Heart's Ransom

by Sara Reinke

  * * *

  “What about Lucio?”

  Rafe blinked, drawn from his forlorn thoughts of Evarado, and a long moment’s unintentional silence, by Kitty’s soft, hesitant voice.

  “The man you said taught you medicine in Madrid,” Kitty said. “What was he like?”

  Rafe raised his brow thoughtfully. “I never really knew him, to be honest,” he said. He had to smile to remember Lucio, however; with his customary, stern demeanor and grim, grisled expression, Lucio had looked and acted very much the part of the gruff curmudgeon. Beneath this brusque exterior, however, there had been a gentleness about the elderly physician, a compassion that had been evident to Rafe in observing his bedside manner, and the way in which he treated not only his patients, but their families.

  “These people are poor,” Lucio had told Rafe once, as they’d walked together through the muddy, narrow, rutted streets of Fatima, a village in Portugal. They had just received their third live chicken in payment for their services; for the entire month that they had been in the village, they had collected almost no coins in remittance whatsoever. Although Lucio kept a small, two-room home in the city of Madrid, his work seldom saw him there for long, and in the three years Rafe spent in his near-constant tutelage, Lucio brought him to countless small villages and impoverished parishes throughout Spain and Portugal.

  “They have little enough as it is, and then the king takes even that meager allowance from them in taxes,” Lucio had said, leaning heavily on a wooden staff as he trudged through the muck. His ‘thinking stick,’ he liked to call the staff, as he was fond to rap Rafe with it if the boy took too long in pondering an answer or diagnosis. He never struck Rafe’s head or hands, however; these, he had told Rafe, were priceless to physicians, above any other portions of their anatomies.

  “Including your miembro,” the older man had growled, sparing a pointed glance at Rafe’s crotch in clear indication.

  He had never hit Rafe’s head or hands, but he had taken to the boy’s buttocks and back aplenty with his ‘thinking stick.’ “A physician has no need of his ass―there is too much work for sitting or reclining,” Lucio had said. “Nor has he much use for his back, as he has trained the wits within his skull to earn his living, not his spine.”

  “He was sick,” Rafe said to Kitty, even though his mind was a thousand leagues hence, remembering his former mentor. “He was dying. I think he knew it even when he came to Mallorca at my father’s summon. He had some kind of lung infection. It lingered with him for years, growing worse with every passing day.”

  In the end, Lucio had died in Barcelona, his lungs too seized with fluids, his body to wracked with fever for Rafe to even attempt to bring him home. He died in a letted bed, his face flushed as he’d wheezed for labored breath. Even to the end, Lucio had been a physician, dictating instructions to his young pupil.

  “Señora Manzano Cadena will try and tell you she needs more of the rosemary tonic,” he had said, watching with sternly set brows to make sure Rafe wrote down each and every instruction. “Do not give it to her until she has finished the last, no matter her insistence.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rafe had said. It had continued on like this until Lucio had at last grown too exhausted from the effort to speak to continue. He had slumped back against his pillows, his face glistening with a sheen of sweat, and Rafe had dabbed a cool, wet linen against him in comfort.

  “You are a good boy, Rafe,” Lucio had said, closing his eyes. They were the only kind words he had ever offered Rafe, and Rafe had paused in bathing his face, profoundly touched.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  Lucio had nodded once and then he had died. It had been no more dramatic than that simple, fleeting moment.

  “I spent three years in his company, but never learned much about him,” Rafe told Kitty. “I do not think he wanted to waste the time he had left in cordialities or sentiment. He wanted me to learn everything he knew, as much as he could teach me. He took me with him all over the peninsula. A physician’s life means never seeing dust settle on your shadow, that is what he told me.”

  Rafe smiled slightly, sadly. “He told me that in Fatima―in Portugal―the year before he died. We spent almost three months there. The people had nothing. They were so poor, but so grateful. I have returned there many, many times in the years since, and it has always been the same.”

  He eyed his empty glass, wishing he could pour even a small allotment of wine, but he resisted the urge. He had promised and he was a man of his word, if no more could be said of him.

  “Lucio taught me well,” Rafe said. “He made sure I was well-versed in literature and mathematics, as well as science. He taught me Portugese and Arabic, French, Italian and English.”

  “All of that in three years?” Kitty asked, her eyes round with incredulity.

  Rafe thought of Lucio’s ‘thinking stick,’ remembering the sharp sting of it across his buttocks when he would conjugate his verbs incorrectly. “He had a way of imparting his lessons rather emphatically,” he said, with a somewhat rueful smile. “I learned all of that and more besides. He made sure I was properly instructed in the cultured ways of the gentry. I am afraid he considered me rather uncivilized. He sent me for several months to a gentleman’s academy in Madrid, where I learned proper manners, etiquette and the like. And how to use a quarterstaff.”

  That is what Lucio’s “thinking stick” had really been, not so much a device for aiding the older man’s gait as for his defense. Lucio might have been aged and somewhat feeble, but on the few occasions Rafe had seen for him to have to wield the stave for its true purpose―as a weapon―he had proven remarkably spry and agile.

  “What? You mean that ninny pole you used to keep tripping me back on the Wight?” Kitty asked. She was playing; there was a mischievous cock to her brows and a wry upturn of her lips. “My father would never carry such a thing. A quarterstaff is a poor man’s weapon, he says―that a proper gentleman prefers his saber or pistol.”

  “It is a poor man’s weapon, yes,” Rafe replied, unoffended. “That does not make it ineffective.”

  “You mean you actually had to go to school and learn how to swing that thing around?” Kitty asked. “I could bloody show you how to do that.”

  Rafe chuckled. He had nearly forgotten about how he had used his stave to prevent her from fleeing on the Isle of Wight. “There is more to it than just swinging it about,” he said. “There is quite a lot to the technique, in fact. Lucio and I carried them to defend ourselves against any would-be bandits we might meet on our travels.”

  “A fair match indeed against an unarmed thief,” Kitty remarked. “Although I dare say, that is a dim-witted sort, if you have them in Spain. In England, our bandits generally wield pistols or swords.”

  “A man well-skilled with a quarterstaff could more than handle any opponent,” Rafe said. “Lucio found pistols too expensive and swords too impractical.”

  “I will be certain to tell my father that,” Kitty said, making him laugh.

  “Please do,” he replied. “A quarterstaff, at least, can serve some additional functions, if need be.”

  “Like tripping up poor, defenseless blind girls on the beach,” Kitty said.

  Rafe laughed again. “Yes, exactly,” he said. His quarterstaff had been stowed ever since leaving England in the back corner of his wardrobe, and it occurred to him that he should be grateful that Kitty had found the manacles and not this, instead, or she could well have bashed his wits from his skull with the iron-capped tip. Being chained to her side was a pleasant alternative to death, all things considered.

  A far more pleasant alternative, he thought as Kitty laughed, too, her entire face aglow with radiant, if not impish, delight.