Midnight Fire (A Jagiellon Mystery Book 2)

by P K Adams

  “Guarda, mamma! Look!” Giulio called. “Maria brought me a present.” He pointed to the blocks with a delighted expression.

  “Marchesa del Vasto,” I corrected him, sending Maria an apologetic look. I felt a stab of guilt for my ungenerous thoughts, for as exhausting as the woman could be, she was also kind-hearted.

  She waved her hand. “I asked him to call me Maria. I don’t like formality.”

  I walked to the sideboard, poured a cup of wine, and held it out to her.

  She shook her head. “I’ve been invited to a party tonight, so I’ll stick to these for now.” She picked up a couple of white-coated oblong shapes from the bowl and popped them into her mouth. “They’re my favorite snack.”

  I sat in the chair opposite hers with a sigh.

  “How was the audience?” she asked.

  “The duke has agreed to arrange a consultation for Giulio with Doctor Nascimbene.”

  “I’m happy to hear that!”

  I smiled. I wanted to be polite, but I also really wanted her gone so I could rest. I said nothing, hoping she would take the hint.

  She scrutinized my face. “You look tired, Caterina.”

  “I am. I might lie down for a bit.”

  “What you need is a distraction and some relaxation,” Maria stated, as if I had not spoken at all. “I have an idea. Come with me to the baths.”

  “What?”

  “I was planning to go to the baths before the party. You should come with me.”

  I frowned. “But they are for men!”

  She chuckled. “Here in Vilnius, both men and women go. It’s very”—she searched for the right word as her eyes twinkled—“interesting.” She settled on that when she saw the alarmed glance I sent in Giulio’s direction. But he was too intent on planting miniature blue-and-yellow flags on top of one of the battlements to pay our conversation any heed. “I visit every time I’m here. What do you say?”

  I must admit I was a bit shocked, although I tried not to show it. After all, it was none of my business how Maria spent her time. She was not married, and, as a distant cousin to Queen Bona, she was highborn, so she could get away with what might be scandalous for a woman like me. If the bibones et comedones were still active in Kraków, she had to be a member. Briefly, I considered asking her, before remembering that Giulio was with us.

  “Thank you, but no. I’ve never been to one, and I don’t think I should start at my age.”

  Maria’s eyes rounded in mock stupefaction. “What?! You don’t look a day over thirty-five!”

  “That’s not true.” I pushed a stray lock of hair that had fallen on my forehead back under my headdress. I cannot deny that I was flattered. “But it’s nice of you to say that.”

  “I mean it. We’ll have a grand time.” Then she added, as if she only just realized a possible reason for my reluctance. “Nothing unseemly happens there, at least not in the baths I go to, but you can bump into courtiers from the palace and foreign visitors. Who knows, maybe Zaremba will be there?” She winked.

  I ignored the innuendo. “No, really. I must prepare Giulio for the doctor’s visit, and when that’s over, we’ll return to Kraków as soon as possible.”

  Maria looked momentarily disappointed. “I’ll go to my chambers and get ready. Send me word if you change your mind.” Then she added, for she was not one to be put off easily, “If not today, maybe some other time.”

  When she was gone, I returned to the chair and took a few almonds from the bowl. Through the windows, I watched the pearly clouds float majestically across the pale blue sky. Despite the lingering warmth, the days were getting shorter. Outside I saw the first signs of approaching dusk; it would be dark in less than an hour.

  “I’ll go lie down, mamma,” Giulio said, rising from the completed structure. He was smiling, but he looked tired, and a sheen of sweat covered his face. My heart constricted. A few more days, my dove, a few more days.

  He came to me, and I kissed his forehead. “You built a beautiful fortress. Now go rest. We’ll see a doctor soon, and he’ll make you better.”

  Cecilia came out of their chamber to take Giulio just as a knock on the door rang out. I expected Rasa, come to light the candles and make up the fire for the evening, but instead Zaremba appeared when Cecilia opened the door.

  “Jakub!” I tried to sound welcoming, but I doubt I succeeded. His presence again robbed me of the chance to rest. Still, I invited him in, and he took the chair Maria had vacated. He looked tense, and it occurred to me that perhaps he, too, could do with a visit to the baths.

