Doctor Copernicus

II. Magister Ludi

Waterborne he comes, at dead of night, sliding sleek on the river’s gleaming back, snout lifted, sniffing, under the drawbridge, the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry. Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps below the wall, brief glint of a bared tooth. In the darkness for an instant an intimation of agony and anguish, and the night flinches. Now he scales the wall, creeps under the window, grinning. In the shadow of the tower he squats, wrapt in a black cloak, waiting for dawn. Comes the knocking, the pinched voice, the sly light step on the stair, and how is it that I alone can hear the water dripping at his heels?

One that would speak with you, Canon.

No! No! Keep him hence! But he will not be denied. He drags himself into the corner where night’s gloom still clings, and there he hangs, watching. At times he laughs softly, at others lets fall a sob. His face is hidden in his cloak, all save the eyes, but I recognise him well enough, how would I not? He is the ineffable thing. He is ineluctable. He is the world’s worst. Let me be, can’t you!

*

Canon Koppernigk arrived at Heilsberg as night came on, bone-weary, wracked by fever, a black bundle slumped in the saddle of the starved nag that someone somewhere along the way had tricked him into buying. He had set out from Torun that morning, and travelled without pause all day, fearful of facing, prostrate in a rat-infested inn, the gross fancies conjured up by this sickness boiling in his blood. Now he could hardly understand that the journey was over, hardly knew where he was. It seemed to him that, borne thither on the surge and sway of waters, he had run aground on a strange dark shore. There were stars already, but no moon, and torches smoking high up on the walls. Off to the left a fire burned, tended by still figures, some squatting wrapt in cloaks and others with halberds leaning at watch. The river sucked and slopped, talking to itself as it ran. All this appeared disjointed and unreal. It was as if in his sickness he could apprehend only the weird underside of things, while the real, the significant world was beyond his fevered understanding. A rat, caught in a chance reflection of firelight from the river, scuttled up the slimed steps below the wall and vanished.

He was shaken roughly, and heard himself, as from a great distance, groan. Maximilian, his manservant, gnawing an onion, scowled up at him, mumbling.

“What? What do you say?” The servant only shrugged, and gestured toward the gate. A peasant’s cart with a broken axle straddled the drawbridge. In the half-light it had the look of a huge malign frog. “Go on, go on,” the Canon said. “There is room enough.”

But they were forced to pass perilously close to the edge. He peered down at the glittering black water, and felt dizzy. How fast it runs! The carter was belabouring with a stick in mute fury the impassive mule standing trapped between the shafts. Max blessed the fellow gravely, and sniggered. From this hole in the gate-tower a sentry shambled sleepily forth.

“State your business, strangers.”

Max, the good German, waxed immediately indignant, to be addressed thus loutishly in the outlandish jabber of a native Prussian, a barbarian, beneath contempt. Imperiously he announced: “Doctor Copernicus!” and made to march on. The Prussian poked him perfunctorily in the belly with his blunt lance.

“Nicolas Koppernigk,” the Canon said hastily, “liegeman to our Lord Bishop. Let us pass now, please, good fellow, and you shall have a penny.” Max looked up at him, and he perceived, not for the first time and yet with wonder still, the peculiar mixture of love and loathing his servant bore for him.

In the deserted courtyard his horse’s hoofs rang frostily and clear upon the flagstones. The hounds began to bay. He lifted his throbbing eyes to the pillared arches of the galleries, to the lowering mass of the castle keep faintly slimed with starlight, and thought how like a prison the place appeared. Heilsberg was intended to be his home now; not even Prussia itself was that, any longer.

“Max.”

“Ja, ja,” the servant growled, stamping off. “I know — the Bishop must not be disturbed. I know!”

Then there were lights, and voices close by in the darkness, and a decrepit half-blind old woman came and led him inside, scolding him, not unkindly, as though he were an errant child. He had not been expected until the morrow. A fire of birchwood burned on the hearth in the great main hall, where a pallet had been laid for him. He was glad to be spared the stairs, for his limbs were liquid. The fever was mounting again, and he trembled violently. He lay down at once and pulled his cloak tight about him. Max and the old woman began to bicker. Max was jealous of her authority.

“Master, she says your nuncle must be summoned, with you sick and arriving unexpected.”

“No no,” the Canon groaned, “please, no.” And, in a whisper, with a graveyard laugh: “O keep him hence!”

The old woman babbled on, but he closed his eyes and she went away at last, grumbling. Max squatted beside him and began to whistle softly through his teeth.

“Max — Max I am ill.”

“Aye. I seen it coming. And I warned you. Didn’t I say we should have stopped at Allenstein for the night? But you would none of it, and now you’re sicker than a dog.”

“Yes yes, you were right.” Max was a good cure for self-pity. “You were quite right.” He could not sleep. Even his hair seemed to pulse with pain. The sickness was a keepsake of Italy; he smiled wryly at the thought. Long shadows pranced like crazed things upon the walls. A dog came to sniff at him, its snout fastidiously twitching, but Max growled, and the creature pricked up its ears and loped away. Canon Koppernigk gazed into the fire. The flames sang a little song whose melody was just beyond grasping. “Max?”

“Aye.”

Still there: a lean bundle of bones and sinew crouched in the firelight, staring narrowly at nothing. The hound returned and settled down unmolested beside them, licked its loins with relish, slept. The Canon touched the soiled coarse fur with his fingertips. Suddenly he was comforted by common things, the fire’s heat, this flea-bitten dog, Max’s bitter regard, and beyond these the campfire too, and the watchers about it, the peasant’s cart, the poor fastidious mule, even that rat on the steps: enduring things, brutish and bloody and warm, out of which, however dark and alien the shore, the essential self assembles a makeshift home.

Later that night Bishop Lucas came and looked at him, and shook his great head gloomily. “A fine physician I have appointed!”

*

That title meant little. He was no true medic. He had not sufficient faith in the art of healing, nor in himself as a healer. At Padua they had taught him to cut up corpses very prettily, but that would have made him a better butcher than physician. Yet he had accepted the post without protest. On returning from Italy he had gone straight to Frauenburg, thinking to take up his duties as a canon of the Chapter; but he was not ready yet for that life, Italy was too much in his blood, and having secured with ease yet another, this time indefinite, leave of absence he had drifted to Torun. Katharina and her husband after protracted negotiations had bought from the Bishop the old house in St Anne’s Lane, and had moved there from Cracow. He should have known better than to go to them, of course. The company of his shrewish sister and her blustering mate irked him; they for their part made him less than welcome. He had engaged Max more as an ally than a servant, for he was a match indeed for that ill-tempered sullen household.

Then word came from the Bishop: Canon Nicolas was summoned at once to Heilsberg as physician-in-residence at the castle, that he might thus, however inadequately, repay the expense of his years of Italian studies.

He liked the job well enough. Medicine was a means of concealment, whereby he might come at his true concerns obliquely and by stealth: to unsuspecting eyes there was not much difference between a star table and an apothecary’s prescription, a geometrical calculation and a horoscope. But although he was free to work, he felt that he was trapped at Heilsberg, trapped and squirming, a grey old rat. He was thirty-three; his teeth were going. Once life had been an intense bright dream awaiting him elsewhere, beyond the disappointment of ordinary days, but now when he looked to that place once occupied by that gorgeous golden bowl of possibilities he saw only a blurred dark something with damaged limbs swimming toward him. It was not death, but something far less distinguished. It was, he supposed, failure. Each day it came a little nearer, and each day he made its coming a little easier, for was not his work — that is, his true work, his astronomy — a process of progressive failing? He moved forward doggedly, line by painful line, calculation by defective calculation, watching in mute suspended panic his blundering pen pollute and maim those concepts that, unexpressed, had throbbed with limpid purity and beauty. It was barbarism on a grand scale. Mathematical edifices of heart-rending frailty and delicacy were shattered at a stroke. He had thought that the working out of his theory would be nothing, mere hackwork: well, that was somewhat true, for there was hacking indeed, bloody butchery. He crouched at his desk by the light of a guttering candle, and suffered: it was a kind of slow internal bleeding. Only vaguely did he understand the nature of his plight. It was not that the theory itself was faulty, but somehow it was being contaminated in the working out. There seemed to be lacking some essential connection. The universe of dancing planets was out there, and he was here, and between the two spheres mere words and figures on paper could not mediate. Someone had once said something similar: who was that, or when? What matter! He dipped his pen in ink. He bled.

And yet, paradoxically, he was happy, if that was the word. Despite the pain and the repeated disappointments, despite the emptiness of his grey life, there was not happiness anywhere in the world to compare with his rapturous grief.

But there was more to his post at Heilsberg than tending to the Bishop’s boils and bowels and fallen arches: there was politics also. At sixty, and despite his numerous ailments, Bishop Lucas was more vigorous far than the nephew nearly half his age. A hard cold prince, a major man, he devoted the main part of his prodigious energies to the task of extricating Ermland from the monstrous web of European political intrigue. The Canon was not long at the castle before he discovered that, along with physician, secretary and general factotum, he was to be his uncle’s co-conspirator as well. He was appalled. Politics baffled him. The ceaseless warring of states and princes seemed to him insane. He wanted no part in that raucous public world, and yet, aghast, like one falling, he watched himself being drawn into the arena.

He began to be noticed, at Prussian Diets, or on the autumn circuit of the Ermland cities, hanging back at the Bishop’s side. He cultivated anonymity, yet his pale unsmiling face and drab black cloak, his silence, his very diffidence, served only to surround him with an aura of significance. Toadies and leeches sought him out, hung on his heels, waylaid him in corridors, grinning their grins, baring their sharp little teeth, imagining that they had in him a sure channel to the Bishop’s favour. He took the petitions that they thrust at him on screwed-up bits of paper, and bent his ear intently to their whisperings, feeling a fool and a fraud. He could do nothing, he assured them, in a voice that even to him sounded entirely false, and realised with a sinking heart that he was making enemies across half of Europe. Pressures from all sides were brought to bear on him. His brother-in-law Bartholemew Gertner, that fervent patriot, stopped speaking to him after the Canon one day during his stay at Torun had refused to declare himself, by inclination if not strictly by birth, a true German. Suddenly he was being called upon to question his very nationality! and he discovered that he did not know what it was. Bishop Lucas, however, resolved that difficulty straightway. “You are not German, nephew, no, nor are you a Pole, nor even a Prussian. You are an Ermlander, simple. Remember it.”

And so, meekly, he became what he was told to be. But it was only one more mask. Behind it he was that which no name nor nation could claim. He was Doctor Copernicus.

*

Bishop Lucas knew nothing of that separate existence — or if he did, for there was little that went on at the castle without his knowledge, he chose to ignore it. He had lofty plans for his nephew. These he never spoke of openly, however, believing seemingly that they were best left to become apparent of themselves in the fullness of time, of which there was ample, he knew, for he had yet to be convinced that one day he would, like lesser men, be compelled to die. He was torn between his innate obsession with secrecy on one hand, and on the other the paramount necessity of dinning into the Canon’s wilfully dull-witted skull, by main force if that would do it, the niceties of political intrigue. Diplomacy and public government were all right, any fool could conduct himself with skill and even elegance there, but the scheming and conniving by which the world was really run, these were a different matter, requiring intensive and expert coaching. But the trouble was that he did not entirely trust his nephew. The Canon sometimes had a look, hard to identify, but worrying. It was not simple stupidity, surely, that made his jaw hang thus, that misted over his rather ratty eyes with that peculiar greyish film?

“—Your head is in the clouds, nephew. Come back to earth!” The Canon started, hastily covering up the papers he had been working on, and peered over his shoulder with a wan apprehensive smile. Bishop Lucas looked at him balefully. I’ll tell the dolt nothing; let him flounder! “I said: there is a guest expected. Are you going deaf?”

“No, my lord, I heard you well enough. I shall be down presently. I have some. . some letters to finish.”

The Bishop had turned to go, but now he came back, glowering menacingly. A born bully, he was well aware that his power over others depended on his determination to let pass no challenge, however fainthearted. “Letters? What letters?” He was decked out all in purple, with purple gloves, and carried the mitre and staff tucked negligently under a fat arm. He was at once alarming and faintly comic. The Canon wondered uneasily why he had found it necessary personally to climb to this high room atop a windy tower merely to summon his nephew to dinner: it must be an important guest indeed. “Now, man — come!”

They hurried down dark stairways and rank damp passages. A storm was bellowing about the castle like a demented bull. The great entrance doors stood wide open, and in the porch a muffled faceless crowd of clerics and petty officials huddled by flickering torchlight, muttering. The night outside was a huge black spinning cylinder of wind and rain. Faintly between gusts there came the noise of riders approaching and the shrill blast of a trumpet. A ripple of excitement passed through the porch. Hoofbeats clattered across the courtyard, and suddenly dark mounted figures loomed up in the swirling darkness. Then there were many voices at once, and one that rang above all others, saying:

“Sennets and tuckets, by Christ! — and look here, a damned army awaiting us.”

The Canon heard his uncle beside him moan faintly in anger and dismay, and then they were both confronted abruptly by a stone-grey face with staring eyes and a beard streaming rain.

“Well Bishop, now that you have announced our coming to every German spy in Prussia, I suppose we can leave off this blasted disguise, eh?”

“Your majesty, forgive me, I thought—”

“Yes yes yes, enough.”

There was a scuffling in the porch, and the Canon glanced behind him to see the welcoming party with difficulty sinking to its knees in homage. Some few fell over in the crush, clutching wildly, amid stifled hilarity. Bishop Lucas juggled with the mitre and staff and proffered awkwardly the episcopal ring to be kissed. His Majesty looked at it. The Bishop whirled on his nephew and snarled:

“Bend your knee, churl, before the King of Poland!”

*

In the Hall of Knights above the nine great tables a thousand candles burned. First came hounds and torch-bearers and gaudy minstrels, and then the Bishop with his royal guest, followed by the Polish nobles, those hard-eyed horsemen, and at last the common household herd, pushing and squabbling and yelping for its dinner. A sort of silence fell as grace was offered. At the amen the Bishop sketched a hasty blessing on the air and ascended the dais to the mensa princeps, where he seated himself with the King on his right hand and the Canon on his left, and with heavy jowls sunk on his breast cast a cold eye upon the antics of the throng. He was still brooding on his humiliation in the porch. Jugglers and mountebanks pranced and leaped, spurred on by the shrieks of Toad the jester, a malignant stunted creature with a crazed fixed grin. Sandalled servants darted to and fro with fingerbowls and towels, and serving maids carried platters of smoking viands from the fire, where an uproar of cooks was toiling. A ragged cheer went up: one of the tumblers had fallen, and was being dragged away, writhing. Toad made a droll joke out of the fellow’s misfortune. Then an ancient rhymester with a white beard tottered forth and launched into an epic in praise of Ermland. He was pelted with crusts of bread. Come, Toad, a song!

See how he flies up, O, pretty young thrush

Heigh ho! sing willow

Here’s a health to the bird in the bush

Clamour and meat! Brute bliss! King Sigismund laughed loud and long, clawing at his tangled black beard.

“You keep a merry table, Bishop!” he cried. His temper was greatly improved. He had cast off his sodden disguise of linsey cloak and jerkin (“Who would mistake us for a peasant anyway!”), and was dressed now in the rough splendour of cowhide and ermine. That Jagellon head, however, lacking its crown, was still a rough-hewn undistinguished thing. Only the manner, overbearing, cruel and slightly mad, proclaimed him royal. He had made the long hard journey from Cracow to Prussia in wintertime, disguised, because he, like the Bishop, was alarmed by the resurgence of the Teutonic Knights. “Aye, very merry.”

