36
When we got to the hostel, they were waiting.
I was waiting, too, for the accusations to start, and was prepared to defend myself against the charge of wandering off recklessly—to say I was sorry again, for yet another thing I didn’t regret—but as soon as I saw them together, standing side by side, a matched pair with arms identically crossed and heads tilted toward each other, my urge to apologize evaporated. In its wake was fury—and something else. All those months I’d begged them to give each other a chance, to stop bitching and whining long enough to have an actual conversation—but maybe I’d been better off with the cold war. Adriane had always made it clear: She could have anything and anyone she wanted. I’d taken it for granted that she hadn’t wanted him.
It was insane to even imagine.
But it would be naive not to. And Max was the one who’d said we couldn’t afford that.
“You found it, didn’t you?” Max lifted me off my feet, kissed me. “I can tell.”
I suppressed the urge to ask why he wasn’t mad, since that would be implying he had something to be mad about. “What happened with the clock?” I asked instead.
“Nothing. But you already knew that.” He kissed me again. “Good thing I fell for someone smarter than I am.”
“So you finally figured that out.”
“I’m slow,” he said. “That’s my point.”
Sometimes it astonished me how soft his hands were. Like he’d worn gloves all his life, touching nothing, until me. He tilted his forehead to mine, a brain kiss, he’d called it once. He whispered, “I’m sorry. For everything.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t ask what he was apologizing for.
“So? Show us what you found,” Max said. “This should lead us to the last piece. This could all be over soon.”
“We found it,” Eli said, handing Max the sheaf of wrinkled pages. “But we weren’t the first.”
There was a page of astronomical calculations, and another long letter, four pages in Elizabeth’s careful hand—or, more precisely, three and a half. The final page had been torn clean through.
Adriane closed her eyes. “Shit.”
I watched Max’s face. He held it almost perfectly still.
“We won’t know what’s gone until we know what’s there,” he said finally. He wrapped his fingers around mine. “Maybe it’ll be enough.”
“Look who’s suddenly glass-half-full, letter-half-intact,” Eli said. “Looks like Adriane’s anger-management classes are working out for you after all.”
Max leaned into me again, forehead to forehead, eyes calm, like Eli had never spoken. Fixed on me, like we were alone, and all that mattered. “ ‘All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.’ Eliot. As per usual.”
I didn’t want to say it like this, like I was trying to convince him or convince myself, but I did, in a whisper, not even that, my lips brushing his, the words slipping straight from my mouth to his. “ ‘I love you.’ Nora Kane.”
37
E. J. Weston, to the persistent John Fr. Weston.
It comes to me I have told you little of Groot, whose shadow fell over my days. You have, I doubt not, heard tales of his mechanical creatures and the strange devices he imagines into being, machines to carry a man beneath the sea or turn winter to summer. Prague has no shortage of wizards, but I will always believe that Groot numbered among their greatest.
He could be cruel. Václav bore the brunt of his rages. The strange servant descends from an old Czech family, once powerful members of the Bohemian Estates, who lost much of their number and all of their influence in the aftermath of the Hussite uprising. Much of his family now labors at court, but to judge from his mutterings, Václav would sooner drown in a sea of piss than serve the Emperor.
I know you deem such sentiments unbefitting a lady, but these are his words, not mine.
I had no understanding for the ties that bound Groot and Václav, but bound they were, for near twenty years, and for all Groot’s fits at his servant’s clumsiness and close resemblance to a boar, for all Václav’s scowling sulks and the delicate mechanisms he was always dashing on the floor, Groot claimed him indispensable.
Groot labored many years to fulfill a secret desire, the unification of nature and artifice, the endowment of his machines with the spark of life. Creation, he often told me, is the closest we can come to divinity. Failure was his loyal and constant friend. I lacked sympathy for this, once, but I now feel the burden he carried, and understand why he carried it with such little grace.
You will wonder that I say nothing here of my other life in these sleepless days, the arguments with our Mother and the fruitless struggle to regain our property from the Emperor and, in the endless meantime, keep a roof above us with food beneath it. I say nothing here of the continued ministrations of Johannes Leo, the man you will soon know as a brother, and I, impossible though it seems, as a husband. I say nothing, even, of my poems, which now again seem the only light and truth in a dark life.
This life continued, as life does, but it daily lost color and meaning. I bore a duty to our Mother and to our family, and an opposing one to our lost Father, and every day it grew more difficult to reconcile the two. It was as if I were two selves in one body, and as one swelled, the other shrank away, until our Mother, our poverty, even you, dearest brother, ashamed as I am to admit it, receded into the distance. Life narrowed to the Lumen Dei, and so, with no thought of propriety or fear, I saddled a horse and, riding beside a man who was neither my husband nor my blood relation, set off into the wild.
It was a ten-day ride to Graz. Most nights found us beneath the stars, our horses tethered to a tree, our hands linked, our thoughts lost in each other. You disapprove, I know. But I have promised you truth. There was only one truth for me in that lonely countryside, and it is the lie we told all who passed, the lie we told ourselves, the lie that became true, in spirit if not on earth, the lie of Thomas and Elizabeth, husband and wife.
