A Sojourn in Bohemia Read online

  Julius led Varanus down the center of the nave, motioning to the room’s decaying grandeur with one hand as he continued his tale.

  “Of course, the knights won in the end.”

  “Rather a foregone conclusion,” Varanus remarked.

  “And poor Brother Claes had died,” Julius said. “But for his sacrifice, he was given a saint’s funeral and laid to rest in the ground beneath this very chapel. Um.…” He looked around and then pointed to a set of decorative flagstones ornamented with bits of mosaic tile. “Just there, I believe.”

  “Charmingly morbid.”

  “The remains of the tribe scattered, of course,” Julius continued, “and in order to secure and subdue this fertile land, the Order built this castle and named it Valkenburg in honor of Claes’s sacrifice.”

  “And then your ancestors took their name from it,” Varanus teasingly reminded him. “A Dutchman lends his name to a Teutonic castle, which then lends its name to a German noble family.”

  Julius tried not to laugh, but a titter of mirth escaped him, and he quickly coughed in a desperate attempt to maintain the dignity of his family.

  “I feel certain there is an historian in Amsterdam laughing at us this very moment,” he said. “At least I can take pride that my patronym is thoroughly German: Von Raabe, the raven.”

  “Mmm,” Varanus mused. She smirked and ran her fingertip along Julius’s temple. “No, too blond to be a raven. I think you should adopt the Valkenburg name and become a Dutchman.”

  Julius caught her hand and gently kissed the tip of her finger. “I think not,” he said, smiling at her.

  Varanus smiled back, but her eye caught a figure standing some distance behind Julius, next to one of the columns that supported the ceiling. She looked properly and saw Korbinian again, leaning against the smooth stonework, his face dripping with blood that splattered in droplets against the floor, only to vanish like the rain.

  Varanus quickly looked back at Julius and then just as quickly looked away, worried that he might discern something of what she had seen in her face. But she concealed her distress well, and Julius took no note of it as they resumed their walk, slowly approaching the chancel and the altar. Beyond the columns, Korbinian walked along with her, matching her step for step despite his longer stride. He never once took his bloodstained eyes from her.

  Finally, Julius stopped before the stone altar and placed his hand upon it, running his fingertips across the smooth surface.

  “A block of stone,” Varanus mused, trying very hard to ignore Korbinian as he lingered just at the edge of her sight.

  “More than a block of stone,” Julius corrected. “This is the heart of the castle. Its soul and purpose. Though I realize it does not look like much now, this altar—indeed, this church—represents the final victory of the Teutonic Order over the pagans who once occupied it. For here, on this very spot, was the shrine where those tribesmen once bathed in smoke and sacrificed to their gods.”

  Varanus looked down at her feet. “Here?”

  “More or less,” Julius said. He placed his hand against the small of Varanus’s back and gently drew his fingers in circles, making her skin tingle pleasantly even beneath the layers of heavy fabric. Varanus smiled and rested her head against Julius’s chest, allowing him to pull her into his arms. “There was a great tree here, according to the legend. It was the centerpiece of the tribe’s entire religion, and they would burn their fires directly beneath its branches.”

  “I imagine it was stained black with corruption,” Varanus said.

  Julius looked at her, his expression puzzled. “Yes, that is precisely what the legend says. How did you know that?”

  “An inspired guess,” Varanus answered. “It seemed thematic. And besides, smoke tends to stain things.”

  She began idly toying with the buttons on Julius’s waistcoat, using it as a distraction to avoid thinking about Korbinian, who surely still lurked somewhere nearby, just out of sight.

  “Logical,” Julius agreed, “but I think I prefer the thought of you brimming with divinely inspired genius.”

  “Do not be absurd,” Varanus said. “My genius is my own. God has nothing to do with it.” She glanced at the altar again. “So where is the tree now? I suppose it must have been chopped down.”

  “Chopped down,” Julius agreed, “dug up, cloven into pieces, burned to ashes, exorcised, and finally cast away on the wind. All that remains are the roots, rotting away somewhere down there. They built the altar directly on top of it, so that the light and the glory of God might cleanse the land and bring forth its bounty.”

  “And how is that proceeding?” Varanus asked.

  Julius chuckled. “Well, we eat a lot of fish around here.”

  “I had noticed,” Varanus remarked.

  She took a deep breath and looked around, finally summoning up the courage to look for Korbinian. If she had been alone, she would have admonished him for his peculiar, bad behavior of late, but alas he no longer seemed to come to her except when she was in company.

  But there was no sign of Korbinian anywhere, only the ruins of Valkenburg’s decaying chapel. That was just as well.

  Varanus looked back at Julius and smiled. “Count von Raabe, I do believe we have become separated from the others,” she said. “This is most distressing.”

  Julius looked this way and that and gasped. “My goodness, you do seem to be right about that, Princess. Not a soul anywhere. I do apologize. I shall attend to the matter immediately.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” Varanus asked.

  Julius smiled at her. He lifted Varanus’s veil just enough to reveal her lips and ran his fingers across the smooth skin of her cheek.

