The Book of Blood and Shadow

by Robin Wasserman

  Greetings. I fear my letters of late have been too full of heartache and grievance. But these months have been hard, dearest brother. Harder than I allowed you to know. You will think it strange that I miss such a hostile home, our Father’s tower, dark and dank, and its outbuildings, the walls so thin I feared my blood would turn to ice. But even a prison can be a home, when there is food, when there are walls to guard against the night, when there is a father like our Father watching over us. Now he is gone, and with him, our sorry home. Though it may be madness, I miss them both.

  That much should have taken me less than an hour, including the twenty minutes needed to transcribe the Latin into my notebook and mark unfamiliar words and confounding verb forms—the dull but soothing warm-up to translation itself, like practicing scales on the piano before moving on to Mozart. But the transcription took two hours, and the single paragraph another two after that. I blamed Chris and his attention deficit disaster, but admittedly, no one forced me to help him cheat at solitaire or plot out a senior-class prank or remember the words to all the theme songs to the Friday-night TV lineup of our youth.

  “The thumb wars were your idea,” he pointed out when I called him a bad influence. “And what about now? I’m sitting here, hard at work, and you’re the one distracting me with these ridiculous complaints about—”

  “Hard at work?” I peered over his hunched shoulders. “You’re making paper airplanes.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.”

  The Hoff’s office was nothing like the beige oversized cubicle my father had once inhabited in the humanities building across the quad. The Hoff’s tenure meant the school could never fire him, but they could and did usher him into emeritus status and strip him of luxuries like photocopiers, Wi-Fi connections, and doors. As penance for his encroaching senility, they’d stuck him in a side chapel of the decaying Trinity Cathedral, which had been out of use since the modern and airy egalitarian church was erected on the other side of the main quad. Now Trinity’s nave and quire were used for the occasional Phi Beta Kappa induction or faculty tea party, while its ancillary chapels had been divided up into professorial overflow offices. So far, it seemed, the Hoff was the only overflow.

  Our work space was a large mahogany table in the center of the room, only a few feet away from the Hoff’s usually abandoned desk, stacked high with teetering towers of journals, conference papers, and departmental memos that inevitably went unread. There was no door, just a long, narrow tunnel that led into the main worship area. The Elizabeth and Kelley letters, along with a collection of materials the Hoff had “liberated” from the library and its barbarian overseers, were housed in a large safe in the far corner, to which Chris had somehow charmed him into giving us the combination. Beside the safe was a fraying gray couch with sagging cushions and a faint smell of dog, and this was where the Hoff, when he showed up at all, usually took his seat and then, promptly, his nap. In the Hoff’s frequent absence, Chris claimed possession, often paying tribute with a nap of his own.

  But that first day, Chris managed to stay awake for the duration, distracting me and drawing occasional disapproving looks from Max, who sat at the end of the table, shoulders bowed, eyes squinted behind the wire-rimmed glasses, index finger tracing line after line of cramped alchemical gibberish. He stopped short of shushing us, but otherwise, the punctilious librarian imitation was complete. I caught a distinct sigh of relief when Adriane showed up to drag Chris away, ostensibly to work on her college essay but presumably to take more interesting advantage of his empty dorm room.

  “Pencils down, time up,” Chris said, shutting my notebook for me. “You’re coming, too.”

  I shook my head. “Not tonight.”

  “You have a better offer?”

  “Oh, let’s see, a glamorous and exotic evening chez Kane, complete with calculus, physics, and some thrilling adventures in Latin translation, because thanks to someone, this afternoon was a complete waste of my time.”

  “ ‘Someone’ sounds dastardly. Point me toward him, I’ll beat him up for you.”

  “He’s not so bad,” I said.

  Chris batted his eyes.

  “Though rearranging his face might improve things a bit, so if you think we should give punching a try …”

  He turned to Adriane. “Do you hear how she talks to me? Can I help it that I’m handsome and charming and irresistible and no girl can say no to me?”

