by Paul Doherty
‘So much,’ I whispered. ‘So much.’ Then I heard her voice, as she used to talk, standing behind me, whispering as if we were lovers.
‘Cleanse yourself, Mathilde! Have your sins shriven, know some peace.’
I told Father Guardian this. He just laughed. He claimed the dead were too busy to bother with us. I should look into my own soul. He was talking to me near a fountain, its water splashing up. For some reason I lost my temper, the first time for years, certainly since coming to Grey Friars. I acted like a prisoner locked in a dark dungeon, throwing herself against the door, beating at the iron grille, desperate to get out. I sprang to my feet, striding up and down. Father Guardian grew perplexed.
‘What’s the matter, Mathilde?’
I crouched at his feet, grasping his bony knee, and stared fiercely at him, a look he’d never seen before. He’d forgotten I was once a player in Fortune’s Great Game. I have seen hot blood spurt! I have fought all my life in the press of the court or against furtive, silent assassins. He sketched a cross above my head.
‘What is the matter, Mathilde?’
‘What is the matter, Father Guardian?’ I replied hoarsely. ‘I shall tell you about her life, I shall confess my sins.’
Those old eyes brightened. I half rose and, pressing my lips against his ear, began my confession. The faint colour in that old face quickly drained; he drew away, gazing at me horrorstruck.
‘I would have to see the bishop,’ he murmured. ‘Such sins!’
‘Such sins, Father Guardian?’ I retorted. ‘What does scripture say? “If your sins be red like scarlet, I shall wash them white as wool”? Well, Father Guardian, my sins are many, of the deepest scarlet, like the sky on a summer’s evening or the red banners of war. I am steeped in villainy, Father Guardian. I am the Lady of Hell. I lived in the shadow of Isabella “La Belle”, the Jezebel, the She-Wolf, the Virago Ferrea.’
‘You must prepare yourself to receive the sacrament, examine your conscience,’ he retorted. ‘Be honest with yourself so you will be honest with God.’
By then I had recovered. I realised what I had said: that old man, on a cold stone seat near a fountain, had learnt more in those few precious moments than Edward, the king, would ever learn. Oh, others have tried. I have been offered bribes, lands, manors, even the marriage of some young man, a royal ward. I have always refused. I have met and loved the great love of my life. Moreover, I took an oath of secrecy to Isabella but, on reflection, I believe that oath has now been lifted; I am released from my obligation. On that day near the fountain I shuffled my sandalled feet and apologised for my temper. I promised Father Guardian how, as soon as Advent began, I would kneel in the shriving pew and confess all my sins. I joked how it would take a long time. Father Guardian glanced at me warily, shaking his head.
‘Sister Mathilde, honesty is short and brief. Confess who you are rather than what you did.’
During the subsequent weeks I often reflected on his words. The more I searched my soul, the more I realised he had not spoken the full truth. To understand what I have done, to realise who I truly was, or who I am, I would have to describe who Isabella was: the princess from some romance of Arthur who arrived in England at the age of thirteen to marry Edward of Caernarvon and unite England and France in an alliance of peace which would stretch to eternity. Oh, the folly of princes! Father Guardian allowed me the use of the scriptorium and the library. I began to write in a cipher, which could only be translated by me, a legacy from my days as a healer. The weeks turned into months. Summer went, autumn arrived in gorgeous profusion. The paths and gardens of Grey Friars became carpeted with leaves which gleamed like copper before the rains fell and turned them into a dirty mush which I had to clear, stack, dry and burn. I promised Father Guardian that once Advent came and the church was cleaned in preparation for the coming of the Christ Child, I would make my confession.
However, the Lord Satan had not forgotten me. On the Feast of St Luke, suddenly like a thief in the night, death caught Father Guardian. He was found in his bed, sprawled slightly to one side, mouth gaping, eyes hard, his soul long gone to God. I asked Father Bruno, the keeper of the scriptorium, a gentle, scholarly man with a stooped back and a face like that of a puzzled sparrow, if I could pay my own final respects. He agreed, so I knelt before Father Guardian’s corpse. I crossed myself and gabbled a prayer I’d learnt as a child, then closed my eyes. I made a promise, a vow to Father Guardian: I would still make my confession, but not to some priest I didn’t know, or one of the brothers, who would only recoil in horror. Father Guardian could sit on the other side of life’s veil and hear me out.
