The Book of Blood and Shadow (39 page)

“What happened last night?”

“How about what
didn’t
happen last night?” I said, voice rising. “There are
two
people in that bed, you know. And just because
you’re
satisfied doesn’t mean that I don’t need you to—”

“I can escort you,” the monk said hastily.

“Really? You’d do that?”

He cleared his throat. “Of course.”

“See, now that’s a gentleman,” I told Eli.

He shrugged. “So marry him.”

I hooked my arm through the monk’s and let him guide me out of the library, past the miniature
Kunstkammer
, and down the stairs to the bathroom, where I stalled inside for as long as I dared.

When we returned, I could tell from the smile on Eli’s face that it had been long enough.

35

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Eli said as we descended toward Malá Strana, Elizabeth’s letter folded into his pocket. Strahov stood on a hill with the entire city stretched out beneath it. Several twisting paths cut through the grass, crisscrossing on their way back to civilization. We chose the steepest, away from the picnicking families and old men with grandchildren perched on their shoulders. “About getting you in trouble with Max. And being an ass about your brother.”

“I’m not in trouble with Max.” We weren’t going to talk about my brother. “That’s not how we work.”

“Right.”

“And just for the record, there’s nothing nefarious going on with him and Adriane.”

“I’m not worried about your little high school soap opera. He’s capable of worse.”

“You can’t still think he had anything to do with Chris. After everything?”

He didn’t answer.

“If you really thought he was guilty, you’d call the cops,” I said. “You wouldn’t just be sitting around chatting with the guy who murdered your cousin.”

“That’s very logical,” he said.

“Which is why I don’t get why you treat him like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you hate him. You barely know him.”

“I barely know you, too.”

“Right, but you don’t act like you hate me,” I pointed out. “Most of the time, at least.”

“No, I don’t. So, Logic Girl, maybe you’re asking the wrong question.”

“So now I’m supposed to ask what the right question is. And let me guess, you tell me that’s for you to know and me to find out? Sorry, I’m not playing this game.”

“You’re not playing any game,” he said. “That’s what’s going to get you in trouble.”

“Trouble with what?”

“Forget it.” He walked faster, kicking off small avalanches of gravel with each heavy step. I hurried to catch up, scuttling down the hill in mincing baby steps, feeling the potential for a disastrous skid every time my foot touched the ground.

“I’m already in trouble. In case you haven’t noticed.”

“I said forget it.”

“Why are you like this?”

“All I wanted to say was sorry,” he said. “About Andy. I get it now.”

“What?”

“Why you can’t let yourself believe in all this. Why you need the
Lumen Dei
not to be real.”

“I thought I was pretty clear I can’t believe in it because it’s ridiculous and because there’s no such thing as—”

“God. You were clear,” he said. “Because if there were a God, he took your brother away. He took Chris away. What would you want with a God like that? But if there were a machine—a miracle—that could prove you were wrong, you’d be stuck with him. And you’d have to ask why he took them.”

“You think that scares me?”

“I think you’re afraid to believe there’s something out there that wants to take everything you love away from you. And maybe … afraid to hope that with the
Lumen Dei
, with the power it’s supposed to confer, maybe you could bring them back.”

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?