The Bloodletter's Daughter

by Linda Lafferty

  “What is this?” Marketa was astonished. “You could afford to have this? It is a treasure!”

  “Yes, well. It was a gift. Let us just say that I did a very rich and powerful man a very great favor.” Annabella smiled. “Shoo, Prophet!” she said, waving her hand at the cat on Marketa’s lap. She laid the tome on Marketa’s lap. “Open it.”

  Never did Marketa think she would see the writings of Paracelsus, let alone in a witch’s house in Krumlov. She handled the book carefully, savoring the animal smell of the vellum, the finely inked writing scratched on the pages.

  It suddenly occurred to Marketa that Annabella could read.

  “Who taught you to read?” she asked.

  “That same good neighbor you met earlier, Pan Alchemist. Now, look, see what it says about skin inflammations. I have a potion for you—Saint-John’s-wort tempered with soaked oats.”

  Marketa carefully lifted the pages one by one, to find cures for skin inflammations.

  “Yes,” she said, as a smile broke over her face. “Yes, Paracelsus calls it ‘red oil.’”

  And as Marketa said this, Annabella reached her hands toward a jar, shining red as a sunset.

  “I have infused these oils since I gathered the flowers on Saint John’s Day. They have a special power when plucked on that date. You must take this home and pour enough oil to cover just the bottom of a cup, fill the cup halfway with cooked oats, and make a poultice to cover wherever the rash afflicts you.”

  Marketa nodded.

  “But that is not all. I want you to take three drops of the tincture three times a day and concentrate on your dream. You must do this or the tincture will do no good for you.”

  Marketa hung her head. “What good will that do? My mother has contracted me to the brewer, and we need the money. I am a woman, and if I practice bloodletting or other medicine I will be accused of being a...”

  She broke off.

  “A witch? Is that what you are afraid of?” Annabella said. “Well, my sister, have some courage and heed your dreams, not your mother’s demands or what the gossips may say or expect you to be.”

  Marketa nodded.

  “If you have hope, the medicine will work for you. If you settle for despair, there is nothing I or anyone else can do to help you. Now let us have some of the chamomile tea with honey. It is also good for your nerves.”

  Then she reached over and caressed Marketa’s hair.

  “Such special hair,” she said. “I have never seen so many colors at once. It is like mottled amber.”

  Then she stared into Marketa’s eyes, holding her gaze.

  “There may be a day when you again need my help, sister. Do not forget that I am here to serve the innocent and deserving. And remember this: Do not fear the good spirits who come to aid you in your life.”

  Prophet the cat began to purr at Marketa’s feet as she settled down to examine the book again.

  When Marketa left Annabella’s house two hours later, she felt a new sense of determination, like a young colt galloping and bucking in the tall grass of summer. The cold wind that curled around her chin seemed gentler than she remembered it, and she dropped her scarf, not worrying whether anyone saw the red blisters on her face.

  LATE SPRING 1606

  CHAPTER 4

  ARCHDUKE MATTHIAS, YOUNGER BROTHER OF RUDOLF II

  A tall, bearded rider raced along the spine of low hills flanking the Danube. The wind blew the white mane of the Andalusian stallion into the rider’s eyes as he crouched low on the horse’s withers, its pounding hoofs churning up loam at breakneck speed.

  Matthias, Archduke of Upper and Lower Austria, glanced back to see his entourage far behind him; no one could keep up with Royal Ducat, his gray stallion.

  Trained to ride in his father Emperor Maximillian II’s Spanish Riding School at the age of five, Matthias had grown up on the back of Lipizzaners. These Andaluz horses were brought from Spain to Austria by his father and uncle and bred exclusively for the Hapsburg monarchy. Matthias felt his father’s passion for horses in his blood. And although his elder brother Rudolf—stocky and short—shared his enthusiasm for the Andaluz breed, it was Matthias’s long leg on a horse and fearlessness in the saddle that made his father proud.

  Emperor Maximillian knew this young son was the warrior Hapsburg.

