Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  “Now touch me,” she said, in her huskiest whisper. “Touch me here—yes. And here. And now here. Ah!”

  Her moist lips were parted, her eyelids fluttering.

  And below the scaffold whereon I stood, the invisible crowd waited, holding its collective breath in eager anticipation of my fall.

  Later that evening, when Caterina had at last released me from what amused her to term the duties of the bedchamber, I walked in the gathering dusk down to Golden Lane, where again I peered in at the windows of my former house. No one was there, and nothing was to be seen, and yet I lingered. What had drawn me back was not nostalgia—although Serafina naturally was in my thoughts—but the conviction, based on I knew not what, that there was hidden here some part of the puzzle I had been set to solve, and that I should find if only I could hit upon the right place to look.

  The narrow street was deserted, and all was silent in the winter twilight. I turned away from the house and paced the little distance to the spot where the girl’s corpse had lain. No trace of her remained, except, for me, an echo, a resonance, of terror and pain. They say life is cheap, but I think it dear, very dear. Why had Magdalena Kroll been murdered? That was one of the questions I went on asking myself, for I knew that only when I had the answer could I begin in earnest to search out who had done the deed. The other question, however, that of motive, seemed to me by far the most pressing. Was this not strange? Yet I believed, again for no reason I could think of, that the killing of the girl, the murder itself, had been an incidental event, an isolated patch of flame on the periphery of a far greater conflagration.

  There was a sound behind me, a movement, a scuffle and a scuttle, I was sure of it. I whirled about, peering this way and that into the descending darkness. The street in both directions was empty and still.

  16

  I followed my mistress’s advice—all her advisings were commands—and next morning found myself once again in that little room with the prie-dieu and the deceptive, freely-hanging tapestry. Very different, however, were the circumstances of my coming there this time. Far from being marched thither by guards or soldiers, I was preceded by a page in yellow stockings and a cocked hat. He was a gawky young fellow with hair crookedly cropped and an unsightly cluster of pustules on the back of his neck—but a page is a page and greatly to be preferred to an armed guard any day.

  As I crossed the courtyard and passed in front of the Royal Palace I was smugly pleased, young coxcomb that I had turned into, by the sound of my Spanish boot heels ringing importantly on the flagstones, and the feel of my short cape, edged with fox fur, flaring behind me on the breeze.

  Chamberlain Lang was in his black habit, as always. He had left me waiting, also as always, and then he entered the room hurriedly with that curious, quick-stepping, gliding gait—he really had the look of a tall black busy waterbird—his fingers clasped before him in a parody of piety, smiling his broad, sly smile.

  “So Wotton has been whispering sedition in your ear, has he?” he said merrily.

  “I should not say that,” I answered, “not sedition, no. He asked only if it might be possible for him to travel to Most.”

  “Aye, and to visit Castle Hněvín and confabulate there with that treacherous Irishman Kelley, I’ll wager. Did he mention him?”

  “He mentioned no one,” I said. “But I took it Kelley would be the object of his traveling to Most.”

  “I have no doubt you took it aright.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “To what purpose, I wonder, would he wish to see and speak to that scoundrelly fellow? Hmm?”

  He was watching me sideways, with his thin and devilish smile and one dark eyebrow arched.

  I said I could not think what he might want with Kelley; keeping one’s thoughts to oneself, I had come to realize, was in general the best policy at Rudolf’s conspiratorial court.

  There had developed between Chamberlain Lang and myself a wary regard, which it pleased him to pretend was a warm and open relation, if not a friendship, even. But I distrusted him, and he knew it; as to what his true estimation of or feeling towards me was I could not begin to guess, so mercurial and enigmatic a creature was he.

  I knew, as who at court did not, that he and Felix Wenzel were locked in a relentless and entangled struggle for dominance. Wisdom, what little of it I had, told me I should throw in my lot with the stronger of the two, which undoubtedly was Lang. Yet I hung back, prizing my independence, or what I imagined to be my independence. I was therefore caught between these two clever, cold, and dangerous men, a not so very hard nut that neither could crack, at least not as long as Rudolf continued to smile upon me and keep me close to his side.

