City of Lost Dreams

TWENTY-ONE

Harriet was dying for a hit, but of course she had to wait until Max was asleep. She was surprised at how relieved she had been the other day to see Max’s Alfa roll back into its parking space underneath the castle. Not everyone came back from Kutná Hora, and she had become rather fond of Max. It was possible they could have a future together when this was all over. It might be rather fun to be chatelaine of the Lobkowicz households. She would do it so well. And Mother might actually be pleased, for once, even if Max was American. He was so nice, and so dishy, and so svelte and slim hipped. Harriet pulled him up out of his chair and over to the bed. He looked gorgeous in costume, even if he wasn’t very clever with accents or sticking to character in their private moments. She began undressing him.

Of all the assignments Elizabeth had given her, Max was by far the pleasantest. Elizabeth had rather a bee in her bonnet about the Lobkowicz family, ever since Polyxena had let her down, but so far all Harriet had had to do was watch and see if Max turned up anything valuable, and make sure he didn’t get too close to the truth. It was terrible bad luck that he had been present for both John of Nepomuk and Jan Kubiš—she’d had to endure a real tongue-lashing from Elizabeth and a threat that if she wasn’t more careful, there would be no more Westonia. Harriet shuddered to think how Elizabeth had fired shots to try to dissuade do-gooders from saving Saint John before she could retrieve him herself. What if Max had been harmed? And she had a bit of a fright when Max had mentioned Kutná Hora . . . but here he was, safe as houses, sitting on his sofa and accepting the very stiff martini she had just poured for him. She fingered the pill inside the silk pouch in her pocket. Soon Max would be off to Elysian dreamland, and she could get back to where she belonged. . . .

“You haven’t told me much about your childhood,” said Max, as Harriet settled herself astride his hips.

Oh, God no, thought Harriet. He doesn’t want to talk. What an eccentric man. She unbuttoned her modest, high-necked nightie and let her breasts spill out. Talking could take hours. And the past was beckoning to her . . . she could feel history’s siren call. Every time some new detail emerged, some conversation, some previously misunderstood corner of the past was illuminated. But it was more than scholarly interest. It was like the most gorgeous dream and the most engrossing book and the most fascinating movie all combined at once. She needed to divert Max, and divert posthaste.

“I’ve brought a special treat for us.” She reached behind her pillow. Zounds, if this didn’t keep him from a chat then nothing would.

Max’s eyes widened briefly. “Is that what I think it is?”

“A fourteenth-century English phallus.” Harriet did not care for the unpleasant American word for such devices. “Ivory. A very special auction at Sotheby’s. The inscriptions are particularly amusing.”

She held the elaborately carved ivory tower between her breasts and pointed to the first of the curving lines that circled it. “‘At this mark the virgins tarry, going no farther if they wish to marry.’”

“Aha,” said Max. “Okay.”

“I’m the Wife of Bath, and you—” Harriet leaned over the side of the bed and brought out a rough hemp robe from her bag. “You are the Friar.” Max looked wonderful in a cowl.

“Canterbury Tales?” said Max, allowing her to dress him in the robe. “I’m not sure we covered this chapter in high school English class.”

“No, I expect you wouldn’t have.” Harriet settled herself on the bed and pulled the hem of her dress up to her hips. She parted her legs and keeping her eyes locked on Max, slowly slid the ivory tusk inside herself up to the first line.

“Whoa,” said Max. Harriet smiled at the look in his eyes. Heigh-ho.

“Mhmm. You read the next bit.”

Max rotated the lingam in order to read the line of script. “‘At this line the good wives stay, when their husbands are away.’”

I do adore my work, thought Harriet. This was much more fun than Histories & Mysteries, where they sometimes censored her impulses. She caressed her breasts and spread her legs wider. “Oh, dear Friar,” she said, “‘Tell me also, to what purpose or end the genitals were made, that I defend / And for what benefit was man first wrought?’” Chaucer really was divine. She wriggled her hips.

“Something, something, something, ‘they were not made for naught,’” answered Max, who tended to paraphrase quotations in these moments, poor darling.

“Do read the next line, Friar.”

Max obeyed and slid the merry Maypole up to the next line.

“‘Touch the naughty wench’s spot, where the door to Heaven is sought.’” Max began to kiss the insides of her thighs.

“One more,” Harriet pleaded, writhing. “The last line, Friar. Read it. Oh, I beg you. Read it to me.”

“‘Pass this point and go straight to Hell, after giving a good loud yell.’”

Harriet, always receptive, complied.

