Alchemy, page 30
‘Merda what?’ Besler asked, from the doorway.
‘We’re dining with the Count and Countess von Rozmberk this evening.’ I pointed a finger at him. ‘Best behaviour.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘You sound like my father. You don’t seem very happy about the invitation,’ he added as we headed out to collect the horses.
‘I don’t know, Besler.’ I pulled my cap down over my damp hair. ‘I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that anyone in Prague wishes us good.’
His eyes widened. ‘You think it’s a trap?’
‘I think we would be clever to keep our wits about us. Don’t drink too much. And no matter how much encouragement she gives, you behave to her as if you were a monk.’
He grinned. ‘Some of the stories I have heard about monks, Maestro—’
‘Yes, all right, that was a bad example. You respond like someone who does not want to find himself on the wrong end of a duelling sword. Understood?’
‘Yes, Maestro.’ He lowered his eyes.
‘Good. Let’s take a look at this crypt first.’
TWENTY-TWO
It was gone three in the afternoon by the time we reached the castle and handed the horses to the care of a groom. The cathedral was sinking into shadow as the daylight faded, but we found it filled with the fluting voices of boy choristers rehearsing with their music master, a sound that pricked me with memories of my youth in the Dominican order. Hearing those pure, clear notes rising to the vaulted roof prompted a moment of melancholy; though I had fought to escape the strictures of religious life, there were times when I felt the loss of its community. Something of this must have shown in my expression, because I caught Besler looking at me with concern and quickly smiled encouragement.
The priest stood at the High Altar preparing for the office of Vespers. He flinched at the sight of me, as if my presence could only herald further disaster. I sympathised.
‘Father, I am investigating the terrible threat to His Majesty yesterday and I want to examine the crypt,’ I said. ‘I will need your key.’
His fingers strayed to his belt. ‘Do you have some written authorisation? Only, I am not supposed to open the crypt unless His Majesty requests it.’
‘You were not supposed to let anyone within touching distance of the Emperor while he was at prayer either,’ I said pointedly. ‘I can go back for a letter if you insist, but I can’t imagine His Majesty will be pleased to hear that, having allowed his assailant into the chapel, you are now attempting to hinder efforts to catch them.’
The priest blanched, and began working a key loose from the ring.
‘Thank you,’ I said as he passed it over. ‘I will make sure he knows how helpful you’ve been. We’ll need lights too. Tell me about the secret passages.’
‘I have never seen them,’ he said, fussing over which candles to take from a nearby stand. ‘But the foundations of the original rotunda are more than six hundred years old, and the castle has been a fortress since the time of St Wenceslas, so it’s hardly surprising that there’s a labyrinth of tunnels beneath our feet. People would have built them for escape, I suppose. But to the best of my knowledge, most of them were blocked up long ago. I couldn’t tell you how to find them, nor whether they are safe.’
‘Well, it appears that one leads to and from the crypt, and someone knows how to access it,’ I said, snatching the candle from his hand as I tried to contain my impatience; I wanted directions, not a history lesson. ‘You really have no idea where the entrance might be?’
‘I assure you, sir,’ he stammered, and in his frightened rabbit face I read sincerity; he was so anxious, I was certain he would have blurted out any secrets if he thought it would save him from further blame. ‘I have been dean here for four years, and sub-dean before that, and I have not met a cleric who has spoken of a secret entrance, nor have I ever seen such a passage marked on any recent plans.’
‘Plans?’ I stared at him as if he were an unpromising child who had unexpectedly said something clever.
‘Yes – you may have more luck with older drawings, but those are not in the cathedral archive. I only keep a record of the most recent works.’
‘Then where are the older plans?’
‘In the imperial library, of course.’
Of course. I exchanged a glance with Besler. It seemed my first instinct had been correct: who would have better opportunity to study ancient maps of the castle and its grounds than the librarian? A spot of hot wax dropped on to my hand from the candle; I swore aloud, then immediately apologised to the priest. He gave me a look of forbearance which seemed to imply that he had forgiven me worse. I felt a little bad about slapping him the day before.
