Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  It was a question at court as to why Sir Henry was in Prague at all. He gave it out, to anyone crass enough to inquire, that he was bound for Italy, to process some business at the Vatican on behalf of James of Scotland—but Prague was hardly a way station on the road to Rome. His chief patron, the Earl of Essex, had earned the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth after a disastrous campaign in which he was supposed to have quelled the unruly Irish but had failed. I speculated that perhaps the wily envoy had thought it prudent to quit his native land and take himself off for a while to a distant and safer place, until the royal lady’s choler had cooled and his aristocratic master was out of danger. It was said that Essex in a rage had half drawn his sword on the Queen: “He lost his head yet kept his head,” as Chamberlain Lang had put it to me, with a wink.

  But for all the polish of Wotton’s manner, I could see from a glint of urgency in his eye that there was something he hoped to have of me.

  “Do you know the countryside round about?” he asked, in a mild, conversational tone. “I imagine it’s very fair, especially in springtime.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “But I’ve seen little of it myself—Regensburg is my place of birth, and I’ve not traveled much here in Bohemia.”

  We had skirted the cathedral and were walking down the cobbled incline past St. George’s Basilica. The Englishman seemed deeply preoccupied.

  “Are you familiar with the town of Most?” he asked.

  Aha, I thought, now I have your drift.

  “I have not been there, no,” I said.

  “How far away from Prague is it, do you know?”

  “Some five and twenty leagues, I believe. May I ask why do you ask?”

  Oh, how innocent I made myself sound!

  I noticed to my surprise that we had come to Golden Lane—that street seemed to work magnetic powers on me, although it was weeks since I had moved from there to far grander quarters up here on Hradčany hill.

  “That’s where I lodged,” I said, pointing to the familiar door, “when I first came to Prague.”

  “And when was that?” Sir Henry inquired, without, it was obvious, the least interest in knowing the answer.

  “Not very long ago,” I said. “I arrived last month from Würzburg, where I had been a scholar.”

  We had stopped before the little house which used to be mine, and which I gazed upon now with some emotion, thinking of poor mute Serafina.

  “You have been in Prague only since then?” Sir Henry exclaimed, in exaggerated wonder. “So short a time, in which to have risen so far!”

  I could see from his quick frown that he regretted having spoken so unguardedly; I imagine wincing is what a diplomat most often finds himself doing. But after all, he was right. The swiftness of my ascent was a source of constant surprise to me, as well as constant, secret misgiving: the loftier the perch, the farther there would be to fall.

  “So, Most,” Sir Henry said, with the air of one hurrying to change the subject. “Most is quite far off—five and twenty leagues, you say?”

  “I believe so, yes,” I answered.

  “Hmm. But there is perhaps a good road?”

  “Are you intending to travel there?” I asked.

  He hesitated again. “I should require a permit, I imagine?”

  “Yes, most likely.”

  “And who would issue it?”

  We had come to the end of the lane. A scudding cloud covered the sun; it was as if a lamp had been blown out.

  “If you wish, Sir Henry,” I said, “I can inquire of His Majesty’s Chamberlain.”

  “Oh no no no no no no no,” he said hurriedly, lifting his hands in soft protestation. “I’m sure His Excellency Herr Lang has matters of far greater importance to attend to—I would not dream of troubling him with such a trifle.”

  We stood in the cloud’s shadow, the Englishman frowning and absently fingering a scrap of ribbon on the front of his doublet. I knew now why he had come to Prague, and why he wished to travel to Most. That was where the sorcerer and spy Edward Kelley was held captive, at the Emperor’s behest, in a prison cell set high on the wall of Castle Hněvín. But why should such a lofty gentleman as Sir Henry Wotton wish to talk to the likes of Kelley, disgraced and locked away as he was?

  Up on the hill, the cathedral bell began to chime.

  “Ah, is that the hour?” Sir Henry said. “I must leave you, Herr Doktor, for I have a pressing appointment at the castle.”

  He lifted his hat and bowed, with an oily smile, and hurried away.

