Some dozen or so years had passed since poor Katharina’s ordeal. And of all things, I found myself in Frankfurt. The mood at the book fair—that was why I had traveled—was like what you might find at a family wedding where both sides feel it’s a bad match. A grim, determined festivity. There were still hundreds of us there, I presume thousands. But business, and spirit, and funds, and good health, and a good grape harvest, and all number of other good things—that had drifted to the Leipzig Book Fair. A decade or so of war does that, I suppose. The Swedes were occupying the city, but best as I could tell the place was overrun by Dutchmen. A gingerbread seller told me his native village, but a day’s walk from Frankfurt, had been almost entirely murdered by the plague. He used that term: “murdered.” I hadn’t thought of the plague that way, but the language was clear enough. He himself hadn’t been to his village to witness the destruction—he had read about it in a pamphlet. He related the story cheerfully. Even with some pride. Some people are like that.

“It’s better than death by marauding soldiers, is the way I see it,” he said.

I bought some of his gingerbread. Ginger protects from consumptive diseases, I believe.

“I count myself blessed,” he said. “The wars will end one day—”

“God willing—”

“—and then how will the young men find employment?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You hadn’t thought of that, had you? They can’t all be night watchmen.” He made his cheery way onward.

I liked the gingerbread, even if it left my throat feeling itchy.

I hadn’t mustered the business courage to inhabit my stall yet. It was okay. I was told tomorrow was the bigger day. Even in my old, old age I still find myself to be a hesitater, an avoider, a doubter. It can be made clear as the starriest night what my proper role is—still I won’t assume it. Foolish unprincipled resistance. When I was younger, I thought maybe I had been given the horoscope for the wrong birth date, or rather that God had received the wrong instructions in relation to me; everything was incorrect. All my feelings. All my instincts. I was a dog who chewed leaves instead of bones. A cat who liked being in water.

I was assigned to stall one hundred and seventy-one. How empty it looked. The wooden bench was water-damaged and splintered.

I decided to walk the aisles to see what the other stalls were doing before setting up my own.

One man was hawking a play about a man who falls in love with his sister.

Another was selling a treatise on how to redress the abuses in the weights and measures used in markets.

I came across Selected Disputations with Aristotle. And: The Feminine Monarchy: A History of Bees. The next aisle had more than the usual number of Christian treatises on one or another way of living. Munition Against Man’s Misery and Mortality caught my attention. I turned a few pages. It was the usual, usual. I was handed a free advertorial page for The Jew of Malta. Another advertisement for a book about a one-hundred-and-forty-year-old Scotsman still fathering children. A tale of harrowing journeys to Siam was illustrated with etchings of a delicate butterfly. I bought only one thing: a compendium of dirty jokes, nonsense jokes, rhyming verse, retorts, and charming tales.

I had failed to notice the people running the stalls. Though watching them had been the original motivation for the walk. I set off for another turn. Some paced in front of their tables. Some had the smile of fruit-sellers. Some sat quietly, as if it didn’t matter to them whether one came by their stall or not. Then I turned a corner and recognized someone. Or I thought I did. Where had I last seen that face? She was a modest-looking woman, maybe forty years old, maybe more. She was in widow’s clothing. She sat there quietly, at stall two hundred and eleven. Set out in front of her was a small pewter bowl filled with purple snap candies. A number of well-dressed men took a candy as they passed by. She looked out at the crowd, offering a timid smile now and again. No one stopped to speak to her.

She was situated between a stall decorated in red that was hawking an edition of Luther’s pamphlets, and another stall that sold yet another edition of Death and the Ploughman. So the stalls on each side of her both sold books from a century ago. Why no interest in the awful and dramatic present?

“You’re Katharina’s friend!” the woman called out to me.

I suppose I must have been staring. “Friend?”

“Yes!”

“Katharina. Which Katharina?”

“Katharina Kepler,” she said. “You were her friend.”

Startled: “I tried to be.”

The woman stood up, she even embraced me.

It was the astrologer’s widow, Susanna. Now I recognized her. I had only met her when she had visited Heumaden at the same time as myself, but that visit had been memorable, and intense, as I already knew so much of her troubles from Katharina’s telling. And now I had heard the sad news of Hans’s passing. Why did I hesitate to offer my condolences? I don’t know. But the moment passed.

“Anna is very well,” I said. I wanted to make a dowry for her. She was engaged to a widower as old as myself. She had in the end married Alexander, but he had died of the plague.

“Anna?”

