much time in forests. He had been born in a city, and what time he had spent in the countryside of his own homeland had not been spent in leisure. He wasn’t… He really wasn’t used to being away from cities, from their smells and their sights and their noise. Oh, true, some of those smells and sights and noises weren’t exactly pleasant, the smells especially, but he still found their absence jarring. He could not remember finding it so jarring on any journeys he had taken in the past. True, those had been shorter, and for most of them, he’d never left the country, but Jonathan was not certain that those factors were enough to explain it. His mind kept returning to the topic of the forests. His mind kept dwelling on the forests as a cause.
It was… Even through the walls of the coach, Jonathan could readily perceive how different the forests were from everything he had known back at home. The green smell of fresh spring growth, often intensified by the rain that had been falling off and on (but more often on) ever since Jonathan had stepped off of the ferry, seeped through every crack in the panels, in between the miniscule gaps between the window panes and the walls of the coach, filling his nostrils with the heady, at times overwhelming scent of new life. It was… He was often finding himself at a loss for words to describe quite the emotion that inspired in him. He supposed there to be many poets who would have waxed rhapsodic about such a thing, but Jonathan was not a poet, and he had a rather different perspective on it than would have a poet. (Unless that poet happened to be of an especially morbid bent, and Jonathan knew there to be enough poets like that out there that he couldn’t entirely rule it out, but anyways…)
He smelled that green smell, smelled the unmistakable odor of fresh plant life pushing through what had so recently been dead or sleeping soil, heedless of every force that might rather it go back to sleep or fall back into death, heedless of every last thing that had wished to grow up in its place, and Jonathan’s mind was not drawn to think of it all as anything particularly glorious. There was plenty in this world that could grow up without much care for the opinion of the body which it grew up on. He had seen that. He had seen that more often than he cared to remember. There had even been an occasion when the growths had—
Ah, enough. He was rattled by his new surroundings, and that was all. There was no need to fill his mind with morbid recollections. There was no need to dwell overlong on things he had never been able to explain at the time, and has never been able to explain since. Leading the mind around in morbid circles like that would only leave him with another splitting headache.
Jonathan had had little experience of forests in England or Scotland, but he thought that the forests he had been passing through here were considerably thicker than any he had seen there. The driver of the coach he had been in the other day informed him that even these forests were nothing compared to the Black Forest in Württemberg, that which the locals called the Schwarzwald, that these forests were gentle and accommodating compared to that one. The driver that day had assured Jonathan that in the Black Forest, it was easy to forget that other people even existed at all, if you went there alone. The driver’s view of things, Jonathan thought, was perhaps a bit skewed by his long exposure to truly dense forests here on the Continent, and that if this forest was supposed to be the gentle, accommodating one, he was not certain that he ever wanted to find out firsthand what the Black Forest was like.
There were no mountains here, as Jonathan was told there were in the Black Forest, and that, he supposed, could be used to explain the driver’s difference in perceptions. There were no mountains warping the roads he had been traveling down for the past few days, though he had had some brushes with mountains elsewhere in the country, and frankly had no desire to see them again unless it was on his trip back towards home. That must explain it. That must explain it.
But these forests truly were unlike anything that Jonathan had known at home, even taking into account the limited time he had spent in the forests back home. Those forests at home, even the ones he had set foot in only once, he had been certain of. He’d not thought them to hold any secrets that he could not discern, not thought them to be capable of preventing him from ever reaching his destination. They had been light and sunny and cheery, in his eyes. They had been yielding and toothless and altogether gentle. Though he had had little experience of them, they had left no real impact upon him. They’d not been capable of that.
The roads here were narrow, and Jonathan did not think that to be because the people in Bavaria just liked driving down narrow roads. The roads here were narrow, and at least when it came to the stretches of road that ran through the forests, it was plain to Jonathan that the forests were to blame. There were few species of tree which he could identify at a glance with any certainty, but it seemed that all of the largest and most grasping were here, oak and elm and beech and sycamore. Here they were, their branches stretching out over the narrow road like the arched roof of a veranda, but nothing so neat and so clear as that. They stretched up and out and down, rippling overhead and reaching down like grasping hands, scraping against the roof of the coach so often that on at least one occasion these past few days (and probably more that he had since managed to forget), Jonathan had been certain that this, this would finally be the time that the roof of the coach was ripped right off, and he would find himself riding in the open air.
That had never happened, of course. If it had happened, then no doubt they would have limped along to the nearest inn, and then traded out the coach for a fresh one, if there was one to be had—and if there was not, Jonathan would have been more than happy to stay in that inn until a fresh coach, an intact coach, could be found, and need for urgency and speed be damned. If he was riding in the open air, the next thing to come off would no doubt be his head, hewed from his shoulders by a particularly malicious pine branch.
But that just went to show you what this forest was like. Jonathan had never experienced anything of the sort back at home. There, the trees by and large had had their branches trimmed back at the road, or else the trees were set far back enough from the road that there was no need to trim branches at all. Perhaps there were denser forests at home, away from any large cities, that were not tended to thusly, but the ones Jonathan had been exposed to were.
Here, however, he wondered if the trees would even tolerate such abuse. Here, the trees felt like something that could rip an axe or a saw out of the hands of the workmen and do mischief with them that would send those workmen rushing back for the safety of the nearest clear space. Forests at home had felt like places in human habitation where trees sprang up in great numbers. This forest felt like a forest where the trees ruled over all, where the trees begrudged even sunlight to the ground, and a place where humans could be guests and intruders, but never the ones in charge.
