Wolf on a String Read online

  “The Chamberlain, the Chamberlain! Already we have had that fellow Kroll and his men, who threatened and mistreated my stepfather, and now there is you. I shall write to His Majesty. He knows me, he knows who I am. I shall entreat him, and lay a complaint against you.”

  “There will not be time for that, madam. We leave for Prague in the morning.”

  She glared again, and then without another word she turned and strode away.

  Kelley was held in the black tower. The turnkey, a slow and solemn fellow with a suspicious eye, unlocked the door and led the dwarf and me up a winding, cold stone stairway, which brought back to me a sharp and shiver-making reminder of that night in Prague when I myself was incarcerated in a tower not unlike this one.

  I had expected Kelley to be a graybeard and was surprised on entering his cell to find him a man not much above forty, though he was obviously ill and in pain. He was lean and bony, with drooping whiskers and a shovel-shaped beard that had gone prematurely white. To hide the lack of his ears, his hair was indeed long at the sides. His left leg was heavily bandaged and rested on a cushion set upon a low stool.

  He was seated by the window at a table laden with books and manuscripts. He wore a black skullcap and a fur-lined coat, and a black shawl was draped over his shoulders. It was clear to me that he had heard of our coming and had set himself up in a scholarly pose with the aim of impressing us.

  He looked at us both with a keen, searching eye, then fixed on me.

  “You must be this Christian Stern of whom there has been so much talk,” he said. “Even out here, in this godforsaken wilderness, we have heard tell of you.”

  “Good day to you, Doctor,” I said. “Yes, I am Christian Stern.”

  He turned a sour look upon the dwarf.

  “Schenckel,” he said, “you I did not expect. Does His Majesty still keep you for a lapdog and feed you bones under the table?”

  “You are out of sorts, I see, Doctor,” the dwarf said, “but your tongue is as sharp as ever.” He smiled sardonically. “We have come to take you back to Prague—that will be a treat for you and put you in better spirits, eh?”

  Kelley looked to me again.

  “Who wants me in Prague?” he asked. “Is it Wenzel? He already sent his man Kroll to quiz and torment me on all sorts of nonsensical matters.”

  “No,” I said, “it was not the High Steward who sent us, but Chamberlain Lang.”

  “Ah, Lang,” Kelley said, nodding grimly—it seemed to me he had paled a little at the name—and added, after a pause: “What of these killings we hear of, Kroll’s daughter and young Madek? Is that why you’ve come for me? If so, your journey was wasted.”

  “What do you know about these deaths?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Only what little news comes to us here—tittle-tattle and gossip, most of it.” His gaze darkened and grew sharper still. “Who was it murdered them?”

  “It’s not known,” I said. “It is a mystery.”

  “A mystery!” he snorted. “I trust Philipp Lang does not imagine I know who the culprit is. Perhaps he thinks I crept into Prague and butchered those two myself.” He pointed to his bandaged leg. “I am so fleet-footed, as you see.”

  Jeppe Schenckel went forward, past the desk, and looked out of the window at the twilit landscape of hill and wood and town.

  “You have a fair prospect from here,” he said. “There are worse prisons in the world.” He turned back to Kelley. “Madek came out here, so I’m told. Was it an interesting visit? Was it profitable?”

  Kelley brushed the question aside with a contemptuous sweep of his hand.

  “I know nothing of Madek,” he said, and made a show of rummaging absently among the papers before him. I could see from his manner that he was lying. “I never met the fellow.”

  Schenckel laughed.

  “You see how it is with him?” he said to me. “He lies for sport, to keep in practice.” And then to Kelley again: “Madek was here. The fact is known. Why did he come?”

  Kelley looked him up and down, smiling a little.

  “Ho, weasel!” he said. “Did His Grace the Chamberlain give you leave to open the questioning on his behalf?”

  The dwarf, too, was smiling now.

  “As you know well, sir,” he said softly, “I am not the Chamberlain’s man.”

  Kelley turned to me.

  “But you are, yes? I hope you keep a long spoon by you, to sup with that particular devil.”

