City of Lost Dreams

FIFTEEN

It had taken Oksana less than twenty-four hours to get back to Max. She and Nico met him at a café in Old Town Square. Nico ordered drinks for Max and Oksana with a wave of his hand as rain beat against the windows, driving even the most stoic tourists indoors. Nico, Max noticed, was having a sedate cup of tea.

“Strange thing,” Oksana said, which made Max lean forward over his pivo. Oksana was never surprised. It was a prerequisite for being married to the little man. “This crazy man, he gone.”

“Gone, like there’s no trace of him?”

“One trace. Fingerprints on crypt door.”

You are impressive, thought Max. “And? Who is he?”

Nico smiled and squeezed a square of lemon into his tea. “His name is Jan Kubiš.”

“Jan Kubiš died in 1942, shot by the Nazis.”

Nico smiled. “And John of Nepomuk died in 1393. And yet they’re baaaack.”

Max frowned. Within a stone’s throw of where they were sitting, Tycho Brahe was buried, a burgomaster had been defenestrated, twenty-seven rebel leaders from the Battle of White Mountain had lost their heads . . . If the dead were coming back to life in Prague, things could get really weird, really fast. “What the hell is going on?” he said.

Nico smiled delightedly. “I have no idea. What I want to know is, who’s next?”

Oksana was less happy. “Dead should stay dead. Who is doing this?”

“Moriarty,” said Nico. “I can feel it.”

Max thought of what Sarah had said, that someone was shooting at her that night on the river. “Whoever they are, they’re possibly very dangerous.”

“I can find no connection between Saint John and Jan Kubiš,” said Nico. “Other than the names, of course.” The little man seemed positively gleeful. “Do you think we will see a raft of historical Johns coming back? John the Baptist. Jan Hus. I am hoping for John Dee. Also for John Denver.”

“Both Saint John and Jan Kubiš died in Prague,” said Max.

“Yes. There is that. Time is getting very thin here in Prague.”

Max hated to ask, but he had to. “And Harriet? What did you find on her?”

“Good as gold,” said Oksana, before her Russian pessimism kicked in. “So far.”

Harriet Hunter made her way through the twisting streets of the Malá Strana toward Letenská Street. Despite the driving rain, she could see her destination. The Gothic spire of St. Thomas was a familiar landmark in Prague; its height made it easy to orient by. Harriet appreciated that. Things had gotten a bit muddled.

Women love or hate; there is nothing in between.

Elizabeth Weston had written that.

Her hands were shaking. It was a weakness, to need something this badly. People could exploit such a weakness.

She hadn’t always been this way.

There had been a point, hadn’t there, when she had stood at a crossroads? Only she hadn’t known it then. Did one ever know that kind of thing? She had always been passionate. That was her trouble. “Susceptible” was her father’s word for her. “Impressionable,” was her mother’s rebuke. Well, Father had been susceptible, too, to women other than Mother. And the biggest impression Mother left was the ruby red imprint of her lips on the edge of an ever-present highball glass.

Harriet could not remember a time when she had been terrifically fond of what was going on in the present.

It had never been enough for Harriet to merely study history. She had wanted to live it, to feel it. It had been a kind of crusade. It still was. Because she was passionate. This wasn’t weakness, it was strength.

She hurried, a little, down the cobbled streets.

It had all started with Elizabeth Jane Weston. Harriet had “discovered” her at university and her first book (unpublished) had been a straightforward biography of the now largely forgotten poet. It had been a labor of love, in all senses of the phrase, and she had felt herself in such kinship with her subject that she, too, had taken to writing verses in Latin and spending long hours at prayer. She had even plucked her eyebrows in imitation of her favorite portrait of Elizabeth.

“Reads like historical fiction” had been the reaction of potential publishers.

“The author intrudes herself . . .”

“Far too many sentences begin with ‘We can imagine’ and ‘It’s easy to imagine.’”

And, most horribly: “Preposterously overwrought and managing to be both overwritten and undercooked, simultaneously.”

But one had to use one’s imagination a little! Elizabeth’s poetry and letters were enough to fill a volume, but that had been done, and nobody outside of a few dusty scholars gave a damn. She had to be made to come alive, to breathe, to laugh and cry and think and act. And for that, Harriet had precious few “facts” to work with. It wasn’t even enough to fill an episode of Histories & Mysteries. She could’ve wrapped up everything known about Elizabeth Weston’s life in one five-minute clip. Four minutes if she did it while walking and they cut away to maps and portraits and things.

Harriet wanted more than that for Elizabeth. Elizabeth needed to be restored to her rightful place! Harriet had scarcely been aware, as she was writing the book, that she was going beyond traditional scholarly speculation into the realm of imagination.

