Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  “Did you not hear—” I began, but she put a finger to my lips and silenced me.

  “I heard nothing,” she said. “No one is there. Shush now, shush, and hold me, so. That’s right. Now put your hand here, and feel the wetness, yours and mine.” She hummed a tune in my ear, a tender little lullaby. “What sweet music we make together, you and I, yes?” She giggled, and squeezed her thighs tight around my hand that was trapped there, and turned onto her side and pressed her cool damp bosom against my chest. “Don’t you hear it”—she giggled again—“the music of the spheres?”

  I moved aside from her, freeing my hand from her steamy lap. There were swaths of shadow under the ceiling, and a sliver of winter sunlight burned whitely in a crack in the shutters.

  Wolf on a string, I thought; wolf on a string.

  And a little later, when she had dressed herself and was leaving, I opened the door for her and, looking down, saw with a spasm of fright the corpse of my poor cat, my dear old Plato, stretched out at the threshold, with his throat sliced open and his blood spread all about him in a gleaming crimson pool.

  My mistress gave him no more than a glance—she had never liked him—and lifted the hem of her skirts as she stepped over his lifeless form.

  “Good riddance,” she said. She gave me a cold stare and was gone.

  I gathered up what remained of the creature and wrapped it in a piece of rag: how insubstantial it was, hardly more than a scrap of fur and a few lengths of stringy sinew. I carried it down to the Stag Moat, half blinded by tears—a soft heart was always one of my weaknesses—and interred it under a big round stone beneath a myrtle tree.

  I was making my way up the steep bank when I saw a figure sitting on the cold, hard crest above me, watching me approach.

  It was Don Giulio, Caterina’s uncanny son.

  He greeted me in his grave, elderly way, and I stopped and sat down beside him. He had his legs drawn up and his arms folded about his bony knees. He was wizened and thin-limbed, with a sunken chest; his hands, however, were man-sized and greatly disproportionate to the rest of his frail person. I could see nothing in him of his father, and little of my mistress, his mother, except a way he had of holding his head slightly to one side, as she did, as if listening to something far-off and faint. He wore a black jerkin and black hose and narrow black shoes with pointed, upturned toes; his close-cut, dead-seeming yet shiny hair looked like a cap of fusty black satin pulled down tight upon his skull.

  His eyes—have I mentioned his eyes? They were small, deep-set, pale, and somewhat glassy. They always seemed to me not to belong to him, somehow: to be in fact the eyes of some other, even stranger creature than himself that was hiding crouched inside him, spying out upon the world through two pale-lashed, pink-rimmed sockets neatly cut into the clay-white mask that was his face. His gaze had an unnervingly fixed quality, and when he blinked, which he did infrequently, it seemed more a sort of start, as if he were registering involuntarily some small internal shock.

  He asked what I had been doing, and I told him, and he nodded.

  “They say that cats have nine lives,” he said. “That was not so of this one, it would seem?”

  “He was a stray,” I said, “and attached himself to me. Who knows how many lives, and deaths, he had before this one?”

  He thought on this for some time, with a solemn frown.

  Even looking at him up close, I would not have ventured an estimate of his likely age. He could have been a young man but seemed not to be; nor was he a boy. Indeed, what he appeared most like was a child that had remained a child and yet at the same time had grown old and frail and feeble. His hands, I noticed, those enormous hands of his that looked anything but frail, had a queer faint tremor; in fact, he seemed to tremble in every part of him, as if he were quaking ceaselessly within.

  “I am sorry for your cat,” he said. “I mean, I am sorry for you, to have lost it.”

  I thanked him for his consideration. He had turned away and was looking at the sky.

  “Clouds are peculiar, don’t you think?” he said. “Like so much cannon smoke.” He blinked, and twitched, and then went on: “I have been studying the Battle of Lepanto. Did you know the Turks poured oil on the sea and set it alight, so that those sailors who threw themselves overboard from burning ships were boiled to death?”

  “No,” I said, “I did not know that.”

  He gave a low laugh, not much more than a sort of wheeze.

