Kepler (8 page)

Jobst Müller came up again to Graz, demanding that Kepler convert: convert or go, and this time stay away, and he would take his daughter and Regina back with him to Mühleck. Kepler did not deign even to answer. Stefan Speidel was another visitor, a thin, cold, tight-mouthed man in black. His news from court was grim: there would be no exceptions this time. Kepler was beside himself.

"What shall I do, Stefan, what shall I
do?
And my family!" He touched his friend's chill hand. "You were right to oppose the marriage, I do not blame you for it, you were right-"

"I know that."

"No, Stefan, I insist…" He paused, letting it sink in, and distinctly heard the
tiny ping
of another cord breaking. Speidel had lent him a copy of Plato's
Timaeus
on the day they first met, in Rector Papius's rooms; he must remember to return it. "Yes, well…" wearily. "O God, what am I to do."

"There is Tycho Brahe?" Stefan Speidel said, picking a speck of lint from his cloak and turning away, out of Kepler's life forever.

Yes, there was Tycho. Since June he had been installed at Prague, imperial mathematician to the Emperor Rudolph, at a salary of three thousand florins. Kepler had letters from the Dane urging him to come and share in the royal beneficence. But Prague! A world away! And yet where was the alternative? Mästlin had written to him: there was no hope of a post at Tübingen. The century approached its end. Baron Johann Friedrich Hoffmann, a councillor to the Emperor and Kepler's sometime patron, on a visit to Graz, invited the young astronomer to join his suite for the journey back to Prague. Kepler packed his bags and his wife and her daughter into a broken-down carriage, and on the first day of the new century, not un-amused by the date, he set out for his new world.

It was a frightful journey. They lodged at leaky fortresses and rat-infested military outposts. His fever came on him again, and he endured the miles in a dazed semi-sleep from which Barbara in a panic would shake him, looming down like a form out of his dreams, fearing him dead. He ground his teeth. "Madam, if you continue to disturb me like this, by God I will box your ears." And then she wept, and he groaned, cursing himself for a mangy dog.

It was February when they arrived in Prague. Baron Hoffmann settled them at his house, fed them, advanced them monies, and even lent Kepler a hat and a decent cloak for the meeting with Tycho Brahe. But there was no sign of Tycho. Kepler detested Prague. The buildings were crooked and ill-kept, thrown together from mud and straw and undressed planks. The streets were awash with slops, the air putrid. At the end of a week Tycho's son appeared, in company with Frans Gransneb Tengnagel, drunk, the two of them, and sullen. They carried a letter from the Dane, at once formal and fulsome, expressing greasy sentiments of regret that he had not come himself to greet his visitor. Tyge and the Junker were to conduct him to Benatek, but delayed a further week for their pleasure. It was snowing when at last they set out. The castle lay twenty miles to the north of the city, in the midst of a flat flooded countryside. Kepler waited in the guest rooms through a fretful morning, and when the summons came at noon he was asleep. He descended the stony fastness of the castle in a stupor of fever and fright. Tycho Brahe was magisterial. He frowned upon the shivering figure before him and said:

"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.

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.

The baron's house stood on Hradcany hill hard by the imperial palace, looking down over Kleinseit to the river and the Jewish quarter, and, farther out, the suburbs of the old town. There was a garden with poplars and shaded walkways and a fishpond brimming with indolent carp. On the north, the palace side, the windows gave on to pavonian lawns and a fawn wall, sudden skies pierced by a spire, and purple pennons undulating in a cowed immensity. Once, from those windows, Kepler had been vouchsafed an unforgettable glimpse of a prancing horse and a hound rampant, ermine and emerald, black beard, pale hand, a dark disconsolate eye. That was as near as he was to come to the Emperor for a long time.

In the library the baron's wife sat at an escritoire, sprinkling chalk from an ivory horn upon a piece of parchment. She rose as they entered, and, blowing lightly on the page, glanced at them with the distant relation of a smile. "Why Doctor-and Frau Kepler-you have returned to us, " a faded eagle, taller than her husband but as gaunt as he, in a satin gown of metallic blue, her attention divided equally between her visitors and the letter in her hand.

"My dear," the baron murmured, with a jaded bow.

There was a brief silence, and then that smile again. "And Dr Brahe, is he not with you?"

"Madam," Kepler burst out, "I have been cruelly used by that man. He it was urged me,
pleaded
with me to come here to Bohemia; I came, and he treats me as he would a mere apprentice!"

"You have had a falling out with our good Dane?" the baroness said, suddenly giving the Keplers all her attention; "that is unfortunate," and Regina, catching the rustle of that silkily ominous tone, leaned forward past her mother for a good look at this impressive large blue lady.

"I set before him," said Kepler, "I set before him a list of some few conditions which he must meet if I was to remain and work with him, for example I deman-I asked that is for separate quarters for my family and myself (that place out there, I swear it, is a madhouse), and that a certain quantity of food-"

Barbara darted forward-"And firewood!"

"And firewood, to be set aside expressly-"

"For our use, that's right."

"-For our, yes, use," blaring furiously down his nostrils. He pictured himself hitting her, felt in the roots of his teeth the sweet smack of his palm on a fat forearm. "I asked let me see I asked, yes, that he procure me a salary from the Emperor-"

"His majesty," the baron said hastily, "his majesty is… difficult."