  Matthias reined in his horse along the rocky ridge, trampling the carpet of red poppies under hoof. He had ridden several miles beyond the walls of the great city of Esztergom—the “jewel of the Danube bend” and ancient capital of Hungary. King Rudolf’s younger brother was determined to defend the city that his armies had fought so hard to take back from the Ottomans scarcely more than a decade before.

  The archduke scanned the low green hills of the Hungarian countryside. There were rumors of an Ottoman incursion in the southeast beyond Buda, but so far he had seen no smoke from campfires where the Janissaries would have been cooking their rations in enormous copper kettles.

  More than any other army, thought Matthias, an Ottoman’s heart for war was determined by the rations in their dinner bowl. The sign of honor and high rank was a soup ladle, distinguishing the officers from the soldiers.

  Not a star. Not a crescent moon or gold stripe. A soup ladle signified the corbaci, the captain of a unit.

  Matthias had learned much about the Turks in the past years, mostly from one of his chief commanders, the wealthy Transylvanian Ferenc Nadasdy, whose gold had financed a large portion of the Hapsburg defense against the marauding Ottomans.

  Despite the financial backing and Nadasdy’s appetite for war, Matthias had not been sorry when he heard last year of the warrior lord’s death in battle. The brutal Transylvanian had made his skin crawl. Matthias dreaded the nights of the Ottoman campaign when he was quartered in Nadasdy’s ancestral castle of Cachtice, a drafty stone fortress at the foot of the Little Carpathians. The frightened eyes of the castle servants and the cowering peasants in the village made Matthias wonder which the people feared more—the Turks or the Nadasdy family.

  Nadasdy was a man who loved war—and was especially fond of torture. Even the Turks feared him, calling him the Black Knight of Transylvania. It was rumored his wife, Elizabeth Bathory, niece of the king of Poland, was as sadistic as her husband.

  Still, distasteful though they might be, these alliances with the rich and powerful families of Europe were critical to the Hapsburg dynasty.

  Nadasdy taught Matthias the savage customs of the Ottomans and their beliefs. Know your enemy, Matthias, he had instructed him. Know your enemy better than he knows you.

  Matthias learned how the Ottomans dyed their horses for battle, how their Janissary troops were kidnapped Christian boys, circumcised and raised as Islamic warriors. He learned that the bloody heathens, who impaled their enemies’ heads upon stakes as trophies, stopped to pray five times a day. Before they prostrated themselves before God, they washed themselves. He learned that on the battlefield, where there was no water, they rubbed themselves with sandy dirt, cleaning behind their ears and rubbing their hands from the forehead to the nape of their necks, as a cat would lick itself clean with the crook of its paw.

  Heathens, thought Matthias, leaning to spit over his boot in the stirrup. Yet the barbarians were banging a mighty fist on the front gates of Europe, once again threatening Vienna itself, as they moved ever closer to the heart of civilized Christendom.

  It was Matthias and his Holy Roman armies—led by men like Nadasdy—on the wild Hungarian front that held back the infidels’ armies. His brother, King and Emperor Rudolf II, had given him a perilous honor: commander-in-chief of the Ottoman War.

  Rudolf would like to see my head stuck on the tip of an Ottoman spear, the crows pecking at my eyes, thought Matthias. At last he would be rid of me.

  Rudolf feared Matthias, for the king had no legitimate children. He put every obstacle in his younger brother’s way to keep him away from Prague and the throne.

  Matthias looked down at the cru
shed poppies on the ground and thought of his lovely cousin, Anne of Austria. He swallowed hard, knowing that as long as King Rudolf was alive, Matthias could never ask for her hand, or any other woman’s for that matter.

  It was not enough that the king had begrudged Matthias permission to marry; the warrior archduke was called away from his home in Linz to plan and fight battles, both offensive and defensive, against the encroaching Ottoman armies. He had no life but war, year after year.

  How he wished he could shift this burden to his older brother’s shoulders! But Prague did not concern itself with Hungary and its scorched lands, the wounded, the dead. King Rudolf spent his gold on alchemists, astrologists, and the occult. He washed his hands of Hungary, leaving its defense to Matthias and his allies.

