Wolf on a String Read online

  The young woman ahead of me had stopped and was waiting for me, with an inquiring expression.

  “The person there,” I said, hastening after her and gesturing back over my shoulder towards the window, “did you see him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That was Don Giulio, my mistress’s son.”

  Her mistress? Who was her mistress? I put that question aside for the present.

  “But is he,” I said, “is he a boy, a man? What is he?”

  This she chose to ignore, and turned and walked on.

  I continued to follow her, feeling strangely shaken.

  We went down another, longer corridor, and presently entered a small, bright chamber in which three women were seated upon ornate Italian chairs.

  One of them I recognized. It was the woman I had seen at the window.

  Now that I knew she was real, I thought her even more striking than she had seemed when I mistook her for a painted image. She was not young, yet her face and hair had a palely luminous quality, a kind of limpid sheen, as if she had lived all her life under moonlight.

  In one hand she was holding an embroidery hoop, and with the other was drawing a needle and a long scarlet thread through the stretched cloth. As I watched, she pulled the thread tight and leaned down and severed it neatly with her small, gleaming white teeth.

  I made my usual clumsy attempt at a bow, my boot heels scraping on the wooden floor. She returned an acknowledging nod.

  “Has His Portliness been requiring you to admire his gewgaws?” she asked.

  This caused the two young women, seated one on either side of her, to quiver faintly, like a pair of swans ruffling up their feathers. One of them tittered.

  “Why, madam,” I said, groping for words, “if such things are gewgaws, I’m sure I’ve never seen the like for preciousness and interest.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, drawing out the word as if it were one of those many long lengths of silk that were twisted into skeins in a rosewood box on the floor beside her chair. “Yes, I suppose that must be how they seem, at first sight.”

  The young woman who had conducted me here stepped past me, seated herself in a fourth chair, and took up a piece of embroidery of her own. I could see I was to be an entertainment, and the atmosphere of the room was giddy with amused expectancy. I felt twice as tall as I was and ten times as clumsy.

  “You know who I am, I presume?” the woman said.

  I had taken off my hat and was turning its worn edges round and round nervously in my fingers. I recognized that she was Italian, for she spoke in the same manner as Bishop Malaspina did, with a breathy drop at the end of each word.

  “I would think,” I said, “that you must be Mistress Caterina Sardo.”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered, with a little toss of her head, “mistress I must be, certainly mistress—da sempre e per sempre.”

  Her three handmaids glanced at each other, eyes wide in fearful delight, rustling their plumage again and then quickly recomposing themselves. The one on the right had a mandolin in her lap; the other was holding closed a slim bound volume, with a finger inserted in it to mark her place. The third leaned over her embroidery in a show of earnest industry. They looked as if they had posed themselves consciously, after some set-piece from a painting.

  The room had a faint but heavy, musky smell; I have always savored the flesh-and-violets fragrance of women.

  Caterina Sardo rose to her feet, tossing the wooden ring with its cloth and threads behind her onto the chair. She came forward and placed herself directly in front of me, looking into my eyes. She was impressively tall: in height I had no more than the width of a couple of fingers on her.

  “And you are the miraculous star from the west,” she said. She let her gaze wander over my face, and then all the way down to my feet and back up again. “I grant, you have something of a starry aspect.” She smiled with a mischievous compression of the lips. “But are you a good Christian, I wonder? We are all Christians here at court, you know. Very pious.”

  Despite her lambent look there was a sense about her of overuse, as of something faintly soiled; it lay upon her almost palpably, like a skim of sweat. This tainted aura did not offend or repulse me—no, on the contrary, it stirred me deeply, indeed alarmingly. She seemed a woman who had done much, and would do more: a woman who would do anything.

  Now she drew herself nearer to me, still thinly smiling. She narrowed her eyes and seemed to look straight into me, into my very thoughts. My forehead was burning.

  “Leave us,” she said sharply, without taking her eyes off me. At once her trio of handmaids rose meekly, putting aside their things, and with their heads down filed past us one by one to the door, which the last one closed softly behind herself.