"See, my lady, " Barbara warbled, "see what we are reduced to, begging for our food. And you were so kind when we first arrived here, accommodating us…"

"Yes," the baroness said thoughtfully.

"But," cried Kepler, "I ask you, sir, madam, are these unreasonable demands?"

Baron Hoffmann slowly sat down. "We met upon the matter yesterday," he said, looking at the hem of his wife's gown, "Dr Brahe, Dr Kepler and myself."

"Yes?" said the baroness, growing more aquiline by the moment. "And?"

"This!" cried Barbara, a very quack; "look at us, thrown out on the roadside!"

The baron pursed his lips. "Hardly,
gnädige Frau,
hardly so… so… Yet it is true, the Dane is angry. "

"Ah," the baroness murmured; "why so?"

Drops of rain fingered the sunlit window. Kepler shrugged. "
I
do not know. "Barbara looked at him. "… I never said, " he said, "that the Tychonic system is misconceived, as he charges! I… I merely observed of one or two weaknesses in it, caused I believe by a too hasty acceptance of doubtful premises, that a bitch in a hurry will produce blind pups. " The baroness put a hand up quickly to trap a cough, which, had he not known her to be a noble lady fully conscious of the gravity of the moment, he might have taken for a snigger. "And anyway, it
is
misconceived, a monstrous thing sired on Ptolemy out of Egyptian Herakleides. He puts the earth, you see, madam, at the centre of the world, but makes the five remaining planets circle upon the sun! It works, of course, so far as appearances are concerned- but then you could put any one of the planets at the centre and still save the phenomena. "

"Save the..?" She turned to the baron to enlighten her. He looked away, fingering his chin.

"The phenomena, yes, " said Kepler. "But it's all a trick our Dane is playing, aimed at pleasing the schoolmen without entirely denying Copernicus-he knows it as well as I do, and I'm damned before I will apologise for speaking the plain truth!" He surged to his feet, choking on a sudden bubble of rage. "The thing, excuse me, the thing is simple: he is jealous of me, my grasp of our science-yes, yes," rounding on Barbara violently, though she had made no protest, "yes, jealous. Andfurther-more he is growing old, he's more than fifty-" the baroness's left eyebrow snapped into a startled arc "-and is worried for his future reputation, would have me ratify his worthless theory by forcing me to make it the basis of my work. But…" But there he faltered, and turned, listening. Music came from afar, the tune made small and quaintly merry by the distance. He walked slowly to the window, as if stalking some rare prize. The rain shower had passed, and the garden brimmed with light. Clasping his hands behind him and swaying gently on heel and toe he gazed out at the poplars and the dazzled pond, the drenched clouds of flowers, that jigsaw of lawn trying to reassemble itself between the stone balusters of a balcony. How innocent, how inanely lovely, the surface of the world! The mystery of simple things assailed him. A festive swallow swooped through a tumbling flaw of lavender smoke. It would rain again. Tumty turn. He smiled, listening: was it the music of the spheres? Then he turned, and was surprised to find the others as he had left them, attending him with mild expectancy. Barbara moaned softly in dismay. She knew, she knew that look, that empty, amiably grinning mask with the burning eyes of a busy madman staring through it. She began rapidly to explain to the baron and his pernous lady that our chief worry, our chief worry is, you see… and Kepler sighed, wishing she would not prattle thus, like a halfwit, her tiny mouth wobbling. He rubbed his hands and advanced from the window, all business now. "I shall," blithely drowning Barbara's babbling, which ran on even as it sank, a flurry of bubbles out of a surprised fish-mouth-"I shall write a letter, apologise, make my peace," beaming from face to face as if inviting applause. The music came again, nearer now, a wind band playing in the palace grounds. "He will summon me back, I think, yes; he will understand, " for what did any of that squabbling matter, after all? "A new start!-may I borrow a pen, madam?"

By nightfall he had returned to Benatek. He delivered his apology, and swore an oath of secrecy, and Tycho gave a banquet, music and manic revels and the fatted calf hissing on a spit. The noise in the dining hall was a steady roar punctuated by the crimson crash of a dropped platter or the shriek of a tickled serving girl. The spring storm that had threatened all day blundered suddenly against the windows, shivering the reflected candlelight. Tycho was in capital form, shouting and swilling and banging his tankard, nose aglitter and the tips of his straw-coloured moustaches dripping. To his left Tengnagel sat with a proprietory arm about the waist of the Dane's daughter Elizabeth, a rabbity girl with close-cropped ashen hair and pink nostrils. Her mother, Mistress Christine, was a fat fussy woman whose twenty years of concubinage to the Dane no longer outraged anyone save her. Young Tyge was there too, sneering, and the Dane's chief assistant Christian Longberg, a priestly pustular young person, haggard with ambition and self-abuse. Kepler was angry again. He wanted not this mindless carousing, but simply to get his hands on-right away, now, tonight-Tycho's treasure store of planet observations. "You set me the orbit of Mars, no let me speak, you set me this orbit, a most intractable problem, yet you give me no readings for the planet; how, I ask, let me speak please, how I ask am I to solve it, do you imagine?"