Wolf on a String

by Benjamin Black

  Kelley’s corpse was in a side chapel, laid out on a bier, his clasped hands resting on his chest. The rag that had bound his jaw had been removed. One of his eyes was not quite closed, and I could see the eye itself, filmed over and reflecting a tiny speck of candlelight.

  One of Malaspina’s big-boned novices, Sister Maria, was seated on a chair beside the bier. She was asleep, softly snoring, her chin resting on a bulging circlet of flesh at her throat.

  I stepped quietly into a pew and sat down. After a time, my heart ceased thumping and I could breathe more calmly. My mind was littered with scraps and shards, and I could keep nothing straight. Terror crouched inside me on its haunches, trembling and alert, like a creature at bay, listening for the sound of the hunt.

  At length I found the courage to venture forth—Sister Maria continued deep asleep—and skulked along in the shadow of the houses, keeping out of the moonlight. I stopped often to listen, but heard no sound; for now at least, I had escaped my pursuers.

  I went to the nunciature. Although it seemed to me it must be the middle hours of the night by now, I found the Nuncio awake, reclining at ease in his big armchair by the fireside, reading Virgil. Seeing me, he put the book away and rose and came to me.

  “Dio mio,” he said, “are you wounded?”

  I did not understand him.

  “So much blood,” he said. “Look!”

  It was strange: I had no recollection of touching the corpse of Dr. Kroll, and yet I must have, for the Nuncio was right: my hands were crusted with dried gore, and the front of my doublet was smeared too.

  “It’s not mine,” I said. “It’s not my blood.”

  “Then whose?”

  This was how things happened in dreams, but it was no dream.

  A basin of warm water was brought, and I cleaned myself as best I could. How pink the water in the basin was, the pale blush-pink of rose petals.

  “I went to Dr. Kroll’s house,” I said, still gazing into the basin. “He was murdered—someone stabbed him in the throat.”

  “Gesù!” the Bishop murmured, making the sign of the cross.

  From somewhere far off in the house came the sound of viol music, the same phrase over and over; late though the hour was, one of the novices was practicing.

  “Mistress Weston,” I said, “how does she fare—has the fever abated?”

  “No, it is bad still,” Malaspina said, “but she will live. Serafina is with her.”

  “Will you take me to her?” I asked.

  He led me along the hall and up the staircase. On the stairs he puffed and panted, shouldering the burden of himself from one step to the next like Sisyphus pushing his impossible rock.

  In the sickroom an oil lamp with a red glass shade diffused a dim glow, pink-tinged like the bloodied water in the washing bowl. Elizabeth Weston lay on the bed with her eyes closed. Her cheeks were livid and swollen and her forehead shone with sweat. I looked at her damp hair spread around her on the pillow, and thought of Magdalena Kroll and the gleaming black halo in which her lifeless head had rested. Serafina sat beside the bed on a three-legged stool. She did not look at me. She was bathing the sick woman’s forehead with a damp rag.

  On the middle finger of her left hand, she still wore my mother’s ring.

  Elizabeth Weston groaned in her sleep, jerking her head from side to side, and then grew quiet again.

  I stood at the side of the bed. The Nuncio had departed.

  Serafina stared at the dark stains on my doublet. She allowed me to take her hand. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  “Serafina,” I said. “Serafina.”

  Elizabeth Weston opened her eyes and stared wildly at the ceiling, tossing her head again from side to side.

  “Ego autem cantabo dissolutio,” she recited hoarsely. “In interitum mundi…”

  I stayed there for a long time. Serafina and I took turns bathing the sick woman’s burning forehead, her cheeks, her throat. She would lie still for long intervals, seeming hardly to breathe. At other times she twitched and thrashed, throwing her limbs about, muttering and crying.

  The Bishop sent up to us a bowl of broth and a loaf of bread, dried figs, a round of cheese, a flagon of wine. Serafina laid out the food on a little table in the corner, and we sat down to eat in the gauzy pink lamplight, while Elizabeth Weston slept and breathed.

  I dozed too, for a little while, after I had eaten, cradling my head on my hands on the table.