He was being morbid. He was being morbid and fanciful. Jonathan was far from home, and the distance and the feeling of vulnerability, of having become unmoored from everything he knew, was making his mind charge off on strange courses. After all, a man who rarely ventured too far from home, and who had never ventured this far from home before could scarcely help being rattled, no matter how childish it might be. Especially when he was traveling alone, without the benefit of a more experienced companion, or even one who was just as lost and borderline-floundering as he, but whom he would have at least been able to commiserate with.
But all of that was hopefully to be over and done with soon—at least until the return trip. When they had set out this morning, the driver of the coach Jonathan was presently sat in had assured him that barring any serious delays, they would reach Albrecht’s home sometime today. The rains had made the roads muddier than was ideal, even in the thickest sections of forest, and one time this morning they had briefly been mired, but even so…
‘Traveling has been even worse than I remember,’ Jonathan wrote out on a sheet of paper flattened over the cover of a medical textbook, which in turn was balanced on his knee, as the coach made its way down a winding road that cut through a patch of forest so dense that even had the skies not been pregnant with angry, bruise-like clouds, might well have rendered the early afternoon sun nothing more than a distant dream of light. As it was, Jonathan was obliged to pore over the paper and squint if he wanted to be certain that anything he wrote in the dimly-lit coach would be legible later. This effort, on top of the effort of keeping track of book, paper, pen, and ink as the coach made its bumpy, jostling way down the forest road, had rendered writing a pitifully slow affair.
‘I swear to you, Jonah, I am hardly incognizant of my years—forty-one can hardly place me among the ranks of the elderly, but I can no longer with any honesty call myself a young man—but I do not think I have ever been so acutely aware of my years as I have been made these last weeks. I was horribly ill on the ferry over from England. You may not recall, as it was years ago now, but the last time we went over the waters together, I had no such difficulties. And traveling over land has been no kinder to me. Every day I go to bed with aches and pains from sitting in an uncomfortable coach as it drives down roads in the most shocking conditions you could imagine, and after a long night spent sleeping on the wretched beds in these inns I have been obliged to stay in, I wake up in the morning feeling even worse. I know, I know; when next we speak, you will scold me for staying in such places, when the sum you bestowed upon me would have been more than enough to secure lodgings that would have provided me with a better, more comfortable bed. You will tell me that if I can find no relief in my bed at night, then it is my own fault.’
Jonathan stopped to stare out the window, rapping his pen against the book under his paper as he did so. There was little to see, really. The rain came down heavy and steady, streaming down the glass of the windowpanes as uniform sheets of water, except for when one of the broad leaves overhead overflowed and let a great downpour splatter down on the glass all at once. That green smell was thick in the air, trying to trick him into thinking himself a younger, stronger man than he actually was, but his mind was unaffected, and he was not fooled, though he still found the call of it just a little irksome. He could look out of that window, certainly, but all he could really see was a blur of green and brown and shadow. Perhaps if the coach had been still, he would have been able, in time, to make the trees out clearly, but it could not be so. There were no inns between him and his destination, only forest. They could not stop.
‘I can think of’ They hit a particularly nasty bump in the road, and Jonathan had to scramble to catch his inkpot before it could topple to the floor, where it would no doubt have shattered and spilled India ink all over his shoes and the hems of his trousers, because if there was any way that fate could conspire to ensure that he had to go to this first meeting with Albrecht in fifteen years with some kind of insecurity plaguing him, it would of course do all it could to ensure that it was so.
Jonathan righted the inkpot, putting it somewhere he thought it slightly less likely to roll to the edge of the seat if it transpired that the coach hit a bad bump in the road again, and looked to the paper only afterwards. He clicked his tongue and sighed when he saw that when he had lunged for the inkpot, he had drawn the pen over the paper in a great slash of black ink. Well, the writing was still legible, and he was going to have to write a second draft anyways; legible his handwriting might have been, but Jonathan did not care for how it looked, not on closer inspection when he could see how messy it became, especially when he realized that he could track the messy sections perfectly to times when the coach had hit other bumps in the road. There would definitely need to be a second draft.
With another sigh, Jonathan put his pen back to paper and continued writing.
‘another instance that will see you scolding me for my choice of inns. Indeed, I think you will scold me vehemently. You’ve sometimes drawn attention to my own propensity for scolding, Jonah, I think with the intent to embarrass me into doing it less. Now you must prepare for finding the shoe on the other foot, and I wonder how comfortably it will fit.
‘There was an incident about a week ago, in an inn some thirty miles outside of a city whose name escapes me now; we did not stop while I was there, so I saw no need to learn the name. I had gotten in very late and had barely been awake enough to take a little supper before trudging up the stairs to the room that had been given to me. However hideously uncomfortable all of the beds I have slept in since finding myself obliged to sleep every night in inns have been, all I could think about was sinking down upon it and finding some rest until the morning came and I was obliged to start the process all over again. Alas, though the innkeeper gave me the key to my room, I did not think to lock the door.
