Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  “Got into a dispute with the night watch, he did,” Sir Kaspar said huskily, sitting up and yawning.

  “Damn it, man,” I said, “you could have taken better care of him.”

  At this the knight gave me a large and wounded look. After rising quakingly to his feet, he shook himself and then hawked and spat. His tousled aspect resembled that of the morning itself—the storm had passed, but the sky was surly still, with racing, smoke-colored clouds through which a watery sun dodged and danced.

  “Dr. Kelley is dead,” I said.

  The old man stared.

  “Slain, was he?”

  “He fell from the tower, sometime in the night.”

  “Christ in Heaven,” the knight said, and gave a delighted, wheezing laugh, shaking his head. “The Chamberlain will have your hide for this!”

  “Yours too, I don’t doubt,” I said. “The dwarf has gone to rouse our driver. You go too, and get ready to depart.”

  I could see him weighing whether to defy me—he was a knight, after all, even if a dusty one, and what was I but a sophister and a scribbler?—but in the end he shrugged his bony shoulders and went away muttering.

  Still Norbert the horrible boy hung in my grip; I let go of him, and delivered him a kick and sent him off to forage for something for me to eat for my breakfast. I walked back to the high cold hall where I had dined last evening but found no sign of a servant, and no fire had been lit. After wandering about for a while, through other rooms, I had still encountered no one—the castle seemed deserted.

  Finally I chanced upon a little stone chapel and spied Kelley’s corpse lying on a bier with lighted candles surrounding it. The blood had been washed from his skull, and he was got up in a black robe and a silk ruff, and his jaw was bound with a white rag to keep it from lolling. His hands were joined upon his breast. He might have been a statue of himself, with skin as pale as marble and his mouth sternly set. Curious, the little kindnesses that death affords us, the balm of dignity it effects. In life the sorcerer had not looked half so noble and serene as he did now.

  I went on, passing through another series of bare and dingy rooms. I was in search of Elizabeth Weston, though I hardly imagined she would be in any mood to speak to me. I had no doubt that she, no less than the Chamberlain, would regard me as responsible for her stepfather’s death.

  I was in a quandary as to what was to be done. It seemed imperative that I should transport Kelley’s remains back to Prague. He had been a great man in that city once, and the Emperor, I felt sure, would wish that he should be given due respect and have his funeral and be buried there. But what about Elizabeth Weston—what was I to do with her? Her term of banishment would be at an end, now that her stepfather was dead, but had I the authority to allow her to accompany his corpse to the city, despite the rash promise I had made her last night in the heat of desire and after too many glasses of plum brandy? And when she got to Prague, what then? Her mother and her brother might take her in, but since they were living there in secrecy they would be loath to draw attention to themselves, even for the sake of a daughter and a sister. And then again, there was the question of Caterina Sardo. What would she say and, more importantly, what would she do, when she saw me with a girl in tow? Diligent dissembler though I was, I knew my Caterina, she of the sharp eye, and sharper claw.

  I had returned to the dining hall, and was sitting at the bare table there—where was that boy with my breakfast?—grappling with these delicate questions, when Sir Kaspar came in, gaunt and crapulous still. He seemed in something of an uncertain state himself, and went about the room fiddling at things—raking the cold embers in the fireplace, pouring out a mug of water, stopping at the doorway to stare out into the courtyard, all the while whistling faintly, tunelessly, to himself. In the end I lost patience.

  “For God’s sake leave off foostering, sir knight!” I snapped. “If you have something you wish to say to me, then say it.”

  He came and sat down at the table, not looking at me but letting his bloodhound’s mournful gaze wander here and there.

  “It’s the runt,” he said—“what’s his name?”

  “You mean the dwarf, Schenckel?”

  “Aye, the dwarf.” He picked at the grain of the table with a horny thumbnail. “I went up to the Doctor’s room, to his cell, you know, just to have a look about—”

  “Why?” I said. He peered at me, frowning. I kept my patience, and asked again: “Why did you go to his cell?”