  When I woke, the table had been cleared. I straightened, wiping away with my fist at a line of spittle that had dried on my chin. Serafina was sitting by the bed again. She had fetched a clean bowl of water and a fresh cloth.

  I told her how I had found the Doctor dead in his chair and the old servant weeping at his feet. I told her of the soldiers who had tried to apprehend me, and how I had fled from them, racing through the city as in a dream. I knew she understood nothing of what I said, but it did not matter. I remembered her playing with Plato the cat; I did not tell her how I had found the poor thing dead outside my chamber door.

  Downstairs, the Nuncio was asleep in his armchair; the volume of Virgil had slipped from his lap and lay open on the floor. Ego autem cantabo dissolutio …

  I raked the embers of the fire and threw on some kindling and a couple of logs. When I turned, Malaspina had woken and was watching me with his gleaming little eyes. I brought up a chair and sat down, facing him.

  “Jan Madek came to you,” I said, “when he returned from Most—that’s so, isn’t it?”

  For a time he made no reply, only went on studying me, sprawled fatly there in his chair. I could not make out his expression. At last he stirred himself and, grunting, struggled more or less upright.

  “Madek,” he said, with weary disgust. “That young fool.”

  He turned his gaze to the fire, where white flames were licking at the tinder.

  “But he did come here, didn’t he?” I said. “What did he want—was he too in mortal need of sanctuary, like me?”

  “No. He wished to give me something, something that the trickster Kelley had given to him.”

  “What was it?”

  He shrugged. “I do not know. I did not want to know.”

  “It was a strongbox, an iron strongbox, containing—”

  He held up a peremptory hand.

  “Do not tell me,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He leaned forward, gesturing for me to give him the poker. He took it, and struck the point of it into the heart of the fire.

  “So that I should not have to lie,” he said. He let the poker drop onto the hearth, where it made a clatter that jarred on my nerves. “He was full of wild talk,” he said. “He was going to expose a treasonous plot, he was going to destroy the High Steward, he was going to bring everything down. And all because of a girl who already had forgotten him, taken up as she had been by a far grander personage. Follia, follia.”

  I heard Serafina moving about in the sickroom above our heads.

  “What did he do with the box?” I said. “Did he give it to you, for safekeeping?”

  He lifted an urgent hand again and wagged it in front of my face.

  “No no no,” he said. “Listen to what I say. I could not allow him to tell me anything, to show me anything. I could not know.”

  I stood up, and walked back into the depths of room, pacing the stone flags, one by one. Then I came back and leaned by the fireplace, watching the regathering flames.

  “He went to Wenzel,” I said. “He was mad from jealousy. He made threats—God knows how he imagined he would get away with it. Wenzel seized him and had him tortured. He wanted the strongbox.” I turned and looked at the fat man where he wallowed in the deep chair. “Did he tell you where it was? Did he tell you its whereabouts?”

  The Nuncio shook his head slowly.

  “He had something with him,” he said, “but I would not look at it, though he kept trying to force it on me. He would not heed my refusal, my refusal t
o know.”

  “What happened?”

  “He left the thing—”

  “The strongbox.”

  “—whatever it was, and rode away to the castle, to confront Wenzel.”

  “And what became of the box?”

  “I never saw it. I closed my eyes and told him to take it away. He would not, and put it instead on the table—the table, there—saying I must help him, I must protect him. I turned away, I would not look. He went. I called Serafina and told her to remove the thing. In the morning, Wenzel’s men came to question me. I demanded to know what had become of Madek. They laughed. I knew then the boy was dead. Povero,” he murmured, “povero giovane.”

  The distant music of the viol resumed, a plangent, falling phrase.

  “They knew he had come to you for help,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Yes. They tortured him, and he told them he had come here. They spoke of this box. I said I knew nothing of it, that I had not seen it. Now you understand? I could not allow myself to be compromised, could not be in a position in which I would have to lie.” He paused. “They threatened me,” he said. “They threatened me, the Pope’s envoy! Then they went away.”

  “And what did Serafina do?”

  He shook his head again.

  “I do not know. I told her she must not tell me, that I must not know.” He looked up at me slowly. “Perhaps you should ask her.”

  That was what I did.

  I cannot say how I made her understand me, for I don’t know; one can do wonders, when one must.

