I was quiet for a moment. Then I laughed. ‘My father spoiled me,’ I answered lightly, ‘for he deemed me intelligent. That is what he always desired for me. To catch the attention of a royal knight and become a noble lady.’
Giorgio tipped my chin up with his fingers. I lowered my eyelids but not before we had exchanged a brief glance. ‘Don’t play a bucolic lass with me,’ he said. ‘Those eyes blaze out intelligence and impudence. You have a manner that belies your station.’
‘And so have you, sir,’ I countered. ‘You must have had some more important position elsewhere before you became an assistant in a pharmacy.’
He winced and I saw that I had made a hit. I pushed forward my advantage. ‘What were you before you came to Salon?’
‘I was a court physician.’
My heart tripped, but I knew that I must ask the next question else it would appear odd. ‘Which court?’
‘The most wondrous court in all of Europe,’ he replied.
The French court claimed their court to hold this honour but then so did Elizabeth of England.
‘England? France?’
‘Not royal.’ He shook his head. ‘I said the most wondrous court of Europe, not the richest or the most grand and ostentatious. This court patronized and encouraged the natural talent of men of genius and produced the most sought after artistry in the world. It was the one held by the Medici of Florence.’
‘That of the family of the queen regent, Catherine de’ Medici?’
‘The very one.’ He bowed low. ‘Doctor Giorgio was one of the most respected doctors there.’
‘So you knew Catherine de’ Medici before she was married to the King of France?’
‘I did. I knew her as a child. I’m not much older than she.’
Yet he looked more aged, and walked hunched, dragging his legs like an old man.
He guessed my thoughts and said sadly, ‘Ah yes, I’m not as robust as I once was. This is courtesy of Signor Strappado.’
He saw my puzzlement and went on to explain. ‘The strappado is an instrument of torture much favoured by the Florentines. The victim is tied with rope around the wrists and the rope flung over a high beam. The rope is then raised and the body let fall just short of the ground. This is done many times until one’s bones jolt out from their sockets. I was lucky. My punishment ceased ere every bone had been loosened from its joints.’
‘What wrong did you do?’
‘None. One of their noblemen took a fever and became very ill, retching green bile. Fortunately for me he recovered but they suspected I had attempted to poison him.’
‘And had you?’
‘No. Had I done so I would have despatched him properly and left no trace.’
‘That is not a skill to boast of,’ I laughed.
‘I know as much about poison as any Medici, and the Medici are very skilled poisoners indeed. This duke had been poisoned but it was a clumsy effort, more like the work of the Borgia family who once ruled the Papal States. They used a white powder, mendoril, mixed with soup or the sauce of any dish. It is odourless and tasteless, but the victim begins to have fits of vomiting and diarrhoea so it’s obvious that poison has been administered. The Medici and those who work for them know more sophisticated methods . . .’
‘Such as?’ This was not quite the thing a young girl should be interested in but my curiosity was piqued.
‘There is a particular mixture of substances that is easily absorbed by the skin. It can be blended into a beauty cream, or an ointment to remove blemishes. And once administered there is no cure. Even inducing vomiting or administering a purge will not rid it from the body. You become as one of the walking dead.’
‘And there is nothing to show that any poison has been given?’
‘Oh, if you have a keen eye, you might determine a faint mottling of the neck, the skin on the back of the hand yellowing, a smell like that of cherries. But it doesn’t matter what symptoms you espy, there is no antidote. The Medici poison is very swift and efficient.’
A fragment of court gossip came into my head and I repeated it aloud: ‘They say that when the queen came to France from Italy she brought her own poisoner with her.’
Giorgio’s head snapped up. He sent a look of alarm towards the door leading to the house.
‘Perfumer!’ He spoke sharply. ‘Perfumer,’ he repeated the word. Yes,’ he said distinctly. ‘I heard that the queen regent brought her own perfumer with her from Italy.’