  The king’s only concern with Royal Hungary was taxing the Protestant majority into poverty and ruin as they fought to save their ancient kingdom. If it weren’t for the money that Petr Vok Rozmberk now poured into the Turkish campaign, the Ottomans would have long since taken Moravia, Bohemia, and Vienna.

  Matthias saw a thin wisp of smoke snake up over a hill in the distance. His stallion nickered, no doubt calling to the mares in the Ottoman camp.

  We will attack at dawn, he thought. If we circle the encampment and cut off escape into Buda, we stand a chance of halting their progress into Royal Hungary. The scouts to the north and east would no doubt report other incursions that evening, for the Ottomans were always on the march.

  Matthias reined his horse back toward camp, where he and the commanders would plan their attack.

  But before he spurred his horse, he took a second look at the flower-strewn countryside and the rolling green hills. Someday all this would be part of his kingdom. Someday he would rule as Holy Roman emperor.

  His numerous spies in Prague kept him informed. They came to the Hungarian front to find him, all with the same report, eager for the silver their sharp ears and wagging tongues earned them.

  The king’s son Don Julius is mad! The people of Prague spit and whistle at the rogue when he walks the streets, yet the king does nothing to contain him.

  The Achilles’ heel of his brother Rudolf was his favorite son. Matthias’s informers told sordid tales of scandals in the streets of Prague and Vienna, and in the brothels of both cities, dark stories of the lunatic bastard, who even prostitutes feared.

  Now there were whispers that Rudolf considered incarcerating Don Julius—his own son.

  Know your enemy, Nadasdy had said. And find his weakness.

  One day my young nephew will help me claim the throne, Matthias thought, and he smiled as his entourage finally caught up to him on the ridge.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE WHITE LADY

  The first time Marketa saw the White Lady of Cesky Krumlov, the girl was kneeling by the banks of the Vltava, rinsing a ring of blood from a white ceramic bowl. Her father had performed a bloodletting that morning, and his finest dish was crusted brown with a stain that clung to the ceramic after she had fed the garden soil with what remained of the patient’s bad humors.

  Her fingernails scratched at the crusted blood, and the sparkling cold water of the river flooded over the rim of the bowl, clearing the stain at last. Suddenly, she had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching her from above. She lifted her eyes from the water, up the stone walls that rose directly from the riverbank to the castle.

  The woman who stood there, far above the racing waters, was as fair as snow, dressed in white satin, her pale arms encased in transparent gauze. A gray sash draped to one side, looping down to a long train of white folds. Her hair was fashioned in ringlets, hay-colored and long against her neck, in the old style of a century ago.

  She smiled sadly down at Marketa from the heights of the palace wall. Marketa dropped the bowl in the mud of the river and heard it chip on a rock. She bent her dirty knees under her homespun dress and wet apron in a curtsy. She supposed the lady to be a Rozmberk of the Five-Petal Rose, the noble family of the castle and the same as kings to those of the village. Even as she curtsied, Marketa stared down at the chipped ceramic and thought of what her mother would say when the surgery bowl came back damaged. Her father’s patients noticed such things, especially the rich ones.

  When Marketa lifted her eyes, the woman in white had vanished. Marketa collected the crockery in the wet folds of her apron and turned back to the bathhouse, her heart thudding within her chest.

  Viennese peddlers often lodged in Marketa’s uncle’s tavern, and he would tell the family their tales at Sunday dinner. Uncle Radek had never married and grew up eating his sister’s Bohemian cooking. He felt it was his birthright to have a place at the Pichler table, whether or not they could afford to feed another mouth.

  The evening following the appearance of the lady in white, Radek invited himself to dinner. Marketa saw him leering at the meal on the table when she peeked as they said grace. He lusted after her mother’s cooking like a dog chasing a bitch in heat. The way he eyed the dumplings made Marketa blush, which did not come easy. Working in her mother’s bathhouse, Marketa had seen all manner of lechery.

  After the Pichlers had thanked God for his bounty, Zigmund Pichler nodded his head and pronounced, “Dobrou chut” before the family broke bread.

  As Lucie ladled out cabbage and lentil soup and jatrove knedlicky—liver dumplings—into his bowl, her brother Radek stuffed his mouth with fresh bread that the twins had baked that afternoon. He rolled his fat tongue over his food and addressed the table with an open mouth, his words making their way through a brown wad of buttered bread.