  “Few do know it, I find,” he said. “I know a lot of things like that. I remember things. I have a good memory.”

  He unwound his arms from about his knees and stood up.

  “Does it seem strange to you, a name such as yours?” he asked.

  “I don’t believe so,” I said. “I’ve never found it strange. But then, I am well accustomed to it.”

  He was above me now on the bank, and I was looking up at him, shading my eyes against the hard blueness of the winter sky. Standing there, the young-old creature seemed no more substantial than the slow floatings of the luminous clouds behind him, and I felt, for an instant, as if something cold and sharp had touched me, the tip of some pointed, shimmering thing, a needle, or a narrow blade that punctured me with infinite delicacy, causing no pain and leaving only an invisible mark.

  “I must go now,” Don Giulio said.

  And he walked away, with his light, quick, almost hopping gait.

  18

  The next morning early, Chamberlain Lang sent a closed carriage to call for me. I went down in the dawn light and there it was, waiting in the courtyard. There is always something sinister about a stopped carriage, I find: a presentiment, no doubt, of the final journey. Neither did I like the look of the brace of piebald nags that would pull it—they might have been rescued from the shambles—and I wondered if they were up to the journey. I am a city man, and the thought of being stranded in the middle of some awful plain, amid wild nature, chilled my blood.

  I had expected to travel alone, but when I climbed into the carriage I discovered there the pustular page boy with the yellow stockings, his cocked hat in his lap, and beside him a melancholy-seeming old scarecrow of a fellow with a yellowed mustache and a rheumy eye. The page, called Norbert, was to act as my valet, while the other, a knight by the name of Kaspar von Kratz, in scuffed boots and a fur-lined leather coat that reached to his ankles, was meant to be—well, the truth is I never found out exactly what he was meant to be, but since he was armed with a flintlock and a sword I supposed that I must think of him as my bodyguard.

  They had brought with them provisions of bread and cheese and cold sausage, on which they were now breakfasting. The cheese was ripe, and the smell of it, at such an early hour, made my stomach heave.

  “You look poorly, sir,” the old knight said. He rooted about in a bag on the floor between his feet and came up with a flagon of wine, and offered it to me. “Here, restore yourself with a swallow or two of bull’s blood.”

  I looked at the neck of the flagon and the old boy’s moist and sagging lips and said my thanks and pushed the vessel aside. This, for some reason, caused Norbert the page to give a spluttered guffaw, which resulted in him spraying my sleeve with a scattering of spit-soaked bread crumbs.

  It would be a trying journey; that much was clear.

  Nor was our complement yet complete. We were going out by the castle gate when the carriage drew to a sudden stop. I looked out at the window and there was Jeppe the dwarf, in a heavy black cape and buckled shoes and his witch’s conical black hat. Another spy! He saw the surprise in my look and was amused.

  “Good morning, Herr Professor,” he said, and swept off his hat and bowed.

  No one but Jeppe Schenckel could address me as Professor and put into the word so pointed a note of mockery and wry disdain.

  The driver, a fat and surly fellow, got down from his high seat with many sighs and muttered oaths and put his hands under the dwarf’s elbows and lifted him up and bundled him into the carriage,
and we went on again.

  The dwarf took his place beside me, squirming and flouncing. He inspected our two companions with a deprecating frown.

  “Ah, I see we are four,” he said. “Where shall we put Kelley? On the roof?”

  Sir Kaspar had greeted him with a shaky salute, which he had ignored. Young Norbert, his mouth full of bread and sausage, was gazing at him in fascination, with bulging eyes, and prudently I drew back my sleeve for fear of another spattering of sticky dough.

  Of all the people who might have been sent to accompany me on this mission, Jeppe Schenckel was the last one I would have expected. Why was he here, and on whose orders? He looked aslant at me now, working again that eerie gift he had of reading my thoughts.

  “I am lent to you by His Majesty,” he said, adding, with a straight face: “He thought you might lack for companionship. Although as it is”—he eyed again the motley pair opposite—“you are amply provided for in the way of company. My my, but the Chamberlain thinks of everything.”