  “I think I shall start by doing this…” he murmured softly, leaning in and pressing his lips to hers.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In the days that followed the destruction of his scientific papers, Friedrich was surprised to find himself easily reconciled with things. Admittedly, he had been overdramatic with how he had handled the culmination of his repeated failures, but perhaps that was to be expected after a decade of exhaustive, even fanatical, devotion to a cause that could never have ended in success. The very notion of granting immortality to the human body was, of course, absurd. It simply couldn’t be done, which Friedrich knew he would have realized if he had only allowed himself to honestly consider the fact once during the past ten years.

  And though he had first been seized with a deep bout of depression, his despair passed with surprising quickness—aided, naturally, by Stanislav’s good cheer and more than a few stiff drinks. His newfound lack of purpose was nothing short of liberation, freeing him from the chains of obsession that had tied him to his desk night after night, producing nothing but pointless fantasies and scientific drivel. Now that was all done and gone. He was a free man again. And while it was true he was rapidly approaching forty, he still had some of his youth left. He might do something useful with himself. He might even marry! He still had his looks, which were returning to him more and more each day that he spent not chained to his desk and his beakers. And after all, both sides of his family aged gracefully. Aunt Ilse had kept her looks well into her forties…right up to the night of the accident. And Mother looked no older than Friedrich, though that could only be the result of good breeding and care. Whatever fantastic illusions Friedrich had previously harbored, he knew that his mother was not immortal.

  And now, pleasurably aimless, Friedrich found himself finally enjoying life again. He had reintroduced himself to Prague society and was accepting invitations to things again—though the letters had to be received at his official address in Prague, which was located in a far more respectable neighborhood but which he only visited every few days to keep up appearances.

  “More respectable,” he mused. Almost anywhere would be more upstanding than the unru
ly warren that harbored his laboratory. But he was not about to abandon his friends just because they weren’t the sort one could take to a soiree or a ball.

  Deep in his thoughts, Friedrich lowered his cup of coffee and cast an eye around his table at those same delightfully not-respectable people. They were in a local coffee house favored by Stanislav and the revolutionaries, which at the evening hour was filled with people all chatting or arguing, until the walls reverberated with the almost deafening sounds of camaraderie.

  There was Stanislav with his arm around Erzsebet. Zoya and her sketchbook, making a study of the crowd. Wilhelm, Nicolas, and Ilya arguing. Karel reciting poetry that no one with half a brain wanted to hear. All was right with the world.

  “The revolution will not begin in Russia!” Wilhelm shouted.

  In reply, Ilya raised his hands as if pleading for divine intervention to knock some sense into him. “What people in all the world are so oppressed—”

  “It is not the oppression of a people but the oppression of the soul!” interrupted Nicolas.

  “Nonsense,” countered Stanislav. “The souls of my people are oppressed, along with the rest of them!”

  “But there is no soul,” protested Karel. “Only the immortal longings of a mind unable to free itself from the shackles of terror at its own mortality.”

  Friedrich sighed and took another sip of coffee. Well, all was as usual, that was for certain.

  Zoya leaned over to him and whispered, “I would stab them all into silence, but I only have the one pencil, and I’m afraid it might break.”

  “What, and ruin the show?” Friedrich replied, grinning.

  “There is that,” Zoya agreed. “Though if this keeps up much longer, I fear the Revolution will either break out here and now or else dissolve into civil war before it has even begun.”

  “Revolutions often do that,” Friedrich noted.

  He coughed loudly as a cloud of particularly pungent smoke wafted past him from Wilhelm’s cigarette. He had never much cared for tobacco, neither for the staleness of the odor nor the heaviness of the smell that seemed to linger in the air long after its passing and assailed one’s nose like a swarm of gnats. It had been bad enough as a child, but with each passing year, he seemed to have less and less tolerance for unpalatable smells. For that reason he never allowed smoking in the house, but in the cafe he suffered at the whim of the local breeze.

  Zoya glanced at him, noticing his distress. “The smell?” she asked.

  “Oversensitive nose,” Friedrich replied, a little embarrassed. As a child, Aunt Ilse had been especially impatient about his finickiness with smells and tastes. “No cause for concern.”

  “Pssh,” Zoya scoffed. “If it’s bothering you, it’s bothering you. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

  She pulled a cigarette tin out of the carpetbag she used to carry her supplies. Opening the tin—which curiously smelled less of tobacco and more of roses and frankincense—she produced a handmade cigarette rolled in old newspaper, lit it from the lamp on the table, and passed it to Friedrich.

  “Here,” she said, “this should help.”

  Friedrich chuckled, very confused. He pushed the cigarette away. “I don’t think actually smoking is going to make the stench any less intolerable,” he said.

  “Smell it,” Zoya insisted.

  Friedrich took a hesitant sniff, but to his surprise the cigarette smelled like the tin it had come from.

  “Smells like perfume,” he said in astonishment. He took the cigarette and waved it under his nose. It was actually rather pleasant, if a little strong.

  “It’s incense,” Zoya explained, returning to her sketching. “I make them myself. It wards off bad smells. You don’t even have to smoke it. Just let it burn and clear the air.”

  Friedrich sat back and waved the curious cigarette a few times, dispelling some of the tobacco stench that had hung about the table.