  I offered him the almonds, but he refused with a distracted air. “How did your audience go?” he asked instead.

  “Giulio will see the doctor, but I’m afraid I failed in my other mission. What the queen asked me to do is impossible.” The words came out of my mouth bluntly, but I was glad of it. Denying the truth would have been worse.

  A shadow of dismay crossed his features. But perhaps that was a trick of the fading light, for when I glanced at him again, his face was composed and difficult to read. Silence enveloped us as I focused on my restless hands in my lap. Another person disappointed in me. A sense of inadequacy crashed over me with a force I had not felt since my time as the overseer of the queen’s maids of honor.

  Across from me, Zaremba exhaled as if he had been holding his breath this whole time. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, his voice almost resigned. Then he added, perhaps reading my dismal thoughts from my expression, “Don’t blame yourself, Caterina. It was always going to be a difficult task, with the odds stacked against you. You’re not the first to have failed in this.”

  I lowered my eyes, embarrassed. I did not tell him that I had not even tried to state my case before the duke. I accepted that I was a failure, but I did not want him to think of me as a coward too.

  “I hope to leave Vilnius with the next convoy heading for Kraków,” I said, eager to change the subject. “You’ll be returning to Bar to rejoin Captain Pretwicz and his troops, I assume?”

  “My orders are to see you to Kraków safely first.”

  “Oh.” I was baffled by how glad this made me feel. “I see.”

  Zaremba’s eyes remained on me for a few moments longer. Then he rose, and I followed him to the door. Before he opened it, he turned to me. Darkness deepened in the corners of the chamber, rendering the features of his face less distinct. I wondered why Rasa had not arrived.

  I opened my mouth to say something—although I was not sure what—and felt his hand on my waist, light but firm. I knew I should resist, but I did not take a step back or move to push his hand away. I just stood there, my breath coming faster and shallower, loud in my ears, where his familiar address—Caterina—was still ringing.

  Zaremba moved closer. The solidity of his thighs pressed against my skirts. His musky scent sent a tingling wave I had not felt in years through my limbs. A warm and pleasant languor spread through my body. He lowered his face, his lips hovering inches from mine.

  What was he doing? What was I doing? Fog filled my mind again, as it had a few hours earlier, although for an entirely different reason. Then my husband’s image emerged from the fog. Sebastian appeared before me the way he had looked that winter night long ago at Wawel: dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a small smile and an air of mystery about him. We stood in the chamber he occupied as a royal secretary, hard snow peppering the windows, and he was about to kiss me just as the cathedral bell struck the hour and broke the spell.

  The clarity of the vision made me gasp, and I took a step back. “What are you doing?” I asked, looking away, although by now it was almost completely dark. Where was Rasa?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was calm, not apologetic. “I got … carried away. You have a way about you, Caterina …” He made a move as if to step closer again.

  I held out my hand. “Please don’t.”

  A knock on the door startled me. Zaremba stepped nimbly aside, and I hastened to open it.
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  “It’s you!” I wanted to greet the maid in a stern tone, but it came out almost cheerful. In truth, I was weak with relief. “I was wondering when you’d come!”

  She picked up the basket of firewood next to her feet. In the crook of the other arm she held several wax candles. “I’m sorry, my lady. The cellars were low on candles, but there was a delivery in process. I had to wait until the crates were opened.”

  I waved her in, and she bobbed two small curtsies to me and Zaremba before heading for the hearth.

  With a swift step, Zaremba was over the threshold. “God give you good night, signora.”

  “And you, my lord.”

  I closed the door and almost ran to the sideboard. Maria’s winking face floated before my eyes, and I shut them forcefully. I poured and drained a good measure of wine as Rasa struck the flint repeatedly until she was able to coax enough sparks to light the kindling.

  A few more days, and we will be on our way back home. A few more days.

  CHAPTER 8

  Wednesday, September 9th, 1545

  The summons came two days later, in the morning. After breaking our fast in our chambers, Giulio and I were accompanied by one of the duke’s junior secretaries to the southern wing of the palace, where Doctor Nascimbene’s exam room was located on the ground floor next to a small infirmary. I thought the escort a thoughtful gesture.

