‘Master Jacob! Master Jacob!’
Jacob wakes, his body still curled around his mistress. For a moment, unused to the luxurious softness of the foreign bed, he lies still, confused.
‘Master Jacob! I know you’re in there!’
The poet, now fully awake, throws a sheet across the sleeping widow and tiptoes to the door.
Janus, his assistant, a cheeky smile plastered across his face, stands on the other side.
‘You rascal! You’ll wake the whole household.’
‘The whole household is awake. ‘Tis morning, master, in case you hadn’t noticed. But there is a more pressing matter. There’s a gentleman at your lodgings, been asking for you. He’s a German, ancient as Egypt itself and dripping with money.’
Jacob makes the boy wait outside while he pulls on his clothes.
The arrival of this mysterious visitor makes him nervous. He prefers to keep his distant past buried, a prism of fleeting memories he has attempted to erase entirely—and has almost succeeded. Since Ruth’s death Jacob has fought to carve out a new identity for himself. But there is no escaping the possible link between his German father, aristocraticborn, and the stranger awaiting him.
He glances down at the sleeping widow. If he were to fall in love, he would make sure never to abandon his reason, for he has vowed never to weep at being left alone again. He is his own companion, his own family, he lacks nothing for he carries his world with him, like a shelled creature who fears nothing for he feels nothing. His reverie is broken by his lover, who yawning, stretches her voluptuous body.
‘How is the intellect?’ she whispers drowsily.
‘Hijacked by the heart and cock, as it should be,’ he answers with a kiss.
‘For a seventeen year old you know far too much.’
‘Knowledge is a better weapon than the sword.’
‘But the pen cuts twice as deep,’ his lover answers, already grieving the youth’s inevitable departure.
With an aching groin he leaves her. Once outside he clouts his grinning assistant.
Out on the street Jacob weaves his way through the traders and merchants hurrying to their places of business. Janus, running alongside to keep up, cannot help but notice a new cockiness to his master’s step, a certain glow playing across his high cheekbones, a softening of the arrogance the handsome youth usually wears like armour, particularly when faced with strangers.
‘So, is it as good as they say?’ The diminutive eleven year old tugs on Jacob’s lace sleeve.
Jacob stares down at the lad, whose carrot hair is dishevelled and ruffled like a parrot’s crest, his smock smeared with printing ink, the breeches beneath patched at both knees. For a moment he flushes with anger. The child’s query has broken the spell of the lovemaking, he fears that an account of their intimacy will cheapen his experience. But Janus’s round face filled with a mischievous but genuine curiosity weakens his resolve. For all his aloofness, Jacob can rarely resist the boy. It was he who found the orphan two years before, sleeping up against the back door of the publishing house one night, and after a solemn declaration from the nine year old that he was ‘good with the written letter’ persuaded his employer to take him on for board and lodgings only. Swiftly the two became inseparable, Jacob secretly relishing the role of mentor and protector and—although he would be loathe to admit it—older brother.
‘Better,’ Jacob replies, tugging the boy’s hair playfully before marching on.
‘Better how? ’Cause I’ve heard it’s better than entering the gates of Heaven itself and that I can’t imagine, though I suppose you could,’ Janus persists, running after the poet eagerly.
‘I think perhaps the allegory of the phoenix would suffice—in that one is consumed in the fires of passion only to rise again,’ Jacob retorts with a wink.
‘So how many times did she consume you?’
The youth turns, smiling. He looks like a god, the small assistant notes wistfully, wondering if there is some magic he could use to turn his own lopsided and freckled demeanour into such chiselled beauty.
‘Four times.’
‘Four times to Heaven! ‘Tis a wonder your feet still touch the pavement.’ At which Janus executes a couple of dance steps to illustrate his point.
Laughing, Jacob cuffs him again then, as he remembers the mysterious visitor, falters, his brow darkening.
‘Tell me more of the German.’
‘He’s a proper aristocrat, smells like a flower shop and sits like he has a stiff rod up his arse.’
Jacob doubles his stride. Could it be who he suspects…after all these years? A shadow from the past who will try to draw him back? Having heard about his parents’ achievements from his protector Rieuwertsz, how both of them turned their backs on convention and society in pursuit of their beliefs, Jacob is fiercely proud of them, but at the same time furious with resentment at what he regards as their desertion of him. Orphaned at the age of six, he has never forgiven Ruth for dying, blaming her for neglecting her health. Reme