  I walked back to my former abode and tried the door, but it was locked, and I had long ago misplaced the key. With my hands at either side of my face, I peered in at the cobwebbed window, as once Jeppe Schenckel had peered in at me. Inside, it seemed as empty as it had been the morning I moved out.

  It was Caterina Sardo who had effected my transfer to new and, as she said, more suitable quarters at the castle.

  “This will not do!” she had exclaimed one day, as she was putting back on her gown. “There’s not even a proper place for me to do pee-pee!”

  And so the next morning, after I had quitted the house, with Plato the cat tucked under my arm, the Chamberlain’s men came back, as covertly as before, and took my things and transported them up to the castle, to a room in the Northern Wing, hard by the Foundry there, a room with tall windows that looked out over the Stag Moat and the spot where Jan Madek’s corpse had been found in the frozen stream. There was an ornate desk for me to work at, a table with carved legs for me to eat my supper on, and a canopied bed for me to sleep in, that bed where, on lazy, love-drunk afternoons, Caterina Sardo would join me in secret.

  This love of mine was mad, of course, but oh, so sweet. Or no, not sweet, for Caterina had a bitter taste. For me our passion was as a deep draught of some dark and instantly intoxicating liquor. And drunk I was, my state of mind a constant, terrified euphoria. I was like a condemned man on the gallows, looking all around at a fair and sunlit prospect, forgetful of the noose about my neck, a silken noose so soft I could hardly feel it, the noose that, when the terrible moment should come, would snap tight and quench me forever.

  Caterina ridiculed me for my fears.

  “Oh, Rudi is too much engrossed in his toys; he won’t find us out,” she would say. “And even if he does, he will not care. He loves you more than he loves me—more even than he loves our children, the ones he deigns to acknowledge.”

  She made a joke of the gap in age between us. She would say I must think her a hag, and then lie back and smile to hear my earnest assurances that she was the freshest, loveliest, altogether the most captivating creature it was my miraculous good fortune ever to have held in my arms. In truth, to me her flesh had a slightly tarnished texture, but, however unnatural it may seem, this tarnishing was the very quality in her that most excited and enthralled me. She would lie languidly in my arms like a large pale soft-skinned doll that had been toyed with overmuch. Then at other times she would seem to retreat from me into a feline stillness, and turn her back on me, inert and indifferent.

  I itched to break through the carapace of her amused disdain. She never said she loved me without laughing.

  It delighted her to provoke me. “Go on,” she would say, “strike me—I won’t feel it. And if I do, I shall like it anyway.”

  It was she who chose and paid for my new clothing, who had directed me to cut my hair and grow my boyish beard, and plaited with her own fingers the lovelock that hung over my shoulder. At times I felt like a doll myself, a manikin for her to play with, to dress and undress, to tease and scold, to fondle and, at the end of it all, put hotly to bed.

  Of those offspring of hers, hers and the Emperor’s—Philipp Lang once said to me, with a grim laugh, “She has not children, but wolf cubs”—she would not speak, and kept them from me. It angered her if I so much as mentioned them, not that I often did; I was reticent especially in the case of that uncanny man-boy Don Giulio, whom I had first glimpsed that day when, on th
e way to my initial encounter with his mother, I looked down from the little window on the return of the stairs and saw him in the picture room, looking up at me as earlier I had looked up at his mother.

  Caterina’s rages were always a sudden incandescence. She would shriek and spit and kick, cursing me in Italian; then a minute later she would fall to her knees before me and implore forgiveness, raking her nails down my chest and cursing herself for a fool, a madwoman, a strumpet—“Oh, I am a bad, bad girl!”

  She made me tell her of every woman I had ever known and loved. I was unwilling at first—not least, if truth be told, because there had been so few—until I saw how it stoked her passion to hear of my loves in precise, in dirtiest, detail. She would watch me avidly as I spoke, her eyes glittering, her lips moist and slightly parted, each breath flowing from her more as a slow, silent moan.

