Agrippa corresponded with many great men in Europe—with the king of England, with the learned abbot and student of magic Johannes Trithemius up until his death, and nowadays even with Luther—but not with Leonardo da Vinci. It was a circumstance that had always vexed him a little, but the old master simply didn’t seem to care for Agrippa’s scholarly discourse. It was a pity, but there was nothing he could do about it.
I hope he never finds out what I’ve done.
Agrippa had told Johann precisely what the man with the red cap and the rooster’s feather had told him to say. During the night of Johann’s fit, someone had knocked on Agrippa’s door. An ice-cold breeze and the smell of sulfur had wafted into his house along with the man. He had promised that Agrippa would win the trial if he gave Johann this one piece of information.
There is a man who complains of symptoms similar to yours. His name is Leonardo da Vinci.
Agrippa knew neither whether this information was true nor what the man hoped to achieve by having it shared with Johann. And he didn’t want to know why Judge Leonard was found with a broken neck the following morning, or why his wide-open eyes had looked as if he had seen the devil himself. He knew only one thing: two nights ago, evil had come to his house. He had smelled its breath and had been enormously relieved when the man left again.
All his theories had turned out to be correct. But this time the scholar couldn’t find any joy in the fact. At least he had won the trial. And his renown would grow—perhaps they would still speak of him in several hundred years as one of the most intelligent men of his time.
We are more alike than you think, Johann Georg Faustus.
He paused outside the door to the dining room, his hand resting on the doorknob. He raised the hand and sniffed at his fingers, as if he could still smell the sulfur. For hours after he’d shaken hands with the man, Agrippa’s hand had hurt as if it was burned.
We have a pact, Heinrich Agrippa. Never forget.
He truly liked the doctor. There was no one he could engage in more interesting conversations with. And together they had saved a woman accused of witchcraft from the pyre—the first lawyers to ever achieve such a thing. Well, with a little help. Agrippa winced as if a cold breeze had come over him. Suddenly the expression advocatus diaboli took on a whole new meaning.
But despite their similarities, there was one decisive difference between him and the doctor. Johann had no family. And Agrippa’s family was sacred to him.
The man with the rooster’s feather had made it very clear which child might next be found beneath a bridge with his throat ripped.
Agrippa opened the door and smiled when he saw his wife and the small, only just four-year-old Paul sitting at the table. What good was all the wisdom, all the knowledge, in the world if there was no one to love and no one who loved you back?
“Papa,” called the boy, holding out his arms.
“Let us eat, Elsbeth,” Agrippa said softly and joined his family at the table. “I am starving.”
He folded his hands in prayer and asked his son to say the daily psalm from the Old Testament. Despite his young age, the boy recited the lines with a clear, sometimes halting voice, and the great scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim had tears in his eyes.
Act II
The River of Kings
6
GRETA LIVED THROUGH THE FOLLOWING DAYS AND WEEKS as if she’d been reborn. She came to view the last few years of her life in a different light. Her childhood, which had been nothing more than faint recollections overshadowed by blank nothingness, now seemed to her like a deep, shady valley waiting to be explored.
She rode beside the man who for years used to be her teacher, friend, and protector. But he was also her father, and the man responsible for her mother’s death. He was so familiar to her, and yet she felt like she hardly knew him at all—perhaps less than ever.
“So many wasted opportunities to tell me the truth,” she said to Johann one day as they rode side by side, Karl straggling behind. “Many times I saw in your eyes that you were keeping something from me. I thought it was to protect me from . . . from the terrible things that happened at Nuremberg.”
“And that’s the truth,” Johann said. “You were just fourteen, Greta. You were deeply disturbed for weeks. Karl and I thought it better not to stir up your memories.”
“I’m twenty years old now! How long were you planning to wait? I think you were just too gutless.”
Greta tried hard to understand why he had kept the truth from her for so long. She thought he probably had meant to protect her, at least in the beginning. But she couldn’t forgive him the long silence entirely, not him and not Karl, who had known all along. And yet she traveled to France with them.
She knew her reasons for that decision: she went because her father might die soon, and he was all the family she had, and because Karl was her only friend. And most of all because Johann was making good on his promise to tell her more about her mother, her childhood, Valentin, and also more about herself. Johann was a good storyteller who knew how to save part of the tale for the next day, and the next, and so on.
Their journey led them west toward France, where Johann hoped to learn more about his disease and the curse. They were on their way to a man Greta had