  I sighed, for my patience had by now worn thin. I was tired after the journey; my head and bones ached from the bucking of the carriage. I was hungry and dispirited, and in no mood to suffer this man’s taunts.

  “Sir,” I said, “we shall leave at first light. Be good enough to have yourself ready for the road. It’s not an easy journey, as no doubt you know.”

  He shook his head.

  “I cannot walk. My right leg was broken and is half mended, while this one”—he indicated his bandages again—“refuses to heal, and I fear may rot. Come closer and get a whiff of it, if you like.”

  “We’ll find some arrangement,” I said. “But be ready when we come for you.”

  He put his head back a little way and gazed at me almost merrily.

  “Why, sir, you are haughty! The Emperor’s favorite, indeed. I wish you well of the heady height you’ve scrambled up to—it will be a long way down.”

  I looked to Schenckel, and he nodded. Without another word we went out together and down the stairs—what a thing it was to see the dwarf negotiate those steep and treacherous steps!—and had the turnkey let us out.

  “It seems hardly worth locking him in,” I said to the fellow, “given the poor state your prisoner is in.”

  “Oh, he do hobble well enough, when he wants” was the reply I got. “But I’ll say this for him: I’ve never known the like of him to bear up under pain.”

  “You see how Kelley does it,” the dwarf said to me as we crossed the courtyard, where dusk was giving way to night, “how he wins round simple souls?”

  “Aye,” I said, “and ones that are not so simple.”

  He laughed, nodding.

  “God bless His Majesty,” he said. “The world does take him for a dupe. What would he be without the likes of you to save him from his follies, not to mention the Edward Kelleys of this world?”

  “You take risks, dwarf,” I said.

  “Do I?” he inquired, assuming a look of large surprise.

  “I don’t care to hear His Majesty spoken of in this way, as a dupe or a dunce.”

  “Ah, but you would not betray me, would you?” the dwarf said, smiling. Then his look changed, turning malignant. “I may take risks,” he said, “but you have a greater disadvantage—you cannot cure yourself of an innocent heart. It will do for you yet.”

  A wave of anger rose in me—who was this fellow to lecture me? But I let the wave go past without breaking; I was too weary to resist it. And anyway, was he not right?

  19

  For my dinner, so-called, I was given thin gruel and the leathery leg of a roast chicken. There was no salt, the oaten biscuits were hard, and I was offered only water to drink. The dining hall was vast and draughty, with walls of undressed rough stone and a high, black-beamed ceiling.

  I ate alone. Jeppe Schenckel, who seemed to survive on air, had waved away the gruel and the blackened fowl and then called for a servant to show him to his bed. Sir Kaspar and the page boy ventured down to the town in search of an alehouse—by now the two had become fast friends, however ill-matched a pair they might have been. My volume of old faithful Pliny was with me, but this evening I was not in the mood for his placid wisdom. I left the book unopened beside me on the table.

  Presently Elizabeth Weston appeared and sat down opposite me. She had taken off her apron and her cap. She was not beautiful, but she had an air of intelligence and self-possession that I found appealing, despite her simmering anger and the sourness of her manner. She watched me
as I ate. Her silence bristled with indignation.

  “You shouldn’t think I mean your father harm,” I said at last.

  “Oh, of course,” she snapped back, with blunt sarcasm. “You are only the one who will take him to Prague and deliver him to the torture chamber, and then discreetly withdraw.” She looked aside angrily. “He is my stepfather, anyway, not my father. My own father died when I was little; I don’t remember him at all.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, “I had forgotten. Forgive me.”

  She turned back and gazed at me stonily for some moments.

  “Don’t imagine I have a great affection for the man up in that tower,” she said. “He’s a schemer and a cheat. Because of him I am washed up here, in this back end of the world. In his great days, after Dr. Dee had returned to England and Rudolf made him his court alchemist, he possessed vast properties here—land, estates, villages entire. He had a brewery, a mill, nine houses—nine!—in Jílové, where the gold mines are, and two great mansions on Charles Square. I was a girl then and took all this as our due. Then the Catholics raised a conspiracy against him, and Rudolf, frightened of the Pope, banished him, and me along with him. And yet”—she raised a hand wearily to her brow—“I would not see him suffer.” She paused. “What does the Chamberlain want of him?”

