Wolf on a String Read online

  How distant it all seemed, to my half-drunk mind’s eye.

  At the mention of Wenzel’s name, the Nuncio’s little eyes glittered all the more brightly, but he made no comment, only signaled for me to continue.

  I described being thrown into that cell in the tower by the castle wall, and how I had allowed myself to sink into despair, until Chamberlain Lang rescued me and directed that I be set up in my house in Golden Lane.

  “Ah, yes,” the Nuncio said, nodding, “the Chamberlain is a clever man, clever indeed. But”—he tapped a finger to the side of his little knob of a nose—“dangerous, too. Sì sì, molto pericoloso.”

  Then I told how Jeppe Schenckel had come to Golden Lane and fetched me away for an audience with the Emperor at the house of Dr. Kroll. The Nuncio sat forward in his chair with a grunt of surprise.

  “His Majesty himself was there?” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered. “He knew me already, for he had dreamed of my coming.”

  “Vi aveva sognato” he exclaimed, falling again into his native tongue. “He dreamed of you?”

  “He did,” I said, not without a note of boastfulness, “he dreamed of a star from the west, sent by Christ, which he took to be a dream of me, because of my name.”

  Here I paused, frowning and blinking, once more struck by the fearful fact that my neck had been saved from the noose by the simple chance that one half of my name had the name of Christ in it and that the other half translated to “star.”

  Malaspina shook his head—no easy thing, given the almost entire lack of a neck upon which to shake it.

  “Yes, His Majesty is much swayed by such deceptive portents,” he said. “He surrounds himself with sorcerers who fill his ears with all manner of wicked nonsense.” He looked at me narrowly. “Have a care,” he said, “that he does not seize on you to be one of them.”

  I was about to declare indignantly that I was no sorcerer but had discretion enough to say nothing, given that it was exactly my ambition to be numbered high among the Emperor’s squadron of savants.

  Having mentioned the dark arts, the Nuncio then launched into a lively polemic against John Dee and his henchman Kelley, describing them as arch-wizards whose maleficent influence at court had been for so long a cause of deep alarm to the Vatican and to the Holy Father himself.

  “I summoned them here to the nunciature,” he said, “those two mascalzoni, at the direction of His Holiness and with the Emperor’s blessing, and held them under guard for many days, questioning them closely. I put it to them that they were spies for that harlot Elizabeth of England, and were dedicated to promoting the Protestant cause in Bohemia.”

  He nodded slowly, remembering, his eyes aglitter.

  “Dee was cautious and kept a guard on his tongue,” he said, “but Kelley, that cacochymicus, although claiming to have renounced Lutheranism and to have pledged himself to Rome, spoke openly of his contempt for the Pope and his ministers and denounced Mother Church for her supposed corruption. Dio mio, che coppia di furfanti!”

  He rose with an effort from the armchair and waddled to the fireplace. Taking up a fire iron, he prodded vexedly at the burning logs.

  “At my urging His Majesty banished the wicked pair,” he said, “allowing them no more than a week in which to quit the city. They fled into the German lands, but soon crept back and sought sanctuary with the great lord Vilém Rožmberk at his castle at Krumlov in the Bohemian southlands. At last Dee returned to England, but Kelley, whose sins the Emperor had made himself forget, was summoned back to Prague to take up again his godless and abominable alchemical labors.”

  He threw down the fire iron angrily and let himself flop back into the large chair, which yet was hardly wide enough to accommodate his enormous bulk.

  “Kelley at first had a great success,” he said darkly, panting a little, his fat face taking on a livid hue. “His Majesty granted him a patent of nobility, gave him the title Golden Knight, so-called, and set him up as court alchemist! So great was his fame that Elizabeth herself, quella strega, sent agents here to Prague with instructions to entice the sorcerer back to England by whatever means.”

  He brooded for some moments, but then grew calm, and folded his hands once more over the mighty mound of his stomach; after a pause, he chuckled.

  “But he was still a charlatan,” he said, “and a fool. He let himself be led into a dispute with an officer of the crown, and in a duel ran the fellow through the heart. After that there was nothing for him but imprisonment again, for good, this time, although the Emperor, it’s said, still pines for his favorite magician.”