On that occasion, after watching his corpse, I rose and noticed a scrap of parchment lying on the writing carrel where Father Guardian used to sit and meditate over some book of hours. I listened intently. The lay brothers on guard outside were gossiping amongst themselves. I crossed swiftly to the desk and picked up the parchment. I immediately recognised Boethius, an extract from his Consolation of Philosophy: ‘My very strength, Fortune declares, this is my unchanging sport. I turn my wheel which spins the circle. I delight to make the lowest turn to the top, the highest to the bottom. Carry me to the top if you want but, on this condition, that you think it’s no unfairness, to sink when the rule of the game demands it.’ I smiled. Father Guardian had left this message just for me. I have been on Fortune’s fickle wheel, at bottom, top and around again. I have known the glories of victory and the bitter ashes of defeat.
Now Father Guardian had always been good to me, giving me pennies or a silver piece. I had carefully hidden these away. A serving boy I trusted, for a bribe, went to the scribblers and parchment sellers in Cheapside. He brought back rolls of vellum, ink, sharpened quills, a pumice stone, and sand to dry the ink, everything a clerk of the chancery or scribe in a muniment room would need. I will keep my vow in the dark hours of the night. I will buy more candles and light them to write my story and that of Isabella, who controlled the Wheel of Fortune and sent it spinning so that kings and princes, lords and ladies, the mighty and the great crashed to earth whilst others were lifted high in exaltation. I will write about the other great love of my life, the study of physic. Father Guardian knew of my art and skill, but I refused to practise it even though he showed me the friary library. I have done with study. I have read the books, be it those of Islam such as Haly Abbas’ Complete Book of the Medical Art, those of the ancients such as Dioscorides’ Herbarium. Galen’s Therapeutics, Caelius’ De Medicina, or the texts from Salerno and Montpellier. I can mix moss and stale milk to create a powder which can scour and heal the filthiest wound. I can tell you if a man has taken his own life, died from a rebellion of the humours or suffered a death other than his natural end. Oh yes, murder in all its guises! Like the first I studied – Sir Hugh Pourte, sprawled in a courtyard, his skull cracked like a walnut with the blood and brains spilling out. The first time I went through that dark door to the House of Mysterious Death. Yes, I’ll begin there, but first, how did I arrive there?
So many years ago! So many lifetimes! Yet no one can contradict me. No one can stop me hurrying down the ill-lit passage of time to those autumn days of October 1307 when I sheltered in Paris, enjoying the sweet life of youth, my heart brimming with ambition to be a physician. I’d hoped for that. I’d prayed for it. I’d spent every waking hour thinking about it, ever since I had left the village of Bretigny to work for my uncle in Paris, where I had proven myself to be the most ardent scholar, avid for the horn book. I could write all my letters correctly, use the calculus, and had learnt the Norman French of the court. I became most skilled in learning. My mother’s only child, she lavished on me all the love and care she used to lavish on her husband. My father had been an apothecary from a family of healers. Ever since I was knee-high to a buttercup, he talked to me about his art, be it in the fields and woods, where he would instruct me in the use of herbs, or in that dark treasure chamber of our own little house with its manuscripts and leech boo
ks, its jars and coffers crammed with healing potions and deadly black powders. Learning? I took to learning as a bird would to the wing. My father died; my mother could do little for me. She would often gaze at me sad-eyed.
‘Mathilde,’ she would murmur, ‘with your hair as black as night, your dark eyes and pale skin,’ she’d smile, ‘you might catch the eye of a merchant widower. You are slender and tall . . .’ She would break off as I pulled an ugly face, and laugh. ‘Or you could go to your uncle in Paris.’
I made my choice, so she dispatched me into the great city, to the one man I grew to admire above all others: my uncle, Sir Reginald de Deyncourt, Senior Preceptor in the House of the Temple, a physician-general, a man dedicated to serving God and his order, as well as those who needed his skill, until Philip of France, that silver-headed demon, decided to intervene.
Chapter 1
Charity is wounded, Love is sick.