She had to admit that her love and admiration of Elizabeth Weston had also contained a measure of impatience. Liz’s stepfather was one of history’s most notorious charlatans. Edward Kelley! A man who was apprenticed to an apothecary, left Oxford under a cloud, was pilloried in Lancaster for forging illegal deeds and coin, was arrested for digging up a corpse and trying to communicate with it in Lancashire, and claimed to have stumbled upon mysterious alchemical manuscripts and magic powders while wandering in Wales. A man who claimed to speak directly to angels, a man who claimed to have transmuted base metal to gold, a man who had killed another man! A man who claimed that angelic communication had demanded that he and John Dee share the favors of their wives! This was Elizabeth’s stepfather!

And Elizabeth says nothing about him, only that she was “content,” and that he treated her as his own.

In this, Elizabeth was like Harriet’s mother and the rest of her mother’s circle, tight-lipped women who behaved as if you were screaming the bloody house down if you so much as sniffled, who thought questions were “impertinent,” and who never, ever, ever told you anything you wanted to know. Or like the dons at school, who were always trying to crush her enthusiasms. But Harriet felt—she knew—that there was much more. And a historian—a real historian—was very much like a detective. One had to be very dogged and persistent and leave no stone unturned. One of those stones was empathy and another was imagination.

And all of these people—Elizabeth Weston, Edward Kelley, John Dee, Rudolf II—were long dead, and even contemporary accounts of what they had said, what they had done, were just that: accounts. Stories. Impressions. Harriet had kept a diary since she was ten years old. There wasn’t much in it that was actually true. She could write an account of what people had said or done in her presence today, five minutes ago. Would it be accurate? Would it be factual?

So, anyway, she had gone into television.

And then, two years before, after a perhaps ill-considered attempt to interview Moravian puppeteers in Brno, Harriet had gotten an e-mail from a woman living in the Czech Republic, in the town of Trebon. The woman worked in some sort of publicity capacity for local tourism, and wouldn’t Trebon Château make for a “rather colorful” segment? She would be more than happy to act as a translator and/or guide, if Harriet ever wanted to visit.

Harriet had visited Trebon before, when she was preparing her book on Elizabeth, and relished an opportunity to return. Trebon Château was where John Dee, Edward Kelley, and their families had retreated when they had temporarily worn out their welcome in Prague. Trebon Château was where Kelley had received the angelic injunction regarding wife swapping. Harriet decided to do an unofficial scouting trip, and since her Czech was far from perfect, take the woman up on her offer. The woman—Harriet couldn’t remember now what she had called herself—had been fantastically helpful and made a wonderful tour guide of the château. She pointed out details that even Harriet’s sharp eyes missed.

She had just followed her into a small room, and was pulling out her camera to take a few photos, when the woman had taken a small atomizer out of her pocket and sprayed it directly in Harriet’s face.

Harriet’s first thought had been anthrax, and she had opened her mouth to scream. The woman lurched forward and covered her mouth. For a moment they struggled, and then Harriet had begun to feel most peculiar, and something—other than the thought that she had just been blasted with anthrax by a tiny, blond, blue-eyed terrorist—began to distract her and she stopped struggling. What was it? What was happening?

The woman said, “Look. Look around you. Tell me what you see.”

Harriet looked. The walls surrounding her were the same walls but the light was different, and the colors were different; everything was shimmering and fading. Now it was dark and the room was crowded with furniture, and in the center of this stood a small child in a long white nightdress.

Harriet’s fear had vanished. It wasn’t exactly like a dream. It was more like what had happened to her sometimes, as a small child, when she had pretended very hard. She had spent her life trying to re-create that feeling, and give it to others. And now here it was, being given to her.

She focused on the little girl in the nightdress. The child was filled with powerful emotion; Harriet could feel it coming off her skin in waves. Fear? Yes, fear, but something else as well. The child’s white face was beaded with perspiration. Harriet moved slowly toward the girl and reached out a hand, which passed straight through the child’s shoulder, as she had thought it might. What she had not been expecting was the jolt of electricity that almost brought her to her knees. The girl remained as she was, her eyes fixed on the doorway, where, presently, a man appeared. A man with a cap slipping sideways on his head, revealing mangled ears.

“Come, girl,” the man said, holding out his hand. “It is time.”

The girl took the man’s hand. Their bodies were ringed with some kind of phosphorescence. Harriet started to cry, without knowing why. Perhaps because the little girl wanted to cry, but would not allow herself to? Perhaps because she, Harriet, was so happy to be seeing this?

“Can we follow them?”

Harriet felt a hand on her back then, and the low voice of the woman spoke again.

