Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)(165)
“Kelley is a prisoner,” Matthew said, toying with the stem of his goblet. It was heavy silver and glinted in the firelight.
“They say he goes home occasionally, usually in the middle of the night when there is no one around to see. At least he gets some relief from the emperor’s constant demands.”
“You haven’t met Mistress Kelley,” Matthew said drily.
I hadn’t, which struck me as odd the more I considered it. Perhaps I was taking the wrong route to meet the alchemist. I’d allowed myself to be swept into court life with the hope of knocking on Kelley’s laboratory door and walking straight in to demand Ashmole 782. But given my new familiarity with courtly life, such a direct approach was unlikely to succeed. The next morning I made it a point to go with Tereza to do the shopping.
It was absolutely frigid outside, and the wind was fierce, but we trudged to the market nonetheless.
“Do you know my countrywoman Mistress Kelley?” I asked Frau Huber as we waited for the baker to wrap our purchases. The housewives of Malá Strana collected the bizarre and unusual as avidly as Rudolf did. “Her husband is one of the emperor’s servants.”
“One of the emperor’s caged alchemists, you mean,” Frau Huber said with a snort. “There are always odd things happening in that household. And it was worse when the Dees were here. Herr Kelley was always looking at Frau Dee with lust.”
“And Mistress Kelley?” I prompted her.
“She does not go out much. Her cook does the shopping.” Frau Huber did not approve of this delegation of housewifely responsibility. It opened the door to all sorts of disorder, including (she contended) Anabaptism and a thriving black market in purloined kitchen staples. She had made her feelings on this point clear at our first meeting, and it was one of the chief reasons I went out in all weathers to buy cabbage.
“Are we discussing the alchemist’s wife?” Signorina Rossi said, tripping across the frozen stones and narrowly avoiding a wheelbarrow full of coal.
“She is English and therefore very strange. And her wine bills are much larger than they should be.”
“How do you two know so much?” I asked when I’d finished laughing. “We share the same laundress,” Frau Huber said, surprised. “None of us have any secrets from our laundresses,” Signorina Rossi agreed. “She did the washing for the Dees, too. Until Signora Dee fired her for charging so much to clean the napkins.”
“A difficult woman, Jane Dee, but you could not fault her thrift,” Frau Huber admitted with a sigh.
“Why do you need to see Mistress Kelley?” Signorina Rossi inquired, stowing a braided loaf of bread in her basket.
“I want to meet her husband. I am interested in alchemy and have some questions.”
“Will you pay?” Frau Huber asked, rubbing her fingers together in a universal and apparently timeless gesture.
“For what?” I said, confused.
“His answers, of course.”
“Yes,” I agreed, wondering what devious plan she was concocting.
“Leave it to me,” Frau Huber said. “I am hungry for schnitzel, and the Austrian who owns the tavern near your house, Frau Roydon, knows what schnitzel should be.”
The Austrian schnitzel wizard’s teenage daughter, it turned out, shared a tutor with Kelley’s ten-year-old stepdaughter, Elisabeth. And his cook was married to the laundress’s aunt, whose sister-in-law helped out around the Kelleys’ house.
It was thanks to this occult chain of relationships forged by women, and not Gallowglass’s court connections, that Matthew and I found ourselves in the Kelleys’ second-floor parlor at midnight, waiting for the great man to arrive.
“He should be here at any moment,” Joanna Kelley assured us. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bleary, though whether this resulted from too much wine or from the cold that seemed to afflict the entire household was not clear.
“Do not trouble yourself on our account, Mistress Kelley. We keep late hours,” Matthew said smoothly, giving her a dazzling smile. “And how do you like your new house?”
After much espionage and investigation among the Austrian and Italian communities, we discovered that the Kelleys had recently purchased a house around the corner from the Three Ravens in a complex known for its inventive street sign. Someone had taken a few leftover wooden figures from a nativity scene, sawed them in half, and arranged them on a board. They had, in the process, removed the infant Jesus from his crèche and replaced it with the head of Mary’s donkey.
“The Donkey and Cradle meets our needs at present, Master Roydon.”
Mistress Kelley issued forth an awe-inspiring sneeze and took a swig of wine. “We had thought the emperor would set aside a house for us in the palace itself, given Edward’s work, but this will do.” A regular thumping sounded on the winding stairs. “Here is Edward.”
A walking staff appeared first, then a stained hand, followed by an equally stained sleeve. The rest of Edward Kelley looked just as disreputable. His long beard was unkempt and stuck out from a dark skullcap that hid his ears. If he’d had a hat, it was gone now. And he was fond of his dinners, gauging by his Falstaffian proportions. Kelley limped into the room whistling, then froze at the sight of Matthew.
“Edward.” Matthew rewarded the man with another of those dazzling smiles, but Kelley didn’t seem nearly as pleased to receive it as his wife had.