Wolf on a String Page 4

  “So, Herr Doktor Stern,” he said, “you have come amongst us at last!”

  4

  Once again I was put in mind of the clammy intimacy of the confessional. There was the man’s priestly garb, there was the prie-dieu with its suggestion of penitential kneeling, there were the books on the table that might be the sacred tablets of ritual forgiveness and absolution. And there was the man himself, with his unctuous and softly suggestive, priestly manner.

  He had brought forward one of the chairs and set it by the fire, inviting me, with a wide and almost comical swoop of his arm, to be seated, and then had fetched the other chair and sat down himself. Now we were facing each other, and so close together that our knees were almost touching.

  “My name, by the way,” he said, as if it were a matter of the least significance or interest, “is Philipp Lang.”

  He wore a flat black felt hat with four corners to it, somewhat like a cardinal’s biretta; a ring on the middle finger of his left hand was set with a ruby the size of a thrush’s egg. His hair under the hat was cut short in tight, gleaming black curls, like shavings of coal. He was still smiling.

  Philipp Lang, or Lang von Langenfels, as he was pleased to style himself, was the Emperor Rudolf’s chief man, all by his own making. He was also a liar, an extortionist, and a shameless embezzler, yet he was untouchable, and remained so for a very long time, before eventually he fell. He had been brought up a Jew in the Prague ghetto, but had lost no time in renouncing his faith and converting to the Church of Rome. After early adventures that would have put any other man in chains, if not a noose, he had wriggled his way into the imperial court, where he found immediate favor with the Emperor. His Majesty took him on first as his valet, and then brought him into his bed, for Rudolf, as all the world knows, had a taste for young men, especially when he was young himself. Soon it was that wherever the Emperor went, there too, at his shoulder, Lang would be—the royal familiar, tall, slender, smiling, and robed habitually in black.

  Lang’s enemies, who were legion, charged that the former Jew was a sorcerer who held his imperial master in thrall with spells and potions supplied to him by demons. But whether by means of magic, buggery, or both combined, the young man rose with smooth swiftness through the ranks of the royal household to attain at last the lofty and, as he made sure it should be, supreme position of Court Chamberlain, in power and influence far above even the likes of Felix Wenzel.

  Half the court, the half he hadn’t yet succeeded in winning over by bribes, threats, or seduction, strove tirelessly to topple him. Countless conspiracies were mounted against him. Spies were set to spy on him, assassins were sent to assassinate him. Everything failed. The Chamberlain swept serenely through his days as if enclosed within a suit of impenetrable, crystal armor, beyond the touch of all save those whom he deemed useful to him and his purposes.

  His greed was boundless. From all who sought his patronage, and they included some of the closest among Rudolf’s innermost circle, the Chamberlain extorted payment in large sums of gold, fine houses, parcels of land. He oversaw the collection of tithes and rents, and made of it another route to enrichment. By the time of his greatest days he had amassed a fabulous fortune in gold, along with vast properties and numerous profitable benefices throughout the empire.

  And yet, for all his crimes and corruptions, he was possessed of a subtle and well nigh irresistible charm. Only the most implacable among his foes were immune to his humorous and self-mocking way. Yes, look at me, he would seem to say, look at me perched up here in this lofty place, isn’t it absurd? Who would have thought a ghetto Jew could scale such heights?

  As I was to find, I was no less susceptible than anyone else to his honeyed words and ways. When he sat down by the fire and laced his fingers before him and leaned forward, with that smile of his, it seemed to me that, far from menacing me with his panther’s claws, the Chamberlain was brushing up against me, sleekly, sinuously, with soft, persuasive purrings.

  Straight off, and with an expression of deep concern, he inquired as to my well-being. He was aware of the events of the night, he said, and gave a little grimace of regretful distaste. Had I been beaten by the soldiers, had my jailers mistreated me? No? Ah, good, good. And what of my journey from Regensburg: had that been difficult, in such harsh weather? I had braved the cold, I had surmounted all hurdles? He was glad, so glad to hear it.