  Doctor Nascimbene was ancient: a man of seventy, small, spare, and slightly stooped. With a long, pointy beard and a cap too large for his head, with a top that tilted sideways, he looked like a wizard from one of the tales Giulio and I read together. My son stared at him with wide eyes, timid and curious in equal measure, and the corners of his lips trembled with what could have been either suppressed laughter or the possibility of tears.

  I put my arm around his shoulders, then addressed the physician. “We are very grateful to His Grace and to you for agreeing to see us, dottore.”

  The old man nodded benevolently. His pale blue eyes turned to Giulio and glinted with a spark of mischief. “And how old might you be?”

  “Ten,” Giulio answered, barely audibly. I squeezed his shoulder for courage. “I’ll be eleven come next spring,” he added, a bit more loudly.

  “That’s a serious age, indeed.” Nascimbene’s voice was mildly high-pitched. It too would not be out of place in a tale of wizardry. I wondered if it was his real voice as he turned his back on us, revealing a small hunchback. When he turned back again, he held out his palm. A dark, square shape rested in the middle of it. It was a piece of marzipan, a great rarity. “But I hope not so serious as to prevent you from enjoying a little treat.” He lifted his hand a little higher in an encouraging gesture as he brought his wrinkled face closer. Round spectacles perched at the end of his nose.

  Giulio looked at me with hopeful eyes, and when I nodded, he took a timid step forward and snatched the confection from the doctor’s hand. “Grazie,” he said as the marzipan vanished into his mouth, and a smile of delight brightened his face. The treat, and the fact that the conversation was unfolding in Italian, were quickly putting him at ease.

  Nascimbene turned to me with a smile that revealed a surprising number of teeth for one his age. Clearly, he himself did not indulge in sweets too much. “I am told that your son suffers from recurring fevers?” he said, his voice lower now and unexpectedly strong.

  I silently chastised myself for my doubts when I first saw him. Despite the outward signs of frailty, Nascimbene’s mind was still sharp. “Yes,” I replied. “Since he was four. We lived outside of Bari until last spring, when we brought him to Kraków to seek help at Her Majesty’s court.”

  The doctor motioned Giulio to sit on a raised bench by the window. The view showed the main city street leading up to the palace gate. We had ridden down that street only three days earlier, although it seemed longer than that. I had expected to wait a week or two before being seen, but we might accomplish our goal much sooner. Suppose we were back on the road to Kraków with the convoy leaving Vilnius on Saturday? At least this part of my mission was going well.

  As Giulio was stripping off his little doublet and shirt, Nascimbene asked me to describe his symptoms in detail. I recounted the fevers and chills, the headaches, nauseas, muscle aches, tiredness, and pallor. A few of the more severe attacks had also included convulsions, followed by a state of semi-consciousness that was neither sleep nor full delirium.

  “And how are you feeling today, young man?” Nascimbene asked as he began his examination.

  “Not bad,” my son replied. “Just a bit weak.”

  The physician pulled down each of Giulio’s lower lids, looked into his eyes while holding up a candle to the side of his head, and examined the inside of his mouth. He also checked his pulse, palpated his ribcage, and measured the length of his arms and legs.

  “Would you say that you have felt generally better since your arrival in Poland?” he asked.

  Giulio tilted his head back, thinking. Bored with the lengthy exam, he had been fidgeting and shuffling his legs in the air under the bench, but now he stopped, as if struck by a thought. “Yes,” he said wonderingly. “I have. I’ve had fewer headaches, and my arms and legs haven’t hurt as much.”

  My heart leaped. While I had, of course, noticed him faring better in the past few weeks, I had not allowed myself to hope too much. I had been waiting for a relapse, expecting and dreading it every day from the moment I opened my eyes. And there were still days when he had sweats and was too tired to get out of bed. This illness, I had to admit, had my mind in as powerful a grip as it did his body.

  Nascimbene handed him a bell-shaped vessel and pointed to a cloth partition. “Go behind this and provide a sample of your water.”