  He shrugged, lifting one shoulder high, and once more let his gaze wander.

  “Just to see that everything was—that everything was in order, and so on. Anyway, the dwarf was there before me.”

  “Oh, yes?” I straightened on my chair, laying my hands flat on the table. “And what was he about?”

  He leaned forward with a confiding squint.

  “He had been searching.”

  “Searching?”

  “Through the Doctor’s things, you know—his papers, and that.” He paused. “I reckon he had already found something, for as soon as he saw me he turned aside, fussing at his doublet, and then turned back to me and put on a haughty look and asked why was I there and what I thought I was doing.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said you had sent me, to tidy things up and see that all was in order.”

  “And did he believe you?”

  He grinned, which, with his long head and his great discolored teeth, gave him for a moment a remarkable resemblance to a horse.

  “What matter if he did or didn’t?” he said. “What is he but the Emperor’s buffoon?”

  “Did you challenge him on whatever it was he had taken?”

  Again he grinned.

  “I thought I’d leave that to you, Herr Doktor,” he said.

  Norbert the page boy, who looked to be recovered somewhat from the night’s excesses—though his swollen eye, all purple and yellow, was a thing hard to look at—came to announce that he could find not a scrap of food anywhere in the castle. The servants, having heard of the Doctor’s death, had apparently fled and gone into hiding in the town.

  I swore, and turned to Sir Kaspar.

  “What about the carriage?” I asked. “Are we set to leave?”

  “The carriage is prepared,” he said, “but the ostler left the horses unfed, and I doubt they’ll consent to travel without their grub.”

  “Christ God!” I exclaimed. “What a country this is!”

  The old knight nodded sagely.

  “You’re in the right of it there,” he said. “Not the place at all, for us folk from the German lands.”

  After another search I came upon Jeppe Schenckel in the muddy courtyard, leaning on his stick beside the coach, putting on the air of one who has been kept waiting long and is impatient to be off. The sun was higher now, glinting strongly amid the scudding clouds, throwing down splashes of pale radiance and then withdrawing into shade again. Our driver had hitched up the horses, which had their muzzles deep in nosebags of feed the fellow had managed to find somewhere.

  The dwarf kept up his bland look and would not meet my eye.

  “What did you take from Kelley’s cell?” I demanded. “And don’t say you took nothing, because you were seen.”

  He glanced narrowly in Sir Kaspar’s direction, then looked back at me. It was clear he intended to brazen it out.

  “I know not what you are talking about,” he said. “What thing am I supposed to have taken?”

  The page boy, lounging in the doorway, looked on with an expression of lively anticipation: there was a promise of trouble in the air. Even the fat coach driver had paused in his tightening of the horses’ belts and buckles to give us his attention.

  “I ask again,” I said, “what did you take?”

  “Pish, sir!” the dwarf answered. “Who am I to stand here and be interrogated by the likes of you?”

  Behind him, Sir Kaspar, with unhurried deliberation, drew his broadsword—it was a fear
some weapon—and turning the blade flatwise struck the dwarf a ringing smack athwart his shoulder blades. The dwarf, letting go of his cane, threw up his arms and with a grunt dropped heavily onto his crooked knees, his face twisted in pain. He knelt there, swaying, until Sir Kaspar, with a terrible grin, stepped forward and put a foot into the small of his back. Crying out, “Down, dog!,” he pushed him over, and the little man collapsed onto his face in the mud.

  Behind us, Norbert the page boy gave a shout of laughter.

  The old knight lifted his foot again and jammed his sole down on the back of the dwarf’s neck, pinning him in the mire, and turned to me merrily.

  “What say, sir, I slice off a bit of him?” he asked eagerly.

  “Enough!” I said, holding up a hand. “Enough, now.”