  “And what a shock it must have been, to find that poor young woman who had been so cruelly destroyed!”

  From the start I had found myself responding to him with a fluency and ease that even I was surprised by.

  Presently, and to my greater surprise, I moved on from immediate matters to speak of the general circumstances of my life. I heard myself telling him of my father the Prince-Bishop and my mother and her early death, of my foster parents and their harsh and loveless ways. I spoke of the Gymnasium in Regensburg and of my studies there, and dwelt, at some length, on my happy years at Würzburg. I boasted of my love of learning and of my fascination with the alchemical arts, into the arcana of which, as I did not hesitate to assert, I had delved deeply, uncovering much that was valuable and an enhancement to my intellect.

  By now the light in the room seemed brighter than it had been, the listless fire warmer, while the image of the fat sentry dangling like a sack of pork from the gibbet in that cold, blind yard had faded entirely from my thoughts.

  At my mention of alchemy Lang’s gleaming eye gleamed more darkly still, and while I expatiated on the subject he held me fixed with a keen, unblinking gaze, nodding rapidly and humming under his breath in what seemed a sympathetic accord, as if he too were a tireless plunger into the luminous abyss of beneficent magic.

  He was leaning towards me more intently than ever now, his dark, slender fingers still clasped before himself, as he hummed and nodded, nodded and hummed. The very air in the room seemed to quiver with the force of his interest and approval.

  After a while, a silence fell, and I glanced aside, somewhat uneasily, into the palely smoking fire. Why had I allowed myself to gabble on at such length? Why had I revealed so much of myself? If this was the confessional, I had none of the shriven penitent’s sense of relief and happy cleansedness.

  I thought of the queer thing Lang had said when he had first turned to me with that actorly pretense of startlement. What had he meant, addressing me as Herr Doktor and welcoming me as having come amongst us at last?

  As if he had read my thoughts, the Chamberlain said now:

  “Yes, we had been expecting you, although we did not know”—here there was the flash of another winning smile—“quite what you would be.”

  He stood up from his chair in a sort of twisting leap and began to pace rapidly the narrow confines of the room, with short busy birdlike steps, rubbing his hands together. In time I would become accustomed to the man’s abrupt, quick manner of movement.

  “I should tell you,” he said, “that His Majesty had a dream in which a spirit announced to him that a star would come from the west, a star sent by Christ our Savior himself. It would be a great good omen to the throne and, amongst many other fortunate tidings, a token of victory over the Turk.”

  He spoke, it seemed to me, in a strange, declamatory fashion, overloudly and with what seemed unnatural point and force. Sitting there while he paced and discoursed, I had the feeling of being the sole spectator, an audience of one, at a not particularly subtle piece of playacting.

  Now he stopped by my chair and smiled down at me, his wide mouth stretching into a scarlet crescent, and said:

  “From your name—Christian Stern—it seems that you must be that God-sent star, for how else should we interpret such a happy confluence, hmm?”

  I gazed up at him in wonderment and alarm, at a loss as to how I should respond to such an extravagant, indeed such an absurd, notion.

  Christian Stern: the star sent by Christ! Now I understood why Wenzel the High Steward had treated me with such suspicion and distrust
, accusing me of lying about my name and where I had come from, as if I were claiming to be the new Messiah.

  Lang remained on his feet for a moment, smiling down at me. He was amused, it was clear, by my wondering and bewildered look. Then, to my further astonishment, he winked—yes, winked, almost gaily—before briskly resuming his seat.

  At that moment I seemed to feel the tapestry behind me stir and sway, as if it had been disturbed by a momentary breeze, a breeze of which I thought I heard the passing. Or perhaps it was not a breeze but a breath, a sort of falling sigh.

  “Wenzel,” the Chamberlain said, leaning forward again, his smile giving way to a frown, “Wenzel the High Steward should not have imprisoned you.” He had lowered his voice to a whisper, arching his eyebrows into two devilish points and nodding portentously. “His Majesty”—this he didn’t speak at all but mouthed mutely, stretching his vivid lips around the shapes of the words—“is displeased.”

