Catherine wore a hooded cloak of midnight blue with fur ruff, snow flecking her golden hair like diamonds. Her riding dress was maroon. She wore a dark stone at her throat, brown leather boots with silver spurs, and kid gloves, and she carried a riding crop in her left fist. She was beautiful, clever, persistent, and wicked. French agents pointed half a dozen guns. I was annoyed that I was shaking, but it was from cold, not fear. Mostly.
“I’ve enjoyed every moment of separation,” I replied.
While I’d lusted after Catherine Marceau as any man would, given her voluptuous figure and seductive habit, she’d not only foiled my plan to disrupt Napoleon’s coronation but had taken a shot at me with a pistol that, with rare foresight, I’d loaded with black pepper. I got a satisfying sneeze from her, but it was still Catherine who tore our family asunder by forcing Astiza and Harry to prematurely flee from Notre Dame.
She’d later had the cheek to write me at Cadiz, offering alliance to hunt for the Brazen Head, under her own conspiratorial control. “Who is it you work for at the moment?” I asked her now. “Royalists, Napoleon, Talleyrand, or the Invisible College? It’s difficult to keep track.”
“You know me better than that. Catherine works for Catherine.”
I looked at Gideon. “Did you betray us, too?”
“They captured me. I’m sorry, Ethan. I followed you to save you, but I’m failing my half of our partnership.”
So I’d dragged him into her web, too. “It’s my debt that is mounting.”
“We followed from Prague,” said Pasques, the gigantic French policeman. He was thick as a wine barrel, had arms nearly the diameter of my legs, and carried the disposition of a tax inspector mated to a paddock bull. “We caught this one lurking at Kutná Hora, sly and sinister like his kind.”
“You mean discreet and observant.”
“We were far from surprised that you’d fallen in with Jews and deserters, Gage.”
“I live to meet your expectations, Pasques.”
He grinned with the satisfaction of a cat that has stalked a mouse. “It’s taken a great deal of trouble to find you. Yet here we are.”
“It does seem serendipitous, does it not? And yet not entirely coincidental. Catherine, I’m guessing you reached Rabbi Abraham before we did?”
“Ethan, you’re not always so astute.”
“We were directed to the Star Summer Palace after our host consulted a book that was left with a long golden hair. I presume you studied the ancient texts?”
“The good rabbi was persuaded that his interests lie with France. He became an instrument to once more bring us together.”
Astiza glanced at me, no doubt wondering about my faithfulness this past year, as I had wondered about hers, given Richter’s leering. We’d been imperfect, lonely, loyal, and merely tempted. Or so I hoped.
“Napoleon knew you wanted to go to Prague and recognized you at the end of the Battle at Austerlitz,” Catherine related, relishing her triumph. “Did you notice his glance? His eye is an eagle’s. Officers made inquiries to find your unit and your friend. It wasn’t hard to guess you’d flee to the biggest ghetto in Europe—and be easily manipulated once you arrived.”
The cold water that hadn’t dripped off me was beginning to freeze. “But how did you know we’d emerge here?”
“Your Jew told us that your witch had a plan to break out.”
“Gideon has a name, Catherine.”
“He eavesdropped on your meeting with the Invisible College in the Golden Lane. You left Prague with Baron Richter, you didn’t emerge from the cells in Kutná Hora, and this is the only known outlet of the underground river that floods the mines. It was far from certain, but then, I’m very lucky, aren’t I?”
I looked about the wintry ravine. “Standing with us, still poor, cold, single, and childless, in a muddy dell in the snow.”
She refused to react. “Rumor is that you copied the ingenuity I invented in Paris by pretending to be dead in Venice. You flatter me with imitation, Ethan.”
“Except the Comtesse Marceau is truly dead.” Years before, Catherine had taken a strangled girl’s identity and shipped to England pretending to be a refugee royalist, while actually operating as a French spy. It was nothing to be proud about. In fact, I wondered if she’d done the throttling herself.
“And I’ll keep you alive, but only if your wife takes me to the Brazen Head.” She smiled at my family. “Work with me and I will make you rich and powerful. Defy me and I will debate whether to execute you or give you back to Richter to be tortured. All this trouble would have been avoided if we’d remained partners from the beginning.” And to emphasize her goodwill, her agents gestured with their gun barrels to move us off the riverbank and into the cover of the woods.
I felt exhausted. To emerge from drowning to the muzzles of guns? To escape one set of tormentors, only to fall in with another cabal of lunatics? To desert the French army and be recaptured by Napoleonic agents? Astiza and I knew too much, and were cursed by our usefulness.
“This was destined to happen,” Catherine went on as we shambled stiffly toward her party’s horses. “We were always meant to be together. Weren’t we, Astiza?”
My wife, drenched, frozen, exhausted, and defiantly erect, was dangerously calm. “Should it serve the gods.”
