Wolf on a String Read online

  I thought she would shrink from my touch, but she did not. Her hand was warm.

  Another flash, another crash.

  “Please, don’t be afraid,” I said again, more softly.

  She looked at me; she looked at my hand.

  “Will you take me to Prague?” she asked, curling her fingers around mine so tightly it seemed she meant to break them. “Take me there,” she said fiercely, watching me. “Take me with you.”

  20

  Her bedchamber was another vast, cold stone hall furnished with large, dark items of furniture of uncertain purpose. In contrast to these outsized, over-ornamented chests and commodes and mighty cupboards was her cedarwood box bed, as tall and broad and deep and plain as a wardrobe, sequestered in a far corner, as if it had fled there in fright of so much useless immensity all round. Into this bed, which was enclosed behind a pair of wide doors, we had climbed, the two of us shivering from the cold and she apologizing for the unlit stove. She shut the doors behind us, enveloping us in darkness. The feather-bed mattress was high and soft.

  Outside, beyond the room’s rough walls, the storm raged on like a maddened giant, beating its fists against the house and hurling shafts of lightning in at the windows.

  “Hold me,” the young woman whispered, trembling in my arms. “Oh, hold me!”

  After that first urgently whispered plea to be held and sheltered, she said not a word, but went at our love-making with wordless vehemence, panting through gritted teeth, writhing under me and pummeling me with her fists. She struggled violently, as if she were being ravished—not by me, however, but by herself. It angered her, I could feel it, that she had given in to her own fear and need and desire.

  I was a little frightened of her, and, obscurely, of myself, too.

  When we had spent ourselves and the bout was over, we lay in the darkness side by side, I fitting myself as best I could to the confined space. The bed was short, for it was meant to be slept in half sitting up, and I kept banging my feet against the end wall of the box and my elbows against the doors.

  Guilt had settled itself square upon me, like Prometheus’s eagle. It would do no good to tell myself that she had given me the bounty of her body calculatedly, like a parcel of precious goods, having first placed the invoice in my hand with her own warm fingers. Now I would have no choice but to take her back with me to Prague. That was the price of my pleasure, and it would serve me right if I suffered for it. I pictured Caterina Sardo fixing her eye upon the young woman and knowing at once exactly what had gone on here tonight, in this shut-in cramped little bed, as the storm raged and that loose door in the distance swung to and fro on its hinges.

  We fell asleep, the two of us, she with her back to me and I with my arms around her. I don’t know for how long we slept, but when we woke, we woke together, with a violent start.

  “Was that a cry?” she whispered, reaching out for me blindly in the dark and taking hold of my wrist.

  “A cry?” I said. I had heard nothing—or had I? “What kind of cry?”

  “Outside somewhere, out in the night.”

  “It was likely Sir Kaspar and the boy, returning drunk from town.”

  “No, it wasn’t a drunkard’s cry.”

  She scrabbled about on the bed for her clothes.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “You can’t go out in such a tempest.”

  The thunder had moved some way off, but the wind was still strong and the rain as heavy as ever. I put my arms around her again and made her lie down. I could feel the rapid beating of her heart. She began to weep, angrily at first, then sinking into sorrow.

  “Why did you have to come here?” she said, sobbing. “Was it not enough that we should be banished and abandoned here? Have we not suffered enough? Now you’ll take him to Prague and they’ll send him to the dungeons and torment him.”

  She sat up quickly. “Listen to me,” she said. I could barely make out her form above me in the dark. “What if I were to tell you what the Chamberlain and the others want to know? Would you go back then, back to Prague, and leave my stepfather in peace?”

  “How do you know what they want to know?” I asked.

  I could hear her putting on her shift. She had dried her tears; suddenly she was all urgency and determination. It was as if she had forgotten our passionate struggle earlier, or as if it had not taken place at all.

  She had seen what to do; she had seen a way out.

  She clambered over me, bathing me in her woman’s rich aromas, and opened the doors and stepped out onto the stone floor. I too began to pull on my things, and made to follow her.

