Her mother struggled to her knees and hoisted herself back onto the bench, gathering her skirt under her. She held her head erect, her back rigid with resentment.
For the rest of dinner, Lucie glared at her daughter across the table and seemed to have no appetite. Still, every now and again Marketa noticed a shiver catch her and shake its way up her spine.
The next day, Pichler set out for Vienna and the barber-surgeon guildhouse, where he kept abreast of the latest phlebotomy studies. He kissed his daughter good-bye and warned her to behave and keep peace with her mother while he was away.
Marketa sighed and promised to make herself useful in the bathhouse. She worked hard that morning washing a mountain of linen bath sheets and hanging them out to dry by the banks of the Vltava. When her mother nodded approvingly at the rows of flapping white laundry strung between the trees, Marketa smiled.
“Daughter, you deserve time away from the bathhouse. Dana and Kate can help me this afternoon.”
Marketa kissed her mother’s cheek, knowing she was trying to make amends for striking her the night before. Her mother embraced her quickly and shooed her away, encouraging her to enjoy a few hours of free time in the sunshine.
Marketa sought out her best friend, Katarina Mylnar, the miller’s daughter. They sat side by side on the riverbank, their feet dangling in the water, looking at the great walls of Rozmberk Palace looming above them. The Mylnar family’s waterwheel groaned behind them as the girls took pleasure in a few rare moments of leisure, basking in the afternoon sun.
Marketa found her friend’s company comforting, especially after her mother’s strange outburst the night before.
Katarina smelled of flour and sugar, especially on Saturdays. That was the day her mother did the most baking and provided cakes for the town and the Rozmberk family.
Katarina was plump, and the flour and fine sugar would find their way deep into the folds of her damp skin, nestling in her neck and cleavage, elbow crooks and fingers. She was fair-haired and laughed at everything as if she were pleasantly drunk at a holiday feast.
The millers’s daughter had many admirers, for who would not love a woman who loved life with such passion—and whose family baked buttery cakes for nobility? As they exchanged secrets, their feet splashing in the cool water, Katarina whispered to Marketa that she wished one day the blacksmith’s son would taste her skin all night long, his tongue savoring every sugared crevice.
Marketa laughed in conspiracy at her friend’s confession, but she knew Katarina’s desire would never come to pass. Katarina’s father was not keen on the match and scowled at the sweaty-faced lad with sooty fingers. He felt his daughter could attract a better suitor, perhaps a butcher or even a wealthy merchant.
In fact, Katarina’s father forbade her to spend time with any man. His daughter was to be surrounded by women and girls until he found her a suitable husband. Katarina chose to spend most of her time with the bathmaid, although Marketa could not understand why the town’s beauty would want to spend time with the bloodletter’s daughter.
But Katarina loved Marketa’s strong character and admired her fierce interest in science. Her stories fascinated the miller’s daughter, for Marketa could read, a skill that was rare among women.
In the winter, the two girls loved to skate down the icy cobblestones on hilly Meat Street in their wood-soled shoes, slipping and falling to the hooting of the butchers. The meat cutters would cheer them on with muffled claps of their fingerless gloves, their bodies wrapped tight in woolen cloaks while they stamped their feet against the cold. Marketa’s cheeks flushed red and hot from the contrast of the steaming barrels of the bathhouse and the damp, frosty air. Katarina’s pale skin would glow warm pink, sticky with sugar, like a frosted cake.
The two were inseparable, and Katarina spent many an afternoon combing and braiding Marketa’s long hair, particularly on lazy warm days such as this one.
“The most peculiar and enchanting hair in the world,” she sighed in wonder. “It has every color of every girl’s hair. Amber, chestnut. Look! Here is a strand of blonde the same hue as mine, and here is one the raven black of the gypsy girl, Ruby!”
“Oh and this!” she said, plucking a hair from her friend’s head.
“Ow!”
“This one is the flaming red of the witch Annabella!” Katarina teased, twisting the orange strand in the sunlight. “Your hair must be bewitched!”
