Marketa argued the virtues of balancing the humors through bloodletting, while Jakub dismissed it as fraud.
“You do not believe in Galen’s humors?” said Marketa, rising to her feet to peek over the rim of the tub. She stared at the bathing physician, forgetting altogether her earlier shyness.
“Charlatanism,” he pronounced, raising the stein of beer to his lips. “Chemistry is the secret to medicine. I am a scientist, not a sorcerer. In my laboratory I distill medicines from herbs, roots, and flowers. I isolate healing minerals from stone, water, and soil. Slecna, I cure my patients without stealing their blood.”
Marketa scowled at the bather, not knowing what to think about this doctor who mocked her father’s profession.
“Do not frown, Marketa,” said Jakub, wiping the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. “It is unbecoming and mars your natural beauty.”
Marketa didn’t know if she was being complimented or insulted. She started to frown again, then paused, confused between anger and a new emotion—could it be vanity? She sneaked a look at the handsome court physician and saw that he was smiling widely.
In an instant, she realized he had been teasing her. It was a revelation. In the king’s court, men teased women just as boys teased girls in the streets of Cesky Krumlov.
She smiled back at him for an instant, then deepened her frown and said, “Better frowning and plain than to distract your lordship from his important study of science, and his colossal self-importance.”
Now it was Jakub’s turned to begin to scowl, before realizing that he was being teased in turn.
He broke into a broad smile and splashed her from the barrel. She sputtered, shaking the water off her face and hair and growled a curse in Czech—a particular Krumlov curse that she knew he would understand.
The other bathers roared in laughter for they had been watching intently. Jakub raised his beer mug at her, smiling.
Marketa smiled in return. She could not remember when she had been so entertained by one of her mother’s clients.
When Jakub finally rose to leave, the water in the barrel was stone-cold, and black fleas floated among the sprigs of lavender. He dried himself with a bath sheet and called for his clothes.
Marketa did not help him dress, but waited patiently at the door. When he emerged from the bathing rooms, he had his magnificent green scarf in his hand.
“Here, Slecna Marketa,” he said, lifting her chin gently with his fingers. He tied the scarf around her neck as if she were a child.
His touch raised the downy hairs on her neck as his fingers fussed with the knot. He stepped back to admire her in his garment. There was a propriety gleam in his eye.
“Something to remind you of Prague,” Jakub said. “A magical city lies waiting for you, Marketa Pichlerova.”
He bowed to her, mounted his horse, and rode away.
CHAPTER 8
NEWS OF DON JULIUS IN KRUMLOV
Pichler arrived home the following day, a week earlier than planned. Marketa heard the hollow clip-clop of his mare’s hooves on Barber’s Bridge as she was hanging out bath sheets in the afternoon sun. She looked up to see him waving to her. She ran out with her arms open wide.
“Easy there,” cooed her father to his mount, who had shied as Marketa ran from the house. “You are home to rest and eat hay. No reason to bolt.”
He slapped his horse on the neck and dismounted. Marketa could tell by the hitch in his leg that he was saddle-sore and had not stopped long to rest along the way. He was more than thirty years old now and could not manage such a hard ride as if he were still a young man. The mare’s coat was lathered white and her flanks were drawn up tight in thirst.
“Father! What is the matter? Why have you come home so early and run your horse so hard?”
He smiled at Marketa’s observation; above all he had taught her that a good physician was alert to symptoms and discrepancies.
He gave his horse to the servant boy who slept in the small shed at the side of the bathhouse.
“Let her have her fill of water,” he said. “Do not feed her until sundown. She has run hard and will colic.”
As the boy started to lead the horse away to the grassy bank of the river, the barber-surgeon stopped him.
“Wait, let me untie my saddlebag. I have something there, Daughter, I want to show you.”
He untied the canvas bag and delicately withdrew a rolled parchment.
Marketa stopped breathing as she gazed at the sight.
