Three Emperors (9780062194138) (3 page)

“That you're an American who might win in Philadelphia but can't prevail in Venice.” He turned to dismiss me. “Lord Ramsey, will you deal?”

New cards arced across the table.

I bowed, awkwardly. “Ladies. Lords.”

They ignored me entirely.

I departed with my mask on, threading through a casino that smelled of cognac, sweat, and pipe smoke. I hailed a gondola. The canal stank.

The boatman demanded I show him payment before departure. “You fools gamble it all away.”

I gave him my last coin.

Why had Richter asked so many questions? How had he crushed me with such assurance? Did he know I was Ethan Gage? He'd mentioned my hometown of Philadelphia, which I had not. Yet once he had emptied my purse, he ignored me.

“Signore!”

A footman hurried from the casino to hand me a note written by a male hand, titled in English. “From a gentleman to a cousin.” Ramsey. He'd dabbed it with sealing wax. I sat by the craft's charcoal brazier, pulled off my mask, broke the seal, and read as we rowed into the canal and passed under the casino's red lamp.

“His brelan included a card I'd already discarded.”

So Richter had cheated. I was embarrassed not to have caught him at it. And annoyed that Ramsey hadn't the courage to accuse him openly.

“Caution. He is deadly.”

Not to a man who is already dead, I thought.

Chapter 3

T
heft is not theft when one steals something that has already been stolen. But Richter's mansion, Ca' Rezzonico, was guarded like a fortress.

The gondola took my last coin, so I experienced the humiliation of removing my meager belongings through a window of my inn to escape payment. Included were some medicinal supplies I'd accumulated in my brief imposture as a doctor, which I now intended to put to ruthless use. I napped in an alcove in the Campo San Polo until being kicked awake at dawn by a member of La Forsa, the local police, who shouted something in Italian that translated roughly, I believe, into “damned foppish sot.” I stood with as much dignity as I could muster. My silk cape and tricorne had kept me from freezing, but I needed something more practical than gaming clothes. So I sold my fancy attire at the Burano market, bought a plain dark traveling outfit, and had enough left over for breakfast and dinner. My curious sword hilt remained tied to my back.

I had planned to start journeying north to hunt for my family by now. Instead I was spending precious time salvaging fortune and pride.

The afternoon was spent making a small profit more shamelessly than I prefer, playing
les trois perdants
, which I'd learned in Paris. It's a three-card confidence game, and I used a deck I'd peevishly pocketed in Casino dei Nobili. The goal is to shuffle the three cards on a table—I used a tray on my crossed legs, “borrowed” from a taverna—and convince the mark that he can spot the ruse and win. By sleight of hand, you trick the victim into following the wrong card from the beginning. The farce depends on the player's greed.

I beat one man and gave him his money back, in order to persuade him to join me as a partner to help distract new players. I did the same with a second, and then took profit from the next dozen men and two women. When the growing crowd finally summoned the courage to accuse us of cheating, I shouted “La Forsa!” and everyone scattered from imaginary police.

I'm not proud of this devilry, but I needed to buy a few props to liberate my purse from the cardsharp Richter.

The mansion of Ca' Rezzonico is at a hairpin turn of the Grand Canal, its three-story pillared facade having a view down both arms. The edifice is grand as a London bank and white as frosting, festooned with balustrades, rosettes, plump cherubs, plumed knights, palm fronds, watchful lions, and Venetian notables no one remembers. The mansion proclaimed ancestral fortune spent on hired taste. A troop of black-caped guards made it forbidding. There were at least two poltroons on the roof, two at the entry, and two more pairs on gondolas in the canal, but a full count was surprisingly difficult. Rather than strut in bright costumes like Swiss Guards, these sentries had the curious ability to blend in and out of the shadows as if temporarily invisible.

Richter was no ordinary tourist. And why hadn't he shown his face? Did I know him? His voice had been unfamiliar.

Getting into Ca' Rezzonico would be easier than getting out, so I contemplated escape while drinking a glass of wine in the winter sunlight of Campo San Angelo. I noticed coffins leaving the adjacent cathedral, recalled a policy imposed by Napoleon, and got a macabre idea. There was a convent to one side of the church and, I noted, a brothel to the other: convenience all around. I visited the bordello to access the roof, tipping a whore for the privilege. Stepping out on a sea of red tiles, I mapped my strategy and liberated a clothesline. Then I waited past midnight so that most of Ca' Rezzonico's inhabitants would be asleep.

Moon, stars, and lights coated the city with silver. Venice has none of the experimental lamps of London and Paris, but torches reflect off the canals and candles glow in the windows of decaying palaces. Gondola lanterns are fireflies, and violins sigh across the canals.