  “No no, stay,” she said. “It’s too cold out here; I am only fetching the lamp.”

  I sat down again on the untidy bed with my legs crossed and my back against the wooden wall behind me. She brought the lamp and set it on a little table in front of the open doors, and climbed again into the tall deep box and settled herself beside me.

  “What have you to tell me?” I asked.

  She took my hand.

  “I think you are a good man, Christian Stern,” she said. “Am I right to think so?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I had not yet addressed her by her name, not once. “I don’t think any man is good or bad entirely. We are all mixed, and act according to the circumstances we find ourselves in.”

  But again her attention had lapsed, and she was not listening.

  “I want to trust you,” she said, and pressed my hand. “I have to trust someone.” She was silent for a time; I could feel her thinking, thinking. In the distance, the thunder rumbled on.

  “The High Steward, Felix Wenzel,” she said finally, “he used to send letters here.”

  For a moment I was at a loss. Of the things I could have expected her to say, this was not one.

  “Letters?” I said. “You mean, to your stepfather?”

  “Yes, but not directed to him.”

  “To whom, then?”

  “To—to someone else. Wenzel used my stepfather as a channel, a channel between himself and…”

  “And?” I urged.

  She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes tight shut.

  “The Queen,” she whispered, in so low a voice I barely caught the word.

  “The queen?” I said. “What queen?”

  “Our Queen—Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth? Elizabeth of England?”

  For a second my chest felt like an empty hollow. I seemed to have no breath at all, as if the force of the sulfurous stormy air had sucked it out of me on the spot.

  The young woman shivered.

  “Dear Lord Christ,” she murmured. “What have I said?”

  That far-off door was banging more frequently now, and with quickening force, like something becoming more and more enraged.

  I could not think what to think. Was she lying? But if so, to what purpose? Was it a trick she was playing on me, perhaps, to save her stepfather, to save herself? But what trick might it be, and how would it work?

  “What did they write about,” I asked, “Wenzel and the Queen?”

  “I don’t know what they wrote about,” she said impatiently. “Secrets, I suppose, plans and strategies. Plots—the kind of things such people deal in.”

  “But how do you know about the letters? Did you see them? Did your stepfather show them to you?”

  She tried to pull away from me.

  “Stop it!” she cried. “You’re hurting me!”

  I let go of her hand; I had not realized I had been gripping it so fiercely.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you have to tell me, I have to know.”

  “I saw one letter. He had been careless and left it on his table. It was from Wenzel, I think.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I couldn’t make it out. It was written in code.”

  “What kind of code?”

  “One he devised.”

  “Your stepfather?”

  “Yes. I made him expla
in it to me. He had drawn up two codes, one for Elizabeth’s use, the other for Wenzel’s. He alone had the keys to both. The letters would come by secret couriers, from Prague, from London. He would translate them, from one code into the other, and send them on, Wenzel’s to the Queen, the Queen’s to Wenzel. That was what they used him for. He was their—their go-between.”

  “Why did he do it? What return did he get?”

  “Wenzel had promised that when he came to power he would allow my stepfather to return to Prague, that he would set him up again in one of those grand mansions he used to own on Charles Square—that he would be a great man again.”

  “When he came to power?” I said. “Wenzel?”

  “Yes. When he had brought down Lang, and the Emperor along with him, and put his brother on the throne instead.”

  “The Emperor’s brother? Matthias?”

  “Yes, yes, I suppose so. I don’t know.” She had begun to cry again, distractedly, almost absentmindedly; her tears glittered in the lamplight. “Oh, God, oh, God,” she mumbled, pressing her fingers to her mouth. Then she grew calm, and dropped her hands, and sat back, as if all her energy had suddenly deserted her. “What have I done?” she asked herself, so simply and calmly it was as if she truly expected an answer. “I should never have spoken.”

  I leaned back against the wooden wall of the bed behind me and closed my eyes. I too felt weary. It was as if I had been bearing a great weight for a long time without realizing it, and only now had I registered it, a thing heavy enough to break my back that yet I had not known was there.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, and could not keep my voice from shaking. “The box, the strongbox that Madek stole from Kroll—”

  “He brought it here,” Elizabeth Weston said.

