Circle of Shadows by Imogen Robertson Page B

his companions, Kinkel put his hand on Michaels’s sleeve and guided him out of the courtyard.
    By the time the sausage, bread and potatoes had been disposed of and their leavings carried away by a sweet-faced daughter of the house, Florian zu Frenzel was well on his way to being drunk. Jacob Pegel was giving a good impression of being so.
    The tavern was popular with the middle-ranking students. The beer was strong and cheap, the food not bad at all, and it was clean enough for a man brought up in respectable comfort to feel at his ease. In other places a man might risk his wealth among a crowd of men who liked to gamble as deep as their courage would let them. In other dark corners, especially those nearest the river on the edge of the old town, he might risk his health with one of the whores who sashayed to and fro for business, or lose his pocketbook to the thieves and slut-masters who watched the drunken young gentlemen like wolves seeking out the injured deer in the herd.
    To be fair Pegel had never seen Florian in that corner of town, and found he liked him for it. A serious devotion to cards or women might have made him easy to blackmail, but Pegel suspected the more earnest and serious the young man was, the closer he might lead him to his goal. Pegel suspected he would only get what was required from an idealist.
    The beer had loosened their tongues, then smeared the talk from mathematics to the personal. Pegel began laying down his lies to build a friendship on like a mason settling his first cornerstone. There were ways to dance into intimacy with a boy such as Florian, like a mountain goat, but he needed to establish a solid base first.
    ‘There are some good men in Weimar,’ he said. ‘Good thinkers. I thought there was a chance of a place there, but no! Some squid who can barely add up got the job.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘His father was a Baron, of course. He had the name, he had the grease …’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘So, it’s “Sorry, Mr Pegel, maybe next year”. Bah! Perhaps I should go to England. They take a man there for his brains, not some bit of paper that proves no man in his family has done a day’s work in generations.’
    ‘My father is a Count.’
    ‘I’ll try not to hold it against you, but honestly, don’t you ever feel this … this rage against the system we live in? Good men ground down, the arrogance of the nobility while better men starve. Ah, forgive me. The beer is heating me up.’
    Florian put a hand on Pegel’s sleeve. ‘You are not alone.’ Then in a lower tone, ‘You are not alone, brother.’
    Pegel had his pocket-watch in his hand. There were no numbers on it, but a compass, set-square, radiant eye. He flicked it shut and thrust it into his pocket now it had done its work. He had bought it from a man in Strasbourg who had offered him some interesting stories of Leuchtenstadt for the chance to rant about his own misfortunes. Now Florian had seen it and assumed Pegel was a member of a masonic lodge. He had also confessed, by calling Pegel ‘brother’, that he was one himself. Easy. Pegel began to build. ‘I don’t know. There are good men in the fraternity, but in the Lodge in Weimar they seemed more interested in legends of Templars and Alchemy than in the truth of universal brotherhood. I am afraid I held out hopes …’ He turned away slightly and touched the corner of his eye as if wiping away a manly tear. He almost felt it. Germany had lost a fine actor when Pegel was trained as a code-breaker. When Jacob looked back, Florian’s eyes were sparkling in sympathy. God, it was too easy.
    ‘Do not give up hope! Some have taken a false path, a path of vanity and mysticism. But. There. Are. Others.’
    Pegel began to worry that the boy was drunker than he had thought. The afternoon would not go as planned if he could not walk.
    ‘Air!’ He stood up and was dismayed to find the room swayed a little. ‘Come along, Your Graciness. I want you to show me