Matilda Bone

by Karen Cushman

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Arriving

  Chapter Two: Looking for Deliverance

  Chapter Three: Going to Market

  Chapter Four: Encountering Doctor Margery

  Chapter Five: Tending a Cat

  Chapter Six: Leeching

  Chapter Seven: Finding Another Matilda

  Chapter Eight: Watching Tom

  Chapter Nine: Meeting Walter and Nathaniel

  Chapter Ten: Doing her Best

  Chapter Eleven: Easing Sarah

  Chapter Twelve: Consulting Master Theobald

  Chapter Thirteen: Talking to Effie

  Chapter Fourteen: Sending a Letter

  Chapter Fifteen: Naming Birds

  Chapter Sixteen: Tending Tildy

  Chapter Seventeen: Receiving a Letter

  Author's Note

  Thanks to Nancy Helmbold, Professor Emeritus, Department of Classical Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago, for help with Latin, and to Robbie Cranch for her arcane knowledge, willing help, and constant friendship.

  Clarion Books

  a Houghton Mifflin Company imprint

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003

  Copyright © 2000 by Karen Cushman

  The text was set in 12-point Goudy.

  Title type calligraphy by Iskra.

  All rights reserved.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10003.

  www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

  Printed in the USA.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Cushman, Karen.

  Matilda Bone / Karen Cushman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Matilda, an apprentice bonesetter and practitioner of medicine in a village in medieval England, tries to reconcile the various aspects of her life, both spiritual and practical.

  ISBN 0-395-88156-0

  [1. Physicians—Fiction. 2. Medicine—History—Fiction. 3. Middle Ages—Fiction.

  4. England—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.C962Mat 2000 [Fic]—dc21 00-024032

  CIP AC

  eISBN 978-0-547-53348-3

  v1.0912

  Dedicated to the memory of my fathers,

  Arthur Lipski and Alvin Cushman,

  and of Dorothy Briley

  Chapter One: Arriving

  Matilda stood before the scarred wooden door and stared at the bright-yellow bone painted there. "Obviously I am here," she said softly, "and Deus misereatur, Lord have mercy on me."

  Just a short while ago she had been mounted safe behind Father Leufredus as they had entered the stone gates of the darkening town. Then Father Leufredus said, "This is Blood and Bone Alley. I must leave you here. Nine shops along, I am told, is the place of Red Peg the Bonesetter, which will be your home now." He helped her off the horse. "Bene vale," he said, switching to Latin. "Farewell, Matilda. Remember all I have taught you, about right and wrong, sin and Hell, and the evils of joy and pleasure. Do always as you think I would have you do, remember your Latin, and pray ceaselessly." He blessed her and rode quickly on. She was alone.

  "Please, Father," she had longed to shout at his retreating back, "please do not leave me here." She had wanted to say, "All my life you have stood between me and a world you say is dangerous and evil. How can you leave me now?" She thought to ask Saint Balbina to inflict him with boils and rashes so that he could not ride away from her, but knowing that he was a holy priest and she should obey him, she said only, "Yes, Father," as she had been taught, then added softly, "Remember to come back for me when you return from London."

  Now he was gone and she stood, reluctant to go any farther. Things were going to happen, unknown things in this unknown place, and she was all unwilling and all alone. Never in her fourteen years had she been alone, there being the priest and the manor servants, the coming and going of cooks and clerks and chambermaids. And the saints, always the saints, who responded when called upon, like Saint Maurus, who had once told an unwilling Matilda, I was able to walk on water when commanded to by my abbot. Obedience is all; or Saint Augustine, who helped her to subdue her evil will whenever her wishes came into conflict with those of Father Leufredus. As she remembered, tears with the salty taste of winter herring slid slowly down her cheeks.

  She turned and looked up and down the alley, searching for deliverance. It was a mere stub of a street off Frog Road, pocked with potholes and spattered with garbage, lined with narrow houses and shops of two stories in need of paint and repair. Many of the shops were stalls with shutters that opened upward to make an awning and down to make a counter, as was common, but some—like this one—had real, solid wooden doors, as if what went on inside was too secret and mysterious to take place in the open. There was no deliverance here.