I followed his glance to the door and remembered the presence of Berthe in the house, who could be listening. ‘Yes,’ I hastened to agree with Giorgio. ‘I heard that too. The queen is very interested in perfumes.’
With my heart beating fast I began to tidy the shelves. Giorgio limped slowly to the house door, opened it and looked into the hallway and up the stairs. I’d seen that Giorgio always treated Berthe with caution. Every morning the kitchen maid brought us both a bowl of porridge laced with honey and a jug of milk. He was always very polite to her, bowing as he accepted the porridge. I don’t believe she considered him in any way a suitor, but you could see that she was flattered by his manner, the little compliments he paid her. I recalled someone questioning an unlikely alliance at court between a cruel and powerful older woman and a young man who had taken up with her.
‘That’s what love can do,’ another courtier had replied.
‘Or fear,’ my father had observed.
If Giorgio’s body and spirit had been broken by the strappado then he would fear torture all the more for having once suffered it and escaped. A picture of the woman and the two men on their way to be burned at the stake in Spain came to my mind.
Giorgio closed the door and returned to the shop.
‘There are those who set more store by the prophecies of Master Nostradamus than by his medicines and cures,’ he continued. ‘Myself, I wish he could shake off his visions. It debilitates him and attracts too much unworthy attention. People add their own interpretations to his proclamations and invent stories of strange happenings within this very house.’ Giorgio pointed out of the window. ‘See, over there is a mill. The paddles go round and the machinery creaks and groans as any mill does. But now it is widely put about that these noises emanate from the spirits that the magician Nostradamus summons to speak with him.’
This was exactly what the pedlar woman had said to me when she’d guided me here! She’d told of weird noises coming from the house and claimed it was souls in torment.
‘But he does make true prophecies,’ I said. ‘Did he not prophesy the death of the queen’s husband and her first-born son?’
‘Some do say so,’ Giorgio replied in a neutral tone.
I nearly blurted out then that Nostradamus had accurately foretold the death of my sister. But I stopped myself. It was not that I thought that Berthe might be listening, but more out of deference to the wishes of Mistress Anne, who had said that no one must know of my true life history.
Chapter Twenty-nine
DESPITE GIORGIO’S MEDICINES and Mistress Anne’s attentions it was the first week of June before Master Nostradamus was fit enough to rise from his bed.
I quickly learned how much work the house required. It was a task in itself just to keep the candles and lamps burning but it was the one I loved most, especially tending those on the upper floor. Just before the shop reopened for the evening hours I would go upstairs to trim the wicks and replenish the oil, lighting each lamp and candle in turn. While doing this I took time to look at the books and ornaments and astrological aids in Nostradamus’s outer rooms.
I touched the fossils and strange stones that he had collected on his travels. I saw the ragged outline of the coasts of the New World on the huge globe that stood near the fireplace. This was where, in the vision I had heard Nostradamus declare, fire and death would rain down from the sky. What peoples lived there? Did they have prophets and seers of their own who would warn them of the coming catastrophe? On the walls of these rooms hung many
charts of numbers set in grids and circles. I could not understand these, and they did not attract me as much as the ones showing the positions of the planets and the stars. I kept returning to them, to wonder at their mystery and majesty, and to consider our place within their pattern.
It was here also that he kept copies of his published works, The Prophecies. These revelations, each one made in four lines of free verse, known as quatrains, were the source of speculation and fascination to the world and to me. Why did my heart beat faster when I looked upon these pages and read the words? Imbued with a terrible force, they opened a fissure in my mind. I struggled to understand his visions, spilling raw from his fevered mind. Was he writing what he saw, what he heard, or merely what he imagined?