  My mind by now was in turmoil. What a little while ago, in that prison cell, in the depths of darkness, had seemed a waking nightmare of menace, pain, and likely death, now in daylight had all at once become transformed into an enchanted fantasy, a fairy tale, it might be, in which I was the lowly lad to whom the Emperor’s emissary magically comes, amid the sound of bugles, bearing tidings of royal favor and the promise of limitless good fortune. What could it mean?

  I was being tricked, I was sure of it. Lang and Wenzel had joined in a conspiracy against me, whereby Wenzel would bluster and threaten while Lang would charm and cajole. But to what end? What did they suspect me of, to what enormity did they imagine I might be persuaded to confess?

  Lang rose again and went to the table and took up from it the pile of books, of which there were at least half a dozen. He came back with them and sat down in front of me as before. Setting the books on his lap, he laid his hands on them and fixed on me a long and, as it seemed to me, a speculative look, although what it was he might be speculating on I could not guess. I had again that sense of being a spectator at a performance, of watching a playlet put on specially for me, the plot of which, however, I could make no sense of.

  The Chamberlain now began to pass the books to me one by one. Among them were The Archidoxes of Magic, by Philip von Hohenheim—better known as the sublime Dr. Paracelsus—and a rare manuscript copy of Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia. There was the Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier; one of Galen’s countless treatises on medicine; and last but most certainly not least, the Englishman John Dee’s renowned Monas Hieroglyphica, in that fine first edition printed at Antwerp by Willem Silvius, a copy of which in the Gottfried library at the university in Würzburg I had for so long and sorely coveted.

  As he handed over each volume, Lang put to me a set of questions concerning its contents and its author, aimed, obviously, at discovering if I was truly as well-read in alchemy and natural philosophy as I claimed to be. Fortunately I was familiar with all these works, save the Galen, but that was no more than a physician’s handbook, commonplace and of little significance. I suspected that he had included it here only as a decoy, hoping to lure me into overreaching myself by giving it an undue weight.

  The Chamberlain himself was no expert on these volumes or their authors, as was clear from the mechanical manner in which he had rattled off his list of rote-learned questions, and also the relief that was evident in his smile when the examination was concluded.

  He took back the books and set them on the floor beside his chair, complimenting me on the breadth of my reading and my profound knowledge of a multitude of arcane matters. His left eyelid fluttered. Surely, I thought, I must be mistaken; surely the man had not winked at me again?

  “Such a show of learning is remarkable,” he said, loudly and again with a forced and heavy emphasis, “even in a scholar from—Würzburg, did you say?”

  If this last was meant as a sally, I mean his pretense at having grandly forgotten the city’s humble name, then it fell flat, and he frowned and sighed. His fingers were linked together again in front of him, so tightly that the knuckles had turned white; his smile, too, showed distinct signs of strain along its edges.

  Now he unclasped his hands and shot up a finger, making a show of suddenly having remembered something. He reached inside his black robe and brought out a large, circular gold object strung on a gold chain.

  “You recognize this?” he asked.

  Certainly I recognized it, and with a shock. It was the medallion I had seen the night before, attached to that same chain around the neck of Dr. Kroll’s murdered daughter.

  “There is,” Lang said, “a mechanism: see?” With his thumb he pressed a hidden spring and the Medusa’s head, or the face of Phoebus Apollo, whichever it was meant to be, sprang open on a hinge, revealing a compartment filled to the brim with a paste of some kind, very fine and smooth and of a pinkish-brown tint.

  Was this, I asked myself, yet another test, another insidious attempt to trip me up and make me reveal—what?

  And how had he got hold of the medallion?

  I was tired; my brain ached. What did this man, what did all these people, want from me? I felt as if I had been caught up in the workings of some terrible machine from which I would never be released.

  Lang, gazing down at the medallion, was rocking himself back and forth in his chair, nodding again and making that humming sound, or more a sort of buzzing, at the back of his throat.

  “This is a curious stuff,” he said, touching a fingertip lightly to the surface of the paste and leaving there a tiny, moistly gleaming hollow. “It has been analyzed in His Majesty’s laboratories. The entire night was given over to the task.”

