The Bloodletter's Daughter (4 page)

“Here is our timid fawn,” called Lucie at last, her voice as sweet as medovina, the honey wine the family served as refreshment.
“Fetch a mug of ale for our guest, girls. We’ll leave Marketa to attend him.”

Marketa entered the bathroom dry-eyed. She could not refuse her mother this time, especially since Lucie had secured special terms from the patron.

Marketa helped the brewer to remove his kidskin boots. Their softness reminded her of live animals, and she cradled them in her hands as if they were kittens, stroking them with her fingertips. Marketa had owned but one pair of shoes in the past two years, and she only wore them in the winter, lashed with sackcloth and strips of pigskin to protect her feet from the cold and snow. The boots Pan Brewer wore were a luxury of which Marketa could only dream. Her mother said the brewer’s pockets were lined with gold, for everyone in the town drank his beer and ale by the barrelful. He even sold his brews in Budejovice, the Bohemian capital of beer. Soon his money would buy lard, meat, and beer to fatten her skinny sisters. It was up to her to help the family.

She was born a bathmaid.

“Come, come, Marketa—help me with the rest of my clothes,” said the brewer, stretching his arms wide.

One of her sisters came in carrying a tankard of ale, and her mother followed.

“What?” she shouted, hands on her stout hips. “You are still dressed. The water will grow cold. Dana, fetch some hot stones from the hearth and drop them into the soaking barrel. Marketa, help Pan Brewer out of his clothes.”

Marketa drew off his linen shirt, the armpits stained brown as the ale he brewed and smelling sour of old hops and yeast.

When she untied his breeches, her hand brushed his penis. It leapt up straight as a stick, pink as the underside of a white pig.

“Pan Brewer, you put the young bucks to shame!” said Lucie.

He laughed, making his penis bob at the compliment. He took a long draught from the tankard of beer.

Marketa felt sick and dizzy. The pork knuckle her mother had fed her as a special dinner for the occasion worked its way up her throat, and she tasted pig’s meat and ale in the back of her mouth.

She wanted to run, run and not stop running until she reached the mountains, where the pines were thick and she could hide forever in their darkness.

“I think you have impressed our Marketa,” said her mother. “Look at her, not a word from her mouth.”

The fat brewer looked at the girl, licking his lips as if there were grains of salt at the edges of his mouth. Marketa struggled to keep her dinner down, merely belching quietly.

“Here,” said her mother, handing her the sponges and the reed brush. “Marketa will bathe you,” she said sweetly to him. Lucie helped her patron to the bath stool.

Marketa dipped the sponge in the bucket and squeezed the water over her patron’s great beefy shoulders. She kneaded his thick neck and back, massaging the muscles the way she had been taught since she was six.

Her hands had grown strong, as strong as many a man’s from years massaging and pounding at knots in bathers’ bodies. Muscles melted under her touch.

The brewer sighed. His old prick flicked up and down, like a stick lashing out at a donkey.

Her mother watched from the corner of the room, nodding and squinting, gesturing and pointing, urging her daughter on.

When Marketa reached his buttocks, he turned around and grabbed her by her waist.

“My darling,” he whispered in a hoarse voice. “
Milacku
!”

Marketa tried to squirm away.

“No, no, your mother and I have come to an arrangement.”

He pawed at Marketa’s breast.

Marketa screamed with indignation and slapped the brewer across the face.

“Get your hands off me!” she said.

“Oh,
Berusko
!” the brewer said, ignoring her protests. “Come here, my little bug!”

Marketa saw her mother out of the corner of her eye. Lucie had been keeping one eye on the bathers in the barrels in the next room and one eye on her daughter, making sure Marketa pleased him and did not spoil her hard-won deal. But she was also keeping watch to see that the brewer did not hurt her daughter.

“Get away from her, Pan Brewer!” shouted Lucie, lumbering toward him. When she saw his greedy hands grabbing at Marketa’s body, Lucie began beating the old brewer about the head and shoulders with a long reed brush, like a washerwoman breaking up a dogfight.

“You get off my daughter this minute! Enough! Remember our agreement—no touching!” she bellowed, still thrashing her patron with the brush. Then she grabbed a bucket of icy river water and dumped it over his head.

