Alchemy, page 40
I did not reply, because at that point the steward returned with paper, quill and inkwell, and I leaned on an ornamental table to compose my note, which I wrote in English, knowing she would attempt to read it the moment I was gone. She was right, I thought; who was I to judge what stratagems a woman needed to employ to secure her future. Theirs was not an easy lot; even a woman like Xena, with all the advantages of beauty and a good family, could find herself jettisoned if she failed to fulfil the one task demanded of her.
‘You mentioned that you sometimes spend time in the Emperor’s Kunstkammer,’ I said as I scattered fine sand over the letter to blot the ink. ‘Have you ever noticed anything strange while you were there?’
She looked intrigued. ‘Like what?’
‘People behaving suspiciously. The Stradas, for example.’
She threw her head back and let out a frank laugh that was very different from the artificial giggles she had employed the night before. ‘The Stradas are always behaving suspiciously.’ She laid a hand on my sleeve. ‘I will tell you something about the Stradas. A few years ago, when my father was still alive, Jacopo Strada became determined that I should be married to his son. He thought it would be a good alliance between our families. My father was not convinced – the Stradas are not of noble blood, after all. But they have a certain position at court, and my father agreed to formal introductions. I didn’t mind – I thought he was handsome. Well.’ She leaned closer. ‘We were permitted to walk together in the castle gardens with his sister as chaperone. She’s a cold fish.’ She gave a little shudder and pulled her cape tighter. ‘Anyway, I managed to shake her off and when we were alone, I told him he could kiss me.’
‘And?’
‘I’ve never seen anyone disappear so fast. You’d think I’d offered to castrate him. So what does that tell you?’
‘He was shy?’
‘He was thirty-two,’ she said scathingly. ‘I was seventeen. It tells me he has an aversion to women. You notice he is still not married. Anyway, I have the count now, who is much better stock.’
She made it sound like purchasing horses for breeding; perhaps among families like hers there was little difference. There was something almost admirable about her self-belief.
‘And Katherina? I take it you don’t like her?’
‘It’s more that she doesn’t like me – she couldn’t have made that more obvious. And I’m a Pernstein by birth – I would have been a very good match for her brother. But she’s one of those women who thinks everyone is a rival. She’s terrified of losing the Emperor’s affections. I honestly think she entertains hopes that he will marry her one day, poor cow.’ She laughed with all the casual cruelty of youth and beauty.
‘Really? You don’t think she might tire of waiting and fall for someone else?’
‘Katherina? You’ve met her, I presume?’ She shook her head. ‘That woman is devoted to her father and the Emperor to the point of obsession. And in any case, do you think Jacopo Strada would allow her to marry another man? Not while her cunny is still a valid currency with Rudolf. Though she’s getting on now, so who knows how long that will last.’ She stood and smoothed out her skirts. ‘Well, I thank you for your gracious apology, Bruno. Consider yourself forgiven. I will pass your letter to my husband – I’m sure he will want to see you.’ She paused and darted a furtive look at me. ‘Perhaps best if you don’t bring your assistant, though.’ It was the closest I had heard her come to an admission of shame.
I walked towards Golden Lane, glad to have my cloak again, sunk deep in my thoughts. I hoped Besler had gone straight home to Bethlem Square – he would surely need a rest after his busy night – but I was unhappy about the thought of him wandering the city alone. I wondered how long it would take Montalcino and San Clemente to discover that Bartos’s silver flask contained a substitute and not the poisoned elixir; when they did, they would redouble their efforts to find Sukie and me. Montalcino had threatened Besler at our first meeting; if his thugs couldn’t now get to Sukie, might he revert to that plan as a way to make me do his bidding? I doubted he would be placated even if I did produce the letters from John Dee that he had demanded. I had no intention of handing anything over, but I would try asking Rabbi Loew again if John had left any correspondence with him. There was clearly something more than the rabbi had told me between him and John – the ‘bond’ symbolised by the gift of the dagger, whatever ‘our enemies suspect’ – and I hoped I could persuade the rabbi to confide in me.