But Bishop Lucas was in no mood for pleasantries, and he shrugged morosely and said nothing. He was worried indeed. The Knights, once rulers of all Prussia and now banished to the East, were again, with the encouragement of Germany, pushing westward against Royal Prussia, whose allegiance to the Jagellon throne, however unenthusiastic, afforded Poland a vital foothold on the Baltic coast. At the centre of this turbulent triangle stood little Ermland, sore pressed on every side, her precarious independence gravely threatened, by Poland no less than by the Knights. Something would have to be done. The Bishop had a plan. But from the start, from that stormy arrival tonight, he had felt that things were going somehow awry. Sigismund played at being a boor, but he was no fool. He was crazed, perhaps, but cunningly so. His Ambassador was whispering in his ear. The Bishop’s brow darkened.

“I am a plain man,” he growled, “a priest. I believe in plain speaking. And I say that the Knights are a far greater threat to Poland than to our small state.”

The Ambassador left off whispering, and squirmed unhappily in his chair. The Bishop and he were old enemies. He was a sour little man with an absurd moustache and sallow high-boned cheeks: a Slav. His one secret concern was to protect his prospects of a coveted posting out of the backwoods of Ermland to Paris, city of his dreams (where within a year he was to be throttled by a berserk in a brothel).

“Yes yes, Lord Bishop,” he ventured, “but is it not possible that we might treat with these unruly Knights in some way other than by open, and, I might add, dangerous, confrontation? I have great faith in diplomacy.” He simpered. “It is something I am not unskilled in.”

Bishop Lucas bent on him a withering look. “Sir, you may know diplomacy, but you do not know the Cross. They are a vile rapacious horde, and cursed of God. Infestimmus hostis Ordinis Theutonici! The time is not long past when they held open season against our native Prussians, and slaughtered them for sport.”

King Sigismund looked up, suddenly interested. “Did they?” His expression grew wistful, but then he recollected himself, and frowned. “Yes, well, for our part we see only one real threat, that is, the Turk, who is already at our southern border. What do you say of that vile horde, Bishop?”

It was just the opening that the Bishop needed to reveal his plan, yet, because his too intense hatred of the Knights threw him off, or because he underestimated the King and his crawling Ambassador, for whatever reason, his judgment faltered, and he bungled it.

“Is it not plain,” he snapped, “what I have in mind? Are not the Knights, supposedly at least, a crusading order? I say send, or lure, or force them, whatever, to your southern frontiers, that they may defend those territories against the Infidel.” There was a silence. He had been too precipitate, even the Canon saw it. He began to see it himself, and hastened to retrieve the situation. “They want to fight?” he cried, “—then let them fight, and if they are destroyed, why, the loss shall not be ours.” But he had succeeded only in making things worse, for now there arose before the horrified imaginations of the Poles the vision of a Turkish army flushed with victory, blooded as it were, swarming northwards over the mangled corpse of one of Europe’s finest military machines. Ah no, no. They avoided his fiercely searching eye; they seemed almost embarrassed. Of course they had known beforehand the nature of his scheme, but knowing was not the thing. The Canon watched his uncle covertly, and wondered, not without a certain malicious satisfaction, how it came that such an expert ritualist had stumbled so clumsily — for ritual was the thing.

“A jolly fellow, Bishop, that fool of yours,” King Sigismund said. “Sing up, sirrah! And let us have more wine here. This Rhenish is damned good — the only good that’s ever come out of Germany, I say. Ha!”

All dutifully laughed, save the Bishop, who sat and glared before him out of a purple trance of fury and chagrin. The Ambassador eyed him craftily, and smoothly said:

“I think, my lord, that we must consider in greater detail this problem of the Knights. Your solution seems a little too — how should I say? — too simple. Destroy the Turk or be destroyed, these appear to be the only alternatives you foresee, but rather might not the Cross destroy Poland? Ah no, Bishop, I think: no.”

Bishop Lucas seemed about to bite him, but instead, plucking at himself in his agitation, he turned abruptly to the King and made to speak, but was prevented by a steward who came running and whispered urgently in his ear. “Not now, man, not. . what?. . who?” He whirled on the Canon, the wattles of red fat at his throat wobbling. “You! you knew of this.”

The Canon reared away in fright, shaking his head. “Of what, my lord, knew of what?”

“The whoreson! Go to him, go, and tell him, tell him—” The table was agog. “—Tell him if he is not gone hence by dawn I’ll have his poxed carcase strung up at the castle gate!”

Through passageways Canon Nicolas scurried, tripping on his robe in the darkness and moaning softly under his breath. Something from long ago, from childhood, ran in his head, over and over: The Turk impales his prisoners! The Turk impales his prisoners! In the flickering torchlight under the porch a dark figure waited, wrapt in a black cloak. The wind bellowed, whirled all away into the swirling tunnel of the tempest, Turks and Toad, sceptre and Cross, crusts, dust, old rags, a battered crown: all.

“You!”

“Yes, brother: I.”

* * *

Bishop Lucas’s decline began mysteriously that night of Andreas’s arrival at Heilsberg. It was not that he fell ill, or that his reason failed, but a kind of impalpable though devastating paralysis set in that was eventually to sap his steely will. The King of Poland, crapulous and monumentally irritated, would hear no more talk of the Knights, and left before morning with his henchmen, despite the weather. The Bishop stood puzzled and querulous, wracked by impotent rage and buffeted by black rain, watching his hopes for the security of Ermland depart with the royal party into storm and darkness. Of any other man it would have been said that he was growing old, that he had met his match in the King and his Ambassador, but these simple reasonings were not sufficient here. Perhaps for him also a dark something had lain in wait, whose vague form was suddenly made hideous flesh in Andreas’s coming.

“Has that bitch’s bastard gone yet?”

“No, my lord. My lord he is ill, you cannot send him away.”

“Cannot? Cannot I now!” He was flushed and shaken, and bobbed about in his rage like a large inflated bladder. “Go find him, you, in whatever rathole he is skulking, and tell him, tell him—ach!”

The Canon climbed the tower to his cell, where his brother sat on the edge of the bed with his cloak thrown over his shoulders, eating a sausage.

“You have been speaking with the Bishop, I can see,” he said. “You are sweating.” He laughed, a faint thin dry scraping sound. Now in the candlelight his face was horrible and horribly fascinating, worse even than it had seemed at first sight in the ill-lit porch, a ghastly ultimate thing, a mud mask set with eyes and emitting a frightful familiar voice. He was almost entirely bald above a knotted suppurating forehead. His upper lip was all eaten away on one side, so that his mouth was set lop-sidedly in what was not a grin and yet not a snarl either. One of his ears was a mess of crumbled white meat, while the other was untouched, a pinkish shell that in its startling perfection appeared far more hideous than its ruined twin. The nose was pallid and swollen, unreal, dead already, as if there, at the ravaged nostrils, Death the Jester had marked the place where when his time came he would force an entry. With such damage, the absence of blood was an unfailing surprise. “I think, brother, our uncle loves me not.”

The Canon nodded, unable to speak. He felt sundered, as if mind and body had come apart, the one writhing here in dazed helpless horror, the other bolt upright there on the floor, a thing of sticks and straw, nodding like a fairground dummy. A dome of turbulent darkness, held aloft only by the frail flame of the candle, pressed down upon the little room. He drew up a chair and very slowly sat. He told himself that this was not Andreas, could not be, was a phantom out of a dream. But it was Andreas, he knew it. What surprised him was that he was not surprised: had he known all along, without admitting it, the nature of his brother’s illness? Suddenly his sundered halves rushed together with a sickening smack, and he wrung his hands and cried:

“Andreas, Andreas, how have you come so low!”

His brother looked at him, amused and gratified by his distress, and lightly said:

“I had suspected, you know, that you would not fail to notice some little change in me since last we met. Have I aged, do you think? Hmm?”

“But what — what—?”

But he knew, only too well. Andreas laughed again.

“Why, it is the pox, brother, the Morbus Gallicus, or as your dear friend Fracastoro would have it in his famous verses, Syphilis, the beautiful boy struck down by the gods. A most troublesome complaint, I assure you.”

“O Christ. Andreas.”

Andreas frowned, if that was what to call this buckling of his maimed face.

“I’ll have none of your pity, damn you,” he said, “your mealy-mouthed concern. I am brought low, am I? You cringing clown. Rather I should rot with the pox than be like you, dead from the neck down. I have lived! Can you understand what that means, you, death-in-life, Poor Pol, can you? When I am dead and in the ground I shall not have been brought so low as you are now, brother!”

Into the globe of light in which they sat dim shapes were pressing, a crouched chair, the couch, a pile of books like clenched teeth, mute timid things, lifeless and yet seemingly alive, aching toward speech. The Canon looked about, unable to sustain the weight of his brother’s burning eyes, and wondered vaguely if these things among which he lived had somehow robbed him of some essential presence, of something vivid and absolutely vital, in order to imbue themselves with a little vicarious life. For certainly (Andreas was right!) he was in a way dead, cold, beyond touching. Even now it was not Andreas really that he pitied, but the pity itself. That seemed to mean something. Between the object and the emotion a third something, for him, must always mediate. Yes, that meant something. He did not know what. And then it all drifted away, those paradoxical fragments of almost-insight, and he was back in the charnel house.

“Why do you hate me so?” he asked, not in anger, nor even sadness much, but wonderingly, with awe.

Andreas did not answer. He fished up from under his cloak a soiled piece of cheese, looked at it doubtfully, and put it away. “Is there wine?” he growled. “Give it here.” And the ghost of the imperious headstrong bright beautiful creature he had once been appeared briefly in the furry yellow light, bowed haughtily, and was gone. He produced a length of hollow reed, and turning away with the fastidious stealth of a wounded animal, inserted one end of it between his lips and sucked up a mouthful of wine. “I suppose you think it only justice,” he mumbled, “that I have no longer a mouth with which to drink? You always disapproved of my drinking.” He wiped his lips carefully on his wrist. “Well, enough of this poking in the past — let us speak of present things. So you have sold yourself to Nuncle Luke, eh? For how much, I wonder. Another fat prebend? I hear he has given you a canonry at Breslau: rich pickings there, I daresay. Still, hardly enough to buy you whole, I should have thought. Or has he promised you Ermland, the bishopric? You’ll have to take Holy Orders for that. Well, say nothing, it’s no matter. You’ll rot here, as surely as I will, elsewhere. Perhaps I shall return to Rome. I have friends there, influence. You do not believe me, I see. But that is no matter either. What else can I tell you? — ah yes: I am a father.” Suddenly his eyes glittered, bright with spite. The Canon flinched. “Yes, the bitch that dosed me redeemed herself somewhat by dropping a son. Imagine that, brother: a son, a little Andreas! That burns your celibate soul, doesn’t it?”

O yes, it burned him, burned him badly, worse than he would ever have suspected it could do. Andreas’s aim was uncanny: he felt as dry as a barren woman. He said:

“Where is he now, your son?”

Andreas took another sip of wine, and looked up, grinning in anguish. “Hard to say where he might be; in Purgatory, I expect, seeing that he was so grossly got. He could not live, not with such parents, no.” He sighed, and glanced about the darkling room abstractedly, then groped under his cloak again and brought up this time a raw carrot with the stalk still on. “I asked your fellow to filch me some food, and look what he brought, the dog.”

“Max?” the Canon yelped, “was it Max? Did he see your. . did he see you clearly? He will tell the Bishop how things are with you. Andreas.”

But Andreas was not listening. He let fall the carrot from his fingers, and gazed at it where it lay on the floor as if it were all hope, all happiness lost. “Our lives, brother, are a little journey through God’s guts. We are soon shat. Those hills are not hills but heavenly piles, this earth a mess of consecrated cack, in which we sink at the end.” He grinned again. “Well, what do you say to that? Is it not a merry notion? The world as God’s belly: there is an image to confound your doctors of astronomy. Come, drink some wine. Why do I hate you? But I do not. I hate the world, and you, so to speak, are standing in the way. Come, do take some wine, we might as well be drunk. How the wind blows! Listen! Ah, brother, ah, I am in pain.”

A bitter cold invaded the Canon’s veins. He had emerged on the far side of grief and horror into an icy plain. He said:

“You cannot stay here, Andreas. Max will surely tell the Bishop how things are. He knows you are sick, but not how badly, how. . how obviously. He will drive you out, he has threatened already to have you hanged. You must go now, tonight. I shall send Max with you to the town, he will find lodgings for you.” And in the same dry measured tone he added: “Forgive me.”

Andreas had taken up his ebony cane and was leaning on it heavily, rocking back and forth where he sat. He was drunk.

“But tell me what you think of the world, brother,” he mumbled. “Do you think it a worthy place? Are we incandescent angels inhabiting a heaven? Come now, say, what do you think of it?”

The Canon grimaced and shook his head. “Nothing, I do not think. Will you go now, please?”

“Christ!” Andreas cried, and lifted the stick as if to strike. The Canon did not stir, and they sat thus, with the weapon trembling above them. “Tell me, damn you! Tell me what you think!”

“I think,” Canon Koppernigk said calmly, “that the world is absurd.”

Andreas lowered the stick, and nodded, smiling, it was almost a smile, almost blissful. “That is what I wanted you to say. Now I shall go.”

*

He went. Max found a hole for him to hide in. The Bishop, believing, wishing to believe, that he had left the country, let it be known that he wanted to hear no more mention of him. But such rage and pain as Andreas’s could not easily be erased. His coming had contaminated the castle, and some malign part of his presence persisted, a desolation, a blackening of the air. The Canon visited him once. He lay in darkness in a shuttered garret and would not speak, pretending to be asleep. The crown of his skull, all that was visible of him above the soiled blanket, scaly with scurf and old scabs and stuck with patches of scant hair, was horrid and heart-rending. Downstairs the innkeeper leered with ghastly knowing. He wiped his hands on his apron before taking the coins the Canon offered.

“You must give him better food. None of your slops, mind. Send to the castle for supplies if you must. Do not tell him that I spoke to you, that I gave you money.”

“O aye, your honour, mum’s the word. And I’ll do that with the prog.”

“Yes.” He looked at the cowering ingratiating fellow, and saw himself. “Yes.”

*

Church business took him with his uncle to Cracow. For once he was glad of that long weary journey. As they travelled southwards over the Prussian plain he felt the clutch of that dread phantom in the garret weaken, and at last fall away.

In Cracow he spent at Haller’s bookshop what little time the Bishop would allow him away from his secretarial duties. Haller was publishing his Latin translations from the Byzantine Greek of Simocatta’s Epistles. It was a poor dull book. The sight of the text, mysteriously, shockingly naked on the galley proofs, nauseated him. If thou wouldst obtain mastery over thy grief, wander among graves. . O! But the text was unimportant. What mattered was the dedication. He was out to woo the Bishop.

He enlisted in this delicate task the help of an old acquaintance, Laurentius Rabe, a poet and wandering scholar who had taught him briefly here at Cracow during his university days. Rabe, who affected on occasion the grandiloquent latinised name of Corvinus, was a spry old man with spindly legs and a plump chest and watery pale blue eyes. He liked to dress in black, and sported proudly still the liripipe of the graduate. He was no raven, despite the name, but resembled some small quick fastidious bird, a swallow, perhaps, or a swift. A jewel glittered at the tip of his sharp little beak.

“I would have some verses, you see,” the Canon said, “to flatter my uncle. I should be grateful to you.”

They stood together amid the crash and clatter of the caseroom at the rear of Haller’s. Rabe nodded rapidly, rubbing his chilblained fingers together like bundles of dry twigs.

“Of course, of course,” he cried, in his pinched voice. “Tell me what you require.”

“Some small thing merely, a few lines.” Canon Nicolas shrugged. “Something, say, on Aeneas and Achates, something like that, loyalty, piety, you know. The verse is no matter—”

“O.”

“—But most importantly, you must put in some mention of astronomy. I plan to produce a small work on planetary motion, a mere outline, you understand, of something much larger that I have in train. This preliminary commentariolus is a modest affair, but I fear controversy among the schoolmen, and therefore I must have the support of the Bishop, you see.” He was babbling, beset by embarrassment and nervousness. He found it unaccountably obscene to speak to others of his work. “Anyway, you know how these things go. Will you oblige me?”

Rabe was flattered, and for the moment, quite overcome, he could say nothing, and continued to nod, making faint squeaking noises under his breath. He was preparing one of his ornate speeches. The Canon had not time for that.