‘A Song of the Times’, 1272-1307
‘Oh dies irae, dies illa.’ So the sequence from the mass for the dead proclaims: ‘Oh day of wrath, day of mourning.’ I shall never forget my day of wrath, my day of mourning: Thursday 12 October 1307. I was about twenty years of age, apprenticed to Uncle Reginald. I’d journeyed from our small farm near Bretigny to Paris with fervent aspirations of becoming a physician and an apothecary. My uncle, a gruff old soldier, one of the two men I’ve ever loved, the father who replaced the one who disappeared when I was a child, took me into his care. He lavished upon me all the love and affection Tobit did on Sarah. A true gentlemen, a perfect knight in every way, Uncle Reginald was a man of deep prayer and piety. He fasted three times a week and always went to Notre Dame, late on Friday evenings, to place a pure wax candle before the Statue of the Virgin. He would kneel on the paving stones and stare up at the face of the lady he called his Chatelaine. Uncle Reginald was a man of few words, of moderate temper and sober dress. He was a saint in a world of sinners. He always thought I’d be the same. However, my early time with him was only an introduction to a life steeped in every type of villainy cooked in hell.
You must remember, before I narrate, what has happened, how the world has changed since my youth. War now rages from the Middle Sea all through France and the northern states. The Great Pestilence has made itself felt; a towering yellow skeleton, armed with a sharp scythe, has culled the flower of our people. Asmodeus, the foulest of demons, the Lord of Disease, has arrived amongst us. Cities lie empty, their streets strewn with the rotting, putrid dead. The symptoms are always the same: the curse of the bubo beneath the armpit, the body on fire as the stomach vomits black and yellow bile. The smouldering funeral pyres have become symbols of our age. The sky is blackened by smoke, whilst the sweet fertile earth is polluted, yawning to receive our myriad dead.
In my youth, the faculty of medicine at the University of Paris was like a dog, hair all raised, teeth bared, jaws snarling against women who practised medicine, but it had yet to bite. Later it did, at the time of the great killing in England, the Year of Our Lord 1322, when it prosecuted Jacqueline Felicie for practising as a physician without medical training. Felicie declared, supported by evidence and witnesses, that she had cured people where licensed graduates had failed. She also maintained (and I have read her defence) how women preferred to be treated by one of their own kind. ‘It is better and more appropriate,’ Felicie argued, ‘that a wise and sagacious woman, skilled in the practice of physic, should visit another woman to examine her and to investigate the hidden secrets of her being, rather than a man.’ Poor Felicie, her defence did not hold. In my youth it was different. I was protected. Uncle Reginald was a high-ranking Templar. He was also a skilled surgeon and physician who had practised his art in Outremer, the Holy Land of Palestine. He had been at the siege of Acre and campaigned in the hot lands around the Middle Sea. He had also experienced the healing arts of the Moors, Saracens and other followers of Mahomet. Oh, the Queen of Heaven and Raphael the Great Archangel Healer be my witnesses, Uncle Reginald was a physician sans pareil, skilled and cunning, a true magister – a master of his art.
Do not be misled by the legends of the Temple, the allegations of sodomy and sacred rites. True, the Templars had their secrets, they possessed the likeness of the face of our Saviour as well as his burial shroud, but they truly were men of this earthly city: bankers, warriors, and above all, physicians. They venerated the Virgin Mother Mary and extolled women more than other men did. Uncle Reginald was much influenced by the followers of St Francis, especially the Liberian Anthony of Padua, who praised our sex and would say no ill word against us.
Uncle Reginald was a Physician-general, a supervisor of the Temple hospitals in Paris, and that was where my education began. ‘You want to drink at the fountain of knowledge,’ he thundered, ‘then so ye shall!’ My studies were highly disciplined. Uncle Reginald would make me translate a passage from Latin into the common patois then into Norman French before rendering it back into Latin. He’d give me a list of herbs, their proper names, powers and effects, then take the list away and test me rigorously. He taught me the gift of tongues and how to imitate the correct meaning. Above all, he taught me medicine. I became his apprentice as he moved from hospital to hospital, from one sick chamber to another. I’d stare, watch, observe, remember and recite: these were his axioms. ‘Mathilde,’ he would wave his finger, staring at me with lowered brows above piercing eyes, ‘we physicians cannot heal; we can only try to prevent as well as offer some relief. Remember what you see. Observe, always observe, study carefully, define the problem and propose, if you can, a solution.’