‘I slept until sometime after midnight, perhaps one or two in the morning, when I awoke to the screech of the aged, rusty hinges as the door was slowly pushed open. You must know what point I am coming to, Jonah. You must know already what I invited upon myself with my own lack of care. As it happens, it was only two young boys who had come to see if the foreigner in the inn had anything valuable with him, and being young boys who were quite green and rather feckless, they were easily repelled, and once I had done so, I remembered to lock the door so that no one else could try their luck with me; considering my luck, the next would have been an experienced highwayman wanted in three different states for larceny and murder, and quicker with his pistol than I would have been with any weapon that I could have had hand.
‘I wonder at your not coming yourself, Jonah,’ Jonathan wrote, a small smile playing on his lips, though that smile was tempered with some amount of wistfulness. ‘I know you say that you are too busy to spare the time to make a visit to Albrecht’s, but there is a large part of me that wishes that you could have done as I did at your request, and cleared out your schedule so that we could make this journey together.
‘Do not mistake me. I do not say this to say that I wish you had shared in my misfortunes. I do not say this as expression of some desire to avenge myself on you for all the days I have spent in near-total misery from my own aching body.
‘I say it to say to you that I think my journey would have been more pleasant if I had had the benefit of your company. You are more well-traveled in this part of the world than I, and there have been many moments when I have feared that I have given the driver the wrong directions and I’m going to end up somewhere completely other than where I want to, and I am sure that I would never have been plagued by such worries had I had you here with me. Considering the time you have spent here, I imagine your German is more expert than mine—I’d not even realized there was more than one dialect of the language until I was speaking to someone in a language that I had thought they would understand, only to discover that we had to switch over to French to make ourselves understood to one another—and you would no doubt have had no such troubles. And really, Jonah, even if we were about as expert as each other in the lay of the land and the language of its inhabitants, I would still have been happier to have your company. Just as it has been a long time since I last traveled anything resembling such a distance as this, it has been a long time since I have gone without the company of anyone I know, and even if I have never been in any particular need of a wide social circle, and even if things between you and I are not always perfectly harmonious, your company has always been’
The green smell that pervaded the interior of the coach was replaced suddenly by a prickling, choking whiff of smoke.
Jonathan’s half-finished letter was promptly forgotten as he looked up and saw a hazy glow of orange light shooting through the trees. He could hear the horses nickering through the walls of the coach, but the driver just kept driving on, and Jonathan could see that the trees were beginning to thin. They were nearing a clearing in the forest, and though the rain fell heavily enough that the whiff of smoke that had come to Jonathan grew no stronger as they drew closer, the orange glow just got stronger and stronger the closer they came.
There came a sudden rapping on the front of the coach, and when at last Jonathan was able to tear his gaze away from the fiery glow, it was to hear, if somewhat muffled, the coachman calling out to him, telling him that they had nearly reached Albrecht’s estate, that it would only be a few minutes now and then his journey would at last be done. Jonathan bit his lip as they kept on towards the long-awaited endpoint, his stomach beginning to churn.
Had the house caught fire, then? He could not tell just how close or far away that glow of flame was, for though the trees were starting to thin, they had yet to thin enough for him to see anything clearly through the tree trunks that clustered on both sides of the narrow road. It was possible that this was a forest fire rather than a house fire, for though Jonathan had not seen or heard lightning shoot down from the sky, all that meant was that he’d not observed it himself, not that it had not happened. For perhaps the past half an hour or forty minutes, all of Jonathan’s attention had been focused, except for the odd moments when he found himself obliged to look away or else find himself too immersed for his own good, on the painfully slow writing of his letter to Jonah. It was entirely possible that lightning had struck earlier, and he had just missed it.
But somehow, Jonathan was not certain that that was it. If it was a forest fire, one caused by a lightning strike, Jonathan would have thought that the glow of flames would be more widespread. He would have thought that the smell of smoke would be stronger, even taking the heavy rain into account. He would have thought that he would have been able to hear a fire crackling even through the walls of the coach, if it was that widespread.
Jonathan sucked in a ragged breath, putting away his pen and paper and book and ink as quickly as he dared considering the still-bumpy road, eyes darting up to the window at every other moment, trying to make out anything that he could through the trees while at the same time, dread coiled in his stomach and began to spread towards his lungs and his heart, tightening around muscle and never giving him quite enough room to breathe freely. It was not… It was not that he thought that he would be at serious risk himself. The rain was coming down quite hard, even now, and rain this heavy would slow the spread of any fire that had not taken root across a very large area. Jonathan had little doubt that, if need be, the driver could spur the horses on to outrun the progress of the devouring flames. That was not what he feared.
He had… he had come here with some hope of helping. Jonathan still was not sure what it was he could do to help, considering how little Jonah could tell him regarding the nature of Albrecht’s illness. But he had come here with every intention of helping Albrecht, and if he was to come to his house to find it a charred ruin, if he had come here to find that all that was left of Albrecht von Closen was a skeleton of cracked and blackened bone… That was not what he had come here hoping to find. That was not what he had come here wanting to find. It wasn’t as if he had ever really known Albrecht all that well—he had listened to so many of Albrecht’s letters being read aloud, but with the benefit of added years, Jonathan knew that that could not be the basis for a real acquaintance, knew that the understanding he had of Albrecht was something closer kin to the understanding a reader might have of a character in a novel, something that must by necessity be opaque and incomplete, for there was a part of that character that would always be utterly inaccessible to them. It wasn’t as if Jonathan had ever known Albrecht all that well, but if he found himself this day confronted with the scarce remains of Albrecht’s corpse…
Soon enough. He would know soon enough. The trees were thinning in earnest now, and though the skies had darkened even further, rendering everything but the orange glow of flame indistinct and hazy to Jonathan’s eyes (even more than they had been through sheets of rainwater), soon they would be close enough that the darkness, either of sky or of smoke, would not matter. Soon, they would be close enough that Jonathan would be able to make out just what it was that was burning, and just what sort of damage had been done.
