Sky's Dark Labyrinth (22 page)

Fighting broke out again in the Old Town. In Karlova Street, Barbara sat on the bed with her arms clutching her folded legs. She rested her forehead on her knees and whimpered at every noise.

Kepler perched nearby, attempting to read. He carried a stone of emotion inside him. Each day, it grew heavier.

The raiders had returned under cover of darkness, and seemingly in greater numbers. There was a succession of heavy thumps. The windows rattled in the house, making Barbara cry out.

‘Cannons,' said Kepler. He crept to the windows and peered through a crack in the shutters. He glimpsed a column of men in armour striding down the road. These were not irregulars; they were well
disciplined
and equipped. This must be Matthias's army, arriving at last.

‘Papa?'

It was Susanna at the doorway.

‘Child, are you feeling better?'

She nodded as if it were a silly question, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her face was still pockmarked, but there was more colour in her cheeks. ‘Ludwig is crying.'

Frau Bezold was already in the children's room when Kepler arrived. ‘I think he's hungry,' said the housekeeper.

‘Thank God, they're getting better.'

But then they turned to Friedrich.

‘He's burning up,' said Frau Bezold.

The children's pustules had broken several days ago, spilling their clear fluid. While the other two had grown stronger, Friedrich continued to weaken.

She lifted him. The boy's body lolled in her grip.

‘I must fetch Doctor Reichard,' said Kepler.

Frau Bezold stood in his way. ‘You can't go out just now, it's too dangerous. What if something were to happen to you?'

‘What choice do I have?' He pushed past her and fled from the house into the hot night.

He checked the street. Figures were stationed at the mouth of the bridge. This was something new. Kepler peered at the checkpoint, eager to gauge any information he could about their identity.

He lingered too long.

‘You there!' one of them called.

Kepler backed away.

‘Halt, I say. In the name of Emperor Matthias.'

Emperor Matthias
. So Rudolph's brother must already have taken the city. A hundred questions clamoured for his attention, but he shoved them all aside and bolted for the alleyways.

At the doctor's house, he rapped smartly on the door. The doctor looked in need of physic himself. He wore a sweat-stained shirt and smoothed the few strands of his hair with grubby fingers. ‘Johannes, if this is about your wife …'

‘It's my son, Doctor Reichard. He needs your help.'

‘Dysentery? It's breaking out across the city.'

‘No, smallpox and fever.'

The doctor looked over Kepler's shoulder, surveying the street. ‘Is it safe?'

‘Yes,' Kepler lied.

‘I'll fetch my bag.'

An awful sound filled the house as Kepler returned, the panting Reichard a dozen steps behind. They found Barbara lying on the floor of the bedroom, tearing at the floorboards and howling. In the corner of the room, Susanna clung to Frau Bezold, head buried in the housekeeper's bosom, neither of them daring to approach Barbara's stricken form.

For a moment Kepler thought that Barbara was in the throes of another seizure, but the movements were not the same. Then he noticed Friedrich, and the reality of the situation became terribly clear.

On the bed, his son lay completely still.

Barbara's wracking sobs somehow helped him keep his own
composure
. He kneeled slowly and ran a hand over her back. ‘Barbara,' he said. His voice sounded stern, though that had not been his intention.

She lashed out, arms flailing, catching him with a ragged fingernail across the eyebrows. Instinctively he raised his hand to strike back but at the last moment plunged it downward to grab her hand.

‘Leave me alone. Look what you've let happen,' she wailed.

He squeezed her wrists tightly. They ended up staring at each other, breathing fast and hard, tears streaming from their eyes. ‘You're hurting me,' she said.

Kepler threw her hands away, jumped to his feet. Susanna was crying silently, still entwined around the housekeeper.

The doctor knelt beside Barbara. ‘Drink this, Frau Kepler, it will help you.' He touched a measuring glass to her dry lips. Initially she gagged on the preparation, but then seemed eager for the potent mix. Within minutes, her breathing slowed and she sat back against the bedpost, eyelids drooping.