“Excuse me,” he said hastily, “I must speak to Haller.” The printer approached between the benches, a big stolid silent man in a leather apron, scratching his beard with a thick thumb and studying a sheet of parchment. “Meister Haller, I wish to put in some verses with the dedication: can you do that?”

Haller frowned pensively, and then nodded.

“We can do that,” he said gravely.

Rabe was watching the Canon with a gentle, somewhat crestfallen questioning look.

“You have changed, my dear Koppernigk,” he murmured.

“What?”

“You have become a public man.”

“Have I? Perhaps so.” What can he mean? No matter. “You will do this favour for me, then? I shall pay you, of course.”

He turned his attention to the galleys, and when he looked again Rabe was gone. He had the distinct, vaguely troubling impression that the old man had somehow been folded up and put neatly but unceremoniously away: closed, as it were, like a dull book. He shook his head impatiently. He had not the time to worry over trivia

*

He had all the time in the world. There was no hurry. He knew in his heart that the Bishop would be about as much impressed with the Commentariolus on Doctor Copernicus’s planetary theory (did it not sound somehow like the name of a patent medicine put out by some quack?) as he would be with dreary Simocatta. Or he might be so impressed as to forbid publication. The times were inauspicious. In Germany the Church was under attack, while the humanists were everywhere execrated — and translating Simocatta could be, the Canon supposed, considered a humanist pursuit, however laughable the notion seemed to him. Bishop Lucas had troubles in plenty abroad without exposing himself to the accusation of laxity in his own house. One scandalous nephew was enough.

“What am I to do with him!” he roared, drumming on his forehead with his fists. “Come, you are my physician, advise me how to rid myself of this sickness that is your blasted brother.”

“He is sick, my lord,” Canon Nicolas said quietly. “We must try to be charitable.”

“Charity? Charity? Christ in Heaven, man, don’t make me spew. How can I be charitable to this. . this. . this defilement, this weeping sore? You have seen him: he is rotting, the beast is rotting on his feet! Jesus God, if they should hear of this scandal at Rome—”

“He tells me he has influence at the Vatican, my lord.”

“—Or in Königsberg! O!” He sat down suddenly, appalled. “If they hear of it in Königsberg, what will they not make of it, the Knights. Something must be done. I will be rid of him, nephew, mark it, I will be rid of him.”

They were in the library, a large high cold stone hall that in former times had been the garderobe, where now the business of the castle, and all Ermland, was conducted. The furnishings were scant, some uninviting chairs, a prie-dieu, an incongruously dainty Italian table, the vast desk at the side of which the Canon sat on a low stool with pen and slate before him. One wall was draped with a vast tapestry, out of which, as from some elaborate puzzle, the Bishop’s flat stern face in various disguises peered with watchful mien, while in the middle distance, incidentally as it were, was depicted the martyrdom of St Stephen. A seven-branched candelabrum shed a brownish underwater light. Nervous petty officials summoned here over the years had left their mark on the air, a vague mute sense of distress and guilt and failure. It was Bishop Lucas’s favourite room. He snuffed up great lungfuls of that rank air, puffed himself up on it. In these latter days he left the library only to eat and sleep. He was safe here, while outside the pestilence raged, that plague of the spirit made tangible in Andreas’s coming. They had returned from Cracow to find him entrenched at the castle, determined, with hideous cheerfulness, not to be dislodged this time. Max had made him very comfortable in his master’s tower, where he passed the time waiting for their return by reading the notes and preliminary drafts of the Canon’s secret book. . A climate of doom descended on Heilsberg.

The Bishop began pacing again, a bell-like bundle of fear and frustration in his long voluminous purple robe, banging and booming angrily. He halted at the narrow mullioned window and stood staring out with his fists clasped behind him. Hoarfrost was on the glass, and a pale moon like a fat cheesy skull gleamed above a snowbound land.

“I might have him murdered,” he mused. “Can you find me an assassin that we can trust?” He turned, glowering. “Can you?”

Canon Nicolas closed his eyes wearily. “My lord, your letter to King Sigismund—”

“Damn King Sigismund! I have asked you a question.”

“You are not in earnest, surely.”

“Why not? Would he not be better off dead? He is dead already, except that his black heart out of spite persists in beating.”

“Yes,” the Canon murmured, “yes, he is dead already.”

“Just so. Therefore—”

“He is my brother!”

“—Yes, and he is my nephew, my sister’s son, my blood, and I would happily see his throat cut if I knew it could be quietly done.”

“I cannot believe—”

“What? What can you not believe? He is anathema, and I will be rid of him.”

The Canon frowned. “Then, Bishop, you will be rid of me also.”

His uncle slowly approached and stood over him, peering at him with interest. He seemed gratified, as if he derived a certain grim satisfaction from the thought that the long list of injuries done him by a filthy world were here being neatly rounded off.

“So you will betray me also, will you?” he said briskly. “Well well, so it has come to this. After all I have done for you. Well. And where, pray, will you go?”

“To Frauenburg.”

“Ha! And rot there, among the cathedral mice? You are a fool, nephew.”

But the Canon was hardly listening, engrossed as he was in contemplation of this new unrecognisable self that had suddenly from nowhere risen up, waving fists in defiance and demanding an apocalypse. Yet he was calm, quite, quite calm. It was of course the logical thing to do; yes, he would leave Heilsberg, there was no avoiding that command, it sang in the wires of his blood, a great black chord. He would embrace exile, would give it all up, for Andreas. It would be the final irrefutable proof of his regard for his brother. And there would be no need for words. Yes. Yes. He looked about him, blinking, bemused by the joy and dismay warring in his confused heart. It was all so simple, after all. The Bishop threw up his hands and lumbered off.

“Fool!”

*

Andreas laughed. “Fool you are, brother. Think you can escape me by hiding among the holy canons?”

“He is talking of assassination, Andreas.”

“What of it! A dagger in the throat is not the worst thing that can befall me. O go away, you. Your false concern is sickening. You would like nothing better than to see me dead. I know you, brother, I know you.” The Canon said nothing. What there was to say could not be said. No need for words? Ah! He turned to go, but Andreas plucked him slyly by the sleeve. “Our nuncle will be interested to know how you have occupied yourself all these years under his patronage, do you not think?”

“I ask you, say nothing to him of this work of mine. You should not have read my papers. It is all foolery, a pastime merely.”

“O, but you are too modest. I feel it is my duty to acquaint him with these very interesting theories which you have formulated. A heliocentric universe! He will be impressed. Well, what do you say?”

“I cannot prevent you from betraying me. It hardly matters now. Heed me, Andreas, and leave Heilsberg, or he will surely do you grievous injury.”

Andreas grinned, grinding his teeth.

“You do not understand,” he said. “I want to die!”

“Nonsense. It is revenge that you want.”

They were startled by that, the Canon no less than Andreas, who stepped back with an offended look.

“What do you know of it?” he muttered sulkily. “Go on, scuttle off to your pious friends at Frauenburg.” But as the Canon went down the stairs the door flew open behind him and Andreas appeared, framed against the candlelight like a dangling black spider, crying: “Yes! Yes! I will be revenged!”

*

Canon Koppernigk set out for Frauenburg by night, a cloaked black figure slumped astride a drooping mare. He was alone. Max had elected to stay and serve Andreas. That was all right. They might try, but they would not take everything from him, no. If the sentry were to accost him now he would announce himself fiercely, would bellow his name and impress it like a seal upon the waxen darkness for all Heilsberg to hear: Doctor Copernicus! But the sentry was asleep.

* * *

Day up there on the Baltic broke in storms of petrified fire. He had never seen such dawns. They were excessive, faintly alarming, not at all to his taste. He had come to detest extremes. The sky here was altogether too vast, too high, and too much given to empty tempestuous displays. It was all surface. He preferred the sea, whose hidden deeps communicated a sense of enormous grey calm. But sometimes the sea too disturbed him, when by a trick of tide or light it rose up in his window, humped, slate-blue, like the back of some waterborne brute, menacing and ineluctable.

He had asked for the tower at the north-west corner of the cathedral wall. The Frauenburg Chapter thought him mad. It was a grim bare place, certainly, but it suited him. There were three whitewashed rooms set squarely one above the other. From the second floor a door led out to a kind of platform atop the wall. This would do for an observatory, affording as it did an open view of the great plain to the south, and north and west across the narrow freshwater lake called the Frisches Haff to the Baltic beyond, and of the stars by night. For furniture he had a couch to sleep on, a table, two chairs, a lectern. That second chair troubled him in its suggestion of the possibility of a guest, but he allowed it stay, knowing that perfection is not of this world. Anyway, the desk far outweighted in garishness any number of chairs. It was his father’s desk from Torun, which he had asked Katharina to let him have, as a keepsake. A big solid affair of oak, with drawers and brass fittings and a top inlaid with worn green leather, it fitted ill in that stark cell, but it was a part of the past, and in time he grew accustomed to it. He felt that to have left the rooms entirely bare would have been preferable, but he was not a fanatic. It was only that he had perceived in this grey stone tower, this least place, an image of his deepest self that furniture, possessions, comforts, only served to blur. He was after the thing itself now, the unadorned, the stony thing.

The Chapter demanded little of him. His fifteen fellow canons considered him a dull dog. They lived in the grand style, with servants and horses and estates outside the walls. His tower to them was a mark of incomprehensible and suspect humility. Yet they treated him with studied deference. He supposed they were afraid of him, of what he represented: he was, after all, the Bishop’s nephew. He had not the interest to reassure them on that score. Anyway, their fright kept them at a welcome distance — the last thing he wanted was companionship. On his arrival at Frauenburg he was immediately, with indecent haste almost, appointed Visitator, a largely honorary title thrust on him in the hope apparently of mollifying for the moment the hunger for advancement that the canons imagined must be gnawing at this stark alarming newcomer. He compelled himself to attend all Chapter meetings, and sat, without ever uttering a word, listening diligently to endless talk of tithes and taxes and Church politics. Easier to bear were the daily services at the cathedral. As a canon without Holy Orders he was called on to be present, but not of course to officiate. Unlike the Chapter sessions, where his mute brooding presence was patently resented, in church his reticence was ideally matched, was absorbed even, by God’s huge stony silence.

Only rarely did he travel beyond the environs of Frauenburg. He liked the town. It was old, sleepy, safe, it reminded him of his birthplace; it was enough. Once he journeyed to Torun and called upon the Gertner household, and to Kulm to see Barbara at the convent. Neither visit was a success. Barbara and he still could not cope with each other as adults, and Katharina. . was still Katharina. He resolved to venture forth no more, and gently refused the invitations of his colleagues to accompany them on their frequent roistering rounds of the diocese. He had at last, so it seemed to him, come to a dead halt. The waves of the world broke in storm and clamour far above the pool of stillness in which he floated.

*

But he was not left entirely unmolested. Ripples slithered down and stirred the filth at the bottom of his pool. He heard of the death of Rabe, poor Corvinus, on the very day that the copy of the Simocatta translations that he had sent to Bishop Lucas was returned, unread and unremarked, from Heilsberg. Then Max appeared one evening, sheepish and sullen; Andreas, he said, had gone back to Italy, with twelve hundred Hungarian gold florins in his belt, entrusted to him for ecclesiastical purposes by the Frauenburg Chapter.

“What!” The Canon stared. “What are you saying? Was he here? When was he here?”

Max shrugged. “Aye, he was here. They gave him the gold. He’s gone off. Said I could go to the devil. Your nuncle gave him monies too, to be rid of him. A bad lot, your brother, if you’ll permit me say it, master.”

The Canon sat down. “Twelve hundred gold florins!” That was bad, but worse, far worse, was that Andreas had been in Frauenburg and no one had thought to warn him. (Warn? He turned the word this way and that, scrutinising it.)

*

He was not to have peace, that much was clear. No matter how far he fled he would be followed. Mysterious emissaries were sent to him, cunningly disguised. The most innocent-seeming stranger, or even someone he thought he knew, might suddenly by a look, a word, deliver the secret message: beware. He had rid his life of everything that could have brought him comfort, but evidently that was not enough, renunciation was not enough. Was passivity, then, his crime? He set himself to work on behalf of the Chapter, accepting only the most servile and distasteful of tasks. He wrote letters, collected rents, drew up reports that no one read; he rode the length and breadth of the diocese to deal with minute matters, frenziedly, like a deckhand racing about a sinking ship vainly plugging leaks that opened again as soon as they were stanched. Now the Chapter became finally convinced that he was a lunatic. He negotiated, almost on his knees, with sneering officials from Cracow and Königsberg. And he treated the sick. Even they sometimes to his horror revealed a treacherous knowing.

It was strange: the people had such faith in him. They sent him their sickest, their hopeless cases, leprous children, wasting brides, the old. He could do nothing, yet he continued doggedly to advise and admonish, making passes in the air, frowning under the weight of a wholly spurious wisdom. The more outlandish his treatment, and more grotesque the ingredients of the potions he poured down their throats, the more satisfied they seemed. Why, some even recovered! He gained quite a reputation throughout Ermland. Yet not for a moment did he doubt that he was a fake.

There was a young girl, Alicia her name, she could not have been more than fifteen, a slender delicate child. She was brought to him one day in April. The air was drenched with sun and rain, cloudshadows skimmed the bright Baltic. She wore a green gown. The tower did not know what to do with her: such loveliness was more than those grim grey stones could cope with. Her father was an over-dressed faintly ridiculous fat man, a fodder merchant and a member of the town council. He owned a wooden house within the walls and a vineyard in the suburbs. His people, he said, hailed from Lower Saxony, a fact which he seemed to consider impressive. He let it be known that he could read, and also write; he carefully avoided meeting the Canon’s eye directly. The mother was a large sad timid woman in black, with a broad pale face all puffed and wrinkled as if perpetually anticipating tears. They were both elderly. Alicia had come, they confided, a gift from God, just when they had at last given up all hope of issue; and they looked at each other shyly, in wonder, and then at their daughter with such anguished tenderness that the Canon was forced to turn away, the celibate’s bitterness rising in him like bile.

“Why have you come to me?”

“She is not well, Father, we think,” the merchant answered. He hesitated, and looked to his wife. She wrung her pale heavy hands, and her lips trembled. She said:

“She has a. . a rash, Father, and there is a flux—”

“Please, do not call me Father, I am not a priest.” He had meant to be kind, to put them at their ease, but succeeded only in intimidating them further. He was himself uneasy. He wanted to walk out quickly now and abandon this fat fodder merchant and his sorrowful wife and ailing daughter, to escape. A handful of bright rain clattered against the window. The sea sparkled. He disliked springtime, unsettling season. With a thumb and finger under her chin he lifted the child’s face and studied it silently for a moment. A faint blush spread upwards from her slender inviolate throat. She was afraid of him also. Or was she? It seemed to him that he detected fleetingly in those exquisite velvety dark eyes a cold and calculating sardonic look, piercing and familiar. He stepped away from her, frowning.

“Come,” he said. The mother moaned faintly in distress and made as if to touch her daughter. Alicia did not look at her. “Come, child, do not be afraid.”

He led her up the narrow stairs to his observatory. (The sick were suitably cowed by the astrolabe and quadrant and all those dusty tomes.) Today however it was not the patient who was the most apprehensive, but the physician. The girl’s strange closed silence was disturbing. She seemed to be turned inward somehow, away from the world, as if she were the carrier of a secret that made her inner self wholly sufficient, as if she were the initiate of a cult.

“Where have you this rash, child?”

Still she said nothing, but stood a moment apparently debating within herself, then leaned down quickly and lifted up the hem of her skirts. He was not surprised; he was appalled, even frightened, yes, but not surprised. A carrier she was, certainly. Now he knew the cult into which she had been initiated. How strange: the sun was on the Baltic, the lindens were in bud, and water and air and earth trembled with the complicity of the awakening season’s fire, and yet this young girl was infected. Once again he was struck by the failure of things and times to connect. The world was there, Alicia was here, and between the two the chasm yawned. She was watching him out of those blank exquisite eyes without fear or shame, but with a kind of curiosity. There, between seraphic face and that dreadful flower blossoming in secret inside her young girl’s frail thighs, was yet another failure of connection.