  There was also, worryingly, the question of what the Chamberlain was to Caterina Sardo, and what she was to him. When I thought about this, the suspicion would insert itself into my mind, like the thinnest of thin, sharp blades, that he might once have been to her what I was to her now. For I was not so blinded by my passion for the woman that I imagined she had not set her eye—and more than her eye—on another man of position and power at court.

  I was in a maze, making my way forward cautiously, turn by turn, but whether I was going towards the exit or the center, I could not tell. A day would come, I felt dreadfully sure of it, when I should have to turn and run, perhaps for my very life. With that eventuality in mind, I saved carefully every other piece of gold or silver I had from the Emperor. This escape money I stored in the leather pouch my father the Bishop had dispatched to me from his deathbed. By now my money bag was reassuringly full, and getting fuller by the day, and was a much needed comfort to me.

  The Chamberlain, still with his hands clasped before himself, paced up and down the cramped space of the little room, humming softly, which he always did when he was busy scheming.

  “This is what we shall do,” he said at last. “Instead of allowing Wotton to travel to Most”—he stopped, and placed himself close in front of me, his voice sinking to a conspiratorial murmur—“and I do not think he should be allowed, do you?”

  This was one of his favorite ploys, to pause dramatically, as if he had been halted in his tracks by a doubt, and plead earnestly for reassurance, for which of course he had no need or desire, since never was there a man more certain of his own certainty than Philipp Lang.

  He set to pacing again, his crow-black robe rustling around him.

  “No,” he said, “we shall keep a watch on Wotton, and instead of allowing him to go to Most, we’ll fetch Kelley and bring him here. Perhaps that way we shall discover what it is the Englishman wants of the rascal.” He stopped again, by the hearth, and glanced back at me over his shoulder with his mischief-maker’s grin. “What do you say, Herr Doktor Stern? Is this not a sound plan?”

  It was not a question; indeed, questions from the Chamberlain were for the most part nothing more than teasing provocations.

  He came now and put a friendly arm about my shoulders.

  “We’ll meet at the banquet this evening,” he said. “Mistress Sardo tells me you are to be there. You have become something of her knight, I think, sporting her pennant on your lance?”

  He winked the way a lizard blinks, effortlessly dropping one eyelid like a tiny silk flange. His hand squeezed my shoulder.

  My mouth had gone instantly dry.

  It was a part of my foolishness to have convinced myself that I could conduct a passionate liaison with the Emperor’s mistress, the mother of his children, and no one would know, not even Philipp Lang, from whom nothing that went on at court could be hidden, as I was well aware. But such is youth, with its delusions and insatiable blind desires. And then, how easily, at whatever age, we hold off from our minds the things that frighten us most.

  Yet there were times when that facility failed me. Often now I start awake in the hour before dawn, the wolf hour, aghast and sweating, like a traveler in the mountains who in a momentary break in the fog finds himself teetering on the brink of a frightful precipice. Fear at first rose as
a kind of fog, a general miasma that constricted my throat and forced my teeth to clench; then it cleared and showed me the specific forms of which I should be most afraid. Chief of these was my failure to do as the Emperor had commanded me and find out the killer of Mistress Kroll, and on the heels of that would come the baleful realization of the peril I was putting myself in by indulging my passion for Caterina Sardo. In the midst of all this there would appear before yet again the vision of the hanged sentry, who in my feverish fancy had become a stylized figure, an image from the tarot, foretelling terrors to come.

  The banquet that night took place in the Spanish Hall, which had been lately built to house the rarest treasures of Rudolf’s priceless collection of paintings. In pride of place, propped on a gilded table, was The Feast of the Rosary, which His Majesty in solitude had sated himself upon all afternoon and had now grudgingly released to general view.

