The Bloodletter's Daughter (33 page)

C
ESKY
B
UDEJOVICE

Marketa’s eyes were swollen nearly shut, yet the chance to see Budejovice made them widen enough to glimpse through a squint that made her wince in pain. She could not help herself. This was the first town she had ever seen other than Krumlov. It seemed another world, full of movement and life.

The coach had pulled up in the main square, colorful as Krumlov but immense. The houses rose in peaked roofs, crowded tight around the square. It was alive with people—boys carrying buckets of water from the nearby river, Bohemians selling hemp bags and casks of salt to rich foreigners in fine clothes, men driving long wagons stacked with beer kegs. In market stalls, men and women were selling squawking hens, root vegetables, secondhand woolens. Packed down by the march of feet, the snow had become a gray sheet of ice.

Steam rose from the backs of the coach horses, and they snorted onto the cobblestones. The trio had traveled many hours at a fast pace to reach Budejovice before dusk.

Viera and the doctor helped Marketa descend from the coach into the strong arms of the innkeeper and driver. “She is in bad condition,” said the beefy innkeeper. He spoke German with a fluency that indicated it was his native language, not Czech. “My wife can tend her, if you like.”

“Thank you for your kindness,” said Doctor Mingonius. “Fräulein Viera will care for her and sleep in the bed by her side.”

Marketa was unsteady and thankful for the support of the two men, who helped her limp into the warm inn. There was a crackling fire in the main room and diners eating at long tables. The yeasty smell of good beer and roasting meats on the fire made her stomach tighten and complain with hunger. She had not eaten in almost two days.

The innkeeper’s wife saw Marketa’s face and gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. She stopped serving beer to her customers, set down the pitcher, and wiped her hands on her apron.

“What in God’s holy name happened to her?” she asked. “Was she in an accident? Are those knife wounds?”

Marketa groaned and touched her swollen, battered face—was it so hideous to everyone?

“You ask too many questions, Wife,” grumbled the innkeeper. He picked up the girl from Krumlov in his arms in one sweeping motion, like a bridegroom carrying his bride across the threshold.

“She shall have the best room in the inn, toward the back, where it is quiet and she will not be disturbed. The linen has just been washed and the mattress stuffed with fresh straw, as you requested, Herr Mingonius.”

Minutes later Marketa was in a room with homespun red curtains across a shuttered window, a large straw bed, and a goose down pillow. The coverlet was quilted of colored squares, some of material that was familiar and others dyed in colors Marketa had
never seen in Krumlov. In the corner was a little table and stool where a ceramic basin stood beside a pitcher of water.

Viera helped Marketa remove her shoes and stockings and pull off the woolen dress. She lay down in her shift on the fresh straw mattress, her back, neck, and limbs as stiff as frozen branches on the trees of winter. When Marketa had been under the spell of the medicine the doctor had given her, she had slept in a contorted position and felt nothing. Now she was acutely aware of the constant pain in her battered body.

She cried into the linen ticking while Viera tried to soothe her. Marketa’s tears wet the bedclothes, making the material translucent, exposing the yellow blades of straw. The fresh-made bed smelled of autumn fields and made her drowsy.

When Marketa was tucked under the comforter, Doctor Mingonius came in to inspect her wounds. She could tell by his worried face that he did not like the look of the throbbing gashes. She ran her fingers over the stitches in her cheek and winced. She wondered if they looked the same as the one on her breast, angry red puckers between the black thread stitches.

“Do not touch them, Marketa,” said the doctor. “Sit up,
milacek
.”

She smiled weakly as he called her
dear
in Czech.

“Good. You need to drink beer—a lot of beer and water from the jug. And I will send for some soup. I want you to try to finish it all. The beer will induce sleep and help you heal. The hops give rich nourishment, and with rest, your body will take care of itself.”

The innkeeper’s wife brought in herbs that she swore reduced swelling and brewed an infusion for Marketa. She called it Mountain Daisy and told the girl she kept stalks drying in the kitchen, along with other wildflowers and herbs that hung from the rafters. Viera prepared a poultice of the leaves and dabbed the paste on her wounds.

Doctor Mingonius inspected the plant and crumbled the leaves and flowers between his fingers, sniffing it, and then taking a lick.

Then he nodded his approval. “Arnica,” he pronounced. “Yes, this and beer will help you heal. We will stay here in Budejovice until you are well enough.”

With that the weary doctor bid Marketa good night and left her in the care of the women.