  A silence swelled in the room, settling about the woman and me like a soft, weightless gauze.

  “It was you who found the trollop with her throat cut, yes?” she said. Her tone was husky and almost caressing, belying the callousness of her words. “All her prettiness marred, her lovely flesh all hacked and bloodied.” She clicked her tongue in mock regret and shook her head from side to side slowly and mechanically, reminding me of one of her husband’s cunningly articulated statues. “Such a waste.” Then she smiled again. “Come,” she said, “come sit and tell me things. In this place no one talks to anyone else except to meddle and conspire.”

  We sat. There was a blue-tiled stove in the corner; the air, with its womanly aroma, was warm and dense.

  I feared being required yet again to embark on an account of myself and my antecedents, but it turned out there was little she did not know about me already. Anyway, as I would discover, she found herself far too fascinating to waste time being much interested in others.

  Abruptly she put on a show of recollecting herself and said, “Oh, but I haven’t offered you refreshment. You’ll be in need of something, after your dusty hour among the royal treasures.” She lifted an eyebrow. “You were impressed, you say, by his bibelots and baboons?” She gave a brief little laugh. “Everyone always is—except me.”

  “Such a collection is surely one of the wonders of the world,” I exclaimed.

  That lifted eyebrow fluttered when she laughed.

  “Oh, surely, yes,” she said dismissively. “Did you see his pictures? They were collected for him by my father, who was his agent and curator. This is how I come to be here, so far from my Tuscan homeland”—she sighed—“here, where one does not see the sun for six months of the year.”

  She took up a little bell from a small table beside her and twitched, producing a muted tinkle. A moment later the door opened and there entered again the snub-nosed girl who had first fetched me here.

  “This is Petra,” Caterina Sardo said. “She is the maid of my chamber, the rock upon which I depend. She knows all my secrets—don’t you, Petra? Tutti i miei segreti.” She turned to me again. “Isn’t she pretty? Except for the nose, that is; there is nothing to be done about the nose. But you should see her unclothed—perhaps you shall, one day. We often cuddle up together of a night, she and I, under the blankets, and tell each other stories.”

  The girl was blushing and biting her lip, but behind this show of prudery I detected something else, a shiver, as it seemed, of the memory of secret pleasures, of forbidden doings.

  “Bring some Tokay for our guest,” Caterina Sardo said. “And a plate of those sweetmeats that we so much like, the ones with almonds and cherries.”

  Petra, still biting a corner of her lip between uneven little teeth, made a curtsy and withdrew.

  “Do I shock you by my talk?” Caterina Sardo asked, watching me with amusement.

  “You must forgive me, madam,” I said. “I am not used to court life—I have not learned its manners sufficiently yet.”

  “Ah. You think me lewd.”

  “Not at all—”

  “But you do. I see it in your look. Well, no doubt you’re right. Court life, as you call it, conduces to indecency. It’s a
ll we have, to stave off the tedium, the monotony, the boredom of it all.”

  There was a light tap at the door and young Petra came back, carrying a pewter tray on which were a flask of tawny wine and two little goblets of carved Bohemian glass hardly bigger than thimbles.

  “Thank you, Petra,” Caterina Sardo said. “Put it here, please, on the table between us. And yes, you may pour.” She watched the girl’s face as she filled the glasses. “The Herr Professor thinks me a shameless doxy,” she said. I began to protest, but she laid a hand on mine to silence me, still regarding the girl. “He denies it, but he thinks me wanton. What do you say, Petra?”

  The girl glanced sideways at her mistress and then at me. Her look was a mixture of calculation and amused malice.

  “Madam likes to tease,” she said, “but it’s all in jest.”

  Caterina Sardo turned to me with her palms outspread.

  “You see?” she said. “You see how it is? Even the maids of the chamber mock me.” She smiled up at the girl with narrowed eyes. “You are a minx, and too saucy by far. I shall have to think of a suitable punishment for you, later. Now be gone.”

