OD by Karl Hans Strobl and translated by Joe E Bandel

Chapter 6

The lord of Reisenberg Castle had been ennobled.

His king, the King of Württemberg, had lifted him from plain citizenry to the rank of baron. His youthful attempt to flee to Tahiti, for which he’d been imprisoned at Hohenasperg, was forgiven and forgotten. He’d been awarded the Royal Württemberg Crown Order, named an honorary citizen of Stuttgart, and now, back home, his contributions to science, especially its practical applications, were deemed so great that he could rightly be made Baron von Reichenbach.

The newly minted baron occasionally said it meant nothing to him, just something for others, but perhaps it was why he hosted this grand gathering today. This wasn’t openly declared or even hinted at, yet the guests likely thought as much when they arrived, one by one, and saw the new baronial crest carved in stone above the castle entrance.

Reisenberg Castle was originally a Jesuit country house, later acquired by Count Kobenzl, whose name gradually became tied to both hill and castle among the people. Now the old count’s crest above the entrance had been chipped away and in its place, the Reichenbach crest had been set.

“Is Reichenbach a Rosicrucian?” Professor Schrötter asks, pausing with Court Councillor Reißnagel before the door.

“Why?” the Councillor’s wife wonders.

“Don’t you see the cross with roses on the crossbars in his crest?”

“Rosicrucian—what’s that?” the Councillor’s wife asks, a slender, delicate lady with translucent pale cheeks and ever-dreamy, searching eyes.

“Rosicrucians?” her husband explains leisurely. “They’re an order, a society. They’re said to possess remarkable secrets.”

“If Reichenbach has a secret,” Professor Schrötter smiles, “it’s how to make money.”

Reißnagel chuckles. “Think so, my dear friend? It’s not that simple with the earning. He earns plenty, sure, but he’s got passions that devour money. And is the Ternitz ironworks really so profitable? You know, Reichenbach does me the honor of asking my advice now and then—on business matters, of course, not science…” He chuckles again. The Councillor’s wife hasn’t taken her eyes off the crest. “And the star in the bottom right, with arrows shooting out?”

“Those must be the meteorites, the shooting stars,” Professor Schrötter says after some thought, “that Reichenbach deals with.”

“Are the Hungarian ones included too?” Reißnagel chuckles. The councillor chuckles, and then the two men laugh in shared malicious glee.

“How’s it really going with that?” the councillor asks then, as they finally enter the garden hall and hand their coats to the servants. “What does science say about it?”

“Well, the matter has turned into a thorough embarrassment. Reichenbach has misfired once. The so-called meteorite fall in Hungary has become a fiasco for him. He calculated three hundred fifty thousand million little stones and claimed that our mountains, in part, so to speak, fell from the sky. To the Neptunian and Plutonian mountain formations, he added the Jovian ones, as he calls them. And it turned out that his Hungarian meteorites are ordinary bean ores, which have nothing to do with the sky and occur in masses on Earth. But against the opinion of the Court Mineral Cabinet, he sticks to his view. He has a thick skull.”

“Yes, he does,” the councillor confirms. “He’s a strange man altogether. A clear head, that you have to admit, but sometimes his imagination plays a trick on him. Imagination is something for poets and such folk, but not for officials, and certainly not for scholars.” And then, with a meaningful glance at his wife, he adds: “Too much imagination and enthusiasm is not for us ordinary mortals anyway.” Yes, imagination certainly holds no power over Councillor Reißnagel; his head looks like a well-ordered registry, everything filed by shelf numbers in compartments, and his rounded little belly guarantees the thoroughly earthly direction of his life philosophy.

“There are so many people here,” the Councillor’s wife says anxiously. “I should’ve stayed home.” She doesn’t handle such crowds of bodies well; a disagreeable feeling rises from the haze, a mix of human breath and various odors making her restless. She can’t quite express it, but it’s anything but comfortable.