  Despite the effects of the wine, I forced myself to listen to all this with as much attention as I could muster, not because I had not known the facts already—the misadventures of Dr. Dee and his henchman Kelley made up one of the many scandalous epics Praguers loved to tell over and over—but because I seemed to hear behind it a caution aimed at me directly. What was it this cunning old cleric was urging me to guard against? Did he see me too, the Emperor’s man, one day disgraced and exiled?

  I felt a tiny sharp chill, as if a drop of icy water had trickled down my spine. Suddenly the fires seemed to give off less warmth, while the food I had eaten seemed to turn over in my belly, a heavy parcel of hot and greasy mush.

  Presently the three novices appeared again, bearing musical instruments, two viols and a lute, and sat down and entertained us with some jigs and galliards and, to close, a slow and stately pavane. The two who played at the viols might as well have been sawing wood or shearing sheep, but the little dark one, bent over her lute with her oval face inclined, performed the pavane with such grave passion and drew out such sweetness from the notes that tears prickled at my eyelids. I always had a weakness for a melancholy tune, especially after drinking.

  When they had finished their performance and retired, I lay back in my chair, lulled and drowsy, and sank into a sort of dream, in which an earless giant in golden robes stood outside a tall window and harangued me, though nothing of what he was saying penetrated the thick and misted squares of glass that separated us. How comical he looked, out there in the snow, this gilded monstrosity, comical and at the same time terrifying, mouthing at me in violent silence.

  I dozed. I dreamed. The fire warmed my shins.

  It was the dark young novice who woke me. I opened my eyes with a start to find her leaning over me and gently shaking me by the shoulder. I had sunk so far down in the chair that I was almost reclining in it full length, but now I straightened hurriedly, blinking and coughing.

  Opposite me, Malaspina’s chair was empty.

  The novice had such lovely, almond-shaped eyes, dark and shining; I wanted to reach up and take her in my arms.

  Seeing that she had succeeded in rousing me, she stepped back, smiling. I knew it must be afternoon by now, and asked her what the hour was, thick-tongued and mumbling. She shook her head and pointed mutely to her lips. She had brought me another small cup of the dark and fragrant Turkish brew. I drank it off in two quick draughts, though it was hot enough to scorch my tongue. My skull seemed filled with thick white heavy smoke.

  I tried to stand, only to slump back helplessly into the chair. Still the girl stood before me, with her arms folded and her hands hidden in the sleeves of her habit. In my muddled state I thought her enchantingly beautiful, a heavenly vision, almost, like that Beatrice of whom the poet of the Paradiso sang so ardently.

  At last she took the empty cup from me and went away. I sat for a while gazing blearily into the gray ash, all that was left of the fire. I shivered. I felt chilled suddenly. Where was my coat?

  In a while I came back to myself sufficiently to be able to struggle to my feet and go off in search of the Nuncio. Eventually I found him in an alcove off the main hall of the house, seated before a lectern on which was propped a sumptuously illuminated book of hours.

  I apologized for my ill manners in having fallen asleep, but he waved a fat hand dismissively.

 
“Eravate stanco,” he said, smiling. “You were weary, you have had many trials.”

  The gorgeous book before him was open at a page depicting a mounted knight in silver armor dispatching with a long and slender spear a fancifully curlicued dragon with bright green wings and scarlet claws, while a dark-eyed, slender lady stood by, watching dispassionately as the dying monster spewed up its heart’s blood. The lady, in her dark gown and elaborate headdress, reminded me of the silent girl who had lately woken me from my sodden sleep.

  “The young one, the dark one,” I said, “she doesn’t speak. Has she taken a vow of silence?”

  The Nuncio shook his head.

  “Serafina, that is her name. She has no tongue. It was cut out by her brother.” He glanced up at me. “Yes,” he said, “her brother. He had taken her maidenhood from her by force, and thought to make it so that she would not be able to betray him. A foolish fellow—he forgot that even a tongueless girl can point. His father hanged the son with his own hands.” He smiled and shrugged, and laid a finger on the page before him. “So you see, it is not only in the old tales that terrible things happen.”