  Not that there were many at the table who paid it the slightest regard. One of the disillusioning discoveries I had made since entering the royal household was how uncourtly court life so often was. Dinners such as this one were especially disorderly occasions, the diners a gorgeously bedizened rabble—all that silk and satin, all those fabulous furs!—who hooted and howled like a pack of hunting dogs, and threw gnawed bones and crusts of bread at each other. It was not unusual for bouts of fisticuffs to break out, sometimes of such ferocity that the Imperial Guard had to be called in to restore a modicum of order. At one such repast I saw a lady of high rank shamelessly performing an act of frottage on her neighbor, one of Rudolf’s drunken generals, the livid eye of his cock and her busy hand plainly visible to anyone who cared to cast a glance below the level of the table.

  The Emperor this night was in one of his darkest moods, and sat slumped with his fat chin sunk in his ruff and his sable cap askew, watching through hooded eyes the graceless antics taking place around him. How to guess what tormented thoughts were turning themselves over behind that somber brow?

  Opposite him, but at the other end of the table, was seated Caterina Sardo, his mistress and also, amazingly, mine. She did not look at me, not once, nor I at her; it afforded me an intense, peculiar pleasure, this mutual ignoring, our secret suspended in the air between us, a shimmering crystal sphere, invisible to all save the two of us.

  Seated on the Emperor’s left was a frail-looking creature of indeterminate age. It was not until halfway through the evening that I recognized him as Don Giulio. He too remembered me, as I saw from the way he stared at me with his curiously dead yet piercing eye, smiling his blank, secret smile. He was Rudolf’s and Caterina’s eldest son, so I had been told, though it was not, I should say, his mother who told me. Once I inquired of her about him, just once, but immediately she blazed up in fury and called me a meddler, and did not come to my bed that night.

  Don Giulio’s presence at his father’s side caused me a wounding pang of jealousy. It was not that I would have wished Caterina to have borne a child of mine, for I wanted nothing from her except herself, her flesh, the touch of her hand, her cool and tantalizing smile. But I could not bear the thought of Rudolf, that fat frog, lowering the great bloodless soft sack of himself down upon my slender Venus and inflicting upon her tender innards the makings of this sickly-looking mooncalf.

  I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips hard upon the lids. Madness! Madness, desire, and dread delight: that was my predicament. I was as a man trapped on an upper floor of his burning house who cannot think what to save from the flames, himself or the things he treasures.

  Chamberlain Lang was there, and Felix Wenzel too. Lang was all talk and smiles for a dark-eyed lady at his side—he was a tireless seducer, of woman, man, maid, or boy, it seemed to be all one to him—while Wenzel, seated opposite, kept a narrow watch on him. Poor Wenzel, there were times when I felt sorry for him: he could not mask his passions even if it were to save his life. His hatred of Lang was as intense in its way as my love for Caterina Sardo, the signs of love and hatred being strangely similar, as I came to learn.

  And in the midst of all sat Bishop Malaspina, a round black puffball, taking in everything with his merry little eyes, missing nothing, not even, I’m sure, the flush of jealousy in my cheeks.

  While the main course was being served—it was slices of spit-roasted wild boar with a glaze of honey and wine—Kepler the astronomer came and sat by me in friendly fashion. He had traveled recently to Prague, at the invitation of Tycho Brahe the Dane, and we had no sooner met than a warm mutual regard was forged between us. I it was who took him on his first tour of the workshops in the Powder Tower, where the air smelled perpetually of scorched metal and wormwood, a scent I can still summon up as if I were there again in that place of crazed dreams and the bitter ash of deluded hopes. I could see by the astronomer’s ill-suppressed sardonic smirk that he had no more regard than I for those poor desperate laborers hunched over their crucibles and retorts.

  Kepler tonight was already on the way to being drunk, as was evident from the glassy look of his eyes—although those eyes were not good at the best of times, having been damaged by a childhood bout of smallpox, which had left him double-visioned. He used to make a joke of this, asking who had ever heard of a cockeyed astronomer? He was a skimpy little fellow with a narrow face and a short, coarse black beard. He was generally of an amiable disposition, although quick to take offense, especially in matters pertaining to his work and his reputation. His aim was to succeed to the high position of Imperial Mathematician, displacing the present incumbent, Tycho Brahe, who sat opposite us now at the far side of the table, planted between the wide arms of his chair, massive, majestic, and remote. Although Brahe was a dedicated and famous astronomer, he regarded his science with aristocratic disdain, and had once confided to Kepler, so the latter told me, his conviction that no true gentleman should stoop so low as to publish a book.

