Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

I returned to the coach and ordered the driver to drive on. In the end I realized there was but one place I could take her, and even there I was not sure what sort of reception might await her.

  Soon the city gates came in sight. The winter day was fading fast.

  The Nuncio was at his dinner and would not be disturbed; so said the ruddy-faced novice who opened the door to me at the nunciature. I was in no mood to observe the niceties, however; pushing her to one side, I strode into the hall and set off in the direction of the dining room. In the street I had left a corpse on a cart, attended by a drenched and despairing young woman who, to my alarm, was beginning to show signs of fever. No, I was in no mood to be hindered or refused.

  The novice, Sister Maria, trotted after me, twittering anxiously. I paid her no heed.

  Malaspina was seated at the long marble table, in front of a platter of roast goose, with a goblet of wine the size of a ciborium at his elbow. He showed no surprise when I pushed open the door and appeared before him.

  “Buona sera, signor Stern!” he said, smiling fatly, and gestured with his knife for me to be seated. I remained standing.

  The two fires facing each other were lit, and the air throbbed with their heat.

  “I have come from Most,” I said. “Dr. Kelley is dead.”

  “Is he now?” the Nuncio said. “Did you kill him?”

  “I believe he took his own life.”

  “Dio mio!” He made a sign of the cross on the air. “I shall pray for him, although self-murder is a grave sin.” He smiled again. “Do be seated, Doctor. I hate to be stood over—mi rende nervoso—and you are so tall. You will take some wine, some food, perhaps?”

  “I want nothing,” I said. “Nothing for myself, that is. The Doctor’s corpse is on a cart outside your door, and his stepdaughter is with him.”

  “His stepdaughter?”

  “Elizabeth Jane Weston.”

  “Ah, sì, l’inglese inglese—la poetessa.”

  “She needs shelter, she requires care—the journey was hard, and I think she has the fever. Will you take her in?”

  At this his smile faltered a little. “La febbre?” he said. “The fever, that is bad.” But he quickly recovered himself and waved his knife. “Prego, signore—please sit.”

  I walked to the fireplace, the one to the left, the one where he and I had sat after our mighty feast that day when the Emperor’s borrowed coach had carried me here. I held out my hands, red and mottled from the cold, to the warmth of the crackling flames.

  “So, Bishop,” I said, “will you offer her sanctuary?”

  I heard him sigh. He set down his knife and fork.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said. “Tell me why you were at Most.”

  I was gazing into the white-hot heart of the fire. The world has such extremes, of fire and ice, of space and depth, of adamantine hardness and gossamer insubstantiality—how is it we are not terrified every moment of our lives?

  “Chamberlain Lang sent me there,” I said. “I was to transport Dr. Kelley back to Prague.”

  “Oh, yes? For what purpose?”

  “The Chamberlain wished to question him.”

  “I see.”

  I had stood with my back resolutely turned to him while he spoke, but now I went and took up my place opposite him, on the other side of the table. Still I would not sit.

  Nothing I had said had surprised him. Had he known already of Kelley’s death? Most likely news of it was all over the city by now—it was evening, and Sir Kaspar would have arrived not much after midday.

  “Let me bring Mistress Weston in,” I said, “if only to warm herself here at the fire.”

  He lifted his shoulders and held out his soft little hands, showing me his palms, as if to say, Of course—I have no choice!

  Outside, a cold rain was falling again, so fine it was hardly more than a whisper in the air yet sharp as a shower of needles tipped with ice. When we had arrived, Elizabeth Weston had not wanted to be parted from the corpse of her stepfather and had attempted to remain on the cart; but I would brook no resistance, and took firmly by the arm and put her into the shelter of the coach. Earlier, as we’d reached the Stone Bridge, the dwarf had left us and hobbled off without a word into the twilight.

  Now in the coach the young woman was sitting slumped against the frame of the window. Her eyes were closed, and I could hear her rapid breathing.

  “Elizabeth,” I said. “Come, here’s a place for you to stay.”