Then the rising waves of social bustle separate them. There are indeed many people in the cheerful garden hall and adjoining rooms, and Schrötter spots Reichenbach’s famous guest, Professor Liebig—he must go greet him.

To Councillor Reißnagel and his wife joins their house doctor, the young Dr. Eisenstein. He kisses the gracious lady’s hand and inquires about her health. “That’s another of Reichenbach’s passions,” the councillor says. “Inviting so many people. He thinks he has to emulate Baron Jacquin, who for thirty or forty years gathered everyone in Vienna with name or reputation. But the heathen money that costs!” With that, he takes a plate from the servant appearing before him, scoops goose liver pâté from the silver dish, and secures a glass of wine on the nearby console table. “Who’s that young man over there talking to Ottane?”

Dr. Eisenstein can provide the answer. The young man with the laughing face, the lion’s mane, and the audacious tie is, of course, a painter, the painter Max Heiland, of whom so much is said nowadays, a genius, everyone wants to have themselves painted by him, a rat catcher after whom the women run, it is said that the noblest ladies are happy to be allowed to pose for him.

For geniuses, Councillor Reißnagel has only a contemptuous growl. “They may make money, but it’s all just hocus-pocus; geniuses are only a nuisance for a decent official, an unreliable element that one can’t trust. Genius and revolution, that somehow go together.” But then his small eyes sparkle with a cold, amused light: “Aha, the host! And of course with Therese Dommayer!” He wipes his mouth, swallows the Nussberger—by the way, a splendid Nussberger—and steers eagerly toward Reichenbach and the actress.

“You haven’t given me an answer yet, gracious lady!” says Dr. Eisenstein, leading the councillor’s wife apparently casually from the garden hall onto the terrace.

Beneath the terrace, the forest mountains slope in wonderful lines down to the plain, and below lies the city with its thousands of lights in the soft darkness of the summer evening. City and river and mountains, peacefully merging, an intimate clinging together of human existence and landscape. But the young doctor isn’t interested in the landscape; he has spotted Hermine’s light blue dress outside. Was it an unfavorable coincidence or deliberate evasion that Hermine has always slipped away from his approach until now?

“I had another attack yesterday,” the councillor’s wife complains. “I almost sent for you. It was the same as always—first raging headaches, everything becomes so loud and glaring and stupefying, smells, lights, pressing in on me from all sides, hostile and threatening, then a twilight where I lose consciousness. When I came to, I was sitting on the bench in the garden. I don’t know how I got there.”

“We should try the magnetic cure after all,” the doctor says distractedly, searching with his eyes for the light blue dress he had just seen over there next to the large iron dog from the Blansko foundry.

“Oh, my husband won’t hear of it,” sighs Frau Pauline. “He thinks nothing of magnetic cures and says my whole illness is nothing but imagination.”

Meanwhile, Reichenbach has led the plump, always cheerful Therese Dommayer to the buffet and piled a mountain of sweets on her plate. Although Therese Dommayer is a great tragedienne, the greatest since time immemorial, in everyday life she has a great fondness for sweets. She saves the grand tones for the stage; her daily life is closer to a bright laugh, a silvery chime—it would be nice if this bell-like laughter could be heard more often, as much as possible.

“It’s quite nice in your city house too, dear Baron,” she says, “but out here, you first realize what a poor dog one is if you’re always stuck in the city. How divine nature is! We theater folk—good heavens, sometimes one wishes the devil would take the whole thing. She blinked slyly up at Reichenbach and then made a wistfully swelling face. “Oh yes, you rich folks have it good.”

A scent rose from her bare shoulders, Reichenbach bent slightly embarrassed over her: “Aren’t you richer than anyone else? Rich in your art! Rich in the admiration of your contemporaries!”

She swatted at Reichenbach with her hand and replied, chewing with full cheeks: “Contemporaries, you’re right, dear Baron, contemporaries! That’s just it. How long does the whole glory last? A few years. Then it’s over, especially for a woman. And then it goes: the mime’s posterity weaves no wreaths. Sometimes one has a longing: to be away from the world-famous stages, married, have a good husband, have children.” She tilted her head in an inimitable, flowing melancholy.