  “That’s rather clever,” he noted.

  “Mmm hmm,” Zoya agreed as she sketched. “One might even think I have half a brain.”

  “On the mantelpiece in the parlor?” Friedrich quipped.

  Zoya smirked at him. “Of course. The boys share it between them. I’m really just holding it for them.”

  Friedrich laughed and drank some more coffee. He really had missed all of this.

  “Freddie…” Zoya said, still engrossed in her sketching.

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you think it’s safe for Erzsebet to be out in public like this?” Zoya asked.

  Friedrich looked at Erzsebet, who was quietly sipping her coffee as she watched Stanislav and his comrades arguing about the soul and whether it was more oppressed than Russia. She seemed to be enjoying herself sitting at the periphery of the conversation and observing rather than becoming embroiled in it.

  “Why wouldn’t she be safe?” Friedrich asked. “She’s with all of us. No one is going to bother her, not with Ilya waving his hands about. I wouldn’t come within ten paces of the table with him carrying on like that.”

  Zoya tilted her head and gave Friedrich a look. “I don’t mean ‘is someone going to bother her’, Freddie. But she is on the run from her family. Stanislav too, you’ll remember. I don’t think either of them should be in public right now, and least of all her.”

  “Well, I suppose there is that,” Friedrich agreed. He leaned across the table and patted Stanislav’s arm.

  “Hmm, what?” Stanislav asked, breaking away from the argument. “What is it, Freddie? We’re in the midst of something momentous.”

  “I have no doubt,” Zoya muttered. She poked Erzsebet with the blunt end of her pencil to get the girl’s attention and flashed her a smile. “Chin up, if you please. I’m going to do something rather angelic with your profile.”

  Though startled, Erzsebet quickly smiled and placed her chin on her hand. “Like this?”

  “Marvelous,” Zoya replied.

  “Stanislav,” Friedrich said, “do you think perhaps we ought to be getting home?”

  “Home?” Stanislav exclaimed. He laughed and shook his head in bewilderment. “But the evening’s just started!” He gave Erzsebet a kiss on the cheek and asked, “You don’t want to go home yet, do you darling?”

  “Um…no?” Erzsebet replied. Her tone was a little distant, and she stared off into the crowd, her eyes darting around as if looking for something she only half imagined she had seen.

  “You are a wanted man,” Friedrich reminded him. “It may have been over a year, but Erzsebet’s father must still be searching for the two of you.”

  At this, Erzsebet’s face turned pale, and she pressed herself deeper into Stanislav’s arms, her eyes still staring at the far end of the cafe. Stanislav gently stroked the back of her neck to comfort her and gave Friedrich an angry look.

  “Good God, Freddie, don’t frighten her!” Stanislav shook his head.

  “I’m not trying to frighten anyone!” Friedrich protested.

  “It’s the first time she’s been out in weeks,” Stanislav said. “Let her enjoy herself.”

  He looked at Erzsebet and smiled. She smiled back at him, but then she quickly returned to watching the crowd.

  “I don’t know why you insist on being out either,” Friedrich said. “Count Erdelyi is a man of some influence, you know. I don’t want either of you getting caught just because you can’t stay indoors for more than five blasted minutes!”

  Stanislav wagged his finger at Friedrich. “Old Erdelyi isn’t going to find us here, and I’ll tell you why. He’s already searched Prague once. I have it on good authority that while we were hiding in Salzburg last year, his men were scouring Bohemia for us. As far as he knows, we’re not here!”

  “Sneaky,” Zoya commented, though her tone did not readily convey whether this was a compliment or a snide remark.

  “I
will tell you what Erdelyi’s doing right now,” Stanislav continued. “Either he thinks I’m a fool and I stayed here in the Empire, in which case he’ll scour Hungary and Austria before he even imagines looking here again; or else he thinks I’m clever and he’ll assume that I’ve fled the country. Paris, maybe. Either way, Prague is the safest place to be right now.”

  As he spoke, Erzsebet suddenly stiffened and shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, it isn’t.”

  “What?” Stanislav asked, suddenly alarmed. He was echoed almost simultaneously by Friedrich and Zoya.

  Erzsebet pointed across the room to a pair of men who were seated at a corner table, drinking coffee like everyone else. But as Friedrich watched, he saw the men cast glances in their direction with deliberate interest.

  “Your father’s men?” Friedrich asked.

  At that distance he could not hear what the men were saying, so he had no way of knowing if their language or their accents were Hungarian.

  “No,” Erzsebet whispered. “But I recognize them. They serve Count von Steiersberg.”

  “The man you were supposed to marry?” Stanislav exclaimed. “How did they find us?”

  “Clearly by looking where the Count wasn’t,” Friedrich said.

  “We should leave,” Zoya said, packing her things away hurriedly. “We should leave now.”

  “What if they follow us?” Erzsebet asked, her tone frightened and barely above a whisper.

  “They’ll do that no matter when we leave,” Friedrich said. “Better now when there’s a crowd.”

  As they hurried to their feet, the revolutionaries halted their argument and stood as well, looking confused. In the heat of their dispute, they seemed to have missed the entire conversation taking place next to them.