All at once, or so it seemed to Jonathan, who by this time could only breathe through shallow gasps sucked in through his open mouth, the coach broke away from the trees, and they were out of the forest. He did not at first register nearly anything of his new surroundings, for the flames were now clearly in view, and Jonathan’s eyes were riveted upon them, blind to everything else.
It was not the house that was burning. This much he recognized almost immediately, this much he saw with relief, this much he registered along with an easing up on the pressure on his lungs and his heart, allowing him to breathe a little more easily once again, though the smoke was thicker now, and he occasionally had to take a break from his relief to cough.
It was, in fact, a single tree that was burning, and once Jonathan had had time to get over his initial relief, he could not help but frown at the sight that played out before him.
Though the rain was still coming down fast and hard, there was a small crowd assembled around a massive, sprawling tree set some thirty feet away from the edge of the forest. The tree looked to have once been an elm, though very soon, the only thing it would be was dead, and considering how gnarled and sparse of leaves those branches that were not yet touched by flame were, Jonathan suspected that that would have in short order been the case even if it wasn’t being set on fire.
Speaking of that, speaking of the flames that spread up from the trunk of the tree, this Jonathan could not help but mark with some confusion. As the coach drew slowly closer—he could hear the horses whinnying nervously through the walls of the coach, and he did not think that the rattling of the coach itself could be attributed entirely to the wind or the rain or the rough ground upon which the horses trod—Jonathan could make things out more clearly. Most of the crowd appeared to be spectators, but there was an older man bearing a torch—Jonathan presumed him to be a groundskeeper, though he could not be entirely certain—who seemed to be directing certain other men to pile kindling in an ever-growing heap at the base of the tree trunk. Every time a particularly torrential burst of rain threatened to put out the fire, someone stepped up to stoke the fire back to a blaze once more, or to add more fuel, or to add a fresh flame to it to replenish what had been lost. This, in spite of how the rain came down?
Jonathan opened the window by his seat—and immediately regretted it, when the wind took the immediate opportunity to batter his face with the water it gleefully blew into the interior of the coach, cold water that for a long moment made him forget that spring had ever found the world or him. Forget coming here to help Albrecht recover from whatever it was that ailed him; Jonathan would be lucky if he did not fall ill, and so soon after arriving at his destination, at that. Ah, if it was not ink all over his shoes, it would be arriving only to be immediately rendered completely useless for at least the next few days that was determined to insert some insecurity into this first meeting with Albrecht in the last fifteen years. But there was something that needed doing, and he could not do it easily without the window open.
“Pull in closer to the tree they’re burning over there,” Jonathan called out to the driver. “I wish to speak with the groundskeeper.”
“The horses!” the driver protested, and one of the horses let out a high-pitched, snorting whinny as if in punctuation.
“The horses will be fine,” Jonathan fired back, scowling at what little he could see of the driver’s back. “Pull in closer to the tree that they are burning. We will not linger long.”
With a sigh clearly audible to Jonathan even over the rain and the whistling of the wind, the driver did as he was told, and though progress might have slow thanks to a pair of horses who absolutely did not want to cooperate, within a few minutes, they were close enough that Jonathan could attract the attention of some of the people in the crowd.
The man he had thought to be the groundskeeper looked over his shoulder at him, and upon passing his torch to one of the younger man standing next to him, approached the coach, shouting instructions to his compatriots all the while. When the man came close to where Jonathan was waiting for him, he nodded to him, bobbing his head while his hand went to snap down on the top of his hat to keep it from being blown away when a particularly brutal rush of wind cut across the clearing. He said something to Jonathan, huffing and puff and nearly shouting to make himself heard over the wind, that Jonathan was reasonably sure had been a greeting, and instructions to the driver regarding where to take the coach, but…
His German was serviceable. It was fine. Yes, he had been spending the last long while becoming acquainted over and over again with the limits of how serviceable it really was, but Jonathan was proficient enough with the language (well, the dialect of the language that had had learned as a young man) that he was usually able to come out of most situations speaking with the locals without too much confusion becoming involved (For the most part). But the wind and the rain had a way of distorting sound, particularly when they were so strong as they were just now, and he was close enough to the fire that its crackling was enough to distort the sound of speech as well, and this man’s accent was very strong (Though the man would likely have said the same thing of Jonathan’s accent, but Jonathan was not accepting criticism at this stage). Jonathan’s German was serviceable, but he thought that he had made out half of what the man said. It made him wish he could ask the man to repeat what he had said, and more slowly, though he was not fool enough not to know how that would have been received.
So Jonathan reminded himself that his German was serviceable, and asked the man, “Please tell me, why are you burning that tree when it is raining so hard? Could it not have waited until the rain had stopped?”