  She shivered, battered by the icy wind. Thin and small, with long yellow braids and large, wary, sea-green eyes, she stood, carrying nothing but a bundle with a change of linen—no Sunday kirtle or surcoat, no poppet or other plaything, nothing of her mother or her father or of the priest who had raised her.

  Staring again at the bright-yellow bone on the door, she thought, Bonesetter. I am to assist a bonesetter. What would this bonesetter person be like? She imagined a saintly figure, soft-spoken and learned, who healed with but a touch of her pale, thin hands. More likely, though, the bonesetter was an ancient crone, bony and wizened, with hairy moles on her chin and cheeks, and implements of torture all about her—racks and chains and huge wooden mallets with which to crush....Matilda stopped imagining and shuddered with dread. "Oh, spit and slime," she said, for they seemed the best words to express her feelings. "Spit and slime," which in Latin was saliva mucusque. It pleased her so well that she said it again, "Saliva mucusque," as she kicked at the wall of the shop with her big boot.

  "Come," called a voice from within.

  What had she done? The bonesetter had heard her. Matilda could picture her on the other side of the door, fingering the hairy mole on her chin.

  "Come!" demanded the voice.

  Matilda shifted her bundle, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

  The tiny shop had a swept-dirt floor and was heated by coals glowing in a small iron brazier. There was a dark, shabby front room with table, benches, and bed with a blue coverlet, and another room beyond. The air was warm and dusty and smelled of wood smoke, sausages, goose grease, and lemon balm. Matilda entered, bumping her head against a forest of clamps and pulleys sprouting from the low ceiling. Implements of torture, just as she had imagined!

  Suddenly she was grabbed from behind and swung around, her feet flying and her breath squeezed from her chest before she was plumped back onto the floor.

  "I have been waiting for you, girl!" shouted a large figure looming over her.

  Matilda crossed herself and backed away.

  "What is wrong?" said the voice. "I am Red Peg. Are you not the Matilda come to help me?"

  "I am Matilda, and you frightened me," the girl whispered. "I feared I had been snatched by the Devil."

  "Do not be such a milksop. None but Peg to grab you here. Now, come and let me see you. By Theodoric the Anti-Pope, you're as welcome as the loaves and fishes." Peg moved Matilda into the weak light from the fire and peered at her. "You seem healthy enough, if a bit puny. And it's a right sweet-looking little polliwiggle you are, with them great green eyes and a chin like God Himself had cupped it in His hand," Peg said, "but you're thin as an eel in winter."
>
  Polliwiggle? Eel? "I am no fish," Matilda said, peering at her new mistress in the dim light: hair orange as a carrot peeping from beneath a greasy kerchief; a big smile that showed more spaces than teeth, although she appeared of no great age yet; and a face beslobbered with freckles, forehead to chin, ear to ear; tall and lean, plain, common, and most ill-mannered. Not fine and saintly—but no hairy moles, either. "And I am thin because I have been fasting. Father Leufredus says that God wishes us to deny our bodies for the sake of our souls."

  "Great gallstones," Peg said. "God would never have created plump and meaty if He wanted us scrawny. Here, fatten up on some of these goose-liver sausages. Best that can be bought in the market, special for your coming."

  As Peg eagerly sliced up the sausages, her hair popped from beneath the kerchief and frizzled about her face, but a bit of sausage grease served to hold it down once again. She licked her sticky fingers and handed a slice of sausage to Matilda.

  Hungry as she was, Matilda backed away. "I cannot eat sausages."

  "Whyever not?" Peg asked.

  "Father Leufredus says sausages are where the butcher hides his mistakes."

  Peg smiled and frowned, opened her mouth, closed it, sighed, and said, "Then leave it, and I will show you around my shop. In truth, it is not exactly mine, for it belongs to a canvas merchant who lives across town where it is cleaner and sweeter smelling. No proper merchant wants to do business on Blood and Bone Alley.