The fat man yelped. He wiped the cold water from his eyes, shivering.

Lucie handed him a dry bath sheet, scowling. The brewer snatched it from her, rubbing himself vigorously.

“There will be no touching, Pan Brewer,” Lucie said, shaking her finger in his face.

Pan Brewer turned away from her growling, his skin puckered and red from the sudden cold shower.

“Sit!” he told Marketa angrily. He rubbed his back, aching where she had pounded her fists. “Sit on the stool and let me see you!”

Marketa began pulling her ripped shift back over her hips.

“No, you sit there naked. I want to study my purchase.”

Now she understood. This revolting old man would study her body. She thought of how many times she had studied the courses of the veins and the anatomy of the human body, fascinated. She thought of the drawings her father owned, copied from originals in Vienna. He had taught her the magnificence of the physical body, the intricate pathways of blood—the interplay of muscles, the functions of some organs, the mystery of others. She had gazed at sketches of both men and women in amazement, marveling at God’s superb creation.

Now this old rutting goat would gaze at her body for his sexual pleasure.

She thought of her skinny sisters, their hollow eyes bulging from their sockets. Dana’s sharp elbows and bony knees. Kate’s sunken belly and raw cheekbones, cutting like white knives through her pale flesh.

He wants to see my body. All right
, she thought.
Let him!

Marketa threw her shift to the ground and looked at the brewer defiantly. She would imagine herself nothing more than a naked drawing on parchment.

She no longer felt the fear of this man, only disgust.

“Open your legs, girl.”

He touched her knees with his clammy hands and drew them apart.

The stink of sour hops mixed with sweat from his balding scalp rose from him, and she turned her head to one side to gasp for fresh air. She felt his beady eyes staring at her womanly parts.

Parchment, she reminded herself. She had no fear—this man could not hurt her. She was no more than a drawing in a book, a figure in ink.

“Ah, there it is. The lips of the young
musle
.”

His hand reached down between his legs.

Why did this old fool speak of mussels? she wondered. Then she thought of the open lips of the bivalves in the waters of the Vltava, their tender flesh creeping over the shell halves.

She felt the sweep of his stumpy fingers touch between her legs, and she drew back in revulsion. “Mother!” she shouted.

“
Musle
!” he said. “Ah, sweet
musle
!”

“I said no touching!” said Lucie, blistering his back with the long-handled brush. Hunkering like a stubborn beast, his brute attention to his task unbroken, the brewer ignored her.

Then he shuddered once, twice, three times, and his hand fell loosely from his penis. He groaned with pleasure. “Moosh-layyy.”

Marketa’s mother helped him up, muttering curses in Czech.

“Pan Brewer,” she said, “you stubborn old goat! Come with me to your barrel. It is steaming hot and ready for you.”

She gave her daughter a congratulatory look over her shoulder and disappeared with the brewer, who stumbled as if he were in a drunken stupor.

The girl was left on the stool alone.

Foolish old man
, she thought to herself. She did not understand the allure of sex—a repugnant act, reducing men and women to the level of rutting animals.

Well, she would not think of it. The brewer’s proposition did not involve her affection or even her regard.

I am only a drawing on parchment
, she told herself.

He can never hurt me.

When Marketa finally composed herself and looked around the open doorway to the bathers’ barrels, she saw her mother place the lid over his head and tip a long draught of beer down his throat.

His eyes were drowsy and a lazy smile of satisfaction spread over his fleshy face.

All the heads in the barrels surrounding him swiveled in his direction, leering in admiration.

“You have been feasting on young mollusks, Pan Brewer,” said the cooper, who made barrels for the brewery. “We could hear your joy!
Dobrou chut
!”

The entire room erupted in laughter, and the full barrels shook with mirth, splashing the stone floor with little puddles of herbed water.

“This is the season for mussels, tender and young,” said the greengrocer, trying to best the cooper. “We should all have
musle
and dive for her pearls!”

She knew from that instant that the name would stick. By the next day, her given name Marketa disappeared from the mouths of the townspeople and was replaced forever by “Musle.” She was christened anew.