“Do not call her a witch!” Marketa snapped, twisting her head around to admonish Katarina. “The Church burns witches! Annabella is a cunning woman, capable of great cures.”
“Calm down! I am neither the Church nor the king. I do not wish to harm our village healer,” said Katarina. “Now relax for goodness’ sake. Let me finish your hair.”
Katarina went back to lifting Marketa’s tresses and braiding it with her soft hands.
“If it were not so perfectly mixed, I could plait it into individual braids and no two would be the same color!” Katarina said.
Marketa felt herself drifting off as Katarina pulled her hair gently with her soft hands and tugged it into long braids. The girls would sit in the soft grass by the river and Katarina would adorn Marketa’s hair with wildflowers, which thrived in the rocky soil and laced riotous colors through the fields and meadows of Krumlov.
Katarina asked endless questions about Marketa’s father’s profession, about the sharpening of the blades, the four humors of the body that were released by surgery, the people he had saved, and the patients he had not. She wanted to know about the fleam, the razor-sharp blade he used to nick the skin, the cupping glasses to pull out blood, and the leeches themselves.
Katarina had a curious habit of crossing herself anytime she asked a question, as if the science of Zigmund Pichler’s profession were somehow a sin.
“Tell me again,” she would implore, her hand fluttering about her face and bosom. “About the humors. I have them all muddled up, Marketa. I am not as clever as you.”
Marketa sighed because she couldn’t believe that a miller’s daughter, with a hundred recipes in her head, couldn’t hold on to four simple humors.
“The black bile. Now that one stays with me, Marketa. The sadness, melancholy humor.”
“Just the opposite of you, Katarina. It’s strange that you should remember only that one!”
“Maybe it is because I have heard it said that King Rudolf is haunted by melancholy. But tell me the others!” she begged. “And how your father brings them into harmony.”
Marketa smiled because Katarina was paying her father a compliment. A good barber-surgeon could cure the sickest man, woman, or child, if he could manage to balance the four humors.
“Blood, the sanguine humor, is for laughter, music, and passion. That one you have in your veins, my friend, by the bucketful.”
Katarina laughed, throwing her head back so that her white teeth gleamed in the sun and the light caught the granules of sugar that clung to her plump throat.
“The others, Marketa. Please.”
“Phlegm. The dull and sluggish.”
“Like the grave digger’s son, who is not saddened at his occupation, but is just like an old mole, bored with life itself. Oh, how I wish he wouldn’t stare at me in the streets with his sad face.”
“The last is yellow bile. It is the cruelest of them all. It causes outrage, ravenous lechery, even—murder.”
Katarina widened her eyes. Legends and fairy stories captured her like nothing else. And to her, the cholers were a witch’s tale.
“Murder,” she whispered.
“Too much yellow bile causes lunacy. It boils up in the veins and scalds with burning lust or murderous passion. That is what the book says.”
Katarina looked at Marketa in admiration, nodding her head.
“You and your books. Ah, what a gift it must be to discover the world in those squiggly lines.”
Marketa heard her mother call from across the river that she needed help in the bathhouse
.
She rose to her feet and kissed Katarina on the cheek.
“I have to go now,” Marketa said. “But as always you have given me cheer, dear friend. Let me teach you to read, Katarina. Then you too can decipher those squiggly lines!”
Katarina looked at her friend, stunned.
“Me? Read?”
“Of course. Why not? It is not magic. Reading only takes instruction and practice.”
Katarina reached for her friend’s hands, kissing them.
“Oh, Katarina,” said Marketa, snatching her hands away. “Don’t make such a fuss!”
Marketa waved good-bye as she hurried to the Barber’s Bridge.
It was true. Reading was a rare gift that Pichler had given his daughter, and Marketa had the opportunity to practice with tutors who were too poor to pay for bloodletting and traded their bookish skills for her father’s services. Books were mainly in Latin, and she struggled with her father’s help to decipher them. But she could understand Czech and German well enough to read and write simple correspondence, her mouth working over the sounds and threading them together into a word.