It's much easier to be invited into a fortress than to breach it, so with my three-card winnings I had purchased an empty keg, a wine-spotted vintner's sash, a low slouch hat to hide my features, a pewter flask, and passage on a gondola. I was rowed to Richter's palace at the witching hour and sprang onto its stone quay as if expected. “A delivery for your master.”

The sentries had cloths pulled around their lower faces like Arab bandits and displayed the pompous hostility that lackeys rehearse everywhere.

“At this hour, tavern keeper?”

“And a tip for you.” Dogs will quiet for meat, and guards for a florin.

A ground-floor pòrtego led to the inner courtyard, the house rising high as a ship's mast. My good friend Tom Jefferson dreams of an egalitarian society of yeoman farmers, but he takes architectural inspiration from European monuments to brutal economic inequality. The rich fantasize, their architects envision, and laborers mine, log, and mortar. Beyond the Grand Canal's palaces are teeming tenements, flea-infested wineshops, beggars like herds of sheep, families twelve to a room, and cripples displaying stumps and leprosy in hopes of pity.

I asked a butler for the kitchen, slipped into a pantry, and watched out its door until the mansion's central marble staircase momentarily emptied. Then I galloped up to the first floor under a hanging lantern big enough for a flagship's stern. I strode boldly through an empty ballroom, its chandeliers gold and the ceiling as gaudy as a queen's coach. Half-naked goddesses cavorted between whipped-cream clouds, boxed in turn by moldings made of noble coats of arms, all of it requiring a neck ache to be admired. Since my boots clacked on the waxed parquet, I slowed and pondered. If Richter could afford these surroundings, why was he playing cards in a shabby casino like Nobili? And where did his money come from?

All was quiet. I passed through red, blue, and green salons, overcast by a perfect storm of cherubs, angels, chariots, sunbeams, and flapping robes. The cacophony made me cringe, as if a rearing stallion or half-draped nymph might accidentally drop on my head. Priceless Chinese vases, ebony African statues, and inlaid Italian furniture dared me to break them. Persian carpets were soft as moss, and divans were embroidered with silk. None of it looked especially comfortable, but then that's not the point.

I jumped when a sentry challenged me from behind. He was wearing a uniform the color of the room and blended with his background as skillfully as a deer.

“Who are you, shopkeeper? Where are you going?” He accosted me softly, his paste-white face blank, but there was menace in the way he'd materialized, with arms cocked like an ape's. He also wore a rapier.

“Baron Richter, fool.” Always reply to a challenge with arrogance. At the mention of Wolf's name, the guard's eye flickered to the paneling of a sitting room beyond. I guessed there might be a hidden door there. I gave the man a contemptuous look up and down. “You're dressed as wallpaper?”

“The baron has no need for a tradesman in the middle of the night.”

“But perhaps he has for a purveyor of pleasure. In this keg is the ambrosia of the gods, ordered by your employer at great expense, with extra offered if I climbed out of bed at this godless hour to deliver it. You interfere?”

“You don't sound like a wine merchant.”

“Wine is puddle water compared with what I have on my shoulder.” I didn't have to feign my impatience, but I pretended to great weariness. “Here, try a drink if you must. I have charity for the slow-witted.”

He scowled, but he had a soldier's familiarity with abuse, and I was relief from the boredom of standing guard. He took my pewter flask warily, glancing about lest a supervisor see him drinking.

“A big swallow, to allow the flavors to come through.”

He nodded, threw his head back, drank, squinted, and grimaced. “What in Hades? It tastes like piss!”

“Swish it in your mouth, like wine.”

The idiot did so. Then his eyes bulged and he reeled, staggering backward. I'd expected a sentry, and needed something to put one on his back. The guard opened his mouth to bellow, and nothing came out, since his tongue had turned to stone. I helped things along with a rap to his temple from the butt of my broken broadsword, and then graciously helped him down.

My Moroccan spice peddler had sold me more than opium seeds. The hairs of the Mediterranean's processionary caterpillar are more venomous than nettles and cause tissues to swell almost to the point of suffocation. I'd bought a snuff tin's worth of the creatures, carried them ashore in Venice, and added their remains to some limoncello. The man gasped blindly, incapacitated but alive. I left him to it.

A minute's investigation revealed that the paneling he'd eyed indeed had a concealed door, its latch behind some books on a case. This led to a secret spiral stone staircase that climbed to a floor with lower ceilings and tighter rooms. I wound down a passageway to an apartment that would overlook the canal, hearing romantic moaning and chuffing within. Normally I respect privacy, but not when I've been cheated. I picked the lock with a twist of a copper nail I'd brought, slipped inside, latched the heavy entry behind me, and quietly braced a heavy chair against it. Then I crept.