Pan Brewer visited weekly and was allowed to see Marketa naked, although Lucie was always present and never allowed him to lay a finger on her daughter. His pleasure in seeing the young girl naked before him, seated on a three-legged stool, was enough to supplement the Pichlers’ income. The brewer looked forward to the day Marketa’s body would be his to touch and take at will. The price would go up.

Marketa dreaded his visits and could not be persuaded to eat the days he bathed. Though she no longer feared him—she realized he was an old man who finished his business quickly—she found his dazed stare repugnant. She grew thinner the more often he visited the bathhouse.

But the twins gained weight, and meat appeared several days a week on the table. Her father never questioned how it was that Lucie could afford such good cuts from the butcher or the bottomless jug of ale always present on the table.

He never questioned, but of course he knew.

VIENNA

L
ANDESIRRENANSTALT
L
UNATIC
A
SYLUM

T
HE
M
AD
B
ASTARD OF
P
RAGUE

“He’s here!” cried the ragged servant boy, his bare feet slapping across the paving stones in the great hall of the asylum. “King Rudolf himself! Glory to the Austrian Empire...” the boy shouted, then trailed off, realizing he had nothing else to say. Deflated, he concluded, “He’s here, Herr Fleischer!”

“Stop screaming and empty the chamber pots,” hissed the head attendant, cuffing the boy’s ears. “You should be invisible, not galloping about like an unshod pony in front of the king!”

The asylum director nodded nervously in what might have been agreement and then stroked his black robe, picking lint off his sleeves in the capricious light of the flickering sconces. His breath cast a foggy halo in the cold air. He swallowed hard, his heart pounding as he stationed himself near the barred door of the stone prison. The toothless woman in the far room cackled, her slick gums shining red in the torchlight. A man wailed a curse at the arriving monarch.

“Damned Hapsburg! One more mule-chinned ninny!”

“Silence, Herr Schiele. A lunatic can lose his head as easily as any other,” snapped the attendant, motioning to a guard.

“Gag him,” the director said, his lip twitching wildly.

The broad-shouldered guard raised his leather whip and stormed off to silence the offending heckler. The director stretched and twisted his short neck like a curious turtle, trying to straighten his posture before he greeted his noble visitor.

It was not every day that a Hapsburg emperor paid a visit to a lunatic asylum.

Two assistants pulled the wooden latch-beam aside and opened the iron-girded door. The hinges groaned as the great doors swung wide, giving way to the cobbled street where the king’s entourage surrounded the royal coach, helping the monarch descend and lighting his way with flaming torches held high.

Dressed in an ermine-trimmed cape, the Holy Roman emperor, King Rudolf II, strode into the asylum, accompanied by a half dozen advisors and servants. He stopped after just three paces, arrested by the smell of human feces and rancid urine.

The director bowed.

“Your Excellency, I am honored beyond words at your visit.”

The king looked at the man as if he were examining a dead insect.

“This is where you treat the mentally diseased?” he asked. “It smells worse than a Spanish slaughterhouse!”

The king snatched a lace handkerchief proffered by a servant. He covered his nose and mouth and breathed in exasperated gasps, his long Hapsburg lip quivering below the white cloth.

“The diseased mind produces an unclean body, Your Majesty. It is one of the many vices we must purge.”

“The place smells of shit!” protested the king, his lips curling in disgust.

At this, several men hooted from the darkness at the end of the long hall.

“And a Hapsburg farts roses, I hear!”

The king sucked air between his teeth, and the flesh at his temples tightened.

“Let me see these men who dare to insult the Hapsburg name!” he roared.

“You understand, Your Majesty, they only insult you because they are bedeviled by disease,” pleaded the director.

“Show me the offenders!” the king shouted.

Reluctantly the director led the way down the dark hall, reaching for a torch from the entry.

As he strode ahead, the light illuminated the dirty, bloodied faces and brown, decayed teeth of the patients, who for the most part retreated hastily from the flame like night beetles, scurrying into the recesses of their filthy cells. One man ignored the commotion and stared straight ahead, pressing his louse-scabbed forehead hard against the rusted bars and leering at the naked women in the cell across the way. The light of the torch reflected off the oily skin of their bald heads.

“These women have no clothes!” said one of the king’s entourage, squinting hard to focus on them.

