Midnight Fire (A Jagiellon Mystery Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Map

  Cast of Characters

  Rules of Pronunciation

  Glossary of Terms

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Historical Note Thank you

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  MIDNIGHT FIRE

  P.K. Adams

  A JAGIELLON MYSTERY 2

  Midnight Fire

  Copyright © 2020 by Patrycja Podrazik

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN 978-1-7323611-7-1 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-7323611-6-4 (ebook)

  Cover designed by Jennifer Quinlan

  Map by Deborah Bluestein

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  Published by Iron Knight Press

  www.pkadams-author.com

  Twitter @pk_adams

  Facebook P.K. Adams Author

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  RULES OF PRONUNCIATION

  Relevant to This Story

  Letter group “dzi” is pronounced like j in John (thus the name Radziwiłł is pronounced Raj-viw)

  Letter w is pronounced like v in vat (thus the river Wisła is pronounced “Viswa,” and Wawel Castle is pronounced “Vavel”)

  Letter ł is pronounced like w in water (thus the name Radziwiłł is pronounced Raj-viw)

  Letter j is pronounced like y in young (thus the name Jakub is pronounced “Yah-khub”)

  Letter g is pronounced like gh in ghost (thus Jagiellon is pronounced “Ya-ghye-lohn”)

  Letter e is pronounced like eh in egg (thus the name of the village of Niepołomice is pronounced “Nye-poh-woh-mitseh”)

  Common diphthongs

  Sz is pronounced like sh in shop (thus the name Dantyszek is pronounced “Dan-tysh-ekh”)

  Cz is pronounced like ch in check

  Ch is pronounced like h in hang

  Rz is pronounced zhe

  “-cki”: a common ending of Polish last names is pronounced “tsky”, unlike in English the c is not silent.

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  Bibones et comedones (tipplers and devourers)—a sixteenth-century semi-clandestine society of courtiers who devoted to their spare time to eating, drinking, and lovemaking. In addition to these activities, they produced poems and pamphlets that satirized life at the Jagiellon court. Their members play a prominent role in the first book of this series, Silent Water.

  Hetman—supreme commander of the army.

  Starosta—senior administrative official of crown territory or district, similar to county sheriff.

  Szlachta (pronounced shlah-ta)—lower nobility, equivalent of England’s landed gentry.

  Wojewoda (pronounced voy-e-voda)—chief administrative officer of a province, a territorial governor.

  Złoty (pronounced zwoti)—Polish currency unit dating back to the fourteenth century. The name translates as “golden.”

  Note on forms of address

  Pan—Sir. Equivalent of Italian “Signore.” Note: like all Polish nouns, it is subject to several conjugations, hence the form “Panie” that appears occasionally in the text. That happens when someone is addressed directly (vocative case) as opposed to being referred to in the third person (nominative case).

  Pani—Lady, if the woman is married or widowed. Equivalent of Italian “Signora.”

  Panna—Lady, if the woman is unmarried. Equivalent of Italian “Signorina.”

  CHAPTER 1

  On the Road to Kraków, Early June 1545

  We set out from Bari on a journey that we hoped would save our son’s life toward the end of May in the year 1545.

  It was altogether different from the grand progress I had made twenty-seven years earlier as a lady-in-waiting to the young Bona Sforza, heiress to the Duchies of Bari and Milan. She was on her way to Kraków to meet her new husband, Zygmunt, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. We stopped in Venice to watch carnival festivities, stayed in Graz long enough for a hunt, and sojourned at the court in Vienna, where Emperor Maximilian treated us to a feast in a manner that befitted a future queen. At our final destination we were greeted by cannons booming from the city walls, cheering crowds, and the entire Polish court awaiting us outside of Wawel Cathedral.

  This time, we rode in a simple carriage as part of a train of merchants, stopping overnight at travelers’ inns, eating the watery stews they all seemed to offer or our own provisions or whatever unspoilt food we managed to buy in villages along the way. But I was glad of the swift pace, for each day brought us closer to the renowned physicians in Kraków who might be able to help our ailing boy.

  Glancing at Giulio as we rattled over yet another rutted road, I shuddered to see how frail he appeared. The recurring fevers that afflicted him, starting when he turned four, had stunted his growth and weakened his limbs. He did not look like a boy of nine. How could he? He spent more time in bed than playing outdoors with other children. As a result, his skin had a pale, almost translucent quality, an effect only enhanced by his dark brown eyes with flecks of amber. Those eyes, so like his father’s, glowed unnaturally large and bright in his thin face. My old friend Lucrezia Alifio, who still served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Bona, insisted that the royal physicians in Poland could lessen his suffering, perhaps even cure him. Watching Giulio now, I hoped that this journey would prove her right, for none of the Italian doctors we consulted had succeeded in helping him. I also hoped that Lucrezia told the truth when she wrote that Her Majesty would be glad to see me and happy to help my family in our predicament.