  He drew himself up out of the chair like a cork out of a bottle, swaying and panting. “That reminds me: I received the news this morning that another corpse has been discovered, this one in the Stag Moat.”

  I looked at the dragon writhing in stylized agony.

  “They say it is Madek, quel povero giovane,” the Nuncio said. “Do you know the name? Jan Madek? Yes, I see you do.”

  10

  That was when I began to discover the limits of my powers as the Emperor’s man. Prompted no doubt by a desperate whim—there are those who will say he ruled his empire entirely by whim—Rudolf had charged me with the task of finding out the murderer of Magdalena Kroll and I had, as I quickly discovered, not a shred of official authority upon which to conduct my investigation. No one thought to consult me or keep me informed of developments relating to the girl’s murder, and had it not been for the Nuncio I would most likely not have known of the death of Jan Madek until after he was waked and buried. That death and its ramifications, of course, lay behind the wily Bishop’s decision to send the imperial coach to fetch me to the nunciature: he wanted to appraise my character and judge if I was to be taken seriously as one who might be capable of nosing out a murderer.

  I think he was not much impressed by what he saw; even so, at his urging I borrowed his carriage, directed his coachman to take me to the castle, and then hurried on foot down to the Stag Moat. I arrived there just before sundown and saw that Madek’s bloated corpse had still not been removed from the water; apparently most of the day had been lost while waiting for Wenzel the High Steward, who had insisted on coming down in person to view the body. He had just left, in fact, and now a soldier with a net began working it around the sluggishly bobbing bundle. Finally the fellow hauled it out, the frozen surface of the water breaking around the cadaver with tiny, musical tinklings, and laid it on the bank. It seemed not a human form at all, but some pulpy crawling thing that had been dragged up by accident from the ocean floor. The face was the color of a fish’s belly, and was swollen to bursting and all bruised and cut. Where the eyes had been there were only two puckered and blackened hollows.

  I could find no one who knew how long Madek had been there. I did learn that early that morning he had been found—a grossly swollen carcass trussed in a goatskin jerkin and ripped hose—floating face-down in a deep part of the stream that in those days still ran through the moat. Those who had seen him had taken his humped form for that of some animal, a deer, maybe, or a wild boar, that had ventured onto the ice and broken through and perished in the freezing water. Eventually one of the Imperial Guard, grown curious, had made his way down the steep bank and poked at the thing with his halberd. At once it flopped over and emitted a great belch of gas so foul it sent the shocked soldier scrambling backwards on his behind up the grassy slope, spluttering and retching.

  By now a horse cart had been ordered, and while waiting for its arrival I had to argue with the sergeant in command to be allowed to examine the corpse before it was taken away. The sergeant was a decent fellow, but Wenzel had instructed him that no one was to be let near the thing. I had to invoke the Emperor’s authority and claim that I was a medical doctor sent to ascertain the exact cause of death. My bluff must have been persuasive, for at last the sergeant relented.

  When the Nuncio had first told me of the discovery of the body, I had thought it must have been Madek who had cut Magdalena Kroll’s throat, in a fit of jealousy and rage; afterwards he had fled down here and, tormented by remorse, must have drowned himself. Now, however, squatting on one knee beside what was left of the young man, I saw the burn marks on the flesh, and the print of the rope on his wrists, and realized that his eyes had not been taken by fish, or water rats, as I had originally assumed, but had been gouged out before he died. Jan Madek had been cruelly tortured and then strangled, as the leather cord buried deep in a groove around his neck attested.

  I had not one murder to investigate, but two.

  The cart came then, and as Madek’s body was being laid upon the rough-hewn boards, the horse turned and regarded the corpse with what seemed a stoically sympathetic eye. What things animals know, things deeper than we are privy to.

  I climbed the bank of the moat, slipping more than once on the frost-laden grass and almost falling. A coldness had seized me that was not the afternoon’s cold. Fear, too, spreads an icy air.