  I touched her hand; her skin was on fire. She looked at me and seemed not to know who I was.

  The Nuncio had come to the door of the coach and greeted her with unctuous courtesy.

  “You are welcome, signora,” he said. “Sister Maria will look after you. We shall put you into a good room on the secondo piano, where you will be warm and safe.”

  She turned to me, though still she refused to look me in the face.

  “My stepfather,” she said weakly, in a sudden agitation, “what of him?”

  “Do not worry, poverina,” the Nuncio assured her, “the good sisters of the Church of St. Peter, which is close by, will take charge of him. They will wash him and lay him out, with candles and flowers, and they will pray for his eternal salvation. Come, now, come inside.”

  She tried to hold back, but she had not the strength to resist any longer and at last allowed me to help her down from the coach. She stepped weakly into the hallway, where the plump nun took her by the arm and led her away. She did not look back.

  “And you, dottore,” Malaspina said to me, “what shall you do, now?”

  “I must go to the castle,” I said, “to deal with Chamberlain Lang, taking my long spoon with me.”

  He frowned quizzically. “Il tuo lungo cucchiaio—che cos’è?”

  “It’s a saying,” I said. “Dr. Kelley reminded me of it. ‘To dine with the devil you must use a long spoon.’”

  “Ah, sì, certo.”

  He smiled, his little dark eyes almost disappearing into the folds of flesh surrounding them. “Dio ti benedica,” he said, “God bless you,” and he made the sign of the cross again, though not without a touch of irony.

  “God help me, rather,” I said.

  The driver was asleep, slumped in his stinking cape, and swore when I woke him. He cracked his whip. We moved on, leaving the cart behind; the canvas, wet from the rain, had molded itself to the shape of the corpse that was wrapped in it.

  As we turned the corner, I looked back. Malaspina was still in the doorway; he lifted a hand in farewell.

  I had forgotten to inquire after Serafina.

  So many things I had not done.

  23

  A vast and brooding silence reigned throughout the castle. It was as if everything—the furniture, the tapestries, all the piled-up treasure in the wonder rooms, even the very walls—were suspended in an anxious hush, not daring to make a murmur. All this was due to the Emperor, who was sunk deep in one of his darker melancholic moods and had not been seen since I had left for Most. He had sequestered himself in the innermost of his private chambers; not once had he come out, even to dine. At morning and evening, trays of food and drink were left at his door. Some he took inside, others he left untouched, and of the ones he did take in, he ate little of what was on them.

  In the Royal Palace I walked through vast echoing halls; it never ceased to puzzle me that a place that housed so many people could so often seem so empty. At my approach, lurking servants scuttled away into the shadows, quick and soundless as silverfish. I was in search of the Chamberlain, and at the same time wishing I might not find him. No doubt he too, like Elizabeth Weston, would hold me responsible for the death of Edward Kelley. In the Chamberlain’s conception of things, there must always be someone to blame; culpability—the culpability of others, that is—seemed, for him, to maintain a necessary equilibrium, like the weights in a scale or the pendulum of a clock. It was a stratagem, aimed, no doubt, at staving off the prospect of the inevitable day when h
e himself should be called to account.

  Tonight even the Great Hall, always such a busy center of gossip and intrigue, seemed deserted. Halfway along that majestic space, however, I spied Jeppe Schenckel perched on the stone bench in one of the window embrasures, looking down upon the lights of the city, his hands folded one over the other on the knob of his cane and his misshapen, stout little legs drawn up under him.

  He was as changed as could be from the last time I had seen him, kneeling in the mud at Castle Hněvín and looking every inch a troglodyte. Now his hair gleamed like a cap of grooved pitch and his jaw was shaved to a shine as bright as that of his shoes. He wore black hose and a jacket of scarlet silk, complete with a ruff and starched lace cuffs. He was entirely his accustomed smooth and polished self again. But I could sense his anger: it made the air seem to vibrate around him.

