priests with colorful gossip about the sinful life at Copenhagen and I ate more or less in peace. Father Maltar and I avoided each other’s eye and Father Stepan was polite enough. When we had eaten, Father Maltar surprised me by offering the use of his cart and driver to return us to Uraniborg. Christian was happy to accept.
The driver was the same boy who had taken Cornelius, Voltemont, and me out to the castle the day we arrived. Christian sat beside him on the plank. I climbed into the back of the cart and sat on a bale of damp wool. The day was still bright and where the sun could reach it, the surface of the snow shone with slick melt. Our driver snapped his whip over the oxen and we were underway.
“You have brought another soldier from Zealand,” the boy said to me, inclining his head toward Christian.
“Indeed no,” I said. “This is the crown prince of the realm, Christian son of Christian.”
The boy performed an awkward sort of bow but did not stop the cart.
“My lord,” he said to the prince.
“And what do they call you?” Christian said.
“My name is Justus Axlrod,” the boy said, and turned briefly to look at me.
“Do I know you?” His name did seem familiar.
“I knew you once,” he said. “Before. When you were one of Brahe’s men.”
“Soren is still one of Brahe’s men,” Christian said. “Though he did belong to me once.”
“I confess the name Axlrod strikes a familiar note,” I said. “But I cannot place you in my memory, lad.”
“No doubt you would recall better the name of my sister, Astrid.”
“Astrid! You are her brother?”
“Aye.” The boy kept his face turned to the front, else I would have searched for a resemblance to his sister. I remembered Astrid well.
During my last year at Uraniborg I saw her almost daily, for she brought milk and cream to Tycho’s kitchens. Astrid’s parents were dead and the girl tended the family cows by herself. I do not have any strong memories of her brother, though perhaps I remember Justus as a small boy, sitting beside Astrid on the cart. Astrid was not tall, nor was she particularly slender, and though she kept her hair always tucked beneath a bonnet, there were times when a stray lock or two fell out over her forehead. Astrid’s hair was always dirty, but had she troubled to wash it, I think it may have been a pretty golden color.
Her voice was soft, barely more than a whisper. It was often impossible to hear her at all. Perhaps she thought that the daughter of a dairyman would have nothing to say that Uraniborg’s educated citizens wished to hear. It is true that, for I know not how long, I did not notice her at all. She may have spoken to me, she may have stood directly in my path as I wandered through the kitchens or the yard on my way from the machines at Stjerneborg to Tycho’s office, and I did not even see her. It was not until I heard her laugh that I noticed Astrid Axlrod.
I will not wax poetic like some second-rate playwright or a penner of sonnets, nor will I pretend to remember a bright spring morning when I first heard Astrid’s laughter amid the trilling and babbling of songbirds. Such a memory is something I do not possess, but I know that it was Astrid’s laugh which caused me to look up from some task and see her, lifting clay jars of cream from the back of her cart. Her hands were red and raw from her labors and she smelled of the barn, but I heard Astrid laugh in bell-like tones, a descending fragment of the Ionian mode, and then I was beside her cart, moving jars of milk and cream. What she laughed at, I know not. Nor can I recall what we spoke of nor how I explained that despite my lofty place assisting the lord of the island, I was compelled to help a dairy maid unload her cart. All of it is lost, for I was not thinking as rationally during those first moments as a scientist ought.
Astrid was not to be compared to a summer’s day, nor her eyes to the sun, but neither was she one of those dirty, brazen wenches a man speaks of when telling false tales about his conquest of farm maidens. If any man at Uraniborg claimed that Astrid had