Wolf on a String Page 6

  The dwarf glanced about the room again, smiling in that crooked way of his and nodding a little, like one revisiting scenes familiar to him from of old.

  “I trust, sir,” he said, “that you’re aware of what an honor it is to have been housed here?”

  “An honor?” I said, turning a doubtful eye upon the cramped and bare little room.

  The dwarf drew back his head and lifted his eyebrows in a show of exaggerated surprise.

  “Did they not tell you,” he said, “that this was where the English magus Dr. John Dee was housed, when he first came to Prague?”

  He smiled thinly, gratified by what was no doubt my expression of frank astonishment.

  “Yes,” he went on, “the great Dr. Dee lodged here while awaiting the arrival of his family and before moving on to grander accommodation in the Old Town. What wondrous works these walls must have witnessed, eh, what rare spells they must have heard intoned, even in the short time the illustrious scholar was here?”

  A chill dampness had sprung up on my forehead and on my upper lip. It was truly as if a spirit had appeared before me in the room, a luminous apparition, majestic and awe-inspiring.

  Although his reputation nowadays is somewhat tarnished, John Dee in his great days was one of the world’s most renowned men of learning, an expert in natural philosophy, a master alchemist, mathematician, and astronomer. He was the foremost authority on the teachings of the ancient Egyptian high priest Hermes Trismegistus and was steeped in the mysteries of the Cabala; he spoke regularly with angels; he had been for many years the Queen of England’s most trusted and valued magician. That he had dwelt in this place, in this modest little house, I took as yet another augury of the momentous future that lay ahead of me here in Prague.

  John Dee—why, I thought, he might have sat upon the very chair where I was seated now! The thought made my yourself tremble inwardly for awe.

  The dwarf was regarding me with the same queer, speculative, and loftily amused expression that he had worn when I first looked up and saw the creature peering in at me through the window. Had he known John Dee? If so, there were a thousand questions I would dearly have wished to put to him.

  However, he had already moved on to another matter.

  “Do you know who she was,” he asked, “that person whose cold corpse you found here in the lane last night?”

  This gave me a further start of surprise. Yes, I thought, sweating the harder, yes, for sure, he must be an agent of Wenzel’s or of Philipp Lang’s.

  “I know that her name was Magdalena Kroll,” I said, feeling like a man making his way carefully forward over a sheet of ice of doubtful firmness. “I also know, because I was told so, that she was the daughter of Dr. Ulrich Kroll, the Emperor’s physician.”

  Even as I was saying this, however, the dwarf was nodding his big smooth head with impatient dismissiveness.

  “Yes yes,” he said, “but are you aware of what she was?”

  God knows why, but on the instant I clearly saw before my mind’s eye an image of the medallion the dead young woman had worn around her neck, and that Chamberlain Lang had now in his possession; I saw, too, the lozenge of smooth paste it contained, and the little gleaming dent that the Chamberlain’s fingertip had made in it. The mind has its own motives, and hides them from us.

  “No,” Jeppe Schenckel said, with a smug twinkle, “I see that you do not know.” He uncrossed his thumblike little legs. “But I can tell you: before she was anything else at all, she was the Emperor’s mistress.”

  6

  Despite the general fuzziness induced in me by the wine, as well as the adventures I had endured since coming to Prague, I had now the sensation of something loosening and then sharply settling, as if the mechanism of my understanding, like the oiled tumblers inside a lock, had relaxed and suddenly disengaged. Now I knew why the soldiers had been sent to the Blue Elephant to apprehend me; why Wenzel had questioned me so relentlessly; why Chamberlain Lang had smiled at me with what had seemed such peculiar intent, arching his dark eyebrows in that cautioning way. Now I knew what had so alarmed the sentry when he recognized the corpse sprawled in the snow, and probably too why the poor wretch had been so summarily dragged to the gibbet.

  The Emperor’s mistress had been murdered, and the world had been taken hold of and turned upon its head.

  The dwarf, I could see, was silently laughing at me, savoring spitefully my renewed look of reeling surprise and shock.