“What man have you been with?” he asked.

She let fall the hem of her gown and with prim little swooping movements smoothed the wrinkles carefully out of the green silk.

“No man,” she said. “I have been with no man, Father.”

“Odysseus then,” the Canon murmured, and was vaguely shocked at himself for making a joke at such a time. He could think of nothing else to say. He took her hand and felt her heart-breaking frailty. “Ah child, child.” There was nothing to be said, nor done. The sense of his failure struck him like a hammerblow.

The parents stood as he had left them, poised, like ships becalmed, waiting for wonders. They had only to look at him and they knew. They had known already, in their hearts. The silence was frightful. The Canon said: “I suggest—” but the merchant and his wife both began to speak at once, and then stopped in confusion. The mother was weeping effortlessly.

“There is a young man, Father,” she said. “He wishes to marry our Alicia.” Her face suddenly crumpled, and she wailed: “O he is a fine boy, Father!”

“We—” the merchant began, puffing up his chest, but he could not go on, and looked about the room, baffled and lost, as if searching for some solid support that he knew was not to be found, not here nor anywhere. “We!—”

“My sister is Abbess of the Cistercian Convent at Kulm,” the Canon said quickly. “I can arrange for your daughter to go there. She need not take the vow, of course, unless you wish it. But the nuns will care for her, and perhaps—” Stop! Do not! “—Perhaps in time, when she is cured. . when she. . perhaps this young man. . Ach!” He could bear this no longer. They knew, they all knew: the child’s groin was crawling with crabs, she was poxed, she would never marry, would probably not live to be twenty, they knew that! Why then this charade? He advanced on them, and they retreated before him as if buffeted by the wind of his dismay and rage. The girl did not even glance at him. He wanted to shake her, or clasp her in his arms, to throttle her, save her, he did not know what he wanted, and he did nothing. When the door was opened a solid block of sunlight fell upon them, and all hesitated a moment, dazzled, and then mother and daughter turned away into the street. The merchant suddenly stamped his foot.

“It is witchcraft,” he gasped, “I know it!”

“No,” the Canon said. “There is no witchery here. Go now and comfort your wife and child. I shall write today to Kulm.”

But the merchant was not listening. He nodded distractedly, mechanically, like a large forlorn doll.

“The blame must fall somewhere,” he muttered, and for the first time looked directly at the Canon. “It must fall somewhere!”

Yes, yes: somewhere.

*

The ripples increased in intensity, became waves. Rumours reached him that he was being talked of at Rome as the originator of a new cosmology. Julius II himself, it was said, had expressed an interest. The blame must fall somewhere: he heard again that voice on the stairs shrieking of revenge. An unassuageable constriction of fear and panic afflicted him. Yet there was nowhere further that he could flee to. Lateral drift was all that remained.

Suddenly one day God abandoned him. Or perhaps it had happened long before, and he was only realising it now. The crisis came unbidden, for he had never questioned his faith, and he felt like the bystander, stopped idly to watch a brawl, who is suddenly struck down by a terrible stray blow. And yet it could not really be called a crisis. There was no great tumult of the soul, no pain. The thing was distinguished by a lack of feeling, a numbness. And it was strange: his faith in the Church did not waver, only his faith in God. The Mass, transubstantiation, the forgiveness of sin, the virgin birth, the vivid truth of all that he did not for a moment doubt, but behind it, behind the ritual, there was for him now only a silent white void that was everywhere and everything and eternal.

He confessed to the Precentor, Canon von Lossainen, but more out of curiosity than remorse. The Precentor, an ailing unhappy old man, sighed and said:

“Perhaps, Nicolas, the outward forms are all that any of us can believe in. Are you not being too hard on yourself?”

“No, no; I do not think it is possible to be too hard on oneself.”

“You may be right. Should I give you absolution? I hardly know.”

“Despair is a great sin.”

“Despair? Ah.”

*

He ceased to believe also in his book. For a while, in Cracow, in Italy, he had succeeded in convincing himself that (what was it?) the physical world was amenable to physical investigation, that the principal thing could be deduced, that the thing itself could be said. That faith too had collapsed. The book by now had gone through two complete revisions, rewritings really, but instead of coming nearer to essentials it was, he knew, flying off in a wild eccentric orbit into emptiness; instead of approaching the word, the crucial Word, it was careering headlong into a loquacious silence. He had believed it possible to say the truth; now he saw that all that could be said was the saying. His book was not about the world, but about itself. More than once he snatched up this hideous ingrown thing and rushed with it to the fire, but he had not the strength to perform that ultimate act.

Then at last there came, mysteriously, a ghastly release.

It was a sulphurous windy evening in March when Katharina’s steward arrived to summon him to Torun, where his uncle the Bishop was lying ill. He rode all night through storm and rain into a sombre yellowish dawn that was more like twilight. At Marienburg a watery sun broke briefly through the gloom. The Vistula was sullen. By nightfall he had reached Torun, exhausted, and almost delirious from want of sleep. Katharina was solicitious, and that told him, if nothing else would, that the situation was serious.

Bishop Lucas had been to Cracow for the wedding of King Sigismund. On the journey home he had fallen violently ill, and being then closer to Torun than Heilsberg had elected to be taken to the house of his niece. He lay now writhing in a grey sweat in the room, in the very bed where Canon Nicolas had been born and probably conceived. And indeed the Bishop, mewling in pain and mortal fright, seemed himself a great gross infant labouring toward an agonised delivery. He was torn by terrible fluxions, that felt, he said, as if he were shitting his guts: he was. The room was lit by a single candle, but a greater ghastly light seemed shed by his rage and pain. The Canon hung back in the shadows for a long time, watching the little changing tableau being enacted about the bed. Priests and nurses came and went silently. A physician with a grey beard shook his head. Katharina put a cross into her uncle’s hands, but he fumbled and let it fall. Gertner picked his nails.

“Nicolas!”

“Yes, uncle, I am here.”

The stricken eyes sought his vainly, a shaking hand took him fiercely by the wrist. “They have poisoned me, Nicolas. Their spies were at the palace, everywhere. O Jesus curse them! O!”

“He is raving now,” Katharina said. “We can do nothing.”

The Canon paced about the dark house. It was changed beyond all recognition. It looked the same as it had always done, yet everything that he rapped upon with his questioning presence gave back only a dull sullen silence, as if the living soft centre of things had gone dead, had petrified. The deathwatch had conferred a lawless dispensation, and weird scenes of licence met him everywhere. In the little room that as a child he had shared with Andreas a pair of hounds, a bitch and her mate, reared up from the bed and snarled at him, baring their phosphorescent fangs in the darkness. Under a disordered table in the dining-hall he found his servant Max, and Toad, the Bishop’s jester, drunk and asleep, wrapped in a grotesque embrace, each with a hand thrust into the other’s lap. A stench like the stench of stagnant waters hung on the stairs. There was laughter in the servants’ quarters and the sounds of stealthy merrymaking. His own fingers when he lifted them to his face smelled of rot. He sat down by a dead fire in the solar and fell into a kind of trance between sleep and waking peopled by blurred phantoms.

In the dead hour before dawn he was summoned to the sickroom. There was in the globe of light about the bed that sense of suspended animation, of a finger lifted to lips, preparatory to the entrance of the black prince. Only the dying man himself seemed unaware that the moment was at hand. He hardly stirred at all now, and yet he appeared to be frantically busy. Life had shrunk to a swiftly spinning point within him, the last flywheel turning still as the engine approached its final collapse. The Canon was prey to an unshakeable feeling of incongruousness, of being inappropriately dressed, of being, somehow, all wrong. Suddenly the Bishop’s eyes flew open and stared upward with an expression of astonishment, and in a strong clear voice he cried: “No!” and all in the sickroom went utterly still and silent, as if fearing, like children in a hiding game, that to make a sound would mean being called forth to face some dreadful forfeit. “No! Keep him hence!” But the dark visitor would not be denied, and, battered and shapeless, an already indistinct pummelled soiled sack of pain and bafflement, Bishop Lucas Waczelrodt blundered into the darkness under the outstretched black wing of that enfolding cloak. The priest anointed his forehead with holy chrism. Katharina sobbed. Gertner looked up, frowning. The Canon turned away.

“Send at once to Heilsberg, tell them their Bishop is dead.”

The bells spoke.

*

Revolted by the pall of fake mourning put on by the house, Canon Nicolas slipped out by the servants’ passageway into the garden. The morning, sparkling with sun and frost, seemed made of finely wrought glass. The garden had been let go to ruin, and it was with difficulty that memory cleared away the weeds and rubbish and restored it to what it had been once. Here were the fruit bushes, the little paved path, the sundial — yes, yes, he remembered. As a child he had played here happily, soothed and reassured by the familiarity of the ramshackle: weathered posts, smouldering bonfires, unaccountably amiable backs of houses, the gaiety of cabbages. And when he was older, how many mornings such as this had he stood here in chill brittle sunlight, rapt and trembling at the thought of the infinite possibilities of the future, dreaming of mysterious pale young women in green gowns walking through dewy grass under great trees. He passed through a gap in the tumbledown paling into the narrow lane that ran behind the gardens. Brambles sprouted here at the base of a high white wall. A faint, sweetish, not altogether unpleasant tang of nightsoil laced the air. An old woman in a black cloak with a basket of eggs on her arm passed him by, bidding him Grüss Gott out of a toothless mouth. An extraordinary stealthy stillness reigned, as if an event of great significance were waiting for him to be gone so that it could occur in perfect solitude. The night, the candles and the murmuring, the wracked creature dying on the bed, all that was immensely far away now, unreal. Yet it had been as much a part of the world as this sunlight and stillness, those pencil-lines of blue smoke rising unruffled into the paler blue: was all this also unreal, then? He turned, and stood for a long time gazing toward the linden tree. It was to be cut down, so Gertner had said. It was old, and in danger of falling. The Canon nodded once, smiling a little, and walked back slowly through the resurrected garden to the house.

* * *

He could not in honesty mourn his uncle’s death. There was guilt, of course, regret at the thought of opportunities lost (perhaps I wronged him?), but these were not true feelings, only empty rituals, purification rites, as it were, performed in order that the ghost might be laid; for death, he now realised, produces a sudden nothingness in the world, a hole in the fabric of the world, with which the survivors must learn to live, and whether the lost one be loved or hated makes no difference, that learning still is difficult. He was haunted for a long time by a kind of ferocious implacable absence stamped unmistakably with the Bishop’s seal.

Then, inevitably, came the feeling of relief. Cautiously he tested the bars of his cage and found them not so rigid as they had been before. He even began to look a little more kindly on his work, telling himself that after all what he considered a poor flawed thing the world would surely think a wonder. He completed the Commentariolus, and, at once appalled and excited by his own daring, had copies made of it by a scribe in the town which he quietly distributed among the few scholars he considered sympathetic and discreet. Then, with teeth gritted, he awaited the explosion that would surely be set off by the seven axioms which together formed the basis of the theory of a sun-centred universe. He feared ridicule, refutations, abuse; most of all he feared involvement. He would be dragged out, kicking and howling, into the market place, he would be stood on a platform like a fairground exhibit and invited to expound proofs. It was ridiculous, horrible, not to be borne! Again he began to wonder if he would be well advised to destroy his work and thus have done with the whole business. But his book was all he had left — how could he burn it? Yet if they should come, sneering and snarling and bellowing for proof, smash down his door and snatch the manuscript from his hands, dear God, what then?

It was not the academics that he feared most (he felt he knew how to handle them), but the people, the poor ordinary deluded people ever on the lookout for the sign, the message, the word that would herald the imminent coming of the millennium and all that it entailed: liberty, happiness, redemption. They would seize upon his work, or a mangled version of it more like, with awful fervour, beside themselves in their eagerness to believe that what he was offering them was an explanation of the world and their lives in it. And when sooner or later it dawned upon them that they had been betrayed yet again, that here was no simple comprehensive picture of reality, no new instauration, then they would turn on him. But even that was not the point. O true, he had no wish to be reviled, but far more important than that was his wish not to mislead the people. They must be made to understand that by banishing Earth and man along with it from the centre of the universe, he was passing no judgments, expounding no philosophy, but merely stating what is the case. The game of which he was master could exercise the mind, but it would not teach them how to live.

He need not have worried. There was no explosion, no one came. There was not even a tapping at his door. The world overlooked him. It was just as well. He was relieved. He had given them the Commentariolus, the preface as it were, and they had taken no notice. Now he could finish writing his book in peace, unmolested by idiots. For surely they were all idiots, if they could ignore the challenge he had thrown down at their feet, idiots and cowards, that they would not see the breathtaking splendour and daring of his concepts — he would show them, yes, yes! And sullenly, consumed by disappointment and frustration, he sat down to his desk, to show them. The great spheres wheeled in a crystal firmament in his head, and when (rarely, rarely!) he looked into the night sky, he was troubled by a vague sense of recognition that puzzled him until he remembered that it was that sky, those cold white specks of light, that had given form to his mind’s world. Then the familiar feeling of dislocation assailed him as he strove in vain to discern a connection between the actual and the imagined. Inevitably, inexplicably, Andreas’s ravaged face swam into view, slyly smiling — Constellation of Syphilis! — blotting out all else.

*

“One that would speak with you, Canon.”

Canon Koppernigk looked up frowning and shook his head vehemently in silent refusal. He did not wish to be disturbed. Max only shrugged, and with a brief sardonic bow withdrew. Even before his visitor appeared the Canon knew from that inimitable respectful light step on the stairs who it was. He sighed, and put away carefully into a drawer the page of manuscript on which he had been working.

“My dear Doctor, forgive me, I hope I do not disturb you?” Canon Tiedemann Giese was a good-humoured, somewhat stout, curiously babyish fresh-faced man of thirty. He had a large flaxen head, an incongruously stern hooked nose, squarish useless hands, and wide innocent eyes that managed to bestow a unique tender concern on even the least thing that they encountered. Although he came of an aristocratic line, he disapproved of the opulent lives led by his colleagues, in the Chapter, a disapproval that he expressed — or paraded, as some said — by dressing always in the common style in smocks and breeches and stout sensible riding boots. His academic achievements were impressive, yet he was careful to wear his learning lightly. By some means he had got hold of a copy of the Commentariolus, and although he had never mentioned that work directly, he let it be known, by certain sly remarks and meaningful looks that made Canon Koppernigk flinch, that he had been won over entirely to the heliocentric doctrine. Canon Giese was one of the world’s innate enthusiasts.

“Please sit,” Canon Koppernigk said, with a wintry smile. “There is something I can do for you?”

Giese laughed nervously. He was the younger of the two by some seven years only, yet his manner in Canon Koppernigk’s presence was that of a timid but eager bright schoolboy. With desperate nonchalance he said:

“Just passing, you know, and I thought I might call in to. .”

“Yes.”

Giese’s discomfited eye slid off and wandered about the cell. It was low and white, white everywhere: even the beams of the ceiling were white. On the wall behind the desk at which the Doctor sat was fixed an hourglass in a frame, his wide-brimmed hat hanging on a hook, and a wooden stand holding a few medical implements. Set in a deep embrasure, a small window with panes of bottled glass gave on to the Frisches Haff and the great arc of the Baltic beyond. The rickety door leading on to the wall was open, and out there could be seen the upright sundial and the triquetrum, a rudimentary crossbow affair over five ells tall for measuring celestial angles, a curiously distraught-looking thing standing with its frozen arms flung skywards. Was it with the aid of these poor pieces only, Giese wondered, that the Doctor had formulated his wonderful theory? A gull alighted on the windowsill, and for a moment he gazed thoughtfully at the bird’s pale eye magnified in the bottled glass. (Magnified? — but no, no, a foolish notion. .)