I called at Goodwife Huss’s to see if Hajek was there, and how Magda was doing. The goodwife had risen to the occasion and the house smelled of simmering herbs as she brewed up tonics to nurse her patient back to health. Magda was lying on a bed by the fire, looking alarmingly like an effigy on a tomb, her face as white as the cloth that bound her head. She drifted in and out of consciousness, the goodwife informed me, though the doctor had sat by her side all night and only left about an hour ago, promising to come back as soon as he could.
‘She’ll live.’ She leaned across with a proprietorial air and brushed a stray lock of hair from Magda’s forehead as she said it. ‘It’s a question of how much damage has been done. I’ve seen people lose the power of speech from a blow to the head. We won’t know until she wakes fully – if she does. I tell you, if I got my hands on the brute that did this, I’d string him up by his balls.’
‘You don’t need to, he’s dead.’
‘Good,’ she said, sounding like Sukie. ‘Hope he roasts in Hell. That’s one less, at least.’
I was not sure if she meant brutes or men in general, so I changed the subject hastily. ‘And Erik?’ I had glanced through the Mollers’ window on my way but the house appeared empty.
‘Erik Moller,’ said Goodwife Huss, in a tone of disbelief, ‘got up and went to work this morning in the Powder Tower, shaved and wearing a clean shirt, with no smell of drink on him. Is that your influence?’
‘Sukie’s really,’ I said. ‘He just needed to be jolted out of his self-pity.’
I asked her to tell Hajek that I needed to speak to him, and set off to the end of Golden Lane, where I descended a flight of steps cut into the wall in the shadow of the prison tower, and followed the slope of the ravine down into the Stag Moat. I had not yet explored the castle gardens, but it had occurred to me that if Bartos was killed because of his relationship with Katherina Strada, either by the Emperor or by one of the Strada men, it was likely that he was stabbed within the castle complex. He had no defensive wounds, Hajek had said; he was not expecting violence from his killer, and he would surely have been on his guard if he had been lured to a meeting somewhere out of the ordinary. So he must have gone willingly to a place that was familiar to him, not suspecting anything amiss until that curved blade slipped between his ribs at close quarters. If that had happened in the palace, how had they moved the body? I guessed that those underground tunnels had played a part and I wanted to see where the other branch emerged.
The Stag Moat was a deep ravine, with steep wooded slopes on both sides tapering down to the dried bed of a stream that ran along the bottom. I half-slid, half-climbed down and became aware of a great cacophony of birdsong to my right. Looking up, I saw that on the south-facing slope, opposite the castle walls, trees had been cleared to make way for an elaborate wooden structure with a high roof and large arched windows; through the glass, I could see foliage and dozens of tiny colourful shapes flitting back and forth. This must be Rudolf’s famous heated aviary, where he kept birds brought back from the tropics. I would have liked to take a closer look, but I pressed on along the path between the high banks. The deer grazing among the trees raised their heads to give me a speculative glance as I passed, but otherwise there was no one about. Despite the cold wind, sunlight pierced the thin gauze of cloud; tight buds were beginning to appear on branches and the air held a breath of spring, but there was something baleful about the sheer dark walls of the castle rising above me to my left. I had the sudden uneasy sense that I was not alone after all, and paused to look around, but I could see no sign of anyone following. I quickened my pace nonetheless.
As I walked on, the sweet trilling of the aviary faded, to be replaced by a frenzied chorus of yapping. The squat round shape of the Powder Tower loomed ahead, and in its lee, at the bottom of the slope, I saw a row of kennels with a fenced enclosure at the side. A dozen dogs leapt against the pales of the fence, jostling for attention from a skinny boy in his mid-teens who was throwing them scraps from a bucket. Suddenly, I remembered Novak’s story of the lad who had drowned the same day Bartos was found. Perhaps his successor could tell me more.
I wandered over, noticing how scrawny most of the dogs appeared. Several of them were afflicted with mange or scabs. One feisty little mutt who might once have been white stuck his snout through the fence and whined softly as I approached; I reached out to pet him and the boy called out a warning in Czech. I shook my head and he repeated it in German.