  As Giulio was attending to the request, the doctor said to me, “There is a slight yellowish tinge to his eyeballs, and he’s not growing as fast as he should.” I nodded, unable to speak for the constriction in my throat. “He’s afflicted by a type of swamp fever. I say a type because cases have also been found in susceptible individuals in drier areas where swamps don’t occur. But that only shows that bad air—mala aria—can travel far, although fortunately not so far as to make it impossible to outrun it.”

  “Outrun it?”

  “Yes. The best thing you could have done for the boy was removing him from southern Italy. There are far fewer swamps in cooler climates, and their miasmas are less noxious.”

  Giulio returned with the vessel that was less than half-full. “I could only manage this little,” he said guiltily.

  “Not to worry, young man. This will be enough, although scant urination”—he spoke to me again—“is one of the symptoms.” He swirled the contents before examining them against the light, his short-sighted eyes squinting behind his spectacles. “The color is paler than normal, which confirms my diagnosis. The fever stems from an imbalance between wet and dry humors.”

  “Does that mean he’s no longer at risk of a relapse in Poland?” I asked, barely daring to hope.

  He spread his arms in a gesture of uncertainty. “Not necessarily. It can take up to a year to fully recover once the patient has left the region whose air sickens him.” Then, seeing my face fall, he added, “But your son is still young and his growth will have time to catch up. If nothing else gets in the way, there should be no difference between him and other boys his age by the time he’s fourteen.”

  “So all we can do is wait?” I was both relieved and disappointed. My son would recover, it seemed, but it would take a long time, and we had traveled so far to hear such mixed news.

  “Ah.” The doctor raised a forefinger. “There is an infusion I can prescribe for him which, God willing, will help his humors return to the original balance faster. But with this malady, there are no guarantees,” he cautioned. “Time is still our best ally.”

  He ambled to the counter, covered with an array of vials, bowls, jars, and various sizes of spoons, knives, and pestles. Atop the counter, a hatch of shelves
and drawers held a variety of labeled boxes and bottles. He pulled two of the boxes out and lifted their lids. He took a wooden spoon and stirred their contents, making a soft rustling sound. He measured out a quantity of dried brown leaves and a similar amount of dried white flowers and placed them in a linen sack he produced from one of the drawers. Then he tied the strings of the bag.

  “Sweet wormwood and yarrow,” he said, handing it to me. “Brew one cup at bedtime every day for at least six months. This bag will last you for four weeks. You should be able to procure more from any apothecary in Kraków. If for some reason you can’t, write to me, and I’ll send another packet with a convoy from the court.”

  “I’m deeply indebted to you, dottore.” I reached for a purse hidden in the folds of my gown and pulled out a gold sovereign.

  He raised a thin leathery hand, dotted with liver spots, in a gesture of rejection. “No need, signora.” He shook his head. “The grand duke pays for all treatments in the infirmary.”

  * * *

  I waited for Jakub Zaremba until ten o’clock that night. I had not seen him since he came to my lodgings two nights earlier and we almost kissed. My cheeks burned each time I thought about how close I had come to betraying my husband, and I wished I did not have to see Zaremba again. But the queen had charged him with escorting us back to Kraków, and I wanted to go with the convoy that was due to leave in three days.

  He had stayed away from the banqueting hall earlier that evening. Given what had passed between us, it would have been even more unseemly than usual for me to go knocking on his door, so I paced the sitting room as the tower clock chimed hour after hour and the darkness thickened outside. I grew more and more anxious until I realized I had no choice: I had to speak with Zaremba, or there might not be room for us in the convoy. I did not want to have to wait another week.

  I went down the corridor, turned the corner, and knocked on the second door on the right, hoping nobody would see me. A long moment elapsed, and my stomach lurched. He might be out, and if so, I had no way of knowing when he would be back. What if he did not return before Saturday? Suppose he had gone to the baths or—the thought filled me with dismay—to one of the pleasure houses, which I’d heard were even more numerous here than in Kraków? Dismissing my fears, I raised my hand to knock once more and watched it trace an arc in the empty air as the door swung open.