  Abruptly the Emperor rose and turned to depart, and at once my Caterina rose too and went forward and took his arm, while Jeppe Schenckel, who as usual had been seated on a low stool at his master’s feet, scrambled up and followed after. I watched them go. Caterina still refrained from looking my way, though she must have felt the heat of my yearning gaze, for these were the young days of our passionate entanglement, and I was besotted.

  The company, which had struggled unsteadily to its feet, maintained silence while His Majesty progressed to the door, but when he had gone it was bedlam once again.

  “Come, my friend,” Kepler said, “let us take ourselves away from this gilded squalor.”

  Outside, the January night was cold and clear under a vast velvet sky studded with stars. We went together through the Stag Moat, where I expected to meet the ghost of Jan Madek stepping out of the shadows under every tree, and thence down to Nový Svět, to an inn Kepler knew there. It was a cramped, low-ceilinged place, but clean, and decently run. The innkeeper, a saturnine fellow with a cadaverous grin, served us the best of Pilsen beer and slices of cold venison, tender and sweet. What a gourmand I had become, what a smacker of lips and patter of the belly, and all in a matter of weeks! Had I gone on as I was going, I would have ended up a second Malaspina.

  I must declare that at the time I had not a full appreciation of Kepler’s greatness, and regarded him as no more than a wandering scholar struggling to make his mark on the world, much like myself. I prized his company, however, and his lively conversation.

  We sat by the window of the inn, with a wedge of the pinpricked sky visible above the rooftops opposite. Kepler, deep in his cups by now, talked freely and with bitter wit of his colleague and rival, Brahe the Dane—it was the topic around which he perpetually orbited. This fabled nobleman had in his student days engaged in a duel in which he had lost the bridge of his nose, and wore now a false bridge made of an alloy of silver and gold, held in place with a resin gum. Under the patronage of the Swedish King, he had built a mighty observatory on the island of Hven in the Øresund strait off Denmark, and there had amassed over the space
of twenty years a great portfolio of star sightings, which Kepler was beadily determined to get his hands on.

  After a falling out with King Christian, Brahe had sought a new patron, which he conveniently found in Rudolf. At the Emperor’s invitation, Brahe haughtily removed himself and his household from Hven and set off for Prague in an immense caravan of coaches and horse carts piled high with everything from battered saucepans to the most precious astronomical instruments.

  The chief disaster of that long and surely wearisome journey southwards was the death of Brahe’s beloved tame elk, which at a castle where the entourage was lodging for the night made its way to an upper floor and there drank a dish of beer, and in a drunken stupor fell down the stone stairway and broke its neck. Brahe was inconsolable; even now, all this time later, he would speak tearfully of his lost pet to anyone willing to listen.

  “He is a fine astronomer, in his mechanical way,” Kepler said, dipping his nose into his beer mug, “but also petty and vain. He fears I might outstrip him, which of course I shall.”

  He narrowed those botched eyes of his and considered me closely for a moment.

  “Can you keep a secret, Stern?” he asked, to which I said of course I could. “Then listen,” he said. “A day will come when I shall reveal the secret of the cosmic harmony and show the very inner workings of the universe itself.”

  He sat back, keeping his narrowed gaze fixed on me and portentously nodding.

  It was not the first time I had heard this kind of talk among the many aspirants to greatness whom Rudolf had gathered from all corners of the empire, and it would not be the last. What I could not have known was that, unlike all those others, Kepler’s boast would one day be proved to have been no less than the truth. His Harmonices Mundi, published some twenty years later, in which among many daring hypotheses he put forward the theory that the planets in their orbits move not in circles but ellipses, would cause a revolution in astronomy as significant as the one Copernicus brought about by setting the sun at the center of the planetary system.