As she stood above him Heinrich resolved to make Ludmila his concubine.

Less and less did he find himself saying to himself, “You mustn’t touch her, Heinrich, no, no, she is not to be touched.”

There remained however the difficulty of language, for she spoke hardly a word of German, and he not one word of Czech.

The next Wednesday, after Zikmund had opened and closed one of his veins, the Prince looked at Ludmila, pointed to the contents of the bowl she was holding, and said with a warm smile the Czech word for “blood.” He’d rehearsed that all week, the astronomer told Leibniz that Heinrich had told him. “His pronunciation was perfect.” Zikmund was delighted; ever since the Emperor had moved to Prague it had been a source of some tension that neither he nor his family spoke the language of the locals; now, the Prince had spoken his first word in their noble Slavic tongue, not only (as Prince Heinrich speculated that Zikmund must have felt) in Zikmund’s presence and in reference to his trade, but directed at his daughter. “She for her part did not know how to react,” the Prince said. “In the whites of the eyes which she cast frantically at her father one saw an entirely charming and wholly endearing social anxiety. Blood was nothing to her, but never before had Ludmila been addressed by royalty, and she had not the slightest idea how to respond! She had no fear of blood but a tremendous fear of repartee.” Her father uttered a few firm words to her and she turned back to the Prince, curtsied, and repeated the Czech for “blood.” “I said it again, and she said it again, blood, blood, blood, blood, back and forth, blood and blood, blood and blood, blood and blood, in Czech, Father,” Heinrich said. “What was interesting to me was that though we were saying the same word in the same language we obviously meant something quite different by it. Blood for me meant dynastic lineages, inheritances, and controversies of succession, it meant physical abnormalities and psychical irregularities, warfare and territorial losses, it meant this huge Habsburg jaw of mine (the fact that it is hard for me even to chew!) and this debilitating Habsburg madness of mine, the fact that it is hard for me even to think straight, it meant my mother’s inability to sleep and my father’s mechanical preoccupations, it meant what I share with my family and what I don’t share with them, what I share with my father and what I do not share with him, what I share with my sisters and what I don’t, what I can never share with them … That’s what I meant by blood. What I can’t share with Wilhelmina, what I can never, ever share with Katharina. How my sisters avoided inheriting our father’s madness and also avoided inheriting his jaw, except I suppose for Margaretha, who did get the jaw, yes, true, Greta got the jaw, she got Father’s jaw but not his madness, no, I do not think his madness. Ina and Willa, no madness no jaw, Greta, no madness yes jaw, I, yes madness yes jaw. When I say blood I mean my father’s madness, I mean my father’s jaw, I mean his crown and my head. That’s what blood meant for me. For Ludmila, however,” Prince Heinrich went on from the floor of the turret, cradling in his arms the astronomer’s father’s emptied-out automaton head, “blood was labor, blood was money, blood was shelter, blood was one’s livelihood, blood was just a substance that one handled in that family from the time one emerged from the womb, blood was what one worked with, what one dealt with, blood was what one did, a life lived in blood, around blood, with blood, a life bathed in blood. Blood was almost too ubiquitous in her life to mean anything at all, it’s just what life was, what the world was, the whole thing was blood! To ask Ludmila what blood meant would be like asking her what the world meant … What a goat is for a goatherd and salt for a salt miner, what the water is for fish and the sky for birds, so blood is for a bloodletter, a barber-surgeon. And doubly so for his children, Father.”