The Astrologer

{ Chapter Eight }

A TRUNK FULL OF ADDERS


THE WEATHER GREW WORSE. THAT EVENING A NEW storm front rolled south to stand over Denmark’s skies and send forth a heavy snow that fell, hour after hour and foot upon foot, until every city and town was an isolated island, besieged by the cruel forces of winter. Elsinore shivered within her walls while above the town Kronberg brooded. King Christian paced the castle halls, barking out conflicting orders and chewing on his unrequited battle lust. He could not make war upon the weather that made the road to Copenhagen impassible. I heard the king complain that Baron Jaaperson would walk unopposed into the royal palace to bed the chambermaids and raid the treasury at his leisure. This was nonsense; the baron and his men were at that moment struggling through a thick forest, fighting their way through deeply drifted snow dropped by the very storm against which the king raged.

Each day that the coastal highway remained closed delayed the king’s order to march south. The horoscopes I had drawn up became outdated one by one, and every evening I found myself casting new charts for the king, the prince, and the baron. My imagination was sorely taxed and I was increasingly troubled by what I could see of the prince’s true chart. Confusion and contradiction reigned in his houses and I liked it not, though all the while I crafted pretty and optimistic horoscopes for him.

The snow fell without pause for a week, during which time Kronberg fell into a routine of expectation and disappointment, the habitants swinging between nervous argument and boredom. Christmas approached and all there wished to be home during the Yuletide season. All save the king, who disliked the pomp of court life. Despite his frustrated bloodlust he looked happier to me in that cheerless antique of a fortress than ever I had seen him in Copenhagen.

My own days were spent orbiting about the penumbra of the king’s routine that I might discover an opportunity to make a ghost of him. Sneaking about, I learned his habits and made a plan.

In the mornings, the king met with his advisors in the office he had commandeered from Sir Tristram. Food was delivered directly from the kitchens and I had no access to the dishes brought up by the cooks. Besides, there was no chance of my tainting the king’s portion without murdering a dozen other men. After meeting with his generals, the king took exercise in the armory, training with his master-at-arms for an hour. There was a score armed men with him and I would be a fool to attempt anything there. The king surrounded himself with advisors and guards at all times but twice each day: after his swordplay he took a bath in a great tub carried into the armory and filled from steaming copper kettles wheeled in from the kitchens, and after his bath he made his way to a chamber on the upper floor of the north wing where he would sleep for a time. Though the room was guarded by four Swiss in the corridor, I had learned that this chamber shared an inner door with the apartment Ulfeldt and his daughter occupied.

My strategy was to admit myself somehow into this sleeping chamber through Ulfeldt’s lodgings, and leave a trap for the king to discover. This would be difficult, as Ulfeldt used his rooms as an office and was in them a great deal. When he was not there, Vibeke was, except when we were all at the supper banquet. The problem vexed me for most of the week until one morning I went up to the private chamber and tried the door, finding it unlocked. I was alone in the hallway and so I opened the door and stepped into the room. It was a small space with a narrow bed, two plain chairs, and an old wooden table. The windows faced the open sea and I supposed that the king found the tedious landscape of waves and sky to be relaxing after his exercise. There were dried herbs cast about the corners to sweeten the air and there was another scent in the room that I knew but could not identify; it tantalized me from just beyond the edge of my memory.

This door carelessly left open was my chance to hand the king his death, if I could act in time. Downstairs in the armory the king had just begun his practice and I had nearly two hours to make things ready. I hurried down to my lodgings and opened the trunk Fritz had brought from Copenhagen. I lifted out a small wooden box, the size of a loaf of peasant bread. A dry scuffling noise came from the box and I felt the vibrations of the creature stirring within. He would be ravenous and angry after being so long imprisoned and unfed.

The only venomous snake in Denmark is the northern cross adder, a rust-brown viper some two feet in length with an eggshaped head and glassy black eyes. Most of these serpents sleep through the winter in subterranean dens, but a few have been found in castles and houses, having slithered in for warmth and to hunt rats. I greatly dislike snakes.

I placed the wooden box on my table, wrapped a warm cloak about my shoulders, and undid a few buttons of my doublet. The box just fit under the garment, and I startled when the snake moved within, knocking his head against the wooden lid. If the latch failed I was surely a dead man. I crossed myself and left the room, hurrying to the castle doors and out into the frigid weather. A light snow fell, very delicate and pretty.