“Has the disease made their hair fall out?” asked the king’s advisor. “They are as bald as baby mice!”

“We can clean them more readily this way,” said the director. “It is easier to undress them once than to fight them every day. The lice bury their nits in the fabric of their skirts, and the fleas infest their underclothes. We shave their heads to keep them free of the vermin, for unlike the men the insects drive them to distraction.”

The king wrinkled his face in disgust. At the far reaches of light, he saw movement on the ground. It appeared as if a cluster of animated melons were watching him approach.

“What in Jesus’s name is that?”

“These are the men who called insults, Your Majesty.”

In the flickering light, the king made out three heads with no bodies, twisting on the ground. He started at the sight, unable to make sense of the dark vision before him. He grabbed the torch from the director and strode toward them.

In unison, the heads swiveled in the dirty sand and straw. Now he realized that they were men, buried up to their necks.

“Hail to the king!” said a head, now beseeching, not mocking.

“This way, my lord!” cried one. “Free me from this hell!”

“Just liberate me and I will not cut flesh—not by my mother’s eyes, will I! Fetch the spade and loosen me from the earth, so that I may walk again!”

“I have an itch that bedevils me between my legs. Unbury me so that I might scratch the vermin who bite me!”

The director jumped in front of the king and seized the torch.

“Please, I beg of you, Your Majesty. Do not approach them.”

As he said this, one of the king’s ministers bent over the man closest to him, marveling at the foam-flecked chin that rubbed against the ground, the body buried deep into the packed earth. He brought a pair of spectacles to his eyes, studying the talking head at closer range.

The head swiveled futilely, dirty teeth snapping.

“Get back!” shouted the director. He circled behind and yanked the buried man’s head back by a shank of his greasy hair, as his teeth gnashed the air. An attendant sloshed a bucket of water full in the man’s face, causing the snapping head to gag and cough.

The king’s attendant screamed in terror.

The small entourage circled the king and pulled him away from the heads that now laughed in unison, their breath raising dust in small puffs around them. They coughed and spat viciously at the monarch and his men, hissing a litany of profanity in labored gasps.

“Come away from here,” motioned the director. “Let me show you what you have come to see, Your Majesty.”

The king, wide-eyed, let himself be led away.

Across the courtyard, there was an empty cell. The director held the torch high so that king could see the straw mat and chamber pot. A rat scuttled out of the straw, startled by the sudden light. It bared reddish-yellow teeth at the intruders.

“This is where we mean to keep him, Your Majesty. He can have his own furnishings, of course, tapestries, and wardrobe. Meals prepared in the castle kitchens can be brought here and served on linen and silver plates. He would be treated as—royalty, of course.”

King Rudolf stared at the dark cell, his nostrils quivering at the stench of old urine.

“No,” he muttered. “No son of mine will be fettered in such squalor!”

“But, Your Majesty!” protested his advisor, Herr Rumpf. “Don Julius cannot remain in the streets of Prague. He shall be imprisoned if he commits another crime. The magistrate has said as much, and the Bohemian lords will insist upon it. The municipal dungeons are as dark and the prisoners more savage than this! He will end up on the gallows if we do not intervene now.”

The king turned to his minister.

“That is why I have brought him with me to Vienna. A new start in a city that he does not know so well as fair Prague—that’s all the boy needs. Let the wretched Viennese deal with him.”

“Your Majesty, I beseech you! His conduct will lead him to death even as it sullies the Hapsburg name and endangers your empire. Your brother Matthias is waiting eagerly for such an opportunity to seize the throne!”

“Vienna is a new start for the boy.”

“Vienna will have far less tolerance than Prague for his conduct, I promise you.”

King Rudolf set his jaw in anger, a scowl contorting his face. Rumpf retreated a few steps, bowing his head.

“No! Never!” roared the king. “No seed of mine shall come to such an end. He has my blood, even if he is a bastard. No Hapsburg shall ever live in such debased conditions. He shall not share his bread with rats, I swear it!”

The king swept his cape around him in an angry gesture and walked quickly toward the street where the royal coach stood waiting.

A cacophony of raucous laughter chased him out as the great door slammed shut, leaving the director alone holding the single torch in the cold blackness of the stone hall.