  I debated with myself if I should tell her how Sir Henry Wotton’s clumsy intervention had raised Lang’s suspicions. The Catholics, I mused, were not the only ones given to conspiracy. Elizabeth of England had her interests here in Bohemia, and Wotton was only one among many who acted as her eyes and ears at Rudolf’s court. The Queen was right to be wary: Rudolf was a religious waverer, and besides, he was a Hapsburg and a nephew of Elizabeth’s arch-enemy, Philip of Spain. And what was this other Elizabeth, sitting here opposite me now? And what, for that matter, was I? Chaff, both of us, before the wind of the world’s great affairs.

  “I am only the Chamberlain’s agent,” I said. “I am not privy to his thoughts or aims.”

  At this she made a kind of sneer.

  “Come, sir,” she said. “You may be here about Lang’s business, but my stepfather tells me you are the Emperor’s favored aide and confidant.”

  “Madam,” I said, pushing away the bowl of gruel, “there are matters afoot at court too densely tangled even for me to penetrate them, no matter how much in favor you imagine me to be.”

  And how favored was I, anyway? I had no position, no office, no title; I had requested the Emperor to appoint me to the Privy Council, but he had hemmed and havered and in the end did nothing. I knew well how tenuously I stood. I was a tall tree clinging to a rock, with only thin and sickly roots to hold me upright.

  “You must know what Lang wants of my stepfather,” Elizabeth Weston said. “I can’t believe you don’t.”

  “A valuable thing was taken,” I said. “A young man and his betrothed were murdered. Dark deeds.”

  Yes yes, I thought suddenly, the strongbox: was that, and the theft of it, the true cause of Madek’s death? The thing had been mentioned so often I had come to disregard it. But perhaps it was of the utmost significance?

  “And what has my stepfather to do with these ‘dark deeds’?” the young woman asked.

  “Jan Madek, the man who died, was here,” I said. “He must have come for some purpose.”

  She was silent, watching me. A draught from somewhere made the candles on the table dip their flames, and shadows pranced momentarily on the wall beside us.

  “What is this thing that was taken?” she asked.

  “A strongbox, containing documents, of what exact nature I can’t say.”

  “You can’t say or you won’t say—or you don’t know?”

  I made no reply. She looked to the side again, nodding, thinking.

  “Kroll when he was here asked about the same thing,” she said. “He and his men threatened my stepfather and made him suffer—I heard his cries, up in the tower. He is a sick man; he should not be treated so.”

  “It’s thought,” I said, “that Madek took the box and hid it somewhere.”

  She was still gazing away, and I was not sure if she had been listening to me or was lost entirely in her own thoughts.

  “Your stepfather denies that the young man was here,” I said, “but I know he is lying.”

  She gave a low laugh, and then a bitter sigh.

  “You should never ask him a question direct—he will always reply with a falsehood. It’s his way.”

  “So I am told.”

  Again the breeze bent the candle flames, again the shadows pranced. Elizabeth Weston rose and went to a tall wooden cupboard in a far corner and came back with an earthenware flask and two small crystal cups. She poured out a drink for both of us and handed a cup to me.

  “Plum brandy,” she said. “I make it myself—like everything else we have, since His Gracious Majesty will allow us nothing, not even a stipend to live on.”

  The drink was a sweet and somewhat cloying stuff, but it had a warming effect that I was glad of. The wind outside was steadily rising, and somewhere off in the depths of the castle a door that someone had left open banged and banged.

  The young lady before me, her anger abating a little, sipped her drink and said nothing for a while. Then she laid a cheek on her fist and regarded me with a speculative eye.

  “Where do you come from?” she asked. “I mean, where is your birthplace?”

  “Regensburg,” I said. “And you?”

  “England, in the county of Oxford.”

  “Your German is admirable.”