  “Yes,” he said, “His Majesty’s latest little plaything, cruelly dispatched.”

  After scrambling down from the chair, he asked to be shown the place where I had discovered the corpse. I rose and put on my beaver coat and my old fur hat and led the way out into the lane. The snow had stopped again, leaving in its wake a vast, hollow hush. We turned to the left and walked along until we reached the patch of ground that by now had taken on for me the aspect of a profane shrine—a place of execution, of ritual sacrifice.

  We stopped, and the dwarf stood leaning on his stick, gazing at the spot I pointed out to him, and nodding slowly with his lips pursed.

  Small fragments of frozen blood, like shards of rubious glass, were scattered about, and there were scraps of velvet ripped from the young woman’s gown that had been stuck fast to the cobbles when she was plucked up roughly by the night watch and carted away.

  “Well, she’s not the first wench to die in Golden Lane,” the dwarf said in his offhand fashion, “and likely she will not be the last.” I told him how her throat had been all torn as if by an animal, and he nodded again. “He must have been playing with her,” he said, with a strange, strained frown.

  He turned away and set off along the lane, heading in the direction of the castle. I hurried after him.

  “Master Schenckel,” I said, “you tell me that you are from the Emperor; may I ask if he sent you to me personally, and if so, to what purpose?”

  This he ignored, as if I had not spoken. In the time I spent at Rudolf’s court I came to recognize a trait common to all courtiers, which was the distracted way they had of seeming always to be trying to overhear something that was being said just out of earshot. For the most part what they couldn’t quite hear was being said only in their overheated imaginations; nevertheless they seemed unable to rid themselves of the conviction that somewhere, and probably somewhere quite close by, people were whispering to each other secrets of immense significance and import. They were all the same, all infected with a wandering attention, Felix Wenzel and Philipp Lang and their like, and even this poor cripple, stumping along on his stick. Their interest was always in part elsewhere, and these were the signs: when you were speaking to them they would hold their faces somewhat averted, their heads slightly inclined, until you managed to say or do something that suddenly drew their full attention. Then they would rotate their heads slowly, dragging themselves unwillingly away from that conspiratorial hubbub they could not quite hear, and peer at you in a dazed and puzzled sort of way, blinking like tortoises.

  This careless and disdainful affectation made me at first indignant, but then it came to be only amusing. Sometimes I almost felt sorry for them, the distracted ones, thinking how exhausting for them such constant, anxious vigilance must be. A time would come, of course, when I would be forced ruefully to acknowledge that they were wise where I was foolish, for if I had attended more carefully to what was going on and what was being said around me, in quiet corners and behind half-closed doors, I might have saved myself a great deal of trouble and pain. But then, most things in life are learned too late, and wisdom, if it comes at all, comes tardily.

  So we walked on in silence, the dwarf and I.

  There had been a slight thaw earlier but now it was freezing again, and wisps of snow were strewn among the cobbles like tatters of soiled white ribbon. I feared that the dwarf might miss his footing and take a tumble on the icy ground, but despite the unhandiness of his gait he was as loosely agile as an ape. What a strange thing he looked, in h
is coat of dark velvet and his broad-brimmed pointed black hat and those short thick twisted limbs on which he lurched and lumbered. If man and the macrocosm are mirrored in each other, as the mystical Platonists assert, what sort of a world would it be that Jeppe Schenckel represented?

  As we went along, he related how the Emperor had set his eye on Dr. Kroll’s handsome young daughter one night at a banquet at the castle, and had taken her straightway to his bed.

  “She was already betrothed,” he said, “but of course that counted for nothing. The young man in question, Jan Madek by name, an impetuous and foolish fellow, set up a great cry of protest when he heard that his girl had been snatched from him, and went about the town complaining bitterly of His Imperial Majesty. In the end he made off, taking with him a hoard of valuables belonging to the girl’s father—among them an iron strongbox in which were locked away a sheaf of magical texts, so it’s said, which the Emperor had sorely wished to have for himself. Meantime Mistress Caterina Sardo, His Majesty’s concubine and mother of his ill-gotten brood of bastards, is compelled to turn a blind eye. Or was so compelled, I should say, since the Kroll girl is now conveniently dead, and all is well.”