“We’re a partnership,” Catherine insisted. “You need clothes, food, and protection from Richter’s gang of mystic cutthroats, who are no more true Rosicrucians than the Borgias were saints. Fear not! We represent the French government and the power it projects. Cooperating with us will restore you to Napoleon’s good graces. Give him a machine that tells the future and you’ll share that future. Always we give you opportunity, Ethan.”
I looked at Astiza, who was not only wet and shivering but wasted, cut, and half-poisoned from her long months underground. Yet her dark eyes were bright, and she could be as calculating as Catherine. I’d just seen my wife blow her way through a rock wall, and I wouldn’t underestimate her now.
“Our nanny is right,” Astiza said to me, not even giving Marceau the courtesy of “governess” in reminding her of our household roles in Paris the year before. “We need help to keep from freezing and to keep Richter at bay. Do you have extra horses, Comtesse Counterfeit?”
She ignored the gibe. “Yes. And money. And tools.”
“Then indeed, let’s be partners. My clue is a castle that Christian Rosenkreutz may have fled to. It’s an educated guess, not a certainty, and I’ve no idea if the Brazen Head is there. But let’s try to find it together.”
I was surprised at her acquiescence. Catherine was not.
“Astiza has always been more sensible and practical than you, Ethan. It’s a mother’s trait. And our destination, Madame Gage?”
“If I told you that, you’d have less need of us. I’ll be our guide, but my price is the survival and freedom of my husband, my son, and his Jewish friend. For now, we need to get north across the Elbe River before nightfall.”
“When we get to this castle, do you have a key?”
“Ethan does.”
This was news to me.
“My husband is more useful than you think,” she added to Catherine.
“Oh, I think he’s useful.” She turned to her six French policemen. “Pasques, take that sword he has and any other weapons. Give the family dry clothes and tie Ethan to his saddle. Jew, I am feeling magnanimous, and have no more use for you. Scuttle back to your ghetto and do not stray into great affairs again.”
“I’d prefer to stay and serve my friends.”
“And I’d prefer you work with Rabbi Abraham Stern for French interests. Be gone, before I change my mind. Tell him we are near success.”
Her agents grinned evilly at Gideon, making plain he had no choice.
“I brought rope for climbing,” he finally said. “Can I leave it with Ethan? It may prove useful.”
“You may leave it with Pasques. Quickly. Oh, and, Monsieur Dray?”
“Yes.”
“Not a word to the other side. I don’t wish to have to hunt you down again and kill you next time.” Dismissing Gideon, she turned to the rest of us. “Let’s get well away from the Invisible College before making camp. How many miles, Madame Gage?”
“Perhaps a hundred to the castle.”
“Then there’s no time to waste.”
We changed out of our sodden clothing, fought our shivers with brandy and sausage, left Dray abandoned on the riverbank, and climbed onto the horses provided by our new escort, Harry riding in front of me. As I watched my new friend fade from view through the light snow, I felt even more helpless. My shoulder ached, my heart was embarrassed by failure, and my son looked despondent. We set out to the north, crossing the Elbe at a ford and trotting through flurries. At least we warmed as we rode.
Catherine eventually slowed her horse to drop back alongside me. “You think me a Fury, Ethan, because I’m a capable woman.”
“A dogged one, I’ll give you that.”
“I do not give up. I can be ruthless, but ruthless only as men taught me. I’m not a comtesse, no. My father was a solicitor, Pierre Avalon, who rose in the Assembly after the Revolution and made too many enemies. Then he fell afoul of the Terror and they imprisoned all of us except my brother, who managed to run and disappear. You think me a spy and impostor. But my parents were beheaded, and I was given the choice of following them or using my beauty to serve the Revolution as a spy. I’ve only done what I had to do.”
“Killing the real Comtesse Marceau.”
“No one killed her. That was a foul rumor. She died in her cell of disease. I was an orphan, her title was vacant, and my jailers would have raped me first if I’d chosen the guillotine. So I took her name, fled to London, and pretended to be a royalist. I survived, loyal to myself.” She turned to stare me in the eye. “Are we really any different, you and I?”
“I live for my family.”
“I had the beauty to marry, but not the stupidity. The last thing I wanted was to be chattel of an aristocratic twit, either an exiled Frenchman or a haughty Englishman. I had many offers! But I wanted more.”
“You’re lonely. I’ve seen it in your eyes.”
“I decided on power, and then Bonaparte brought sanity to chaos.”
“Dictatorship.”
“Order. He and I are alike, too. Survivors. Opportunists. So I was told of a woman researching ancient secrets, told to ally with her wayward husband and get them to Paris. Yet it wasn’t I who rebuffed friendship. It was you.”
“I’m married. You tempted me like a courtesan.”
