The Bloodletter's Daughter (47 page)

The words of the book, unreadable—they held the key to his destruction! All the strange plants, the flowing waters where the maidens bathed. His blood. The green water in which the women played? Greenish-blue as the veins that ran under his skin.

He stared in horror at his hand, cold with sweat, examining the veins that pulsed just beneath the flesh. Look! The same color as the waters that flowed through the book. Maidens laughing, in the waters, maidens round-bellied with another man’s seed, swimming in his blood.

“I will kill her!” he shouted.

The devil leapt unsteadily from his seat though the bear struggled to pull him away.

“You Hapsburg shit!” spat the devil, his breath stinking of sour beer and boiled eggs. “Foul villain who preys on innocent
girls! Coward!” The blacksmith’s son tore off his mask as he shouted.

Don Julius blinked to see a devil become a red-eyed, sootfaced man, screaming insults. He had never had anyone challenge him in his life.

“You dare insult a Hapsburg?” he shouted, reaching clumsily for his rapier.

The blacksmith already had his dagger in his fist. With a quick jab, he slashed Don Julius’s face.

The riotous talk ceased and silence filled the cellar as royal blood was spilled. Only the crackle of the wall torches could be heard, licking the stone walls with their flames.

Don Julius raised a hand to his cheek, his fingers coming away bloody. He stared at the sticky redness as the bear and the rooster pulled the devil-man away, now shouting and kicking him out the door as he screamed insults.

The wound to Don Julius’s face was not mortal, a horizontal glance of the blade. Still, it bled copiously. He sat fingering his blood, dumbfounded and remembering the leeches.

All around him swirled stumbling ghosts and stags, gawking chickens and fish monsters. They shoved each other to get a closer look at a bloody Hapsburg, haunting him with whispers and curses in a guttural Czech he could no longer understand. The closed air of the tavern was sour with fermented hops and men’s sweat.

“The devil curse all of you!” he screamed, waving his rapier at the crowd of ghouls. The drunken mob parted as he struggled to the door.

He stumbled out into the square where he found his horse, attended by a barefoot boy.

“Out of my way!” he screamed at the hapless boy, kicking him in the ribs.

He threw himself into the saddle, still swinging his rapier. The horse shied and he lurched forward, nearly toppling from the saddle. With a dig of his spurs he galloped away to the castle, muttering the name of Marketa between his clenched teeth.

“Marketa, can you hear us?” shouted Doctor Mingonius.

There came no answer.

“She must be in the furthest recesses of the rooms,” he said to Doctor Jesenius. “Where is Jakub?”

They both looked around. Jakub Horcicky had disappeared.

“I must get back to the doctors,” argued Jakub. “I think Mingonius means to break the door down.”

“What?” said Annabella. “Release her and have Don Julius extract vengeance on the entire village?
Ne
, listen to me, Jakub. This is a true solution, which will settle the matter once and for all.”

“How can you be sure it will work, Annabella? What if he—”

“It is her last wish. Trust me,” she said. “Dismiss all the kitchen servants and forbid them entry.”

Before she heard his reply she was already working a metal wedge into the wooden crate, prying it partly open with great care. She looped a rope around the box, securing it with a knot.

Jakub helped her lift the box onto the platform in the shaft, the device that had once been used to ensure Wilhelm Rozmberk’s meals were delivered piping hot from the kitchen.

“Are you sure you can pull the cable without me?”

“It will not be just me but Marketa. We are strong and the load is light, compared with the strength of our necessity. Go! Stop him before he reaches the door or all will be lost!”

Jakub hurried out of the kitchen, his winter cape drawn over his shoulders.

Neither of them noticed the sweep of a dark robe and the glitter of a crucifix in the shadows of the servant hall.

A C
ONFESSION

Carlos Felipe Sanchez de Miramar had heard the snap and creak of his knees as he lowered himself to pray on the cold granite of the monastery chapel a few hours earlier. He had heard the screams and protests of Marketa as she had been locked in the room, and the howls of the brewer trampled in the streets, the wretched man clutching at the broken bone of his leg.

I have helped the bastard prince play Satan against the people of Krumlov
, he thought.
He will murder the girl now.

The priest lowered himself to his knees, folding his hands in prayer, his stiff knuckles protesting. The harsh Bohemian cold was unmitigated by tapestries, rugs, or heat, and the old priest shivered under his coarse wool tunic. The dim light that strained through a leaded glass window only partly illuminated the altar and the worm-eaten wooden statue of Christ on the cross.

The priest bent his stiff neck in prayer. He remembered how fervently he had prayed as a young man, how the mystery of Christ and the aura of the Blessed Virgin had enthralled his soul and left him ardent to serve God. He was from a wealthy family
in Ronda and did not have to join the order, but he had heard the call as clearly as a man stricken with love, a stirring in his heart that had urged him to dedicate himself to the Jesuit brotherhood. The erudition of the Jesuits suited him, for he was a man of books and learning. He counted himself many times blessed to have been given the honor of tutoring the young Hapsburgs, Rudolf and his younger brother Ernst, when they had come to the Spanish court.