Her skinny twin sisters, Dana and Kate, age ten, could neither read nor write. Like most of the children in Krumlov who did not attend the Jesuit Latin school, they did not seem to mind in the slightest. The girls shook their heads as they saw their sister sitting with a book in her lap, her finger tracing the words to sound out their meaning. They never resented Marketa for having the education they did not, for neither of them had any desire to spend precious minutes of free time bent over a book.
Lucie would stomp over to the table in the evening where Marketa leaned over a precious book, poring over the words. With a wet pinch of her finger and thumb, she would snuff out the sputtering tallow candle, leaving Marketa in the dark, with only the glow of the embers in the hearth to illuminate the room.
“Do not waste candles,” her mother scolded. “We are not Hapsburgs! Go to sleep. Your reading will do you no good in the baths and is useless for a woman. It can only ruin your eyes!”
Marketa would sit in the sudden darkness as the rancid, smoking fat of the candle spread its last greasy fumes across the room. She breathed in the thick air, touching the parchment with her fingers.
Her father thought it was important for her to read, especially as she had taken an early interest in his profession. There was no such thing—there could be no such thing—as a woman barber-surgeon, but Marketa quickly excelled as an assistant. She knew how to keep his scissors and blades sharp, and when he performed surgery, she held the bowl to catch the splashing course of blood in a modest manner that reassured the patients. She learned the bleeding points, the system of veins, and how to stanch bleeding.
And Marketa knew she was never ever to touch hair that was cut with her father’s barber’s scissors. The spirit left in the strands could be malevolent and strike her dead. At the very least it might invade her soul, make cows’ milk curdle, or leave her infertile.
Marketa also took a keen interest in the humors and the diseases they created when out of balance. Marketa felt that her father’s profession was akin to the divine working of miracles. It was said that she was much more like her father than her mother, but some of the older folk in Krumlov whispered she was much like her revered aunt, the mother superior of the convent of Poor Clares. They nodded their white heads in silent agreement when they saw her in the street. Indeed, the girl possessed the same mysterious air the holy Mother Ludmilla had when she was the same age.
Marketa’s father whispered to her when she was a mere toddler that he was sure she had the gift of healing. He thought his daughter too young to understand and remember his words.
But she did.
As Marketa walked over Barber’s Bridge to the bathhouse, she thought wistfully of her father in Vienna. How she wished she could be at his side, listening to the latest discoveries in human anatomy and phlebotomy.
Little did she know that another discovery—a chance encounter in the streets of Vienna with a Hapsburg—was about to change her father’s life forever.
He would be the first to bring the unspeakable news to Cesky Krumlov.
CHAPTER 6
RUDOLF II AND THE CODED BOOK OF WONDER
King Rudolf scratched peevishly inside one nostril with his manicured fingernail. It wasn’t a particularly elegant act to perform in the Viennese court, but then what did it matter? He was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the king of Hungary, king of Moravia and Bohemia and Croatia. And the Eastern kingdoms paid him tribute and asked for his mighty protection, so he could include these in his possession.
And given the daily news of the outrageous behavior of his bastard son Giuglio—now known to everyone but the royal family as Don Julius—what condemnation could a little nosescratching merit? He had divine right, he was...
One of his many dwarfs, the pimply one, giggled and whispered something behind his pudgy hand.
“Do you mock me, you ugly sprite?” snapped the king. The finger so recently engaged in scratching now pointed ominously at the little man. “Approach me, you warty little toad!”
The dwarf widened his eyes in horror and tried to swallow his fear. The king was known for sudden fits of rage, and a court dwarf was disposable, just one among the many given to Rudolf for his amusement. The man trembled at the thought of being plunged into the darkness of a Viennese prison.
“Of course not, my lord! I’d sooner cut off my right arm than to insult my king!” he said.
“Of what do you speak, then, so full of mirth?”
