Wolf on a String Read online

  “I’m told it is you whom His Majesty has tasked with finding the killer of my daughter,” he said. “Is that so?”

  “That is so, yes,” I answered.

  Wenzel: it would have been Wenzel who had told him; again I cursed myself for having spoken so intemperately to that man.

  “And what have you discovered?” the Doctor asked.

  “It seems plain,” I said, “that the young man Madek did the deed, in a transport of jealous rage.”

  “That’s what you think, is it? That is your finding?”

  I felt a stirring of uncertainty.

  “Yes, Doctor,” I said. “Have you cause to doubt it?”

  He was gazing up now at the silver crucifix set high above the altar.

  “Have you ever thought,” he said, “how strange a thing it is that the Christian faith should be founded on an atrocity? The Son of God, nailed to a wooden post.” He turned to me; his grieving eyes were hooded. “I carried out an examination of the young man’s corpse,” he said. “He was dead while my daughter was alive.”

  At first I could not take it in.

  “But how could that be?” I asked. “It was he—it was he that murdered her, surely. And he was caught, and tortured, and put to death.”

  “That’s what you may believe.”

  “Yes yes,” I said, “I thought—” I broke off. By now I was not sure what I thought.

  He shook his head. He was looking up again at the crucifix.

  “Listen to me,” he said, in his slow deep weary way. “He died before she did, killed by whom I know not. You shall have to look elsewhere for the killer of my daughter.”

  14

  After quitting the cathedral, I returned to Golden Lane wrapped in confusion and prey to a host of troubled speculations. The midwinter darkness had fallen swiftly, and there was a vast sky of glistening stars, just as there had been that other night when I had stumbled on the body of the Doctor’s daughter under the castle wall. I had no choice now but to believe that it could not have been Madek who had murdered her—“I know a week-old corpse when I see it,” Dr. Kroll had said, and there was no doubting him. Two killers, then, for two corpses. I would have to tell the Emperor. That was not an interview I looked forward to with anything but dread.

  Everything I had believed about this bloodstained business had been put at naught. I dearly wished I had not been charged with solving the riddle of the young woman’s death. Indeed, I wished I had never come to Prague, and so desperate were my thoughts that night that I considered gathering up my belongings and fleeing the city at once under the shroud of darkness. Death had attended me since my arrival here: would it not be wise to leave now, lest I too should be caught up in the Dark One’s web?

  But how could I go, and where should I go to? Flight would be futile: they would find me, they would hunt me down, wherever I went.

  Whoever they might be.

  I felt I was half a dead man already.

  Then I bethought myself, and chided myself for my weakness of spirit. Was I a child, mewling in fear of the dark and its imaginary monsters? Had I learned nothing from all my years of study at Würzburg? The world is a world of men, not devils, however devilishly men may act. That I could not yet see the faces of those who had murdered Magdalena Kroll and dispatched her forlorn lover did not mean they were faceless. Somewhere in the city, now, at this moment, those killers were going about their lives just as I was; they were just as vulnerable as I, just as prone to blundering mistakes, even as baffled, for all I knew. The Emperor had put his trust in me, in me, against the likes of his High Steward and his Chamberlain—against the whole world, I was his chosen man. I would not, could not, fail him.

  The embers in the stove had redness in them still. I stoked them to life, and heated the last of the marrowbone broth and ate it with spelt cake crumbled into it, and drank also the last of the mulled wine, not caring that it was cold by now. Then I trimmed the wick of my oil lamp and got myself into bed, still in my clothes, to read some pages of Pliny the Elder, who was a favorite author of mine in those days, and still is.

  Life’s little rituals—how should we survive without them?

  I am not sure how much time had passed before I heard a sound outside that woke me from the doze I had dropped into, but the lamp had burned low, so it must have been a matter of some hours. The book was still open in my hands but my chin had sunk onto my chest; my eyelids felt hot and were as heavy as flakes of lead.