It was three a.m. when Max awakened from a bad dream he didn’t remember and found that Harriet was no longer sleeping beside him. He wasn’t sure if she had left the palace or not. Her clothes, shoes, and coat were gone, but her purse still lay on the chair where she had flung it before unpacking her . . . things.

He pulled on the friar robe to go searching for her. He hoped she wasn’t sleepwalking. If she wandered into any of the museum rooms, she’d set off the alarms. But she was nowhere to be found. Possibly she had left and simply forgotten her purse. Definitely not the girl next door, Harriet. For all her professional accomplishments and confidence, he sensed there was a vulnerability there she was hiding. It made him feel protective, which was nice.

Well, he was awake now, might as well do some reading. Pols had asked him for books on the Golden Fleece for the libretto of her opera. It was nice to talk to someone about Fleece lore. So far his search through the secret library hadn’t turned up anything useful about Philippine’s cures, but he had found some interesting things about Ferdinand, his collections, his interest in architecture, and his happy marriage. Pols loved hearing about Ferdinand and Philippine, too, and he enjoyed reading to her. Ferdinand and Philippine had really come alive for him—they no longer seemed like distant historical figures but flesh and blood people. Ferdinand’s struggles to please his demanding father, his inconvenient ardor for Philippine, whom he had spotted on a trip to Augsburg and fallen madly in love with—Max felt like he and Ferdy would have a lot to talk about. He was beginning to wonder if the Archduke hadn’t been the original member of the secret Order of the Golden Fleece.

Max made his way down the stairs to the subterranean basement, followed a narrow hallway into a small, windowless room, and rolled up the rug that concealed the trapdoor. He descended into a tunnel, walked in a crouch for thirty meters, pulled open a second trapdoor, and then ascended into the secret library of his palace.

His grandfather Max had sealed this room before fleeing the Nazis in 1939. He had left all his most prized possessions here. Not the priceless art or artifacts or jewels, but letters, books, and the strange alchemical arsenal. Though many of the books mentioned the Fleece, none so far seemed to contain a clue about its whereabouts, but it was going to take a while to get through everything. Max grabbed a couple of things he had set aside earlier about Philippine and Ferdinand to take upstairs. Two books and a folio of heavily annotated architectural drawings. He reversed his path, moving through trapdoor-tunnel-trapdoor. He could renovate this lower part of the palace, and make it all easier, but it was . . . let’s face it . . . totally badass to have trapdoors and secret passages.

He came up in the little windowless room. This had been Sarah’s room, when she had been at the palace two summers ago. Sarah. Talk about inconvenient ardor.

Max sighed and flicked the flashlight app on his phone to make his way up the stairs. He heard a scuttling in the narrow hallway. Damn. The rats were back.

Harriet tried to stand, but couldn’t quite manage it. The robed figure had walked past her in the darkness, with ancient tomes under his arms. Who was it? Martin Luther? Richard of Wallingford? The Venerable Bede?

No. No, she was in Prague. The drug let you see into time, but it didn’t let you see across space. She could see only things that had happened here. Thank God she had realized at the last second it wasn’t a figure from the past, and stayed where she was, out of sight. It was Max. That was close. Harriet wondered what time it was. Max was probably looking for her. She’d need to reappear with a story about needing some air. A tiny little lie. And while she was at it, she would have to dissemble just a wee bit to Elizabeth, too, and tell her she’d seen a monk. With a wand of light! Elizabeth seemed to be doubting Harriet’s skills to see the past. But really all she needed was a little more practice. And a bigger dose of Westonia. One pill was not nearly enough. Elizabeth was so mean with the stuff. Harriet kept begging her for a big bag, big enough to see all of the Napoleonic Wars. All in good time, Elizabeth said. Pish! But she needs must do as she was told.

Harriet screwed her eyes shut and breathed deeply. The drug worked so erratically! Sometimes it took hours before anything happened, and sometimes it happened right away. Harriet wanted to do what Elizabeth asked, but Elizabeth didn’t realize how blasted difficult the whole thing was.

Or how much she was demanding.

After they’d met at Trebon, Elizabeth had shown Harriet her lab in the abandoned mines beneath the village of Kutná Hora. Elizabeth had explained to Harriet that she occasionally needed subjects to test her drugs on. Drugs that every once in a while proved fatal, which was why Elizabeth only experimented on very bad people. “Rapists,” she had said. “Child pornographers.” Harriet tried very hard not to think about that part. She was aware that occasionally some new bones were added to the piles at Sedlec Ossuary, after being chemically treated to look like old bones. She was aware because Elizabeth sometimes had her do the treatment. It wasn’t all whortleberries and roses, being handmaiden to a genius. Or being a drug addict. A history addict, she told herself. After all, what’s wrong with being addicted to history?

