Wolf on a String Page 13
I bowed, and began backing cautiously away from her, cap in hand, making for the door.
She had picked up my glass, in which a drop of wine remained, and now she handed me her own, which was still nearly half full.
“Drink,” she said. I stared at her. “Go on,” she said, more softly, “drink where I have drunk.”
I hesitated, not knowing what she meant or intended, then put the glass obediently to my lips. She watched me as I drank the wine, flaring her nostrils and nodding. In her turn she raised my glass, and inserted into it that sharp tongue tip of hers, reaching all the way to the bottom and licking out the last drop.
Then she stepped forward and kissed me, softly, swiftly, her lips barely brushing against mine, light as a butterfly’s wings and moist from the wine. As she did so I could feel her smiling.
“Now our pact is sealed,” she whispered. “Our secret pact.” She lifted a finger and put the tip of it first to my lips, and then to her own. “For we shall be great friends, yes, Herr Professor? Oh, yes, great friends, I am sure of it.”
13
The Stag Moat was a deep ravine that ran along the northern flank of the castle. In earlier and more turbulent times it had been a broad line of defense against attack, but Rudolf had fenced it off as a breeding place for deer, which grazed freely on its steep grassy banks. Today the winter grass was white with hoarfrost, and it crackled like cinders as I walked over it. I had come down from Caterina Sardo’s sewing room bemused and atremble—what pact was it she imagined we had sealed? I felt excited, expectant, fearful, all at once. These were murky waters I was wading in, and there were creatures in the deeps that could drag me down with them to their dark grottoes.
After crossing the courtyard, I went out by the Powder Tower and walked down the slope through the snow-laden trees.
I was hardly conscious of where my steps were taking me, and it was with some surprise that presently I came to the place where Jan Madek’s corpse had been found floating. A stretch of the thin stream at the bottom of the ravine had been sealed off with sandbags, and soldiers in leather jerkins were cutting channels to drain away the icy, sluggish water.
Felix Wenzel, his head drawn deep down into the collar of a big bearskin coat, stood on the bank of the stream, watching the men at work.
When I greeted him, he did not so much as glance in my direction. Nevertheless I tarried there beside him, as the soldiers continued their delving. Their task was not easy, for the ground was frozen and hard to break and they could hardly keep their footing in the gelid mud. The day was perfectly still, under a clear, china-blue sky, and the men’s spades as they struck the earth made a medleyed, iron ringing in the diaphanous air.
At last Wenzel spoke.
“I should have hanged you when I had the chance.” He turned his head and looked at me with cold contempt. “What business have you here?”
His eyes, which I had thought black when I saw them first by firelight, were a shade of darkish blue, and they glittered like splinters of lapis lazuli.
“I have a commission from His Majesty,” I said, “to discover who it was that murdered Magdalena Kroll.”
My words were no sooner uttered than I regretted them. That was always my weakness, to blurt and boast.
Something moved in the depths of Wenzel’s eyes. Was it surprise, resentment, anger—alarm, even? He was silent for a moment.
“Even a monarch sometimes oversteps his powers,” he said softly. “I am High Steward of this realm, and if there is an investigation to be carried out, I and my officers shall be the ones to do it.”
I said nothing to this. It’s a rare thing in life, I was thinking, that a man should stand out and show himself, in so stark and unequivocal a fashion, to be one’s unremitting enemy. In that way at least the High Steward had done me a service. Yet it puzzled me that he should harbor such a deep antipathy against me. Had he really believed I was the one who murdered Magda Kroll, when he sent his men to seize me that night at the Blue Elephant? It seemed unlikely that a man as shrewd as he should have allowed himself to make such a blunder, yet here he was, still talking of hangings, and warning me not to trespass on his privileges. The difference now was that I was no longer afraid of him, having more menacing things to fear. Or not as much afraid as I had been.
“This”—he gestured grimly with his chin in the direction of the laboring soldiers—“is Chamberlain Lang’s work.”