  From Rudolf’s well-stocked library she would bring books, coarse and obscene texts by Aretino and his like, which she would have me read aloud to her while she lay beside me with her skirts around her waist, lazily pleasuring herself.

  She was a priestess of passion, to which she gave herself with narrow-eyed concentration and cold delight. On one of the first occasions when we lay together in the house in Golden Lane—I’m sure if I were required to, I could recall and recount in perfectly framed images every single one of those occasions—she stood up naked from my sleeping couch and turned to say something to me, and for a moment the wintry sun in the window made a radiant soft wheel of light about her head. It was then that I realized how closely she resembled the painted Venus who had stirred me to secret desire that day in Bishop Malaspina’s house. I believe that inside every man there is hung a stylized portrait of the ideal woman, a model against which to measure this or that flesh-and-blood mortal he holds in his arms. Caterina Sardo was no vision of perfect loveliness—her skin had a slightly sallow cast, her breasts and belly were no longer those of a young woman, her legs were thin and touched each other at the knees—yet to me she seemed the being towards whom I had been yearning all my life and at last had found, my tainted sweetling, my darling succubus.

  It was to her I went after my encounter with Sir Henry Wotton; it was to her I always went when I was troubled or in need of advice. I did not realize it at the time, and probably should not admit it now, but of course one of the springs of my love for her was the fact that, with only a little adjustment, she might have been my mother.

  She was in her sewing room that day, with, as always, Petra and her two other young ladies-in-waiting—I thought of them as the Happy Harpies. When I entered she dismissed them, and they went off tittering and simpering as usual. Dear Christ, I would often think on those occasions, my heart clenching in fright like a fist, what if one of them should have a mind to betray their mistress and me?

  She patted the cushions beside her and bade me sit.

  “The Englishman?” she said, nodding. “Ah.” When she was thinking hard, her lips would become pale and thin and her eyes would narrow. “We must tell the Chamberlain of this; it’s a thing he will wish to know.”

  “Would he allow Sir Henry to travel to Most?” I asked.

  She laughed softly, this time shaking her head.

  “Certainly not,” she said, amused at my simple-mindedness. “Wotton is the most watched man in Prague—after you, that is.”

  “I?” I said, with a rush of alarm. “Am I watched? By whom?”

  Again she laughed.

  “By everyone, my dear and darling fool!” she exclaimed. “No one has been known to rise so swiftly in favor here since—why, since the days when Kelley’s master, the magician Dee, so captivated poor Rudolf and made a dunce of him.”

  I walked to the window, thinking hard myself, now.

  For all my newfound foppery, within myself I was as uncertain and as fearful as ever. I had made not the slightest advance towards discovering who had murdered Magdalena Kroll, and each way I turned I found myself facing blankness and confusion. I received only vague or plainly evasive answers from everyone I spoke to who might have been expected to know where the girl had been and what she had been doing in the hours before her death. By some she had been seen that evening in the vicinity of the Emperor’s private quarters; others swore they had glimpsed her in a carriage traveling towards her father’s house in the Old Town. But Rudolf assured me she had not been with him that day, while her father insisted he had not seen or spoken to her at all in the week before she died. Yet she must have been somewhere, she must have been doing something, before she was seized upon and slaughtered.

  As to Madek, I had early on come to the conclusion that his death had been ordered by the Emperor himself. Had the young man not gone about the city abusing Rudolf, calling him a tyrant and a monster and even muttering threats against the throne? What king would countenance such behavior in a wild young man whose beloved girl that same king had cavalierly taken from him?

  Then, over the days devoted to the celebration of Christ’s birth, Rudolf appeared to lose all interest in the affair, and ceased even to mention the name of Magda Kroll. However, I was by now familiar enough with him and his ways to know that his attention was like a river that plunges underground and disappears only to gush forth again at some other place. The day would come when I would be called before him and required to account for myself and say what progress I had made in solving the mystery of the girl’s death. And how then should I reply? That I had failed, and failed again, to discover the merest clue as to who had murdered her, and why.

