The Bloodletter's Daughter

by Linda Lafferty

  PART II

  AFTER THE FALL

  CHAPTER 31

  A MIDNIGHT DEPARTURE

  “Marketa! Marketa!”

  What voice was this? She knew she was dead. But then, how could she still feel pain? Every part of her body screamed in pain. She could not breathe. Her chest felt as if it had collapsed.

  “Dear girl, Marketa. Speak to me!”

  She opened her eyes and saw the face of Doctor Mingonius floating before her eyes.

  Then a stench filled her nostrils, and what little air she had in her lungs was forced out in a burst of coughing. She felt something heavy and furry run over her leg.

  “You have fallen on the rubbish heap,” said Mingonius. “Just lie still, try to breathe.”

  Long minutes passed. Doctor Mingonius willed her to breathe, whispering encouragement in her ear as he knelt beside her in the stinking heap. He placed her hand over her chest so she could feel the rise and fall of each aching gasp.

  Dazed, she looked at him, hovering just above her. Blood was still running down her face from the slash to her cheek and scalp. When he at last helped her to her feet, she saw her new white blouse was soaked red from the cut on her breast.

  “I tried to trust him,” she said and fell again to her hands and knees and began to sob. She could smell the spoiled food of the kitchen and the human waste of the castle, slimy and putrid under her hands. The stench assailed her as she tried desperately to breathe.

  God had condemned her to hell before her spirit had even left the earth.

  The doctor knelt beside her and drew her into his arms. She convulsed in sobs.

  “You can never trust a madman,” he said. “Never. But I blame myself for this. I never should have let you treat him. I was worried about my reputation, my failure as a physician. And now look. All this sorrow is of my creation.”

  “No, I wanted to cure him. I thought I had. I thought—”

  “That your patient could love you. That is my fault, too. I have failed your family, and I have failed the king. But most of all, I have failed you, Marketa. Let’s get you up and take you back to the bathhouse where your mother can care for you—”

  “No! I never want to see my mother again! This was her idea—she thought I could be his mistress and she would never have to work again.”

  Mingonius didn’t say anything for a few minutes.

  “Do you still want to leave with me, Marketa?” he said in the darkness.

  She turned and lifted her face toward him as far as the pain would allow.

  “I want nothing more in this world than to go to Prague.”

  Doctor Mingonius looked up at the moon, blinking back tears as the first snowflakes of the winter hit his eyes.

  “Marketa, I cannot take you to Prague. Especially now. We must find safe haven for you. You need care—you are badly hurt.”

  “I—I must go to Prague! I need to escape him.”

  “Shh! Shh!” said Mingonius, stroking her hair.

  He looked up to the window, the torches still burning bright. He could hear the howls of Don Julius within the castle.

  “Do not talk, slecna. Rest. We will talk later of Prague.”

  They rested there in silence a while longer until, at last, Doctor Mingonius thought he could move her safely, and he pulled her gently to her knees and then to her feet. He was relieved to see that she could walk or, at least, limp with his help. Once they were back in the castle, in his apartments, he ordered Viera, the housekeeper, to bathe Marketa and clothe her in some of Viera’s own garments.

  He spoke to the guards, swearing them to secrecy, lest the priest learn what had transpired during the night. For their part, they were terrified of being assigned the blame for what had happened to Marketa and eagerly swore an oath of secrecy.

  “We must make him think she is dead,” said Doctor Mingonius. “And it is only by the grace of God she is not.”

  It was two hours past midnight when the coach was brought round. The clatter of iron horseshoes on the cobblestone shattered the dark silence, striking sparks in the courtyard. The wildeyed horses, snorting great puffs of white vapor into the cold air, gave urgency to the departure. The trunks were hastily lashed to the back of the coach, and two guards carried Marketa out. Doctor Mingonius and the servant Viera helped settle the girl into the velvet seat.

  The road was snowy and rutted. The carriage rocked and jumped, jostling the passengers like dice shaken in a gambler’s hand.

  Marketa’s face throbbed from being battered by Don Julius. There were sharp, searing pains from the blade wounds. But for the most part, the shock numbed her gashes and bruises. Soon she felt nothing but the deep aching pain in her head.

  Doctor Mingonius had given her a potion to calm her, and despite the rough, jarring ride in the carriage, she found herself falling asleep.

  When she opened her eyes again, sunlight was streaming in through the open curtains of the carriage. She saw the hard frozen ponds of the Rozmberks, where fat carp slumbered in the deep, cold water. Soon they would be harvested for Christmas dinners and sold throughout Bohemia, for what good Christian mortal would not feast on the white flesh of that fish in honor of the holy day?

  Her eyes were heavy with sleep, and her face throbbed rhythmically like the beat of a drum. Doctor Mingonius, seeing that she was awake, steadied himself beside her in the rocking carriage. His fingers inspected the knife wounds that he had stitched up before they left Rozmberk Castle. They had already begun to pucker a bit and ooze, but the work had been done with a steady hand and he thought it would hold together, God willing, and heal.

  He smiled gently at her.

  “We will stop in Cesky Budejovice,” he said. “There is a good little inn, clean and simple. I’ve sent a rider ahead to notify the innkeeper of our coming. His wife is a good cook.”

  He looked at her, worry etching his face. “You do like brook trout, Marketa? Fresh from the river?”

  Marketa tried to smile, but when her skin stretched across her wound, she winced.

  “It will take time to heal, Marketa. Viera will take good care of you.”

  Viera smiled and reached over to clasp her hand gently.

  “You have gone through too much in that wretched little village.”

  Marketa wondered through her haze just how much Viera knew. She looked at her warily, but saw the woman’s kindness shining in her soft blue eyes.

  “You will love Prague. There is no city like it in the world. You will see!” Viera squeezed her hand. “A world of reason, medicine, and science,” she said, stealing a quick look at Doctor Mingonius. “The finest artists, astronomers, and poets. You shall see. You will never want to return to Cesky Krumlov again!”

  Doctor Mingonius put a finger to his lips.

  “Enough, slecna. Marketa is too ill to go to Prague now. Budejovice will have to do.”

  Slecna Viera looked crestfallen and stroked Marketa’s damp, blood-crusted hair.

  Marketa closed her eyes against the pain. When she woke again the carriage had rolled to a stop in Cesky Budejovice and it was late afternoon, less than a day after she had walked through the heavy wooden door, into the madman’s chamber.

  CHAPTER 32

  CESKY BUDEJOVICE

  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.

  CHAPTER 33

  DON JULIUS GRIEVES

  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.”