'What must I do?' I pleaded, waiting for his verdict.

What Professor Kant said was destined to change my life.

'You've been inside the mind of a murderer, Hanno. You have harboured thoughts that few men would dare to admit. You are not alone! And the knowledge makes you special. Now, you must turn it to good account,' he replied warmly.

'But how, sir? How?'

As he spoke, his words settled on my troubled spirit like a healing balm.

'Bring order where crime brings chaos. Right wrongs. Study the law.'

Two weeks later, I enrolled at the University of Halle as a student of Jurisprudence. Five years afterwards, my bachelor's degree confirmed, I began my working career as a magistrate. Accompanied by Helena Jordaenssen, my wife of seven months, I started out in the country town of Lotingen. It was a quiet, regular sort of life, but I enjoyed the drab anonymity of it. I was not called upon to judge and punish, so much as to officiate. But I had only partly followed Kant's advice. Violent crimes being unknown in the town, I had never been truly called upon to test myself.

Until the day that Sergeant Koch entered my office.

I looked down at the page and read what Kant had dictated to Lampe.

The laws of Nature are turned upside down in the exercise of G.o.d-like power over another human being. Cold-blooded murder opens the doorway to the Sublime. It is an apotheosis without equal...

The question presented itself to my mind with the force of a hammer blow. Had Professor Kant been infected by the insanity that he had meant to cure in me? Had I opened a barred path and handed him the Golden Apple of forbidden knowledge which lay at the end? Kant's philosophy had been foundering on a reef, and I had unwittingly thrown him a lifeline. Had he found, in his declining years, the pathway to Absolute Freedom which the exercise of rational discipline and logical disputation had denied him? Just before the body of Sergeant Koch was found, Kant had been feverish, his voice hoa.r.s.e with pa.s.sion.

'They cannot imagine what I have been able to conceive,' he had raged. He had been talking of his detractors, the Romantic philosophers, the high priests of Sturm und Drang. 'They cannot begin to know what I...'

I completed the sentence for him.

They cannot begin to know what I have done with your help, Stiffeniis.

This thought erupted in my mind like red-hot magma exploding from an uncapped volcano. Had Immanuel Kant sown the evil seed in the mind of his valet with that book, dictating night after night, knowing that Lampe would take him at his word? Had Kant knowingly created a murderous Golem in his valet, then set him loose on Konigsberg?

If Kant knew...

Jan Konnen, Paula-Anne Brunner, Johann Gottfried Haase, and Jeronimus Tifferch were his victims. He had provoked the humiliation that led to the death of Procurator Rhunken, he had precipitated the murder of the serving-boy, Morik, driven the Totzes to suicide, pushed Anna Rostova beyond the pale, and made Lublinsky's soul as monstrous as his face. The lives of Frau Tifferch and her embittered maid would be forever blighted by his meddling. Like those of everyone who had known or loved the murdered ones. The city and the people of Konigsberg had been entangled in the web of terror that Kant had woven so artfully.

And he had killed Koch. My faithful, stolid adjutant. Humble servant of the State and of myself. Sergeant Koch had found nothing safe in Kantian philosophy, nothing rea.s.suring in Professor Kant himself. Koch had sensed the sinister nature of Kant's involvement in the case, detected evil in that laboratory, while I had been overwhelmed with admiration.

If Kant knew...

He had chosen me for one reason alone. I had been inside the mind of a murderer. He had said it himself. He had chosen me not Herr Procurator Rhunken, or any more expert magistrate to admire the infernal beauty of his final philosophical thesis. The sublime expression of will, the act that went beyond Logic or Reason, Good or Evil: murder without a motive. The moment when a man is free, unchained from the claims of morality. Like Nature. Or like G.o.d. When I insisted on the need for logical proof, credible explanation, when I failed to understand what he intended me to see, Kant had opened the door and sent me out to be murdered with his own cloak on my shoulders. But Koch had stepped in the way. He had taken the fatal blow that was meant for me.

If Kant knew...

He had not been interested in the man I had become, a diligent magistrate with a wife and two babes from tranquil Lotingen, when he summoned me to him. He had appealed, instead, to a confused and troubled creature he had met only once before, spattered with blood as a king was butchered before his eyes in Paris, a morose individual who had watched his own brother die, a fool who had unwittingly revealed to him the darkest secret of the human soul as they walked together through the fog one cold afternoon beneath the Fortress of Konigsberg. By entrusting that case into my hands, Professor Kant had intended to exhume the demon that he had met seven years before.

And during those days in Konigsberg, I thought with a violent shudder, had he not almost succeeded in calling up that ghost?