  "This," she said, pounding the table with the flat of her big hand so that Matilda jumped, "is where I eat and tend to patients and where I will, God willing, beat you at draughts every night. I have a passion for draughts, my good man Tom, good friends, and sausages.

  "Here is where I sleep," she continued. "You will have a pallet back there in the buttery with the pots and platters, where you'll be cozy as a yolk in an egg, and upstairs is where our landlord—thief and miser that he is—stores his overpriced canvas. There is a wee bit of a plot in the yard where we can grow a few cabbages in the summer, though mostly we will buy meat pies and onions in the street, and the baker down past the Poultry will cheat us of our pennies for bread."

  A pallet on the floor? Pots and platters? Cabbages? Matilda longed to be back at the manor, where there were proper beds, beef and cheese and ale, and fires blazing in fireplaces tended by the huge, quiet Donal, or even bouncing on that bony horse headed toward London.

  Peg continued to talk, describing Blood and Bone Alley, where ordinary people came to be bled, dosed, and bandaged, with its barber-surgeons down this way and leeches down that. "I am the only one on the alley setting bones," she went on, "and there has been more to do here lately than I can attend to by myself. My cousin told me there was a girl with nimble wits at Randall Manor needed a place, and I told my cousin I could use a nimble-witted girl to do as I bid her and help as necessary, and here you are. There is not overmuch to do, even for someone as little as you...."

  Swept by a wave of loss and loneliness, Matilda heard only the voice in her head that said over and over, This is a miserable and lowly place with no Father Leufredus, no servants, and only sausages to eat. Oh, deliver me!

  Finally Peg ceased chattering at the girl and sent her to make ready for bed. As she spread her straw pallet on the floor, Matilda once again called for heavenly assistance: Dear Saint Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead, I do not like it here at the bonesetter's, where it is cold and dark as a tomb. I pray you rescue me.

  My child, she heard the saint replying, I understand your unhappiness, for I too was left in a cold, dark tomb. Of course, I was dead. Have courage.

  Chapter Two: Looking for Deliverance

  Matilda heard rain slapping against the roof as she woke. With no window unshuttered, she could not tell if it was dusk or dawn outside, just that it was near dark inside. Not knowing where she was at first, she was bewildered, but found she preferred that to the hopeless, lonely feeling that came next. "Blood and Bone Alley," she said to herself. "I am somewhere named Blood and Bone Alley, with a mistress who is noisy, untidy, and not at all holy. And I am miserably cold." She tucked her icy hands beneath her as she watched her breath steam in the frigid air for a moment.

  The room grew very gradually lighter, although no warmer. Morning, then. Matilda said her morning prayers, leapt up, pulled on her shift and kirtle, and jumped back into bed. "I think the fire must have gone out," she said to herself, "for even in this place it would never otherwise be so cold."

  Getting up again, she hopped and jumped over the icy floor to the brazier in the front room. Peg was but a hump under the blue coverlet.

  "There is no fire, Mistress Peg," Matilda called.

  "Just as I expected," said Peg, her voice muffled by the coverlet, "for you are to tend the fire."

  "The fire? Me?"

  Peg sat up, her wild red hair standing out like flames around a martyred saint. "You. Were you not listening to me last night? I clearly said that you would be obliged to tend the fire."

  "Is there no slavey or servant to do that?"

  "Yes, indeed. You. Now stop squeaking at me or we will surely freeze to death. You will find kindling wood in a box in the buttery and some nice bits of charcoal. I think there is enough fire left in those embers to raise a blaze without much trouble," said Peg, pulling the blue coverlet over her head again.

  Matilda gathered up the wood and charcoal and carried it into the front room, where she dumped it in a heap on the gray coals in the brazier. Ash flew up into her eyes, her hair, her mouth.

  "I am smothered near to death," she said. "And my kirtle is stained with sap and ash. I cannot do this."

  "I was told you are uncommonly clever," came Peg's voice. "Surely you can make a simple fire."