‘I said, they might seem friendly but they’ll take your finger off if you give them a chance.’
I withdrew my hand hastily. ‘They don’t look too well.’
He shrugged and jerked his head towards the Powder Tower. ‘Hardly matters. Most of them will end up in there having mercury or God knows what pumped into them, poor fuckers.’
I grimaced and looked back at the dogs. The small white one – some kind of terrier mongrel, I thought – was standing on his hind legs, peering at me through the fence with knowing brown eyes. I understood Hajek’s argument for the necessity of it, but I had never felt comfortable with the degree of detachment it required.
‘They’d only starve on the streets otherwise,’ the boy said, as if he divined my sentimental tendencies. ‘I bring them in and they get a bit of feeding up if they’re lucky.’
‘Have you been doing the job long?’ I asked, careful to keep my voice neutral.
‘Two days. I’ve always had dogs at home, though – I’m good with them.’ He sounded defensive, as if I was questioning his credentials.
‘I can see that. But I thought there was another boy who looked after the kennels?’
He made a sombre face. ‘Yeah. My mate Pepa. He died.’
‘I’m sorry. What happened?’
‘Drowned. Fell in the river, they reckoned. He always was clumsy, on account of his size. My dad – he’s a night-soil man – heard one of his friends say he saw Pepa down on the bank with a woman, so he probably went with a whore. He used to do that – he couldn’t get a girl any other way. He was nice, but a bit soft in the head, you know.’ He tapped his temple. ‘Sad, though – he loved these mutts. Even used to sleep here with them sometimes. But then it worked out lucky for me, didn’t it, getting his job? I’d better get on and feed this lot.’
‘What do you feed them?’ I asked, to prolong the conversation. An idea had begun to take shape in my mind, but it was too inchoate yet to make sense.
‘Kitchen scraps, mainly.’ The boy showed me his bucket of offal; it looked revolting and smelled worse. ‘No point treating them like royalty. Although I suppose the scraps are from the Emperor’s table, so in a sense … They’ll eat anything, though, this lot. The other day I was cleaning out the run and I swear to God, I found an eyeball.’
‘A what?’
‘I know. Turned my stomach, I can tell you.’
‘A human eyeball?’
He gave me an odd look. ‘Wouldn’t have thought so. I assumed it had come out of the butcher’s bucket. Probably from a sheep’s head or something – you should see the stuff that’s in there sometimes. How would a human eyeball get in there?’
The boy clearly didn’t pay much attention to the news on the streets. ‘Maybe someone threw it in,’ I said. ‘You didn’t find anything else? A tongue, perhaps?’
He made a face. ‘Don’t remember seeing one, but like I said, you could chuck anything in there and they’d gobble it up before you’d blinked. The eyeball only escaped because it rolled under a corner of the kennel where they couldn’t reach it.’
‘How do you get the dogs in and out of the castle?’ I asked. ‘You don’t bring the corpses out through the public courtyards?’
‘’Course not. People are funny enough about what goes on in the Powder Tower as it is. There’s a secret entrance.’ He pointed to the rocky outcrop behind us, where the tower rose imposingly from its foundations. ‘For getting things in and out of the laboratories discreetly,’ he added.
Like bodies, I thought. I thanked him and gave him a thaler. ‘If you find any more body parts, I’d be interested to know. You can give the information to Dr Hajek in the Powder Tower.’ I tried to ignore the voice in my head that said, what if Hajek already knows?
He tossed the coin in the air with a grin, but as he caught it, his face grew sombre. ‘Wait – you don’t think it was that alchemist that was murdered, do you? Because he was killed down at the bridge, I thought. How would his eyeball end up here?’
‘Good question,’ I said. ‘Probably was a sheep.’
A sharp bark made me turn back; the little white dog had slipped a paw between the pales of the fence and was mauling the air as if he wanted my attention.
‘He likes you,’ the boy said cheerfully.
