Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  At the house in Golden Lane the stove had gone out, but Serafina soon had it blazing again. It was bitterly cold, and we had not taken off our coats. I sat down at the table and rubbed my eyes. I was weary, in the aftermath of the wine and my dealings with the mutilated corpse of young Jan Madek, and thought was not easy, though I had many things to think on.

  I believe I dozed again for a little while. When I woke, the stove was warming nicely and had taken the chill off the air.

  Now I looked up, and Serafina was standing beside me. I rose to my feet. She was so much the littler of the two of us, bright-eyed as a blackbird.

  I had tried to get her to understand me, speaking in both German and in Latin, but she had only smiled at me, shaking her head slowly and sadly. Perhaps she only understood Italian, a language of which I had no more than a word or two. I mimed my gratitude—the stove was blazing strongly now—but she shook her head again. There was to be, it seemed, no communicating with her, not by way of words, at any rate. She looked about, searching for something to write on, and, finding nothing, leaned forward across the table and in the mist on one of the windowpanes drew with a fingertip a rough figure of a man, and beside it that of a girl, kneeling, with bowed head. I turned to her in puzzlement; smiling and biting her lip she lowered her head, like the figure on the windowpane, and joined her hands before herself.

  It took some time, with more signs and smiles and encouraging nods, before I understood her meaning. She was telling me that she was happy to be here, and that while she was here I had only to indicate to her what I wished her to do and she would do it. Her innocence touched me, but made me shiver, too. I thought of Jan Madek, eyeless on the bank of the frozen stream; he too had been young, he too had thought the world a simpler and a gentler place than ever it was, is, or will be.

  The first task Serafina undertook—without my asking, need I say—was to clean my hair, for my stay at the Blue Elephant, short though it was, had left me with a healthy and ever-burgeoning infestation of lice.

  I was doubtful about this procedure—I am one of those who does not care to be touched overmuch—but Serafina heated a kettle of water on the stove, and had me sit on the side of the bed and lean over a dish which she had placed between my feet, and poured the water over my hair and scrubbed a solution of oil and lye into it with her fingers, which were surprisingly strong. Next she brought a chair to the stove and had me sit there while she plied a fine comb, crooning softly to herself. I smiled to see her hold the comb up to her eyes and peer at the harvest of squirming creatures she had collected from my scalp, frowning and shaking her head and making a deprecating sound with her lips. Afterwards, when she had done with my hair, she leaned close over me—she had a sweet warm fragrance—and with a tiny pair of copper calipers plucked the last of the lice out of my eyebrows, although I had not even known they were there.

  She made herself very busy that first day. I noticed that she seemed familiar with the little house and the things in it, but I did not give that much consideration at the time. She made my bed and swept the floor, and folded my clothes and put them away in a cupboard by the stove. She took up the bowl of stew the potboy had fetched from the Blue Elephant, which I had left standing on the table and forgotten about. She carried it outside, wrinkling her nose at the stink of the rotten meat, and emptied it into the drain.

  She had taken off her coat while she was working, and now she put it on again, and touched my arm as a sign that she was leaving. I took her hand, however, and led her to the table and made her sit. The night was fast deepening and I had lit my oil lamp. I wished very much to hear her say something, though I knew it was impossible.

  What did I want from her? Love-making, the vigor and comfort and pleasure of her young body? I think not, not really. Instead, I was overcome by a sense of sweet melancholy. Serafina’s presence there in the little house had made me realize how lonely I had been, for a long time; I fear I had, in those young days, a lamentable tendency towards self-pity. Being motherless, I had always a craving for the company of women. But I was wary of them, too. A woman had been the main cause of my precipitate departure from Würzburg. A young lady of the town had developed a passion for me, a passion I had been foolhardy enough to reciprocate, or pretend to. Mathilde, she was called, Mathilde Westhof. Her father, Matthias Westhof, was a powerful figure, being the college chancellor. There had been a scare when for some weeks Mathilde thought herself with child. Although in the end it proved not to be the case—she was a fanciful girl—I judged it wise to bring the affair to an end and absent myself from the city, using the deaths of my foster parents and the mortal illness of my father the Bishop as an excuse for flight.