  It gives me no pleasure to see a man squirming on the ground with another man’s foot on his neck, whoever he is or whatever ill he has done. Besides, if it was some document Jeppe had filched from Kelley’s cell, and it was inside his doublet, the mud would soon be getting at it.

  The old knight, plainly disappointed that there was to be no more fun, reached down and, saying, “Upsy-daisy,” hauled the dwarf upright and set him on his feet.

  Schenckel’s face was a mask of mud, though which his eyes shone with a murderous fury.

  I held out my hand.

  “Give it to me,” I said. “Whatever it was you took from the Doctor’s desk, give it to me, now.”

  22

  It was noon before we managed to get going at last, in a ragged caravan consisting of our coach, with Sir Kaspar, Norbert the page boy, and the dwarf inside, and me sitting aloft next to the driver to act as lookout—and, if I am honest, so as to be out of sight of the dwarf in his humiliated and vengeful state—while behind us came a cart drawn by a moth-eaten mule, with Dr. Kelley’s corpse placed upon it, wrapped in a canvas shroud. I had urged Elizabeth Weston to take my seat in the coach and let young Norbert have charge of the cart, but she had insisted that she must be the one to drive her stepfather on his last journey. Turning from me with a face set in stone, she had stepped up to the driver’s seat, spurning the hand I put out to assist her, and cracked the cart’s reins as if they were a pair of whips. Her things were packed in a leather bag at her feet.

  The dwarf was indeed a sorry spectacle, all soiled and bruised and smarting with pain. Taking pity on him before we left, Elizabeth Weston had led him into the castle and cleaned him up as best she could. Yet he remained a wretched sight, and I felt a little sorry for him myself, and somewhat ashamed, too, at having let him be so harshly treated. But after all, he had sought to deceive and betray me.

  What he had removed from among Dr. Kelley’s papers—all of which, I know, I should immediately have secured as soon as I had heard the Doctor was dead—was a clutch of some dozen thin and yellowed sheets of parchment, with holes punched along the left side and bound loosely together with cord into a sort of untidy chapbook. The pages were covered all over, in minuscule script, with a strange hieroglyphic of letters and symbols that I could make nothing of. When I pressed the dwarf to tell me what the thing was, and why, out of all the mass of documents on Kelley’s worktable, he had taken it alone, he refused to answer, and turned away from me with a face fully as cold and unyielding as Elizabeth Weston’s.

  Now, as we set off on our slow way towards Prague, I took the pages from my satchel and pored over them closely once more. The writing, in two separate columns, seemed to be some kind of cipher, made up of Roman, Greek, and Hebrew letters all jumbled together with numbers and many strange symbols that I could not identify.

  Had this document, I wondered, been among Dr. Kroll’s trove of precious papers? Had Kelley overlooked it and failed to destroy it when he burned all the others? Surely that was what Jeppe Schenckel had taken the document to be.

  After an hour of fruitless wrestling with the puzzle, I suddenly understood. It was only when I laughed that I realized how little cause or opportunity I had for laughter in those days.

  The thing was not a code at all, but the key to a code—two codes, Elizabeth’s and Wenzel’s. I laughed again, bitterly this time. So that was Kelley’s final, cruel joke: he gave the coded letters to Madek, but not the keys to break the codes. That was what Kroll had come here to find, but he had failed—he could not have been much of a torturer, that Kelley could hold out against him.

  If the journey up to Most had been hard, the return was ten times worse. Along with the bad roads and the mud left by the storm, our broken-down horses, and the vile way-stations we were forced to stop at, there was for me the constant consciousness of that cart trundling along behind us, with its grim, shrouded cargo, and the unforgiving young woman driving it.

  Also the weather had worsened, and for many leagues we endured driving showers of snow and icy rain that stung my face and numbed my hands. Beside me the fat coachman, swathed in a filthy and evil-smelling fur cape, ignored me and complained to himself endlessly in a low, sing-song mumble.