  It was plain the girl was well used to her mistress’s suggestingly teasing ways, and she poured out the wine unhurriedly and handed us each a glass.

  “There are no cakes,” she said.

  “What?” Caterina Sardo cried. “No cakes? Pray, why not?”

  “The baker forgot to make them.”

  “Forgot! I shall have him hanged by his thumbs—remind me to order it.”

  The girl glanced at me again with a wry little smile—there was indeed something lewdly knowing in her look—then made a mocking sketch of a curtsy and left the room, shutting the door behind her with a muffled but pointedly insolent bang.

  I sipped the deep-toned, honey-sweet wine, and thought with no little wonder how in a matter of a few extraordinary days my life had been so strangely and alarmingly transformed. What if, in that moment, I had known how much more there was to come—how, for instance, on a day not far off, the winter sun shining snow-bright in a high window and the great cathedral bell shaking the air above the rooftops, I would find myself on my knees between this woman’s thighs, there to lap a drop of this very wine from the tiny, whorled vessel of her navel, preliminary to moving southwards and imbibing a different ichor elsewhere? What if, indeed.

  “You knew that she was with child, the Kroll girl?” Caterina Sardo suddenly said.

  I stared at her. She had been gazing pensively at the stove beside us, and now she turned her head slowly and looked at me. “You didn’t? Ah, Professor, for such a learned man you seem to know so little.”

  And you, madam, I thought, could tell me so much.

  She leaned back in the chair, hunching her shoulders forward and settling into herself with a satisfied sigh, smiling up at me from under her lashes. Her mouth, I should say, was truly a delightful shape, the upper lip a perfect Cupid’s bow resting lightly upon the lower, and tapering at the corners into a notch in the soft, full flesh of her cheek.

  “Yes,” she said, taking a delicate sip of her wine like a cat lapping its milk, “the venerable Doctor’s spotless daughter was carrying in her belly a little surprise.”

  She gave a breathy laugh.

  “Everyone would have thought they knew whose it was,” she said, “but as I might have told them, His Lowness could never have hoisted himself high enough to get a hearty girl like her with child.” She held out her glass. “Pour me some more Tokay, if you please, Herr Professor.”

  “Then it was Madek’s child?” I said. “Jan Madek, her betrothed?”

  She shrugged, laughing softly in gleeful malice.

  “Oh, yes, Madek, perhaps,” she said, “or some other. Mistress Magdalena, so meek and mild, in truth liked nothing better than the bit between her teeth. They could have kept her at a staging post and hitched her up as often as they liked and as she wished, a mount ripe and ready for all comers.” She stopped, and turned to me, her eyes wide and a hand to her mouth. “Oh, Dio mio, but I have shocked you again, I see. How terrible I am—there’s no controlling this tongue of mine.” And she smiled, and showed it, the tip of that tongue of hers, sharp and pink and glistening.

  I stood up, to do what I don’t know. I felt a great constriction suddenly, as if something that had been wrapping itself stealthily around me had all at once drawn tight its coils. I looked at the glass I was holding. The wine on my tongue seemed a thick and glutinous humor; my innards heaved at the taste of it.

  And yet, for all this, my blood was fairly on fire. I had never heard a woman talk so freely, with all of a man’s crude carelessness, and I was hotly, horribly, excited.

  Caterina Sardo looked up at me now in feigned alarm.

  “Why, sir,” she said, putting a hand to her breast, like a maiden in a fable, “but you are impetuous. Why do you jump up? Do I affect you so? I would not wish”—another low and throaty laugh—“to discompose or frighten you.”

  Through a window above the stove I could see a little patch of blue sky, like the one I had glimpsed through the carriage window the previous day after crossing the Stone Bridge with Serafina by my side. This time, however, I might have been in some altogether other, distant realm of the universe, peeping down at our world through the wrong end of one of Galileo’s magnifying spyglasses.

  “Sit,” Caterina Sardo said in a drawling voice, “do please sit, and we shall be calm and speak of milder things.” I sat, but not with any ease, for I still had the fidgets and my collar felt tight enough to choke me. Again she put a hand on mine. “Tell me what you make of His Majesty,” she said. “Do you think him entirely mad?”