Those heads in jars had thrilled me more than I had dared to admit. Was it science alone that fascinated me? Had I felt no shiver of excitement as I examined the frozen corpse of Lawyer Tifferch? The split skull of Morik? As I smashed my fist into the bloated face of Gerta Totz and gazed on the b.l.o.o.d.y mask of her husband's self-destruction? I had embraced the idea of torture too warmly when the occasion presented itself, despite Koch's warning. Augustus Vigilantius had poked a gaping hole in my shallow veneer of normality at our first meeting. Then Anna Rostova had bowed before my dark animus, recognising a fellow traveller, a nature perverse and d.a.m.ned like her own. I cannot deny that I had been aroused by her murderous carnality...

I closed my eyes in shame.

But a protest bubbled up from the depths of my heart.

No! I had done it all to catch a murderer. I had used Kant's laboratory in the interests of science and methodology. That was what I admired, not the macabre exhibits for themselves alone. Tifferch's rigid body had told me how the victims had been killed. I had lifted my hand against Gerta Totz to spare her a far greater punishment. I could not have foreseen the desperate determination that had tied the husband and the wife together. Then, Anna Rostova had appeared. She was different from Helena, the woman that I had chosen as my companion. There had been moments when I hoped to protect the albino from the consequences of her crimes. Not to possess her body, but to save that beautiful flesh from the violence of the troopers.

In Kant's eyes, I had failed to appreciate the beauty of those murders. But I was no longer the creature he had thought me to be. That ghost had fled for ever. My heart had been warmed, redeemed, saved, by love. Love of my wife. Love of my little ones. Love of the Law. Love of Moral Truth. Nothing that Immanuel Kant had thrown in my way had brought out that dark and secret side of myself again. Seven years before, walking around the Fortress in the freezing fog with Professor Kant, I had been truly cured. I had been reborn. And it was all his doing...

Sweeping up the papers, I dropped a coin on the table and rushed from the cafe. Outside, the cold night air was a benediction of sorts. It cleared my mind of doubt about what I was going to do. For what I knew I must do. As Professor Kant himself would have said, it was a Categorical Imperative. The irony was not lost on me. I had no choice. Reason obliged me. In the circ.u.mstances, there was no other way to achieve the Supreme Good.

I dashed along the cobbled lane in the gathering gloom. Rushing out across the stone bridge at the end of the street, I stopped at the middle span. The swollen grey-brown waters of the River Pregel bubbled below me like hot treacle. Leaning out over the flood, I began to shred the leaves of the doc.u.ment that Frau Lampe had entrusted to my care. The white sc.r.a.ps fell like a flurry of fresh snow and were gobbled up by the hungry waters.

Thus, the final work of Immanuel Kant, Professor of Logic at the University of Konigsberg, was launched upon an unsuspecting world.

Chapter 37.

Back home in Lotingen, I returned to work more convinced than ever that the daily round of a country magistrate was sufficient for my happiness. Disputes about common land and small legacies occupied my days, controversies between rival shopkeepers, farmers stealing fodder from their neighbours' barns by the light of the moon, occasional bad manners, frequent drunkenness, minor breaches of the peace. These were my daily concerns. Nothing more violent troubled my days or disturbed my rest than the accidental crushing of a mature rooster as a horse-drawn cart went trundling home in the dwindling light of dusk.

The events in Konigsberg did not fade from my mind, but the experience seemed to retract and diminish with time and distance. That memory was like a raw scar that aches on a cold day, reminding us that the danger and pain are over, that the worst is past, that we are getting better day by day. Indeed, life was all but back to normal when early in April, I received a letter from Olmuth Hanfstaengel, who had been the family lawyer for as long as I could remember. Without any preamble, the writer informed me that my father had expired ten days before of a sudden fit, that he had been buried, according to his last wish, beside my mother and brother in the family plot in Ruisling cemetery, and that Hanfstaengel himself had been appointed to execute my father's will. In this terse communication, the lawyer noted that the estate, the land, the house, and all that it contained had been sold off, with one exception, as my father had specified, and that the proceeds had been donated after death duties to the Junior Military Academy in Druzbha where Stefan had served his country for a few brief months. In a short codicil, Lawyer Hanfstaengel informed me that I had been directly mentioned once in my father's will, and that I would have news from him again within a very short while. And with that scant announcement, the communication ended.

Helena stood mute at my side as I was reading. Hands clasped tightly across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she seemed to be struggling to quell the mounting anxiety which the arrival of that letter had provoked. Without a word, I handed it her. Her eyes raced over the page, and when she lifted her gaze to mine some moments later, there was a sort of mirthful glee, a welling up of joy in her expression which, try as she might, she could not suppress.