“I too have some interest in astronomy, you know, Doctor,” he said. “Of course, I am merely a dabbler, you understand. But I think I know enough to recognise greatness when I encounter it, as I have done, lately.” And he leered. Canon Koppernigk’s stony expression did not alter. He was really a peculiar cold closed person, difficult to touch. Giese sighed. “Well, in fact, Doctor, there is a matter on which I wished to speak to you. The subject is, how shall I say, a delicate one, painful even. Perhaps you know what I am referring to? No?” He began to fidget. He was seated on a low hard chair before the Doctor’s desk. It was on occasions such as this that he heartily regretted having accepted the position of Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter, which had fallen to him on Canon von Lossainen’s accession to the bishopric following the death of Lucas Waczelrodt: he was not cut out for this kind of thing, really. “It is your brother, you see,” he said carefully. “Canon Andreas.”

“O?”

“I know that it must be a painful subject for you, Doctor, and indeed that is why I have come to you personally, not only as Precentor, but as, I hope, a friend.” He paused. Canon Koppernigk raised one eyebrow enquiringly, but said nothing. “The Bishop, you see, and indeed the Chapter, all feel that, well, that your brother’s presence, in his lamentable condition, is not. . that is to say—”

“Presence?” said the Doctor. “But my brother is in Italy.”

Giese stared. “O but no, Doctor, no; I assumed that you — have you not been told? He is here, in Frauenburg. He has been here for some days now. I assumed he would have called on you. He is not — he is not well, you know.”

*

He was not well: he was a walking horror. In the years since the Canon had seen him last he had surrendered his own form to that of his disease, so that he was no longer a man but a memento mori only, a shrivelled twisted hunchbacked thing on whose ruined face was fixed a death’s-head grin. All this the Canon learned at second hand, for his brother kept away from him, not out of tact, of course, but because he found it amusing to haunt him from a distance, by proxy as it were, knowing how much more painful it would be that others should carry word of his disgraceful doings into the fastness of the Canon’s austere white tower. He lodged at a kip down in the stews (where else would have him?), but flaunted his frightful form by day in the environs of the cathedral, where he terrified the town’s children and their mothers alike; and once even, one Sunday morning, he came lurching up the central aisle during High Mass and knelt in elaborate genuflexion at the altar rails, behind which poor ailing Bishop von Lossainen sat in horror-stricken immobility on his purple throne.

It was not long, of course, until there began to be talk of black magic, of vampirism and werewolves. Crosses appeared on the doors of the town. A young girl, it was said, had been found in the hills with her throat torn open. By night a black-cloaked demon haunted the streets, and howling and eerie laughter was heard in the darkness. Toto the idiot, who had the gift of second sight, was said to have seen a huge bird with the pinched violet face of a man fly low over the roofs on All Souls’ Eve, shrieking. Hysteria spread through Frauenburg like the pest, and throughout that sombre smoky autumn small groups of grim-faced men gathered at twilight on street corners and muttered darkly, and mothers called their children home early from play. The Jews outside the walls began discreetly to fortify their houses, fearing a pogrom. Things could not continue thus.

The first snow of winter was falling when the canons met in the conference hall of the chapterhouse, determined finally to resolve the situation. They had already decided privately on a course of action, but a general convocation was necessary to put an official seal upon it. The meeting had a further purpose: Canon Koppernigk had so far remained entirely aloof from the problem, as if his brother were no concern of his, and the Chapter, outraged at his silence and apparent indifference, was determined that he should be made to bear his share of responsibility. Indeed, feeling among the canons ran so high that they were no longer quite clear in their minds as to which of the brothers deserved the harsher treatment, and some were even in favour of banishing both and thus having done with that troublesome tribe for good and ever.

The Canon arrived late at the chapterhouse, wrapped up against the cold and with his wide-brimmed hat pulled low. A thin forbidding figure in black, he moved slowly down the hall and took his place at the table, removed his hat, his gloves, and having crossed himself in silence folded his hands before him and lifted his eyes to the bruisedark sky looming in the high windows. His colleagues, who had fallen silent as he entered, now stirred themselves and glanced morosely about the table, dissatisfied and obscurely disappointed; they had somehow expected something of him today, something dramatic and untoward, a yell of defiance or a grovelling plea for leniency, even threats perhaps, or a curse, but not this, this nothingness—why, he was hardly here at all!

Giese at the head of the table coughed, and, continuing the address that Canon Nicolas’s coming had interrupted, said:

“The situation then, gentlemen, is delicate. The Bishop demands that we take action, and now even the people press for the afflicted Canon’s, ah, departure. However, I would counsel against too hasty or too severe a solution. We must not exaggerate the gravity of this affair. The Bishop himself, as we know, is not well, and therefore may not be expected perhaps to take a perfectly reasoned view on these matters—”

“Is he saying that von Lossainen has the pox?” someone enquired in a loud whisper, and there was a subdued rumble of laughter.

“—The people, of course,” Giese continued stoutly, “the people as ever are given to superstitious and hysterical talk, and should be ignored. We must recognise, gentlemen, that our brother, Canon Andreas, is mortally afflicted, but that he has not willed this terrible curse upon himself. We must, in short, try to be charitable. Now—” While before he had simply not looked at Canon Koppernigk, now he began elaborately and with tight-lipped sternness not to look at him, and fidgeted nervously with the sheaf of papers before him on the table. “—I have canvassed opinion generally among you, and certain proposals have emerged which are, in my opinion, somewhat extreme. However, these proposals are. . the proposals. . ah. .” Now he looked at the Canon, and blanched, and could not go on. There was silence, and then the Danziger Canon Heinrich Snellenburg, a big swarthy truculent man, snorted angrily down his nostrils and declared:

“It is proposed to break all personal connections with the leper, to demand that he account for the sum of twelve hundred gold florins entrusted to him by this Chapter, to seize his prebend and all other revenues, and to grant him a modest annuity on condition that he takes himself off from our midst immediately. That, Herr Precentor, gentlemen, is what is proposed.” And he turned his dark sullen gaze on Canon Koppernigk. “If these are dissenting voices, let them be heard now.”

The Canon was still watching the snow swirling greyly against the window. All waited in vain for him to speak. He seemed genuinely indifferent to the proceedings, and somehow that genuineness annoyed the Chapter far more than pretence would have done, for they could at least have understood pretence. Had the man no ordinary human feelings whatever? He said nothing, only now and then drummed his fingers lightly, thoughtfully, on the edge of the table. But even if he would not speak they were yet determined to have some response of him, and so, with unspoken unanimity, they agreed that his silence should be taken as a protest. Canon von der Trank, an aristocratic German with the thin nervous look about him of a whippet, pursed up his wide pale pink lips and said:

“Whatever it is that we do, gentlemen, certainly we must do something. The matter must be dealt with, there must be a quick clean end to the present intolerable situation. The Precentor gives it as his opinion that the measures we have proposed are too extreme. He tells us that this—” his sharp fastidious nose twitched at the tip “—this person did not will upon himself the disease that afflicts him, yet we may ask whose will, if not his, was involved? All are aware of the nature of his malady, which he contracted in the bawdyhouses of Italy. We are urged to be charitable, but our charity and our care must be extended firstly to the faithful of this diocese: them we have the duty to protect from this outrageous source of scandal. And further, there is the reputation of this Chapter to be considered. This is the very sort of thing that the monk Luther will be delighted to hear of, so that he may add it as another strand to the whip with which he lashes the Church. Therefore I say let us hear no more talk of charity and caution. Our duty is clear — let us perform it. The leper must be declared anathema and driven hence without delay!”

A rumble of yeas followed this address, and all with set jaws glared at Giese grimly, who squirmed, and mopped his forehead, and turned a beseeching gaze on Canon Koppernigk.

“What do you think, Doctor? Surely you wish to make some reply?”

The Canon took his eyes reluctantly from the darkling window and glanced about the table. Snellenburg, you owe me a hundred marks; von der Trank, you hate me because I am a tradesman’s son and yet cleverer than you; Giese — poor Giese. What does it matter? Lately he had begun to feel that he was somehow fading, that his physical self was as it were evaporating, becoming transparent; soon there would remain only a mind, a sort of grey ghostly amoeba spinning silently in the dead air. What does it matter? He turned away. How softly the snow falls! “I think,” he murmured, “that it would be foolish to worry overmuch as to what Father Luther thinks of us or says. He will go the way all others of his kind have gone, and will be forgotten with the rest.”

They stared at him, nonplussed. Did he think this was some kind of religious discussion? Had he even been listening? For a long time no one spoke, and then Canon Snellenburg shrugged and said:

“Well, if the fellow’s own brother will not even say a word in his defence!—”

“Please, please gentlemen,” Giese cried, as if convinced that the table was about to rise up and attack the Canon with fists. “Please! Doctor, I wonder if you realise fully what is being proposed? The Chapter intends to strip your brother of all rights and privileges whatever, to — to cast him out, like a beggar!”

But Canon Koppernigk paid no heed. Look at them! First they blamed me because he is my brother, now they despise me because I will not defend him. Wait, Snellenburg, just wait, I will have my hundred marks of you! Just then he found an unexpected and unwanted ally, when another of the canons, one Alexander Sculteti, a scrawny fellow with a red nose, stood up and delivered himself of a rambling and disjointed defence of Canon Andreas to which nobody listened, for Sculteti was a reprobate who kept a woman and a houseful of children at his farm outside the walls, and besides, he was far from sober. Canon Koppernigk took up his hat, and wrapping his cloak about him went out into the burgeoning darkness and the snow.

*

As if he had been waiting for a signal, Andreas visited his brother for the first time on the very day that he heard of the Chapter’s decision to banish him. For a man so grievously maimed he negotiated the stairs of the tower with surprising stealth, and all that could be heard of his coming was his laboured breathing and the light fastidious tapping of his stick. He was indeed in a bad way now, but what shocked the Canon most were the signs of ageing that even the damage wrought by the disease could not outweigh. The few swatches of hair remaining on his skull had turned a yellowish grey, and his eyes that had once flashed fire were weary and rheumy and querulous. His uncanny intuition, however, had not forsaken him, for he said:

“Why do you stare so, brother — did you expect me to have become whole again? I am nearing fifty, I do not have long more, thank God.”

“Andreas—”

“Do not Andreas me; I have heard what plans the Chapter has in store for me. And now — wait! — you are going to tell me how on your knees you pleaded my cause, spoke of my sterling work at Rome on behalf of little Ermland, how I have taken up the banner in the crusade against the Teutonic Knights passed on to me by our dear late uncle — eh, brother, eh, are you going to tell me that?”

The Canon shook his head. “I know nothing of your doings, and so how should I plead such mitigation?”

Andreas glanced at him quickly, surprised despite himself at the coldness of his brother’s tone. “Well, it’s no matter,” he growled. He eyed morosely the bare white walls. “Still stargazing, are you, brother?”

“Yes.”

“Good, good. It’s well to have some pastime.” He sat down slowly at the Canon’s desk and folded his ravaged hands on the knob of his stick. His mouth, all eaten away at the corners, was fixed in a horrid leer. Extraordinary, that one could be so damaged and still live. It was spleen and spite, surely, that kept him going. He gazed through the bottled windowpanes at the blurred blue of the Baltic. “I will not be made to go,” he said. “I will not be kicked out, like a dog. I am a canon of this Chapter, I have rights. You cannot compel me to go, whatever you do, and you may tell the holy canons that. I shall leave Frauenburg, yes, Prussia, I shall return to Rome, happily, but only when the interdict against me is lifted, and when my prebend and all my revenues are restored. Until then I shall remain here, frightening the peasants and drinking the blood of their daughters.” Suddenly he laughed, that familiar dry scraping sound. “I am quite flattered, you know, by this unwonted notoriety. Is it not strange, that I had to begin visibly to rot before I could win respect? Life, brother, life is very odd. And now good day; I trust you will communicate my terms to your colleagues? I feel the message will carry more weight, coming from you, who are so intimately involved in the affair.”

Max had been listening outside the door, for he entered at once unbidden, with the ghost of a grin on his lean face. At the foot of the stairs he and Andreas stopped and whispered together briefly; seemingly they had patched up their Heilsberg quarrel. The Canon shivered. He was cold.

*

The battle dragged on for three months. Chapter sessions grew more and more frantic. At one such meeting Andreas himself made an appearance, stumbled drunk into the conference hall and sat laughing among the outraged canons, mumbling and dribbling out of his ruined mouth. At length they panicked, and gave in. The seizure of his prebend was withdrawn, and he was granted a higher annuity. On a bleak day in January he left Frauenburg forever. He did not bid his brother goodbye, at least not in any conventional way; but Max, the Canon’s sometime servant, went with him, saying he was sick of Prussia, only to return again that same night, not by road, however, but floating facedown on the river’s back, a bloated gross black bag with a swollen purplish face and glazed eyes open wide in astonishment, grotesquely dead.

* * *

It rose up in the east like black smoke, stamped over the land like a ravening giant, bearing before it a brazen mask of the dark fierce face of Albrecht von Hohenzollern Ansbach, last Grand Master of the brotherhood of the Order of St Mary’s Hospital of the Germans at Jerusalem, otherwise called the Teutonic Knights. Once again they were pushing westward, determined finally to break the Polish hold on Royal Prussia and unite the three princedoms of the southern Baltic under Albrecht’s rule; once again the vice closed on little Ermland. In 1516 the Knights, backed up by gangs of German mercenaries, made their first incursions across the eastern frontier. They plundered the countryside, burnt the farms and looted the monasteries, raped and slaughtered, all with the inimitable fervent enthusiasm of an army that has had its bellyful of peace. It was not yet a fully fledged war, but a kind of sport, a mere tuning up for the real battle with Poland that was to come, and hence the bigger Ermland towns were left unmolested, for the present.

In November of that turbulent year Canon Koppernigk was appointed Land Provost, and transferred his residence to the great fortress of Allenstein, lying some twenty leagues south-east of Frauenburg in the midst of the great plain. It was an onerous and exacting post, but one with which, during the three years that he held it, he proved himself well fitted to cope. His duties included the supervision of Allenstein as well as the castle at nearby Mehlsack and the domains in those areas; he supervised also the collection of the tithes paid to the Frauenburg Chapter by the two towns and the villages and estates roundabout. At the end of each year he was required to submit to the Chapter a written report of all these affairs, a task to which he applied himself with scrupulous care and, indeed, probity.

But above all else he was responsible for ensuring that the areas under his control were fully tenanted. With the rise of the towns, the land over the previous hundred years had become steadily more and more depopulated, but now, with the Knights rampaging across the frontier, driving all before them, the exodus from the land to the urban centres had quickened alarmingly. Without tenants, so the Frauenburg Chapter reasoned, there would be no taxes, but beyond that immediate danger was the fear that the very fabric of society was unravelling. As long ago as 1494 the Prussian ordinances had imposed restrictions upon the peasants that had effectively made serfs of them — but what ordinance could hold a farmer locked to a burnt-out hovel and ravaged fields? During his three years as Provost, Canon Koppernigk dealt with seventy-five cases of resettlement of abandoned holdings, but even so he had barely scratched the surface of the problem.

Those were difficult and demoralising years for him, whose life hitherto had been lived almost entirely in the lofty empyrean of speculative science. Along with the rigours of his administrative duties came the further and far more wearying necessity of holding at arm’s length, so to speak, the grimy commonplace world with which those duties brought him into unavoidable contact. For it was necessary to fend it off, lest it should contaminate his vision, lest its pervasive and, one might say, stubborn seediness should seep into the very coils of his thought and taint with earthiness the transcendant purity of his theory of the heavens. Yet he could not but feel for the plight of the people, whose pain and anguish was forever afterwards summed up for him in the memory of the corpse of a young peasant woman that he came upon in the smouldering ruins of a plundered village the name of which he did not even know. As he expressed it many years later to his friend and colleague Canon Giese: “The wench (for indeed she was hardly more than a child) had been tortured to death by the soldiery. I shall not describe to you, my dear Tiedemann, the state in which they had left her, although the image of that poor torn thing is burned ineradicably upon my recollection. They had worked on her for hours, laboured over her with infinite care, almost with a kind of obscene love, if I may express it thus, in order to ensure her as agonising a death as it was possible for them to devise. I realised then, perhaps (to my shame I say it!) perhaps for the first time, the inexpendable capacity for evil which there is in man. How, I asked myself then (I ask it now!), how can we hope to be redeemed, that would do such things to our fellow creatures?”

