Basel, Switzerland
1589
They rest awhile in Basel. Little Antoinette has a cold and a wet cough that will not shift. With the political climate so dangerous, they have been forced to take a roundabout route to Rome, Madeleine becoming ill with the rocking of the coach, Henri chafing against so much enforced stillness, whinging unceasingly. And, too, it has been raining for days with only the briefest breaks, and the roads are a danger; the fields no better. Muddy ruts suck at the wheels, and the rain is a misery, a terrible drumming against the coach’s roof and sides, the brim of Petrus’s hat, the shoulders of his cape, grown heavy with water. The world is a blur of wet; even during the rain’s short pauses, the air is thick and damp, the tree branches dripping, the streams so swollen they seem heavy and quick as rivers. If their coach does not get caught in the mire, they might get swept away at the next true river crossing. Better to find an inn.
The inn they find is pitched above a tavern that is clearly popular, the tables mostly full. Petrus goes ahead to inquire about the room and tries not to be ashamed of himself for wishing he could hide his face as long as possible; but he is very tired. His body aches, not merely from the hours of riding but also from the particular pain of keeping his muscles tense and his sense alert as a prey animal’s. All along the road these endless weeks, he has expected disaster—in the form of a cracked wheel, a lamed horse, or an attack from either side in the endless war between the faiths—but until now, they have been lucky.
A week ago, they learned from a man driving a cart filled with hay that the king was dead—stabbed through the belly by a Jacobean monk while he sat on his pot. The news must have raced past them on riders while they were on the road; or perhaps it was merely Petrus’s appearance that put the gossips off whenever they stopped for food or rest. The man peered with eyes touched with milk, his mouth hanging open over the yellowed stumps of his teeth. He could not possibly see clearly through the thin white film, and in the instant of understanding this, Petrus felt his very skeleton shift and settle, shoulder bones sloping down after days upon days of holding themselves tense.
When he understood they did not already know of the king’s death, the carter whistled. “How?” he said. “The news has been flying—the very birds singing of it!” But they were a ready audience for a story that must already have grown frayed in the telling, so he offered the children some tangy cheese from his sack and sat down in the yellow grass to relay the entire, gory business. Petrus listened with half his mind; with the other, he watched his children as they moved swift as falcons across the field, the girls raising their skirts so that they might run with nearly as much freedom as Henri; and eventually he let the hum of insects drown out the carter’s words altogether. When he tipped his head back, letting the sun warm his face, he caught Catherine’s eye. She smiled, small and discreet; then tilted her own face up as well.
Once their room is paid for, the lot of them go dashing across the inn yard, even Antoinette, who is so tired of being wet that she ignores the lure of the puddles. Inside, their clothes steam gently, for the room is humid with bodies, well lit by fat-dripping candles and by a great hearth, generously laid. Catherine immediately draws Antoinette over to the fire, rubbing her arms to warm her; Petrus looks about for an unoccupied table, furtive under the brim of his hat, though Henri—brazenly hatless, his hair wetted down to his head and face as if he’d just come from the bath—has already drawn the attention of half the room. All about them, the chatter at tables goes abruptly silent.
There comes the scraping of a chair against the floor. “My good monsieur,” says a man, suddenly close at hand. He gives a deep nod in greeting, though his eyes flick from one hairy child to the next, excitement bringing spots of red to his narrow cheeks. Petrus’s heart batters his chest, but he nods in return.
“Will you not join me at my table? You mean to dine, yes? Let the little ones dry, fill their stomachs with good hot soup.” He spreads his arms, smiling. “I am all on my own, you see, and would welcome the company.”
His French is thick; his beard but a feathery circle of hair about his lips and over the point of his chin. Almost, Petrus refuses; he cannot trust the man’s eagerness, the brightness of his eye, the open palm with which he attempts to guide them to his table. But a glance about the room reminds him that every other table is full, that his children are hungry and damp and cold. So he nods, gruff, half-expecting the man’s open palm to reach out and stroke the hair of his or his children’s faces without permission.
But the man merely leads them to the table; conjures more chairs by speaking to the innkeeper; orders soup for them all, the broth thickened with bread and rich with cabbage, turnips, and parsley.
“Nourishing,” the man says, smiling at them all. Then his eyes widen. “Oh! Please forgive me—my manners have fled! I am Felix Platter. A physician here in Basel. And you? Are you passing through? Staying?”
His expression has a hopeful cast, open as a child’s. Petrus pauses for long enough that Catherine, face pinking and eyes darting Petrus with a fierce glance, hastens to say, “I am Catherine Gonsalvus, Monsieur. This is my husband, Petrus—and our children, Madeleine, Henri, and Antoinette.”
“A beautiful family,” Platter says. He nudges a loaf of bread, the dark grain flecked with herbs, toward Antoinette, who snatches a slice and nibbles at it like a mouse. Platter smiles.