They told her she slept for three days. Even after she awoke, everything was still muddled and vague as a dream. Steins of beer were brought to her lips. She ate broths of beef bones and barley soup flavored with dried marjoram. The innkeeper’s wife spooned beef marrow into her mouth between sips of arnica tea. Marketa drank in the smell of her hair—perfumed with the smoke of the wood fire and the essence of roasted poultry. The woman’s hands were red and cracked from washing dishes all day in her stone sink, but they were moist and soft on Marketa’s forehead. She stroked her skin as she would a favorite cat, and the girl fell asleep again under the spell of her touch.

Besides these soothing moments and Marketa’s struggle using the chamber pot—for her torn flesh still stung when she urinated—she remembered nothing. It was warm under the quilts, and she sensed the warmth of Viera’s body at night.

At last, one morning, Marketa opened her eyes and realized the swelling had diminished. She looked around the room and saw a stub of a tallow candle, rosary beads, and a pitcher of beer sitting on a rough-hewn table. There were thick fingers of frost around the cracks in the shuttered window. The water in the bucket beside her bed was frozen, an uneven crust of chipped ice revealing the depression where Viera had been dipping the cup.

“You are awake!” said Viera, entering the room with an empty chamber pot in her hands. “We have been so worried about you, so worried,
milacek
!”

Marketa pulled herself up to a sitting position and shivered. The cold made her teeth ache.

“Here, you must put a shawl on,” Viera said, rummaging through her bag. She put a clay-colored shawl around Marketa’s shoulders.

“Here, drink some beer. I’ll have Ivana make some tea to warm you. There is a blizzard raging outside.”

Marketa could not talk, but nodded her head. All day and all night long the storm blew, and when they woke in the morning, snow powdered the stone floor in drifts blown in through the gaps in the shutters.

D
ON
J
ULIUS
G
RIEVES

For days, Don Julius moved as if he were in a stupor. Don Carlos Felipe, the Spanish priest, was hopeful for the first week, thinking that perhaps the crafty Doctor Mingonius had done them all a favor and bled the bastard dry. The blood would not be on the priest’s hands if the boy died a day or two after bleeding. Then he could leave this godforsaken backwater and perhaps even return to the good red wines and sherry of Spain.

Yes, perhaps he will die
, thought the priest,
and God will have his revenge so much the sooner. As men of the holy cloth, we can only provide spiritual salvation to the willing. This whore’s son of Rudolf II spits in the eye of God and laughs. He will pay at the gates of hell.

The ghostly pallor of Don Julius’s skin made the priest think the youth had been leeched to death. On the heels of this observation came the thought of morcilla, his beloved sausage of pig’s blood, rice, onions, and spices. With a good glass of bone-dry rioja, not the sweet, flowery swill of the Austrian lands. That was
a meal for real men, not the perfumed white wines and sweet beer and damnable caraway seed that scented every dish in Bohemia.

Die, bastard. Die.

Still, now that Mingonius was gone, the health of the king’s son was in his hands. The Jesuit could not let the boy die, damn it. But if Don Julius did return to robust health and his accompanying madness, the Spaniard would have no peace with his thundering roars and wails piercing the night.

He would see that the lunatic hunted by day—escorted by legions of guards—and he would find ways to keep him out of Rozmberk Castle as much as could be managed. Maybe he could obtain some opium to make the boy sleep at night. It was sold by apothecaries in the alleys of Prague, but he was not certain where to search for it in Krumlov. He loathed having any contact with the town below.

The priest was still puzzled why Doctor Mingonius had left before dawn, without so much as a farewell. Still, there was no love lost between them, and Mingonius had performed the last bleeding as promised. Perhaps he had been summoned by King Rudolf to report personally on the health of his patient.

The priest questioned the guards, but they said they knew nothing—only that they were ordered to fetch the coach and ready it for the journey. The men were predictably tight-lipped with him, and he was certain they talked about him to his face in that damnable gibberish of a language. These Bohemians rogues, he thought, were not to be trusted. He was sure they were lying to help Mingonius.

He enlisted some of the Jesuit monks to help in taking care of his charge. The bastard had not protested when he was brought to the chapel to pray for eternal salvation. He refused to say confession, but the fact that he had stayed two hours that first morning in the cold chapel on his knees was accounted a victory—a holy victory.

But at the end of the second week, Don Julius complained of pain in his breast and his scalp. He winced when the priest inspected his body, as if there were an invisible wound. He yelped in pain, not letting the priest touch him. He waved away the Jesuit brothers and cursed at their incense orbs, coughing and sneezing and cursing, in German, Italian, and Latin.