The man did not answer him immediately. Truth be told, Jonathan had not expected an immediate answer, considering the sort of question he had just asked. It was such a ridiculous thing to do, after all, and Jonathan would expect the man to need a moment to come up with an explanation that did not sound patently ridiculous. He expected to be kept waiting, was what he meant.
The man did not answer him immediately, though even without the aid of much in the way of nearby light, he stood close enough that Jonathan could watch the way the man’s face changed. Where before, he had worn the businesslike mien of a man who was simply going about his work, and not thinking too much about the motives behind it or the likelihood of success, here, Jonathan watched the crags of his face sag into something very tired, very weary, something that revealed every one of his no doubt many years (Or so Jonathan thought from the iron gray of his hair and his beard). The man shook his head in unmistakable resignation, his free hand going up to scrub at his brow.
When the groundskeeper spoke, once again, Jonathan understood perhaps half of what he said. The half he didn’t understand he thought to be shot through with profanity, just judging by tone, so it probably wasn’t as big of a loss as it could have been, but Jonathan still felt that loss, and it left him feeling more than a little adrift.
He understood perhaps half of what the groundskeeper had said. The tone of resignation in his voice when he said anything that Jonathan could understand helped Jonathan’s comprehension along somewhat, though. One sentence in particular stood out to him:
“My master wants the tree dead.”
Jonathan felt… He wasn’t certain what he felt. A little as if the shadow of the tree had fallen over him, suddenly, though thanks to the gloom and the position of the sun (and its obfuscation) and the fire between him and it, he did not see how that could have been possible. His voice fitting a little strangely in his mouth, he pressed, “And your master is within the house?”
The groundskeeper looked at him as if he had grown a second head, but nodded.
Still a little unsettled, Jonathan thanked him, and motioned to the driver to continue on towards the house. Grateful to be able at last to shut the window and leave him, if not dry, than at least able to drip off in peace, he settled back into his seat, hand curled into a fist and pressed to his mouth as he thought to himself.
‘Dead.’ Had that been the word the groundskeeper had used? ‘Dead,’ really? Jonathan’s grasp of German was… Would it not have been something more like ‘removed’ or ‘destroyed?’ Those two would make rather more sense, would they not? Especially for a tree which, while obviously venerable, had long since ceased to be anything but an eyesore on the property it inhabited? Jonathan knew it to be not entirely uncommon for landowners to take it into their heads to give a premature death to a tree that looked to be halfway into the grave already, particularly if it was close to a building it could have done damage to if it was ripped up by its roots the wrong way, or close to a road it could have obstructed in its fall. Jonathan did not think he had ever seen an elm tree as massive as the one that was burning behind him now, for though he had seen some large elm trees in his life, he had never seen one which he thought could have fit several small houses under the shelter of its sprawling branches, as this one could.
If it was up to Jonathan to decide how to dispose of an inconvenient tree, he did not think he would have chosen fire, honestly. Even for a tree of that size, saws and axes would have been his first resort, and though he knew little of tree disposal, would not setting the tree ablaze bear with it a risk of the fire spreading, even in this sort of weather? And unless the tree was completely rotten or riddled with disease, cut it down, and you could at least sell the timber or chop it into smaller pieces for use as firewood. Setting it on fire was so much more… final.
But then again, the groundskeeper had said ‘dead.’ Jonathan was certain of it now, certain that he had not misheard the man, and that his master, whom Jonathan could only assume to be Albrecht, did not want the tree removed and disposed of it. No, Albrecht wanted the tree dead.
It concerned him. Jonathan knew that chronic illness, especially if the sufferer had no stretches of good health in between their bad spells, could incline a sick man to morbid, sometimes irrational lines of thought, even if his mind was otherwise completely sound. If this was what he was dealing with, on top of a physical ailment, it might make treatment somewhat more troublesome than he had thought. But he ought to leave thoughts such as that behind him, at least until he had had a chance to speak with Albrecht. He would go into this with an open mind, and ask him about the tree with that same open mind.
The coach rode up a narrow, though somewhat better-maintained, road through what Jonathan could only presume to be a park, though thanks to the gloom and the rain, he could make out little of his surroundings. The house, though, the house he could make out well, even from a distance, even through rain and gloom and trees and shrubbery. The house stood out clear and crisp against the bruise-dark sky.
At last, Jonathan could see precisely what Jonah had meant about there being more than enough room for him there. Jonathan had seen larger houses in his time, but he’d not seen many. The house was immense, visibly raised from the ground on what looked like a hill of not inconsiderable height and surrounded by gardens, and so large that even in this gloom, it cast an immediately visible shadow across the ground, where in that shadow the world was drowned in premature night. It was…
Do you know, Jonathan had never been any expert on architecture, and he cared more about the comfort of the interior of a house than whether or not it was aesthetically pleasing? He cared much more about whether the interior of a house was warm and dry and had a comfortable chair for him to sit in and a soft bed for him to sleep in than if it was particularly pretty. He could not help but notice if the inside of a house was ugly, but prettiness did not draw his attention very much.
But this was, in its own imposing way, quite an attractive house. Jonathan could not put his finger on what about it exactly stood out to him as attractive, except for him to say that he found the house pleasingly proportioned, even if the size was a little intimidating. It looked like a house that would be pleasant to live in, if you were the sort of person who could live in such a massive house without feeling as if you were masquerading at being a much more important person than you actually were.