A snake hibernates when he is cold, like a bear. He will only rouse, even when starved, if he becomes sufficiently warm again. At least this is what I had once read, or how I remembered something I had once read. I would carry the viper out and loose him into the snow where he would coil upon himself and fall into a suspended state, as if dead. I would then box him back up, carry him through the castle to the sleeping chamber, and place him beneath the pillows on the king’s bed. The warmth of the king’s body would attract the adder and he would slither down under the sheets to lie against the Dane’s skin. When the king awakened the snake would strike him with deadly venom in his fangs. The king’s final thoughts might bend to how even nature is treacherous; he might see that we are all betrayed by one thing or another eventually, by men or by snakes, by sons or by fathers, or by the heavens themselves.

I walked out of the castle, the air biting my lungs and skin, and I shrank into my fur cloak as I followed the narrow road down the hill and through the portcullis. Once beyond the high brick ramparts I turned right with the curve of the moat, walking to where the great ditch joined with the sea on the east edge of the island. It was a remote spot and, although a curious guard atop the battlement could have seen me, I thought that the distance and my turned back would hide what I was doing.

My hands were stiff with cold, and clumsy. I worried that I would not move quickly enough once I had opened the case, that it would be I who would know the betrayal of nature. I held the imprisoned serpent at arm’s length, fumbled with the latch, and lost my grip on the box, dropping it into a snow bank.

“Soren!”

I looked up and saw Straslund coming toward me. He moved like a plow horse in a muddy field, lifting his knees high and shaking the snow from his boots. My hands ached when I plunged them into the snow, digging for the viper in his case.

“Soren! What do you out of doors on such a morning as this?”

“Knud, well met! I am conducting an experiment on snow dissolving into saltwater. As you see, when the snow falls on the ground it accumulates, but when it falls on the moat it melts. What do you here?”

“I have come out into the weather to privately remind you of my offer regarding Brahe’s tools out on that island. You have not forgotten?”

“Nay. Nor should you forget what my answer was. So we are concluded, I think. Good day to you, Knud.”

Straslund came up and stood beside me. We were a yard or so from the bank of the moat. My arms and chest were white where I had been searching in the snow.

“I saw you drop something. What was it?”

“Nothing to concern you, Knud. An instrument to measure the density of the falling snow.”

“Indeed? It sounds a most clever device. I must see it.”

“Nay! You’ll ruin the experiment.”

He had already bent down and scooped away handfuls of snow. I leaned over and joined my efforts to his, hoping to find the box before him. His hands touched it first and he lifted the case from the snow bank. He shook it at me.

“It’s just a wooden box.” He seemed disappointed and then smiled. “You are hiding something, Soren. What can it be?”

“It is a box of snakes. Give it to me.” I held out my hand and Straslund took a step back.

“You are lying. What can little Professor Andersmann be concealing in the snow?”

Straslund undid the latch and dropped the lid to the ground. He held the box close to his face, peering in and shaking it again.

“Is that some kind of chain?”

The viper had been only momentarily dazed by the cold, and that moment passed. I reached out, intending to take the box away from Straslund but I was not swift enough. The snake uncoiled and flung himself forward out of the box, his mouth open and his long fangs yellow with drool and venom. Before Straslund could react, the viper sank its fangs into his right eye, slid entirely free of the case, and coiled over the unfortunate idiot’s face.

Straslund clutched the empty box with one hand and with his other beat at the adder clinging to his face. He cried out, a high keening like a whipped dog or a bird with a broken wing, and hopped madly from side to side, and then he spun about and ran directly over the bank of the moat and disappeared beneath the water. All of this took no more than half a minute.

I stood at the lip of the moat flapping my arms in fear and anger, and waited for Straslund to surface. The fool. The meddlesome fool. Did he think I had a trunk full of adders, that he could waste them? I had no idea how I would explain any of this. When Straslund lost his eye, it would be richly deserved. But of course Straslund did not come to the surface, at least not where I could see him. The current through the moat washed him past the castle and his body came up to the south, in the King’s Harbor. Some fishermen pulled him out a few hours later. The snake swam off or froze or drowned, I know not which.

For a quarter of an hour I paced along the moat where Straslund had gone in. The cold grew too much and finally I made my way back to the castle, hurrying to my room where I put on dry clothes and spent the remains of the morning sitting as close as I could to the coal stove, thawing the chill from my bones. Torstensson had brought me more tools of the assassin’s trade than a snake, but I had placed my best hopes on the adder and now those hopes were dashed.

“You are failing,” I said. “You are failing, Soren, and you have barely begun.”

