"My elk, sir, my tame elk, for which I had a great love, has been destroyed through the carelessness of an Italian lout. " With a wave of a brocaded arm he swept his guest before him into the high wall where they would breakfast. They sat. "… Fell down a staircase at Wandsbeck Castle where they had stopped for the night, having drunk a pot of beer, he says, and broke a leg and died. My elk!"
The vast window, sunlight on the river and the flooded fields, and beyond that the blue distance, and Kepler smiled and nodded, like a clockwork toy, thinking of his dishevelled past and perilous future, and 0.00 something something 9.
II
Enough is enough. He plunged down the steep steps and stopped, glaring about the courtyard in angry confusion. A lame groom trundling a handcart hawked and spat, two scullery maids upended a tub of suds. They would make him a clerk, by God, a helper's helper! "Herr Kepler, Herr Kepler please, a moment…" Baron Hoffmann, panting unhappily, hurried down to him. Tycho Brahe remained atop the steps, strenuously indifferent, considering a far-off prospect.
"Well?" said Kepler.
The baron, rheum-eyed grey little man, displayed a pair of empty hands. "You must give him time, you know, allow him to consider your requests."
"He, " raising his voice against a sudden clamour of hounds, "he has had a month already, more. I have stated my conditions; I ask the merest consideration. He does nothing." And, louder again, turning to fling it up the steps: "Nothing!" Tycho Brahe, still gazing off, lifted his eyebrows a fraction and sighed. The pack ofhounds with an ululant cheer burst through a low gate from the kennels and surged across the courtyard, avid brutes with stunted legs and lunatic grins and tiny tight puce scrotums. Kepler scuttled for the steps in fright, but faltered halfway up, prevented by Tycho the Terrible. The Dane glanced down on him with malicious satisfaction, pulling on his gauntlets. Baron Hoffmann turned up to the master of Schloss Benatek a last enquiring glance and then, shrugging, to Kepler:
"You will not stay, sir?" "I will not stay. " But his voice was unsteady. Tengnagel and young Tyge came out, squinting in the light, sodden with the dregs of last night's drinking. They brightened, seeing Kepler in a dither. The grooms were bringing up the horses. The dogs, which had quietened, hunched with busy tongues over their parts or ruminatively cocked against the walls, were thrown into a frenzy again by the goitrous blare of a hunting horn. A haze of silvery dust unfurled its sails to the breeze and drifted lazily gatewards, a woman leaned down from a balcony, laughing, and in the sky a panel slid open and spilled upon Benatek a wash of April sunlight that turned the drifting dust to gold.
The baron went away to fetch his carriage. Kepler considered. What was left if he refused Tycho's grudging patronage? The past was gone, Tübingen, Graz, all that, gone. The Dane, thumbs hitched on his belt and fat fingers drumming the taut slope of his underbelly, launched himself down the steps. Baron Hoffmann alighted from the carriage, and Kepler mumbling plucked at his sleeve, "I want to, I want…" mumbling.
The baron cupped an ear. "The noise, I did not quite..?" "I want-" a shriek "-to apologise." He closed his eyes briefly. "Forgive me, I-"
"O but there is no need, I assure you." "What?"
The old man beamed. "I am happy to help, Herr Professor, in any way that I can. "
"No, no, I mean to him, to him. " And this was Bohemia, my God, repository of his highest hopes! Tycho was laboriously mounting up with the help of two straining footmen. Baron Hoffmann and the astronomer considered him doubtfully as with a grunt he toppled forward across the horse's braced back, flourishing in their faces his large leather-clad arse. The baron sighed and stepped forward to speak to him. Tycho, upright now and puffing, listened impatiently. Tengnagel and the younger Dane, downing their stirrup cups, looked on in high amusement. The squabble between Tycho and his latest collaborator had been the chief diversion of the castle since Kepler's arrival a month ago. The bugle sounded, and the hunt with Tycho in its midst moved off like a great rowdy engine, leaving behind it a brown taste of dust. Baron Hoffmann would not meet Kepler's hungry gaze. "I will take you into Prague," he muttered, and fairly dived into the sanctuary of his carriage. Kepler nodded dully, an ashen awfulness opening around him in the swirling air. What have I done?
They rattled down the narrow hill road. The sky over Benatek bore a livid smear of cloud, but the hunt, straggling away across the fields, was still in sunlight. Kepler silently wished them all a wasted day, and for the Dane with luck a broken neck. Barbara, wedged beside him on the narrow seat, pulsated in speechless anger and accusation (What have you done?). He did not wish to look at her, but neither could he watch for long thejoggling view beyond the carriage window. This country roundabout of countless small lakes and perennially flooded lowlands (which Tycho in his letters had dubbed Bohemian Venice!) pained his poor eyesight with its fractured perspectives of quicksilver glitter and tremulous blue-grey distances.
"… That he will of course," the baron was saying, "accept an apology, only he, ah, he suggests that it be in writing."
Kepler stared. "He wants…" and eye and an elbow setting up together a devil's dance of twitches "… he wants a written apology of me?"
"That is, yes, what he indicated." The baron swallowed, and looked away with a sickly smile. Regina at his side watched him intently, as she watched all big people, as if he might suddenly do something marvellous and inexplicable, burst into tears, or throw back his head and howl like an ape. Kepler regarded him too, thinking sadly that this man was a direct link with Copernicus: in his youth the baron had hired Valentine Otho, disciple of von Lauchen, to instruct him in mathematics. "Also, he will require a declaration of secrecy, that is, that you will swear an oath not to reveal to… to others, any astronomical data he may provide you with in the course of your work. He is especially jealous, I believe, for the Mars observations. In return he will guarantee lodgings for you and your family, and will undertake to press the Emperor either to ensure the continuation of your Styrian salary, or else to grant you an allowance himself. These are his terms, Herr Kepler; I would advise you-"
"To accept? Yes, yes, I will, of course." Why not? He was weary of standing on his dignity. The baron stared at him, and Kepler blinked: was that contempt in those watery eyes? Damn it, Hoffmann knew nothing of what it was to be poor and an outcast, he had his lands and title and his place at court. Sometimes these bland patricians sickened him.
"But what, " said Barbara, choking on it, "what of our conditions, our demands?" No one replied. How was it, Kepler wondered, with a twinge of guilt, that her most impassioned outbursts were met always by the same glassy-eyed, throat-clearing silence. The carriage lurched into a pothole with a mighty jolt, and from without they heard the driver address a string of lush obscenities to his horse. Kepler sighed. His world was patched together from the wreckage of an infinitely finer, immemorial dwelling place; the pieces were precious and lovely, enough to break his heart, but they did not fit.