Downstairs in the shop Giorgio and I worked mainly alone. Prior to my arrival Mistress Anne and the older children had helped out. But of the six children of Mistress Anne and Master Nostradamus, only four were at home at this time. The oldest boy had recently left to travel abroad with an uncle and one of the girls had gone to live with an aunt for a while. Of the rest, the two young boys were schooled daily outside the house, while the remaining girl had a tutor who came to teach her at home each day. In addition to tending to her husband, Mistress Anne’s time was taken up with her smallest child, Diane, the little girl who was still sickly and constantly sought her attention.
Nostradamus’s presence was missed in the shop for, as Giorgio told me, he was in the habit of consulting there two or three mornings a week. During opening hours part of the space behind the screens was used for this and Giorgio now did the diagnoses there every morning. Sometimes our customers would be members of the aristocracy who had journeyed especially to Salon to meet the famous Nostradamus. Their servants would push their way to the front and demand that Master Nostradamus attend personally to their particular lord or lady. They gave Giorgio scant attention when he informed them that Nostradamus was unavailable but that he, Giorgio, was a qualified doctor and could offer a consultation at a lesser fee. I had a certain sympathy for these frustrated persons who went away crestfallen, for more than anything I wanted my own private meeting with the prophet.
Yet Giorgio was patient, even with the most humble petitioners who presented themselves. He often gave consultations without charge to the common people, to compensate for the cancellation of Nostradamus’s free sessions held on the first Monday of each month. Some came looking for a cure for nonexistent illnesses. It seemed to me that Giorgio often spent more time than was necessary with such customers, when it was clear they only wanted to unload their troubles. For these patients Giorgio recommended a variety of water tinctures. He would invent a long and complicated history of success for the particular remedy he prescribed; of how this potion had cured the youngest son of a Spanish princess, who herself was eighth in line of succession to the throne, or how that infusion had healed the favourite wife of the second Sultan of Arabia. In some patients’ minds the more convoluted the story, the more potent the medicine became.
I queried this with Giorgio, saying, ‘These infusions you give out are no more than liquorice boiled in water.’
‘They will do no harm,’ he informed me. ‘And sometimes believing you will get better is more than half the cure.’
But to balance these cases, the desperate and the hopeless also arrived in the apothecary shop, and on occasion caused us both to be depressed for the remainder of the day. To look into someone’s face and tell them there was no cure for their terminal illness is a melancholy task. Once a woman arrived carrying a dead baby. She laid her piteous bundle on the counter and begged us to have Nostradamus put his hands on her daughter, thinking that he could restore her child to life.
‘You must go to a priest,’ Giorgio told her. Even he, who must have seen many deathly sights, was disconcerted. ‘Only God Almighty has the power of life. Doctors can stave off death, and Master Nostradamus is an expert in this, but he is not a worker of miracles.’
As word spread that the prophet was unwell, business fell away and the shop became quieter. Giorgio made a remark about this when doing the accounts at the end of one week.
‘Everyone thinks that we make a fortune here. But the ingredients we use are expensive. There must always be some prepared ahead of time, so we are obliged to outlay money, even though our income drops.’
The biggest expenditure was on rosewater, which was delivered in huge jars made up to Nostradamus’s own recipe. The rose grower who did this was contracted to him alone, and used thousands of rose blossoms in the preparation.
‘It seems a waste of so many roses,’ I commented. ‘Why spend so much on this, a product used to beautify the body, while others die for want of proper medicine?’
‘Master Nostradamus is a good doctor, and a wise man,’ Giorgio replied. ‘Rosewater is also used to make the pills that curtail the Plague. His own first wife and their two children were struck down with Plague and he could not save them. Thus he has dedicated himself to finding a cure for this affliction. Also, the money paid by the rich for their beauty treatments subsidizes the medicine for the less fortunate.’
It was the less fortunate who Giorgio contrived to help the most. He always had a sugar stick for the ragged children of his poorer customers, and would sometimes entertain them with simple conjuring tricks when the shop was less busy. He had a repertoire of these. By dint of twisting his fingers and holding them up to the light he could make shadow shapes of animals cavort on the window blinds; he showed them unbreakable eggs and many card tricks, and once even perplexed me by having a coin slide across the counter to him as he beckoned to it. After the children had gone he revealed the secret – a piece of magnetite chipped from a block of lodestone that he had concealed in his hand and which had attracted the metal in the coin to move towards it.