  Under the pretext of setting the empty glass on the table I freed my hand from hers, not because I disliked her touch—quite, quite the opposite was the case—but I was frightened of it, and of myself. I could feel my brow all flushed and damp.

  “I think you mock me, madam,” I said, making myself smile.

  She laughed softly, leaning her head back and showing me the soft pale slender column of her throat. At the same time she reached up a hand to touch the tendrils of hair where they strayed from the thick, loose braid that hung down her back.

  “Oh, but that is my way,” she said. “I provoke everyone, I am famous for it. But you must understand, I only bother with people who interest me, and they are few”—here she lowered her voice to a husky whisper, and leaned forward and put her face close to mine—“very few.”

  I coughed and frowned and busied myself pouring out two more thimblefuls of the heavy, sweet wine. I could feel her watching me, in my discomposure, with rich enjoyment.

  “You know,” she said, accepting the wine from my hand, “you know it was that pander Felix Wenzel who put the girl in his way?”

  “Fräulein Kroll?” I said.

  She made a grimace.

  “Of course Fräulein Kroll—who else? And when I say Wenzel put her in his way, I do not mean Madek, that helpless poor milksop.”

  She took a sip from her glass, smiling at me slyly over the rim.

  “Yes,” she said, “it was Wenzel who coached her in all the intricacies of poor Rudi’s tastes and preferences. Although of course he could not make her into a boy—that was beyond even his powers.” She laughed with bitter mirth. “Why, I believe it was Wenzel who chose the very gown she wore that night, and at the banquet pushed her forward himself, with her father’s consent and encouragement, into His Greediness’s path. The fat old fool would have fallen over her had she not stopped him with her brilliant smile, and her even more brilliant bosom, which was so brazenly on show that he might have got that sharp nose of his wedged in its cleft.”

  She drank again, and mused in silence for a while, looking up at the window and that patch of sky and nodding a little to herself.

  “Wenzel,” she said then, with disgust, seeming to spit the name. Then she turned again to me with almost an angry look. “You know him, of course—it was he
who had you hauled off to the tower clapped in irons, yes? That’s his weakness—he always overreaches himself. It will be his downfall, one day.”

  Her attention wandered again and she brooded for some moments. Then she tapped me on the knee sharply with a hard little knuckle.

  “You should speak to Rudolf about him,” she said, “put in a bad word for him. Rudi is greatly taken with you, you know—he truly thinks you have been sent to him from Heaven. But be warned: his favor is a fickle thing, and soon wavers. Strike now, before his passion for you cools.”

  Afterwards I would brood for long hours on that first encounter with Caterina Sardo in her sewing room, turning it this way and that, as if it were a globe of beveled glass, studying the flashes of light it threw off, flashes that did not illuminate but only dazzled the eye.

  She had turned away from me again, and her thoughts, I could see, had drifted elsewhere. I put down my glass and once more rose to my feet.

  “I hope you will excuse me, madam,” I said. “I should leave now and return home, before the snow comes on again.”

  “Home?” she said, looking up at me vaguely. “Where is home?”

  “In Golden Lane,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Oh, yes, yes, I knew that, and had forgotten. Our friend the Chamberlain put you in a house there. Is it to your taste? Does it suit you? I should come there and visit you.” Something sparked in her eyes again, and she smiled darkly, giving me a sportive look from under lowered brows. “Would you like that, Herr Professor? Would you like me to come and see you in your little house?”

  “Of course, madam,” I said stiffly, “you are welcome to call on me whenever you care to. Although—”

  She put her head coquettishly to one side.

  “Although?”

  “The place is hardly—how shall I say?—palatial.”

  “Oh, I did not always live in palaces. And besides, I have not been outside these quarters for—oh, I don’t know how long.” She rose up and approached me slowly, swaying her hips a little and smiling. “Yes, expect it,” she said. “Petra and I shall descend on you one day, out of the sky, like a pair of benignant harpies.”