“Oh, that’s right, you probably never met my daughter.”

We had a little laugh.

Susanna was here at the book fair hoping to sell some of Hans’s juvenilia, it turned out. Something he had composed as a student, his dissertation, she explained. Then she blushed. Which seemed odd to me. “It’s written as a dream that he had. An imaginary dream. About a boy who travels to the moon. And sees the earth from there, and the other planets. There’s a strange bit about the mother of the boy that you might find, well, curious. Yes, strange and curious.” She blushed again. Susanna’s shawl was worn. She wore gloves with mendings. I suspected she was in difficulty.

“That sounds familiar,” I said. “I could never keep up with your husband’s accomplishments.”

“It’s a beautiful book. It’s like a story.”

“Very nice.”

Susanna asked me what had brought me to the fair.

At that very moment, a well-dressed Frenchman approached Susanna’s table. Wearing ludicrous red silk hose.

I hastily suggested we meet up later and she agreed. I walked away quickly, then glanced back and saw her speaking hopefully, somewhat pathetically, to the peacock in the red hose.

I wondered briefly what might be “strange and curious” about Hans’s childish writings. Then I put the mystery out of mind.

I WAS READY now to give stall number one hundred and seventy-one a try. I had traveled this distance to Frankfurt. I wouldn’t let my aversion to action rule me. I had an important manuscript to sell.

At first I spoke to interested gentlepersons of the terrifying and moving tale of a devout Christian woman, a good woman, a hardworking widow, exemplary, facing the worst calumny, with dignity and—

No one had much interest in that.

“Is it the tale of a virtuous woman whose head is turned?”

I hesitated. “Not really.”

The stranger walked away.

Next I tried: A tale of the viciousness that lurks in village life! Liars, scoundrels, purse-grabbers! Malice, greed, revenge, ignorance—

I grew tired. Tired of pretending to be something that I wasn’t.

In the neighboring booth was an Englishman selling the story of a young woman set to marry a much older man. “A real old piece of horseflesh. Hair in the ears. The whole December if you follow, right down to the kisser. Meanwhile, she’s the prettiest pink in the garden, full of bloom, in love with a nice young fellow.”

“So she marries the young man in the end?”

“No, she marries the old man.”

The Englishman was getting a lot of chitchat and interest from passersby.

In a quiet moment, the Englishman said to me, “If you don’t mind a bit of advice: People don’t like an old lady story, you know? I wouldn’t lead with that part.” What would he lead with? He said he wasn’t sure, he would give it a think. He went on: “Even Shakespeare, very popular on all topics as he is, sticks to daughters and wives. An occasional mother. But not front and center, you know? You don’t want an old lady front and center. Honestly never heard of such a thing.”

Who was Shakespeare? I knew asking would only extend the conversation, so I didn’t ask.

I MET UP with gentle Susanna in the very crowded tavern of the modest inn where she was lodging. Why did I not call her the widow Kepler? It was too unsettling to do so. For me the widow Kepler could only be Katharina. Poor Katharina. She was a better backgammon player than she would admit. Or I would admit. She was a frighteningly intelligent woman—also a fool.

Susanna told me that evening the story of the so-called juvenilia she was there with at the fair. I hadn’t asked about it. She must have really needed to hear herself explaining her position. I dimly remembered hearing of it being spoken of in the testimony of that poor weak-minded schoolmaster who had been so envious of Hans. It had not come up in the later stages of the trial, I was told, but I didn’t know why. “Hans emended it in detail,” she said. “Of course he did. He cared so much. He didn’t want there to be room for anyone to misunderstand. None.” She showed me a copy of the book, with all its emendations. The book was still quite slim, closer to a pamphlet.

My eyesight was too poor for the smaller print. But the main text was laid out handsomely. “You can have this copy,” Susanna said.

I should have turned down her generosity. It was too much. But again I missed the moment. She wanted to lead me through the pages. I let her.

The story starts with Hans himself, falling asleep while reading a book. He has a dream. In the dream there is a mother and son, living in Iceland. The mother, Fioxhilde, sells packets of magical herbs to sailors. Her son, still a young boy, accidentally ruins one of the packets. Fioxhilde impulsively sells the boy to a sailing captain as punishment. The captain is pretty nice. He drops the boy off with the astronomer Tycho Brahe. The boy learns Danish, and also astronomy.

“This was written before Hans worked with Brahe,” she said. “It’s spooky, right? He meant it as pure imagination.” She covered her mouth with a kerchief and coughed. “But then it was like a prophecy.”

