Now and then Margaretha teased: “How goes your edification of our little Czech Katharina?”

But of course he had never drawn Katharina down into the dirt with him, except of course to tickle her, and of course to be tickled by her.

Strolling with Ludmila around the Castle complex, articulating to her each and every one of his innermost thoughts and copulating with her there in the dirt beneath the big windows of the North Wing, with his father’s eyes possibly on his back, or hers, the Prince felt that no one had ever seemed more real to him than she did, a “wonderful, wonderful feeling.” Prince Heinrich said: “I cannot express to you, Father, how real she seemed to me in those days, how really real, what a really real person Ludmila seemed to me to be! A real person, a real other person, not me, with another person’s head.” She even learned to speak excellent German, far better, actually, than she let on at first, and upon discovering this he was able to dismiss the stonemason permanently and commune with her directly in his mother tongue.

Every night he fell asleep.

During the night he stayed asleep.

And every morning he awoke in natural light.

“Never had I dared dream of such happiness, Father.” Heinrich added: “Of course, it did not last.”

One day, the inventor Balthasar von Ulm came to the Great Hall to exhibit his latest invention, a smallish thing concealed theatrically beneath a white sheet.