A sitting room first, and then a boudoir in blue, with Chinese basin and feminine combs. The bedchamber beyond was where the noise was coming from.

Two candles and the coals of a fireplace cast yellow light on a sumptuous bedroom with maple armoire and marble mantel. My eye was drawn to the four-poster canopied bed. Richter galloped against Countess Nahir's well-sculpted derriere, the baron still dressed in evening shirt and silk breeches, unbuttoned only for the part in vigorous use. Must be in a terrible hurry, which is seldom a good idea. Even more oddly, he still wore his ivory-colored mask with its painted smirk, giving a mechanical look to the proceedings. Nonetheless, the lady's translucent chemise was pulled up to her waist, and she matched the rhythm just as lustily, with encouraging noises. Lady Nahir clearly was not waiting for her husband's return from his travels. A bedside candle silhouetted the glory of her form.

The tableau was arousing, but not as much as the small iron chest I spotted on an inlaid table. It was just the kind of treasure box to contain Richter's cheatings from the game. I'd hoped the baron would simply be asleep, but the lovers seemed preoccupied enough for me to retrieve my share anyway.

So I advanced on all fours, kneeled at the table, eased out the old sword, and used the jagged edge of its broken blade to jimmy the latch. The lid opened to a pleasing pile of gold and silver coins. I began easing the plunder into my empty leather purse, heart hammering as its weight increased.

Alas, Richter and Nahir were people of the casino, their ears attuned to the clink of money. She swiveled her head to gasp warning, her lovely hair flying like a flag, and the baron quickly disengaged. “Like a fly to sweets,” Richter said calmly. He pulled a pistol from under a pillow and rapped a bell on the wall with the muzzle. It gonged with doom. “I'd almost given up waiting for you, Gage.” He hauled up his breeches with one hand and pointed the gun at me with the other.

I had frozen in surprise. This Bohemian noble knew who I really was? How?

Boots pounded on the parquet below.

Richter yanked off his mask to take better aim, and it was then that I truly started. No wonder he made love in disguise! Beneath the covering was one of the most hideous faces I'd ever seen.

Someone had melted it. His cheeks and lips were a mass of scars, as if ravaged by acid, a hole in one spot giving a glimpse of a tooth. The color was an angry red, and one eye squinted against the pull of scar tissue.

“I think you will share everything you know,” he said, face muscles straining to enunciate past the damage. The man was a monster, and had set a trap.

But so had I.

Chapter 4

Astiza

T
he language of angels is Enochian, and the language of gods is the stars. I cannot see the sky's fire from my alchemical laboratory, its vaulted stone ceiling the weight of divine silence. I've heard nothing from Ethan in nearly a year. Our son, Horus, is pale and withdrawn, his hands pitifully wrapped in rags. We are prisoners, and Harry's unhappiness is my greatest torture. I keep us alive by agreeing to do Satan's work, mixing brews that promise gold and immortality for my captors. Penelope held off her suitors until her husband Odysseus's return by asking them to wait until she completed her weaving, and then unspooled her progress each evening. I delay by skittering globules of silver mercury and glints of copper to conjure a miracle, and then concoct slag at midnight to convince them of another failure. They cannot kill me until I succeed. Yet each experimental mistake makes them surly. Our cell stinks of fumes, our eyes strain from inadequate candlelight, and our joints ache from damp.

Alchemists John Dee and Edward Kelley received revelation from the angels in the language of the patriarch Enoch, great-grandfather of Noah. Enoch learned it when he was lifted up to tour heaven. There are books in my prison written with the angelic script, such as
Mystic Sevenfold Rulership, The 48 Angelic Keys,
and the
Book of Earthly Knowledge, Help and Victory.
Their meaning, alas, remains a riddle to all but the angels. I'm ensnared in webs of mystery, my only hope that pursuit of the rose will lead me through its labyrinth of petals to truth at the bud. I'm devising an escape but need the help of my husband. Ethan, where are you?

Has my quest for understanding led me to earthly damnation? Or was it merely my impatience to flee Napoleon's coronation at Notre Dame without waiting for my mate, thinking I could discover a bargaining chip that would protect us all? He doesn't know that when searching the bedroom of Catherine Marceau in Paris, I found a cache of her romance novels, that I brought three of them in my bag to the coronation at Notre Dame, and that they made a fine weapon to sling against the head of the giant policeman Pasques in order to escape. It was the first useful service Catherine did for my family. The blow gave Horus and me time to run from the cathedral with the letters of recommendation that Talleyrand had given me. The French minister wanted us to search for the fabled Brazen Head.