  In the preceding days I had talked to anyone I could find who had known Jan Madek, yet I had been able to discover precious little about him that I did not already know. He had been an apprentice physician under the tutelage of Dr. Kroll, living in rented quarters on one of the upper floors of the doctor’s house; his father was a rich surgeon in Augsburg who had paid handsomely for his son to come to Prague and study with the world-renowned Ulrich Kroll; and Madek had hardly settled in Kroll’s house before he had succumbed to the spell of the doctor’s bewitching and, as everyone agreed, clever and calculating daughter. Magdalena Kroll, I was told, was as ambitious as she was fair, and while it amused her to dally with the handsome young Augsburger, she had dropped him from her favor without hesitation the night she caught the Emperor’s eye in the banquet hall at the Royal Palace.

  Madek was young, and he took hard the loss of the fair Magdalena. She had become betrothed to him in a lighthearted moment one evening when the two of them danced together at a gathering of students in a beer hall in Kleinseite. I tracked down an acquaintance of Madek’s, one Krister Kristensen, a big fair-haired Dane with glossy pink cheeks and invisible eyelashes, one of the astronomer Tycho Brahe’s assistants, who had been present on the occasion. “Oh yes,” Kristensen boomed, in his comical accent, laughing and showing his big square teeth, “he was mad for her, the wench, but she thought it all a joke.”

  After Rudolf had taken his beloved from him, the young man had at once begun neglecting his studies. He had fallen to drinking, and often in the alehouses he was heard to abuse the Emperor’s name and curse him for a whoremaster. Matters became so bad with him that in the end Dr. Kroll turned him out of the house. Later it became known that when he left he had taken with him an iron box—the strongbox Jeppe Schenckel had spoken of that day when he was leading me to Dr. Kroll’s house to meet the Emperor—that was said to contain a cache of precious papers on alchemy and natural magic the doctor had assembled over many years. For a week and more the young man was not seen or heard of in the city. Dr. Kroll posted a notice for information on his whereabouts, but in vain. The rumor went round that the renegade had abandoned Prague altogether and returned home to Augsburg.

  But he had not gone home. Instead, he had been seized, and tortured, and then throttled and thrown into the Stag Moat. He had been not yet twenty years old. “Damned foolish fellow,” Krister Kristensen said jovially, wiping his blond mustaches with the side of a thumb.

  I returned to the nunciature,
where I was told the Bishop had retired for the evening. All the same, I was shown to his bedchamber, which was not much larger than a cubbyhole, and almost entirely filled by an enormous four-poster bed overhung with a baldachin of scarlet brocade. A fire was blazing here, of course, and the air hummed with its heat. “I am from the south,” the Nuncio said, pressing a hand to his breast. “I cannot bear the northern cold!” He was propped against a mound of cushions, still wearing his black felt hat, as well as a voluminous woolen robe the same shade of scarlet as the canopy above him.

  I told him of Jan Madek, of the burns on his body, of his gouged-out eyes. He nodded somberly.

  “Yes,” he said, “it is as I had expected. It does not do to speak, in public, as he spoke.” He bent on me a keen look out of those dark, sharp little eyes of his. “And you, dottore, you must go carefully.” He smiled. “Perhaps you need an angelo custode—a guardian angel.”

  And so, when some short time later I departed the house, I was accompanied, on the Nuncio’s instructions, by the angelic young novice Serafina. The imperial carriage was waiting outside; I expected to see the driver frozen into a figure of ice, but he was animate still, though as silent and unresponsive as ever.

  We rumbled and rattled our way across the Stone Bridge and again ascended the long hill towards the castle. The girl sat close by me, a tender presence, like some shy creature of the wild that had settled by my side for warmth. When I looked out the window I saw a clear patch of sky above the castle, a wash of densest blue, with a single star, dagger-shaped and faintly atremble, shining out into the gathering darkness, and its blade seemed to pierce my heart to the core.

  I fell to watching the girl, covertly, not turning my head but only swiveling my eyes sideways. She was beautiful, in her delicate way, and when she caught me peeping at her she smiled, and blushed, and no doubt I did, too. She had changed out of her habit and wore a plain gray gown under a heavy sheepskin coat. Her hair, which before had been hidden under a stiff hood, hung loose now, black and lustrous. She had a southern duskiness, and when she smiled her teeth glistened like damp pearls.