Deborah Harkness - Shadow of Night

“My attention is always on my wife, where it belongs. How else did I know to be here?”

“Of course. Forgive my meddling. The forest has ears, and the fields have eyes .” Hoefnagel bowed. “I will see you at court, La Diosa.”

“Her name is Diana,” Matthew said tightly. “Madame de Clermont will also serve.”

“And here I was led to understand it was Roydon. My mistake.” Hoefnagel took a few steps backward. “Good evening, Matthew.” His footsteps echoed on the stone floors and faded into silence.

“Schaduw ?” I asked. “Does that mean what it sounds like?”

“It’s Dutch for ‘Shadow.’ Elizabeth isn’t the only person to call me by that name.” Matthew looked to Gallowglass. “What is this entertainment Signor Pasetti mentioned?”

“Oh, nothing out of the ordinary. It will no doubt be mythological in theme, with terrible music and even worse dancing. Having had too much to drink, the courtiers will all stumble into the wrong bedchambers at the end of the night. Nine months later there will be a flock of noble babes of uncertain parentage. The usual.”

“‘Sic transit gloria mundi ,’” Matthew murmured. He bowed to me. “Shall we go home, La Diosa?” The nickname made me uncomfortable when strangers used it, but when it came out of Matthew’s mouth, it was almost unbearable. “Jack tells me that tonight’s stew is particularly appetizing.”

Matthew was distant all evening, watching me with heavy eyes as I heard about the children’s day and Pierre brought him up to date on various happenings in Prague. The names were unfamiliar and the narrative so confusing that I gave up trying to follow it and went to bed.

Jack’s cries woke me, and I rushed to him only to discover that Matthew had already reached the boy. He was wild, thrashing and crying out for help.

“My bones are flying apart!” he kept saying. “It hurts! It hurts!”

Matthew bundled him up tight against his chest so that he couldn’t move. “Shh. I’ve got you now.” He continued to hold Jack until only faint tremors radiated through the child’s slender limbs.

“All the monsters looked like ordinary men tonight, Master Roydon,” Jack told him, snuggling deeper into my husband’s arms. He sounded exhausted, and there were blue smudges under his eyes that made him look far older than his years.

“They often do, Jack,” Matthew said. “They often do.”

The next few weeks were a whirlwind of appointments—with the emperor’s jeweler, the emperor’s instrument maker, and the emperor’s dancing master. Each encounter took me deeper into the heart of the huddle of buildings that composed the imperial palace, to workshops and residences that were reserved for Rudolf’s prize artists and intellectuals.

Between engagements Gallowglass took me to parts of the palace that I had not yet seen. To the menagerie, where Rudolf kept his leopards and lions much as he kept his limners and musicians on the narrow streets east of the cathedral. To the Stag Moat, which had been altered so that Rudolf could enjoy better sport. To the sgraffito -covered games hall, where courtiers could take their exercise. To the new greenhouses built to protect the emperor’s precious fig trees from the harsh Bohemian winter.

But there was one place where not even Gallowglass could gain admission: the Powder Tower, where Edward Kelley worked over his alembics and crucibles in an attempt to make the philosopher’s stone. We stood outside it and tried to talk our way past the guards stationed at the entrance. Gallowglass even resorted to bellowing a hearty greeting. It brought the neighbors running to see if there was a fire but didn’t elicit a reaction from Dr. Dee’s erstwhile assistant.

“It’s as if he’s a prisoner,” I told Matthew after the supper dishes were cleared and Jack and Annie were safely tucked into their beds. They’d enjoyed another exhausting round of skating, sledding, and pretzels. We’d given up the pretense that they were our servants. I hoped the opportunity to behave like a normal eight-year-old boy would help to end Jack’s nightmares. But the palace was no place for them. I was terrified they might wander off and get lost forever, unable to speak the language or tell people to whom they belonged. “Kelley is a prisoner,” Matthew said, toying with the stem of his goblet.

It was heavy silver and glinted in the firelight.

“They say he goes home occasionally, usually in the middle of the night when there is no one around to see. At least he gets some relief from the emperor’s constant demands.”

“You haven’t met Mistress Kelley,” Matthew said drily.

I hadn’t, which struck me as odd the more I considered it. Perhaps I was taking the wrong route to meet the alchemist. I’d allowed myself to be swept into court life with the hope of knocking on Kelley’s laboratory door and walking straight in to demand Ashmole 782. But given my new familiarity with courtly life, such a direct approach was unlikely to succeed. The next morning I made it a point to go with Tereza to do the shopping.

It was absolutely frigid outside, and the wind was fierce, but we trudged to the market nonetheless.

“Do you know my countrywoman Mistress Kelley?” I asked Frau Huber as we waited for the baker to wrap our purchases. The housewives of Malá Strana collected the bizarre and unusual as avidly as Rudolf did. “Her husband is one of the emperor’s servants.”

“One of the emperor’s caged alchemists, you mean,” Frau Huber said with a snort. “There are always odd things happening in that household. And it was worse when the Dees were here. Herr Kelley was always looking at Frau Dee with lust.”

“And Mistress Kelley?” I prompted her.

“She does not go out much. Her cook does the shopping.” Frau Huber did not approve of this delegation of housewifely responsibility. It opened the door to all sorts of disorder, including (she contended) Anabaptism and a thriving black market in purloined kitchen staples. She had made her feelings on this point clear at our first meeting, and it was one of the chief reasons I went out in all weathers to buy cabbage.

“Are we discussing the alchemist’s wife?” Signorina Rossi said, tripping across the frozen stones and narrowly avoiding a wheelbarrow full of coal.

“She is English and therefore very strange. And her wine bills are much larger than they should be.”

“How do you two know so much?” I asked when I’d finished laughing. “We share the same laundress,” Frau Huber said, surprised. “None of us have any secrets from our laundresses,” Signorina Rossi agreed. “She did the washing for the Dees, too. Until Signora Dee fired her for charging so much to clean the napkins.”

“A difficult woman, Jane Dee, but you could not fault her thrift,” Frau Huber admitted with a sigh.

“Why do you need to see Mistress Kelley?” Signorina Rossi inquired, stowing a braided loaf of bread in her basket.

“I want to meet her husband. I am interested in alchemy and have some questions.”

“Will you pay?” Frau Huber asked, rubbing her fingers together in a universal and apparently timeless gesture.

“For what?” I said, confused.

“His answers, of course.”

“Yes,” I agreed, wondering what devious plan she was concocting.

“Leave it to me,” Frau Huber said. “I am hungry for schnitzel , and the Austrian who owns the tavern near your house, Frau Roydon, knows what schnitzel should be.”

The Austrian schnitzel wizard’s teenage daughter, it turned out, shared a tutor with Kelley’s ten-year-old stepdaughter, Elisabeth. And his cook was married to the laundress’s aunt, whose sister-in-law helped out around the Kelleys’ house.