Now I kneel on flagstones, palms on the rock, to feel the Goddess mother. But the womb of the earth is only half of what sustains us. I'm buried from the sky, and thus robbed of male power. All things are dual, and burial keeps me half a priestess.

My jailers know this. I beg for a tower. They fear me too much to allow one. If I don't cooperate, I'll be tied to a stake and burned. Or so they threaten. And then the dwarf eyes my son . . .

My name is Astiza of Alexandria, priestess of Isis and Athena, devotee of the white Madonna and the black, seeker of Astarte, Artemis, Cybele, Ishtar, Mary, Sophia, and Freya. My husband is Pan and Vulcan, Mercury and Mars, as dissatisfied as Siddhartha and as redeemable as Augustine. I despair for his soul and yet miss him desperately. I'm the white rose, he the red. All these deities are but a hundred shades of the One Truth. I believe I exist to seek, but which revelation? Ambition, vanity, and curiosity are the curses visited upon our family, and lost secrets are fuel to our fire. Wisdom, wisdom! How I wish I could truly achieve it.

A monster I nearly loved has imprisoned us in a mine of Bohemia: punishment for my desires. I've sought foreknowledge and dangerous companionship, and now I pay the price.

Because I've promised my captors alchemical magic to spare my son, I have magic books in abundance. In the margins of the
Picatrix
, the
Lemegeton
, the
Key of Solomon
, and the
Dragon Rouge
, I retain my sanity by writing this account of how I came to be here. In remembering my husband, perhaps I can conjure him like the necromancer I'm supposed to be. He strides to save us, knight in armor! This is my fantasy. The reality is that he may be oceans away, or have no idea where we are, or have been seduced. He's a good man, but imperfect. Like me.

I'm convinced Ethan lives. I'd know in my heart if he died. But I no longer know if he seeks us. I shouldn't doubt him, but he has an eye for other women. I think about this because I've strayed with my soul.

What really torments us is our own conscience.

Ethan and I were separated when my son and I fled the treachery of the Comtesse Catherine Marceau, who had shared our apartment in Paris. My husband had just promised us not to part, but then Talleyrand wanted consultation, and Catherine promised Ethan would quickly return, and the brute policeman Pasques towered like Goliath. Instead of trusting my instincts, I was foolish enough to agree. Time dragged on. Harry and I were pulled deeper into the shadows of the cathedral. More police materialized. As the crowd murmured like a heaving sea at the appearance of Napoleon and Joséphine, I realized we'd been betrayed and my husband was about to be arrested. I decided to flee east, which French authorities would least expect, and count on Ethan to make his own escape.

We'd learned that the scholar Albertus Magnus had built a mechanical man, or “android,” in the thirteenth century to foretell the future. In desperation I decided I'd find this machine by myself and use its power to protect my family. Or at least use its value to bargain! Hubris.

I remember the smoke of censers rising in the winter sunbeams in Notre Dame, and the thud of celebratory cannon, when I finally realized that while we thought Catherine was an English spy, she was actually a French one. She had fooled us from the beginning, helping to betray royalist conspiracies to Napoleon, and wanting my husband for herself. Ethan, and the Brazen Head.

So while Catherine moved forward to watch Ethan's arrest, I silently took Harry's hand and backed into the alcove chapel of St. Michael at Notre Dame, having learned in my studies that a secret spiral stair behind its altar led to a crypt below. There's no exit from this room of tombs, but our disappearance caused momentary confusion. When men scattered to find us, we managed to creep up, battle past Pasques, slip out a rearward door, climb the wall of the archbishop's garden, cross the pont, dash to the eastern end of the Île Saint-Louis, and drop unseen onto a barge laboring up the Seine. At midnight, using light snow as a cloak, we slipped ashore at Neuilly-sur-Marne and hid, shivering, in a convent graveyard.

For the next three days Harry and I walked east, watchful for patrols. We finally had the opportunity to join a traveling circus of acrobats and clowns, a migratory example of the ring shows that Philip Astley had organized across Europe. We could hide amid its peculiar circle of characters and animals. I told its leaders that I was a sorceress who could cast fortunes, and because I was pretty, starving, and Egyptian—since Napoleon's expedition, the world is mad for all things Egyptian—they took me on. We played Christmas carnivals at Strasbourg and then, on the third day of January 1805, slipped across the Rhine.

What had become of Ethan, I'd no idea.