It all seemed so long ago now. The future had shone with untold brilliance then, the strengthening of the Holy Roman Empire, where God’s word would educate and guide the hand of an emperor, and Jesuits would administer holy discipline to the continents of Europe and the Americas.

But Hapsburgs bred weaker and weaker monarchs with each generation. They bred amongst themselves like caged rabbits. Despite the Jesuit’s tutelage and his Uncle Felipe II’s stern hand in his education, Rudolf II’s fancy turned to collecting art and clocks, frivolities, and fanciful inventions. He spent the empire’s treasure on alchemists and practitioners of the occult, astronomers and astrologers who predicted his future from the position of the stars, instead of leaving fate to the hand of God. It was rumored that Rudolf had left the faith entirely, too occupied with his fanciful pastimes to find time to pray to his Maker.

Then the king had bred haphazardly and prolifically with the Italian wench to produce this devil, Don Julius. The bastard, who, under Carlos Felipe’s own charge and supervision, had planned to rape and possibly murder an innocent girl.

The priest winced as he thought of his part in this tragedy. His temper had betrayed him; his pride had made him suggest that the barber should be seized and punished for having lied to a Hapsburg.

And to him.

Suddenly, Carlos Felipe’s chest contracted in a spasm of pain, and he pressed his tight fist against his heart. What had become of the man who served God so willingly and who had shyly asked favor of the Blessed Virgin Mother, like a schoolboy with a crush? When had his heart shrunken like a withered apple in winter? His faith and soul had been pure so many years ago, praying and studying in the monastery. Now he was an accomplice to murder, an embittered old man who had helped a madman procure his blameless victim.

His heart tightened again, and he gasped. He looked up for someone to help him and saw a pale white light hovering over the niche that held the statue of the Virgin. He thought he heard a rustle of skirts, the stiff cloth an aristocratic lady would wear, but all he saw was the light illuminating the niche. He was dying, and this must be the Holy Spirit gliding away from him.

He cried toward the light, “Forgive me!”

Suddenly the light was extinguished and he heard shuffling footsteps behind him.

“Brother,” a voice called from the shadowed recesses of the chapel.

Carlos Felipe gave a little cry, clutching his chest.

Abbot Prochazka hurried to his side and pleaded for the old man to lie down, kneeling beside him and propping up his head. The chill of the stone floor soaked into the old priest’s back, but his heart ceased its clenching pain as he felt the kind hands holding him in the darkness. He began to breathe a little easier, though terrified the pain would return.

“I am dying,” Carlos Felipe gasped. “God punishes me for my actions, for my betrayal.”

“How have you sinned, my brother?” the abbot whispered. “I shall give you absolution.”

“Yes,” the priest admitted in a small voice. “Let me confess my sins, for they weigh heavy in my heart.”

As the weak winter sunlight had faded in the western windows of the chapel and vespers began, Carlos Felipe’s heart and soul had been unburdened. Abbot Prochazka, who had suspected the Spanish priest’s complicity in Don Julius’s search for Marketa, listened, reminding himself to hear the confession with compassion and forgiveness, as he had been taught to do in the name of Jesus Christ.

But he had already thought of a plan to heal the damage that had been done.

“It is not your time to die, Brother,” the abbot said. “The blood is returning to your cheeks.”

The priest sat up, amazed.

“The pain has stopped! Blessed be our Lord. But there is a weight in my heart, a sin, that must be expunged.”

Abbot Prochazka stared at the priest through the darkness of the late afternoon and said, “I have a way. If you will listen...

“Once there was a young girl named Ludmilla,” he began. “She had the bluest eyes and the creamiest skin of any girl in the land. But this young beauty resisted the advances of all the men of Krumlov, even the one who desperately loved her the most. She had only one suitor—Jesus Christ. She renounced her worldly goods and joined the Poor Clares. After many years of tireless service, she became the mother superior.

“Now she is dying,” the abbot said, his voice breaking. He tried hard to swallow back the tears and the hard lump in his throat. “But she is not finished with her work to serve God and mankind, and she is determined to perform one last unselfish act. There may be yet a way to rinse your soul of your sin against Marketa and save her life.”

“How can I serve?” the priest whispered, straightening up now and looking into the abbot’s face. “I cannot abide this stain upon my spirit—it will burn my path to hell.”

The abbot drew a deep breath. When he first mentioned the flame-haired witch, he thought Carlos Felipe surely would denounce him as a blasphemer. But the priest only listened quietly, staring into the darkness toward the statue of the Blessed Virgin. It seemed as if she looked upon him with kindness at last.