  “Do you know what I’d love to see when we get to Konary, Caterina?” Sebastian Konarski, my husband of twenty-five years, said from his seat across the rocking carriage. “ I’d love to see the woods still as thick as they were when I was growing up. We’ll need a lot of timber for the repairs,” he added, appraising the large pines, ashes, and beeches rolling past our carriage windows.

  It is not a thing one would normally admit, but the inheritance of Sebastian’s family estate after the death of his elder brother Feliks was a godsend to us under current circumstances. Just five miles outside of Kraków, it gave us a place to live and an income to enable us to stay in Poland for as long as necessary to see Giulio restored to health. Sebastian’s hopes for abundant wood had a high chance of coming true. Northern Europe was, after all, the land of endless forests. The woods we were traveling through had started in the Austrian territories and continued through Bohemia, which, according to the calculations of the leader of our caravan, should be coming to an end soon. Any moment now, we would cross the borders of the Kingdom of Poland, with less than a hundred miles separating us from Kraków.

  The day was hot, but the broad canopy of leaves kept our path in a pleasant shade. After a while,
the buzzing of insects and the twittering of birds soothed Giulio and his nurse Cecilia into asleep. Giulio curled up on the same seat Sebastian occupied, and Cecilia’s head lolled on her ample chest next to me. After ten days on the road, with fitful nights tossing and turning on uncomfortable pallets and long hours of riding in a carriage with little to relieve the tedium of the journey, I rejoiced to see them able to sleep at last.

  “It surprised me to hear that Feliks let the estate decline so much,” I said, referring to the letter we had received from Konary’s caretaker two weeks before our departure from Bari. We wasted no time in making our decision, putting our affairs in order, and setting out for the north. “But after the death of his son and then his wife,” I added on reflection, “perhaps it’s no wonder he lost interest in managing his affairs.” I winced, realizing that, wrapped up in my own family’s troubles, I had not stopped to consider the blows life had delivered to my late brother-in-law. His only son, Adam, thirsting after a soldierly adventure, had joined the army of Jan Tarnowski and headed east to the Grand Duchy to fight alongside the Lithuanians against Moscow. During the battle of Homel in 1535, the boy, only eighteen years old, was struck by an arrow and killed.

  “Feliks never recovered from Adam’s death.” Sebastian’s eyes strayed to Giulio with a concern I often saw in them but which he almost never expressed aloud, for fear of adding to my own worries. I had once appreciated his restraint, but these days it seemed like a way to avoid talking as we had in the early years of our marriage—about everything, happy and sad, honestly and openly. I missed those days.

  The carriage rocked and shuddered as the wheels hit a rut, and the jolt awoke Cecilia with a start. She opened her eyes, blinked, saw that her charge was still asleep, and promptly nodded off again. I turned to the window, where the forest appeared to be thinning. More sunlight streamed through the tops of the trees, most of which looked like pines. I could not mistake those tall, narrow silhouettes. A sudden breeze hit my nostrils with the pungent odor of sap, which trickled in long rivulets down the ancient trunks.

  As the air filled with that sharp, invigorating scent, I recalled with astonishing clarity the March morning when one of Queen Bona’s maids of honor, who had been in my charge, was executed outside the royal jail for murdering two men of the court. In the moments before the executioner raised the axe, just such a breeze swooped across the river. Cooler than today’s, it too smelled of pine and spring and life. In all the years I lived in the south of Italy, I had seldom encountered that aroma. I did not realize, until now, how its absence had helped me bury the past for so long. But inhaling that fragrance brought back the memories of the injustice Helena Lipińska had suffered and the revenge she took, for which she paid with her life. I knew even before leaving Bari that my return to Poland would force me to revisit that dreadful winter of 1519, but I had not expected it to be so soon or so sudden. The weight that settled on my chest told me that I had overcome my guilt and grief, but not completely. They lurked deep inside me and would last the rest of my life.

  We sat for a long time in silence as I contemplated my son’s sleeping face and the sheen of sweat on his forehead. I hoped he was simply exhausted, but I feared another bout of fever. After so many days on the road, we were all ready to stretch our limbs and sleep in a comfortable bed, without having to rise at dawn to spend hours jolted about in a carriage.

  At length we entered a sizable village, with solid, limewashed cottages, busy animal pens, and sounds of clanging metal coming from a smithy somewhere out of sight. After the tiny hamlets of Bohemia, where ramshackle huts were shared with skinny pigs and scrawny chickens, and where people barely eked out a living farming small plots of land, this was the surest sign that we were now in Poland.