Councillor Reißnagel arrived at that moment very uninvited, no, he was not welcome at all. He wore his oiliest smile on his face, and his belly broadly pushed the air before him. He had to express his most submissive congratulations orally to the host for his elevation to baronial rank and for this illustrious company today, which in no way fell short of that of the late Baron Jacquin, indeed, on the contrary, through the presence of an artist like the divine Dommayer, gave a consecration often missed at Jacquin’s.

Therese nodded and calmly shoved a piece of cake into her mouth.

One could not say otherwise, the councillor continued, than that a lucky star hovered over this house, a downright Napoleonic lucky star. And if now, moreover, this process—this somewhat protracted and certainly costly process with the Salm heirs—should also come to a satisfactory conclusion…

“You know, of course,” Reichenbach interrupted, “that I won the first lawsuit…”

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The old count spoke without undue solemnity, yet Reichenbach sensed something weighty behind it, an inner shift toward something new.

“And what’ll happen here without you?” Reichenbach asked.

“It’s a blessing I have you, Reichenbach,” the old count replied, a wistful smile in his voice. “You don’t need me. It’s as good as if I were here. No task is too much.” Perhaps he truly smiled now, but it wasn’t visible.

“And tomorrow I’ll come by the factory again,” the old count added, then left.

Frau Paleczek appeared with a light and set the table, but as she brought the plates, she suddenly wailed and ran out. After a while, Susi brought the supper instead.

“Where’s Paleczek?” Reichenbach asked.

“She’s sitting in the kitchen crying,” Susi said, but then her composure broke too. She swallowed hard, abruptly sobbing, pulled her apron over her face, and ran out.

After poking at his food, Reichenbach rose and went to the children’s room. It had been fumigated with sulfur and juniper and sprayed with vinegar, still smelling sharp. The children lay in freshly made beds but weren’t asleep yet.

“Have you done your assignments for tomorrow?” Reichenbach asked, standing by Reinhold’s bed.

“Herr Futterknecht said,” Reinhold admitted hesitantly, “we don’t need to do assignments for tomorrow.”

“So!” Reichenbach said, nothing more. Then: “Good night! Sleep now.” He shook Reinhold’s hand, stroked Hermine’s forehead, and bent to kiss Ottane’s cheek.

The child flung her arms up, wrapped them around his neck, and pulled him close. “Papa,” she whispered, “I’ll always be good and love you so much.”

The painfully sweet tenderness of such clinging melted the stiffness in his limbs, and Reichenbach held Ottane close.

“I promised Mutti,” the child whispered, “and she’ll always come to me and tell me what the sky-sheep sing.”

“When did you promise Mutti?” Reichenbach asked, just as softly.

“Tonight—when she was with me.”

Tonight? Tonight? What could that mean, tonight? A sudden stab of dread seared his heart. Troubled, shaken to his core, Reichenbach tucked the blanket over Ottane and went to the next room, where the drawings for the new furnace still lay on the desk.

The furnace was built to Reichenbach’s plans and exceeded all expectations. It roared, spat, and glowed, producing nearly as much charcoal as the wood fed into it, and most importantly, showed no tendency for unexpected mischief.

Once it was running smoothly, Reichenbach decided it was time to restart the abandoned Doubrowitzer hammer mill. So he put it back into operation. Then he thought it was time to build a drilling rig. He built one, installing a drilling machine—naturally, the largest in Austria,and could bore cylinders over twelve feet in diameter.

Then Reichenbach turned to agriculture, starting, as agreed with the old count, to grow sugar beets, which naturally required a sugar factory. Since farming was foreign to him, with no innate knowledge of it, nothing became more important than beets and sugar. Some things succeeded, others failed, and years passed. Looking back on New Year’s Eve, it felt like each year had only begun the day before yesterday.