  “I also speak Czech, Italian, and Latin.”

  “Of course, I have read your Latin verse,” I said.

  She smiled wryly. “I see you are a liar, too, like my stepfather.”

  No doubt I colored. She was right: I had not read her poetry, and had only meant to flatter her. I knew her reputation, although it was slight at the time. Afterwards, with Kelley dead, when she was allowed to settle again in Prague, she made a famous name for herself, penning ponderously ornate odes to Rudolf, to Prague, and Bohemia, to herself and her circle of admirers. She was a remarkable woman—that is, she became one, by becoming famous. I cannot speak for the quality of her verse, except to say it was not to my taste.

  She took up the flask and refilled my glass and her own.

  “Do you think my stepfather mad?” she asked.

  “Mad?” I said. “He does not seem so to me. He was John Dee’s first man, and a master of the scryer’s art, so it’s said.”

  “Oh, all that stuff and nonsense!” She gave me a mocking look. “Only men could take it seriously. Do you believe in it?”

  I had to smile, despite myself.

  “Dear me, madam,” I said, “you do ask a hard question.” I paused for a moment. That door was still banging in the wind. “I think,” I said, “that the world is a great cipher set for us to solve. I have no doubt there are certain men born with the gift of seeing deep into the essence of things, who have a secret knowledge of the true nature of matter and its potentials.”

  She was looking distractedly into her glass. A gust of wind struck the walls and windows with a great soft crash.

  “He claims to talk with angels, as did Dr. Dee,” she said. “I came upon him once squatting on the ground and keening like a wolf. He stands sometimes atop the tower, too, at night, with arms outstretched, shouting blasphemy at the heavens and summoning up spirits. At times like those, I’m not sure whether to laugh or to be frightened of him. I sometimes think perhaps he is sick in his mind—”

  “Often people with occult powers do seem so, to the rest of us.”

  “—but then I see how cunning and calculating he is, and I think otherwise.” She tilted her glass and rolled the base of it like a hoop this way and that upon the tabletop. “Do you dabble in these things—alchemy, the transmutation of metals, all that?”

  “I studied it for many years,” I said, “and credited much of it. But I was young then, an
d believed all sorts of things.”

  She smiled at me almost warmly.

  “You are hardly old now,” she said.

  “I put my faith in natural philosophy, of course,” I went on, “to that science of things that can be proved and disproved in the visible world. But for the rest, I have grave doubts.”

  “You don’t believe in magic, then?”

  I shrugged.

  “There are phenomena that cannot be accounted for by reason alone,” I said, “that much I’ll grant. But many of the wonders your stepfather and Dr. Dee claimed to be capable of I believe to be no better than—well, than humbug.”

  I could see that this time she had indeed stopped listening. She was looking about the room and frowning.

  “It’s hard for me to live here,” she said. “I’m lonely and afraid. The guards—” She stopped; I waited.

  She shook her head. “I see how they look at me, I hear the things they say. This is an uncouth place, wild and forsaken. I wasn’t meant for here, and cannot be at peace.”

  Now came a sudden lashing of rain outside. The wind took on a new intensity, and two of the four candles on the table were abruptly extinguished.

  “Have you no one else in the world?” I asked.

  She was busy relighting the candles.

  “Oh, yes, there is my mother, and my brother, John, but they are in Prague—they live there in secret, unknown to the Emperor, while I am left in banishment.”

  She poured us another drink. The storm howled about the castle, a huge fury of air and rain and hail. I thought of the man in the tower, at his desk, muttering incantations to himself and to the night.

  A great flash of lightning lit the whole hall for an instant; then came the peal of thunder. Elizabeth Weston, I saw, had turned white, and her lip trembled.

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid of the world.” She looked at me anxiously. “Do you think he conjured it?”

  “The storm?”

  “Yes. To show you his power.”

  I leaned back in my chair and gazed at her.

  “You said he was a fraud. And even if he weren’t, no mortal has the power to command the elements, whatever Dr. Dee and his like may say.” I reached across the table and touched her hand. “Do not be afraid.”