‘Let's get you into bed, madam,' Frau Bezold said calmly. She stroked Susanna's head and untangled the frightened child, then guided Barbara out of the children's room.

‘I will arrange for an undertaker to call,' said the doctor, ‘if they're not already overrun.'

Kepler nodded dumbly.

Frau Bezold took to praying every day in the children's room. Susanna would cry while clutching Astrid for comfort. Kepler would stand outside and listen, unwilling to step inside in case his heart truly broke. Only Ludwig was untouched by the tragedy.

Barbara refused to get up, looked blankly at her food and would not talk. She stared at the ceiling or at the window where all she could see of the wounded city were the roofs of the houses opposite.

One day Kepler heard Barbara's food tray and its contents crash to the floor.

‘I give up with her,' said Frau Bezold, passing him on the stairs.

In the bedroom he cleared up the mess. ‘Barbara, you must eat. How long can you last like this?'

She did not answer.

He would sit often on her bed, talking about anything that came into his head. Mostly it was about his work, sometimes about their children. She rarely acknowledged his presence.

‘I saw Jan today at the university. He tells me that Rudolph is still alive but confined to his Chamber of Arts. Matthias has taken over all the running of the Empire.' There was no news of von Wackenfels. He had disappeared. ‘Let us hope my blond friend escaped in time,' said Kepler. Anything else was unthinkable.

The children spent time with their mother daily, but her eyes had stopped following them around the room. Everyone knew that Friedrich had been her favourite; Kepler's too, if he were being honest. The boy had moved like her, spoken like her. His easy nature and quick smile were like the Barbara Kepler had fallen for all those years ago. The Barbara he still searched for in her eyes. But they were faded and distant, their gaze locked on something unfathomable. Occasionally they looked at her battered prayer book, but even that ritual was on the wane. As the days passed, her face began to sag and her skin took on a grey pallor.

Frau Bezold looked after the children, becoming more of a
grandmother
than a housekeeper. One night she knocked gingerly on Kepler's study door. She was sniffling as she explained that she could no longer cope. One of her last remaining teeth had simply fallen from its socket, too tired to hold on any longer. She felt the same way.

‘I know,' said Kepler.

The next day, Kepler sat on his wife's bed. ‘There is nothing to keep me in Prague any more. I've been thinking that perhaps we should move on again. I thought somewhere more like Graz, back in Austria where you will feel more at home.' He watched her, willing some kind of reaction. ‘There's a District Mathematician needed in Linz. We could go there; somewhere with no memories, somewhere we can start again.'

Frau Bezold entered the room carrying a pile of laundry and took off the top sheet, flapping it over the bed.

Barbara spoke, her voice so weak it was barely recognisable. ‘Is this the cloth of redemption?'

Kepler felt his eyes dampen with tears. ‘You have no need for that.'

That night, Barbara's soul departed. She released it so modestly: one moment she was alive, the next moment her jaw dropped and Kepler knew she was gone. Her body remained upright in bed, as unmoving as it had been in her last few weeks of life. He did not call out to her or
shake her or make any attempt to revive her because he knew that all she had wished for was to see Friedrich again. This was the reason for her death. How could he deny her this greatest wish?

Her soul had been so deeply wounded by the death of her precious boy that she could find no reason to continue living on this bitter Earth. Despairing of a future without Friedrich, she had achieved her final journey as easily as they could have walked across one country's border with another. He almost admired her resolve, perhaps even envied her a little.
She is with God now, all is well
, he told himself. Yet inwardly he felt as though she had set him on fire. He had loved her with all his heart but it had not been enough for her. She had left him. He could find no words sufficient to express the pain.

On the morning of her burial, Kepler pushed her rigid body on a tumbril through the muddy streets. The act felt as insensitive as the wooden cart itself, clunking through the ruts. Detached and downcast, he trailed his children and the few friends brave enough to be seen at a Lutheran funeral. Frau Bezold, clutching self-consciously at her crucifix, had bade them farewell at the kitchen door with a plaintive ‘I cannot' at his request for her to join the procession.