  “One thing is certain,” I said, feeling a new surge of hope. “The countryside has never been so prosperous as it is now due to the queen’s reforms.” When we left a quarter of a century earlier, Bona had just set out to overhaul the outdated farming practices, to build roads and bridges, all of which would in due course bring a significant increase in revenue for the Crown and make the Jagiellons’ fortune one of the largest in Europe. In Bari, which she continued to rule through her representatives, we had only ever heard of her successes. Now we could see them with our own eyes. Perhaps we might even benefit from them.

  “It will be good for us, too, once we’re settled in Konary.” Sebastian’s words echoed my own thoughts.

  But I could not help sounding a cautionary note. “After we complete the repairs.”

  Sebastian leaned forward and took my hand in his, squeezing it briefly. “Don’t worry about that. Whatever the state of the buildings, I’ll do everything in my power to restore the estate to what it once was.” The fine lines around his eyes softened as he rubbed Giulio’s foot. It was a measure of the boy’s fatigue that he did not even stir.

  With a sting of longing for happier days, I wondered when Giulio had become the main recipient of my husband’s affection and caresses. I did not blame Sebastian. Our son’s poor health had long been our main preoccupation, leaving little time for ourselves and for each other. And in all fairness, whatever tenderness I missed from Sebastian, he probably missed it from me in equal measure. I sighed, setting the concerns about the state of our marriage aside for later, because whatever he said, I did worry about the renovations, especially their cost.

  To save money, Sebastian would supervise the repairs and even spoke of doing some of the work himself. But he was a gentleman by birth who had spent his youth as a royal secretary at the court in Kraków. True, in Italy we had farmed almonds, but Sebastian only managed the estate and kept its books, so the prospect of him doing manual labor made me uneasy. Still, I drew comfort from the calm assurance with which he seemed to approach this new challenge. Having no other choice, I decided to trust in Providence.

  * * *

  We found Konary’s buildings in better shape than I feared. On examining its books, however, it became clear that for years the farm had generated barely enough income to cover basic upkeep. We would have to spend much of the money we had brought with us to fix leaky roofs and broken shutters, replace rusty hinges on the doors of the grain storehouse, and clean out the barn occupied by a handful of animals, although large enough to accommodate a hundred head of cattle.

  A few days after our arrival, we took the estate’s only carriage—its chipped paint and worn wheels suggesting that it, too, would require replacement soon—and drove to Kraków. We wanted to visit Sebastian’s sister Emilia, who lived with her prosperous merchant husband on a street not far from Wawel Hill.

  As we emerged from the wooded tract, I gasped at the familiar panorama of the city with its slanted red roofs. Kraków had spread out in every direction since the last time I saw it. But the proud bulk of the castle above the silver ribbon of the Wisła still dominated the capital, timeless as the river itself. Its shape had changed somewhat due to the demolition of the east wing in the 1520s and subsequent new construction; yet it was still the Wawel I remembered, encircled by a stone wall that looked gray in the rain and almost white in the sun, with the copper-domed bell towers of the cathedral watching over the royal residence.

  The castle held a special and conflicted place in my heart. Within its walls, terrible crimes had been committed on my watch, lives and futures destroyed. But I had also met Sebastian there and begun a new, unhoped-for, and happy chapter in my life. I looked at him, and only then did I realize tears were rolling down my cheeks. He smiled, but I saw a shadow of emotion pass over his face. For him, too, this journey brought a mixture of joy and grief.

  As we approached, the bells of the city’s churches rang out, but within the gates the subdued atmosphere in the streets struck me. As a crossroads of major trading routes and the kingdom’s capital, Kraków was normally loud and bustling, but on that beautiful early summer day a strange hush hung over it. People seemed to move slowly and talk in soft voices. When they turned their faces
in our direction, I saw worry lines or tears swiftly dabbed away.

  Sebastian and I exchanged a puzzled look. The bells rang more loudly now, as they once had for Bona’s arrival. But this time I heard something somber in their sound; their rhythm lacked the energy and joy I remembered. The slow and mournful cadence sent a shiver through me. Could it be for the king? Zygmunt—now nicknamed Stary, the Old, to distinguish him from his namesake and heir—was approaching his eightieth year and fast declining, according to Lucrezia.

  “I hope it’s not for His Majesty’s soul,” I said to Sebastian, who had served in Zygmunt’s household during those dark events of 1519 and 1520.

  “Me too,” he replied, but I could see that he was worried. He liked and respected the old king, and I knew that Zygmunt’s demise would cause him a great deal of sadness.