  One morning I was summoned urgently to the Throne Room. There I found my master pacing the floor agitatedly and waving a sheet of paper in his hand. It was a letter he had received from Madek’s father, begging His Imperial Majesty to deliver justice to his son by finding and punishing his destroyer.

  “What shall we answer him?” Rudolf softly wailed. “What shall we say?”

  I took the letter, telling him I would answer it, which, I’m compelled to confess, I had no intention of doing—what should I say, any more than Rudolf?

  Nevertheless, he was glad to be relieved of the burden of writing to the bereaved man, as I knew he would be.

  These days he had other matters to concern and, I hoped, to distract him, not alone at court but in the detested wider world. The rivalry of his brother Matthias, for instance, who coveted the throne, and the constant agitations fomented by his young cousin Ferdinand of Austria, scourge of the Protestants, were a never-ending source of anxiety and torment to him. He cared nothing for their plans and ambitions; only he wished they would leave him in peace, with his ivories and enamels, his basilisks and bezoars, his myriad of clocks as they steadily ticked away the dragging hours of his jaded life.

  I too had other tasks to occupy me. Rudolf in his whimsical way had one day decided to charge me with overseeing the labors of the royal alchemists in the numerous laboratories and workshops housed in the Powder Tower. Also I had, again at the Emperor’s instigation and insistence, embarked on an ambitious text devoted to a detailed interpretation of certain passages on the transmutation of metals in the work of Albertus Magnus, that dubious savant who was one of Rudolf’s obsessions at the time. These tasks I found irksome in the extreme: the Powder Tower turned out to be a nest of schemers and scoundrels, while Albertus Magnus was as dry as dust.

  As will be apparent, much of the shine had worn off my initial captivation with Prague and all I had taken it to represent. Rudolf was a demanding taskmaster, as capricious in private affairs as in public ones. He would work up an enthusiasm for this or that topic or author, maintain it passionately, then pass on restlessly to some new source of wonder, some new promise of revelation and final enlightenment.

  As for myself, I had grown secretly to disregard many of the things His Majesty held most dear. Towards alchemy in particular I nursed a deep and incurable skepticism; now that I had ample opportunity to observe it in operation and was forced to deal with its operators, I came to the conclusion t
hat half of them were mad and the other half rank fraudsters. And all of them were swollen on self-interest and quaking in fear of being found out.

  Do not mistake me: I still held fast to my conviction of the hidden order of the world and the interconnectedness of all things. Only I no longer believed that the great code could be uncovered by the likes of that collection of crackbrains pent up in the Powder Tower, who passed their days like spellbound goblins, feverishly immolating metals and producing by their labors nothing more than little piles of smoking black dust. They were a tormented lot, and sometimes I almost pitied them. Their world was a mass of potential transformations, in which nothing was stable and nothing could be controlled. It was, for them, as a handful of mercury, and everything they thought to grasp slipped through their hapless fingers.

  Of course, I allowed myself to show no sign of these doubts and disillusionments to Rudolf, who was as gullible as he was haunted, and whose innocent faith in his wizards I would not have dreamed of destroying, even if I had possessed the power to do so. Yes, I had rapidly learned to dissimulate as subtly and as skillfully as any of the courtiers around me, whom in my deceitful heart I despised.

  Yet I never felt safe. The thought was always in my mind that one day, sooner or later, Rudolf would tire of me, when some newer star rose in his firmament. And if he banished me, would I be banished also from his mistress’s bed? In thrall to her though I was, I had no illusions as to the fastness of Caterina Sardo’s attachment to me, for in her way she was every bit as capricious as Rudolf himself.

  When I dwelt on these things I would feel that noose of silk about my neck draw another notch tighter.

  “You must talk to the Chamberlain,” Caterina said behind me now, drawing me out of my reverie. “You must alert him that Wotton aims to meddle. You will not be thanked if you don’t speak and the Englishman is allowed to work his wiles.”

  I turned to her, meaning to say something, but she silenced me by taking my hand and guiding it to her breast.