  The sound seemed to be a sort of panting, or harsh gasping, as if some creature were in the lane outside, nosing at the lower part of my front door. Had I been in a hut in the woods, instead of in the center of a great city, I would have said it was a wild boar scavenging after scraps, for the sounds were very like a sort of swinish snuffling. I listened intently, thinking it might be my imagination playing a trick on me.

  But no, there was something, or someone, out there.

  Plato, who had been asleep in my lap, had woken too, and stood up now on all four paws and arched his back, his fur bristling.

  I rose soundlessly from the bed and crept to the door and wrenched it open.

  It was black night outside, for the sky had clouded over, and either the lamplighter had not come on his rounds yet or the lamp at the far end of the lane had been doused. The result was that at first I could see nothing—I had left my own light at the bedside—but I heard a quick scuffle and then the rapid patter of feet, or paws, as it might be. Stepping over the threshold, I peered in the direction where the sounds were retreating and seemed to see a low, bent shape hopping and scampering along at a rapid pace. I thought of Jeppe the dwarf, but I knew this was not he. I could not be sure it was even a human shape. I had the impression, I couldn’t say why, of a large and general gleefulness, as if the night itself had joined with the fleeing creature to make savage fun of me.

  I called out a challenge, only the thing by now had disappeared into the darkness. I went back inside the house and tried to strike a little warmth from the stove, but in vain, for all that remained were ashes. The air was bitingly cold.

  It might have been an animal, I thought, some half-wild thing that had escaped from the royal menagerie, in which were kept all manner of exotic creatures, including apes—perhaps it was one of those that had climbed out of its cage to go wandering about in the night. But I didn’t think so, not really. I was convinced it had been a human form, though no bigger than a large child; however, the impression it had left behind, of dark and malignant mockery, was far from childish.

  I lay awake for a long time, listening to the sounds of the night, afraid that whatever the thing had been might return. I kept the lamp lit beside me; its flickering flame threw hunched and undulating shadow-shapes upon the walls and ceiling. Dawn was coming up when I fell at last into a kind of sleep, and dreamed of walking along a river bank. Seeing something resembling a swollen gray sack bobbing in the shallows, I waded out and grabbed it and turned it over, only to find a drowned girl, eyeless and without a mouth and wound tightly all round with leather cords.

  I woke, gratefully, to the sound of Serafina raking out the stove.

  Soon she had a pot of water heating for my morning shave, and soon too a warm brown fragrance began to suffuse the air, from a pot of that Turkish coffee drink I had first tasted after my lunch with the Nuncio. It was wonderfully stimulating, and already I had developed almost a craving for it, especially at morning time. Handing me my cup, Serafina put a finger to her lips and shook her head, swearing me to secrecy, for she had pinched a bag of the precious beans from the larder at the nunciature and then ground them in a clever little machine that she had brought with her.

  The sky was clear again, and an angled spike of early sunlight came in through the window.

  I sat down at the table and read some more pages of Pliny while Serafina heated up the remains of yesterday’s spelt cakes, which added their own sweet savor to the air. My cup was already empty, and she came and poured out anoth
er dose of the hot black brew, her breath warm against my ear. Then she sat down beside me, with Plato the cat in her lap—they played together endlessly, those two. She smiled at me; she had such a sweet, shy smile; I see it even now, as if she were here before me.

  Just then, however, in the midst of the morning’s homely contentments, I experienced a stab of foreboding as sharp as that shaft of sunlight in the window. I felt no concern for myself; I feared for Serafina. I had accepted her services as though they were my natural due, yet now it seemed to me that in some way, a way I could not name, I was leading her inexorably into peril.

  A moment later she stood and turned away from where I sat. As she did, I took her hand and looked up at her earnestly, as if somehow to communicate—what? A warning? Yes, a warning, though of what kind I could not have said. At first she smiled, but then, seeing the anxiety in my look, she frowned and drew away from me, and went to the stove. She stood there with a hand to her mouth, glancing back at me over her shoulder.