'I do believe that Stefan prayed for us, as I begged him to do when I went to Ruisling to lay fresh flowers on his grave,' she said with a vehemence that I did not expect.

Evidently, she was still inclined to believe that her chance meeting with my father that day in the cemetery had worked a miracle. She seemed to think that a reconciliation had been brought about, a change of heart which had led my father to remember me in his will, posthumously embracing me as his only surviving son. For an instant, I persuaded myself that she was right. But there was something perplexing in that letter, some unspoken impediment which would not permit my own optimism to flourish as hers had done. Whenever he mentioned my brother, my father spoke of 'Stefan, my beloved son,' but when he referred to me, it was by my name alone.

Still, in a state of heightened expectation if that is the correct word we waited for further news from Lawyer Hanfstaengel. It arrived two weeks later. A few words, no more: 'Herein lies your inheritance, as prescribed in the last Will and Testament of the late Wilhelm Ignatius Stiffeniis.'

We watched in a state of nervous agitation as the baggage was taken down from the wagon by the carrier and his boy and manhandled into the entrance hall. I recognised that trunk immediately. It was of steel-bound oak. The largest trunk in the house in Ruisling, it had always been kept in my mother's dressing room. I did not need to open it to know what it contained. A creeping paralysis seemed to overpower my limbs. My heart froze within my chest, thudding painfully as it struggled to fight against the horror that consumed my mind.

I knelt down on the cold stone floor and raised the lid.

All the worldly possessions that had belonged to Stefan were stuffed haphazardly into the trunk: the clothes he most loved to wear, the trinkets he had kept in memory of happy days, the favourite books that he had read, and read again. And on the top of the pile, five gla.s.s vials of golden honey. For the latter, tormented part of his life, those tubes of sugary sweetness had guaranteed his well-being. A sixth vial had shattered during the journey. Fragments of broken gla.s.s and syrupy stickiness lay everywhere.

That was my inheritance.

My father did not intend to let me forget. He would not bequeath me peace of mind. The curse that he had laid on my head while living would not be laid to rest with his mortal remains. The relics of my brother's shattered life had been transported into my own home.

Turning to Helena, I saw that the joy and hope had faded from her eyes. She stared at me accusingly, wonderingly, and in her prolonged silence, I thought I heard again the questions that I had never answered. The questions in that letter she had written to me in Konigsberg after her one and only meeting with my father. What can cause such hatred in a parent, Hanno? What does he think you have done?

The trunk was consigned without another word to the attic, where it lay collecting dust for some months. An unusually wet summer had pa.s.sed and a cold and gloomy autumn was upon us when I was obliged one evening to repair to the attic in search of candles. Having found what I was looking for, I was just about to return downstairs when a sudden impulse took hold of me. Morbid curiosity, set aflame by a spark of resentment for my father, prompted me to open the trunk and examine the contents with more care than my first state of shock had allowed. As the lid fell back on its rusty hinges, a dusty cloud of pain and sorrow seemed to rise into the air. The shambles of my brother's brief existence on this earth had been tumbled into that box with violent energy and total disregard. Honey had congealed like amber on a bundle of love letters tied up with a faded pink ribbon, and stained the covers of Stefan's favourite book, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

I sat down on the wooden floor, that book as heavy as lead in my hands, recalling how much he had loved the tale. He must have read it a hundred times with a pa.s.sion which seemed never to diminish, but, rather, to increase with every reading. How often had he recited pa.s.sages aloud in the study that we shared? And how frequently had I dozed with Goethe's n.o.ble phrases ringing unheard in my ears? In a moment of distraction, as I relived this lost Arcadia of youth, the volume slipped from my hands and fell on the floor. Looking down, I saw that the novel had fallen open at the pages that describe the untimely death of the young protagonist. Stefan had scribbled critical notes in the margin with a pencil, as he was wont to do. But then, I espied my own name written there. 'Dearest Hanno,' I read, You may have asked yourself why I was silent when you spoke of Paris, and the murder of King Louis. All my life I had plagued you with my questions. But I said nothing. You could not know the emotion that your words provoked in my soul. And how was I to tell you? If there is no life after death, no place where we may meet again, I thank you now for sharing your secrets with me. I thank you for showing me the path to follow. Can suicide be defined as cold-blooded murder? It is the most momentous decision that any man can make. Is any freedom more absolute?

If we must wait to be annihilated, to 'suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', as the English Poet tells us, why defer the crisis another day? To die is the sublimation of every life that was ever lived.

I have decided to end my suffering.

And with your help, dear Hanno, though you will never know it. I doubt that you will ever read this book of mine! Tomorrow we will climb the Richtergade. You will not fail me. Our minds and our hearts are troubled, dearest friend. You have your reasons, I have mine. A race to the top will do us both the world of good. But I will ne'er return, for I am sick of honey! Perhaps you will discover the trick...