Uncle Reginald was critical of the claims of other physicians. He bitterly attacked Lanfranc of Milan’s Science of Surgery and openly mocked physicians’ obsessions with urine, faecal matter and purgation. He was appreciative of the Arab commentators Averroes and Avicenna, deeply interested in Galen and, above all, in the writings of Bernard de Gordon of Montpellier, whose Regimen Sanitatis he would swear by. Uncle Reginald was fascinated by the beat of the blood in the wrist or throat, the odour of his patients, their eyes, tongue and the texture of their skin. ‘Observe,’ he would bark, ‘examine, then reflect.’ He was pessimistic on what he could achieve and was always downcast if he felt tumours or lumps within the body. On herbs and potions, however, he was most skilled, arguing that that was one field of knowledge where he could both sow and reap the harvest. I became equally proficient in the mixture and effects of different plants: what proportion should be given, what results expected.
‘We must be humble,’ Uncle Reginald argued, ‘and recognise our limitations. Herbs are our weapons, the arrows in our quiver, the one thing we can control; that, and the cleanliness of what we do. Mathilde,’ he would lecture as he walked up and down some chamber, ‘the cause of infection I do not know, but its effects are all around us. So wash your hands, clean a wound, apply a pure poultice, and always remember that dirt and death walk hand in hand.’
For eight years that was my life, my being, my very soul; from its first blossoming to the full ripening. Uncle Reginald! Whether I trotted beside him down a row of beds or was sent like some herald into the city to buy this or that. Other young women married, but my life was Uncle Reginald. God rest him. God knows, I have spent most my life, at least in physic, obeying him.
My life, at least with Uncle Reginald, ended as I have said on Thursday 12 October 1307, when Philip of France, Philip ‘Le Bel’, he of the light blue eyes and silver hair, struck like a hawk and destroyed the Temple. My uncle and I had been visiting a farm the Temple owned just outside Paris, the fields around it being rich in herbs. We unexpectedly returned to the city. My uncle decided to stay in a small tavern close to the Porte de St Denis. From its cobbled yard I could see the soaring gallows of Montfaucon and the red-tiled roof of the Filles de Dieu, the Good Sisters, who always gave the condemned criminals, hustled up to be hanged from the great gibbet above its deep pit, a final cup of wine. On that heinous day my uncle acted like a man condemned to th
ose gallows. He was troubled, agitated and ordered me to keep close in my chamber just beneath the eaves of the old tavern.
I, of course, was desperate to return to Paris: a farmer’s daughter, I had become bored with the beauties of nature, its open fields, lonely meadows, brooding granges, rat-infested barns and silent, twisting track-ways. I was only too pleased to forsake them all and plunge into the city of Paris, as eagerly as any miser would a horde of silver coins. I’d grown to love the city, with its various markets: the Place Mordare for bread, the Grand Châtelet for meat, Saint Germain for sausages, the Petit Pont for flour and eggs, the great herb market on the quayside of the Ile de Cité, or Le Marché aux Innocents where you could buy anything you wanted. Noise and gaiety were my constant companions. People shoving and pushing, whispering and shouting:
‘Dieu vous garde!’
‘Je vous salue!’
I’d been my uncle’s messenger to this place or that, coursing like a hare through the city. By my twentieth summer I was still fascinated by the chestnut-sellers from Normandy, the cheese-hawkers, the plump apple-sellers with cheeks as red as the fruit they sold. My uncle had taught me all about the tricks of the market. Innkeepers and wine merchants who mixed water with wine, or bad wine with good. Women who thinned their milk and, to make their cheeses look richer and heavier, soaked them in broth. Drapers who laid their cloths out on the night grass so in the morning they weighed heavier. Butchers who soaked their meat or fish-mongers who used pig’s blood to redden the gills of stale and discoloured fish. Clothiers who had one yardstick for selling and another for buying. He also advised me to be wary about those who sold goods in dark streets to deceive the unsuspecting, and made me memorise all I learnt and observed about the city I loved. Each trade had its quarter. Apothecaries in the Cité. Parchment-sellers, scribes, laminators and book-sellers in the Latin Quarter. Money-changers and goldsmiths on the Grand Pont. Bankers near the Rue Saint Martin and mercers in the Rue Saint Denis. The colour and hurly-burly of city life never seemed to die. Richly brocaded burgesses sweeping down to picnic by the Seine. Knights in half-armour riding by on fine palfreys or noble chargers. Lavishly dressed gallants posing with falcons and sparrowhawks on their wrists. It was like visiting a church and going from one wall painting to the next. So much to see! I took to it with all the vigour and curiosity of youth.