Petrus clears his throat. “We are—on our way to Rome, Monsieur. We had been part of the court in France, but . . .” He waves a hand, grimacing.
The other man’s expression turns grave. “Ah, yes.” He pauses. “I think—I believe I have heard of you, Monsieur Gonsalvus; and your children, too. But I never dreamed I might have the opportunity to meet you, to . . .” His fingers flutter; his face flushes. “I am a physician, you see; and a scholar of—unusual, ah, manifestations of . . . well . . . of humanity.” He puts a hand over his narrow chest. “I would be honored if your family would visit me while you are in Basel—it is only me, and I have a garden in which the smaller children might enjoy playing. My cook makes the most delightful almond tart.”
Petrus forces his fingers to remain splayed upon the tabletop, though they long to tense and curl. “Monsieur, that is . . . most generous of you, but we mean to stay for only one night—”
But a look from Catherine quiets him. “Antoinette would benefit from a rest,” she says. “We all could, I think. And unless the sun is unusually hot, the roads will not be much better tomorrow, even if the rain were to cease this very minute.”
The din of the tavern has lessened since they were noticed; even now, several minutes later, people speak in low voices, and Petrus can feel their gazes like probes within the torn flesh of a wound. But he slants a glance at their youngest daughter, who made quick work of her bread and dozes now in her mother’s arms. Her breath clatters in her chest upon each inhalation. Platter watches, too, frowning.
“I could make the child an electuary,” he says. “You needn’t make her endure a coach ride to my home—keep her here, tucked up warm, and you—or Madame—could bring it back to her. Though she is welcome to come, too, of course, if you wish.”
“That is very kind of you,” Catherine says, glancing at Petrus, “but we would not want to put you to any trouble—”
“Nonsense! It is no trouble at all. Sickness, and the healing of it, is my business, after all.”
“Well—that would be most welcome, Monsieur. Thank you.” Catherine tucks Antoinette’s head more securely into the cradle of her elbow, though Petrus knows her arms must ache already from holding their daughter in the coach. Antoinette has grown large enough that her weight is not insubstantial.
Platter’s eyes roll a bit from side to side. He licks his lips. Petrus sets down his spoon, waiting.
“I . . . I hope this does not sound presumptuous,” Platter begins. His fingers tap the table edge; his own bowl, empty, rattles a little as the table rocks with the motion upon the uneven floor. “But I—well, as I said, I am—rather a scholar—of plants, and of the human body, in all its marvelous incarnations. I have a—well, rather a collection.”
“Of human bodies?” Henri says, speaking for the first time around a mouthful of bread, ignoring Catherine as she hisses at him.
But Platter laughs. “Oh dear me, no. Of plants. Pressed plants, but also live plants, in my garden. Of human bodies, I’ve only my sketches, and my notes. I am a teacher at the university as well—the medical school. I always tell my students that observation is the most vital of skills in any physician. I’m writing a treatise and . . . forgive me, but your family would be a deeply important addition to my work. If you would permit me to make notes—to learn more about your . . . unusual condition—”
Petrus’s breath has become hutched behind his breastbone, and so it is Catherine, after a long moment, who answers for them both. Under the table, her shoe presses his. He concentrates upon the knob of her ankle, at once sharp and settling.
“That does sound like—most important work, Monsieur Platter,” she says, smooth as butter spread upon hot bread. “We would be honored to contribute.”
They pass a restless night. The inn is a good one; but still mice scrabble under the thatch, and the chimney in their room smokes badly, the wall above it is stained the gray of linen long unwashed. The bed is large enough that he and Catherine can fit comfortably with Antoinette snuffling between them, and the innkeeper offered blankets—wool as scratchy as a man’s whiskers, and smelling faintly of horse—that the other children might make nests for themselves upon the floor. The noise from the tavern room below only grows more intrusive as the hour grows later, and Petrus’s mind refuses to still. Danger, it whispers; though the little physician seemed sincere, and sincerely kind. But still—
“Why?” he whispers to Catherine in the night, when she rolls a little, her breathing changing from the evenness of sleep to something wakeful.
She tilts her chin, that she might look at him as well as possible through the darkness. Leans closer until their faces are very near, their daughter still curled between their two chests.
“Scholarship,” she says in his ear, her lower lip catching upon the lobe. “My love, you might be in one of those books you hold in such esteem.”
Petrus loves her then, in the same way he loved her when she sat with their first child in her arms and proclaimed her perfect. But he knows, too, he will not go into the physician’s house, no matter how good and earnest the man appears; nor will he force his children, do they not wish to go. Even now, so many seasons later, he can still remember a nose behind his ear, sniffing; hands comparing the texture of hair on his shoulders to that on his buttocks.
Careful of Antoinette between them, he reaches across to shift the hair that has straggled from Catherine’s sleeping plait away from her face, and lets his thumb linger upon the ropelike weave of the plait itself. Her hair, softer even than his own.