“What is it they’re searching for?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“That’s a question for the Chamberlain.” He glanced at me sidelong with a sort of smile. “Why not inquire of him, since he has made himself your patron and protector?”
I gave no response, which in itself was a response. After a while he spoke again, with a bitter smile.
“So, tell me,” he said. “Have you an idea as to who murdered the girl?”
Now I too gestured towards the soldiers delving and dragging in the mud.
“I believe the Imperial Guard found the culprit here. Jan Madek was heard to speak violence against her for her betrayal of him.”
He gazed at me for a long moment then, thoughtfully fingering the sharp point of his beard.
“Yes, that is plausible,” he said. “He was a hothead, certainly. We can be grateful he did not do worse. Had he harmed or even tried to harm a certain imperial personage, it would have shaken the state. The Catholics are itching for the chance to put one of their party on the throne.” He nodded slowly, still stroking his beard. “Tell me, Stern, which side are you on?”
“I don’t know that I know what sides there are,” I said.
He scoffed at that. “Oh, come, man!” he said. “You know there’s Rome, and there is us.”
“Us?”
“The party of reform, and of stability.”
“The Protestants, you mean?”
Still he held my eye.
“I ask again,” he said, “on which side of the line do you stand?”
One of the soldiers straightened from his work and shouted something to his fellows. Wenzel went down to the dwindling water’s edge and called across to him. It was only some buried implement the fellow had found, a mattock by the look of it. Wenzel shook his head and climbed back up the bank, and we stood before, beside each other but not together.
“My father was a bishop,” I said. “He held to the faith of Rome.”
He laughed. “A bishop’s bastard, eh? That’s no surprise.” He looked me up and down. “And as to faith, what are you?”
“A philosopher of nature. God is in all things.”
He nodded, though not out of accord, and the look in his narrowed eyes was one of mockery.
“In all things, yes?” he said. “In the canker that killed my father at the age of thirty? In the lump of iron that dolt just dug out of the mud? In the knife that slit Magdalena Kroll’s young throat? Are my farts a divine afflatus? The God of all things is the God of none.”
“I would not have taken you for a theologian, my Lord Steward,” I said drily.
“And I would not have taken you for a fool,” he replied.
He began to move away, then turned back and faced me again.
“Will you allow yourself to be advised?” he asked. “When there are sides, and there are always sides, you either choose, or the choice is made for you.” He paused, tipping his head back and looking narrowly at me along his nose, in that way he had. “You were with Mistress Sardo just now. Oh, yes: there’s nothing that happens here at court without my knowing of it.” He came a step closer to me, smiling now. “Have a care,” he said softly. “Your head hangs by a thread, and she has to give but one tug for you to lose it.”
He walked away along the river bank. I watched him go, and then, hearing a whirring high up behind me, I turned. Looking up, I saw a crane flying above the trees. God knows why, but it sent a shiver through me to see that sublime bird, the magnificent stretch of it, straining through the clear blue icy air.
Presently I climbed back up the slope and passed into Golden Lane by way of the White Tower. I wondered if that was the tower where I had been imprisoned, for, strange to say, I could not remember where I had been held that first night—or perhaps it is not strange, for the mind has a peculiar power to suppress those things it considers better not recalled. I tried to put that facility to use now, and banish from my thoughts Wenzel’s warning about Caterina Sardo and the gleaming thread by which, according to him, my life was suspended.
Serafina was in the house, scrubbing the deal table with soap and water. The sight of her cheered me, as she worked there with her sleeves rolled up. Something in the way she leaned and stretched—the way her hand held the wet rag sweeping in broad loops over the pale wood—made me think of the crane rising above the snowy trees; suddenly, almost magically, it ceased to seem a bird of ill omen and became, in this new manifestation, an image of life’s lightness, of its soaring possibilities. How sprightly is the spirit’s power to lift itself up from the depths, even on the darkest days.