  So Rudolf had sent his man to keep a watch on me. It was hardly surprising, since Rudolf trusted no one. But should I believe it? Nothing in Prague was simple; nothing was ever as it seemed. It was to Dr. Kroll’s house that the dwarf had led me that first day. Was he Kroll’s creature, too—was he Wenzel’s? It could have been any one of these—Rudolf, the Doctor, the High Steward—who had deputed him to accompany me. And to what purpose? My mission was to go to Most and bring back Edward Kelley to Prague. What danger could there be in that, to necessitate my being spied upon and guarded?

  All that long day we made our way northwards, following the western bank of the Vltava. It was upland country, desolate mostly but with glades and passages of frost-laden beauty that made me think of my Bavarian homeland.

  The roads were middling good, but our horses were old, and the going was slow and difficult. The dwarf hardly spoke, only sat beside me in his finery—his ruff, his lace cuffs, his silver buckles—like one of those lifelike manikins in Rudolf’s wonder rooms. I believe he had the gift of sleeping with his eyes open.

  As the day wore on I was aware of old Sir Kaspar’s gaze wandering in my direction now and then, with a sharpness in it I had not thought him capable of. Was he yet another spy, and if so, what was his mission? What momentous matter awaited me at Most that I should need such watching?

  Fear rose in me like black bile, a burning bubble in my breast.

  At noon we stopped at a dirty inn where I knew better than to touch the pike-perch pie we were offered—I had already smelled it before we entered through the low door. The wine at least was drinkable, dark ruby in color and peppery on the tongue. I like the wines of Bohemia; what they lack in subtlety they make up for in robustness. I wish I had some here, in this cold northern refuge where I have come to a sort of rest at last.

  Jeppe Schenckel had not bothered to get down with us from the carriage, but remained sitting there by the window, his gaze fixed calmly before him. I envied his composure, unnatural though it was. But then, was there anything natural about that man?

  Soon we were on our way again, in the direction of Mělník, where the Vltava and the Elbe merge. The old knight and the page boy played an endless and to me incomprehensible game involving a wooden board with holes in it and small wooden pegs that they moved here and there with great speed and dexterity. They kept trying to cheat each other, amid much hilarity, the boy spluttering and the old man rumbling and coughing and wiping his eyes with his fists. Their merriment grated on my nerves; I tapped my foot impatiently, crossed and uncrossed my arms, and loudly sighed, all of which signs of my annoyance they ignored, or perhaps did not even notice.

  Between bouts of uneasy sleep, I passed the tedious hours by trying to gather together in my mind the disparate strands of the mystery at the center of which I was floundering. I knew I must somehow solve it; increasingly I was convinced that in the end no less than my life would depend on it. For Rudolf I had at the outset been the miraculous star come to his Bethlehem, a harbinger of wonders. But in the weeks since my advent I had proved less than a wonder worker, as I had anxiously to acknowledge. How far would His Majesty’s patience stretch, how long could I hope for his tolerance to endure?

  The task I had been assigned, onerous though it was, at first had seemed straightforward. Rudolf had taken to himself a new young mistress, and the young man who loved her had set up a protest so clamorous that it had cost him his life—so, at least, I had reasoned. Then the young man’s beloved in her turn had died, at whose behest and by what hand I still knew not. There was a court full of candidates for me to choose from—any of Rudolf’s intimates, as likely a friend as an enemy, could have ordered the girl’s death. Chamberlain Lang, for one, might well have sent the assassin forth that December night. Caterina Sardo had revealed to me how Felix Wenzel had as good as pushed the girl into the Emperor’s arms. Why else would he do so except to set a spy in the seraglio? And if that was the case, and Magdalena Kroll was indeed Wenzel’s informant, I felt certain that Chamberlain Lang, had he learned of the ploy, would not have hesitated to be rid of her. As for Caterina Sardo herself, what was there to prevent me from thinking she might have murdered her usurper, except that she had me so helplessly entranced?

