The Bloodletter's Daughter (12 page)

T
HE
A
RRIVAL

Saturdays were always the busiest for the bathhouse. The people of Cesky Krumlov wanted to be bathed and shaved before Sunday prayers.

“It is the clean-faced man who can receive the Holy Spirit,” said Pan Mann. “To approach God with a four-day growth of beard is blasphemy.”

When Marketa asked how Jews were so pious and yet so hairy, her father signaled to her to be silent with a wave of his hand.

“Marketa! What do you know of Jews?” said Pan Mann, turning to the girl in astonishment, his face creamy with soap.

“I see them in the marketplace during the day, peddling their wares. And I watch them retreat at sunset, outside the city walls. My mother told me they were Jews. They wear tight caps and have long beards. They look pious and humble.”

“Even if they were to pluck each cursed hair from their puckered skin so they looked like a Sunday roasting chicken, they could not purge their sin.”

“Marketa, fetch me the long razor,” said the barber.

“But Pan Mann,” Marketa insisted, “some of them are the most skillful surgeons, they say. Isn’t it so, Father, for you have told me so?”

“The razor, Marketa. Pan Mann’s face is drying. I do not want to cut his fine skin.”

The man in the chair screwed up his mouth and stabbed a pudgy finger at Marketa. “This is what happens when you expose a girl to the world of men. They begin arguing with you about Jews! Next thing you know, she will be arguing to become a bloodletter and inherit your practice.”

Marketa’s father laid a hand on her shoulder, and she remained silent.

She trembled in anger under his touch, but in deference to him, she said no more. She found herself thinking of the young physician Jakub Horcicky and how they had spoken so freely of medicine. And how he had kissed her.

“Go help your mother in the baths,” said Pichler.

Marketa nodded, bidding farewell to Pan Mann.

As the steam of the bathroom hit her face, she heard her mother call.

“Ah, good! I was about to send Kate to fetch you. Please help Miklos into a barrel and put a plank across the rim so I can serve him ale and sausage.”

As Marketa helped a young farmer into the barrel, her eyes were drawn to his anatomy. From hard work with the hoe and shovel, scythe and pitchfork, his veins stood clearly defined and blue against his skin, especially that skin that was normally protected from the sun by clothing. Marketa traced the blue threads eagerly in her mind, trying to commit them to memory.

She felt her mother’s quick cuff on her ear and her admonishment.

“Avert your eyes!”

Marketa blushed red and realized that the farmer had mistaken her study of his veins for admiration of his body. Already his penis had begun to thicken and was levitating, swaying this way and that, to the bawdy guffaws of the other bathers.

“Miklos, submerge yourself this minute,” shouted his mother, embarrassed, although secretly proud of her son’s prowess.

“Musle,” Miklos whispered to Marketa. “I would love to discover your pearls.”

“Fetch water, Marketa!” ordered her mother, her face reddening. “Now!”

Miklos smiled at Marketa in a way that made her skin crawl. Another boy who would pester her.

When the men were safely submerged in their barrels where Marketa’s curious eyes could not study their anatomy, she was allowed back in the bathhouse, to the snickers and loud whispering of the bathers.

Still, this was a good night, for Pan Brewer was sick at home with a cold and Marketa was not forced to attend him.

She struggled with the heavy buckets of hot water from the cauldron. Her younger sister Kate followed with baskets of wild thyme she tossed into the water to make it sweet. Marketa returned with a poker, hot from the coals, and plunged it into the water, watching it sizzle as the bubbles tossed the dried herbs across the surface.

Before the bathers soaked in the barrels, the girls scrubbed them clean with brushes of reeds, gathered at the shores of the Rozmberk carp ponds. Marketa’s sisters harvested them, while Marketa tended the cow, tethered deep in the reed bed. The cow attracted the leeches Barber Pichler used in his practice, and when they had attached, Marketa led the beast out of the water onto the surrounding meadow. When the leeches were gorged, they dropped one by one, onto the green grass where they were easily gathered.

That summer night the bathhouse was full to capacity, and the air buzzed with gossip. Marketa’s mother hurried from one barrel to another, testing the water. If a bather was scalded, he would never return. She stood on a little wooden stool and dipped her elbow in the water; her hands were too callused from washing to be sensitive to temperature.

All anyone wanted to talk about was the Hapsburg prince.

“Pan Brod said that he is only a few hours’ ride from here, probably staying the night in Budejovice.”

“And your own husband, Pani Pichlerova, witnessed his filthy acts in the streets of Vienna.”

“Yes, you are right, Pani Pstruh. The man is a lunatic. But just the same, he is the son of the king.”

“A Hapsburg at Cesky Krumlov! Who would ever imagine a Hapsburg living amongst us in southern Bohemia?”

Marketa’s mother smiled at this as she fluffed up the linen bath sheets in her large basket.

“Yes, and I hear that he is unmarried.”

Pani Pstruh pulled her lip down into a frown.

“And what of that?” she muttered. “Look at his father. Sired six children with that Italian whore but cannot bring himself to marry, even to produce a Hapsburg heir. And this son’s the mad bastard. Married or not, what does it matter?”

“Still,” said Lucie, “Rudolf’s Italian favorite lives like a queen in the
hrad
. And the young prince will be wanting services, won’t he, same as the Rozmberks?”

