Mathilde 01 - The Cup of Ghosts (3 page)

‘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

‘
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 those 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.

I loved the city! I was well protected. My future ran like a broad, clear thoroughfare before me. When I wasn’t at my studies or in the hospital, I’d wander from quarter to quarter, observing the beggars in the church doors or by the bridges; the peasants coming in from the country with their carts and wheel-barrows; the artisans and craftsmen shouting and gesticulating from behind their stalls; the wandering jongleurs, monks and friars in their dark gowns and pointed hoods; the canons of the cathedral with all their pomp and ceremony; the ermine-clad professors of the Sorbonne and their motley retinues of students and scholars. Royal couriers beat their way through the crowd with their white wands of office. Heralds in resplendent tabards, trumpets lifted, shrilled out harsh music to draw the attention of the crowds before a proclamation was read out. Harness jingled like bells as nobles from their great houses rode down past the bridges and gates of the city to hunt in the fields beyond. Ladies lounged in their litters, taking the air. Judges in their bright scarlet, surrounded by royal men-at-arms, processed down to the law courts. Pilgrims off to Saint Geneviéve or Notre Dame chanted their prayers or sang sweet hymns. Prisoners, manacles held fast, were driven under the whip to the Grand Châtelet. Clerks and scribes scurried along to the great palace and castle of the Ile where Philip ruled France as a hawk does its field, ever-watchful, ever-menacing.

I was impatient to visit these city sights again. I couldn’t understand my uncle’s harshness. He towered over me in the tap room of that tavern, grasping me by the shoulder, pushing me towards the stairs.

‘Go up to your chamber, girl!’

He very rarely called me that. It was always ‘Mathilde’, or ‘
ma fille
’. Uncle Reginald’s face looked strained, a haunted look in his eyes, he kept glancing over his shoulder towards the door.

‘What’s the matter, sir?’ I demanded.

‘Nothing,’ he whispered, then he quoted a line from the Gospels: ‘
Tenebrae facta
. Darkness fell.’ I recognise that phrase now, the description given to the night Judas left to betray Christ. Again, I tried to reason. I was hoping to go into the city, perhaps visit one of the taverns near the hospital, mix with the scholars, dance a jig or indulge in some other revelry. My uncle lifted his hand and glared at me.

‘I have never struck you. I will if you do not obey my order. Go to your chamber, small as it is, rat-eaten and mouse-gnawed, it’s the safest place for you. Stay there until I come.’