I feel the need in this crabbed journal to explain my affection for my husband. Ethan Gage is a man of action, a traveler, dreamer, and, in his own words, a climber, drawn to people of power or notoriety. He has the restlessness of men. I am reclusive, scholarly, and judicious, with a mother's caution and a woman's need for home. I also know, in ways he does not, how alike we are.

My husband resolves to find rest for us, but that's not really what we seek. I, too, enjoy new places. The only difference is that I savor the journey as much as the destination, while he imagines an ending. There are no endings, only steps.

Both of us are curious. He was my liberator in Egypt, and the first and only man I truly loved. Ethan can be rash and shallow, but also greathearted and thrilling, even dangerous, a frightening hero when unleashed. His strong hands make me shiver, and his odd insights make me laugh. We're the light and the dark of the moon, two sides of the same coin, Jupiter and Venus. I reform him; he inspires me.

Harry and I left the circus in February. My inquiries in Germany took me to castles, crypts, town hall records, and the scriptoriums of monasteries. I studied books such as Comenius's
Labyrinth of the World
. As I journeyed east, I felt I was falling back in time and deeper into mystery. The turreted castles became craggier and ill repaired, blank windows looking over a wintry landscape with blind eyes. Broken towers reached like scrabbling fingers. The season was dim, night early, shadows long, snow spotting the fields, and the rush-and-tallow lights of rude cottages were faint as misted stars. Bohemia seemed older yet, a land of forest magic and cave revelations, its rude carts creaking ominously as they crept on miserable tracks. Ravens wintered on the branches. Wolves bayed in the woods. Harry clung to me like an infant. He misses his father. He needs a father.

The stem that I followed was the rose. A dried rose led me to our informant Palatine in Paris, rose windows dominate Notre Dame, the spy Rose befriended Ethan, and the sacred symbology of the rose guided the mystic Christian Rosenkreutz. At the Bohemian town of Český Krumlov, looped by a river and protected by a castle growing out of a cliff, the symbol of the ruling families is the five-petal rose. This is the symbol of the five wounds of Christ and the five elements that make up the universe: earth, air, fire, water, and the fifth element, the life force itself. In geometric terms it is synonymous with the five-sided pentagram. The flower was everywhere embossed on walls and ceilings.

I took this as a sign.

In a world in which many cannot read and write, symbols are how scholars communicate with the illiterate. Every church is a picture book, its story told with stained glass windows, saintly sculptures, and paintings. Every coat of arms tells a patriotic story. Addresses in Bohemia are pictures, so one resides at the House of the Boar or the House of the Golden Stag or the House of the Three Hearts, its sign painted over the door. No symbol is more potent than the rose.

A rosebush sprang from the blood of Adonis, and another from the drip of blood from Jesus' wounds. In the unfolding petals is the expanding cosmos. The six-petal rose stands for love, seven for inclusion and perfection, and eight for rebirth. The thorns are life's obstacles on the way to grace. Every culture reveres this flower, and every lover presents it as adoration. Rose is the first name of the French empress, although Napoleon prefers Joséphine. Cleopatra carpeted her bedchamber ankle-deep with petals for the Roman conqueror Antony. The flower's quick withering is symbolic of the fleetness of time, and so the Roman Rosalia was a feast of the dead. The labyrinth of petals was a sign of secrecy, so a confidential Roman meeting was marked by a rose over the door, the confidences said to be sub-rosa.

Christian Rosenkreutz combined the rose with the cross, meaning he combined knowledge with faith, and beauty with the inevitability of decay. In Paris we stole the crown of thorns, and now I seek an alchemical marriage in my prison. Chemists believe that uniting light and dark, thorn and flower, will bring unity and perfection. So I felt that the carved rosettes set in the castle at Český Krumlov, coat of arms of the House of Vitek, were a sign of Rosenkreutz.

The Viteks, who built Krumlov Castle, were succeeded by the Rosenberg family in the sixteenth century, their name meaning “Mountain of Roses.” Surely this was no coincidence. Now the rambling edifice is inhabited by the Schwarzenbergs, and they had heard of my fortune-telling in Germany and sent an invitation. I presented myself as a seer and expert on the tarot, suspecting that, like many aristocrats, the Schwarzenbergs are bored and seek distraction. I made my way with Harry up the cobbled town street to the rambling castle, courtyard succeeding courtyard. Duke and Duchess Josef and Paulina Schwarzenberg are patrons of the arts, alarmed but intrigued by the rise of Napoleon, and fascinated by modern reports of new inventions and curiosities.

They waited for me to tell them what I wanted to know myself.

The future.