  She too was leaning against the wall behind us; she too sounded as if all her strength were lost to her.

  “What was in it, this box?” I asked.

  “Magic papers, documents, spells, suchlike—things that Kroll had collected over many years, and that the Emperor was jealous of and desired for himself.”

  So what Jeppe Schenckel had said was true: there had been precious papers, and Madek had stolen them.

  “He offered them to my stepfather,” she went on, “that he in turn might offer them to Rudolf, and thereby secure an end to his exile and be allowed to return to Prague.” She sighed. “Poor Madek—he was determined to be revenged on Wenzel, and on Kroll. He wanted his Magdalena back, and for her father and the High Steward to suffer for allowing her to be taken from him. He was half mad with jealousy and rage.”

  “So he gave your stepfather the strongbox,” I said.

  “Yes.” Her voice was very small now.

  “And what did he ask for, in return?”

  I knew the answer to that question, of course; how would I not?

  “The letters,” she said. “My stepfather was supposed to have destroyed the originals, after turning them into code, but instead he had kept them, in secret.”

  “And did he give them to Madek?”

  She gazed before her into the light of the little lamp on the table outside, nodding.

  “Yes. He knew Wenzel had deceived him, that all his promises were false. He knew he would not be brought back to Prague in triumph. He had been waiting too long, and had despaired. Now he wanted his revenge, wanted to see Wenzel destroyed, and Kroll along with him. So he removed the papers, Kroll’s papers, from the strongbox, and put into it instead the Queen’s and Wenzel’s letters, and locked it, and gave it to Madek. ‘Take them to Prague,’ he said. ‘Destroy Wenzel, as you want to do. Bring the pillars of the temple down.’”

  Again we were silent.

  “And the papers that had been in the strongbox, Kroll’s papers, that the Emperor wanted—what did your stepfather do with them?”

  She gave a little low laugh.

  “He put them in the fireplace and burned them,” she said. She paused, and then went on: “They had betrayed him, you see, all of them—Wenzel, Ulrich Kroll, the Emperor himself. And now, through this vengeful young man, he would have his revenge on them.”

  I put my head back and rolled it slowly to and fro against the bed’s wooden wall. Yes, yes, yes, I saw it all. Kelley had come to understand that he had been tricked, that Wenzel had no intention of restoring him to his former position of power and influence; nor would the Emperor release him from exile here at Most. The days of grandeur were gone forever: it was the end, the sorcerer robbed of his powers. There was nothing left to him except vengeance.

  “I do not know what happened when Madek went to Prague,” Elizabeth Weston said, in a calm, slow voice that seemed to come from far off. “I suppose he told Wenzel he had the letters, and threatened him with them, and Wenzel seized him.”

  “They tortured him,” I said. “They put out his eyes. Then they strangled him with a cord and threw his corpse into the Stag Moat.” I paused, struggling to gather my thoughts, to make some order of them. “But what became of the strongbox?” I asked, of myself rather than of her. “He would have told them where it was; he could not have held out and stayed silent under the torments they inflicted on him.”

  She shook her head.

  “He didn’t give it to them. Whatever he did with it, he didn’t surrender it. That was why Kroll came, with his men, looking for it here. They tortured my stepfather, too. In the end they would have put him to death, as they put Jan Madek to death, except I suppose they feared the Emperor might one day change his mind and ask again for his old wizard and want him back.”

  “And did your stepfather tell Kroll he had given the letters to Madek?” I asked.

  Again she shook her head.

  “I don’t know. All I know is that Kroll left in a fury, threatening to return. Yes, he was very angry, but he was afraid, too, I could see it, afraid of Wenzel, afraid of the Emperor, afraid of all these plans and plots he had allowed himself to become entangled in. And then his daughter died.”

  “Yes” I said, “she was murdered, cruelly murdered. Do you know by whom?”

  “What?” She gazed at me vague-eyed.