Perhaps the stars had been wrong for this mission. I resolved that later I would cast my own horoscope, letting the heavens show me the best day on which to try my hand against the king.

At midday the news of Straslund’s death had reached the castle. Prince Christian informed me when we dined together in the kitchen.

“You do not seem much upset by it,” he said.

“I did not like him. It is no great secret.”

“Still, Straslund is dead. It is tragic. He was a person of little use to anyone, but I’ve known him my whole life. He was my own age.”

“Was he drunk, my lord?”

“Oh, very like. Did you know he also fell into the moat the night of our arrival? His death by drowning seems to have been fated. It is a terrible misfortune that you were not there to save him as you saved me. Poor Straslund.”

“God’s mercy on him.”

“And on us all. But here is some better news. The storm is breaking, and already it has stopped snowing. My father believes we will clear the highway and march on Jaaperson’s army tomorrow or next day.”

“Is this better news?”

“You worry for my safety, I know. You are a good friend and a loyal subject. But my place is to be—finally—at my father’s side. I have longed long for this.”

Christian sat straight and looked into my eyes, for all the world a brave prince and confident man of arms. I believed him safe, even favored by the gods of war, so poised and calm was he. These impressions seemed solid, more reliable than the chaos to be found in Christian’s stars.

“I have faith in you, my lord.”

“I have less faith in you, Soren. Promise me that you will not fall into the moat.”

“My word upon it.”

Straslund’s demise was put down to a drunken accident. He had not been well liked and so most at Kronberg lost interest in his death almost as soon as his body was identified. His corpse was laid out in the church at Elsinore, prayed over briefly, and then rolled into a barrel and set in a snow bank to keep until the weather cleared enough that he could be carted to his father’s estate for burial.

Though he was easily forgotten, Straslund’s death remained a vexation for me. The fool had cost me what was possibly the best opportunity to finish my task against the king. Chances to find him alone and vulnerable were not many. Any day the king and his Swiss mercenaries would ride out at the head of the royal army and I would be sent off to the observatory on Hven. Perhaps I had already lost the only possibility for revenge that life would ever offer me. What then?

You are failing, Soren.

When the prince left me I snuck back to the third floor and crept slowly down the hall, past the door of the sleeping chamber. The king might be found there again the next morning if the weather did not improve, and so I must plan for that as may be. The room was locked when I tried the door. Across the hall was an alcove with an enormous chair in it. I sat in this chair, an uncomfortable and ugly pile of carved oak, set my chin upon my fist, and tried to imagine a way into the king’s chamber, and to conjure a murder once I was inside. Nothing came to mind.

You are failing.

I closed my eyes and willed the spirit of inspiration to visit me. If I do have any sort of muse, she is not an assassin, and so she kept her distance. No brilliant design came to life in my mind’s eye.

“Soren? Do you sleep?”

I opened my eyes and Vibeke stood before me, her head tilted to the right. She looked past me, to a point beyond my skull, and smiled.

“How do you, sir?”

“I am well. How fares my lady?”

“Excellent well, sir. Are you Cerberus, guarding the door? I’ve seen no one sit in this chair until now. Is it a comfortable seat?”

“Nay, lady.”

“Then as you do not sit here for pleasure, you must do so to a purpose. Do you wait for Christian?”

“Christian? I dined with him an hour ago.”

Her gaze shifted from one distant point behind me to another, and she blinked.

“Did he say aught of me?”

“Of you, lady? Nay, he did not. What would he have said?”

“I do not know what he should have said.” Vibeke played with her necklace, the long string of amber beads sliding through her fingers. “Though I may have something to tell, something touching on my lord Christian.”

“You have heard something?”

“Oh, more than heard, sir.”

“You have seen something?”

“Oh, more than seen, indeed.”

I waited for Vibeke to continue, but she only stood there, a bright-eyed dove with her head cocked, that slight smile upon her face.

“Lady, wilt thou have me guess?”

She turned her face away for a moment and color rose in her cheeks.

“Oh, thou surely canst not guess this.”

“Then I am at a loss. You have more than heard, more than seen, and what that more than is I cannot divine. It appears, dear lady, that you must tell me.”

Vibeke came closer, her hip against the grotesque arm of the chair, her lips but inches from my ear. The air filled with a faint scent I knew from somewhere, the smells of spices, maybe, and then I knew that I had encountered this scent in the air of the king’s sleeping chamber. Perhaps all the better lodgings of the castle had that scent. My own chamber smelled faintly of the stables.

“I was sewing in my closet,” Vibeke said. “It was late, after supper. Then Christian, with his doublet all unbraced, no cloak or crown or servant to announce him, came before me.”

