City of Lost Dreams Read Online Free Page B

it only opened one door, and that door was here, not in Vienna. “Why?”
    “No reason. But watch your step. You must remain
en garde
, my dear.”
    “Don’t worry,” Sarah promised. “What could possibly happen to me in Vienna?”

TWO
    S arah woke early the next morning, surprisingly none the worse for having hauled a fourteenth-century saint out of the Vltava the night before. Of course she didn’t really believe the man was actually John of Nepomuk, whose statue, with its crown of golden stars, she had passed many times on the Charles Bridge. She had also seen the saint’s tomb—a mind-boggling tribute to what the Baroque could do when it got its hands on a shitload of silver—in St. Vitus’s Cathedral. No, the most likely explanation was usually the correct one: the guy she had fished out of the river was a nut job in a costume. She was also not prepared to believe that the nut job was on some sort of rival crusade to find the Golden Fleece. Max imagined mythic quests around every corner. He was about a half step away from seeing Rudolf II on a piece of toast.
    Max had been very generous, putting her up for the evening at the Four Seasons, where he said the manager was a friend. Sarah appreciated the high-thread-count sheets, but was horrified by the prices on the room service menu. No eggs should cost that much unless they came with the actual chickens and a handsome farmer who would rub your feet while you ate.
    Sarah opened her computer and sent an e-mail to Alessandro, her former Boston roommate, advising him of her train times. It was Alessandro who had alerted her to the work of the nanobiologist Dr. Bettina Müller. He was teaching at the University of Vienna this year, and she would be staying with him.
    The events of the previous evening almost seemed like a dream now. Nico. The restaurant. The dive into the river. The shots. Saint John’s pale blue eyes staring at her. Max’s hands. The feeling that she had made a mistake in letting him go. The desire to kiss him. Harriet.
    Telling herself she was allowed to be curious, Sarah had done a little Internet search on Harriet Hunter before collapsing into bed the night before.
    Max’s new girlfriend was pretty famous in Britain. Her academic credentials were impeccable—her PhD was from Oxford and she had published in her field. But she was best known as the host of a popular television show,
Histories & Mysteries
. Naturally, Sarah found some episodes of it on YouTube. Dr. Hunter practiced what was called archaeological history. In her programs she re-created the banquets of seventeenth-century kings, spent the night in freezing castles, slept on a straw-tick mattress, and used a chamber pot. She squeezed her petite but well-endowed frame into corsets, donned bonnets, attempted an exit from a tiny horse-drawn carriage while wearing an enormous crinoline. She took a bath in goats’ milk, plucked a goose, fought (unloaded) pistols at dawn. She punctuated her speech with Shakespearean exclamations: “Oh, pish!” “Heigh-ho, what have we here?” “What tilly-vally!” There was nothing she wouldn’t explore, investigate, or ingest.
    “It’s 1598 and Oswald Croll is writing his
Basilica chymica
here in Prague,” ran one documentary clip. Dr. Harriet was dressed in a floor-length magus robe and stood before a table of glass beakers and pewter dishes. “We can—if we dare—follow his instructions for the making of a magical amulet: two ounces of dried toads ground to a fine powder, one complete menstruum of a virgin, one dram of unpierced pearls, one dram of coral, two scruples of Eastern saffron . . .” Apparently Dr. Harriet had not dared to try—or, more likely, was prevented from quaffing on-air—the collected monthly of some suitably innocent schoolgirl, but she promised her viewers that Croll believed his amulet was a surefire preventative from diseases both astral and venereal.
    All of this had earned the historian a raft of snarky