The dwarf hesitated, his eyes darting like scared minnows as he conjured his lie. “I—I was wondering if life in Prague and the hrad is as marvelously amusing as I’ve heard. The music, the feasts, the Vltava River that sparkles green—”
Everyone in the Viennese court knew of His Majesty’s preference for Prague, where he could escape the pressures and royal duties of Vienna and indulge his melancholy, his love for art, astronomy, exotic animals, beautiful women, and clocks.
The king’s minister, Wolfgang Rumpf, stepped in, perhaps saving the dwarf’s life.
“Yes, indeed. This little man does praise well the charms of the capital city Prague for one who has never laid eyes on her eternal beauty,” he said, casting a sardonic look at the trembling dwarf. “What an astute observation from someone so humble.”
“My holy city of enchantment,” murmured the king, momentarily forgetting his wrath. “Bah! Vienna sickens me with her air—the Danube cannot compare with the Vltava. Did I not proclaim Prague as City Eternal of the Holy Roman Empire? Why do state affairs continue to draw me back to this old whore of a city and the nagging voice of my mother? We shall prepare for Prague immediately. You, Rumpf, shall address these tedious councilors who suck my very marrow with their questions and pleas. They tire me with their wheedling.”
Minister Rumpf, who was long accustomed to taking charge of the reins of the empire, especially when His Majesty suffered a bout of melancholy, consented with a low bow.
“However, before your imminent departure, my lord,” said Wolfgang Rumpf, addressing the king’s polished boot, “if you please, we must discuss the fate of your son, Don Julius Caesar d’Austria.”
“Giuglio has the corrupt blood of his Italian mother in his veins. This is my punishment for coupling with the foreign wench.”
Minister Rumpf’s eyebrow twitched. It had long been assumed by the European royal courts that Emperor Rudolf’s own mental failings—bouts of melancholy and fits of temper—were a direct inheritance from his great-grandmother, Juana La Loca of Spain, the maddest perhaps of all the Hapsburgs. And now Don Julius, in turn, manifested undeniable signs of the Hapsburg lunacy. The bastard son did not share the dark, brooding melancholy of his father, but displayed a belligerent choler that endangered all near to him.
At least King Rudolf was more eccentric than macabre and his tempers were short-lived, blessed be, thought his minister. It could be wors
e. His ancestor, Juana La Loca, had kept the dead body of her consort with her for years, caressing and sleeping with the decomposing corpse. Certainly it was best not to have a rotting corpse at court and a queen who made love to it, especially with the Turkish sultan Suleiman waging war and demanding tribute in the southern regions. Still, the nagging problem of the bastard son had to be addressed.
“Last night, my lord, Don Julius attacked his own servant with a knife and thrust the blade through the man’s hand. He has been detained by the authorities and rests in a guarded room in the courthouse.”
The king’s face contorted, but he said nothing. Rumpf waited silently, hoping the king would gain control of his temper before he spoke.
Then Rudolf exclaimed, “Damn that bastard! Damn him and his brothers and sisters, all six bloody bastards! Well, set him free at once, by my order.”
Rumpf lowered his voice. He was nearly whispering. “This act was the culmination of a night of debauchery, Your Majesty. Don Julius is reported to have taken two whores into the streets and performed his sordid business in front of a crowd of drunken louts, who cheered him on. His servant tried to pry him from the thighs of the prostitutes and throw clothes on his naked back. The man received this unmerited assault as thanks from your son. He nearly bled to death, but a barber-surgeon in the crowd rushed to stanch the bleeding.”
The king said nothing. He remembered the one afternoon years ago when he had struck his son, the day he had found him trying to decipher the Coded Book of Wonder. He thought how his young son had been intrigued by the workings of clocks and other mechanisms such as music boxes and windup toys.
Perhaps it was this instinct for logic and order that had led Giuglio to study the incomprehensible text of the mysterious Coded Book of Wonder.
Why had he lost his temper that day? The memory from seven years ago still gnawed at the king.
What had happened to that boy with the curious mind, the intellectual? The king had pinned all his hopes and pride on his eldest son, the handsome boy who had inherited the good looks of his mistress.
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