Paul Doherty - The Cup of Ghosts

Now Father Guardian had always been good to me, giving me pennies or a silver piece. I had carefully hidden these away. A serving boy I trusted, for a bribe, went to the scribblers and parchment sellers in Cheapside. He brought back rolls of vellum, ink, sharpened quills, a pumice stone, and sand to dry the ink, everything a clerk of the chancery or scribe in a muniment room would need. I will keep my vow in the dark hours of the night. I will buy more candles and light them to write my story and that of Isabella, who controlled the Wheel of Fortune and sent it spinning so that kings and princes, lords and ladies, the mighty and the great crashed to earth whilst others were lifted high in exaltation. I will write about the other great love of my life, the study of physic. Father Guardian knew of my art and skill, but I refused to practise it even though he showed me the friary library. I have done with study. I have read the books, be it those of Islam such as Haly Abbas’ Complete Book of the Medical Art , those of the ancients such as Dioscorides’ Herbarium . Galen’s Therapeutics , Caelius’ De Medicina , or 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.

‘ 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.’