He had slipped his own life-saving vial of nectar into my empty pocket as we left the house that morning. Tears came to my eyes as I read the final line of what he had written: As you have given me a glimpse of Freedom, I bequeath you the vision of my death.

Ruisling, 17 March 1793.

Thus I came into my true inheritance.

Could I have received a more bountiful legacy? In his unloving wish to d.a.m.n me beyond his death, to taunt me with a crime that I had never committed, my unforgiving father had restored to me the peace of mind that I had all but lost seven years before.

The following morning, strolling in the countryside around the house, enjoying the first bright day in weeks and the uncertain trials that little Immanuel made to get about on his own two legs, I finally answered Helena's questions: I spoke out plainly about Stefan's death, and told her what my father thought I had done. She listened in silence. Her eyes gazed calmly into mine. Like my brother when I had told him what I had seen in Paris. Like Kant when I confessed to him the fear of the obscure creature that had taken possession of my mind. I told her of the troubled youth that I had been before we met, and of the man that I had since become. At that point, she laid her hand tenderly upon mine and raised a finger to her lips, directing my attention towards our infant son with a curious gesture of her head. Immanuel had broken free from her guiding hand and was stumping solemnly but steadily ahead of us on his own two chubby little legs.

'He is a good, brave lad, Hanno. A trifle independent, perhaps. Exactly like his father,' Helena observed. 'I do believe the time has come for us to pay a visit to Ruisling. Don't you?'

That evening, I overheard Lotte and Helena chatting in the kitchen. Our maid sounded both puzzled and concerned, saying that she was glad to find me so serene after the news of my father's death and the financial disappointment it had brought upon us.

'I've never known him so carefree as he was today,' Lotte exclaimed. 'The master seems to have recovered from a long and terrible illness.'

The answer my wife returned was coined in that animated, joyful tone of voice she normally employed with the children.

'He has, Lotte. He most certainly has.'

Two days after, we made our pilgrimage to the family plot in Ruisling. The thanks I addressed to Stefan, the prayers I uttered for the souls of my mother and father rang all the louder for the profound silence of the place, which seemed to wrap itself around me like a warm and comforting cloak.

In the month of May, a bright and sunny morning after a dismal week of lingering, dreamlike fog and early morning frosts which had set the untilled fields a-shimmering, Lotte Havaars entered the kitchen with a theatrical air of secrecy about her.

She held out her clasped hands to the children, then opened her fingers with a sudden gesture, revealing two bright orange ladybirds nestling together in her palm.

'The whole of the country is infested with them, sir,' she announced with a happy smile. 'This summer will be a good 'un. Ladybirds this early in the season! It's an omen of plenty. Napoleon will ne'er prevail against a nation that's so rich an' good an' strong.'

Mindful of how we had laughed at her sour predictions the previous year, and of all that had come to pa.s.s in the mean time, Helena and I exchanged a wan smile. We were more than well disposed to believe that Lotte was right.

And so she was.

The summer of 1805 was a season of great bounty and fruitfulness. Peace reigned in Eastern Prussia. Like Konigsberg and all the other towns great and small in the kingdom, Lotingen returned to the steady industriousness of former times. Napoleon Bonaparte turned his armies south to face the combined forces of the Austrians and the Russians at the Battle of Austerlitz. To all effects, the French Emperor appeared to have turned his back on us. But how long would the undeclared truce persist? He had marched into Hanover and occupied the city in 1802, and everyone knew that he could do exactly the same again, whenever he chose. Margreta Lungrenek, the aruspice to General Katowice, had foreseen the possibility, cunningly divining the name of the nation's graveyard in the tangled, b.l.o.o.d.y entrails of the dead crow that lay crucified on her table.

History was to prove her right.

The Prussian seed had been planted in Napoleon Bonaparte's indomitable mind, and it would flower within a year, carried south, perhaps, on the innocent wings of a migrant ladybird from a cornfield on the outskirts of Jena...

Acknowledgements.

Many wonderful books have influenced the development of this novel, but one of the most enlightening explorations of life and thought in Prussia in the early nineteenth century must be Tales from the German Underworld by Richard J. Evans (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). Regarding the life and opinions of Immanuel Kant, the recent Kant A Biography by Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) debunks a thousand myths, and adds enormously to our knowledge of the philosopher. Both books are both highly recommended.

Special thanks to agent, Leslie Gardner, for her critical insights and endless encouragement, and to everybody at Faber and Faber in the UK and Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin's Minotaur in the United States, particularly our editors, Walter Donohue and Peter Joseph.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

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