  I wished I could tell her what the matter was, but how could I, since I myself did not understand the nature of this chill draught that had caused me such an inward shiver? And what should I have said, had I been able to speak? Just this: that the world bides, crouched in cover, waiting to spring, and that there are moments when all unexpectedly we feel upon our cheek a waft of its ravenous breath.

  Ah, my poor Serafina, my poor lost girl.

  On impulse I rose from the table and went to the cupboard where I kept hidden the purse of money my father the Bishop had sent to me from his deathbed, and from it I took the gold ring that I believed had belonged to my mother. I caught hold of Serafina’s hand again—she tried to resist but I would not let her go—and slipped the ring onto her finger. She stared at it, and then at me.

  “It was my mother’s,” I said, my voice shaking, “do you understand? It belonged to my mother.” She shook her head almost angrily, frustrated by her own incomprehension. I put a hand to my breast, and lifted up her hand and pointed to the ring on her finger. “Mia madre,” I said. “It was hers, yes? Mia madre.”

  Now she smiled at last—it seemed like the sun coming out—and nodded rapidly. She was blushing, and there were tears in her eyes. She turned away from me to hide her face. I put a hand on her shoulder, and thus we stood, for a long time, she with her back to me, and I touching her, feeling how she trembled.

  At last she stirred and looked towards the window, where something had caught her attention. Almost before I knew it, just as she had done yesterday when Dr. Kroll had come, she took up her coat and without a glance in my direction opened the door and was gone.

  I moved to follow her, and reached the doorway just as a carriage was stopping outside.

  “I see we have frightened away your little pet mouse,” Caterina Sardo said, putting out her head at the carriage window. “Look how she scurries! Will you be very cross with me now?”

  She withdrew her head and opened the door. Giving me her soft hand, she stepped down to the cobbles, where she paused and leaned her head to one side with a look of pouting reproof.

  “What?” she said. “Not even a greeting?”

  “Forgive me, madam,” I answered. “It’s early, and you find me at something of a disadvantage.”

  “I gave you warning that we should descend on you,” she said mischievously. “I am always as good as my word; that’s something you must learn.”

  Behind her, Petra was getting down from the carriage, with her cheekily mocking eye and wound-up thick braids and her pink little button of a nose. “Well then, you’re welcome, ladies,” I said. “Will you come inside?”

  Caterina Sardo turned to the maid and widened her eyes in feigned shock.

  “Why, Petra,” she said, “hear how he makes a lady of you! We shall have bowing and scraping and kissing of hands next.”

  I stood aside for them to enter through the doorway, then followed after. As we came in, Plato the cat ran out, darting swiftly past me in the doorway. He had a keener nose for trouble than I did.

  Caterina Sardo wore an elegant gown of heavy black silk and a starched ruff with pointed lacing all round its edge. The sleeves of her gown were puffed, which made her small pale delicate hands seem smaller and more delicate still.

  She looked about the room and wrinkled her nose.

  “Oh, you drink that vile stuff the Mussulmans so love,” she said. “I can smell the stench of it, like burning hair.”

  “I’m sorry, madam, that it offends you,” I said. “I find it enlivening.”

  She cast a laughing look at me.

  “Do you, now.” She turned back to the maid. “Petra, don’t stare so at the Herr Professor’s things! Don’t you know how rude it is? Anyway, you may go. Come back and fetch me in”—she glanced at me with an eyebrow arched—“an hour, say? The gentile professore will divert me for that long with wonderful facts and fancies. Won’t you?”

  Petra was biting her lip and trying not to smirk.

  “Yes’m,” she said, and having made a flouncing curtsy, she turned to go. Passing me she paused, however, and whispered, “Sir, will you tell me what that object is?”

  She was pointing to a little brass astrolabe that I had set on the windowsill. It was one of my most prized possessions—I have it yet—fashioned according to my specifications and at much expense by that master craftsman Isaiah Ortelius of Nuremberg. I took it up and laid it on the girl’s palm.

  “It is an instrument,” I said, “for predicting the positions of the sun and the moon, the planets, and even of the fixed stars. A very ingenious contrivance.”