The parchment displayed the human body and the courseways of blood, penned with exquisite precision. Marketa had long tried to learn what she could by tracing her white skin and blue veins with her index finger, referring to her father’s notes, but here was a wealth of new knowledge.
The human body lay unveiled before her in all its mysterious glory.
“This comes from England, where they have charted the veins from humans themselves,” said her father.
“But look at the detail—and there are interior veins here that would kill a man if he were cut so deep!”
“Not if that man were already dead.” Her father smiled. “In England and France, bodies can be procured legally for science’s sake. It is the law, Daughter. Science is the law!”
She dropped her jaw in awe.
“The law?”
“Ah, they say there are still grave robbers, but in a country as wild and ruthless as England, it is no surprise.”
He paused a moment as Marketa’s eyes drank in the tracings, then murmured, “How is your mother?”
Marketa lifted her eyes slowly. “She complains every day about my ineptness in the bathhouse and my clumsy manners with the customers. I caught Pani Schmidt’s curls in the lid of the barrel and made them limp. She howled like a cat in heat.”
She gave him a glance. If only he would intervene and save her from her work in the bathhouse.
“I could not wait for you to return!” Marketa said, taking his arm. “And we have at least five patients who desperately require your services—they were almost prepared to let me bleed them myself.”
She meant this as a joke, but her father gave her a stern look.
“You would never do that, would you, Marketa?” he said. “Not that you do not have the knowledge—even the gift, I believe.”
“No never, Father,” she said. “I do not belong to the guild.”
He took her chin in his hand. He squeezed it tight, almost as tightly as her mother did in anger.
“And that is the only reason?”
“I do not belong to the guild,” she said stubbornly. “It would not be right.”
He released her chin, and she dropped her eyes to the ground and made a quick excuse to leave to fetch water for the bathhouse.
But instead Marketa ran to her straw pallet and retrieved the green silk scarf from under the feather pillow. She stroked the scarf and then brought it near her face. She could still smell the scent of Jakub Horcicky deep in the fibers.
Pichler wasted no time in talking to the town council. They met at Radek’s tavern. Marketa helped serve pitchers of beer and spiced mead.
“No Hapsburg bastard will rule us!” shouted the mayor, pounding his fist so hard that the creamy foam on his ale quivered. “We shall send a delegation at once to Prague and take up this matter with the king.”
“But what of the Rozmberks? Should we not approach them and challenge their right to sell the castle to a madman?”
“Gold is gold to them,” muttered the municipal judge. “We will not have a legal right to challenge them.”
“But if they leave, so will the courtiers go—over three hundred! Who will buy our goods? How will Krumlov survive?”
“I would like to throw them in the moat with their own bears,” sputtered a member of the council. “What right do they have to seat a Hapsburg idiot above our town? What if he takes a liking to one of our women, or worse yet, one of our boys as his father is rumored to fancy? No one will be s
afe.”
At this, Pichler told them the stories of debauchery he had heard in Vienna, ending with his own experience with Don Julius. The men muttered in anger, and the mayor himself declared that the Hapsburgs had copulated so frequently with their own family members, they were no better than pink blind mice at ruling an empire.
Marketa stood silently in the shadows and listened. Her father had never kept sex a secret from her. It was a normal function of the human body, and Marketa knew both men’s and women’s anatomy as thoroughly as the four humors. Her father had a theory that the yellow bile, the murderous and most dangerous, caused excesses of sexual acts and was a symptom of imbalance in either a man or woman.
Marketa’s father said that Don Julius would be accompanied by a Jesuit priest, a Spaniard from the court of Felipe II.
“That is all we need, a Spanish Jesuit!” grumbled the mayor, a staunch Protestant. “A Papist, mumbling the pope’s bidding in a foreign tongue. Plotting against our church.”
The meeting dispersed well after midnight, the men not having settled on any plan. As they drank more and more beer, they grew hoarse from uttering threats, but there was no way of counteracting the king’s will.
As Marketa walked home alongside her father under the black sky, she heard him puzzling aloud.