  I thought and thought again, and gradually, as we rattled and lurched along those frozen roads, a new notion formed itself in my mind. In the beginning I had taken it that Jan Madek had cut the throat of his faithless girl; then I had discovered that Madek had been the first to die. That had puzzled me, but still it had not occurred to me to doubt that the two deaths were directly linked. But what, I asked myself now, what if there was no connection between them at all? Perhaps my philosophical belief in the hidden unity of all things had deceived me in this case—perhaps I had not given randomness its due.

  If I had been baffled at the start, so had others been. I recalled Wenzel questioning me that night after I had been dragged from my bed at the Blue Elephant. I could see even then that he did not know, any more than I did, who had killed Magdalena Kroll. And then there was Dr. Kroll’s strange start of surprise, or so it had seemed, when he heard Wenzel demand of me if I knew the whereabouts of Jan Madek. Had the Doctor an inkling that Madek was already dead?

  If Magdalena Kroll was no part of Madek’s death, then why had he died? What had he known, that had to be tortured out of him? What had he seen, that in consequence his eyes had been put out?

  Late that afternoon, as the carriage made its way towards Most and my thoughts churned, my eyes met those of Sir Kaspar. From the opposite corner of the coach he was watching me now with a hooded gaze, a gnarled hand gripping the hilt of his sword. Another thought came to me, as alarming as anything that had gone before. What if the knight was not a spy at all, but something far more sinister? Maybe I was not meant to return from Most; maybe my traveling companion was also my executioner.

  We were still some way short of Mělník when our driver turned the carriage sharply westwards, and soon we reached the Ohře and followed it as far as Louny. We lodged for the night outside the town, at a staging post the condition of which I forbear to describe, except to remark that this time it was not lice I had to contend with, but a squadron of fleas.

  Jeppe Schenckel took one look at the place and declared he would sleep in the coach. That creature could sleep on a bed of nails if nothing better was on offer.

  The next morning, hitched up to a new pair of horses not much less decrepit than the old ones, we crossed the river by a wooden bridge that creaked and cracked in such loud protest I feared it would give way under our weight. I was amazed that in the end it held.

  It was late afternoon when we arrived at Most, a handsome little town at the foot of a wooded hill, its clustered rust-red roofs glowing in the last of the day’s pale sunlight. The narrow streets were busy, and I was glad to be among such bustle and cheerful sounds after two long, weary days on that desolate road.

  We made our way through the town and out at the oth
er side, and hauled our way up Hněvín hill, atop which sat the castle, an unimpressive pile with a vile-smelling moat and a single, blackened tower set on the southern wall. As we entered by the main gate chickens ran squawking from under our horses’ hooves, and a pig lying in a patch of pale sunlight gave us a disdainful stare out of its little pink eyes before heaving itself up and trotting out of our path.

  When we had pulled up in the courtyard, our driver went in search of an ostler, and we four passengers got down and stretched our legs.

  By now even Jeppe Schenckel was looking travel-worn and dusty, and there was a dent in his conical hat. Leaning on his ebony cane, he glanced about the shabby square, sniffed, and then pronounced the place a dismal hole.

  Sir Kaspar walked a little way off from us and let go a tremendous fart, about as loud as the firing of a small cannon. Grinning, he gave himself a doggy shake. The page boy scratched his pustules.

  By now my mind was a little more at ease; this place seemed altogether too mundane to die in.

  There appeared then a brisk young lady about my own age. She was severe of aspect, with a sharp little face and large dark eyes. This was Elizabeth Jane Weston, Kelley’s stepdaughter. She wore a long white apron, her sleeves were rolled up, and her hair was covered by a white linen cap. She had been churning butter—“We are abandoned here to fend for ourselves as best we can,” she informed us—and was in no mood to be hospitable.

  “Have you come to release my stepfather?” she demanded. “It is about time.” I told her he was not to be released, but that Chamberlain Lang had sent us to fetch him back to Prague. “To Prague?” she snapped. “For what reason?”

  “The Chamberlain has questions he wishes to put to him,” I answered.

  At this she pressed her lips tightly together and glared at me from under her black, heavy brows.

  “Dr. Kelley cannot travel,” she said. “He is crippled and sick.”

  “The Chamberlain will not be balked, madam,” I said.