“How touching.” Scharley, dismounting, winked at Reynevan. “They haven’t seen each other for half a day. Their yearning, as you see, was almost the death of them. What joy to be reunited after being so long apart.”

“You, Scharley,” began Reynevan, “will probably never be able to understand what—”

He didn’t finish. Another member of the fair sex emerged from a turf-covered cellar. A more mature one. More mature in every curve, grace and inch, one might say. A Galatea or an Amphitrite, judging from her face and figure, a Pomona or a Ceres, judging from the basket of apples and cabbages she was carrying.

“Were you saying something?” asked Scharley with the face of an innocent.

“No. Nothing.”

“I’m glad to see you, m’Lord Reynevan,” said Mistress Blažena Pospíchalová, the widow of Mr. Pospíchal, once Reynevan’s landlady in the house on the corner of Štěpán and Na Rybníčku Streets in Prague’s New Town. “Make haste, gentlemen. Dinner will soon be served.”

Spring is coming, Reynevan observed, walking beside Scharley along a waterlogged causeway. Water dripped from the bare trees. There was a smell of wet earth. And of something rotten.

“I arrived in Prague in the late autumn of last year, after the Austrian plundering raid,” said Scharley. “I wintered at Samson’s house. It has never been especially peaceful in the capital, but now, in the spring, it has become quite turbulent. And damned dangerous. A seething cauldron, one might say. The reason was the negotiations Prokop the Shaven conducted with Sigismund—”

“Prokop is parleying with Sigismund?”