Plato the cat greeted me in his accustomed fashion, weaving himself around my ankles and making a rattly purr deep in his chest.
Spelt cakes were cooking on top of the stove, and the air in the little room smelled sweetly of them. There was a marrowbone broth, too, and eggs and butter and honey that Serafina had brought in a basket from the nunciature, along with a little pail of mulled wine spiced with cloves and cinnamon. The fragrance of the drink brought back to me a piercing memory of my father the Bishop’s palace in Regensburg, and the few visits I was allowed to make there as a boy; the Bishop liked his grog, and there was always a pot of it simmering down in the kitchens.
Serafina dried her hands and poured me out a mug of the warmed wine. I reached for one of the cakes, which looked to be done, but she slapped my hand away and shook a finger at me, sternly smiling. She made signs to warn me that the cakes were not ready yet, and that anyway they would burn my mouth if I ate them straight from the stove.
It was surprising how quickly I had learned off the rudiments of her lexicon of signs. Already we had begun to communicate with some ease, and the range of our exchanges was remarkably broad, for all that when she was not there I could never recall exactly how we had managed to make ourselves understood to each other.
She had, I think, dear Serafina, the sweetest nature of any woman I have ever known. I say woman, but she was hardly more than a girl—she was, as I was shocked to realize, probably of the same age that Magdalena Kroll had been when her short life was so brutally quenched.
And yet how dissimilar they were, Magdalena Kroll and my Serafina—whole lives apart. At certain fixed hours of the day, Serafina would interrupt whatever task she was about and would go off into a corner and kneel there and pray silently for some minutes, her head bowed and eyes closed and her hands joined in a steeple before her, the tips of her fingers touching her silently moving lips. As for Magdalena Kroll, although I had not known her alive, I thought it unlikely, remembering how Caterina Sardo had spoken of her, that she would have been given to kneeling regularly on cold stone in devout communion with her Father in Heaven.
I filled my mug again from the pail of warm wine, and sitting myself down in the warmth of the stove, I plunged at once, irresistibly, into thoughts and speculations on all the day’s events: the tour of the wonder rooms; the encounter, in equal measure bewitching and alarming, with Caterina Sardo; the confrontation at the Stag Moat with the vengeful High Steward. I thought of Madek too, of his scorched flesh, his empty eye sockets, of the cord about his neck. There were, I was convinced, two modes of murder here, two separate sorts of savagery. The Doctor’s daughter had been slain in an extremity of passion and madness, but the young man who loved her had been tortured and put to death by judicial process—that leather cord alone was the executioner’s mark. But who had directed him in his grim task? That was the question that gnawed at me now.
As I mused on these matters, it came to me, not for the first time, that just as the universe is a vast and intricate code, some fragment of the meaning of which we seem somehow on occasion dimly to apprehend, through the force of the intellect, through magic and natural philosophy, but also in other, more mundane ways—most notably, and I suppose surprisingly, in the throes and ecstasies of profane love—so too behind the closer world, the one in which we lead our little lives and accomplish our worldly deeds, there is an altogether deeper, secret realm, where the puppet masters rule, pulling at the strings that control and direct us in what we imagine is the freedom of our actions. Of them too, the hidden masters, we are allowed to catch a glimpse now and then, when in all their dark sovereignty they choose to show themselves in order to cow and coerce us.
Wenzel had said I was a fool, and no doubt I was, by his standards. But I knew enough to understand that I had been right not to let him trap me into declaring which side I stood on in the matter of religion. Even then, before the century had turned, the world was buckling on its armor and picking up its sword in preparation for this terrible, thirty-year-long war that has torn Europe asunder in a squabble over whose version of God should have ascendancy. A pox on priests, I say, and if my curse should condemn me, then I’ll frolic with the suffering souls in Hell and not hanker after a Heaven that is none of mine.
I drank my drink, and huddled closer to the glowing stove. But the coldness in my bones was the coldness of dread, and no warm blaze could dispel it.