It struck Jonathan that there were lights in the windows on the ground floor, but none on the first. In several of the many, many windows on the ground floor, he could see candle flames bobbing and flickering, but form the first floor, there was no sign of light or life at all. He frowned. On the first floor must have been contained Albrecht’s living quarters, and oh, perhaps he was downstairs while it was still daytime, but you would think that there would have at least been lights in some of the upstairs windows, for there would have still been servants up there going about their business upstairs, and they would need light to see by, surely. Was there something going on upstairs that would have required all the rooms be vacated and left dark? Perhaps they were being renovated, or some such. He would find out soon enough, either way.
(It did occur to Jonathan, a moment later, that even if renovations were underway, those responsible for it would have needed light to see by and work by. But he was trying not to think about that. He was trying to hold on to an explanation that could have wrapped that all up neatly.)
Soon enough, the coach pulled to a halt, and Jonathan was obliged to go outside in the rain, which he would be lying if he said pleased him. He had expected to conducted towards a main entrance, but when Jonathan looked up (and immediately regretted it, considering the amount of water that dripped down into his eyes), he saw a woman waving frantically at him from a door half-hidden behind a shrub growing up against one of the sides of the house. Good enough. Jonathan ran towards her, cursing under his breath at the rain all the while, wishing he’d thought to keep a raincoat out for him to put on.
The woman, once Jonathan came to stand beside her, thankfully in a sheltered place, he saw to be rather young and quite short, her cheeks red, perhaps from the chill or from exertion. She smiled and clasped her hands in front of her, and before Jonathan could even open his mouth, she began to speak:
“Good afternoon, sir!” she chirped, her smile widening a little. “My name is Greta; I am the housekeeper here. Have you traveled very far?”
Jonathan stared hopefully past her, at the door which she had presumably slipped out of the house through, but had not opened back up again. It was a relief to be somewhere dry, but somewhere warm as well would have been much nicer. But for all that she was smiling at him so pleasantly, it seemed as if she would not budge one step in either direction until she knew who he was.
That in mind, Jonathan tried to smile at her, tried to hide his irritation at being blocked from getting somewhere dry and warm. “My name is Doctor Jonathan Fanshawe, and… and yes, it was rather a long journey, especially once I crossed over the Channel.” So please let me in the house so I do not come down with a cold before I can even begin seeing to your master.
At that, her eyes lit up, shining with a light that Jonathan was not entirely certain he liked. Actually, you can forget about that, because a moment later, he learned exactly what it was that made her eyes light up like that, and it was something that would provoke such headaches for him over the following months that he would almost immediately wish that he had never so much as hinted to her where it was he had originally come from.
“Oh, you are English? You are in luck, sir; I know a little English!”
His already strained smile beginning to falter a little, Jonathan shook his head and insisted to her, “I assure you, my German is more than sufficient for us to speak to one another.”
But Greta frowned at him almost skeptically, though Jonathan had no idea why, really, and shook her head. And from then on out, whenever there was an English word she knew well enough to slip into a sentence, there it went, and Jonathan could find no words to dissuade her, and soon enough gave up on even trying, seeing that she was so determined. It was… He could understand her, most of the times. She did not speak the language with nearly as strong of an accent as, say, the groundskeeper, and she spoke clearly enough that Jonathan was not having to push back an accent or garbled speech or anything like that to try and make it out. When she spoke in English, she enunciated fairly well, and for the most part, everything was pronounced correctly. But the constant switching between the two languages was disorienting, and it really did start to give Jonathan a headache after a while.
Greta imparted a great deal of information upon him in a very short stretch of time. Some of it he already knew, though some of it was genuinely new to him, and this, he listened to properly.
She first apologized on behalf of her master, whom Jonathan was presuming to be Albrecht, Jonathan really not wanting to think that he had stopped at the wrong house, who could not come down to greet him at present, as he was indisposed. Jonathan tried to tell her that that was why he was here, but before he could say anything, she was going on, explaining that the lady of the house had died some years ago, and that the two boys were away at school, so it was just Albrecht left here, now.
The revelation of children was not one that Jonathan had been expecting, honestly. Perhaps he should have been, for people who lived in houses like this one typically desired heirs of their own blood to live in it after them. But Jonah had never once mentioned Albrecht and his wife having any children, and none of Albrecht’s letters had mentioned them, either.
Then again, that could well have just been Jonah’s doing. Jonathan had never been especially enamored of children, especially not younger children, and he had never made any secret of that to Jonah. It was entirely possible that there was a wealth of letters out there, where Albrecht expounded not on his misadventures but upon domestic bliss, and Jonah, knowing they would be of less than no interest to Jonathan, had simply never shared them.
Well, however much Jonathan might not have cared for children, he hoped that whatever it was that was ailing Albrecht was simple enough that he could have him on the mend by the time his two sons came home. For a man who was obliged to raise his children without their mother or a second wife, it was better to be in good health as often as possible.
Greta kept up a constant, somewhat dizzying stream of conversation that Jonathan tried his best to follow, though truth be told, she was speaking so quickly that later it would be easier for Jonathan to describe the topics she had touched upon, rather than any particular details. The weather, what they’d be having for dinner, the goings-on in the town a couple of miles away, all of it came and went like the chattering of an impatient, over-excited bird which had just seen a farmer spread seed across the ground and was waiting for that farmer to go away so that the bird could feed without having to worry about being whacked by a hoe. Jonathan never attempted to contribute, and Greta never seemed to notice.