‘We should go before we waste these candles,’ I said.
‘Take a tinder, in case the light is snuffed out.’ The priest retrieved one from somewhere beneath the altar cloth. ‘There are strange draughts in that crypt.’
I thanked him; that sounded promising. Where there was a draught, there was a connection with the outside. I could not now turn up at the library and ask to look at old plans of the cathedral without arousing Ottavio Strada’s suspicions; we would have to discover the tunnel for ourselves.
The priest walked with us as far as the mausoleum; at the top of the stairs to the crypt, he let out a high nervous laugh.
‘Foolish of me even to say this, I know, but – you won’t open any tombs, will you?’
I hesitated, unwilling to rule out the possibility. My thoughts flashed back to a time in Canterbury, four years earlier, when I had been obliged to open a grave in pursuit of a killer. I blinked hard to dispel the memory; it was not one I cared to revisit.
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Only – there’s a curse.’
‘Naturally,’ I said, persisting with my forced humour, because I could see the alarm on Besler’s face. ‘What self-respecting crypt doesn’t have a curse?’
The priest lowered his voice. ‘It’s why His Majesty won’t set foot in there. In case he disturbs the bones of Boleslaus the Cruel.’
I looked at him; he was evidently waiting for me to ask. ‘Go on,’ I said, feeling the wax running down the sides of my candle. ‘The short version.’
‘He was a notorious fratricide. He killed his elder brother, Wenceslas the Good, to become Duke of Bohemia.’
‘Ah.’ No wonder Rudolf didn’t like the story. ‘Well, we’ll try not to bother him. Come, Besler.’ I took the boy by the sleeve; he appeared rooted to the spot.
‘You should not make light of such things,’ the priest called as we descended. ‘If there is any city in Christendom that has given the powers of darkness free rein, it is this one. As should be abundantly clear from the events of the past few days, but it seems we will not heed the warning.’
‘Cheerful soul,’ I muttered as I unlocked the iron gate and closed it behind us. ‘Well, we can guess where he stands on matters of religious tolerance.’ I wondered if the priest was Rudolf’s confessor, the one who had been instructed to omit the phrase about papal authority from the Mass. A priest of conservative leanings, who feared his sovereign was turning away from the influence of the Holy Mother Church, might easily ally himself with the likes of San Clemente and Montalcino. I could almost suspect him of leaving the dog’s tongue on the altar himself as a warning to Rudolf, if it weren’t for the fact that he could not have been the person who attacked me in the crypt.
I took a few steps forward. The light from our candles seemed very small in the darkness, serving only to make the shadows beyond its reach appear denser. The silence had an unnerving, expectant quality, like held breath.
‘Do you think the curse is real?’ Besler said, uncomfortably close to my ear.
‘No, but if you creep up on me like that again, you’ll wish it was only old Boleslaus after you. Go and look over there, we can cover more ground. But keep my candle in sight.’
‘What are we looking for?’ he asked, moving all of five paces away.
‘Anything that might conceal the entrance to a passage. It’s likely to be well-disguised as part of the wall or floor. But someone came in and out yesterday, so there should be marks of fresh use – fingerprints in the dust, signs of stones being moved.’ I held up the light to examine the wall in front of me. With no idea how far the crypt extended under the cathedral, I realised we could be searching for hours. I began to wish I had insisted the priest accompany us; I did not entirely trust him, and it would be easy for him to alert someone to the fact that we were down here alone.
‘How simple things were in bygone times,’ Besler remarked from somewhere to my right. ‘When people were known by only one character trait. Boleslaus the Cruel – you’d know what you were dealing with before you met him.’
‘Besler the Annoying,’ I said, animated for a moment by a visible line where one kind of stonework met another, older section. I pressed my fingers along the join but nothing yielded.