“He is not a prince—he is a bastard son,” growled the mayor from a barrel nearby.

Lucie ignored him.

“You, Pani Mylnar, your good breads and cakes made from your husband’s flour. Once the Hapsburg smells the baking on Saturday mornings, he’ll send a servant soon enough to fetch him some sweet rolls and cakes for his royal belly. You will be
working in the castle kitchens again, just as you did for Wilhelm Rozmberk when he was alive.”

Katarina’s mother smiled to herself, her fat cheeks crinkling up so high her eyes were pinched tight under folds of flesh.

“And you, butcher’s wife. Do you not make the best sausage in southern Bohemia? Did not Petr Vok dine on your meats and wursts and even take them with him to Trebon Palace?”

The
pani
nodded so vigorously, the water reciprocated with little splashes all around her stout neck.

“Ah, but I don’t think the son of a king will be bathing here,” Lucie said sadly. “All of you will profit, but what do I have to trade for royal gold coins?”

“A bloodletting!” exclaimed Pani Pstruh. “Perhaps Don Julius will employ your husband to cure him of his tempers.”

At this all the bathers laughed until their barrels shook, to think of young Marketa carrying bowls of Hapsburg blood to pour into the garden and feed the earth.

When the royal coach crossed the Barber’s Bridge, there were at least a hundred villagers lining the banks of the river. It was not often that a Hapsburg traveled to Cesky Krumlov. Only old Friar Damek remembered a visit by Rudolf’s father fifty years before.

And now one was about to live above them in Rozmberk Castle.

Several riders preceded the coach, and a young nobleman with blond hair and Viennese clothing winked at Katarina when he saw her alongside the road. She blushed and lowered her face, almost missing the coach itself.

“Look up—here he comes!” Marketa whispered to her.

The red velvet curtains were shut when the coach rattled across the bridge. An old hand, dry and withered, slipped through the curtains and drew them open for just a second.

Marketa saw the face of a priest in a black cassock. Beside him was a stout youth who looked to be bound and gagged. He stared at her intently, and as the coach moved along, his head suddenly thrust out the window. She could see the gag plainly as he twisted his head to watch her until she was out of sight.

Marketa was the first person he saw in Cesky Krumlov. She often wondered if that was her moment of destiny.

That hot summer of 1606, few could sleep soundly in Cesky Krumlov. The howls that pierced the night air disturbed even the most profound slumber, and the oppressive humid heat of the Bohemian plains settled uncomfortably into the little river town.

The people of Krumlov resembled sleepwalkers in the day, stumbling through their errands on the cobblestoned streets.

“Who can sleep at all with that bellowing?” they complained in conspiratorial whispers. Every resident knew that it was treason to speak ill of a Hapsburg, but going night after night without sound sleep made their nerves raw.

“The priest who cares for him is trying to drive the demons from his flesh. He lives on black bread and water.”

“Imagine a Hapsburg eating like one of us. Worse!”

Don Julius himself could not imagine it. He cursed the priest, throwing any object he could find. His apartments were stripped of anything that could be hurled at those who attended him.

“I want cake!” he sobbed, holding the loose folds of skin that gathered around his shrunken belly. “I want sausage! I can smell the meats frying in that wretched town. What torture! Barbaric fiend!”

Carlos Felipe looked coldly on his charge. His kissed the crucifix he held in his hand and stowed it again under his woolen robe.

“You are just beginning to realize life’s pleasures,” he said. “Have you ever savored smell so keenly?”

Don Julius spat back at him. “You sack of Spanish bones! What do you know of pleasure, you spineless, ball-less demon? You wouldn’t know how to enjoy a sausage pie or a whore between your legs!”

“It is only with an empty belly, dry lips, and purged heart that you can receive the grace of God,” said the priest.

Don Julius lunged at him. The two guards retrained him easily; the lack of food had made him weak. Still his curses condemned the priest to a painful death and a damned afterlife, threats wrapped in a host of references to his mother.

Carlos Felipe, in fact, suffered in his own way. He keenly appreciated food and wine, but the fare of the Bohemians bordered on cattle feed to his Castilian tastes. He could not abide the smells of Cesky Krumlov, where the river valley retained the local cooking’s pungent aromas like a hovering cloud over the land. The air was laced with vinegar from pickles and hops from the brewery. The breath of the men in the streets was heavy with yeasty ales and pickled cabbage. But above all was the caraway! The priest lay awake at night on his cot, his nostrils yearning to breathe fresh air, uncontaminated by caraway. Even the skin of the people exuded this vile spice; they feasted on foods stewed in the wretched seeds, even bathed with it in the vast barrels where they submerged their white flesh, their heads bobbing above the waters, draining great tankards of beer.

Miserable spore! Carlos Felipe believed the Bohemian fondness for the strong essence of the caraway seed bordered on sin, just as the Andalusians took such delight in smothering the good, simple taste of God’s bounty with heathen saffron, the spice of
the infidels. Harvesting the stamen of the crocus and infusing their rice with the yellow-orange seed struck him as vulgar and worse...Moorish.

All such strong tastes of foreign spice smacked of the devil.

The Spanish priest longed for the succulent roast pork of Avila in the clean plains of Spain, simple foods, unspiced except for salt—the grain of God.