Greta led him up the stairs to a room where his things had already been carried in ahead of him. All the while, Jonathan could not help but be struck by how dark and how quiet the house was. True, he had seen lights in the windows on the ground floor, but no one seemed to have bothered lighting lamps or candles in the corridors, and every hall Jonathan was led down was drowning in a gloom that seemed entirely too dense for the time of day, even taking the weather into account, tables and pedestals rising up out of the darkness like ice floes on a midnight sea. By the same token, since entering the house, Jonathan had seen no one but Greta. There was a small trail of water leading from the door of his room that suggested that however his things had found their way up here, it had not been by magic, but Jonathan saw neither hide nor hair of the men who would have carried them. The only sounds he ever heard were Greta’s voice, his and Greta’s footfalls, and the muffled drumming of rain upon the distant roof. As for sight, it was just Greta, which considering how many servants Jonathan knew would have been required to maintain a house of this size in anything resembling dignity, surprised him. He knew that there must have been staircases and hallways reserved for the servants’ exclusive use, but surely he would have at least heard something…
But there had been quite a large crowd out by the old elm tree, hadn’t there been? Jonathan reminded himself, as he changed into dry clothes. Those people were no doubt connected to the household, and once they returned inside, the house would be full of their noise once more.
Now, as for Albrecht…
As for Albrecht, Jonathan could make no progress yet, because for all that Greta was quite a short woman, she plainly had no trouble herding men where she wanted to herd them, for before Jonathan knew it, for all his attempts at protest, he had been directed back down the stairs and into a downstairs drawing room before he could even get a single full sentence out of his mouth.
“Dinner will be served at six, sir,” Greta informed him brightly. “But you will find some food here to sustain you until then. I am sorry that we must leave you alone that long, but the master of the house is indisposed and really is not in any fit state to receive visitors at this moment.”
Resisting the urge to sigh—he suspected he would have sighed loudly—Jonathan straightened and, staring down his nose at her and doing his best to appear authoritative, said, “Miss, I did tell you that I was a doctor. I am here specifically to bring an end to any such indisposition. If you would just tell him—“
But Greta was looking at him oddly, as if he had spoken to her in a language that was neither the dialect of German that was her cradle tongue, or the English that she had some command of. As if he had just spoken gibberish to her. She shook her head, some of the cheer gone out of her face, though Jonathan could not have rightly told you what emotion that cheer had been replaced with. “He will see you when he is ready, sir. Now, please, rest yourself. I will come find you when dinner is ready.”
And just like that, she was gone, swallowed up so quickly by the gloom outside the door of the drawing room that Jonathan could easily have believed her literally swallowed, and the invisible mouth shut down upon her without so much as a click of the teeth. Greta was gone, and Jonathan was alone.
Alone.
Alone, Jonathan no longer saw any point in biting back a long sigh, which he let out slowly and quietly, shaking his head and running his hand through his still-damp hair. Well. He’d been here for less than an hour, and already, this was not going the way he had expected it to. How ill was Albrecht, that the amiable, well-mannered man he remembered from fifteen years ago could not be roused to come downstairs and speak to him now, even if he was ill? Even if he did not remember Jonathan, or even if he did remember Jonathan, but no one had told him who his visitor’s name was, surely his curiosity (more than amply evidenced by some of the things he had related in his letters to Jonah) was strong enough to compel him to come down and see who the man in the drawing room was? It concerned Jonathan, honestly, filled his mind with images of Albrecht too sick to rise from his bed, Albrecht so ill that if he was not cared for quickly and intensively, might well waste away so completely that he would never rise from that bed again.
But there was little that Jonathan could do about that right now. He was a guest in this house, certainly, but he had been a guest in this house for less than an hour, and hospitality had its limits. Greta had shown herself skilled at herding men, and if Jonathan went back upstairs trying to figure out which in that long procession of shut doors had been the door to Albrecht’s chambers, he suspected that Greta would prove herself more than capable of herding him right out through the front door, and slamming and locking that door in his face. He’d come here to help, if he could, and there was no way for him to help if he was barred from even entering the house. As much as it rankled, he must practice patience, and if his patience could endure that long, wait for Albrecht to come to him.
Jonathan looked around himself, drinking in his surroundings as best he could in the drawing room, considering that it, too, was only very dimly lit. This, it would seem, was one of the windows on the ground floor that had not been lit up by a candle or a lamp, for he looked all around himself, and saw no light gracing the walls or the furniture, no light but what little could be granted by what filtered in through the wide, highly-polished window. (Jonathan did look to that window, very briefly. He looked to the angry sky, and when he caught sight of a faint orange glow coloring the glass, he looked away again.)
There was enough light to see by, once he grew accustomed to it, and though Jonathan had a matchbook in his jacket pocket and he quickly spied a lamp on one of the tables, he did not move to light it. He was being silly, he knew, but it felt like a step too far, at this juncture. He felt as if lighting a lamp in the daytime would have been some sort of intrusion. And there really was enough light to see by, even if that light was rather watery and rippling, even if others might have disagreed as to whether this much light to see by in a drawing room was really proper.
