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explained, to pass through the eye of the Ottoman Empire than to attempt an overland journey across the plague-stricken, robber-haunted roads of the continent. The Count, he also learned, was something of an inventor and had installed a system of steam-driven winchesthat controlled the braces and the halyards. This meant that only a skeleton crew was needed to man the ship, and so Flood spent most of the journey in solitude, feeling as though he were sailing alone to the end of the world.
    – My father has shut down the castle’s machinery for the night, Irena said.
    She led Flood through a dark and tortuous passageway where votive candles glimmered from niches in the walls. Irena’s blue silk gown rippled in the changeable light like water. They climbed a curving staircase which caused Flood to stumble. When he glanced down at his feet he saw the reason: the height and width of each stair was decreasing as they ascended.
    They went along another tunnel of fitfully illuminated blackness. When Irena spoke next she turned to look at him, her pale aquamarine eyes reflecting the candlelight. She seemed to him like one of the flames taken human form.
    – My father wishes you to be comfortable, she said. Be prepared, however, for a few surprises in the morning.
    They had apparently arrived at his chamber, although he had not noticed a doorway and saw only a bed and the indistinct shapes of panelled walls.
    – May you have a restful night, Irena said. She lit the torch in the sconce attached to one of the bedposts and left him.
    Even after Flood had undressed and sunk with relief into the depths of his vast, chilly bed, he kept putting a hand to his cheek in amazement. Finally he sat up, dug her letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and smoothed out its soft creases.
    To Nicholas Flood, printer and bookseller, from the Countess Ostrova
,
    Dear sir, It is with pleasure that I discharge the office
appointed to me by my father, in offering you the following terms of employment…
.
    He had answered her letter on an impulse. He hadn’t needed to. His painstakingly crafted, expensive novelties sold well, leaving him with no desire to crank out the heaps of pamphlets, travelogues, and fat novels that a growing reading public clamoured for. Every year he sent a catalogue to the Frankfurt book fair, boasting of new wonders to come. Impossible books that he could not imagine creating. And yet somehow he always found a way to turn his mad ideas into actual books that could be held in the hand.
    No, he hadn’t needed to come. But here he was. Transported a thousand miles from home by a letter.
    Who was she?
he had wondered the day he first read her elegant greeting. To conjure up a Bohemian countess, he resorted to the little he knew of the nobility, a patchwork of fact and conjecture that had been sewn together more out of reading than experience. From the remembrance of some of his more salacious commissions he constructed a haughty duchess, a soft white body armoured in boned taffeta. A stabbing glance of disdain giving way to purrs of delight once blood had been drawn.
    He folded the letter, tucked it back in its envelope, and blew out the candle.
    Lying awake in the dark, Flood thought back to what she had said about the castle’s machinery. He remembered the bizarre ship, with its wheezing steam pipes and squealing pulleys, and he guessed that something similar awaited him in the morning. Closing his eyes and squirming deeper into the bedclothes, he remembered with drowsy amusement howsoundly he had slept on that voyage, lulled by the ever-present vibration of the machines. Before he left London he had consulted Bostridge’s
New Orthographical Atlas
for the location of the River Vah and found it at last, after his finger had made a meandering peregrination over mountain ranges and through forests,
there
, an inky rivulet issuing from the remote Carpathians. The nearest large place name on the map, he had been delighted to see,