  “Nora doesn’t seem to have a problem with it,” Adriane said. Then kissed him, full on, rising on her toes and kicking up her leg like a black-and-white-movie damsel in desire. “Lucky for me.”

  “Let’s test it out,” I said. “No, I am not hanging out with you tonight.” I paused to take stock. “That wasn’t particularly traumatic. Think it was a fluke? No, no, no thank you, no. Easy enough.”

  Chris grabbed me around the waist, plucking me effortlessly out of the chair and off my feet. He spun me around as I kicked and flailed and shook with laughter. “Help me show this one the error of her ways,” he told Adriane.

  “Chris, let her be. If she wants to go home …”

  “How could she want to go home when she’s got such a better option?” He was still dangling me a few inches above the ground, despite my halfhearted efforts to extricate myself. I was laughing too hard to be of much use. “Come on, you grab her legs, we’ll carry her back with us.”

  Adriane didn’t move.

  “Now is the time you put me down,” I told him, trying to catch my breath.

  “As you wish, milady.” He deposited me gently back on my feet. “See? Not so hard to say, ‘Yes, whatever you want.’ ”

  “So apparently I’m irresistible.”

  “I knew we had something in common,” he said.

  “You know he won’t stop until you give in,” Adriane said. “You should come over. We can watch a movie or something.”

  It was tempting—of course, oral surgery might have been tempting in comparison to what awaited me that night and every night, the empty house, the closed doors, the people unseen and the words unspoken. There was a reason I spent so much time shuttling between Adriane’s house and Chris’s dorm room. But there was such a thing as too much. He was my best friend; she was my best friend. So maybe I spent too much of my time with them worrying that they were both waiting for me to leave. But sometimes, just in case, I did.

  “I really can’t,” I told him. “Not tonight.”

  “You work too hard,” Chris said, giving me a light shove.

  I waved the nearly blank notebook at him. “All evidence to the contrary.”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  I nodded and, as they wove their fingers together and left me behind, tried to look like I’d won something, no matter how much it felt like the opposite.

  “That must be weird for you.” They were the first words Max had spoken all day. His voice was low and reedy and not altogether unpleasant.

  “What?” Mine was hostile. It was one thing for me to feel like an unwanted tagalong—it was another for someone else, a virtual stranger, to confirm the suspicion.

  “Nothing.” He turned back to his work and didn’t look up as I packed my stuff and bundled myself against the chilly October night. Nor did he look up when he said, as if speaking to his ancient pages, “Get home safe.”

  I always did.

  9

  Chris was right, I did work too hard, but only because it was an effective way of making the time at home pass with a minimum of musing, remembering, regretting, and a variety of other unappealing activities that the sight of my brother’s fading kindergarten paintings, my mother’s hastily scrawled notes about missing dinner, again, or my father’s closed door was apt to provoke. Even if I hadn’t felt at least marginally guilty for slacking off all afternoon, I might have started with the Latin, because translating narrowed the world down to a single page, a line, one word at a time. It was exactly as absorbing as I needed it to be.
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  I will not tell you of our journey.

  We have survived, that is all you need know. We hid when hiding was needed, we ate when we could and starved when we could not. We have arrived tired and penniless, filthy and weak, clothed in the shame of our condition and our need. But we have arrived, dearest brother. We have returned. I had begun to fear Prague was nothing but a dream. Now I know it to be real, and I believe it to be a new beginning.

  I swear to you now, fear and grief will not win out. Our Mother needs me, and I will neither fail her nor shrink from the burden. There is little need for the regret you express in your letters, as your schooling is paramount. It is for you to uphold the family name and glory, and for me to tend to domestic matters, our property, our home, our Mother. We have secured temporary lodging, and surely it is only a matter of time before I can persuade the Emperor to relinquish our possessions. In times of greatest hopelessness, I have my letters from you to keep me afloat, and I have my poetry. Of course I know it to be little more than a trifle. But you know better than anyone how my soul indulges in its dreams, and I will admit, only to you, that there are nights when I lie awake and imagine myself Ovid reborn. The poems are nothing but words, as your letters are nothing but words, ink on parchment, and yet words continue to save me. I trust you read this in good health, and with full knowledge of my continued love for you.