Does it surprise you to know that while you were penning me letters that sang of Johannes Kepler’s wild exploits of imagination, the beauty you found in the Mysterium Cosmographicum and its vision of the universe with its heavenly spheres, that while you rhapsodized about another star joining Copernicus and Ptolemy in the firmament, I was dismounting before a small and crooked house in the small and crooked town of Graz, watching your bright new star sweat as he drew water from a well, not nearly fast enough to suit his carping crone of a wife? The great man, little older than you, welcomed us when we presented the letter by Groot’s hand, a parchment page assuring Kepler that only he had the skill to read our fate in the stars, and determine the most auspicious astronomical moment for operating our machine. The Lumen Dei exists both in this world and beyond. It unites the spiritus and the bodily realm, but can do so only when heavens are in their proper alignment. For this, we needed Kepler.
—Astrology, most astrology, is, of course, so much foolishness and blasphemy; you must know this.
Kepler’s dark hair was curlier than mine, his face cratered as the moon, and as he spoke to us, his wife fluttered about, demanding this pot or that shoe, demanding most of all his attention, though why she would want it was mysterious, as the river of hate that flowed between them was unmistakable. Married nearly a year, he confided in us, his voice a discordant harmony of unspoken regrets. I promised myself, silently, that Thomas and I would never come to this, and in Thomas’s eyes I saw the same vow.
—I slight the astrologers, not their enterprise. From that crawling, festering pile of maggots and dung, a sure hand may withdraw a pearl.
The hand, he had no need to explain, belonged to him.
He explained nonetheless, at length, the ways in which his studies of the stars far exceeded those of his rivals, a truth that soon would be universally acknowledged across the Continent, and yet what could easily have become an insufferable bout of boasting transformed itself, before our ears, into an anxious plea for us to
carry word of his studies back to Prague. Had we the ear of the Emperor, he wanted to know, or the ear of Groot or Hájek, anyone who could rescue him from the hell that was Graz: the Archduke’s campaign against the Lutherans, his wife’s misery, his own ill health, their imminent poverty. As if we were not strangers but his bosom friends, he confessed that all would soon be lost, by his own weakness and mistakes, if he could not convince someone of the worth of his ideas. And here he shifted paths yet again and returned to singing the praises of his own work, towering, as it did, above the heads of all who had come before.
Finally, Kepler seated us before a bowl of warm broth and retreated to his small study, where, he told us, he would happily plunge into the muck and seize a pearl. He emerged shortly before nightfall, his hair wild as his gaze, cheeks flushed, fingers stained with ink and clutching a sheath of pages, one of which he handed to me.
—You have read my book?
I allowed that I had.
—Then you understand.
There was no need to ask what it was I was presumed to understand, for he continued.
—They ask how the universe is arranged, philosophers, mathematicians, and they draw pretty pictures, impossibilities on the page. They save the phenomena by telling one ugly lie after another, epicycles upon epicycles, and the fools care not. It is not enough, I tell you, to ask how the cosmos is designed. We must ask why. For to understand His design, the why of it, is to know the mind of God. My work, your Lumen Dei, they seek the same end, do they not? Illumination of the grand design and its reasons for being. His reasons. You will tell the Emperor of my contribution, will you not? You will explain what I can provide for Prague and the Empire, if he can provide for me?
I assured him that I would, and had it been possible, I would indeed have done so. Kepler, for all his rambling ambitions, spoke as if with my own voice. Even now, I believe that to know how is useless if we do not know why. And there are too many who forbid us to ask.
Our final task had been completed with ease; the universe had bent to our united will. This was the unspoken hubris between us as we galloped back to Prague, a page of astronomical calculations sewn into the lining of my cloak. We believed we would soon bring the Lumen Dei into this world and ourselves to glory, and then as the natural course of events, as simple as water falling from high ground to low, we would be married.
How it pains me to remember the ease with which we forgot ourselves. Both of us near impoverished; my Mother depending on me to restore the family to its rightful position; marriage an unthinkable step at this stage of his apprenticeship; an alchemical apprentice an unthinkable match for marriage, at least in the eyes of our Mother. On looking at Thomas, she could see only our Father, and for me, a life of misery and destitution, of empty stomachs and cold prisons. She would, I knew, forbid our union. We could dream of our future, but God had failed to give us the tools with which to build it. These, dearest brother, were the truths we happily ignored on that journey back to Prague, and as we approached the banks of the Vrchlice, only a day’s ride from home, our smiles were wide as the river.
That is where they found us.
The first arrow whistled past my ear, but the second found its mark and sank deep into my stallion’s flank. A third and fourth arrow flew, one piercing his eye, the next his long black neck. I was thrown from the horse, thankfully landing a safe distance away from the thrashing beast, and could do nothing but watch his dance of pain and his eventual surrender. Thomas’s horse fell just as swiftly, and I waited to bear the consequences of an ignored warning, waited to die at Thomas’s side, knowing with my final breath that I had stolen his life.