“Like another opportunity, which you ignored. Don’t be priggish with me; I know you too well. Now you’re in my power. Your wife is fond of fate, but where has fate delivered you? Back to me. Why? Think about that.” She leaned in close. “We ride to find an oracle of the future. But think of your own future, Ethan, and which woman promises you more.”
Then she kicked her mare with her silver spurs and trotted ahead. Yes, she wanted me, I knew. But only for the triumph of possession. I also knew she would become bored of any man, like a spoiled child with toys, and toss them away. She had been aloof to intrigue me with challenge, and seductive to undermine my wife. And what did she really desire? To win, but what, and why, she had no idea. Her manipulations were a drug to forestall her own deep dissatisfaction. The most driven are the most cursed.
We avoided any highway and followed farm lanes without inns, so Catherine bargained for a barn where our group could bed in the hayloft. Astiza, Harry, and I made a nest in the straw, with Catherine and Pasques to one side and three rough-looking French agents on the other. A few yards’ separation gave meager privacy. Two more stood guard below.
I had one ankle shackled to a barn post.
It was, however, my first opportunity for conversation with my family. I hugged them fiercely and inspected my son’s recovered hands, and we briefly reviewed a year of journeying since Napoleon’s coronation. Harry said, “Stop going away, Papa,” which both warmed my heart and broke it. He was relieved to be out of the cell, profoundly happy that we were reunited—he credited his escape to my appearance, since I’d shot a bad man and a bad dog—and fearful of what was to come. He was old enough to know that bulky men with big guns meant trouble, and young enough to think I could still protect him.
Finally, he fell into exhausted and troubled sleep.
My wife and I kissed again, but our passion was held in check by tension and the proximity of our enemies. I showed her my bullet wound with odd pride, as if being shot in the back was a mark of honor. She touched both scars, front and back, with fascination. Reminders of mortality hypnotize us.
“What’s your plan?” I whispered, since I had none of my own.
“I’ve made a guess from fragmentary hints in old books and the markings on a dungeon wall at Český Krumlov,” my wife murmured. “There’s no certainty the Brazen Head still exists, but there’s a peculiar castle that could have attracted a seeker such as Rosenkreutz. Its architecture is symbolic.”
“Gideon and I found the old sword blade in a tower built in the shape of Solomon’s seal. The palace was built as a place to speculate.”
“Like an astronomical tower,” my wife said.
“Yes, except this one looked inward instead of outward.”
“What is within is without. What is above is below.”
“So what do the stars tell you now?”
“I haven’t seen them in many months. It’s cloudy tonight. But our destination has a shape that reminds me of the Egyptian hieroglyph for ka, or soul. What better place for our medieval mystic to rest?”
“You think Rosenkreutz is buried there, too?”
“We’ll shortly find out.”
“And if not?”
She looked at Catherine and Pasques, who were watching our whispering. “Then our usefulness will be at an end. Be ready for a final fight.”
The next morning, we skirted the eastern side of Nymburk and followed the river Mrlina northeast, the land slowly rising, with Poland over the horizon. Far ahead we could see the gentle crest of the Krkonoše Mountains. The terrain became more rumpled. The snow gave way to clear weather, the earth like frosting. Catherine announced that we had passed into the year 1806. Then we trotted by the villages of Dětenice, Dolní Bousov, Sobotka, and Troskovice.
From a high pasture, we saw our goal curdled in mist.
“Trosky Castle,” Astiza said.
Two rock spires rose from the top of a wooded hill. Atop each outcrop was a stone watchtower. “One is called Baba and the other Panna, meaning ‘grandmother’ and ‘maiden,’ ” Astiza told us. “Crone and virgin.” Linking the two rock crags was a castle wall. “It was built by Čeněk of Wartenberg late in the fourteenth century and passed on to Ota of Bergov. The younger Ota, his son, plundered nearby Opatovice Monastery and by legend hid its treasure under the castle, never to be found. I think Christian Rosenkreutz came here.”
“You’re certain?” Catherine asked.
“No. But this castle’s peculiar shape fits the only clues I have. It burned shortly after Rosenkreutz would have arrived.”
It was the oddest edifice I’d ever seen. The geology would have been strange enough, the twin rocks like gigantic fangs. To have each topped by additional towers gave the hill the fantastic silhouette of a horned god.
“You think this was built to mirror an Egyptian hieroglyph?” I murmured to my wife.
“No. But Rosenkreutz might have recognized the glyph and its astrological significance. What better resting and hiding place?”
“It’s a ruin. How could he and the automaton be hidden here and remain unfound?”
“Not everyone has the searching ability of Ethan Gage.” She squeezed my hand. “Books say there are hidden caverns here.”
“I’m done with caves. For all time.”
“And yet our path toward heaven requires sojourns in hell,” my wife said.