She was whispering; the words came in a rush and her breath fluttered against my cheek.

“He took me by the wrist and held me hard, then went to the length of his arm and fell to such perusal of my face as if he were a portrait artist. Long stayed he so. At last he raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.”

“When did this happen? Here at Kronberg?”

“Nay, sir, some seven months agone in the palace at Copenhagen.”

“And have you had much more commerce with Christian since then?”

“Oh, I have heard that sigh now many a time. He hath multiplied the tenders of his affection to me. I do not know what I should think. He hath given countenance to his speech with almost all the holy vows of Heaven.”

“Almost all?”

Vibeke straightened, backing away from me.

“As you say, good Soren, the queen would not like it.”

“I dare say she would not, lady.”

“She will have no choice but to like it soon enough. My lord Christian trusts you, does he not?”

“He trusts me passing well, lady.” I shook my head. “What do you mean, ‘soon enough’?”

“I hope all will be well. We must be patient. I am afeared he will die on the field. You must counsel him to caution, Soren.”

“So I shall, lady.”

“I must away now. You know that I never knew my own mother?”

“Aye.”

“They say she was a madwoman.”

Vibeke put a hand to each side of her face, took a step backward, and turned a complete circle. She reminded me of those painted wooden dolls that dance pirouettes atop children’s musical boxes. I have seen them in Dresden and Berlin. When Vibeke had done her turn, she clasped her hands before her.

“I am better than my mother,” she said. “My mother kept wild birds in her closet and would never wear shoes with heels of wood. I do pity my father that he did not know of it before they married.”

“I have not heard this story, lady.”

“Oh, aye, it is most sorrowfully true. Happily I differ from my mother’s ways. I find my own path, past her past, and she have I surpassed. A daughter need be no more than passing familiar to her family.”

She closed her eyes and curtsied.

“That is very clever, lady.”

“I thank you, sir. I fear I am clever. I have knowledge my father would not dream of. Nor my mother, neither. She died birthing me. I hope that will not be my fate.”

“What do you mean?”

She curtsied again and turned suddenly to look down the corridor.

“God bye you, sir. I must to my orisons. We should all of us recall our sins.”

Vibeke drifted across the hall to her own rooms, one hand on her belly as she closed the door behind her. This was most alarming. She dare not think Kirsten would allow her to bear the prince’s bastard. She dare less think to marry Christian. I did not know if I even believed Vibeke’s inferences. She could have meant anything at all; the landscape of Vibeke’s mind was very different from my own.

I climbed out of the chair and made my way downstairs to the library. It was not locked this time and there were no secrets being whispered by unseen speakers. My head ached and I hoped to forget myself for an hour or two in one of Tristram’s books. He was fond of Ovid, I remembered.

The library was long and narrow, the longest two walls covered with shelving. It gave the impression of a hallway built from old leather spines. There was a thin slice of window at the far end and a few dusty chairs sitting beside a small square table with a lamp. The books were in no rational order and most of them were the bound journals of the fortress, records of a century of ships taxed as they made their way from the Atlantic to the Baltic through the Sound. The Sound Tax was the main source of the king’s wealth, but important as this commerce was I had no interest in going through the account books. I walked slowly along, inspecting the shelves, hoping to find something worth reading. It had long been my plan that one day I would have a library of my own, and I would fill it with the newest books, brimming with the latest ideas. There was no chance that on Tristram’s shelves I would find Francis Bacon’s Essays, or Abbot’s Geography, or even Rowland’s The Letting of the Humour’s Blood in the Head-Vein. A copy of Castellio’s On the Art of Doubting and of Knowing caught my eye and I sat down by the window to read. Outside the sky had brightened and the clouds were breaking up. The light was dazzling and I turned the chair to put my back to the window that the brightness might fall on the pages I was reading.

I was just coming to the chapter on Moses when the door opened and Tristram lumbered in, walking tenderly on his gouty leg and using a carved walnut stick to support his weight. I rose from my chair.

“Good day to you, Uncle.”

“Soren, is that you there? I have sought you the morning long, my lad. I should have known to look for you here. You were always more at home with dead books than with living men. No, no, sit down, lad.”

Tristram waved me back into my seat and he pushed along the length of the room to place himself near me. The chair he sat in creaked and he sighed to have the weight off his leg. There was a spot of egg in his beard.

“Uncle, your leg betrays you.”