As well as Land Provost, he was also for a time head of the Broteamt, or Bread Office, at Frauenburg, in which capacity he had charge over the Chapter’s bakeries and the malt and corn stores, the brewery, and the great mill at the foot of Cathedral Hill. Repeatedly he held the post of Chancellor, supervising the Chapter’s records and correspondence and legal paperwork. Briefly too he was Mortuarius, whose task it was to administer the numerous and often considerable sums willed to the Church or donated by the families of the wealthy dead.

Along with these public duties, he was being called upon in another sphere, that of astronomy, to make himself heard in the world. His fame was spreading, despite the innate humility and even diffidence which had kept him silent for so long when others far less gifted than he were agitating the air with their empty babbling. Canon Bernhard Wapowsky of Cracow University, a learned and influential man, requested of him an expert opinion on the (defective, defective!) astronomical treatise lately put out by the Nuremberger, Johann Werner, a request with which Canon Koppernigk readily complied, glad of the opportunity to take a swipe at that proud foolish fellow who had dared to question Ptolemy. Then came a letter from Cardinal Schönberg of Capua, one of the Pope’s special advisers, urging the learned Doctor to communicate in printed form his wonderful discoveries to the world. All this, of course, is not to mention the invitation that had come to him in 1514, by way of Canon Schiller in Rome (no longer the representative of the Frauenburg Chapter, but domestic chaplain to Leo X, no less), to take part in a Lateran Council on calendar reform. Canon Koppernigk refused to attend the council, however, giving as excuse his belief that such reform could not be carried out until the motions of the Sun and Moon were more precisely known. (One may remark here, that while this account—ipse dixit, after all! — of his unwillingness to accept what was most probably an invitation from the Pope himself, must be respected, one yet cannot, having regard to the date, and the stage at which we know the Canon’s great work then was, help suspecting that the learned Doctor, to use Cardinal Schönberg’s mode of address, was using the occasion to drop a careful hint of the revolution which, thirty years later, he was to set in train in the world of computational astronomy.)

Thus, anyway, it can be seen that, however unwillingly, he had become a public man. The Chapter was well pleased with him, and welcomed him at last as a true colleague. Some there were, it is true, who did not abandon their suspicions, remembering his extraordinary and unaccountable behaviour at the time of the distasteful affair of his outrageous brother’s banishment. Among that section of the Chapter, which included of course Canons Snellenburg and von der Trank, it was never finally decided whether the Doctor should be regarded as a villain because of his connection with the poxed Italian (as von der Trank, his pale sharp aristocratic nose a-twitch, had dubbed Andreas), or as a cold despicable brute who would not even rise to the defence of his own brother. While that kind of thing may be dismissed as the product merely of envy and spite, nevertheless there was something about Canon Koppernigk — all saw it, even the kindly and all-forgiving Canon Giese — a certain lack, a transparence, as it were, that was more than the natural aloofness and other-worldliness of a brilliant scientist. It was as if, within the vigorous and able public man, there was a void, as if, behind the ritual, all was a hollow save for one thin taut cord of steely inexpressible anguish stretching across the nothingness.

*

The spring of 1519 saw the sudden collapse of the political and military situation in the southern Baltic lands. Sigismund of Poland, perhaps at last recognising the truth of Bishop Waczelrodt’s contention years before that the Cross represented a very real threat to his kingdom, summoned Grand Master Albrecht to Torun for peace talks. Albrecht refused to negotiate directly, and Poland immediately mobilised and marched on Prussia. Total war seemed inevitable. The Knights now suggested that the Bishop of Ermland should mediate between themselves and Sigismund. Bishop von Lossainen’s health, however, was by this time seriously in decline. The Frauenburg Chapter, therefore, knowing well that little Ermland would be the theatre for the coming war, decided that in the Bishop’s stead the Precentor, Canon Tiedemann Giese, along with Land Provost Koppernigk, should travel at once to Königsberg and attempt to reconcile the warring parties.

Were the wrong men chosen for the task? Precentor Giese thought so, afterwards. He had, he supposed, gone to Königsberg too innocently, with too much trust in the essential worthiness of men, and so had failed where a hard cold scheming fellow might have succeeded. Or was it that in his heart he had known all along that the mission was doomed to failure, and this knowledge had affected his ability to negotiate? Well well, who could say? From the start he had not believed that Albrecht, although a Lutheran, could be so black as he was painted. It was said that he was irredeemably wicked, a monster, worse even than Hungary’s infamous Vlad Drakulya the Impaler. But no, the good Precentor could not believe that. When he told his companion so, as they rode eastward through dawn mists along the coast at the head of their escort of Prussian mercenaries, Canon Koppernigk looked at him queerly and said:

“I would agree with you that likely he is no worse nor better than any other prince — but they are all bad.”

“You are right, Doctor, perhaps, and yet. .”

“Well?”

“You are right, yes, quite right. Ahem.”

Precentor Giese was a little afraid of Canon Koppernigk; or perhaps that is too strong — perhaps a better word would be nervous, he was a little nervous of him, yes. There was at times a certain silent intensity, or ferocity even, about the man that alarmed those who came close to him, not that many were allowed to do so, of course, come close, that is. This morning, hunched in the saddle with his hat pulled low and his cloak wrapped about him to the nose so that only the eyes were visible, staring keenly ahead into the mist, he seemed more than ever burdened with a secret intolerable knowledge. Maybe it was this stoical air the Canon had of a man marked out for special suffering that made Giese’s heart ache with sympathy and concern for his friend, if he, Giese, could call him, the Canon, a friend, as he was determined to do, justified or not.

But friendship aside, was it wise of the Chapter, Giese could not help wondering, to have sent the Canon with him on this delicate mission? He, the Canon, had always been something of a recluse, despite his public duties (which of course he fulfilled with impeccable et cetera), had always held the world at arm’s length, as it were, and while this aspect of his character was not in any way a fault, indeed was only to be expected of one engaged in such important and demanding work as he was, it did mean that he was, so to say, unpractised in the subtleties of diplomacy, that he was, in fact, quite tactless, although it could be said that this very tactlessness, if that was what it was, was no more than evidence of a charming innocence and lack of guile. Well, not innocence perhaps. . Canon Giese glanced at the dark figure in the saddle beside him: no, definitely not innocence.

O dear! The Precentor sighed. It was all very difficult.

*

They arrived at Königsberg as night came on. Their escort was allowed no further than the city gates. Albrecht’s castle was a vast grim fortress on a hill. The two emissaries were led into a large white and gold hall. Crowds milled about here, soldiers, diplomats, clerics, ornate women, all going nowhere purposefully. Canon Koppernigk stood in silence waiting, wrapt in his black cloak, with his hat still on. Precentor Giese fidgeted. A band of courtiers, some armed, marched swiftly into the hall and wheeled to a halt. Grand Master Albrecht was a small quick reptile-like man with a thin dark face and pointed ears lying flat against his skull. His heavy quilted doublet and tight breeches gave him the look of a well-fed lizard. A gold medallion bearing the insignia of the Order hung by a heavy chain on his breast. (It was said that he was impotent.) He smiled briefly, displaying long yellow teeth.

“Reverend gentlemen,” he said in German, “welcome. This way, please.”

They all turned and marched smartly out of the hall, cutting a swathe through the obsequious crowd. Candles burned in a marble corridor. Their boots crashed on the cold stone. They wheeled into a small chamber hung with maps and a huge portrait of the Grand Master standing in an heroic pose before his massed army. Albrecht sat down at an oaken desk, while his party took up positions behind him with folded arms. Flunkeys came forward bearing chairs, and Albrecht with a quick gesture invited the Canons to sit. A silken diplomat leaned down and whispered in his ear. He nodded rapidly, pursing his mouth, and then looked up and said:

“We demand an oath of allegiance from the Bishop of Ermland and the Frauenburg Chapter. Mark, this is a condition of negotiation, not of settlement. We are prepared to speak to Poland through you only when we are assured of your loyalty.” There was no bluster, no threat, only a brisk statement of fact. He was almost cheerful. He grinned. “Well?”

Precentor Giese was astounded. He had come to negotiate, not to take delivery of an ultimatum! He chose to disbelieve his ears.

“My dear sir,” he said, “I fear you misunderstand the situation. Ermland is a sovereign princedom, and owes allegiance to its Prince-Bishop and clergy and none other. It was you yourself, you will recall, who requested us to mediate. Now—”

Albrecht was shaking his head.

“No no,” he said gently, “no. It is you, I think, Herr Canon, who has misunderstood how matters are. Ermland is a small weak province. You wish to believe, or you wish me to believe, that you are, so to speak, an honest broker who observes matters with utter dispassion. But this war will be fought on your fields, in the streets of your towns and villages. Even if we fail to defeat Poland, as we may well fail, and even if we do not capture Royal Prussia, which is also possible I regret to say, nevertheless we shall certainly take Ermland. Sigismund will not protect you. Therefore why not join with us now and thus avoid a deal of. . unpleasantness? Men who are anxious to win the favour of a prince present themselves to him with the possessions they value most: since you wish to win my favour in these negotiations, and since obviously you value loyalty most dearly, should you not in that case swear to be loyal to us?”

“But this is preposterous!” Giese cried, looking about him indignantly for support. He met only the cold eyes of the Grand Master’s men ranged silently behind the desk. “Preposterous,” he said again, but faintly.

Albrecht lifted his hands in a gesture of regret.

“Then there is nothing more to say,” he said. There was a silence. He turned his sardonic faintly humorous gaze now for the first time on Canon Koppernigk, and his eyes gleamed. “Herr Canon, we are honoured by your presence. The fame of Doctor Copernicus is not unknown even in this far-flung province. We have heard of your wonderful theory of the heavens. We are eager to hear more. Perhaps you will dine with us tonight?” He waited. “You do not speak.”

The Canon had turned somewhat pale. Giese was watching him expectantly. Now this insolent knight would receive the kind of answer he deserved! But, in a voice so low it could be hardly heard, Canon Koppernigk said only:

“There is nothing more to say.”

Albrecht bowed his head, smiling thinly. “I meant, of course, Herr Canon, when I said what you have just echoed, that there is nothing more to say in these — ha — negotiations. On other, more congenial topics there is surely much we can discuss. Come, my dear Doctor, let us take a glass of wine together, like civilised men.”

Then followed that curious exchange that Precentor Giese was to remember ever afterwards with puzzlement and grave misgiving. Canon Koppernigk grimaced. He seemed in some pain.

“Grand Master,” he said, “you are contemplating waging war for the sake of sport. What is Ermland to you, or Royal Prussia? What is Poland even?”

Albrecht had been expecting something of the sort, for he answered at once:

“They are glory, Herr Doctor, they are posterity!”

“I do not understand that.”

“But you do, I think.”

“No. Glory, posterity, these are abstract concepts. I do not understand such things.”

“You, Doctor? — you do not understand abstract concepts, you who have expressed the eternal truths of the world in just such terms? Come sir!”

“I will not engage in empty discussion. We have come to Königsberg to ask you to consider the suffering that you are visiting upon the people, the greater suffering that war with Poland will bring.”

“The people?” Albrecht said, frowning. “What people?”

“The common people.”

“Ah. The common people. But they have suffered always, and always will. It is in a way what they are for. You flinch. Herr Doctor, I am disappointed in you. The common people? — pah. What are they to us? You and I, mein Freund, we are lords of the earth, the great ones, the major men, the makers of supreme fictions. Look here at these poor dull brutes—” His thin dark hand took in the silent crowd behind him, the flunkeys, Precentor Giese, the painted army. “—They do not even understand what we are talking about. But you understand, yes, yes. The people will suffer as they have always suffered, meanly, mewling for pity and mercy, but only you and I know what true suffering is, the lofty suffering of the hero. Do not speak to me of the people! They are the brutish mask of war, but war itself is that which they in the ritual of their suffering express but can never comprehend, for their eyes are ever on the ground, while you and I look up, ever upward, into the blue! The people — peasants, soldiers, generals — they are my tool, as mathematics is yours, by which I come directly at the true, the eternal, the real. Ah yes, Doctor Copernicus, you and I — you and I! The generations may execrate us for what we do to their world, but we and those rare ones like us shall have made them what they are. !” He broke off then and dabbed with a silk kerchief at the corners of his thin mouth. He had a smug drained sated look about him, that the troubled Precentor found himself comparing to that of a trooper fastening up his breeches after a particularly brutal and gratifying rape. Canon Koppernigk, his face ashen, rose in silence and turned to go. Albrecht, in the tone he might have used to remark upon the weather, said: “I had your uncle the Bishop poisoned, you know.” The crowd behind him stirred, and Giese, halfway up from his chair, sat down again abruptly. Canon Koppernigk faltered, but would not turn. Albrecht said lightly, almost skittishly, to his hunched black back: “See, Doctor, how shocked they are? But you are not shocked, are you? Well then, say nothing. It is no matter. Farewell. We shall meet again, perhaps, when the times are better.”

As they went down the hill from the castle, borne through the gleaming darkness on a river of swaying torches, Precentor Giese, confused and pained, tried to speak to his friend, but the Doctor would not hear, and answered nothing.

*

At dead of night to the castle of Allenstein they came, a hundred men and horse, Poland’s finest, bearing the standard of their king before them, thundered over the drawbridge, under the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry into the courtyard and there dismounted amidst a great clamour of hoofs and rattling sabres and the roars of Sergeant Tod, a battle-scarred tough old soldier with a heart of stoutest oak. “Right lads!” he boomed, “no rest for you tonight!” and dispatched them at once to the walls. “Aw for fuck’s sake, Sarge!” they groaned, but jumped to their post with alacrity, for each man knew in his simple way that they were here not only to protect a lousy castle and a pack of cringing bloody Prussians, but that the honour of Poland herself was at stake. Their Captain, a gallant young fellow, scion of one of the leading Polish families, covered with his cloak the proud glowing smile that played upon his lips as he watched them scramble by torchlight to the battlements, and then, pausing only to pinch the rosy cheek of a shy serving wench curtseying in the doorway, he hurried up the great main staircase with long-legged haste to the Crystal Hall where Land Provost Koppernigk was deep in urgent conference with his beleaguered household. He halted on the threshold, and bringing his heels together smartly delivered a salute that his commanding officer would have been proud to witness.

The Canon looked up irritably. “Yes? What is it now? Who are you?”

“Captain Chopin, Herr Provost, at your service!”

“Captain what?”

“I am an officer of His Gracious Majesty King Sigismund’s First Royal Cavalry, come this night from Mehlsack with one hundred of His Highness’s finest troops. My orders are to defend to the last man this castle of Allenstein and all within the walls.” (“O God be praised!” cried several voices at once.) “Our army is on the march westward and expects to engage the foe by morning. The Teutonic Knights are at Heilsberg, and are bombarding the walls of the fortress there. As you are aware, Herr Provost, they have already taken the towns of Guttstadt and Wormditt to the north. A flanking assault on Allenstein is expected hourly. These devils and their arch fiend Grand Master Albrecht must be stopped — and they shall be stopped, by God’s blood! (Forgive a soldier’s language, sire.) You will recall the siege of Frauenburg, how they fired the town and slaughtered the people without mercy. Only the bravery of your Prussian mercenaries prevented them from breaching the cathedral wall. Your Chapter fled to the safety of Danzig, leaving to you, Herr Provost, the defence of Allenstein and Mehlsack. However, in that regard, I must regretfully inform you now that Mehlsack has been sacked, sire, and—”

But here he was interrupted by the hasty entrance of a large dark burly man attired in the robes of a canon.

“Koppernigk!” cried Canon Snellenburg (for it is he), “they are bombarding Heilsberg and it’s said the Bishop is dead—” He stopped, catching sight of the proud young fellow standing to attention in his path. “Who are you?”