  She fetched her sheepskin coat, the one that I remembered so well. I could have wept to see it, so much did it bring back.

  Sister Maria was summoned from her sleepy vigil beside Kelley’s bier—“The Devil will take care of his own,” Malaspina cheerfully said—and was set to watch instead over Elizabeth Weston, whose fever had begun to abate.

  The Nuncio would have offered his coach, but his coachman, who had a secret taste for his master’s wine, was in a drunken stupor and would not be roused. Serafina and I thus had to walk across the sleeping town and over the Stone Bridge and up through Kleinseite. It was a long walk. I was full of fear, afraid that at any moment a squad of soldiers would march out of the shadows and arrest me. And yet how the stars shone!

  At last we came safe to Golden Lane. It felt so strange, to walk with the silent girl over those familiar cobbles, to the old, familiar door. Serafina had a key—Serafina had always had a key—and we entered. The little house was dark, but she found a candle and lit the oil lamp. There was the table, there the sleeping-couch, and there, behind its bit of curtain, the wooden cackstool, where at morning I used to perch, with my volume of Pliny on my knees.

  Now Serafina lifted the china pot out of its hole and put it on the floor, and raised the hinged frame, and there, in the hollow underneath, was the iron box, where she had hidden it the night Madek came with it to the nunciature. I picked it up. It was locked. I shook it, and heard the slither of documents within.

  Here it was, in my hands, the evidence with which Madek, in his youth and foolishness, had thought to topple Felix Wenzel, and win back his beloved, and have his revenge on her father the pander. Instead of which he had lost his eyes and ended up in the Stag Moat with a cord drawn tight around his throat.

  The box was square, not large and not very deep, with sharp corners, and was rusted somewhat on the lid and down the sides. It seemed so commonplace a thing, an article I used to shit upon, of a morning, all unknowing, yet for the sake of it men had schemed and suffered and died.

  26

  It was the bells that wakened me. They were tolling in towers all over the city, in the lofty cathedral on the hill, in the Old Town Square, in the Týn Kirche, in the little Church of St. Peter, where the remains of Edward Kelley lay. I was confused at first, thinking the gears of time had slipped, for I was in Golden Lane, stretched out on my couch as in the old days, with the vague smoke of morning in the air around me and a spike of winter sunlight pale as old gold piercing the dusty window. The couch had not been slept on since I had last lain here; it felt damp and smelled of mold. I was chilled to the bone, having had nothing to cover me in the night except my beaver coat. I had a bad crick in my neck, too, from resting at an awkward angle with no pillow or cushion for support. Even the condemned man chafes at the discomforts of the last night in his cell.

  I lay for a while listening to the mingled ringing of the bells. I wondered what could be the occasion of so much solemn clamor, and then remembered what I already knew, that this was the official birthday of the Emperor.

  I sat up and looked about. I wished Serafina were there with me, but I was alone. I thought of the terrors of the night, of my discovery of the corpse of another Kroll, of my flight through the city, of what Serafina had shown me, hidden here.

  Remembering the strongbox, I sprang up and went to see that it was safe. I had stowed it in my goat-hide satchel. It was there; a part of me had wished it might have been gone.

  There was nothing to eat or drink, and no water in the pitcher even, for me to wash with. I could not contemplate using the cackstool, that lowly and yet now so momentous hiding place. Quickly I got dressed and put on my coat and shouldered my heavy satchel, and left the house. I walked along the lane until I came to an inn where I knew the latch on the side gate was always carelessly left undone, and got into the yard there and used the privy.

  Afterwards I washed myself under the spout of a water pump. I felt, in my glooms, like a sacrifice preparing itself for the slaughter.

  The day was harsh and raw under a louring purplish sky full of snow, and the air was swathed with a dense white mist. I was glad of the mist, as a sort of second cloak in which to wrap myself and hide. It is a strange thing to walk about in the world in the usual way, exercising one’s usual limbs, while thinking that by nightfall one will likely be dangling stiff by the neck from the end of a hangman’s rope.

  In truth, I did not walk, but crept, rather, keeping close to the walls, and stopping every dozen paces to dodge into a doorway and peer back along the street for fear I was being followed. The world had become a vast trap set exclusively for me.