‘Bruno the Miserable,’ he retorted. His candle had vanished behind a column. ‘Here, come and look at this.’
‘I’m not miserable,’ I said, affronted, as I followed his voice. I rounded a corner and saw him standing in front of an arched recess framed by two fractured pillars, looking down at two plain stone sarcophagi. Between them, a slab the size of a gravestone had been set into the floor.
‘Do you think that’s him?’ Besler whispered, as if anxious not to disturb the dead.
I crouched to step under the arch and held up the light, but the inscription on the slab had been rendered illegible by time. Instead, something else caught my eye. ‘Told you,’ I said, pointing out the faint trace of fingermarks at the top edge of the slab. ‘I think you’ve done it, Besler. Let’s try moving this.’
He knelt across from me and we tried every means to prise the slab from the floor, with no result except broken fingernails.
‘Dio porco.’ I sat back on my haunches, sucking a bleeding finger. ‘I distinctly heard the scraping of stone yesterday before I passed out – it has to move somehow.’
‘There must be a mechanism,’ Besler said, running his hands around the raised edge of the slab, though we had already checked it for any hidden hand-holds. Suddenly, he shrieked and dropped his candle, falling backwards on his arse against the tomb.
‘What?’ I brought my light closer to see if he was hurt; he looked up at me with wild eyes.
‘Something touched my foot.’ He pointed with a shaking hand to the sarcophagus behind him. ‘It came from there.’ And then, good Protestant that he was, he crossed himself, muttering to Jesus to protect him.
I held up a hand for silence and caught the patter of claws skittering away.
‘That was a rat, Besler, not Boleslaus reaching out of his grave to grab you. Let’s see where it came from.’ I knelt to look; each stone coffin was raised up on feet carved like lion’s paws, raising them six inches or so off the plinth beneath. Gingerly, I reached into the gap and felt around until my hand encountered a space between the stones. I slid my fingers in and they closed around a metal rod, almost like—
‘I think it’s a lever,’ I said, pulling it up with some effort; I heard a grinding of metal and a solid thunk as something turned beneath the slab.
‘It moved,’ Besler exclaimed, the ghost of Boleslaus forgotten as he pushed down on the top end of the stone and watched as the other half swung upwards.
‘A basic pivot,’ I said with admiration. ‘I’ve seen a device like this in a great house in England, where it concealed a hiding place for priests beneath the floor. But this must be hundreds of years older. Come, relight your candle.’
The slab only lifted to an angle of forty-five degrees; I had to lie on my back to wriggle into the gap, feeling my way with my feet – there was no knowing how far the drop might be. But I made contact with a flight of steps and eased my way in as Besler held the heavy stone to prevent it falling.
I counted eight steps before I found myself standing in a narrow corridor hewn out of the rock below the cathedral’s foundations, high enough for me to stand. I held up the light but could only see a few feet ahead.
‘We should find something to prop that slab open,’ I said, shuffling forward into the darkness as I heard Besler shunting himself through the gap behind me. ‘We don’t know how the mechanism works from this—’
Before I could finish speaking, there came a crash of such force it sent small rocks and dust scattering down from the roof of the tunnel; the echo reverberated through the foundations loud enough to wake all the dead kings of Bohemia. The draught from the sudden movement of the stone blew out both candles and I heard Besler bumping down the steps behind me.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I couldn’t hold it,’ he said, and I caught the quiver in his voice. ‘It became too heavy for me and I slipped.’
‘Do you think someone pushed on it?’ I thought of the priest again.
‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, Maestro. Are we trapped?’
‘Well,’ I said, reaching for the tinder-box and striking it so that he could see my resolute smile, ‘we know it must come out somewhere. Nothing for it but to go forward, Besler. Andiamo.’
