Mathilde 01 - The Cup of Ghosts Read Free Page A

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 books, 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