  “Do you know who it was that killed her, the Doctor’s daughter?”

  She shook her head almost impatiently.

  “No,” she said shortly, “no, of course not. Do you?”

  We live upon the conviction that we are safe, that the ice will not shatter beneath us, that the lightning will not strike the tree under which we shelter from the storm, that the door will not burst open and the soldiers come tramping up the stairs to seize us in our bed. Yet deep down we know it is all a delusion, although one that we must cling to, if fear is not to overwhelm and consume us, like the deadly crab that grows inside a man and eats his innards. And indeed that night, sitting there on that cramped bed, side by side with that frightened woman, I seemed to feel inside me a saw-edged claw stealthily opening.

  Elizabeth Weston turned to me.

  “But why have you come?” she asked. “Why did Lang send you—why now?”

  I hesitated.

  “Sir Henry Wotton,” I said, “do you know of him, who he is?”

  “I know he is the Queen’s man, her representative, her ambassador. He used to come to our house, long ago, in the great days.”

  “He asked for leave to travel to Most,” I said. “It raised the Chamberlain’s suspicions.”

  I might have added that it was I who had gone to the Chamberlain with word of Sir Henry’s request, but I kept silent; I kept silent.

  The wind keened in the chimney; the lamplight wavered. The thunder had ceased at last.

  “So that’s all there was,” Elizabeth Weston said, in a tone of weary wonderment. “Wotton’s asking, and the Chamberlain’s suspicions? That’s all there was, to cause all this?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I said it and, saying it, felt something turn in my gut, the creature’s jagged claw again. I was not innocent here; I was complicit. I was the Chamberlain’s man, ju
st as Jeppe Schenckel was the Emperor’s, as Kroll was Wenzel’s. Is there anyone who is not owned by someone?

  “And yet Lang will not let him off,” Elizabeth Weston said, “now that Wotton has put a doubt into his head.”

  In the toils of our love-making earlier the pins had come out of her hair, and gleaming strands of it hung down now about her shoulders. The bodice she had pulled on was unlaced, and I could see in the opening the smooth slope of a breast. Yet our moment of love-making seemed far off now, a stylized scene, like the mythical subject of a painting which the painter has placed at a far distance, somewhere down in the lower corner of a vast landscape of tree and stream and dream-blue mountains.

  “What will they do to him, in Prague?” the young woman asked.

  We were both gazing dully before us, as we sat there in the lamplight, side by side.

  “As I have said, he will be questioned.”

  “Questioned? That is a pretty way of putting it. They’ll torture him, won’t they? It’s what they always do—they call in the one in the black hood, with his pincers and his burning irons.”

  I was silent. She nodded slowly, gazing before her. For a long time she did not speak, and then she said:

  “It was a cry I heard. It was.”

  21

  She was right; she had heard a cry. In the morning, Kelley was discovered at the foot of the black tower, from the top of which he had fallen or more likely cast himself to his death on the stone flags below. It was his stepdaughter who found him. When I arrived she was kneeling in the mud, cradling his broken, bloodied head in her lap. She looked up at me without expression, except that her mouth was twisted strangely at each corner, as if in a mad sort of smile. I could think of nothing to say to her.

  Jeppe the dwarf appeared, stepping carefully in his fancy shoes through the mire the storm had churned up.

  “What’s this?” he said. “The sorcerer soars too close to the sun and melts his wings?”

  “Go find our coachman,” I said to him. “Tell him we leave in an hour.”

  I went myself in search of Sir Kaspar and the page boy. They had returned at midnight, drunk and drenched by the storm, and finding no one to show them the way to a bed, they had slept in a barn outside the castle wall. When I came upon them they were sprawled in the straw like a pair of corpses. I kicked them on the soles of their boots to wake them. The boy mewled piteously and would not open his eyes until I got him by the scruff and jerked him to his feet, and even then he hung from my grip like a stringless puppet. In his wet garb he smelled like a sheep, and the front of his jerkin was caked with dried puke. Also he had a black eye and a split lip.