  For all that, I still missed my Mathilde, who was sweet-natured, though somewhat too clinging for my taste. Had I married her it would no doubt have pleased her father, but I’m sure that in the end it would have frustrated my ambitions and hindered me in my work as a scholar. Do not judge me too harshly; I was young, and callous, and single-minded—I saw myself as a second Erasmus in the making—and now I am old and soft and sit daydreaming by the fire, up here on the frozen shores of the Baltic.

  Serafina was nothing like the buxom Fräulein Westhof, yet her presence had brought the lost and distant dear one sweetly to my mind, and now we sat there, the mute girl and I, gazing at each other helplessly in the flickering lamplight, two sad souls lost in wordless need.

  At last she rose and touched my face lightly with two fingers—it seemed a blessing, or even a sort of kiss—and went to the door and was gone.

  The coach, I realized too late, had not waited for her, otherwise I would have heard the sound of it departing. She would have to walk all that way down the hill and across the bridge and into the tangled heart of the Old Town. I pictured her hurrying along through the wintry gloom, alone and defenseless, and cursed myself for a careless scoundrel.

  I sat down again at the table. The figures she had drawn on the windowpane were still faintly visible, two vague shadows, somewhat together, in the twilight.

  11

  The next day I sought, and was granted, an audience with His Majesty. I had spent a sleepless night, writhing and sighing on my couch in the corner, preyed upon by all manner of fancies and fears, as the red eye of the stove dimmed and the darkness closed about me entirely. Strange to relate, the sight of Jan Madek’s bloated corpse had affected me more strongly than had the discovery of his beloved Magda Kroll lying dead in the snow. The girl had been a stranger, unknown and by now forever unknowable, but somehow the young man seemed—not familiar, that’s not the word I want—but plausible, yes, frighteningly plausible. By which I suppose I mean that I could easily have been as he was, a parcel of whey-like flesh dumped on a river bank with a knotted leather cord biting into my swollen neck.

  When I arrived at the castle I was conducted to the Great Hall, where I found the Emperor standing alone before one of the big square leaded windows, looking down at the city. He wore a heavy, dark cloak and a tall hat studded with jewels. Under the great dome of the ceiling a vast stillness reigned, and my footsteps echoed loudly as I walked with a solemnly slow, respectful tread towards him down the length of the hall; I had learned to be careful always to approach him as if for the first time, so capricious was he and so unpredictable his temper.

  He had heard me, I knew, yet he kept his back turned to me. I stopped. The silence about us seemed to vibrate. A faint mist pervaded the farthest corners of the enormous room. So large a space was it that markets were set up there at Shrovetide and Christmas, and sometimes even tourneys were held, the mounted knights pounding up and down the straw-strewn floor with lances bared, while spectators on either side cheered and waved their caps.

  “Your Majesty,” I said, “the young man that was found yesterday, the drowned young man, Jan Madek: you know he was”—I hesitated—“you know that he was acquainted with Fräulein Kroll.”

  He nodded slowly, still not allowing himself to turn from the window
, as if he could not bring himself to face me, as if he could not bear to take more cognizance of me than the little he had taken so far.

  There was a long silence. I cleared my throat. Should I speak again? I wondered. But before I could, he did.

  “Look at them,” he said, “our subjects, so many strangers.”

  I waited. Still he did not turn, but remained facing the window, stoop-shouldered, gazing down upon the city, like a child studying an ant hill.

  “I suspect, Your Majesty,” I said, speaking very slowly and softly, “that the young man is the one who murdered Fräulein Kroll. I think he killed her out of jealousy, and then was killed himself—by whom, I do not know. This is what I believe.”

  How did I expect him to respond? I wished that he would turn, so that I might see his expression and perhaps guess what he was thinking. He had directed me to find the girl’s killer, and now I was confident I had done so, although the mystery of Madek’s own death remained. Could he not say something? Anything?