“Who knows if I could cure him with regular bleedings? It could be the miracle he needs.”
She whispered a prayer and looked up at the few twinkling stars that were etched in the night sky. Her thoughts wandered to Jakub Horcicky, and she wondered if he gazed up at the stars tonight, just as she did.
The Vltava roared in the blackness, winding its way through their town like a serpent.
Within a week, the town council had drawn up a petition and selected a rider to carry it to the king in Vienna.
They did not know that the king was already in Prague and Rumpf had invited the Rozmberks to Vienna to discuss the sale of the castle. By the time the messenger came back, the affair was settled. He brought news of the sale and the impending arrival of Rudolf’s notorious bastard in Cesky Krumlov.
The church bells tolled, and people left their bakeries, taverns, shops, and fields to come hear the news in the town square. The mayor stood by the well on a sturdy wooden box.
“The king’s minister promises that Don Julius will be kept under lock and key until he is controllable,” announced the mayor. “We have begged the Bohemian lords, especially Petr Vok, to intercede on our behalf at the Prague court. This is their response.”
“What if he gets out? Who will he stick with his dagger, and what will become of our women?”
“No, I have the king’s word—Rumpf’s word—that he will be confined to the palace and will never cross the moat. Until he is cured.”
The men in the crowd began to grumble and spit on the cobblestones.
“There has never been a Hapsburg who did not have his way. The bastard will descend upon our village and defile our women.”
“This is what a Hapsburg does to his subjects? Send a lunatic to dwell amongst us?”
The mayor furrowed his brow. “You had best learn to control your tongue before the Hapsburgs arrive. If a guard from Prague heard your slander against the king’s son, you would be searching for your head.”
Again the people hissed. The cobblestones glistened with their spit.
Marketa’s father always said it was right for men—and women—to spit and cough up any phlegm that might poison them. The phlegm that welled up from an excess of the phlegmatic humor was easily concentrated into disease. So the glistening cobblestones of Cesky Krumlov that day should have pleased him, but Marketa saw no smile on his face.
CHAPTER 9
A HOLY CONSPIRACY IN HUNGARY
The freshly minted coin winked up at him, silver glinting in his hand. Engraved on the thaler was the image of his older brother, King Rudolf II.
“You say the pope himself has protested?” said Matthias, turning the coin over in his palm.
The pope’s emissary, Melchior Klesl, bishop of Vienna, raised his chin in confirmation.
Klesl had voyaged down the Danube on a merchant’s barge, from Vienna to this outpost at the edge of the Royal Hungarian city of Esztergom on the violent border where the Holy Roman Empire battled the Turks. The thud of an Ottoman kettledrum drifted up from beyond the gates below, and Klesl shivered with apprehension. His mission was crucial to the pope and to the empire, but the borderlands were still scorched and smoking, the Ottoman frontier lined with rotting heads impaled upon bloody stakes.
There was never true peace with the Ottomans. Ever.
The old stone fortress above Esztergom looked down upon the embattled city, a strategic stronghold recaptured from the Turks in 1595 by Matthias’s armies. The Ottomans camped within sight of Esztergom’s walls, like snarling wolves, encircling their prey.
Klesl imagined the flashing yataghans of the bloodthirsty Saracens who had spread the word of the Prophet Mohammed into the heart of Europe. The pope’s blessing must be brought to Matthias far from the luxuries and safety of Vienna. As his coach had rattled up the hill away from the Danube, the bishop kissed the gold crucifix around his neck. But this was God’s work, and he would bring the pope’s word directly to the younger brother of Rudolf II.
This Matthias, unlike his brother, was a man of few words, a soldier who never shirked from a battle. He spent much of his time here on the frontier, on the long, narrow tongue of Hungarian land that still belonged to the Holy Roman Empire.