  Farewell.

  15 August 1598 Prague.

  She didn’t blame him for leaving her; she didn’t allow herself to blame him, because leaving was a brother’s job. I understood more than I wanted of the things going on inside a dead girl’s head. A home that felt like a prison, an exile that was simultaneous punishment and relief. The determination, in spite or because of the fact that she had nothing left—a useless mother, an invisible father, an absent brother—to keep moving forward and do what needed to be done.

  I allowed myself about three minutes to indulge in that sad little melodrama of identification. There were no extant pictures of a young Elizabeth, so easy enough to imagine my head poking out of some Renaissance dress of rags, mooning around a tower, dragging my mother through mud and river valley, forest and desert and whatever else it was one encountered on the way to Prague. Three minutes, and then I cut it off.

  Her prison wasn’t a metaphor, it was a stone castle where her disgraced father marked out the last three years of his life. Her money problems couldn’t be solved by a scholarship—to a school she no doubt would have been forbidden to attend—and an annual birthday gift certificate to the nearest outlet mall. Her father wasn’t invisible, he was dead; her brother wasn’t. We weren’t the same.

  That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else’s words in a voice that somehow was and wasn’t your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but—as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it—words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefore I am. In this case, Elizabeth’s letters, written in a language that died centuries before she was born, were already at some remove from her life. Transforming them, word by dictionary-approved word, into modern English meant there would inevitably be a little of me in Elizabeth. It didn’t mean there was any of her in me.

  10

  She was a poet. A reasonably famous one, if not one I or anyone else had ever heard of. And, despite the fact that she was born in England, spent most of her life in Prague, and, just for good measure, spoke fluent German, she wrote exclusively in Latin. Maybe when you were a woman in sixteenth-century Europe hoping to be taken seriously for something beyond whom you slept with and whom you birthed, it helped to cultivate a linguistic superiority complex. Or maybe the language without a people just appealed to the girl without a home.

  The more I read of her letters, the more I wanted to know about her, but there wasn’t much to find. Famous or not, Elizabeth Weston was a historical shadow, flickering across the officially important lives of Edward Kelley and Emperor Rudolf II, surfacing occasionally in feminist histories or turgid Neo-Latin literature surveys, but she had no biographies of her own, and—judging from the paucity of information on her Wikipedia page—no obsessed amateurs hoarding Westonia trivia and lobbying for the spotlight of scholarship to shine down on her. The only way to know Elizabeth was through her letters.

  And so the days settled into a routine. Three times a week, I left school early and joined Max and Chris in the Hoff’s musty office. Whether it was Max’s stern looks, Chris’s laziness overpowering even his tendency to distraction, or my own begrudging curiosity, the paper airplane races and thumb wars tapered off, and often hours slipped by with no more than a few words passed among us, mostly half-articulated requests for this dictionary or that conjugation list, muttered curses, groans of frustration, and the lapping murmurs of unfamiliar passages read softly aloud, searching for the rhythms of the past. More than once when I arrived, Max had a cappuccino waiting, with cinnamon and two sugars, the way I liked it.

  “You’re actually getting into this, aren’t you?” Chris asked once as he walked me out. It was late, and he offered to toss my bike into the car and give me a ride home, but I told him I liked pedaling through the dark.

  I never let anyone take me home.

  “It’ll look good on my college applications,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fine. It’s interesting. To read something no one’s touched in four hundred years? Not the worst way to spend an afternoon.”

  “Careful,” he said. “You’re starting to sound like Max.”

  It no longer seemed the insult it might once have. And when I got home that night, I went straight back to work.