“Captain Chopin, sire, at your—”

“Captain who?”

Zounds! the Captain thought, are they all deaf? “I am an officer of His Gracious—”

“Yes yes,” said Snellenburg, waving his large hands. “Another damned Pole, I know. Listen, Koppernigk, the bastards are at Heilsberg. They’ll be here by morning. What are you going to do?”

The Land Provost looked mildly from the Canon to the Captain, at his household crouched about the table, the secretaries, whey-faced clergy, minor administrators, and then to the frightened gaggle of servants ranged expectantly behind him. He shrugged.

“We shall surrender, I suppose,” he said.

“For God’s sake—!”

“Herr Provost—!”

But Canon Koppernigk seemed strangely detached from these urgent matters. He stood up from the table slowly and walked away with a look of infinite weary sadness. At the door, however, he halted, and turning to Snellenburg said:

“By the way, Canon, you owe me a hundred marks.”

“What?”

“Some years ago I loaned you a hundred marks — you have not forgotten, I trust? I mention it only because I thought that, if we are all to be destroyed in the morning, we should make haste to set our affairs in order, pay off old scores — I mean debts — and so forth. But do not let it trouble you, please. Captain, good night, I must sleep now.”

*

The Knights did not attack, but instead marched south-west and razed the town of Neumark. Two thousand three hundred and forty-one souls perished in that onslaught. In the first days of the new year Land Provost Koppernigk sat in what remained of Neumark’s town hall, recording in his ledger, in his small precise hand, the names of the dead. It was his duty. An icy wind through a shattered casement at his back brought with it a sharp tang of smoke from the smouldering wreckage of the town. He was cold; he had never known such cold.

* * *

Frau Anna Schillings had that kind of beauty which seems to find relief in poor dress; a tall, fine-boned woman with delicate wrists and the high cheekbones typical of a Danziger, she appeared most at ease, and at her most handsome, in a plain grey gown with a laced bodice, and, perhaps, a scrap of French lace at the throat. Not for her the frills and flounces, the jewelled slippers and horned capuchons of the day. This attribute, this essential modesty of figure as well as of spirit, was now more than ever apparent, when circumstances had reduced a once lavish wardrobe to just one such gown as we have described. And it was in this very gown, with a dark cape wrapped about her shoulders against the cold, and her raven-black hair hidden under an old scarf, that she arrived in Frauenburg with her two poor mites, Heinrich and little Carla, at the beginning of that fateful year (how fateful it was to be she could not guess!), 1524.

As the physical woman prospered in misfortune, so too the spiritual found enhancement in adversity. Not for Frau Schillings the tears and tantrums with which troubles are most commonly greeted by the weaker sex. It is life, and one must make the best of it: such was her motto. This stoical fortitude had not always been easy to maintain: her dear Papa’s early death had awakened her rudely from the happy dreaming of early girlhood; then there had been Mama’s illness in the head. Nor was marriage the escape into security and happiness that she had imagined it would be. Georg. . poor, irresponsible Georg! She could not, even now, after he had gone off with those ruffians and left her and the little ones to fend for themselves as best they might — even now she could not find it in her heart to hate him for his wanton ways. There was this to be said for him, that he had never struck her, as some husbands were only too prone to do; or at least he had never beaten her, not badly, at any rate. Yes, she said, with that gentle smile that all who knew her knew so well, yes, there are many worse than my Georg in the world! And how dashing and gay he could be, and even, yes, how loving, when he was sober. Well, he was gone now, most likely for good and ever, and she must not brood upon the past; she must make a new life for herself, and for the children.

War is a thing invented by men, and yet perhaps it is the women who suffer most in times of strife among nations. Frau Schillings had lost almost everything in the dreadful war that was supposed to have ended — her home, her happiness, even her husband. Georg was a tailor, a real craftsman, with a good sound trade among the better Danzig families. Everything had been splendid: they had nice rooms above the shop, and money enough to satisfy their modest needs, and then the babies had come, first Heinrich and, not long after, little Carla — O yes, it was, it was, splendid! But then the war broke out, and Georg got that mad notion into his head that there was a fortune to be made in tailoring for the mercenaries. She had to admit, of course, that he might be right, but it was not long before he began to talk wildly of the need to follow the trade, as he put it, meaning, as she realised with dismay, that they should become some kind of camp-followers, trailing along in the wake of that dreadful gang of ragamuffins that the Prussians called an army. Well she would have none of that, no indeed! She was a spirited woman, and there was more than one clash between herself and Georg on the matter; but although she was spirited, she was also a woman, and Georg, of course, had his way in the end. He shut up shop, procured a wagon and a pair of horses, and before she knew it they were all four of them on the road.

It was a disaster, naturally. Georg, poor dreamer that he was, had imagined war as a kind of stately dance in which two gorgeously (and expensively!) caparisoned armies made ritual feints at each other on crisp mornings before breakfast. The reality — grotesque, absurd, and hideously cruel — was a terrible shock. His visions of brocaded and beribboned uniforms faded rapidly. He spent his days patching breeches and bloodstained tunics. He even took to cobbling — he, a master tailor! — for the few pennies that were in it. He grew ever more morose, and began drinking again, despite all his promises. He struck Carla once, and frequently shook poor Heinrich, who was not strong, until his teeth rattled. It could not continue thus, and one morning (it was the birthday of the Prince of Peace) Frau Schillings awoke in the filthy hovel of an inn where they had lodged for the night to find that her husband had fled, taking with him the wagon and the horses, the purse with their few remaining marks, and even hers and the children’s clothes — everything! The innkeeper, a venal rough brute, told her that Georg had gone off with a band a deserters led by one Krock, or Krack, some awful brutish name like that, and would she be so good now as to pay him what was owed for herself and the brats? She had no money? Well then, she would have to think of a way of paying him in kind then, wouldn’t she? It is a measure of the woman’s — we do not hesitate to say it — of the woman’s saintliness that at first she did not understand what the beastly fellow was suggesting; and when he had told her precisely what he meant, she gave vent to a low scream and burst immediately into tears. Never!

As she lay upon that bed of shame, for she was forced in the end to allow that animal to have his evil way with her, she reflected bitterly that all this misfortune that had befallen her was due not to Georg’s frailty, not really, but to a silly dispute between the King of Poland and that dreadful Albrecht person. How she despised them, princes and politicians, despised them all! And was she not perhaps justified? Are not our leaders sometimes open to accusations of irresponsibility on a scale far greater than ever the poor Georg Schillingses of this world may aspire to? And you may not say that this contempt was merely the bitter reaction of an empty-headed woman searching blindly for some symbol of the world of men which she might blame for wrongs partly wrought by her own lack of character, for Anna Schillings had been educated (her father had wanted a son), she could read and write, she knew something of the world of books, and could hold her own in logical debate with any man of her class. O yes, Anna Schillings had opinions of her own, and firm ones at that.

Those weeks following Georg’s departure constituted the worst time that she was ever to know. How she survived that awful period we shall not describe; we draw a veil over that subject, and shall confine ourselves to saying that in those weeks she learned that there are abroad far greater and crueller scoundrels than that concupiscent innkeeper we have spoken of already.

She did survive, she did manage somehow to feed herself and the little ones, and after that terrible journey across Royal Prussia into northern Ermland, after that via dolorosa, she arrived, as we have said, at Frauenburg in January of 1524.

*

The best and truest friend of her youth, Hermina Hesse, was housekeeper to one of the canons of the Cathedral Chapter there. Hermina had been a high-spirited, self-willed girl, and although the years had smoothed away much of her abrasiveness, she was still a lively person, full of well-intentioned gaiety and given to gales of laughter at the slightest provocation. She had never been a beauty, it is true: her charms were rather of the homely, reassuring kind; but it was certainly not true to say, as some had said, that she looked and spoke like a beer waitress, that her life was a scandal and her eternal soul irretrievably lost. That kind of thing was put about by the “stuffed shirts”, as she called them (with a defiant toss of the head that was so familiar) among the Frauenburg clergy; as if their lives were free of taint, besotted gang of sodomites that they were! Was she to blame if the good Lord had blessed her with an abundant fruitfulness? Did they expect her to disown her twelve children? Disown them! why, she loved them just as much and more than any so-called respectable married matron could love her lawful offspring, and would have fought for them like a wildcat if anyone had dared (which no one did!) to try to take them away from her. Scandal, indeed — pah!

The two friends greeted each other with touching affection and tenderness. They had not met for. . well, for longer than they cared to remember.

“Anna! Why Anna, what has happened?”

“O my dear,” said Frau Schillings, “my dear, it has been so awful, I cannot tell you—!”

Hermina lived in a pleasant old white stone house on a hectacre of land some three leagues south of Frauenburg’s walls. Certainly it was a well-appointed nest, but was it not somewhat isolated, Frau Schillings wondered aloud, when they had sat down in the pantry to a glass of mulled wine and fresh-baked poppyseed cake? The wine was wonderfully cheering, and the warmth of the stove, and the sight of her friend’s familiar beaming countenance, comforted her greatly, so that already she had begun to feel that her agony of poverty and exile might be at an end. (And indeed it was soon to end, though not at all in the manner she expected!) Her little ones were making overtures in their shy tentative way to the children of the house. O dear! She felt suddenly near to tears: it was all so — so nice.

“Isolated, aye,” Hermina said darkly, breaking in upon Frau Schillings’s tender reverie. “I am as good as banished here, and that’s the truth. The Canon has rooms up in the town, but I am kept from there — not by him, of course, you understand (he would not dare attempt to impose such a restriction on me!), but by, well, others. However, Anna dear, my troubles are nothing compared with yours, I think. You must tell me all. That swine Schillings left you, did he?”

Frau Schillings then related her sorry tale, in all its awful starkness, neither suppressing that which might shock, nor embellishing those details that indicated the quality of her character: in a word, she was brutally frank. She spoke in a low voice, with eyes downcast, her fine brow furrowed by a frown of concentration; and Hermina Hesse, that good, kind, plump, stout-hearted, ruddy-cheeked woman, that pillar of fortitude, that light in the darkness of a naughty world, smiled fondly to herself and thought: Dear Anna! scrupulous to a fault, as ever. And when she had heard it all, all that heart-breaking tale, she took Frau Schillings’s hands in hers, and sighed and said:

“Well, my dear, I am distressed indeed to hear of your misfortune, and I only wish that there was some way that I could ease your burden—”

“O but there is, Hermina, there is!”

“O?”

Frau Schillings looked up then, with her underlip held fast in her perfectly formed small white teeth, obviously struggling to hold back the tears that were, despite her valiant efforts, welling in her dark eyes.

“Hermina,” said she, in a wonderfully steady voice, “Hermina, I am a proud person, as you well know from the happy days of our youth, as all will know who know anything at all of me; yet now I am brought low, and I must swallow that pride. I ask you, I beg of you, please—”

“Wait,” said Hermina, patting the hands that still lay like weary turtle doves in her own, “dear Anna, wait: I think I know what you are about to say.”

“Do you, Hermina, do you?”

“Yes, my poor child, I know. Let me spare you, therefore; let me say it: you want a loan.”

Frau Schillings frowned.

“O no,” she said, “no. Why, what can you think of me, to imagine such a thing? No, actually, Hermina, dearest Hermina, I was wondering if you could spare a room for myself and the children for a week or two, just to tide us over until—”

Hermina turned away with a pained look, and began to shake her head slowly, but at just that awkward moment they were interrupted by the sound of hoofbeats outside, and presently there entered by the rickety back door Canon Alexander Sculteti, a low-sized man in black, blowing on his chilled fists and swearing softly under his breath. He was thin, and had a red nose and small watchful eyes. He caught sight of Frau Schillings and halted, glancing from her to Hermina with a look of deep suspicion.

“Who’s this?” he growled, but when Hermina began to explain her friend’s presence, he waved his arms impatiently and stamped away into the next room, thrusting a toddler roughly out of his path with a swipe of his boot. He was not a pleasant person, Frau Schillings decided, and certainly she had no intention of begging him for a place to stay. And yet, what was she to do if Hermina could not help her? Grey January weather loomed in the window. O dear! Hermina winked at her encouragingly, however, and followed the Canon into the next room, where an argument began immediately. Despite the noise that the children made (who now, having become thoroughly acquainted, seemed from the sounds to be endeavouring to push each other down the stairs, the dear little rascals), and even though she went so far as to cover her ears, she could not help hearing some of what was said. Hermina, although no doubt fighting hard on her friend’s behalf, spoke in a low voice, while Canon Sculteti on the other hand seemed not to care who heard his unkind remarks.

“Let her stay here?” he yelled, “so that the Bishop can be told that I have installed another tart?” (O! Frau Schillings’s hands flew to her mouth to prevent her from crying out in shame and distress.) “Woman, are you mad? I am in trouble enough with you and these damned brats. Do you realise that I am in danger not only of losing my prebend, but of being excommunicated? Listen, here is a plan—” He interrupted himself with a high-pitched whinny of laughter. “—Here is what to do: send her to Koppernigk—” (What was that name? Frau Schillings frowned thoughtfully. .) “—He’s in bad need of a woman, God knows. Ha!”

Summoning up all her courage, Anna Schillings rose and went straight into the room where they were arguing, and in a cold, dignified voice asked:

“Is this Nicolas Koppernigk that you speak of?”

Canon Sculteti, standing in the middle of the floor with his hands on his hips, turned to her with an unpleasant, sardonic grin. “What’s that, woman?”

“I could not help overhearing — you mention the name Koppernigk: is this Canon Nicolas Koppernigk? For if so, then I must tell you that he is my cousin!”

*

Yes, she was a cousin to the famous Canon Koppernigk, or Doctor Copernicus, as the world called him now. Theirs was a tenuous connection, it is true, on the distaff side, but yet it was to be the saving of Anna Schillings. She had never met the man, although she had heard talk of him in the family; there had been some scandal, she vaguely remembered, or was that to do with his brother. ? Well, it was no matter, for who was she to baulk at a whiff of scandal?

Their first meeting was unpromising. Canon Sculteti took her that very night to Frauenburg (and was knave enough to make a certain suggestion on the way, which of course she spurned with the contempt it deserved); she left the children in the care of Hermina, for, as Sculteti in his coarse way put it, they did not want to frighten “old Koppernigk” to death with the prospect of a readymade family. The town was dark and menacing, bearing still the marks of war, burnt-out houses and crippled beggars and the smell of death. Canon Koppernigk lived in a kind of squat square fortress in the cathedral wall, a cold forbidding place, at the sight of which, in the slime of starlight, Frau Schillings’s heart sank. Sculteti rapped upon the stout oak door, and presently a window above opened stealthily and a head appeared.

“Evening, Koppernigk,” Sculteti shouted. “There is one here that would speak with you urgently.” He sniggered under his breath, and despite the excited beating of her heart, Frau Schillings noted again what a lewd unpleasant man this Canon was. “Kin of yours!” he added, and laughed again.

The figure above spoke not a word, but withdrew silently, and after some long time they heard the sound of slow footsteps within, and the door opened slowly, and Canon Nicolas Koppernigk lifted a lighted candle at them as if he were fending off a pair of demons.

“Here we are!” said Sculteti, with false joviality. “Frau Anna Schillings, your cousin, come to pay you a visit. Frau Schillings — Herr Canon Koppernigk!” And so saying he took himself off into the night, laughing as he went.

*

Canon Koppernigk, then in his fifty-first year, was at that time laden heavily with the responsibilities of affairs of state. On the outbreak of war between the Poles and the Teutonic Knights, the Frauenburg Chapter almost in its entirety had fled to the safety of the cities of Royal Prussia, notably Danzig and Torun; he, however, had gone into the very midst of the battlefield, so to speak, to the castle of Allenstein, where he held the post of Land Provost. Then, after the armistice of 1521, he had in April of that year returned to Frauenburg as Chancellor, charged by Bishop von Lossainen (rumours of whose death in the siege of Heilsberg had happily proved unfounded) with the task of reorganising the administration of the province of Ermland, a task that at first had seemed an impossibility, since under the terms of the armistice the Knights retained those parts of the princedom which their troops were occupying at the close of hostilities. There was also the added difficulty of the presence in the land of all manner of deserter and renegade, who spread lawlessness and disorder through the countryside. However, by the following year the Land Provost had succeeded to such a degree in restoring normalcy that his faint-hearted colleagues could consider it safe enough for them to creep out of hiding and return to their duties.

