City of Lost Dreams

CHAPTER TWO In which I am wronged, again.

By the time I was fourteen my stepfather, Edward Kelley, had forced a number of potions down my throat. So I wasn’t terrifically distraught when he was arrested and thrown into prison. Not for anything he did to me, of course. I was a girl and his stepdaughter and the phrase “child abuse” would have caused a good laugh in the 16th century. No, my stepfather had enraged the emperor—possibly the one man in Prague even dippier than Kelley. All of our family’s property was seized. We were left destitute. My saintly mother took to her bed, which was understandable, but not very useful. My brother was at school. I was painfully aware of just how bad our situation was due to my excellent education—I was fluent in English, Czech, Italian, German, and Latin, and well versed in mathematics, botany, philosophy, poetry, astrology, and astronomy. Shocking for a girl of this era to know so much, say you? Well, how many people—let alone adolescents—do you know in your era who can speak five languages?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the current era. I consider the microwave oven to be the apotheosis of human civilization, right after Scotch tape and RevitaLash. But I digress.

So, there we were, friendless and penniless. I began to write. I sought assistance from all quarters of the world, sending out letters and poems and odes and prayers. I described in the most delicate terms the condition of my family and our plight. Since you, dear twenty-first-century reader, are unlikely to have much of a grounding in the linguistic arts (r u mad @ me? ), I will put it in terms your electronically numbed brain can grasp: I was the original blues singer, and, man, could I let rip.

My daddy’s in jail.

My momma’s a mess.

The larder is empty.

And I ain’t got not one single dress.

I got the sixteenth-century blues, let me tell you,

the one-six-oh-oh blues.

Things are so bad that gettin’ a case of the clap would be damn fine news . . .

I got the sixteenth-century bluuuuues.

Imagine that in Latin. It killed! Every fortnight I received a letter of praise about my mellifluous verses from one exalted person or other, but none of them actually lifted a snot-caked finger to help me except dear Georg von Baldhoven, and his concern was getting my work published so he could make a fast pound of flesh off it (literally, as he ran a brothel to support his printing press, things being then about as they are now in the book trade). My stepfather was never released from prison. My brother died. My mother died. It was just me, hovering around the edges of the court at Prague, relying on the kindness of strangers. Not a good place for an apple-cheeked young lassie to be.

And I was a wee lassie indeed. My mother had blamed our diet of thin porridge, thinner porridge, and porridge-flavored water for my stunted growth. I was in my twenties, yet appeared to be still on the cusp of my teens. And unfortunately, there were men even before Nabokov coined the term “nymphet” who had a real yen for that sort of thing. And were willing to pay top florin for it.

Women back then were considered property, you see, like chairs and donkeys and cloth of Flanders (my list is in ascending order of value), and if you no longer had a father to own you, and you weren’t married, well, anyone could claim you at the nearest lost and found. And do with you as he pleased. Which usually involved you getting a good sniff of his boils. Pun intended.

Fortunately, I had become one of the most celebrated women of my age. My verses brought delight across Europe. I received letters from kings, naming me the English Virgo, the Tenth Muse. Like Cher or Madonna, I ascended to the heights of single-namedom—I was “Westonia.” But writing turned out to be no road to riches. No movie deal was “inked.” I was a woman alone with no cash. Being a rock star wasn’t going to protect me from the wolves forever. Literally the wolves—there was a pack living in what is now Prague 4. So, like many women of a certain age, I got out of the entertainment industry.

I married one Johannes Leo. I did not plight my troth for love. Johannes had a position at the imperial court and had promised to help with my petition to the emperor to get my stepfather’s property back. It wasn’t as selfless on his part as it sounds, since Johannes now under the law owned me, and anything I earned or was restituted would all go to him. So we were pretty well matched.