Meanwhile, the old count traveled the world, writing long letters to Reichenbach about his findings.

The old count wrote that he and Lord Rumford conducted experiments on gas expansion, especially gunpowder, nearly blowing themselves up once.

He wrote that he’d heard of Jenner’s vaccination discovery, calling it a magnificent invention, and was now vaccinating himself. He sent vaccine and needles to Reichenbach for free distribution, later adding a self-written treatise on cowpox.

Reichenbach replied that it was indeed a great invention, but the people wanted no part of it. Meanwhile, the workshop was now producing hydraulic presses, water-lifting, and conveyor machines.

The old count wrote that he was now studying the Loserdorre cattle breed disease, to be fought with iron-containing hydrochloric acid, and he sent a self-written pamphlet on it. He was also on the trail of a remedy for rabies, likely in a cyanide compound. But against cholera, no cure could be found.

Reichenbach replied that the Brno censor was a fool for banning the old count’s pamphlet. As for rabies, he begged him, for God’s sake, to be careful with sick animals. Meanwhile, he was shipping barrel hoops to Singapore, cookware to Haiti, iron stoves to Turkey, and creosote to America and Egypt. He said nothing about cholera or its treatment.

Sometimes the old count came home. His eyes had a restless glint; he laughed loudly, sat in Reichenbach’s sofa corner, smoked like a chimney, and drank heavy wine. He looked over the books, made a few tweaks to the machines, then vanished again for days. During one such visit, Forester Ruf came and said, “Can you believe, Herr Director, the old count stopped by my place today?”

“So what?” Reichenbach asked. Why shouldn’t the old count visit Ruf? He roamed the valley, dropping in on folks, asking how they were, urging them and their children to get vaccinated against smallpox. Sometimes he liked to wander the woods in shabby, tattered clothes, like a traveling journeyman, chatting with old peasant women to beg from those who didn’t know him, only to richly reward them afterward if they gave him something. Why shouldn’t he have visited Forester Ruf?

“Well, but,” Ruf said hesitantly, “you won’t believe it. He sent Schnuparek’s widow, who’s watching the child, away, and when I came in, he was crawling under the table with the girl on all fours, barking like a dog, fooling around. He brought her a big new doll, too, and when he left, I saw money tucked in the mirror frame.”

“Why shouldn’t he give you money, Ruf?” Reichenbach said. “He probably remembered being at your girl’s christening and how different things were then.”

“But I don’t know if I can keep it,” Ruf stammered, flushed with embarrassment. “It’s a whole hundred gulden. The old count must’ve made a mistake.”

“Keep it!” Reichenbach urged. Yes, great lords sometimes had such generous whims, and perhaps the old count, with his incognito wandering and gift-giving, took after a caliph who’d done similar things. But Ruf shouldn’t thank him—the old count didn’t like being reminded of his kindnesses.

The old count never stayed home long. He’d look around briefly, bring gifts for Reichenbach’s children, praise their growth, looks, and progress, discuss business and new scientific plans with Reichenbach. But Friederike Luise was never mentioned.

Then the old count went on his way again.

He wrote: He had been admitted to the Société Harmonique in Strasbourg, where new and remarkable insights into human nature were to be gained. He was increasingly convinced that hidden forces lay in the human soul—a mysterious agent, a magnetic fluid, stretching into the incomprehensible. Mesmerism was merely a casual name for it. The laws of this natural force were still little explored, and he urged Reichenbach to study it, believing his skill and persistence could greatly advance science.

Reichenbach, grappling with sugar beets and tenants, thought something irreverent. Mesmerism, he felt, was for people with too much time, and it could slide down his back. A few months later, a letter arrived: the old count had become politically suspect in Strasbourg, likely because the French government had once seized his ancestral castle in the Ardennes. Facing arrest, he chose to slip away, continuing his studies in Vienna.