Even yet the demands of public life did not slacken, for with the death at last, in January of 1523, of Bishop von Lossainen, the Chapter was compelled to take up the reins of government of the turbulent and war-torn bishopric; once again the Chapter turned to Canon Koppernigk, and he was elected Administrator General, which post he held until October, when a new Bishop was installed. In all this time he had been working on a detailed report of the damage wrought by the war in Ermland, which he was to present as a vital document in the peace talks at Torun. Also he had drawn up an elaborate and complex treatise setting forth means whereby the debased monetary system of Prussia might be reformed, which had been requested of him by the King of Poland. Nor was he spared personal sorrow: shortly after hearing of the death at Kulm of his sister Barbara, he received news from Italy that his brother Andreas had succumbed finally to that terrible disease which for many years had afflicted him. Small wonder then, with all this, that Canon Koppernigk appeared to Frau Schillings a reserved and distracted, cold, strange, solitary soul.

On that first night, when Sculteti abandoned her as he would some ridiculous and tasteless practical joke on his doorstep, the Canon stared at her, with a mixture of horror and bafflement, as if she were an apparition out of a nightmare. He backed away from her up the dark narrow stairs, still holding the candle at arm’s length like a talisman brandished in the face of a demon. In the observatory he put his desk between himself and her. For the second time that day, Frau Schillings related her tale of woe, haltingly, with many omissions this time, holding her hands clasped upon her bodice. He watched her with a kind of horrified fascination, but she could plainly see that he was not taking in the half of what she said. He seemed to her a kindly man, for all his reserve.

“I’ll not mince words, Herr Canon,” she said. “I have begged, I have whored, and I have survived; but now I have nothing left. You are my last hope. Refuse me, and I shall perish.”

“My child,” he began, and stopped, helpless and embarrassed. “My child. .”

Moonlight shines through the arched window; the candle flickers. The books, the couch, the desk, all crouch like enchanted creatures frozen in the midst of a secret dance, and those strange ghostly instruments lift their shrouded arms into the shadows starward, mysterious, hieratic and inexplicable things. All fade; the dark descends.

* * *

Nicolas Koppernigk, Canonicus: Frauenburg

Rev. Sir: I presume to write to you, remembering our many interesting conversations of some years ago, when we met at Cracow. I was then adviser to the Polish King, & you, as I recall, were secretary to your late uncle, His Grace Bishop Waczelrodt: on whose death may I be permitted now to offer you belated condolences. I admired the man greatly (although I knew him not at all), & would hear more of his life & works. His death was indeed a tragedy for Ermland, as events have proved. I dearly hope that your many public duties do not keep you from that great task which you are embarked upon. Many wonderful reports of your theories come to me, especially from Cardinal Schönberg at Rome, whom I think you know. You are fortunate indeed to have such allies, who surely will stand you in good stead against the bellowing of ignorant schoolmen & those others that you have outraged by the daring of your concepts. For myself, I have so little power at my command that I hesitate to assure you that you have my best wishes for your great & important work, which I pray God to bless, in the name of Truth. I hesitate, as I have said: yet who can know but that even the friendship of one so humble as myself may not at some future date prove useful? The Church in these perilous days, I fear, shall not for long be able to sustain that generous liberality which hitherto She was wont to extend to Her ministers (a liberality, I might add, for which I myself have been grateful on more than one occasion!). Dark times are coming, Herr Canon: we are all under threat. However, it is my conviction that, so long as we maintain strict vigilance over our lives, & do not leave ourselves open to accusations of corruption & lewdness by the Lutherans, we shall be safe, no matter how revolutionary our notions. I pray you, sir, regard me as your most devoted friend.

ex Löbau, 11 November, 1532

+ Johannes Dantiscus

Bishop of Kulm

*

Tiedemann Giese, Visitator: at Allenstein

Dear Giese: I have had a letter from Dantiscus, which I enclose herewith: please tell me what you think of it, & how I should reply. I do not trust the man. He has a daughter in Spain, they say. Perhaps our own Bishop has asked him to write to me thus? I suspect a conspiracy against me. Destroy this letter, but send back the other, with your suggestions as to how I should proceed. I am not well: a catarrh of the stomach, & my bowels do not move, as usual. I think I shall not reply to him. Please say what I am to do.

ex Franenburg, 16 December, 1532

Nic: Koppernigk

*

Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Kuim Löbau

I have Your Rev. Lordship’s letter, full of humanity & favour, in which he reminds me of that familiarity with Your Rev. Lordship which I contracted in my youth: which I know to have remained just as vigorous up to now. As for the information you required of me, how long my uncle, Lucas Waczelrodt of blessed memory, had lived: he lived 64 years, 5 months; was Bishop for 23 years; died on the last day but one of March, anno Christi 1512. With him came to an end a family whose insignia can be found on the ancient monuments in Torun. I recommended my obedience to Your Rev. Lordship.

ex Frauenburg, 11 April, 1533

Nic: Koppernigk: Canonicus

*

Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Kulm: Löbau

My Lord: I write to you on behalf of one that is dear to us both: id est Doctor Nicolas Copernicus, the astronomer, & Canon of this Chapter. As you are aware, the Frauenburg canons shall assemble this month for the purpose of electing a Bishop to the throne of Ermland, following the lamented death of Our Rev. Lordship Mauritius Ferber. The list of candidates, decided upon, as is the custom, by His Royal Highness Sigismund of Poland, comprises four names: Canons Zimmermann, von der Trank, & Snellenburg: the fourth name you know, of course. While it is not my wish to attempt to influence the course of this lofty affair, I feel it my duty humbly to suggest that one of these names, that of Canon Heinrich Snellenburg, be removed from the list, in order to protect the Chapter from ridicule, & the Polish throne (whose interests I hold as closely to my heart as does Your Rev. Lordship) from accusations of gross misjudgment. Your Lordship knows the manner of man it is that I speak of here. Canon Snellenburg is not a great sinner: but the very pettiness of his misdemeanours (unpaid debts et cetera) surely must exclude him from consideration as a candidate for this highest of offices. Therefore I suggest that he be removed forthwith from the list, his name to be replaced by that of Canon Nicolas Koppernigk. The Rev. Doctor, need I say, does not aspire to so high an office as the Bishopric of Ermland (and is not aware of this petition, be assured of that): yet even to name him a candidate would, I feel, & I think I am not alone in this opinion, be an indication, however subtle, of the high regard in which the Rev. Doctor is held both by the Church & the Polish throne: it would also, of course, be a means of arming him against his enemies, who are, alas, legion. Doctor Copernicus is an old man now, & in ill-health. He does not sleep well, & is plagued by hallucinations: sometimes he speaks of dark figures that hide in the corners of his room. All this indicates how he feels himself threatened & mocked by a hostile world. Your Rev. Lordship’s generous praise for his great work (which even yet he refuses to publish, for fear of what reaction it may provoke!) is not universally echoed: not long ago, the Lutheran Rector of the Latin School at Elbing, one Ludimagister Gnapheus, ridiculed the master’s astronomical ideas (or those debased versions of them that this Gnapheus in his ignorance understands) in his so-called comedy, Morosophus, or The Wise Fool, which was performed publicly in that city as a carnival farce. (However, in this respect, as the Rev. Doctor himself remarked, Master Gnapheus has obviously never heard of the divine Cusan’s great work, De docta ignorantia, or he would have seen the irony of choosing for his scurrilous farce the title that he did!) As another example of how the Doctor is persecuted, Your Rev. Lordship will forgive me, I hope, for mentioning this absurd but painful incident: Some ten years ago, a young girl was brought to him here in order that, in his capacity as physician, he might treat her for an unspeakable disease which the child had contracted we know not how. He could do nothing, of course, for the disease was already far advanced. The girl has since died at the Cistercian Convent in Kulm, & now her father, mad with grief no doubt, has begun to put it about that the Rev. Doctor is to blame for the tragedy, for the girl said, so the father claims, that when he was examining her he cast a spell upon her, making passes with his hands & speaking a strange word that she could not understand et cetera. The accusation is absurd, of course, but Your Lordship will understand how these things go; matters have come to such a pass that the sick will no longer trust themselves to his care. However, I fear that by now I have begun to stretch Your Lordship’s patience with my ramblings. Let me close by saying that, having considered all these factors which I have mentioned, Your Lordship will recognise that our beloved Canon Nicolas deserves whatever honours it may be in our power to bestow upon him—& deserves also whatever small comforts, of the spirit or of the flesh, that he is himself able to wrest from a cruel world.

ex Frauenburg, 10 September, 1537

Tiedemann Giese: Canonicus

*

Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Kulm: Löbau

Lord Bishop: Disturbing reports continue to reach me regarding the Rev. Doctor & this matter of the woman, Anna Schillings. It is suggested that he keeps her as his focaria, & that she fulfils all duties attaching to such a position, being housekeeper & also concubine. I obliged you, my Lord, by substituting his name for that of Snellenburg on the King’s List, despite the grave reservations which I entertained at the time, for I confess that the substitution of the name of one sinner by that of another did not recommend itself to me as a wise act: however, I did so because of the high regard I had for the Doctor’s work, if not for his character. Now I think that I should have been swayed not by your arguments & entreaties, but by my own feelings. Anyway, the matter is past: I mention it only so that you may now repay this favour by speaking to him, & encouraging him to put away this woman. He must yield. There is more at stake now than the reputation of the Frauenburg Chapter. He maintains close friendship with Sculteti: that is bad. Admonish him that such connections & friendships are harmful to him, but do not tell him that the warning originates from me. I am sure that you know that Sculteti has taken a wife, & is suspected of atheism.

ex Heilsberg, 4 July, 1539

+ Johannes Dantiscus

Bishop of Ermland

*

Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Ermland: Heilsberg

My dear Lord Bishop: Doctor Nicolas is staying with us briefly here, along with a young disciple. I have spoken earnestly to the Rev. Doctor on the matter, according to Your Most Rev. Lordship’s wish, & have set the facts of the matter plainly before him. He seemed not a little disturbed that although he had unhesitatingly obeyed the will of Your Rev. Lordship, malicious people still bring trumped-up charges of secret meetings, & so forth. For he denies having seen that woman since he dismissed her. I have certainly ascertained that he is not as much affected as many think. Moreover, his advanced age & his never-ending studies readily convince me of this, as well as the worthiness & respectability of the man: nevertheless I urged him that he should shun even the appearance of evil, & this I believe he will do. But again I think that it would be as well that Your Rev. Lordship should not put too much faith in the informer, considering that envy attaches so easily to men of worth, & is unafraid even of troubling Your Most Rev. Lordship. I commend myself et cetera.

ex Löbau, 12 August, 1539

+ Tiedemann Giese

Bishop of Kulm

*

Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Ermland: Heilsberg

Your Grace. . As regards the Frauenburg wenches, Sculteti’s hid for a few days in his house. She promised that she would go away together with her children. Sculteti remains in his curia with his focaria, who looks like a beer waitress tainted with every evil. The woman of Doctor Nicolas sent her baggage ahead to Danzig, but she herself stays on at Frauenburg. .

ex Allenstein, 20 October, 1539

Heinrich Snellenburg: Visitator

*

Nicolas Koppernigk: Frauenburg

Sir: I write to you directly in the hope that you may be made to understand the peril into which you have delivered yourself by your stubborn refusal to yield upon the matter of the woman, Anna Schillings. Surely you realise how great are the issues at stake? If it were merely a matter of this focaria, I should not be so intemperate as to hound you thus, but it is more than that, much more, as you must know. On my recommendation, Canon Stanislas Hosius was nominated candidate for the office of Precentor of the Frauenburg Chapter. I shall dare to be frank, my dear Doctor: I do not like Hosius, I do not like what he represents. He is a fanatic. You & I, my friend, are children of another age, a finer & more civilised age: but that age is past. Some years ago I warned you that dark times were coming: that darkness is upon us now, & its avatars are Canon Hosius and his ilk — the inquisitors, the fanatics. I do not like him, as I have said, yet I appointed him to a canonry at Frauenburg, & would see him Precentor: for, like him or not, I must accept him. For Ermland, the future is one of two choices: this province must become either Prussian & Lutheran, or Polish & Catholic. There is no third course. The autonomy of which your uncle was the architect & guardian is about to be taken from us. The choice, then, is clear: whatever our feelings regarding Poland, we must bow to the Jagellon throne, or perish. Now, the Frauenburg Chapter, foolishly allowing itself to be misled by forces who have not the good of Ermland, nor Frauenburg, at heart, has elected the unspeakable Sculteti to be Precentor, thereby thwarting my carefully laid plans. This is intolerable. Do those damned clerics among whom you have chosen to live not realise that Sculteti is backed by that faction at the Papal Court which imagines that Ermland can be brought under the direct control of Rome? Even if this were feasible, which it is not, Rome rule would spell disaster for all of us. We must cleave to Poland! It is the only course. I must have Hosius: & the corollary of that need is that I must destroy Sculteti. I shall use whatever weapons against him that I can find. The scandalous manner of his life is one such weapon, perhaps the most lethal. I trust that these revelations, which I am foolish to commit to paper, will make clear why, for so many years, I have striven to force you to be rid of this woman. This shall be my last warning; ignore it, & you shall be in grave danger of going down along with Sculteti when he falls. That is all I have to say. Vale.

ex Heilsberg, 13 March, 1540

+ Johannes Dantiscus

Bishop of Ermland

*

Johannes Dantiscus, Bishop of Ermland: Heilsberg

Reverendissime in Christo Pater et Domine Clementissime! I have received Your Rev. Lordship’s letter. I understand well enough Your Lordship’s grace & good will toward me: which he has condescended to extend not only to me, but to other men of great excellence. It is, I believe, certainly to be attributed not to my merits, but to the well-known goodness of Your Rev. Lordship. Would that some time I should be able to deserve these things. I certainly rejoice, more than can be said, to have found such a Lord & Patron.

I have done what I neither would nor could have left undone, whereby I hope to have given satisfaction to Your Rev. Lordship’s warning.

ex Frauenburg, 3 July, 1540

Your Rev. Lordship’s most devoted

Nicolas Copernicus

*

Tiedemann Giese, Bishop of Kulm: Löbau

My dear Tiedemann: Scuiteti has been expelled from the Chapter, & banished by Royal Edict. He will go to Rome, I think, as do all outcasts. His focaria, the Hesse woman, has disappeared. What a lot of trouble she caused! It occurs to me that our Frauenburg is aptly named. I have issued yet another edict of my own against Frau Schillings, but she refuses to go. I am touched, truly, by her devotion to a sick old man, & have not the heart to make her understand that it would be altogether best if she were to go. Anyway, where would she go to? So I await, without great interest, Dantiscus’s next move. Do I seem calm? I am not. I am afraid, Tiedemann, afraid of what the world will think to do to me that it has not done already: the filthy world that will not let me be, that comes after me always, a black monster, dragging its damaged wings in its wake. Ah, Tiedemann. .

ex Frauenburg, 31 December, 1540

*

Waterborne he comes, at dead of night, sliding sleek on the river’s gleaming back, snout lifted, sniffing, under the drawbridge, the portcullis, past the drowsing sentry. Brief scrabble of claws on the slimed steps below the wall, brief glint of a bared tooth. In the darkness for an instant an intimation of agony and anguish, and the night flinches. Now he scales the wall, creeps under the window, grinning. In the shadow of the tower he squats, wrapt in a black cloak, waiting for dawn. Comes the knocking, the pinched voice, the sly light step on the stair, and how is it that I alone can hear the water. ?