There was some detail in the book which Susanna could not follow. The general story, however, was simple. After a number of years, the boy returns to his mom, who is overjoyed to see him. He tells her he’s learned astronomy. She’s even more delighted. She also knows astronomy, she tells him. She’s learned it from some daemons she knows. She calls one of the daemons over to teach them more. The daemon—

“So it really is true that the mother is a witch?”

“Only in a story sort of way. Not a witch, even. But in touch with spirits.”

I nodded.

“And the daemons aren’t bad. They’re not devils. They’re more like ancient spirits. It’s all imaginary, you see. Hans makes that very clear in the footnotes. He really, really didn’t want anyone to misunderstand. One of the daemons describes how to get to the moon. What the geography is there. What the earth looks like when one is standing there. It’s a story for a schoolboy, you see?”

She asked me if I, as a friend of Katharina’s, thought people would take it the wrong way.

“I know very little about the book trade,” I said.

She said she was unfortunately in a difficult place with money. So many revered Hans, but so few paid him what they owed.

I nodded.

She asked me what manuscript had I brought to the fair.

I panicked. “It’s hard to say. It’s a Christian testimony of a kind. I haven’t figured out how to describe it. Maybe that’s my problem.” I laughed, like a dog. “I couldn’t be a worse salesman.” I felt the ghost of Katharina—the other widow Kepler, my first widow Kepler—sitting next to us. She rested her head in her hands and looked at me askance. “You were very kind to Katharina,” I said. “She told me that.”

The widow Kepler, the younger one, began to tear up. She said that she had spent a great deal of money on a respectable tombstone for Hans. She had hoped an office of the Emperor would help pay for it. Her pleas were never answered. He had been in Regensburg, trying to collect his pay, when he died. No one could give her details of his illness. The tomb was not marble, but limestone. On it was an illustration from one of Hans’s books: The Harmony of the World. The tombstone maker charged her double what was appropriate, she knew what he was doing, but she had no energy at that time to argue. And then the soil was still soft when the gravestone was destroyed by soldiers. She couldn’t even find it now.

YES, I WAS and remained a too-quiet witness. There is something else I haven’t mentioned before, to anyone. I first met Katharina as a child. When I was twelve, my family had stayed for a short time at The Sun, the inn run by her father. We were looking for a home in the area. Kath-chen was a pretty young woman, and at her father’s side more than any of the other children. I remember her handing him an embroidered kerchief for his breathing. He would sometimes be short of breath, and would then hold it to his face. I noticed the young woman’s fidelity—that was how I saw it—because my father faced some hardship at that time, and I felt my own fidelity wavering. Another family ignominy had forced us to move: My father was said to have provided saddles to the Spanish Catholic troops. He denied it. I myself suspected that he had—he was not one to pass up a commission. I write this all now as if lightly. Yet it still makes me tremble, though the origin of the tremble is seventy years in the past. When we were at The Sun, it was with great vigilance that I and my siblings pruned back any weed of the rumor that followed us. Why were we moving? My father told a story that an angel had come to him in a dream, told him to bring his family to a clear spring, with day-moths visiting dark violets on the shores. Where he got that nonsense from, I don’t know. He sounded like a pastor whose services were poorly attended—that was my unfaithful feeling at the time. He had no gift for lying. He had a gift for making saddles. Katharina never recognized me from that short time I stayed at her father’s inn. I never mentioned it.

That young Katharina, so attentive and faithful, is the one who remains most vivid to me. More than the old woman I came to know so many years later.

WHAT A FOOL I am to forget that a reader might not know the fate of Katharina. A fool too directed by his own memories and anxieties. The trial ended, but still there was no decision. The paperwork of the trial, including Hans’s final defense, as well as the ducal advocate’s final offense, were sent to the law faculty at Tübingen. I hardly understood the procedure, it was shifting one day to this, one day to that. Finally, it was another five weeks before a response came on the paperwork, and Katharina remained in prison for the deliberations. Five weeks was fast in comparison to our previous waits. I was at that time ready to die myself. The suitor Alexander had returned, but Anna had fallen to a terrible consumption. If faith is worth anything, shouldn’t it make us not fear death?

On a Monday afternoon, Hans came to my home unannounced. I thought that he had heard word of Anna’s illness, and maybe he had. But he came with papers in his hand and said nothing of my child.

What was the verdict? I couldn’t read the expression on his face. He didn’t look devastated. He didn’t look triumphant. He looked distracted. He took a seat at my table.