Then no further news came until a thick letter arrived, addressed in a stranger’s hand with black seals. It stated that the old count Hugo zu Salm-Reifferscheidt had unexpectedly died in Vienna of a heart ailment, leaving his heirs, his father the old prince, the widow, and his son, the young count, instructed before his death to renew the general power of attorney for Herr Karl Reichenbach. The enclosed power of attorney was signed in accordance with the deceased’s wishes.

This was written not by the old prince, the widow, or the young count, but by the old princely lawyer, Dr. Gradwohl.

In the midst of a heated argument with the chief accountant over booking certain items, the door opens, and old Johann enters.

He had knocked, of course, but with the shouting as the general director defended his view, no one heard it. Old Johann hasn’t grown younger since that glorious night of the meteor fall—a parchment-stretched skeleton, cheekbones nearly piercing his skin, nose crooked over a sunken mouth, but his eyes hold a strange brightness, as if seeing things clearer than younger eyes, perhaps through them. He had accompanied the late old count on his travels, not always a restful job, judging by what Johann occasionally lets slip. At any rate, he returned to the Rajzter castle quite aged and worn, and for a while, he was allowed to rest and do nothing. But then they pulled him out again, and the young count said Johann was far from too old to do nothing but smoke his pipe and whistle to his starling. The young count, barely made prince after his grandfather’s death, brought a sharper edge to everything, tightening all that was loose.

And the young prince thought old Johann far from frail enough to eat his bread for free, still capable of sitting on the coachbox, so long as it wasn’t the wild Lipizzaners hitched up. He could still save them a second coachman.

Now old Johann announces that the carriage waits outside and that His Princely Grace requests General Director Reichenbach to Rajtzer Castle. He says “requests,” though His Princely Grace simply said: Reichenbach should come.

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Chapter 2

On the swing sat little Ottane, with Reinhold keeping it in motion.

“Higher!” Ottane squealed, kicking her thin legs. Her brother strained, stretching himself so that he could just barely touch the swing’s seat at its highest point with his fingertips.

“Now I’m flying!” Ottane crowed. “Now I’m flying into the sky, right through the clouds!”

“What do you see up there?” her brother asked, panting.

“I see lots of sheep on a green meadow. Nothing but—”white sheep. They have blue ribbons around their necks. No, some have red ones too. And they sing…”

“Sheep can’t sing,” Reinhold corrected.

“Oh, yes, the heavenly sheep can sing.” Ottane was indignant that Reinhold wouldn’t believe her sky-sheep could sing.

“If you talk such nonsense, you’ll have to get down,” said her brother, stopping the swing. “It’s Hermine’s turn now. Hermine!”

Hermine was kneeling in the grass by the flowerbed, holding a thick green seedpod in her hand. “Never mind,” she said, “I don’t want to.” She had other things to do; with a sharp little knife, she was already dissecting the elongated pod, carefully studying the arrangement of the snow-white, soft seeds in their tiny cradles.

Ottane obediently climbed off the now-still swing and walked slowly, a bit sadly, to her sister. “Is that why you don’t want to swing?” she asked. “There’s nothing better than flying like that.”

“Look!” Hermine held up the sliced pod to her sister. “See how beautifully the seeds lie side by side.” She pursued the life and growth of the plant world with passionate zeal, dissecting stems, flowers, and roots; her neatly kept herbarium had reached a tally of about five hundred specimens.

“No,” Ottane disagreed, “the whole thing is much nicer.” With a faint pang of regret, Ottane watched for a while as Hermine’s knife continued its work of destruction. Then she put her arm around her sister’s neck: “There’s a huge cake with a seven on it, and Friederike. And whole mountains of gingerbread, sooo high, and candied calamus and preserved nuts—”

“Father’s coming,” Reinhold said, standing by the girls, his voice carrying a note of warning. The children looked up, a ripple of tension and composure running through their bodies.

Reichenbach came through the garden, bringing with him the gravity of life, judicial sternness, responsibility, duty, and a faint unease about the incomprehensible. Only Ottane ran to her father, wrapping her arms around his knees. The other two stood stiff and alert, an unyielding will casting a shadow over them.