I promised God to be a good wife to Johannes, a promise that I kept despite God’s disinclination to show Johannes the path to fresh breath or flatulence control. (To my list of mod cons I heart, let’s add toothbrushes and Beano.) And I desperately wanted children. I gave birth to six, one after another. All three of my sons died. My youngest daughter was born simple, and another had fits of such violence that she had to be tied to her bed and a nurse set to watch her at all times, lest she swallow her tongue. Portia, my beloved firstborn, so brilliant and clever and beautiful, had poor lungs and suffered fits of coughing and weakness that broke my heart. I did not think Portia would survive.

There is no greater grief than this. To bring children into the world and then see them die, or endure a living death of illness. I came to believe that it was my womb that was corrupting them. That my blood was fouled. As I’ve mentioned, my stepfather tested his potions and spagyric tinctures upon me when I was a child. And as a young woman I became his assistant. I helped him to the best of my ability, which soon became greater than his. I saw many things. Many things neither of us understood at the time.

But now my children were suffering for having had to live inside my damaged body. I created a small laboratory in my home and began testing things secretly, trying to find a solution, but to no avail. I was bequeathing my children nothing but death or pain.

I prayed very hard.

And at last I was shown a way. In the midst of my prayers one evening I heard a voice. I knew it instantly to be the voice of God.

I admit that it surprised me to find that God was a woman, and that Her voice sounded so much like my own! She had quite the vocabulary. God sang to me, soothed me, and promised me help. I thanked Her and vowed to do Her work. I will be with you always, God promised. You are precious to me. You are my true daughter, as He was once my true Son. You will have many trials. Hang in there. [I translate for you from the ancient Greek.] But I will save you and you will do my work. There is a way.

Where? I asked the voice. How?

When your stepfather was in prison, the voice answered, what was the one thing he asked for more than anything else? More than food, more than blankets, more than his own freedom?

He asked for the Book, I said.The Curious historie and awfull magick of the ancient and wonderfull golden fleece.

Yes. That is the Way.

I thought hard about the message I had received. Emperor Rudolf had confiscated all of my stepfather’s property, including his books (the arresting guards seemed keen on the illustrated ones, hoping for anatomical representations of impossible acts involving twins, I suspect). How do you take something back from an emperor? None of my letters or poems or Johannes’s entreaties had ever convinced him to part with even a chamber pot. But perhaps I had erred in seeking the help of men. God was woman. Would not a woman help me?

That was not a rhetorical question. I really had no idea. I did not have many women friends. But I had always admired Polyxena Pernstein, a noblewoman, a good Catholic, and a lady of exceptional learning (not as exceptional as my own, but she knew her diphthongs from her troches). Polyxena and her husband, Zdenek, a dullard with a penchant for Blutwurst, were intimate with the emperor.

Later that evening, when Johannes was lying on top of me, shoving himself inside me, I did not have to resort to my usual mental trick of repainting the frescoes on the ceiling. My mind was racing. A poem in praise of Polyxena was not difficult to pen. I could tweet Latin in my sleep. The result of my efforts—slightly more than 140 characters—was an invitation to dine at Lobkowicz Palace.

All I wanted was for Pretty Polly to use her influence to ask the emperor to let me borrow one damn book.Prithee, God has told me that I need to recover a book my stepfather practiced from so that I might find a way to reverse whatever curse I am suffering under and my next child can be born healthy. How hard is that?

And yet Polyxena didn’t get it, that pampered bitch. She sipped wine and fed her lapdog a better dinner than her servants got and told me that the death and illness of my children was, after all, God’s will. Which was ridiculous because I had spoken to God at length and knew for a fact it wasn’t Her will.

I cursed the Lobkowicz family and all their descendants.

I cast the net a little wider, writing next to a man my stepfather had known, the powerful and influential Tycho Brahe. I told him that I knew there was a book in the emperor’s keeping that had belonged to my stepfather, an important book, “leant” to my stepfather by Archduke Ferdinand (copied in secret without his knowledge). I said I knew the book well (a lie) and could help him interpret its meanings and formulas if we studied it together (a truth). I followed this with an epigram of praise for his genius, which took me less time than the rest of the letter, since it was a repurposing of some lines I had intended to send to Johannes Kepler. (To my mind, a far superior astronomer, but Kepler was no friend to alchemy.)