So, in the gloom, Jonathan had a long look around him. The chairs and sofas all seemed to have been graced with thick, plush cushions in pale pastel shades, embroidered with leaves or flowers or some such—the light wasn’t quite good enough for Jonathan to make out which one until he was standing right next to the chair or sofa in question—and Jonathan, seeing no reason not to, sat down at the sofa in the center of the room, by a low, oval-shaped table. At that oval-shaped table, which had a glass surface so highly-polished that Jonathan could make his reflection out in it immediately, he found a plate of white porcelain painted with pale pink roses, upon which sat a round, dark cake about the size of his palm, a lump of orange cheese and a small bowl full of what looked like preserves, and a small fork and knife. Sitting beside that plate was a glass of gleaming crystal, and a small bottle of what on closer inspection proved to be brandy. Well, there was an invitation Jonathan did not think he would pass up without very good reason, considering that the rain had conspired to sink a bit of a chill into his bones.
The rest of the room revealed much the same décor as what Jonathan had already observed from the furniture. The wallpaper was a very pale color that he could not make out properly in the gloom, though he thought that it might have been a pastel blue or green, and was certainly adorned with some sort of floral print, though again, he could not make it out properly just now. There were a few vases scattered about, most of them filled with dried flowers, though one had what looked like reeds shooting up from its mouth, casting stark shadows on the wall behind it.
All was silent, still. The rain battered on the window, and a clock on a small table by the window tapped out the passing of the minutes and the hours with a crisp ‘tick-tock, tick-tock,’ but Jonathan heard nothing else. No rustling of cloth from Greta’s long skirt out in the hall. Not footsteps out in the hall, nor any footsteps overhead that would have suggested that anyone was moving around anywhere upstairs. None of the distant clangor of pots and pans from wherever the kitchen was in this house. No shouts or susurrus of conversation from outside as the crowd that had gathered around the elm tree made their way back into the house where it was warm and dry. Jonathan could well have been completely alone in the house, the only person here for miles around.
This disquieted him, he would admit. There were very few people whom it would not have disquieted, he thought, considering that it would have been miles in the rain to reach the nearest town and no guarantee that he would be able to make it there before nightfall, no guarantee that he would not get lost in the woods that seemed to surround the estate on all sides. It was practical, Jonathan supposed, to be disquieted by a complete absence of people where there should have been many, even if nearly all of them would have been servants in a great house, and thus accustomed to masking the signs of their presence as much as they could.
There was something else as well, though. Greta had left the drawing room door open when she had left Jonathan to wait here alone. Now, Jonathan was being silly, silly and jumpy, because if this room had been properly lit and the corridor beyond it had been properly lit, he was sure that he would have thought nothing of it. After all, Jonathan had not spent the most time in houses anything like this, but he rather doubted it was common practice for a guest to sit alone in a drawing room with the door shut, not unless he was indisposed in some way and preferred to nurse his ailments in the drawing room rather than the chambers which had been assigned to him. It seemed downright unsociable, and though Jonathan wasn’t really one to talk about what was sociable and what was not, this distinction was one he had little trouble making.
In proper light, Jonathan would have thought little of it, he was certain. But the corridor was so dark that he could make out nothing in it, and he did not particularly care for sitting with his back to it, as he had been at that sofa. Ridiculous as it might have been, with no lights in the corridor, it was easy to feel as if someone was out there in the dark, standing and watching him in silence. As such, Jonathan moved to one of the overstuffed chairs opposite the sofa, but that provided him with little comfort. He was facing it now, and—
Jonathan stood upright abruptly, heart hammering as he stared out into the dark hall. Still, all was silent but for the rain and the ticking of the clock and his own harsh, erratic heartbeat, but for a moment… For a moment, he thought he could make out a shape in the dark. Not a table or a pedestal, but the figure of a man, crouched low on all fours.
There was nothing, of course. Jonathan discovered that the moment he was able to make his legs work enough to come to stand at the doorway, and closer proximity revealed that where he had thought there was a shape, there was in fact only empty air. He was alone, still, alone with the rain and the clock and his thoughts, and with that in mind, he chided himself for being so silly as he shut the door behind him, caring no more of how it would look for such a newly-arrived guest to shut himself up so.
Jonathan shut the door, and took a seat once more, trusting as he walked that this would be enough to banish the feeling of being watched from his mind. But he still found himself sitting down in the chair facing the door, rather than the sofa that faced away. He still found his gaze drifting to that door, lingering over the doorknob, scouring its recently-polished brass for any sign of so much as a quiver of movement, lingering of the seam of empty space between the door and the floor, where he might have been able to make out the faint shadows cast by feet planted just outside. He heard nothing, still, and still could not resist looking.
Not that he didn’t try. Jonathan turned his attention to the food that had been left for him, as well as the glass of brandy he had left unfinished. He took another sip, and though the taste was just as fine as it had been on first encounter, he found it could not fully fortify him. He cut a small slice of the cake and ate, instead. The cake was sweet and dense, full of almonds and raisins and what he thought might have been orange peel. It turned thick and gummy and tasteless in Jonathan’s mouth as his gaze again became riveted upon the door, and he swallowed only with difficulty, and the aid of another draught of brandy.
Jonathan did not approach the door again. He found that rather beyond him. He sat in his chair as the afternoon lengthened and the shadows in the room lengthened, and the clock ticked away, and though there never came a single sound from out in the corridor, he could not quite escape the idea that there was someone standing on the other side, waiting for his curiosity to grow too potent to constrain.