  He sighed, his shoulders drooping deeper.

  “I used to go among them,” he said. “I would put on commoner’s apparel and have myself brought down in a plain carriage to the Old Town, where I would walk about, disguised. Strange, to be noticed by no one, like that. I might have been a ghost, the ghost of myself. I felt happy and at the same time afraid—of what, I don’t know. Perhaps I thought I would lose myself, and never return. Yet it might have been a joyful release, to be gone, simply.”

  He stopped. The stillness shimmered; I seemed to see it, like an undulation in the air about us.

  “Your Majesty,” I began, determined to have something from him, some acknowledgment of what I had said so far. At that moment he turned with such abruptness, his cape swishing, that I retreated a startled step, convinced he meant to strike me. Indeed, in my mind’s eye I saw him draw back his arm in a rage and slash his hand across my face.

  But on the contrary, and to my great astonishment, I realized that he was smiling.

  “Come,” he said, with sudden, boyish eagerness, extending a hand and taking me lightly by the arm. “Come, we shall show you our wonder rooms.”

  He led me out of the palace and across the snowy courtyard. I could hardly match the swiftness of his pace, as he trotted along on his little stout legs, his cloak trailing behind him and his tall hat askew. After passing under an archway, we climbed a broad stone staircase to an upper floor of the Long Corridor, which connected the royal living quarters to the northern ramparts, where the building of the Spanish Hall had lately been completed.

  “Now you shall see,” he muttered eagerly. “Now you shall see!”

  Much has been spoken and much written of Rudolf’s fabled collection of objects rich and strange. Yet no one who has not walked though those magnificent, cluttered rooms can begin to comprehend the majestic madness that lay behind the amassing of so many treasures and so much trash. In four successive great chambers were gathered countless of the world’s rarest artifacts, along with the most tawdry of curios, all jumbled up together. Cabinets reaching halfway to the ceilings contained drawer upon drawer of precious stones and ancient coins, quaint figurines molded in gold or carved from ivory, jasper, jade. There were bezoars—gallstones, that is—plucked from the innards of animals and men, said to be a guard against poison and the plague; there were skeletons, dried foetuses, fossils, feathers of gaudiest shades; there was a unicorn’s horn as long as a man’s arm, and the jawbone of a siren, polished and delicate as a seashell; there was a life-sized statue, worked by an intricate hydraulic mechanism within it, that moved its limbs and sang a strange, droning song.

  Each room revealed things increasingly rare and wondrous: I was shown a nail from Noah’s ark, and a grain of the earth from which God had fashioned Adam, the first man. Pictures stood against the walls—dozens upon dozens of them propped one on top of another and even suspended across the ceiling—by his court painters Spranger and Sadeler, by Dürer and many other masters, including Arcimboldo, whose fantastical portrait of Rudolf as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons, in the form of vegetables, fruits, and flowers of many varieties, was displayed most prominently. There were shelves of precious books, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, the Geographia of Ptolemy, the great Codex Argenteus, containing Bishop Ulfilas’s ancient Gothic translation of the Bible, a priceless volume which Rudolf had borrowed from the abbey of Werden in the Rhineland and had never returned.

  The Emperor was fascinated by the fluctuating line that separates animate and inanimate, human and beast, flesh and mineral. In one of the rooms were kept all manner of mechanical apparatuses, lifelike figures and clockwork dummies, a wax figurine that would weep when exposed to the sun, the mummified corpse of a hermaphrodite child, a pair of Barbary apes that His Majesty insisted could count up to a hundred by beating their fists on the floor of their cage. By the time we reached the fourth room, in which was stored a trove of the most ingenious and exquisitely crafted astronomical instruments, my head was spinning.