And the day was not done yet, not by a long way.
It was somewhat later, and I was sitting with Serafina at the table, the wood of which was still damp from her washing of it. We were finishing up the dish of broth and a platter of spelt cakes when a closed carriage came rumbling down the lane and stopped outside the door. I thought with a sinking heart that it would be Jeppe the dwarf, come to fetch me off to yet another undesignated rendezvous, and I was relieved, if startled as well, when I peeped out of the window to see Dr. Kroll step down from the carriage and stand for a moment surveying the unimposing front of my little house.
Coming in at the door, he had to stoop—in these confines he loomed even larger than he had on the previous occasions when I had been in a position to take the measure of him. I greeted him with as much composure as I could manage: I felt a chafing awkwardness before his imposing presence, which made my abode and all the things within it, including, especially, myself, seem diminished. He pressed upon the place, this large unsmiling grieving man, like the shadow of a cloud on a summer’s day, dimming the light suddenly and making everything seem to shrivel and shrink.
He looked at Serafina with a quizzical frown; at once she rose and took up her basket and put on her cloak and was gone, slipping out at the door as silent and quick as a cat.
“That is one of Malaspina’s females, yes?” he said, leaning down to peer out the window at her hurriedly departing form. “How is it she was here?”
“The Nuncio lends her to me, as a housekeeper”—I pointed to the table and the food Serafina had prepared for me—“as you see.”
He shrugged this aside.
“Do you lie with her?” he asked. He waited. I let him wait. “All right,” he said, “don’t answer. It’s nothing to me whether you do or don’t; I’ve no doubt there are greater sins you’ll be damned for. But beware Malaspina: he is well-named, for he is a poisoned thorn indeed.” He looked about disparagingly. “Is this the best Lang could do for you?”
“Doctor,” I said, “will you sit and take a mug of wine with me?” He looked at me hard, seeming to nibble on some small speck between his teeth, a muscle in his jaw working. “Come, sir,” I said, and dared to lay a hand on his arm. “Sit, you are in pain.”
He sat, and stared unseeing out of the window, his cheek still twitching. I poured a measure of the mulled wine into a mug and set it before him. He did not
touch it, however, and seemed not even to notice it.
“This morning I buried my daughter,” he said. “She lies beside her mother, in the Josefov cemetery, the Beth Chaim.” He glanced at me. “Yes, my wife was a Jew. Does that surprise you?”
“I have the greatest respect for the Jews,” I said.
He gave a sort of laugh, and turned to the window again.
“I did not ask you for a testimony,” he said. “I have no interest in what you think of the Jews, or anyone else. I’m not interested in anything about you, except that you were the one who found my daughter dead.” He was silent for a moment, then gave his head an angry shake, like a horse tormented by flies. “I thank God my Rahel did not live to see our child so foully slaughtered. I wish I had not lived to see it myself.”
The winter sun had almost set, and the lane outside was momentarily aglow with a thin, honeyed radiance.
I said, “The Emperor is set on knowing who it was that took her life.”
He laughed again, more darkly.
“And how is he to go about discovering that?”
I was preparing to answer when he stood up abruptly, accidentally knocking over the mug of wine I had offered him. He paused there and watched the purplish stain spread across the recently scrubbed wood. Then he turned towards the door.
“Come,” he said, “come walk with me.” He glanced again about the little room. “In Prague even the walls are listening.”
I donned my coat and cap, and opened the door. We stepped out into the last of the winter twilight’s golden dust.
We walked up the lane in silence, and then along by the wall as far as the Powder Tower and across to the cathedral and entered there through the high bronze double doors.
Under the immense, net-vaulted ceiling, the hallowed space was deserted. Our breath smoked in the chill air. We went forward and stood before the high altar, bathed in the crepuscular, multi-tinted radiance falling down upon us from the towering stained-glass windows. Tall candles burned in silver sconces.