While I waited for an answer from Tycho, my need became ever more urgent. I discovered I was pregnant again. And try as I might to find the right combination of herbs and tonics to soothe the violence that was tearing my darling Portia’s body in two, Portia could not stop coughing. She grew weaker and weaker. I will not attempt to describe the terror and sorrow of that time. Not in any language. Let us leave that alone.

Finally I received a letter from Tycho. Would I perhaps pay him a call at Baron Kurz’s summer palace, where he was currently in residence? There was something he wanted to discuss with me.

Brahe greeted me cordially, though his foul abortion of a dwarf had the effrontery to address me as well. I hid my face in my wimple and ordered him from the room, holding my hands protectively over my swollen belly. He skittered away.

Tycho Brahe claimed that he did not have the book and had never seen it. But he began to question me about certain alchemical phrases. As if he were testing my knowledge, though I could immediately tell that my knowledge was greater. We thumbed through various alchemical texts.

“That is the image for Solve et coagula. Dissolve the fixed and fix the volatile.”

“This tells you that any plant matter will do, but the bark of an oak tree is best.”

“When you notice the particles falling like a gentle snow inside the retort, you must remove the oil.”

“Elk bone, ground very fine.”

He pressed me further. Did I know what was meant by . . . ? How would I translate . . . ? And so on.

It seemed from the specificity of his questions that he had seen the book, perhaps only briefly and on the sly, since the emperor was so protective of it. He made casual mention of a drug he had heard tell of that allowed one to see many things that had happened in the past. Did I know of such a drug? Since I needed to let Brahe see he could trust me, I suggested an exchange. I told him I did know of such a drug—I had helped my stepfather make it often. If I told him the formula, then would he help me find the antidote to what was poisoning my womb? He quickly agreed, and I sketched out the formula for him as I remembered it.

“I will call it ‘Westonia’ in your honor,” he said. He was excited, humming.

“Now you will help me,” I said sharply, less interested in branding and more in saving my children’s lives.

I suggested that he test things on his dwarf. If Brahe gave the dwarf the substance my stepfather had poisoned me with, and the preliminary versions of the antidote didn’t work, the only harm that would befall the dwarf was that he would not be able to father healthy children. And what loss was that to the world? He could just keep testing the antidotes on the dwarf until he found the one that worked.

Brahe laughed. “Oh, yes, Jepp is very useful.”

I returned to my home and my children and my flatulent husband. I wrote to Brahe repeatedly, but he did not answer me. I suspected that he had never planned on helping me at all, but I had no recourse, and soon, no strength to deal with him. Portia was gravely ill. And my pregnancy was advancing. Another baby.

We are dying, I thought. We are all dying.

Finally the answer from Brahe came. I cannot help you.

That is all he said. I cannot help you.

I cursed Tycho and that malicious dwarf. And my stepfather. And the emperor. And my husband. And the fleas on his head.

The baby was born dead. I held this last baby, this last child borne of my curse, and I decided that I could go on no longer. In that moment I took the powder I kept under my pillow. A simple powder. Obtainable in any apothecary’s shop. And I asked God’s forgiveness. When God did not answer, I took the powder anyway. I thought about taking Portia with me, to spare her the last ravages of her illness, but some part of me hoped that perhaps God would spare her in the end, if I offered myself in her place.

They said I died in childbirth.

I remember thinking: This is what it means to be dead. This kind of sleep. Perhaps this is Purgatorio, where I must atone for the sin of taking my own life until I may be admitted to Heaven.

They buried me with my child at my breast. I could hear Portia weeping outside the casket. Her thin sobs. Portia, Portia. I will wait for you, my darling. We will be together.

They buried my body in the cemetery of the Church of St. Thomas.

And I lay in that coffin for some time before I realized something very important.

I was not dead.

And that made me very, very angry.