The bishop mopped his temples with a white kerchief, attempting to compose himself. “Our Gracious Holiness has denounced King Rudolf’s image on the coin as an alchemist, an adeptus. No mortal, certainly no Catholic, should aspire to communicate with the dark spirits of the netherworld. Now the entire Holy Roman Empire shall be reminded of his dalliance with the evil spirits and the Jews each time a merchant draws a coin from his purse.”
A slow smile tugged at the corners of Matthias’s mouth and widened the breadth of his close-clipped beard. He flipped the shining coin into the air and caught it as if it were deciding a bet.
The bishop lowered his voice, though they were alone in the drafty castle chamber. The acrid scent of gunpowder wafted in through the high windows, and he could hear the not-so-distant sound of cannons, thundering.
“Rudolf is said to converse on a regular basis with Jews. Rabbi Lowe is admitted to court and lingers in the king’s presence to discuss the Kabbalah and the Elixir of Life.”
“Hardly a Catholic notion, is it?” said Matthias. His eyes twinkled with conspiracy.
The bishop sniffed, indignant. “The elixir of everlasting life is our Lord, Jesus Christ, that God sent down from heaven to save us from eternal damnation!”
“Yet as Holy Roman emperor, Rudolf is the guardian and moral authority of the Catholic Church.”
The bishop winced.
“Pity,” said Matthias, studying the image of his brother in the robes of an alchemist. “Good likeness, though—finely minted. Indeed, it will remind everyone in Europe of the alchemists’ quest. And silver finds converts...”
Melchior Klesl’s face grew red as the Turkish paprika the Hungarians used to flavor their stews. He looked about the room, devoid of furnishings except a tattered tapestry, a few roughhewn chairs, and a straw pallet.
The clergyman whispered, “He must be stopped, Matthias. I bring word from the pope in the most confidential manner that should you as a good Catholic succeed him—in a most timely manner—you would have the pope’s blessing and the full support of the Church.”
“These are the pope’s own words?” said Matthias.
“From his holy lips. King Rudolf must be stopped. His conduct is intolerable.”
Matthias smiled and pinched the silver coin tight between his finger and thumb.
“I shall keep this, good bishop,” he said, pocketing the coin. “As a token of the promise and good will of His Holiness.”
Bishop K
lesl leaned closer to Matthias. “His Holiness has confidence in you as a staunch defender of the Catholic faith. He trusts you to lead our flock away from this blasphemy. Protestants infest the Bohemian states like maggots on a rotted corpse.”
“His Holiness overlooks the sin I commit by having Lutheran advisors at my side, trusted friends who practice their damnable faith? He condones my siding with William of Orange and the Netherlands at the age of twenty?”
The bishop folded his hands over his robe. “He believes these are the follies of youth, and as a Hapsburg you will find your way back to the True Faith.”
“That is a risk,” said Matthias, his voice blunt. “I am the least Catholic of all Hapsburgs.”
The bishop sighed and opened his hands, his palms facing Matthias. “His Holiness believes you will bring peace to the empire and stop the encroachment of the Ottomans, before they besiege Vienna and overrun the remainder of Europe. Then you will lead the vermin back to the Truth Faith.”
Matthias walked to the window and looked down at the waters of the Danube, sparkling below. Beyond the walls of Esztergom, in the grassy fields he could see the corrals of Ottoman warhorses, painted red or green up to their bellies, the colors fading slowly in the rain and sun.
Facing the window he sighed. “They are not maggots, these Protestants, but men who hunger for freedom to practice their faith. This is their land, my good bishop.”
He turned to the pope’s emissary. “Has His Holiness’s opinion been swayed by the Ottoman armies’ proximity to Vienna? Perhaps the unrest has benefited my standing.”
“Your brother’s inept handling of the Turkish campaign has made all of Europe anxious,” said the bishop. “We are certain you will be declared king of Royal Hungary.”
The bishop approached Matthias, who stood in the small pool of sunlight that stole across the stones. How fine this younger Hapsburg would look with the gold crown of the Holy Roman Empire upon his noble—and Catholic—head, thought Klesl.
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