  Looking back now, I think I was always afraid of Jeppe Schenckel. Or is that the word for it—afraid? I am not sure. He was, for me, the very emblem, the very figure of Prague itself, gaudy, sinister, and deformed. I knew that in his heart he harbored an evil intent against me, one that had sprung up long before that moment at Most when Sir Kaspar’s sword blow knocked him sprawling at my feet—oh, long before. It had been there from the start, from that first day when he was dispatched to escort me to meet the Emperor at the house of Dr. Kroll.

  But what was it that he hated in me? It is true, he loathed everyone—loathed the world itself in which he was condemned to be a freak. But for me he reserved an especial animus, and I felt the force of it always like a harsh hot wind against my face. I had in a manner usurped him, although this notion, when it first occurred to me, caused me puzzlement and dismay. When I thought upon it I saw that it was true. What was I for Rudolf but another diversion, another amusement, another jester?—another freak.

  I stopped. I knew he had heard my step, but he did not turn.

  “Have you come to return that thing you took from me?” he asked, keeping his gaze fixed upon the lights far below, flickering and flaring in the darkness. I said nothing, and went on saying nothing, until at last he stirred himself, but only to cast a sidelong glance contemptuously in the direction of my knees. “I suppose you mean to give it to His Majesty yourself,” he said, “to prove anew your loyalty and devotion.”

  “It is not the thing you thought it to be,” I said. “You were mistaken.”

  He turned about fully to face me now, untangling his legs from under himself and letting them dangle halfway down the stone front of the bench.

  “It is the thing,” he said, “or at least one of the things that His Majesty charged me with finding, and bringing back to him. Charged me, mark, not you.”

  I laughed, which made him frown.

  “I tell you,” I said, “you were mistaken—you are mistaken. You thought those pages were part of Dr. Kroll’s great collection of magical nostrums, which His Majesty coveted. They were not. They are not.”

  The dwarf’s large, pale face was flushed with anger.

  “How wise you think you are,” he said. “But you know nothing.”

  “Some things I know, many things I do not,” I said. “But in this one thing I am right. Kelley burned Kroll’s papers, all of them.” I took the bound sheets from inside my doublet and held them aloft. “There is no magic here,” I said.

  He looked at the pages, his eyes aglow. Then he smiled, with cold malice.

  “You are lying,” he said.

  “I am not lying,” I responded. I folded the parchment sheets and put them back in the deep pocket I had taken them from. “I say again—this is not magic.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s better, I think,” I said, “that you should not know.”

  He watched me out of his cold, glass-green eyes. I could see him thinking, judging, calculating.

  “Things are happening,” he said softly. “Matters are coming to a head.”

  “Matters?” I asked. “What matters?”

  He was smiling again.

  “I tell you,” he said, very softly now, “I tell you, you know nothing. You think you do, but you do not.” He paused. “Kroll’s dog was slaughtered—did you hear?”

  “His dog?”

  “Yes, old Schnorr—you remember him? His throat was cut, just like Mistress Kroll’s. They say the creature’s head was nearly severed from the trunk.” He rolled his eyes in mock horror. “There is a fiend abroad,” he whispered.

  I was about to speak again, but stopped. For some reason there had come into my mind the image of Serafina, in her heavy coat, seated beside me in the coach that first day when Malaspina sent her with me to the house in Golden Lane. Perhaps the dwarf was right; perhaps I knew nothing, and all the nothings I knew might be the end of me.

  I could lose everything—in the blink of an eye, everything could be gone.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and turned to see Chamberlain Lang approaching with that strange quick-stepping, gliding walk of his, like a wading bird rapidly treading through the shallows.

  “Ah, here you are, Herr Doktor,” he said, beaming at me and rubbing his hands, as so often. He glanced at the dwarf and in a different tone said, shortly: “You, creature, be gone.”

  Schenckel dropped down from the bench. Bowing and simpering in a parody of obsequiousness, he poled himself away on his ebony cane, casting back at me a last malignantly mocking glance.

  “Look at the brute,” Lang said to me. “Were he not His Majesty’s pet fool, I should have him weighted with a stone and sunk in a cesspit.”