“Did you know my first wife, Barbara?”

How would I have known her?

He said he had never hidden that it was a contentious marriage, but that didn’t mean it was not also full of love. Barbara—there are so many Barbaras—had wanted to be part of his scientific world. She had spoken to guests in Latin and Greek, had asked after their work, as if she were one of those Frenchwomen who present themselves as most at home among men. That had annoyed him. Women, he said, are even numbers, and men are odd. Then he said he had strayed from what he wanted to tell me. He had a question for me.

“Our son died of the flu.” Barbara and the boy had been constant companions; the boy had worn her shoes around the house; he had tied her hair kerchiefs on his own head; the two of them had hunted for mushrooms together, and drawn pine cones, and flowers. He was eleven when he died. One loves all of one’s children—but she was the closest to this boy. “After that, Barbara devoted herself to caring for soldiers sick from the same flu. She soon succumbed.”

I was listening.

“Would you call that a suicide?”

I didn’t know what to say. “When will we hear your mother’s fate?” I asked.

“My God, I thought you already knew.”

“I’ve been finishing a stirrups order.”

“She will be freed. More than freed—the Reinbolds are fined nearly a thousand thalers. You didn’t hear? The judgment says Katharina will have to endure one last threat of torture, for some salad logic reason they offer—but the torturer is absolutely not permitted to put anything to effect. They want to scare her. They’ve hired some buffoon with a knife to do so. But I gave her warning, she knows he can’t do anything. We’ve won, you see?”

Once freed, Katharina went directly from the prison to live in Heumaden with Greta. She was not able to return to her beloved, brutal Leonberg. Einhorn and the Reinbolds had made it known that she would be killed in the street. They let it be known that her head would be put on a pike, her body roasted in the town square, that her blood would be used as an ink to make a sign warning others, that her corpse would be treated with none of the respect of a pig at market day, that the story of the evil she had done would live long, and survive as a tale to frighten children until the end of days.

THE DAY I resolved that I would walk to Heumaden to go to visit Katharina, I first went, deliberately, to Jerg Hundersinger’s bakery. I wanted to buy something celebratory. Egg cakes, or a raisin loaf. Jerg appeared unusually bright and cheery. I’m no master of sly small talk or charmingly ambiguous phrases. But I said to Jerg, since other customers were around, that I thought I knew what had put a smile on his face.

He said that yes, he did indeed have good news, and how did I know?

Katharina? I asked in a quiet voice.

He looked confused. That’s a different story, he said. He was smiling because his uncle had died. That was the good news. He, Jerg, had come into some money, and wasn’t it just at the moment he needed it? Others wanted to complain of bad winters, of ill cattle, but look, even death had this bright underside, didn’t it?

I bought a round milk loaf with raisins and headed out on my way, bewildered.

I can admit that I was somewhat anxious about not having made the trip to Heumaden to see Katharina earlier. I had meant to go in November, shortly after she was released from the Güglingen prison, and after Anna had so quickly recuperated. But surely Katharina needed that time to rest and recover, to have only her close family nearby. December was too cold for the long walk, I felt. The same thinking continued on into January and February. Easter, you may recall, came early. It was in March. And so it wasn’t until the very start of April that I went. Anna encouraged me to go—I don’t know why. Why didn’t I write to Katharina in that time? Since she couldn’t read the letters herself, I felt the scrutiny of eyes other than hers—that distressed me.

Now I will also mention that by this time in April I had heard rumors that Katharina was in a fury, that she was often seen wandering country lanes, shouting curses at magpies, at goats. That was not why I was avoiding her. I had heard reports that she scared children at the well with her dark mutterings, that she went about in velvet cloaks and lace headdresses, and that hound dogs whimpered and ran off when she came near. I didn’t want to put faith in such stories. Even as a part of me wondered if my own name came up for gruff reprisals. When Katharina was grumbling about wrongs—if, indeed, she was grumbling about wrongs—was I one of those wrongs? It was selfish, I know, to be thinking in that way. And after all she had been through. As I walked the path, past cherry blossoms, I felt that I was walking to my own trial. I was looking forward to it, I realized, as the miles passed. It had been trying, waiting so long, to be heard out, to be issued a verdict. A brief drizzle was the only interruption to the long spring day’s walk, and by the late afternoon I had arrived to Heumaden. I realized I was anxious about knocking at the door unannounced. But as it turned out, I didn’t need to knock. Katharina was outside, in the garden.