  There had been time for me to examine no more than a fraction of this vast and bewildering collection when Rudolf, who at first had been full of childish eagerness and glee, suddenly lost interest in showing off his treasures. With an impatient gesture he turned on his heel and made his way back as we had come. I imagined he wished to speak with me further about the death of Jan Madek, but all thought of Madek, and even of Magdalena Kroll, had seemingly been banished from the royal consciousness. That was how it was with Rudolf: his gaze so often was directed away from the main prospect and fixed upon things at the side, the inessentials.

  We were passing again through the second room, which housed his lesser collection of pictures, when I happened to glance aloft. High up on one wall I spotted what struck me as a particularly lifelike portrait. It was a head-and-shoulders study of a woman: she was pale, with a broad brow and sharp chin and somewhat protuberant eyes, and her reddish-gold hair was gathered into a long and fashionably untidy braid. The bodice of her gown was low, showing off her long, slender neck and the smooth, creamy upper slopes of her bosom. Her lips, dark pink and voluptuous, were turned upwards at their outer corners in a faint and, as it seemed, a knowingly penetrating smile. She was looking downwards, so that her gaze seemed to meet mine directly, and indeed as I walked on, still looking back and up, her eyes followed me in a most uncannily realistic fashion.

  At the doorway I paused, letting Rudolf go ahead of me, and turned back to snatch a last glimpse of the woman’s strange and striking image. But to my consternation, I saw that the portrait’s frame was empty.

  Of the many amazing things I had witnessed today, this surely was the most astonishing of all—a picture that could make itself go blank, in the twinkling of an eye! What powerful magic could there be that would work such a wonder?

  I peered up at the wall more keenly, and now realized that I had not been looking at a picture after all. It was a window, small and square and edged with an ornamental stucco frame, giving onto the return of a staircase, where a woman, a real one, of flesh and blood, had paused to glance down at me with that faint and coolly quizzical smile, before passing on, out of the frame.

  12

  When I had got over what forever afterwards I thought of as the Wonderment of the Window and followed Rudolf out through the doorway, I found that he was nowhere to be seen. I went down the stone staircase and passed under the archway into the great courtyard, but still there was no sign of him. I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck. Had the wizards in his employ discovered a spell whereby he could disappear himself, as thoroughly and abruptly as the woman had vanished just now from that little high-up window?

  I stood in vague perplexity, looking about and asking myself what I should do. I was still uncertain of court etiquette—but then, was I ever to be certain of it?—and was conscious that His Majesty had given me no opportunity to take my leave of him; did that mean I was free to quit the castle precincts, or must I wait, in case
he should reappear, as suddenly as he had vanished, and, finding me gone, think me careless, if not downright insolent? I had a vision of another squad of soldiers coming for me, this time to the little house in Golden Lane, and marching me back to that jail cell in the tower on the wall and leaving me there to rot.

  I heard a light step behind me and turned, greatly relieved, expecting to find the Emperor there. It was not His Majesty, however, but a young woman, a servant, with a little pink-tipped snub nose and her hair in thick braids wound in spirals at either side of her head.

  “If you please, sir,” she said, with what I strongly suspected was a smirk, “my mistress wishes you to come to her.”

  “Your mistress?” I said.

  “Yes, sir. Please, come this way.”

  She turned, and I followed her back under the archway and up the stone steps.

  At the top of the staircase we passed the door to the wonder rooms, then walked along a short corridor and up another, steeper flight of stairs. On the return, halfway up, there it was, as I expected, the window giving onto the room below where the Emperor’s pictures were stored, the little window through which I had glimpsed the woman regarding me. Looking down, I in turn saw standing there, in exactly the spot where a little while ago I had stood, a person, a stranger, looking up at me, just as I had looked up at the woman. I glimpsed him only briefly, in the second or two while I paused at the window, yet I had an intense impression of him, of his assured stance and bold stare. But what a creature he was. I could not have said if he was man or boy. He had a boy’s stature, delicate and slight, but his face—ah, that queer, ageless face! He had shiny black lifeless hair cut short, and small, dull eyes out of which he considered me coolly and, so it seemed to me, in a peculiar fashion, somehow at once penetrating and indifferent.