  We moved to the window and stood side by side, looking out. It was fully night now. A scant flurry of snow swirled against the glass.

  “So, tell me, Herr Doktor,” the Chamberlain said, “tell me what happened”—he gave a shudder of feigned horror—“in all its awfulness.”

  “We arrived at Most,” I said, “where I informed Kelley that you had sent me to fetch him back to Prague, that there were questions you wished to put to him.”

  He chuckled.

  “Why, then,” he said, “you must have spoken to him very harshly, for him to do as he did and make away with himself. Or was he testing to see if he could fly?”

  “He believed he would be tortured, sir, if he returned here.”

  “Oh, did he, now.”

  “I think he would have died anyway, before long. There was black rot in one of his legs, and the other one was grievously damaged too.”

  The Chamberlain waggled his head in comical dismissiveness.

  “Yes, the fellow was forever falling down,” he said. He drummed two fingers against his lower lip, frowning. “And you, where have you been, all this time? I hear you arrived in Prague many hours ago.”

  “I would have come to you sooner,” I said, “except there were matters I had to attend to.”

  “Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure,” he said smoothly. “We all know what a busy fellow you are.” He put an arm around my shoulders in that exaggeratedly fraternal way of his. “Come and sup with me,” he said, “will you? You must be in need of refreshment, after your long journey.”

  “Sir,” I said, “tarry a moment.”

  He paused, and took his arm from around my shoulders. Grasping me by the sleeve, he held me a little way away from himself, fixing me with a quizzing eye.

  “That is a serious look,” he said. “I think I like it not. What further things have you to tell me?”

  I brought out the folded sheets of parchment and handed them to him.

  “What’s this?” he asked, flicking through the pages and frowning.

  “It was among Kelley’s papers.”

  “Oh, yes?” he said absently, scanning the columns of numbers and letters. “But what manner of thing is it? I can make no sense of it.”

  I hesitated.

  “Jeppe Schenckel had got hold of it, but I took it from him.”

  “The dwarf?” he said, glancing towards the door where Schenckel had gone out. “Why would he take it?
What’s it to him?” Again he tapped his fingers against his lips. “But of course, he is Wenzel’s pet ape, and trained to do his master’s bidding.”

  “He claimed to have seized it on His Majesty’s behalf.”

  At this the Chamberlain leaned back his head and gave a hoot of laughter.

  “His Majesty is far from such matters at the moment. This seems to be one of his deeper bouts of heartsickness. He calls it his wolf, did you know that? My wolf has his fangs in me, he says, and shivers and shakes. His wolf—ha!”

  “Wolf on a string,” I murmured.

  He threw me a keen glance.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Wolf on a string—a musical term. It came into my head.”

  “Ah. Right.”

  His mind was elsewhere. He examined the parchment chapbook again, holding it so close to his face that it almost touched the sharp tip of his nose. “It is written in a code of some kind, is it?”

  “I suspect, sir,” I said, “that it is, rather, the keys to a set of codes.”

  He looked up and gazed at me, though without seeming to see me, the cogs of his mind turning and turning.

  “The keys to a code,” he said, “and Wenzel’s man snatched it up. But what codes does it solve? Perhaps it’s the dwarf we should subject to a little light torturing. Who knows what nasty wriggling secrets might spill out of him.”

  He moved closer to the window, and looked again at the muffled lights of the city. Snow was still falling, but at random, half-heartedly. Time passed. The hall in which we stood seemed to me a vast lung, silently breathing. I thought of Elizabeth Weston. I thought of her stepfather’s corpse wrapped tight in its drenched canvas shroud.

  When there are sides, Felix Wenzel had said, down in the Stag Moat that day, you either choose, or the choice is made for you.

  I had known, all along, without knowing I knew, that sooner or later this moment would arrive, when I should have to place myself alongside either Lang the Chamberlain or Wenzel the High Steward. The choice should have been easy. Wenzel it was who had seized me, who had accused me of murder, who had threatened me with the rack, while who was it but Philipp Lang who had plucked me from his clutches?