  He glanced up at me from under his brows, smiling his jester’s thin-lipped, crimson smile.

  “You know His Majesty keeps many scores of adepts here,” he said. “They are constantly at work—alchemists, astrologers, doctors of medicine, natural philosophers such as yourself. He has a great faith in the chymical arts.”

  He compressed his smiling lips yet more tightly and widened his eyes in what seemed a sort of mischievous merriment.

  “It is a sorcerer’s balsam,” he pronounced, pointing to the paste, “compounded, if I recall the formula rightly, of red and white arsenic, dittany root, dried frog, a pinch of pearl and a flake of coral, a few grains of amber, all pounded together and mixed with gum tragacanth and dissolved in some rare oil. Oh, and there is also a dash of woman’s menstruum”—once more he let his voice sink to the featheriest whisper—“perhaps that of young Mistress Kroll herself.”

  He offered up the medallion on the palm of his hand. I leaned down and sniffed the paste; it had a flat, stale, yet slightly sweetish odor, rather like the smell of dead-flower water.

  In other circumstances I would have laughed. I knew very well that what Lang had said was nonsense, that no matter how diligent or subtle the Emperor’s chemists might be, they could not have dismantled into its constituent parts so intricate a mixture as Lang had claimed this one to be. It was, I guessed, nothing more than a simple paste made up of some element, alum or the like, finely ground, with an admixture of attar of roses, that old standby, and with a few common spices thrown in—in other words, the kind of harmless potion, that a girl anxious to win over her lover could get for half a groat from a village apothecary.

  I sat back on the chair, frowning at my hands. What was I to say—that the Emperor’s chemists had gulled him with their talk of pearl and coral, of dittany and dried frog and all the rest?

  “Likely it’s a prophylactic of some kind,” Lang said, “a nostrum against the plague, or the pox, or”—this again he mouthed almost silently—“an unlooked-for conception.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly, “it’s possible, yes. Yet I wonder—I wonder if the Emperor’s chemists have not—well, if they have not exaggerated, somewhat?”

  Lang’s eyes widened and he put a finger quickly to his lips.

  “Ssh!” he said softly, and then assumed again his
former loud, assertive tone. “Oh, I think not,” he almost shouted. “I’m sure their analysis is correct.”

  “Yet I must say I doubt it,” I persisted. “It seems to me it is no more than—”

  “Ahem!” the Chamberlain exclaimed, giving me a hard, admonishing stare. He clicked the medallion shut and stowed it away inside his habit. “Let us say no more of it.”

  Picking up the stack of books from the floor, he rose and crossed the room and set them back on the table. Then he stopped, and stood quite still, with his eyes cast upwards and moving his lips silently.

  Again at my back there was that breath of something, that faint, lapsing sigh, and again the tapestry seemed to sway.

  Lang turned quickly then, his black robe swishing. Fixing on me with his dark stare he declaimed:

  “You are requested to do the Emperor the honor of abandoning your plan to travel on to Dresden—it was Dresden you said you were bound for, yes?—and instead to remain here in Prague, at His Majesty’s pleasure. You shall have accommodation, of course, and an allowance from the privy purse—the details we shall look to later. So: what do you say? I emphasize”—his tone grew heavier and more hortatory still—“that it is His Majesty’s express wish to have you remain and bide here amongst us, Herr Doktor Christian Stern.”

  A moment passed. Lang, posing by the table, with his head lifted and his nostrils flared, was staring at me expectantly. Tongue-tied and floundering, I looked back at him, and said nothing. What could I say? My mind was a-swirl.

  In the fireplace a smoldering log emitted a thin derisory piping note.

  Lang abruptly abandoned his histrionic pose and came and loomed over me. In exasperated dumbshow he urged me, as it seemed, to say something, rolling his eyes and making scooping gestures with his hands, as if to draw the words up out of me. But what words?

  I tried to rise from my chair but he prevented me, pressing two fingers on my shoulder.

  “Speak!” he commanded.