  Matilda took a wooden spoon in her frozen fingers and began to stir the mess in the brazier, gently blowing as she had seen Donal do at the manor. Ashes flew into the air like dusky snowflakes but, Deo gratias, the fire lighted. Also the wooden spoon. She opened the door and threw it out into the rain, where it spluttered and lay black and jagged in the mud. Closing the door, she called, "The fire is lit."

  She sat down on the bench, crossed her hands on the table, and waited. She had forgone supper last night and was mightily hungry. Her guts grumbled. Finally she asked Peg, "When will there be breakfast?"

  A loud sigh came from under the blue coverlet. "When you prepare something."

  No doubt, Matilda thought, I will also be expected to empty the chamber pots and pick the weevils from the bread. She sat still, clenching her jaw to hold her misery in, missing Father Leufredus, warm ale and cheese for breakfast, all that was familiar to her.

  Peg got up, dressed, and dropped a loaf of yesterday's hard bread on the table in front of Matilda. "Eat. You can start tomorrow." She sat down across from the girl and broke off a bit of bread. "I know something of your story from my cousin, who is brother-in-law to Lord Randall's clerk—how you lost your parents long ago and were raised at the manor," she said, chewing. "Tell me what you did there and what you know."

  "What I did not have to do," said Matilda, taking a big breath and a small piece of bread, "was light fires. Or eat sausages."

  "Never? What then did you do?"

  The girl took a bite of the hard bread and chewed industriously. "I had reading and writing, Latin and Greek, from my father. And Father Leufredus taught me to seek higher things, like God and Heaven, saint-liness and obedience. We prayed, and he taught me about God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell. I read aloud from the lives of the saints when he was tired, did some writing and figuring for him, kept his papers in order and his holy books. I was of much assistance to him."

  "Yet this Father Leufredus left you."

  "God and the Church called him to London to swear his support to the young king who is Edward the Third. And Lord Randall's clerk's brother-in-law contrived to send me to you. I do not know why I could not accompany Father Leufredus or await his return at the manor. But I could not." Matilda
stopped, suddenly overwhelmed by loneliness.

  Peg jumped into the silence. "Well, and now you are here, where you will be of much assistance to me," she said. "Let me see your hands."

  Matilda held out her small hands, their broad palms and straight fingers stained with ink. "Bonesetting is a skill of the hands," Peg said, examining them front and back. "You seem fine as fivepence to me—smart and strong enough to be a right skillful workfellow to a bonesetter, for all you're little as a flea. In exchange for your doing what I need done, I will give you an occasional penny and your keep."

  "As I have said," Matilda responded, still frowning at being likened to a flea, "I assisted Father Leufredus with reading and writing and figuring. Perhaps I could do the same here."

  "I have little enough use for figuring and none for writing. As to reading, why only last year Geoffrey Blackhead, the bishop's clerk, was reading from the letters of John of Salisbury as he walked along the river-bank and right into the water. Nothing was ever seen of him again but for his hat, which floated downriver as far as Toadapple Village." Peg crossed herself. "No, there will be no reading here. What I need is someone to tend the fire, see to meals, brew lotions and boil tonics, soothe and restrain patients, and help me in the setting of bones."

  Brew and boil? Restrain? Matilda felt hopelessness descend like a weight on her shoulders. She was here in the wrong place with the wrong mistress until Father Leufredus came to rescue her.

  "There'll be no one in town can teach you as much about bonesetting as old Red Peg here," Peg went on. "I have been setting bones on the alley since I was apprentice to Harold Spinecracker, many years ago." Peg crossed herself again. "Harold is now setting bones in Heaven, the Lord bless him for a sweet and noble soul."

  She swept most of the bread crumbs onto the floor. "What we call bonesetting," she said, "is the freeing of stiff or injured limbs, the mending of broken or ill-formed ones. Folk come with pains or aches, fever sometimes, red and swollen joints sometimes, or leg or arm frozen from disuse. We'll see children ovenidden by ale carts and left with broken limbs, clumsy carpenters who tripped or fell or hammered their fingers instead of nails, men and women crippled by disease. If it has to do with bones or joints, Red Peg is the person to see. Twenty years or more it has now been, and I have tended to every finger, back, and knee in this town."