“Aye. The surgeon forbids me all manner of delicious food and drink, yet my leg still purples and swells like a melon. I am bled, I am given potions of mercury and oil, I suffer through the most bland meals a man could imagine, and I drink nothing but water and milk. I am an old man, my lad.”

“You have two score more summers before you, I warrant.”

“It is the winters that worry me. Sometimes I cannot feel my fingers and toes. Day by day, a man’s health will fall to earth in bits or in bushels, just as a tree drops its leaves. I do not wax healthy.”

“You are by no means waning, Uncle.”

Tristram grunted and shifted in his chair, the wooden frame groaning as he moved.

“I am fat, you mean.”

“Healthy, like a sturdy calf.”

“Your flattery comforts me not. You have not outgrown your sharp wit, I see. When I last spoke with your father—”

“Enough on my father, Uncle. I have not come to Elsinore to pay him my respects.”

“You should.”

“I have duties here, and soon on Hven.”

“Ah, Hven. It will not be so pleasant and pretty there as you remember it. The walls have all come down. Just as your father warned they would.”

“How goes the tax collection? Do the townsfolk still call you Sir Tollbooth, Uncle?”

“You cannot turn me from my pursuit. I mean to speak of your father.”

“Then I must take your leave, Sir Tristram.”

I stood, put the Castellio on an empty shelf, and made to move past Tristram. He clutched my hand and his grip was still that of a strong young man. I twisted but could not escape.

“Stay a moment, Soren. I will leave off on your father. But stay.”

“To what purpose?”

“A favor.”

“To me or thee?”

“To me. Sit, prithee.”

He released my hand.

I sat and crossed my arms. Tristram squinted at me. The sunlight streamed into the room from behind my back and I must have been but a shadow to his eyes. Were I in a kinder mood I should have sat where he could see my face.

“You come so rarely home, Soren. I know this visitation was not of your own inclining, but here you are and here I am. We have known each other almost your entire life. I saw you baptized. I stood with you and your father when your mother was buried. Your father—”

“Enough.”

“He was a good man.”

“He was a man. Take him for all in all, Tristram.”

“We will not look upon his like again, lad.”

“God willing.”

“Now, lad—”

“Enough, Tristram. If you wish to weep at his grave I will not stop you, but neither will I join you. And that’s the end.”

Tristram heaved himself forward toward me. The chair protested beneath his weight. He reached for my hand, but I was out of reach.

“Soren, I do not mean to upset you. I was only hoping that by speaking to you kindly of your father, I might make you remember that once you were fond of me.”

“Oh, Uncle. The less you speak of that man, the more you endear yourself to me.”

Poor old Tristram. His youthful dreams of valor, fame, love, and wealth all had come to nothing and in his mature years he was a bachelor and a bureaucrat, a lonely tax collector. Tristram now belonged to that most unfortunate cohort: he was a man who does not see his own face in the mirror, but sees instead only what is left of his dreams. So many come to this pass. A man may suffer the end of his life when he is young, only to march onward through the decades toward his grave, unaware the whole time that he is already dead. I resolved to say something kind to him.

“Uncle, do you still keep that wolf as a pet? I well remember how he led your dogs during the summer hunts. He was a fearsome thing.”

“Aye, so he was.” Tristram smiled a moment at the memory and then frowned. “His name was Titus, you recall. I had to put him down two winters before last.”

Tristram had found Titus, an abandoned cub, in the forest north of Elsinore. He carried the whelp home in his doublet and gave him to his favorite bitch to raise as one of her own. Titus grew into a large black and gray beast that terrified guests to Kronberg, much to Tristram’s delight. The wolf sat at Tristram’s feet during meals and stood with raised hackles between him and any man who raised his voice in anger at the Steward of the Sound. Titus was a dog in wolf’s clothing except when on the hunt; then he was all wolf, and Tristram’s pack of hounds followed the wolf to take up his fierce wolf ways in the forests. Tristram was said to have let Titus sleep in his closet with him, so fond was he of this frightening creature.

“Put him down, Uncle? Was he that old and infirm already?”

“Nay, lad. He was strong yet, with a fair stretch of years in him. But Titus was, alas, in the end just a wolf. His heart was ever in the wilds, no matter how long I kept him inside this castle and scratched his ears. He killed and ate two fine—and expensive, mind you—hunting dogs I had just purchased from Sweden. Then in a fit he went mad in the pantry, tearing at the laying hens. I’d forgotten his origins, but Titus remembered his wolfish blood, and that was his downfall. He could not unlearn his true self. Poor beast.”