  And so I went on, with my cap pulled low and my face sunk to the nose in the collar of my coat.

  The birthday festivities were already well under way. A Te Deum was being sung in the cathedral, and I could hear within the soarings of the choir and the braying of the organ. In the broad courtyard before the Royal Palace, a squad of the Imperial Guard, gorgeously arrayed in shades of blue and scarlet, was measuring out tight, ceremonial squares, the guardsmen’s muskets shouldered and their lances bristling and their spurred heels ajingle. In streets off the square, other regiments were going through their paces; there was a great mingling of booted men and caparisoned horses, and echoing everywhere were the sounds of shouted commands and the sharp clatter of iron-shod hoofs on cobbles.

  On the balcony above the palace arch, a group of courtiers had gathered to view the maneuvers being performed in the square below. Rudolf, I saw, had been lured out of hiding, for there he was, at the front of the group, looking cowed and anxious. To his right was his brother Matthias, tall, vigorous, with his plumed hat in his hand, grinning and waving. On the Emperor’s left stood a somewhat jaded-looking, slender young man got up in ceremonial black armor, with a jeweled black hat and a deep ruff. This I took to be Rudolf’s cousin the Archduke Ferdinand. Caterina Sardo’s name for him, I remembered, was Turnip-Head, but with his great, deep brow and matching long chin, divided from each other by a stiff brown mustache, to my eye he resembled nothing so much as the sole and heel come loose from an outsized boot. The Hapsburgs were not, to say the least, a handsome tribe.

  I ducked under an arch and hurried up the stairs towards my chamber. Somewhere in the castle a band of minstrels was playing; I could hear the skirl of pipes and the tapping of a drum. I wondered where Caterina Sardo might be—I had not seen her among the crowd on the
balcony. I did not expect we would meet today, for we had a discretionary understanding to avoid each other on ceremonial occasions such as this one; in my heart, I wondered if we would ever meet again.

  When I opened the door to my chamber, the first shock was to find Chamberlain Lang, in his long black robe, reclining at his ease on my bed, with his back against a bank of pillows and his ankles crossed, reading my old dog-eared copy of Pliny.

  “Ah, Herr Doktor Stern,” he said, looking up and smiling. “Here you are at last—we have been waiting for you.”

  The room around him was in great disorder. My worktable had been overturned, and my papers were strewn across the floor amid puddles of spilled ink. Drawers had been wrenched out and their contents emptied. The cushions on my couch had been disemboweled, and the upholstery had been slashed, leaving wads of horsehair stuffing sprouting from the wounds. A shelf of books had been swept to the floor, carpets had been turned up, and the drapes had been ripped from the window.

  In the midst of the wreckage stood a pale young man with a high forehead, watchful eyes, and a deeply receding chin in which was set, like the bud of a rose, a very small pinched pink mouth.

  “This is Curtius,” the Chamberlain said to me. “You have not encountered him before, I think. He carries out for me the more delicate of the necessary tasks that arise from time to time.” He looked about at the wreck of my room. “Yes, something of a jumble, I fear,” he said, “but you will understand, there was a certain urgency.”

  “What were you looking for?” I asked.

  He put his head to one side in his birdlike way and gave me a wry smile.

  “Oh, come,” he said, “we both know the answer to that. We all know it—don’t we, Curtius?”

  The chinless young man said nothing.

  “Then let me ask,” I said to the Chamberlain, “what it was you found?”

  Lang pretended to give serious consideration to this, putting a finger to his chin and lifting up his eyes.

  “Nothing very much,” he said, “to be truthful. Some questionable books borrowed from the Emperor’s private library—saucy stuff, Herr Doktor. Notable too was a leather riding crop that, I warrant, was never laid upon the flanks of any horse. Also an item or two of ladies’ intimate apparel—souvenirs, perhaps, forfeits won, favors given? No, you’re right—not my business.” Curtius murmured something that I did not catch, and the Chamberlain nodded. “Yes yes, of course, I had forgotten that.” He turned his attention to me again. “And a purse of silver and gold money, pushed to the back of a drawer. We have been saving our pfennigs diligently, it seems, Herr Doktor.”