  We went on some paces, and then the dwarf chuckled.

  “They whisper at court that it was La Sardo who cut her rival’s throat,” he said. “But why would she do the deed herself when she had executioners at hand to call upon?” He gave me a sly glance and again laughed softly. “It is a dark world you have ventured into, Master Stern. You will need a strong light to guide you through it.”

  Was he offering himself, I wondered, as the one to go before me holding the lantern aloft? But if he was to be my guide, he could begin by at least saying where he was leading me.

  We gained the top of Hradčany hill, and went round by the towering walls of the cathedral and crossed the broad paved way in front of the Royal Palace. In its pomp and splendor the palace seemed to me magnificent beyond any such edifice I had ever beheld, even at Würzburg. I had often tried to imagine Prague and its glories, but the reality of it was grander and more gracious than anything I could have dreamed of.

  Past the castle, we stopped on the height there to look out over the city. The sky was white and the air was draped with a freezing mist, pierced by many spires, all of them appearing black in that pervasive, icy miasma. Despite the wintry murk, I could see the river and its bridges and, beyond, the clock tower in the Old Town Square.

  “Ah, Prague, Prague, look at you!” the dwarf said, shaking his head and sighing. He might have been gazing upon an erstwhile lover who had once been young and fair but had by now grown old and feeble. “The center of the world!” At this he chuckled again.

  We walked down into the narrow streets of Kleinseite, and the dwarf again spoke of the magus John Dee, and of Dee’s partner in magic, the rascally crystal-gazer Edward Kelley, an Irishman and a notorious fraud. Schenckel had many curious incidents and escapades to recount of this ill-matched pair. He told of the scandalous pact that Kelley had forced on the deluded and unfortunate Dee whereby—supposedly on the urgings of an angel-spirit, Madimi by name, whom Dee himself had conjured—the two men were to share between them everything they possessed.

  “This included, of course, their spouses,” the dwarf said, “for Dee’s wife was young, and charming to look at, and Kelley lusted after her. Foolishly the Doctor agreed to the pact, with the result that Kelley sired a son on Mistress Dee, a child that her husband, to save face, was obliged to bring up as his own.”

  I could not fail to note how the dwarf savored these juicy titbits, lingering over them with relish, while yet keeping up a tone of pious reprehension, pursing his bloodless lips at one side and sniffing in sham disapproval, and despite myself I could not but be entertained and amused by the fellow’s sharp tongue and spiteful humor.

  “They were necromancers, of course, the pair of them,” he said, with another sniff, “and practicers of the black arts, however much they denied it. Dee, besides, was sending back secret dispatches to the English Queen and Walsingham, her master of spies—oh, yes, indeed, I know it for a fact—and is lucky to have kept his head on his shoulders. The Emperor thought much of him for a time, but soon saw through his wiles and his sinister ways.”

  Jeppe Schenckel, it was plain, had been no admirer of the venerable Dr. Dee. I, of course, could hardly believe my ears to hear this legendary magus spoken of with such disrespectful, sardonic amusement.

  “As for Kelley,” the dwarf went on, “the fellow rose high only to suffer a plunge all the deeper. And plunge he did: you know His Majesty had him imprisoned twice, and twice he attempted escape and twice fell down from the high window of his prison cell and broke a leg? A different leg each time, unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how one looks at the matter.”

  He laughed softly, rolling his big shoulders in happy enjoyment at the thought of the mountebank’s misfortunes.

  “Yet still he lives on, seemingly unkillable, locked away in a dungeon high on the wall of Castle Hněvín at Most, which is far enough away from Prague but not so far that he cannot be kept an eye on. They say he’s engaged in writing a voluminous treatise on the philosopher’s stone which he intends to dedicate to the Emperor and in that way worm his way back into the royal favor and secure his release.” Again that soft, malicious laugh. “If he does hope for mercy, I fear he will be disappointed. Once His Majesty is done with you, you are done with. Which is a thing, young master”—he gave me another sly glance—“that you would do well to keep in mind.”