“Yes. Do not run. Do not speak of what you are seeing. Do not attract attention. All shall be well.”

Harriet had breathed deeply, inhaling a curious scent that seemed to her dazed brain to be a mixture of amber and olives. She felt the muscles of her face relax and her shoulders fall. The hand on her back remained, pleasant and reassuring. She had followed the man and the child into the hall.

It was very dark. The man held a candle, which threw shadows on the walls around them but did not illuminate much. Harriet could just make out the outlines of a tapestry, a low bench, a chest. The man led the child down a flight of steps, and Harriet reached a hand out to the banister, relieved to feel solid wood under her fingertips. From her earlier tour, Harriet knew they were heading in the direction of Dee and Kelley’s laboratory. When they reached the laboratory door, the man unlocked it, and the little girl looked down the hallway. For a moment her eyes seemed to meet Harriet’s own. She’s wondering if she can run, Harriet thought. She’s wondering how far she will get before he catches her.

Pity and morbid curiosity mingled in her brain, but the hand was firmly guiding her on, and when the man had at last managed to open the heavy door, Harriet slipped in behind them.

This room, too, was nearly pitch-black, though the man lit another candle, illuminating a kiln made of round tiles, patterned with symbols in red and black. The smell coming from the oven was noxious, and Harriet covered her face with her hands, her eyes and nose burning.

“Watch,” the woman’s voice said again. “Watch what happens.”

The man took a long pair of pincers and removed something from the kiln, something that glowed darkly blue. He moved with this over to a long table.

“Bring the candle,” he ordered the girl.

Harriet watched as the man plunged the blue stone into a dish of dark liquid that immediately began to turn milky white. The man held the dish to his lips and blew over it softly.

“Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt,” he whispered, speaking the Latin words awkwardly.

All that is, is light.

Harriet felt the little girl beside her shiver. The hand at her back, too, was shaking.

The man handed the girl the dish. She held it in her small hands, her eyes shut tight, her face streaked with tears.

“Drink,” said the man.

The next thing Harriet knew, she was sitting on a park bench. The woman was sitting next to her, with a book in her lap. They were in the château’s park, in the present day. People wearing jeans and trainers passed by on bicycles. Harriet’s stomach rumbled.

“What . . .” Harriet pressed a hand to her rib cage.

“I read your book,” the woman said, in a low voice. “And I have followed your career with great interest. I was waiting for the right time for us to meet.”

“My book?”

“Elizabeth Weston: Venus in Exile.”

“How? Did you work in publishing?” Harriet took a deep breath.

“You got many things right,” the woman continued. “I was surprised. And intrigued. Frankly, I was a little alarmed at how you might have come by that knowledge.”

For a moment, all of Harriet’s questions vanished in a thrill of triumph. She knew she had been right! “Preposterously overwrought,” indeed!

“But, of course, you got many things wrong,” the woman continued. “You made me too emotional.”

“I remember,” Harriet said, her voice beginning to rise. “You sprayed something in my face. We were standing in a room and then you . . . and then I . . .”

“And then you saw.” She put her book down and faced Harriet. “You saw my stepfather give me something to drink.”

Harriet let this sink in for a moment. The questions were forming fast now, but the one that came to her lips was the simplest and most obvious one. Harriet could never bear having a story interrupted.

“Did you drink it?”

“I did.”

“And what happened?”

“For a while,” the woman said, “nothing. Or so I thought. But I was wrong.”

And then the woman, whom Harriet now knew to call by her real name, Elizabeth, began to talk in earnest. She talked for a long time. She talked about the book they would write together. About the things Harriet could see with this drug that she had learned to make. A drug that would allow Harriet to see the past. A drug Elizabeth would be happy to provide in return for Harriet’s cooperation in a few small matters. They talked until the shadows fell and then Elizabeth asked Harriet to walk with her. And Harriet, who had not known she was at a crossroads, had followed.

Harriet was at St. Thomas’s Church now. She had gotten the e-mail the previous night with the second chapter and the instructions on where to claim her reward. Harriet had already sent the first chapter, which covered the events at Trebon, off to her agent, who was surprised but pleased Harriet was going in such a commercial direction. It was raining harder than ever as she entered the church and made her way to the inner courtyard, stepping briskly down the covered loggia until she reached a familiar slab of stone set in the wall.

The tomb of Elizabeth Weston. She reached up high and found the niche in the bricks. Her hands stopped shaking as they found the tiny box that had been left there for her. One pill inside.

Just one. Where should she take it? Charles Bridge? Wenceslas Square? Why not here? She swallowed the pill, sighed. It would begin soon.

She reached out a hand and traced the Latin with her fingertips.

The tomb of Elizabeth Weston.

The empty tomb.