(It’s the herbs, she told him once, years ago, when he had insisted she unbind the whole of it, let it spill over them both. She climbed atop him that the pale curtain of her hair might fall down around them, the tips undulating across his chest, his shoulders, over his ribs. It’s the herbs that make it so soft. With his fingers in her hair and hers trailing through his beard, along his arms, his hips, firm and unflinching through his own hair, leaving gasping prickles in their wake, he had no idea what she meant, only knew that it was soft, and sweet-smelling, and that he would stay there always if he could, hidden behind it, safe even from the eyes of God.)
His thumb drifts now under the neckline of her chemise, finding the hollow of her chest, that shallow dent between her tired breasts where he can feel the strength of her breastbone. He rubs small gentle circles there until she returns to sleep. Eventually, he follows.
When morning comes, Petrus’s eyes are crusted nearly together, and his cheekbones feel as if thumbs are pressing upon them. Perhaps he has caught Antoinette’s cold. He lies still for a moment, feeling the dull ache beginning at his temples, and sighs.
But then he remembers—today Catherine is going to Monsieur Platter, and bringing the children with her, all but Madeleine, who does not wish to go, who crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head and said, “I do not want to be studied by that odd little man.” Madeleine, so petted at court, so beloved of the court ladies, saying now that she hated to have others’ hands upon her, that she would not let that physician look at her body, her face, her hair. Petrus imagines, for a moment, remaining here at the inn, eating a hearty meal in their room with his eldest child, resting and cosseting himself so that, perhaps, the cold will not root itself so deeply inside him.
And then, just as suddenly, he has a flash—his body splashed with cold seawater, the creaking and damp of a ship’s hold, the burn of rope at his wrists. And then: a market selling people, the checking of teeth, the pinching of sides, the feeling for swellings in the glands of necks and in the hollows under arms. The air stagnant and acidic with human fear. His own good fortune—and how odd to think of it so—to be so covered in hair, to be so miraculously strange in his makeup, that he was bought to impress a king, and not for the strength of his back or the power of his shoulders. That he was not, like so many of Isabel’s people—his mother’s people, his people—consigned to spend a few years with fields of sugarcane around and above him, twice as tall as he, all their tasseled heads rustling above in a wind that was choked off down below, the sky blotted out by green. Only to die at twenty, all the life labored out of him, muscles shredded, back bent and twisted as an old man’s.
No, he thinks. He hears stockinged footsteps in the room; feels Catherine’s absence from the bed without having to look. Murmured, argumentative voices. Petrus opens his eyes, cracking the crust at the corners, and sees Catherine, already up and mostly dressed; Madeleine and Henri awake but yawning, sleep-rumpled, folding the blankets upon which they had slept and squabbling quietly, Madeleine’s voice peevish and sounding much younger than her sixteen years. His wife is ignoring them, her hair, unplaited, hanging loose down her back, her fingers on the laces at the front of her bodice. Hearing the rustle of shifting coverlets as Petrus folds them back—trying not to disturb Antoinette, who sleeps on, a little open-mouthed curl of child in the center of the mattress—she looks over her shoulder, smiles a tired smile. Her own eyes are smudged underneath, as if with soot, and her hair is lank with travel, darker than usual with her own unwashed oils. But there is something soft in her expression, which he longs to touch. He rises and comes toward her, cups her face, feeling the bones of her jaw under the give of flesh; kisses her mouth and the tip of her nose. Remembers when she would not look at his face but spent long hours at the mirror, combing her hair, scenting it, smoothing her skin, as if it were something to be preserved, like the furs and skins of mounted stags’ and boars’ heads, stretched tight over their false insides and kept as they were in life.
She looks at him now, though, looks with a smile and a hand to his cheek; and she does not smell of hair powder, but of her own skin and sweat, and of the weeks they’ve spent together on the pockmarked, dusty roads.
“I will come with you,” he says softly.
Her smile broadens, and he hastens to add, “Not into the house. Madeleine does not wish to be examined by the physician, and neither do I. But I want to be sure that you are safe—we will go, all together, as long as Antoinette is well enough.” She looks better now, in sleep, her breathing a little easier, her dreams untroubled by fever. Well enough to sit in a garden, at least, rather than in this drab little room. Through the window, the fast-rising sun is pinking the sky, all signs of yesterday’s rain eased away.
If there is more than one entrance to the physician’s house, Petrus thinks, he can watch one, and the driver the other.
Catherine’s shoulders jump, and she steps away from him. “Do you truly believe the man is dangerous?” she says, a jittering quality to her voice as she twists up her hair, pinning it tight under her cap. Madeleine and Henri, kneeling beside the hearth, both turn to look up at their parents, the game of knucklebones they had only just begun forgotten between them. Petrus frowns at them without meaning to, his fingers fumbling on the lacings of his shirt.
“No,” he says, for he does not. And yet, the splash of seawater remains, wetting his memory limbs and chilling his blood. “But I would rather be careful, in any case.”