“Have you done your lessons?” Reichenbach asked, and the children nodded, Reinhold with a slightly guilty conscience, for two of his six math problems remained unsolved.

“Is Mother back from church yet?” he asked further. No, the christening party hadn’t returned yet; but the old countess had sent a ham and Linzer cookies, Ottane reported, and Frau Paleczek had arrived, putting on a large white apron and a white cap, looking so funny with her dark face, like a fly in buttermilk, Ottane thought.

Reichenbach stroked Ottane’s blond head, listening for a moment to the clatter of plates in the large room on the first floor, where the christening feast was being prepared, and to the booming voice of Frau Paleczek, who had taken command over the maids.

“She sent us out to the garden,” Ottane confessed,— “She doesn’t need us; we’re just in her way.”

Now Reichenbach noticed the sliced seedpod in Hermine’s hands. “Well done!” he praised. “What’s the plant called? Iris germanica. Repeat!”

“Iris germanica,” Hermine recited obediently.

“You’ll write down what you found while dissecting it. The work will be on my desk by noon tomorrow.”

“Father, what’s that?” Ottane asked, tapping the small linen sack Reichenbach held in his hand.

“Well, that’s something special.” Reichenbach lowered the heavy sack to the ground, reached in, and pulled out a black stone. It looked like a dark-brown coal with a host of strange bumps and hollows, as if it were made of a dark, molten glass fused into a lump. At the fracture, it was blue-gray, speckled with iron-gray and yellow flecks.

“What is it?” Reinhold asked eagerly.

“It’s a stone that fell from the sky,” Reichenbach said. When he spoke to the children, his Swabian dialect was scarcely noticeable. “And when it hit the Earth’s air, it shattered. That was a few days ago, at night, but you were all asleep, of course, and didn’t hear a thing. The foolish people say it’s a sign and means trouble. But it was just a stone—granted, a stone from the sky. And we’ve been searching for the pieces, hundreds of them, scattered in an elliptical— pattern, like a strewn field. The smaller pieces fall almost straight down, while the larger ones continue their slanted path. Remember that, Reinhold—you’ll work on a problem about it, and it’ll be on my desk by noon tomorrow. What you see on the outside here is a fusion crust. That comes from the tremendous speed and heat. And what’s inside the stone? I’ve already examined some of the pieces in the laboratory and found various minerals—nickel, labradorite, hornblende, chromite. Reinhold, what is chromite made of?”

Reinhold stared at the stone, a heavy unease sealing his lips. Chromite, my God, chromite—what’s it made of? He stayed silent.

“You don’t know,” said his father, his eyes hardening. “You don’t know. You’ll know it tomorrow and write it out a hundred times on my desk. It’s remarkable that these stones contain iron compounds not found in nature, but which we produce artificially in metallurgy.”

Reichenbach didn’t get a chance to expound further on these curious iron compounds, for now the sound of wheels rolling on the road was heard, and then the decorated carriages came into view, bringing the christening party back from the church.

Frau Paleczek poked her dark face, framed by the white cap, out of the open window and shouted, “Jesus, they’re already here!”

The children felt stones lift from their hearts, far larger and heavier than the ones that fell from the sky. They breathed a sigh of relief and ran to meet the guests. But Hermine still found time to give Reinhold a poke in the ribs. “Write it out a hundred times, ugh!” And Reinhold returned the poke with interest.

Ottane trailed behind slowly, lost in thought. A small tumult had erupted in her mind. Who was throwing these stones from the sky? On her green heavenly meadow with the singing sheep, there were no such black, ugly stones.

The christening feast was loud and merry. That Frau Friederike Luise Reichenbach had taken on the role of godmother for the seventh Ruf child turned the modest forester’s family event into a matter of significance, granting the father honors that dazed and delighted him long before the wine, provided by the old count from his cellar, took effect.