  The Ohře, when we came to it, was in spate, and this time I thought we must surely perish as we crossed the rickety bridge. We were just past midway when I heard from behind me a terrible cracking sound; turning, I saw the left wheel of the funeral cart on the point of sinking back into a jagged rent it had made in the boards of the bridge. But Elizabeth Weston was a woman of spirit, and with a shout and another whipcrack of the reins across the mule’s haunches she drove the animal to a greater effort, and the moment was saved.

  We stopped again at Louny, but this time found better quarters within the town walls. We passed a tolerable night there, although Elizabeth Weston still kept her face turned against me, while the dwarf, poorly and in pain though he was, again refused to get down and instead elected to sleep in the coach with his cape wrapped round him, as he had done on the way up.

  I made sure that Elizabeth Weston had a clean and comfortable room, and bade her good night. The only reply I got was the sound of her door slamming in my face.

  I knew well why she was angry with me—how would I not know?—and I even sympathized with her, to a degree, and felt the guilt of it to a greater degree. But I was not the cause of her stepfather’s death. True, it was my task to bring him back to Prague to face the Chamberlain’s questioning, and likely more than questioning—the rack stands always ready and serves all masters equally. Yet I believed it was not the Chamberlain whom Kelley had feared most, but his own former ally and fellow conspirator, Felix Wenzel. For it was Wenzel whom Kelley had betrayed by putting into Jan Madek’s hands the means with which to menace the High Steward—with which, indeed, to destroy him, if he chose.

  In the end all Kelley’s stratagems had come to dust. He had served Wenzel faithfully, had diligently acted as his go-between with the English Queen. He had guarded his secrets, aided his cause, supported his interests. But he had known in his heart that Wenzel one day would betray him, and cheat him of all he had been promised.

  The next morning in Louny, I commissioned a pair of saddled horses and sent Sir Kaspar and the page boy ahead of us to Prague, to carry the news of Kelley’s death to Chamberlain Lang. I thought it prudent that he be forewarned of the ill tidings being borne towards him, trussed up in a canvas shroud.

  Yet still my chief concern was what I should do with Elizabeth Weston when we reached the city. I had hoped she might be able to join her family, her mother and her brother, wherever it was they were living in secret in the city. But this, she gave me to understand, she had no intention of doing—evidently there was no love lost between her and her relatives. As to what she did intend to do, that she would not say either.

  We were a league or so short of the city when, realizing I could put it off no longer, I called our little caravan to a halt and got down and went back to speak to her where she sat on the driving seat of the cart, red-eyed and shivering.

  “Mistress Weston,” I said, “Elizabeth—you must tell me what you plan to do in Prague, how you intend to live, an
d where.”

  Silence.

  There had been more rain but it had passed, and the twilight was windy. Behind her the sky was a blaze of cold yellow light low in the west.

  I tried again.

  “My dear”—that brought an outraged glare—“I cannot arrive at the castle with you and your stepfather’s corpse on this cart. I don’t know what manner of welcome we are to expect, but I can guess it will not be warm. I wouldn’t wish you to suffer by association with me. I was charged with transporting Dr. Kelley back to Prague to be questioned, instead of which all I can produce is his lifeless body. Let me lodge you somewhere safe, until I have had time to fix the matter, as best I can. These are dangerous times, and Prague is a dangerous place.”

  Silence again, and that stony frontwards stare.

  I lingered, yet not knowing what else to say to her. She sat motionless, hunched and white-faced, with the reins loose in her hands. It grieved me that she would give not the least acknowledgment of what we had been to each other, however briefly, while the gale raged about us and she reared and writhed in my arms, caught up in her own tempestuous throes. I might have reminded her of how fiercely she had clung to me, of the passionate kisses we had exchanged, of the tears that had suddenly burst from her at the crest of our embracing, and of the sighing languor in which she had lain beside me, afterwards. There were a hundred things I could have spoken of, feelingly, tenderly, but that rigid face and the cold rejection in her stare silenced me.