He begged incessantly for the Coded Book, but it had disappeared with Doctor Mingonius.

And then there was the infernal commotion about Marketa. Lucie Pichlerova insisted on seeing Don Julius to find out why her daughter had left for Prague without embracing her or even fetching the beautiful trousseau the village of Krumlov had assembled for her stay in Prague.

“Quite impossible,” said the priest. “No one can see Don Julius but the doctors, guards, and priest assigned to him.”

“What do you mean?” said Pani Pichlerova, crossing her stout arms in front of her. “We see him weekly riding to his hounds. My daughter has seen him many times, including the night she left for Prague.”

Were they really bleeding again that same night?
thought the priest.
No wonder he has no wits or color to his face. Pity they hadn’t finished the job and sent him to the devil.

“It is out of the question,” said the priest. “And if you had any sense in your head, you would realize how dangerous the man is and never permit your daughter near him.”

“He is a Hapsburg,” sniffed Lucie. “Is he not?”

The priest closed the door on the indignant woman and ordered the guards to escort her out through the courtyards and beyond the gate. She lingered on the far side of the moat, throwing the fattened bears covetous looks and bitterly begrudging them their supper.

The end of the second week brought wails and high screeches again. Don Julius had found a small lock of hair near the window,
where he had plunged the fleam into Marketa’s scalp. When the priest arrived in response to the racket, he found Don Julius clutching the strands of hair.

“What have you got there, Don Julius?” asked the priest.

“None of your God-cursed business, you withered maggot!” the bastard prince snapped, hiding the strands in his clenched fist. The priest could see a few long hairs emerging from his fingers.

“Did you touch her?” the priest muttered, realizing what he had in his hand. “Is that why she left so precipitously?”

“No!” roared Julius, leaping to his feet and lunging at the priest. The guards seized him just in time as his outstretched hand reached for the priest’s neck. The priest jumped back, placing his own hands over his throat.

“No, no, no!” cried Don Julius, struggling against the guards. “I did not mean to kill her! It was the demon that possessed me. I love the Angel of God more than my own life! I shall be damned to hell and never see my Marketa again.”

The priest’s mouth puckered as if he had bitten into a Malaga lemon, and he flashed a bitter look at the guards.

“If she is dead, she has at least escaped this godforsaken town,” said the priest, gathering his composure. He narrowed his lizard eyes at the madman. “And that is a blessing.”

The guards’ faces turned stony, and they considered letting their hands relax their grasp on the royal lunatic. “
Do prdele
,” they cursed the priest, and spat on the ground.
Go fuck yourself!
The Spanish priest thought he heard the word “crucifix” uttered in their profane litany of Czech curses, and that offended him more than all the other unknown vocabulary that sputtered out of their outraged Bohemian mouths.

Barber Zigmund Pichler read and reread the letter Doctor Mingonius had sent him. The looping letters were written in haste, not at all the usual fine penmanship of the great doctor.

December 5, 1606

Herr Pichler:

I am sorry that I cannot say my farewell in person, but we must leave Krumlov in the utmost haste. There has been a terrible situation—accident?—concerning your daughter. She secretly arranged to enter Don Julius’s chamber alone, apparently with the blessings of your wife. Could this be true?

What followed was a disaster! The results were miraculously not as tragic as they might have been, but still she was stabbed and fell out the window of the castle. God be praised, she landed on the castle rubbish heap and was saved, but she has suffered greatly and will take a good many months to heal.

I have taken her to a good inn in Cesky Budejovice and will remain with her until I think she can travel back to Krumlov to continue her recuperation. Is there a safe haven for her, someplace other than your home? I fear that Don Julius will learn she has not died and will demand she return to the castle. The first place he would look is the bathhouse.

In the meantime, I shall treat her as a member of my own family. I have much to atone for and shall be honored to care for her health and help her heal.

I will send her back to Krumlov at my own expense in a carriage, when she is well enough to travel. Please tell me the address I should give the driver. Obviously it would not do to take her to your residence, as she might be seen from the castle above the bathhouse.

By My Heart and Truest Confession with the Greatest Apologies,

Doctor Mingonius

Pichler fingered the creased parchment. He did not trust himself in his great sorrow and rage to broach the subject with his wife. He knew how much she coveted the wealth and status of the noble class, but had not had an inkling of how far she would push Marketa. Instead he wept alone, quietly, in the dark recesses of his barbershop, staring into the muddy buckets where the leeches slept peacefully in the cold, dark water.