The soldiers they encountered stood aside, though Kepler noticed the captain watching carefully, scanning each face and making sure the swaddled body was not some kind of decoy. He scowled at the soldiers, willing them to challenge him but none met his gaze. Robbed of the confrontation he had been expecting, perhaps even hoping for, Kepler trudged on.

At the graveside, it began to drizzle. Barbara was laid upon a set of straps, ready to be lowered into the dampening earth. The fine rain hid Kepler's tears as he insisted on preaching his sermon. His voice sounded flat and unemotional even to him.

‘Some things can only be truly appreciated in retrospect. The
movement
of the great circles of Heaven can be reckoned only after they have been watched to turn an entire revolution. So it is with human lives. Only at the culmination of a lifetime can we strip away our own feelings, our own hopes and fears for what they may achieve or do. In death can we see them in their entirety and finally understand who they were and why they were so special. Barbara was special to me in every way …'

So why did she abandon me?

‘She was a person who … She … She …'

The words stopped. He glared at the body. He imagined screaming at her for causing him so much torment. Why make such a selfish choice to be with Friedrich instead of with him and Susanna and Ludwig? Shaking in his rage, he forced his eyes away from the lifeless bundle and scanned the straggle of humans watching him. There were his two dear children, upset and puzzled.

Brought to his senses by their scared faces, he found himself talking again, though where his words were coming from he could not say. He was the mouthpiece of some unknown power. ‘Though it is hard to see it at the moment, there must be harmony in this world. God's
perfection
cannot allow it to be otherwise. The terror of the recent past reminds us that the harmony must be so grand that it reduces all human woe to triviality, as the sound of a buzzing fly is surpassed by the mighty crash of the ocean. Now at peace, Friedrich and Barbara are free to not only hear this great harmony but to rejoice in it. For those of us left behind, we can only wonder and wait until it is our time to hear it, too.'

Kepler felt a tremor of recognition pass through him, substantial in meaning yet incorporeal in form. The first time he had felt this had been in the schoolroom in Graz, when he received his vision of the
planetary
arrangement. Now it had happened again. For the second time in his life, Kepler knew that God had visited him.

The city was calm at last, but everything was different. Kepler had been confirmed as Matthias's mathematician, but he was not required at court. The new Emperor preferred to take advice from his generals rather than his stargazer. Kepler was grateful for that; no more time wasted casting horoscopes for things they could not be applied to anyway.

To fill his days Kepler had buried himself in Tycho's ledgers, looking for the harmony he had so clearly, if briefly, perceived at Barbara's graveside – her parting gift to him before she took her place with Friedrich in Heaven. He told himself that he would eventually return to the composition of
The Rudolphine Tables
; his oath to Tycho alone meant that he could not forget them, but for now he had to follow his
heart and look for the harmony. It was the only way to make sense of all the suffering, and there was no one to stop him. Rudolph had been deposed and Tengnagel was missing, presumed dead in the fighting.

Shut into his study in Karlova Street, he could temporarily forget about Barbara and Friedrich. But every time he left the cramped
workspace
he had the momentary thought
Where's Barbara?
followed by the painful realisation. During the evenings, he would stare at her empty chair by the fire and her prayer book on the table until he slipped into a fitful sleep in his own chair, or he would drift to the children's bedroom and sit on Friedrich's cold bed.

Barbara's grief at the loss of their son had been so intense that his own had been eclipsed. In the emptiness of the night, the agony of this untended wound tore at him. He looked at his surviving children, their small chests rising and falling in sleep, and wished he could find solace in them. He loved them more than ever but all he could really feel were his losses. Neither was he equipped for their constant demands. Frau Bezold did her best with them but she was old and no substitute for a mother.

Letters of condolence from friends and acquaintances trickled in from across the Empire as the news spread, and it was in one of these that Kepler saw the solution. A friend that Barbara had made during her first few weeks in Prague was now living in Kunstadt having been widowed. He remembered her well; she had been tall and youthful with a ready smile. Her letter offered help with the children.