Meanwhile Mistress Anne moved my bed from the cupboard to a curtained alcove in the family room upstairs and I was allowed to use the candle stumps to read by after supper each night. This was when I most missed my mandolin. My fingers ached to pluck the strings and send music cascading through the air. I had to content myself with playing songs in my mind and bend my head to study my notebook.
Then, near noon one day, Mistress Anne arrived in the shop to say that her husband had woken up and asked for some chicken to eat. She had given Berthe a day off to visit her mother and wished me to go to the shops in the main square, where there was a poultry seller and I might get a joint of chicken for two pennies. I put the money in my apron pocket and went to do as she asked. As I left, Giorgio pulled down the window blinds and locked the street door.
‘I will go out too,’ he said. ‘I heard a pedlar has come to town carrying Secren seeds from Marrakesh. It’s a rare commodity and I want to obtain some before the other pharmacists buy them all up.’
Giorgio regularly went off for an hour or more when the shop was shut to track down obscure ingredients. It was a sign of how much he was trusted that he was allowed to take such money as he wished from the cashbox to do this.
The poultry seller’s shop was easy to find. Like the rest of the traders in Salon, as soon as the month of June began, they set up their tables outside with awnings on top to give shade. I pointed out a fresh piece of chicken and, as the shopkeeper wrapped it up, I placed my two pennies on the table top.
He glanced at my face, and then at the money.
‘Two pennies!’ he exclaimed. ‘I think not! Such a fine piece of chicken is worth far more than that!’
I was taken aback. Mistress Anne had only given me two pennies. Then I recalled I had a penny or two in my apron pocket, for occasionally a grateful client would return and give us a coin as gratuity for our services. I rooted around in my apron pocket and took all the money I had – three more pennies.
‘Is that all you have?’ the shopkeeper asked in a belligerent voice.
My face went red and I nodded.
‘You are robbing me,’ he declared, ‘but I suppose I will have to take it
.’
Five pennies was more than double what Mistress Anne had given me. But I had never in my life bargained for food in the market, so I did not really know the best price. And Master Nostradamus had asked especially for chicken and I did not want to disappoint him. Yet I hesitated.
The man glanced beyond my shoulder. ‘Quickly now,’ he said. ‘Else I’ll raise the price again.’
I looked to see what had caught the shopkeeper’s attention. A tall figure was making his way down the street from the direction of the Château Emperi. It was the Lord Thierry. He had with him his sergeant at arms who was carrying a solid long box.
Some murmurs of discontent sounded around the stallholders.
‘What is our noble Lord Thierry poking his nose into today?’
‘Look! His sergeant carries the box of the official weights. He must mean to check our scales are accurate.’
‘He’s always bothering someone about something, that one. Why can’t he leave honest traders in peace to go about their business?’
I was about to say that if they were honest traders then they should not fear an inspection of their scales and weights, but now I was experiencing my own flutter of disquiet. Weeks had passed since the spring market and my encounter with this man. My hair had grown a little and I had altered Mistress Anne’s dress so that it looked more fitted to me but I did not want to be near him and come under his scrutiny.
‘Come on, girl!’ the poultry man said in an anxious voice. ‘Are you buying this chicken piece or not?’
If he was hastening to do the deal, then so was I, albeit for a different reason. I gathered my money and made to give it over, when a hand reached out and over mine.
‘Stop!’
I whirled round. Giorgio stood beside me. ‘Put your money in your apron,’ he told me. Then he addressed the shopkeeper. ‘That is an absurd sum of money to pay for a piece of chicken, as well you know. Shame on you, to take advantage of a young girl.’
The Nostradamus Prophecy Page 14