Well, there’s one name to add to the list next time I see Montalcino, I thought. Except the dog didn’t have a name. Any day now he would be taken to the Powder Tower, dosed with mercury or arsenic and cut open to see how his organs reacted. I shook myself and walked away before I did anything rash.
THIRTY-ONE
The secret entrance to the tunnel was concealed behind laurel bushes, though a trail of flattened grass and broken twigs marked the path to it. It looked dank and forbidding, much like the mouth of an underground water conduit, except that it was barred by an iron gate which proved locked. Evidently only authorised people had access to this means of entry. I tried peering in but no light penetrated the rocky depths. The boy had said it led to the Powder Tower; it must also link up with the passage that ran from the cathedral crypt to the cellars beneath the private apartments, where Hajek had his laboratory and Ottavio his storeroom.
A severed eyeball in the dogs’ pen; a big lad, perhaps a little slow-witted, who often spent the night right outside the entrance to this tunnel, found dead in the river the morning after Bartos’s body was hung from the bridge; none of this was conclusive in itself, but it was enough to suggest connections. If Bartos had been killed either in the Powder Tower or the palace, his body could have been brought out under cover of darkness through this tunnel, his eyes and tongue flung over the fence for the dogs on the way. I thought of Erik carrying Magda through the streets in a handcart last night; it would be possible to bring a cart down here into the moat, if you could enlist a strong boy to help move the corpse to the bridge and make sure he couldn’t talk about it afterwards. But the poor unfortunate Pepa had been seen at the waterside with a woman. Katherina? I couldn’t see her colluding willingly in the disposal of her lover’s body, especially if her father or brother were responsible.
I rubbed my eyes; all this was nothing but speculation, and yet I was sure I was edging in the right direction; I just needed one solid piece of evidence that would tie it all together. I was considering how to proceed when I heard the crack of a twig somewhere behind me. I whipped around, alert for any sign of movement, but there was only the wind through the branches and the occasional guttural noise from the wild animals in the enclosure on the opposite bank.
I pushed my way out through the bushes, holding Greta’s fruit knife point-first and regretting that I had still not retrieved my own dagger from the gatehouse. Now that I remembered, I had not collected my horse either. I stood on the path at the foot of the tower, scanning every inch of the slopes on either side, but again I saw no one. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been followed, so I scrambled quickly up the bank by the Powder Bridge and was admitted into the castle courtyard by the stables. I had sent a boy to fetch my horse when I was distracted by a hammering on one of the windows above; I glanced up and saw Sukie frantically gesturing to me. What had she found now? She pointed down and then disappeared; after a couple of minutes she emerged breathlessly into the yard and ran over to me, holding out Esther’s book.
‘Did you find something?’ I whispered.
‘I have to give this back,’ she said.
‘Why – don’t you like it?’
‘I do, but Katherina wanted me to get rid of it.’
‘Did she say why?’ I took the book from her, puzzled. Inside the cover, Esther Loew had written her name in Hebrew letters.
‘She says it’s not suitable for a good Christian girl. She seemed quite angry about it.’
‘Really? That’s …’ I was surprised to hear that Katherina had reacted in this way. While it was obvious that her father still clung to the old prejudices, I had expected her to be more open-minded. Hadn’t she just declared to me that she thought it absurd to judge people not on their actions but on generalised ideas about a group? Perhaps I had misunderstood her meaning.
‘I didn’t find any more letters, by the way. I searched her whole room. But there was something in the hearth that might be important – she’d tried to burn it but one page escaped the flames. I tucked it inside the book. Can I go home yet?’ Sukie raised her eyes guiltily to the Stradas’ windows.
‘Soon, I promise. And thank you. I’ll take the book for now and you can borrow it again when you’re back at your own place.’
‘I did read some of it. I liked Judith cutting the general’s head off.’
I smiled. ‘I thought you might.’
‘But my favourite was the Book of Esther. They’re both about bad men getting what’s coming to them. Goodwife Huss would approve.’
I looked at her. Something had triggered a connection in the depths of my tired thoughts. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, Goodwife Huss would like it.’
‘No, before that.’