  A dog all skin and bone appeared out of an alleyway and approached us, leering and pitifully cringing, but the dwarf brandished his stick and drove it away.

  “Prague is a city of dogs,” he said with a scowl. “I would have them all destroyed, except that the Emperor thinks them possessed of magical powers and protects them.”

  We walked on. I must say, I reprehend and distrust any man who would needlessly mistreat an animal; the one who kicks a dog would as soon kick me.

  “You know that Kelley has no ears?” Schenckel said. “They were clipped off him long ago, in England, for being a counterfeiter of coin. Now he wears his hair long enough to cover the scars. What a rogue he is. He would still be a spy, had he the freedom for it. He connives even yet with all sorts of conspirators, according to the Chamberlain”—he smirked at me—“Herr Lang, your friend and patron, that is. They say young Madek, too, had secret dealings with him.”

  Here was yet another mention of that Jan Madek, whom Magdalena Kroll had spurned in favor of the Emperor and whom High Steward Wenzel had dubbed a renegade. I wished to know more of him, but when I inquired, the dwarf, as I expected, pretended not to hear. He was an inveterate pretender, as I would come to learn. He liked to give one to believe that he carried a store of secret knowledge, to which he alone was privy, though at first I thought it all a show.

  Now he stopped to glance in at the window of an inn; evidently he was quite the looker-in at windows, this strange, maimed little man.

  “Dr. Kroll traveled out to Most and questioned Kelley,” he went on, squinting in an effort to see through the thick bottle-glass panes. “It seems His Majesty suspects that Kelley somehow came into possession of that strongbox with all Kroll’s accumulated magic in it. A lot of foolishness, needless to say—Kelley is a spent force.”

  Schenckel’s mention of Dr. Kroll prompted me to press him to elaborate on the Emperor’s infatuation with the good doctor’s daughter, thinking I might by that means learn more of Madek and why the High Steward Wenzel had been so interested in him. The only response I got, however, was a remote and faintly irritated stare, as if I were standing annoyingly in the way of someone or something of far more consequence.

  Having come down now to the lowest level of Kleinseite, the dwarf and I set off across the Stone Bridge. I inquired again as to where it was we were going, but again was ignored. No doubt I should have persisted, perhaps should even have turned on my heel and l
eft him to go on alone to wherever it was he was bent. But curiosity will win out over indignation every time, or at least that is certainly the case with me.

  A frozen river, I always think, is an uncanny phenomenon, a violation somehow of the laws of nature. As I looked down from the bridge at the scarred and splintered surface of the Vltava, I imagined the titanic struggle that had gone on, since the onset of winter, between the surging flow of water and the irresistible frost, a struggle the end of which was this broad expanse of ice stretching from bank to bank and up and down for as far as the eye could see. It seemed to me now, as I gazed upon it, the very emblem of death and of dying. I thought of Magdalena Kroll, after her throat had been torn open and she had been let drop from the assassin’s grasp, lying there in the snow, her consciousness quieted forever but her body still straining, creaking, her very flesh inwardly groaning, fighting with all its failing strength against the encroaching cold, until at last it could fight no more and her life’s quickness ceased and all went rigid.

  I shivered. The mist was filling my chest with a wet, icy heaviness.

  By now the effects of the wine that the potboy had brought to me had worn off—how much I drank in those first days in Prague, I who up to then had been, of necessity if not by inclination, so moderate in everything!—and I was again impatient to know where we were going. For it was clear we were not strolling idly, as it might have seemed at first; we were bound, in however roundabout and lackadaisical a fashion, towards some definite destination, of that I was sure. My heart sank. What new challenge might await me, what further baffling interrogation might even now be in preparation? Jeppe Schenckel still would reveal nothing, and when I asked for the third time, with a marked sharpness, where it was he was leading me, he turned aside yet again in a pretense of bland distraction.