  She gazed at the gleaming thing in silence for a moment, then thrust it back into my hands and departed as speedily as Serafina before her.

  “You frightened her,” Caterina Sardo said with a shrug. “She thinks such devices the work of the Devil.” She came and stood before me, very close, smiling into my face. “But perhaps you are a devil, Christian Stern? A minor one.”

  In my confusion I could think of no reply. Why was she here, at this early hour of the morning, dressed as if for a state occasion? That the obvious answer did not at once occur to me is an indication not so much of the purity of my mind but of my cognizance of the fact that she was the Emperor’s mistress and the mother of his children. Besides, she was older even than the innkeeper’s wife at the Blue Elephant; it seemed unlikely, to say the least, that such a personage would present herself on a winter morning at a hovel in Golden Lane with the aim of seducing a penniless young scholar. And yet I had not forgotten that kiss she had given me in her sewing room—how could I forget it, light and brief though it had been?

  “You must excuse me,” I said, “but I have no refreshment to offer you, since you don’t like the Turkish brew.”

  “Why, sir—do I seem in need of refreshing?”

  “I merely meant—”

  “Oh, fie! Must you be so grave? I shall not eat you”—she gave a little silvery laugh—“unless you should wish me to. Dr. Kepler, the stargazer, who knows everything, or claims to, tells me the female spider devours the male once the mating business is done with. What a world we live in—can you believe such a thing?”

  Before I could answer—and what would I have answered anyway?—she turned aside with a sort of cheerful flounce. It struck me that in her bustled black gown and puffed sleeves she did somewhat resemble a large and sinisterly lovely spider.

  Now she walked about the room, picking up this or that of my things to look at and then toss carelessly aside. She put her head into the scullery, and after that drew back the curtain that hid the cackstool.

  “My my,” she said, “surely Chamberlain Lang could have done somewhat better for you than this. I shall speak to him.” She took up the astrolabe. “Did you mean to slight me by ignoring me while you entertained my maid’s silly curiosity about this thing?”

  She did not look at me.

  “No indeed, madam,” I said with a certain stiffness, “but I am a scholar an
d a teacher, and it is my habit to reply when my knowledge is appealed to.”

  “Please don’t do it again,” she said, but mildly. “I can be very cross when I am crossed.”

  She sat down suddenly at the table, and with a gesture invited me to join her. I took the other chair. She folded her pale hands in her lap.

  “Do you like my gown?” she asked. “It’s new—this is my first wearing of it.”

  “It’s very handsome,” I said. “It becomes you well.”

  “Do you not think it a little too close-fitting at the bosom?” She looked down at herself, frowning. “I seem so flat.”

  She glanced up at me again and laughed. I have never been so much laughed at, without minding, as I was by Caterina Sardo.

  “Did you study medicine?” she asked. “At—where was it?”

  “Würzburg. Yes, I did. A little.”

  “Then you can advise me. I think there is something the matter with my heart. I have consulted Dr. Kroll, but he says there is nothing amiss, although between you and me, I think he is a humbug and knows nothing. Will you measure my pulse? They say the pulse tells all about the heart’s condition.”

  She held out to me a white wrist traced with fine blue veins. I pressed my thumb to it. Her skin was cool, and delicately brittle, like paper.

  “It seems usual to me,” I said. “I can detect no trace of fever or the like.”

  “But I can,” she said, with another sulky pout. “I am quite feverish, I’m sure of it. Here, feel.” She took my hand and put it to her breast. “Don’t you think the beat is much too swift?”

  “It’s not easy to tell, madam,” I said.

  She gazed into my face. I’m sure I was blushing—yes, yes, I know, I blush like a girl; it has always been one of my afflictions. Cautiously I withdrew my hand.

  “Wait, you must try again,” she said. She unhooked the top part of her gown, and took my hand again and slipped it into the opening. She wore no chemise, and my palm encountered her bare flesh, curved and warm, and the hard little tip of her breast. “Do you feel it now, how fast it runs, my poor heart?”