She was wearing a simple dress, and had neither a velvet cloak nor a lace headdress on. She was not muttering, or cursing. But also she was not humming. She looked to be sowing seeds. She had not yet noticed me. When I got closer, I saw that she was working scraps of yarn and some broken buttons and a little bit of ash into the soil. Maybe it was some recipe for avoiding pests.

“I can’t invite you in, Simon,” she said, when she noticed me.

I apologized for surprising her.

“Let me rinse my hands, and I’ll bring out another stool and we can sit in the shade,” she said.

I said I didn’t mean to interrupt her gardening. I said that I understood if she had no time for me. I held out the milk bread from Jerg’s bakery. I told her about how he said he’d had some good luck with a relative dying. She laughed at that. Then she stepped away and into the house.

I don’t know why I had believed the stories of Katharina fuming, or muttering, or being mad. But she did seem altered. What was it? It was more than a year since we had seen each other. Why had she not asked me straight off why I wasn’t present at her trial? Or why I hadn’t written to her? Why didn’t she ask after Anna?

She came out carrying two small stools, with some difficulty. I hurried forward to help her and set them in the shade.

After some period of quiet, I suggested that we could play backgammon. We could have a makeshift board from pebbles and leaves, which was how I had played as a child.

She said she wasn’t in the mood, if that was okay with me.

I told her that, for a while now, I had been wanting to say, I had been meaning to write, or visit—I wanted to say how relieved and pleased I was that she had been freed, that the correct thing had happened.

At first she said nothing. Then she said, “Yes, Simon, I know that you didn’t put in a good word for me. That’s troubling you, isn’t it? You’re coming here on this visit to tell me all about it, or explain your reasoning. I don’t mean to offend you, Simon, but you’re not the Duke of Württemberg. I don’t know what difference your words would have made. I wonder if it’s worth two old people spending time reassuring each other of this or that.”

Was she trying to say that she wasn’t angry because it was happy in the end?

“I wouldn’t call it a happy end,” she said. “To have nothing to give my children, to be unwanted in my own town.”

“I’ve been a bad neighbor,” I said. “You must despise me.”

“My father used to call me his little scallion,” she said.

I was confused by the change of topic. Then I saw that she was looking at the spring scallions, already making their way in the garden.

She said, “You liked me, Simon.”

“I still like you,” I said.

“Of course you do. And you wish me well.”

I was waiting for the counterpoint of the argument. I was waiting to hear how little it would have cost me to visit her at Güglingen. Or to have spoken what I knew of her.

“I’m fond of you, Simon,” she said. “I can see that you want me to be angry with you, but I can’t do it. You have love in your heart. You’ve been a friend to me. In the ways that were available to you. You’re not on trial. I won’t convince you that you’re not a witch, or that you are one.” Then she said it was time for her to take Chamomile to pasture. I offered to walk with her. She said I shouldn’t feel obliged. She then apologized again for not being able to invite me in. She said Pastor Binder preferred not to see her, a position that she understood. It was his house.

I walked home with the feeling that I had been acquitted. Or that was the feeling at first. As the miles passed, I began to wonder if maybe it was simply that Katharina couldn’t be bothered to convict me. That she was too morally exhausted. If I was tired, then she must have been all the more tired. She didn’t seem like the same woman I had known before. Her apparent peace could as well be a sign of terrible defeat as a sign of the grace of God.

I SAW GERTIE at the tailor’s, where I was having Anna’s dress altered. Gertie told me that it was she who had walked Chamomile the distance so that Katharina could be reunited with her in Heumaden. Gertie told me that Katharina wept with gladness to see her cow—the first tears Gertie had ever seen her cry. And that Katharina had said of the cow that it had her father’s eyes, and Maruschl’s soul. Gertie also told me the sad news that in the middle of April, Katharina had died in her sleep. That I had seen her that one last time was a blessing.

The dark times that have been on my mind now seem like milk and honey. Not long after our meeting in Frankfurt, Susanna also died. I don’t know where she was buried. I heard the news from someone who had spoken to her stepson. When the papal soldiers came through last fall, in faded greens and metal, Greta’s husband, the pastor Binder, was beaten to death, and the soldier who beat him was soon dead of the plague, as was the nurse who cared for that soldier. I learned of that from Christoph, who became a criminal court judge. He held the position until only last year, when he died, too, also of the plague. Gertie and Agnes passed of an illness within weeks of each other. Greta is all right. Even well. She has married a distinguished poet. A friend of Hans’s. It is rumored to be a happy match.