But no blade was drawn. We were bound and blindfolded, bundled into a ragged carriage and released into a pungent room. Despite the care our captors had taken to ensure our ignorance of the place, I knew it by smell alone. Our Father brought me to Sedlec only once, but the earthy scent of aging skulls is one not quickly forgotten.
Their efforts gave me hope. Had they brought us here to kill us, I thought, surely they would not have bothered to disguise our path.
My blindfold was removed, though the binds were not. Thomas slumped in a corner, only the slight movement of his chest reassuring me that his life had been spared. Thus far. Our three captors wore masks.
—We know what you were doing in Graz. We know what you do with Groot. We want the Lumen Dei. And we will pay handsomely.
There is no Lumen Dei, I told them.
At this, the second man spoke.
—Not yet. But there will be, and it cannot fall to the Hapsburgs. It would be a crime against the Czech people, and all the peoples of the world who have yet to fall under their blade.
—A crime against the Lord. The Emperor, despite his denials, will always be a friend to the Church. Their hands will mold a miracle into a transgression.
If you know of the Lumen Dei, and you know of Groot, what need do you have of us? I asked. Take it from him.
I looked at the third man as I spoke, the one who had stayed silent. Another wasted subterfuge. I knew him even without his low, croaking Czech. I knew his hunched back, as I knew his clomping limp. Václav. Groot’s loyal servant, the only man trusted with Groot’s secrets. If anyone could steal from Groot without my help, it was he. And yet I held my tongue. Václav could not know I had recognized him, or I would never leave his sight alive.
—It must be you.
—It will be you.
—More florins than you could spend in a lifetime.
—You will deliver it to us by sundown two days hence.
—Or we will find you, and that will be the end of you.
I did not ask how they knew the Lumen Dei would be ready within two days, for if anyone knew Groot’s progress, it was Václav, and even at that moment, brother, can you believe I felt a thrill of anticipation at the thought of the device come to fruition?
—You need not answer us now.
—You will answer with your actions.
—Or you will answer for them.
They blindfolded us again. The carriage carved an eternal path through the countryside. And then a boot to my gut toppled me to hard ground, and I heard the horses retreat into the distance. They left us there, blind and bound in a darkness that stank of cattle dung. Rubbing my head against Thomas’s shoulder, I was able to remove my blindfold, and, our fingers working together, we managed to set ourselves free. We found ourselves in a crumbling alley. A snuffling cow watched us with blank eyes. The air carried voices to us, eager haggling over the price of cattle and beef. We could be no more than a few blocks from Wenceslas Square. We were not simply alive. We were home.
Thomas held me. He was shaking. I had done this to him. I had drawn him into this. I had nearly destroyed him.
I must tell you something, I confessed.
—And I you. But not here.
He brought me to the crypt of the Church of St. Boethius, where, he said, he had been baptized and had for many years served the priests in their most menial tasks, stoking fires and patching holes. The priests would protect us, he said. He lit a candle and held me as I told him about the man who had appeared in my bedchamber, the man with the priest’s robe and the knife, who had warned me to turn back.
I believed the priest now, as I had not before. I would die if I helped the Lumen Dei come to life. And, at the hands of Václav and his fellows, I would likely die if I did not.
I could bear this. The choice, at least, would still be mine. My fate, for the first time in my life, was something I could take upon myself.
But I could not bear bringing that same fate upon Thomas.
I held him, in the lowest depths of that dark church, and told him why this had to be our end. He did not argue.
—There are things you need to know.
He had brought us to the church so I could hear his confession, and so I did. And as he spoke, I thought of the arrows that had laid down our horses, and I longed to return to that bloody riverbank
, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.
Better to be betrayed by my body than by my heart.
The rest of the letter was torn away.
“It was him,” Adriane said. “The letters you found in Chris’s room. Thomas was the spy.”
“You don’t know that. He could have confessed anything,” I said. “A secret wife. A third nipple.”
“She has sewn his calculations into the lining of her cloak, remember? Thomas is the only one who would have known where she hid the formula,” she said, always remembering too much. “It was him. You know that.”
I did. He had brought her to the Church of St. Boethius to confess his betrayal. The same church we had visited on our first day in Prague, the church where an angry priest had given us our first frustrating non-answers about the Hledači. It couldn’t be a coincidence. But how could it be anything else? “He loved her,” I said stupidly.
Adriane shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said before anyone could say it for me. “I know. We have a bigger problem.”
She had been so sure he loved her.
“I guess Strahov wasn’t the home away from home she thought it was,” Eli said. “The monks betrayed her.”
“Or someone found it since then,” Max said. “Someone recently.”
“And left the whole thing except for the last piece, then sewed it back up in the binding again?” Eli said. “That seems equal parts elaborate and useless.”
“Crazy people do crazy things.”
“It doesn’t matter who did it,” Adriane said. “It’s done. We’re screwed.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “We have most of what the Hledači want, right? We have three out of four pieces—they’ve got nothing. So they should be willing to bargain with us.” If we could find a way to contact them without getting ourselves killed; if we could give them everything they wanted, betray Elizabeth, and reward Chris’s murder, just to save ourselves; if this whole thing hadn’t been a game of make-believe, the pleasant delusion that we could actually win.