The pastor Mandrial was there, along with Dr. Roskoschny, the chemist Mader, and a dozen other senior officials from the Salm works, and, of course, the old count himself. He sat to the right of the hostess, and to her left, between him and the pastor, the proud father of today’s christened child swelled with a sense of boundless bliss and importance. He was clearly at a pinnacle of his existence, taking great care to match the refined manners and skill of the distinguished company around him. In doing so, he completely forgot the worries about his wife, who had been lying in high fever since the birth of the child, and the ominous head-shaking with which Dr. Roskoschny had stood at the sick woman’s bedside.

Reichenbach had taken his place between the chemist Mader and Dr. Roskoschny, who was Meineke’s successor as the doctor in Lettowitz. They were a welcome audience for his current obsession with meteors—their origins, orbits, and composition—especially since, alongside the already-convinced Mader, the doctor was a skeptic who still needed persuading.

At the lower end of the table sat the children next to their tutor, a poor, peasant-looking philosophy student named Futterknecht, whose name seemed to prophetically chart his life’s course. They were perfectly well-behaved and modest, but their eyes lingered with growing longing on the dish of the old count’s Linzer Kränzerln nearby, waiting for the moment it would be served.

But Frau Paleczek, midwife, corpse-washer, and indispensable fixture at every festive feast far and wide, kept bringing out new platters of roasted and baked poultry from the kitchen. Her quick eyes darted over the table and guests, and her face—blackened since time immemorial by some ailment—gave no hint of when she would finally allow them to move on to the long-prepared pastries.

“That’s how it is,” Reichenbach said, clapping the doctor on the shoulder. “You can believe me, and once I’ve thoroughly studied the material, I’ll write a major treatise on meteors that’ll push science forward a bit.”

The doctor shook his head, unable to accept what Reichenbach was explaining. “Couldn’t it have been an optical illusion?” he asked cautiously, with the tenacity of his old-school training, reluctant to abandon an opinion without proof.

“Optical illusion, please, Doctor,” Reichenbach snapped. “The old count saw it, and I saw it, and we were only on the second bottle of Forster Hofstück—where’s the illusion supposed to come from?”

The doctor stared gravely ahead. “For now, it looks like the common folk with their superstitions might be right.”

“Please, don’t talk like that as a man of science!”

“Haven’t you read about the epidemic in Hamburg?”

“What’s Hamburg got to do with us?”

“And last week it started in Prague. And since yesterday, I’ve had a case in Lettowitz that seems highly suspicious to me.”

Reichenbach paused. “What exactly do you mean?”

The doctor hesitated to say the word, glanced around, and then said very quietly, “Cholera! But please,” he added quickly, “keep it to yourself. The symptoms aren’t entirely clear yet. We don’t want to cause alarm among the people prematurely.”

A gray shadow fell over the table and the guests, a hollow-eyed specter in a blood-flecked shroud grinned palely through the loud, carefree merriment.

But Reichenbach wouldn’t let himself be daunted. “Oh, come off it,” he said brusquely, “with your cholera! In summer, it’s just stomachache season—people gobble cherries and currants and unripe apples, then gulp down raw milk, and there’s your cholera. Besides, if medicine was worth anything, it would’ve found a cure for it by now.”

“The best remedy for cholera is not catching it,” the doctor admitted. “Careful eating, plenty of fresh air, and staying away from the sick.”

“That’s not much wisdom to boast about,” Reichenbach scoffed. “And the best remedy for childbed fever is not having children!” Then he added, “How’s our Frau Ruf doing?”

“I hope we’ll pull her through,” Roskoschny said curtly.

A gesture from the hostess drew Reichenbach away from further attacks on medicine. It reminded him of his duties. With a sharp tap of his knife against his glass, Reichenbach called for attention and stood to toast the christened child and her proud father. After tossing in a few more jocular remarks about Ruf’s remarkable vigor and the blessings of his marriage, he urged those present to raise their glasses to the father and little Friederike.

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