“I am sorry, Uncle. Titus was a fair hunter. Let us speak of happier things. Tell me how you fare with the king during his present visit to your keep.”

Tristram glanced behind him, making certain the library door was shut.

“You learned at the queen’s banquet how I am allowed no spirits to drink.”

“Aye, for your health.”

“Aye, my health. At my age, lad, health is worth much less than happiness. Look you, the king is at my castle and I— Master of the Oresund, Warden of Kronberg—I am forbid to drink his Majesty’s health. My lord Christian is aware of how I sip milk whilst his generals rouse with Rhenish and aquavit. I do him no proper honor, lad. He looks at me and smiles, but I know the king weighs my use, computes my value, and figures my remaining days of service. I do not wish to retire yet. All of my friends are dead of old age and I have neither wife nor children, and though you call me ‘uncle’, we are not family. When you leave Kronberg I will not see you again.”

“What will you have me do, Tristram? I cannot make you younger, nor can I find you a wife. My own prospects there are no better than yours, I fear.”

“Nay, it is not that.” Tristram looked again to the door. “I know that you studied alchemy with Brahe.”

“All Tycho’s apprentices spent time in the laboratories at Uraniborg.”

“Brahe was particularly interested in medicinal chemistry, was he not? When he was not fussing about with the position of the sun, that is.”

“The position of Mars, Uncle. But aye, he was a brilliant chemist.”

“And so. You see.”

“I do not see, Uncle. You have your own physician. I am an astrologer, not a surgeon. I cannot cure your gout.”

Tristram waved a hand, dismissing the idea.

“My gout will accompany me to the grave, lad. Here is the thing: I have read somewhere that certain tinctures will combat the poisonous effects of wine. Is it not so?”

“Some compounds of pepper and sulfur and saltpeter, according to Paracelsus, are said to render a man incapable of drunkenness.”

“If wine hath no power to make a man drunk, perhaps it will have no worse effect upon the same man’s gout.” Tristram looked down at his swollen hands and feet. He shook his head, the great gray mustachios wagging like a pair of hound’s tails. “My physician says that I have drunk enough wine in my lifetime already.”

“I fear I agree with him, Uncle.”

“Oh, damn you both. I have sworn before the Blessed Virgin never to lose my head to strong drink again. But I have not forsworn all habit of honor, you. I will drink a salute to my king.”

“Even if it kills thee?”

“I have not forsworn honor, I say. Besides, lad, it will not kill me.”

Although there was neither love in me for the king nor respect for whatever honors were due that murderer, I understand what honor is. Tristram and I had many differences as men, but he had been a kindly and amusing fixture during my youth. I had no doubt that his physician refused to concoct Paracelsus’s tincture because he believed Tristram’s heart looked more to love of drink than to honor.

“My dear old Uncle,” I said. “Even with such a potion in your belly, you could not withstand a night of drinking with the king and his men. If it did not kill you, it would surely lay you very low.”

“Ah.” Tristram waggled his index finger at me. “That is not what I intend. The king rides out tomorrow, do you know? He has a hundred men digging out the highway even now. There will be no feasting nor rouse with wine this evening. Christian will want his men to be clear-headed come daybreak. No, I need only be fortified such that I might bring a bottle of Rhenish to the king’s chamber tonight and drink a single goblet with him, as a man with his lord, in honorable fashion. Can you do me this? What can be the harm?”

An image came to me of Tristram alone with the king, both of them drinking from a bottle Tristram supplied. I saw the bottle, saw into it and imagined the contents and what could be dissolved into the blood red liquid. I saw Tristram drink a single cup, savoring each drop while the king poured cup after cup down his own gullet, laughing at his prowess and fortitude. This image was clear and strong and true as if it happened before me while I sat in the library, as if it had already happened and I merely recalled to mind an event I knew in detail.

“Uncle,” I said. “Fetch me up a bottle of your best Rhenish, and before nightfall I will infuse it with a compound that will render it safe for my gout-ridden old friend to drink. But only one glass, Tristram. Do you hear me?”

“Aye, lad. One glass.”

“One, Uncle. More than that and the ill effects of the wine will be doubled, or worse. You won’t rise from your bed for a week. Do you promise, Tristram?”

“Upon my soul, lad. A single cup.”

“Let his Majesty the king take all he likes.”

“It’ll be a fine bottle. Christian will drink it all down and bless me.”

“Excellent, Uncle.”

“Need I send to town, to the apothecary mayhap, for aught you will require?”

“Nay, Uncle. I can make do. Just bring me the wine an hour before you visit the king.”