  E. J. Weston, to her dearest brother John Fr. Weston, greetings. The dream is always the same. Our Father leaps from the tower, his white dressing gown billowing behind him like angel wings. He believed the angels would carry him to safety, and always, for an endless moment, I trust his faith. I expect him to fly. But always, he falls. Blood stains his white silk. I wake, and still I hear his voice, screaming my name. In life, he never screamed for me, not once. He dropped to the ground in silence. The guards must have been lying in wait, for they were on him in moments, and dragged him back to his cell. He writhed, he bled, but never once did he call for me.

  You tell me I was right to stay in my hiding hole, curled in the hollow base of the tree. You rage against our Father for summoning a helpless young girl to assist with his escape. But I am far from helpless, and I would have gladly given my life to save his. Or so I believed until the moment was on us, and I failed him.

  I will not fail him again.

  No more of these unhappy musings. You ask for word of Prague, perhaps hoping to relive the memories of our happier youth. The Pražský hrad is as imposing as ever before, its spires scraping the clouds. Many mornings I walk the Stone Bridge at sunrise, watching the Vltava flow beneath. The linden tree seems taller to me, sturdier than before. I enclose a leaf with this letter, so that you too can inhale the scent of our childhood.

  There was no leaf: It had probably crumbled away to nothing centuries before. But I understood the impulse. There had been a day, two years before, a perfect March day ten degrees warmer and sunnier than a New England spring had any right to be, a day of lying in the grass with Adriane and Chris, listening to the river burble past, water that was more of a creek than a river and more sludge than water but looked clean and deep in the sunshine, a day of picking out cloud animals, of parades of white elephants and rabbits and dragons marching across the sky, a day when Adriane explained in great detail how to rid my hair of the dreaded frizz and then made a classically Adrianesque segue into discussing the deep-rooted cultural and racial issues embedded in any evaluation of hairstyle and the ways in which our three coifs, respectively half-Jewish, half-Asian, half-black, could chronicle the tale of American race relations for the last two hundred years, all while Chris pretended, loudly, to sn
ore, a day when Chris, drunk on lemonade and freshly cut grass, took both our hands and told us, no laughter in his voice for once, that everything was different now that we had each other, and everything was better. And that day, while they were both sleeping, for real this time, knocked out by the sun, I wandered along the sludgy water and pocketed a smooth gray skipping rock that smelled like the river and that, like the day, I would keep.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that Chris confided what had happened while I was down at the water, the way first their hands came together and then their lips followed suit, the looks and secret smiles they’d stolen for the rest of the afternoon, behind my back and over my head, knowing what I didn’t, luxuriating in the pleasure of anticipation, of what would happen when I was gone. He was so happy, and, later, by my locker, grinning as her fingertip traced out a heart against the rusting steel, so was she, that I was happy for them, and tried not to care that while I’d been having my perfect day, they’d been having an entirely different one, together. I told myself it was a good thing that I hadn’t noticed, that everything had seemed the same—that it boded well for the future, and it did.

  I still had the rock. But it wasn’t the same.

  Outside, the night sky was shading into a pearly gray that suggested I should sleep while I still had the chance. But I kept going.

  The canons at Strahov have opened their library to me, and many a morning have I lost myself in the words of the masters. In that hushed chamber I feel at home as I do nowhere else in this city, perhaps because I can so easily envision you by my side, racing me through the pages. It seems near impossible you have never known this place, for your spirit inhabits it so fully. If I could wrap myself in its warm quiet for an eternity, drunk on words and ideas and questions I had never before thought to ask, I promise you I would mourn nothing of the life left behind. But the library on a hill is but a temporary refuge. Below, our Mother awaits. The city awaits, its people, I fear, much as you remember them, frothing with tales of courtly betrayals and petty treasons of the heart. Our magnificent Parent remains much in their minds. At the market this morning I overheard two fishwives conferring in hushed voices about the wizard who lived in a tower, cursing those who passed beneath. He communed with the angels, they said, and in his wrath once transformed a squawking infant into a braying ass. I smiled to know of whom they spoke. His power and legend live on in his absence.