She had to trust Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the only one who could give her what she needed, feed the need she had created that day at Trebon, the need to see the past. And it was insanely impressive what Elizabeth had accomplished! Things that the rest of science was only beginning to admit were possible. Especially considering what she had had to endure and how she had been forced to keep moving, never letting anyone realize how slowly she was aging. It was being a poet, Harriet thought, that had allowed Elizabeth to become such a gifted scientist. That and her initial training in alchemy. She actually knew how to decipher those complicated metaphorical manuscripts! No more guessing.

And of course Elizabeth’s cause was full of poetry, too. It was four-handkerchief-weeper stuff, really, about trying to die because of grief and then finding out you had to live with grief. And then all the feminist bits. Her insights about current culture. Harriet was pretty sure the Man Booker Prize would be hers for those. If there wasn’t some immigrant narrative that year. Of course, Elizabeth’s sense of humor needed to be cleaned up here and there. People now didn’t find beheadings all that funny.

It was all going to make an extraordinary novel. The question was, how did the story end?

Harriet stood up. She felt ghastly, and her mouth was dry. There wasn’t much doing down here in the hallway. Maybe nothing interesting had ever happened down here.

On his way back upstairs, Max passed the practice room and heard noise. He flipped on the lights to reveal Pollina, who was unaware he was there. The daily walk from her apartment to the palace had been proving to be too much for her, and Max had given her and Jose rooms here to sleep in, so that she could play whenever she felt up to it. She was determined to finish her opera.

He would wait for a pause and then tell her about the books.

Max leaned against the door frame of the practice room, stroking the grizzled head of Boris, and watching the girl play. The dog leaned heavily against his leg. Boris might be mostly blind, and nearly deaf, but he was a hero. Boris, Max thought, was far braver and more loyal than he was.

Pollina was experimenting with equipment Max had just bought for her: an electronic piano (full eighty-eight keys), plugged into a specially designed laptop (Braille keyboard and voice activation), which automatically recorded everything she played. Pollina had asked for this, and Max, desperate for ways to feel useful to her, had immediately complied. He couldn’t hear what she was working on—she had plugged in and was wearing the enormous headphones—but the slight plonk-plonking sound of her fingers hitting the keys was oddly soothing.

As the girl played, Max used the sleeve of his monk’s robe to gently rub the cover of the folio he’d retrieved from the secret library. A gleaming six-pointed golden star began to emerge. At first Max thought it represented the Jewish star, but when he opened the cover, he found that the loose collection of pages were in Latin.

Veteres ritus et ritualia stellae aestate palatium Ferdinandus. Max flipped through the handwritten pages, recognizing the floor plan and some of the drawings. It looked like the Star Summer Palace, here in Prague. Someone had made a series of handwritten notes on it, probably the builder.

Max knew a little about the star-shaped palace. Ferdinand had built it for Philippine as a sort of vacation home. Except, looking at the alchemical notations on the drawings, Max wondered if it was more than that. . . .

Pols turned, startling him. Of course she had known he was there. Her senses were incredible.

“What’s that thing you’re reading?” she asked. “Is it for my opera?”

“It’s very late,” he said. “Let me help you back to your room. We’ll read together tomorrow.”

Harriet staggered up the stairs. The drug had finally kicked in on her way up, but she hadn’t seen anything historically interesting at all. It had just been Sarah Weston and the dwarf Nico that Elizabeth had warned her about, marching up and down, up and down, dragging some third person and giggling. It had been odd, but not at all useful, and she hadn’t been able to push past the energy of either of them. Sarah, in particular, had been crackling, sending sparks right and left. It wasn’t the first time Harriet had encountered Sarah while on Westonia. The girl had mucked up half of Prague with her energy.

Another figure appeared at the far end of the hallway. Max again. Damn it, she had lost the thread. Harriet hid herself and watched Max help the little girl down the hallway. Pollina didn’t like Harriet, she’d made that bloody clear. Moritz snarled at her, too, the unholy cur.

She needed to get back to bed and tell Max she’d gone out to look at the stars.

Harriet tried the door of Max’s office. Locked, damn it. She needed something to give to Elizabeth. Elizabeth might stop telling her the story if Harriet didn’t deliver. And the novel wasn’t finished.