It must come out somewhere, I told myself repeatedly as we progressed between walls of black rock slick with damp, although it felt as if we were burrowing into the heart of the castle’s bedrock. I concentrated on steadying my breathing, reasoning that the tunnel had been built strong enough to have survived for six hundred years so ought to last a little longer. I would not have endured five minutes as a secret priest in England, I reflected, if my survival had depended on hiding for hours in a hole barely big enough to stand up in; I had a grudging admiration for the courage of those who saw that as their mission, even though I had helped to send more than one of them to the executioner at Tyburn. With these thoughts I distracted myself from the very real possibility that whoever had last used this route had locked the exit behind him, and that we might be forced to return to the crypt, only to find the stone slab shut fast too. No one except the priest knew we were down here, and it might be in his interest not to mention it. Besler had stopped his usual prattling, and I could feel him holding the sleeve of my doublet between his thumb and forefinger like a child afraid of being separated from his mother in a crowd. I pretended I hadn’t noticed, and wished again that I had persuaded him to return to Wittenberg.
At length we came upon a pile of rubble where the roof had crumbled so badly that the way appeared blocked.
‘Are we trapped?’ Besler said in a high, strangled voice, bumping into me as I stopped to examine it.
‘Someone came through here,’ I said with forced determination. ‘So there must be a way. Hold up the light.’
I could feel a draught from beyond the rockfall; on closer examination, I saw a gap wide enough to squeeze through.
‘Follow me,’ I said, fighting my rising panic as I climbed over the fallen stones, praying I wouldn’t dislodge anything that would bring the rest of the roof crashing down. On the other side, I found that a half-hearted attempt had been made to board up the tunnel with planks, though the wood was now rotten with damp. I moved one of the broken slats aside and emerged into a place where the tunnel forked. It seemed to me that the air from the right-hand branch was colder, though it was hard to be certain. I paused as Besler scrambled through behind me.
‘Our friend in the crypt must be very familiar with these passages,’ I said, ‘to know that there was a way through that rockfall.’
‘Skinny too,’ Besler said, rubbing his elbow. ‘Which way now?’
At that moment, like an omen, another rat darted past from the left-hand passage, squealing indignantly at the disturbance. He must have got in somehow, I reasoned.
‘Here,’ I announced, pointing with more confidence than I felt.
The passageway began to slope noticeably upwards, which seemed a good sign, but the further we progressed, the more it began to smell of decaying flesh, which did not. The odour was faint at first, but grew stronger with each step, until it was thick in my nose and I found myself slowing in dread of what we might find ahead. The last fool who thought he could escape this way? Or some as yet unknown victim? Behind me, Besler made a choking sound.
‘What is that?’ he said through his sleeve.
‘Nothing good.’ I could feel my dinner rising in my stomach. ‘Stay behind me.’
I walked on a few more paces and sensed movement; at the furthest reach of the candle’s glow I made out a mound wedged into a crevice in the side wall. It appeared to be writhing repulsively.
‘Brace yourself,’ I said, ‘this won’t be pleasant.’ I picked up a loose rock and hurled it with force at the seething mass; a crowd of rats fled, shrieking, scuttling over our boots as we pressed ourselves against the rock face while they passed. I knew they wouldn’t be deterred for long; reluctantly, I moved closer and crouched to see what they were feasting on. The relief I felt when I realised made my legs buckle and I had to steady myself against the wall.
‘Poor fellow,’ Besler said, looking down at the mauled lump of fur and flesh that was just about recognisable as canine.
‘I feared worse,’ I said, taking a kerchief from my doublet and lifting the creature’s bloodied jaw. ‘No tongue. So that part of the mystery is solved, anyway. I’d guess the other branch of this tunnel leads out to the Stag Moat, somewhere near the kennels where they keep the strays for experiments.’ Thinking of the kennels brought to mind the boy Novak had mentioned, the dog-catcher who had been fished out of the river on the same day Bartos was found hanging from the bridge. It was too much of a coincidence for my liking; I must speak to Hajek about it. I let the unfortunate animal’s head drop as Besler squeezed past behind me.