  “Another rich trader came bringing fine cloth and bright jewels for the Rozmberks,” he said, taking a long draught of pilsner and filling his mouth with a dumpling. “He says it was a waste of a hard journey—they no longer have the gold to buy his goods.”

  “As if the Rozmberks cannot buy anything their heart desires!” Lucie scoffed. “They drive coaches of gold, and the lady wears loops of pearls around her neck! The old bears in the moat dine on fattened calves—I have seen the carcasses with my own eyes! How could they not afford to buy pretty things?”

  “I am only telling you what I hear from my customers, and they have no reason to lie,” said Uncle Radek, digging with his thumb at a plug of dumpling between his molars. He sucked at his thumbnail and the dislodged food, smacking his lips in satisfaction. “The Rozmberks have come onto hard times and may even sell the castle.”

  “Sell the castle!” Marketa echoed. “Maybe that’s why the fair lady in white is walking the walls. I should like to look upon her again!”

  Suddenly the clatter of dishes and lip-smacking stopped.

  Marketa’s mother stared, her dark eyes bulging.

  “When have you seen a lady in white, girl?”

  “Leave her alone now, Lucie,” said her father, setting down his knife, a chunk of dumpling still speared on its end. “Let her finish her dinner.”

  “You heard me, Daughter!” her mother insisted. “When did you see a woman in white?”

  “Today, as I was washing the surgery tray,” Marketa said. “She startled me so that I dropped it and took a chip out of the rim. I am sorry. She was looking at me, and I’ve never seen her like before. Fair-haired and bejeweled, with skin whiter than bleached bedsheets in summer.”

  “It is the White Lady,” murmured Uncle Radek, swallowing at last, his hairy nostrils flaring. “She’s seen her. One of my own family! Musle, you have the gift—”

  “Do not dare call her that vulgar name in this house!” roared Pichler, his dining knife raised and pointing at his brother-in-law’s face. “This is not the tavern, and you will keep a civil tongue!”

  Marketa felt the blood drain from her face, and her cheeks went cold and numb. No one had ever dared to use that lecherous nickname in her father’s presence before. She wanted to seep into the cracks of the stone floor and hide under its darkness forever.

  She had hoped her father did not know what the townsp
eople now called her.

  Her mother jumped up from the bench. She knelt by her daughter’s side and grasped her hand so hard, Marketa thought she would cry out.

  “What color gloves was she wearing, Marketa?”

  “Gloves?”

  “Were they white or were they black?”

  Marketa could feel her mother’s hand trembling. She could smell her sweat and the onions from her cooking clinging to her skin.

  “I—I did not see any gloves. No—she did not wear gloves. She was bare-handed and fair-skinned as a marble statue.”

  “Liar!” said her mother, suddenly smacking Marketa with an open palm. “You chipped our good bowl and made up a lie about the White Lady just to frighten us!”

  Marketa pressed her hand against her stinging cheek. She was too stunned to cry, for her mother had never struck her before. She looked at her twin sisters, whose faces blanched, and they clutched each other in fear.

  Pichler pushed his wife away and sent her tumbling on the floor. Marketa gasped. Her father had always been a gentle soul, and now he was shouting at Uncle Radek and shoving her mother to the ground.

  “Our Marketa does not lie! If she saw a woman in white, it could have been a Rozmberk relation or guest. If she says she had bare arms, it is the truth. Do not dare to strike her again, lest you feel my own hand on your face!”

  He hugged his daughter close, sheltering her in his arms. Marketa could smell her mother’s meaty cooking in his beard and ale on his breath.

  She whispered to him, “Who is this woman and why is Mother so angry?”

  “Finish your dinner, Marketa. You are looking pale and thin. It will not do for my patients to see my assistant, my own daughter, ailing when you carry away the trays of blood.”

  “But the White Lady?”

  “Never mind now. Eat, Daughter.”

  He scraped a gravy-covered dumpling off his plate onto Marketa’s with his knife. The scratching of the blade against the pewter plate filled the room, otherwise silent in obedience to her father’s rage.