A Bed of Spices

To my mother, Rosalie Putman Hair, who

taught me to dream and dance instead of clean

and cook. And to Ram, for heroically eating

whatever I happen to burn for dinner.

HarperPaperbacks
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HarperCollins
Publishers

10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

Copyright © 1993 by Barbara Samuel

Cover illustration by Bob Berran

First printing: September 1993

Printed in the United States of America

HarperPaperbacks, HarperMonogram, and colophon are trademarks of HarperCollins
Publishers
.

ISBN: 978-0061080784

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Two thousand Jews
perished in the Strassburg fire of February 14, 1349, but the sacrifice did not, of course, halt the advance of the plague. Within a few weeks, the city fell prey to the Black Death.

Throughout that summer, plague and pogroms raged through Germany. Some Jewish refugees fled to the east, some were successfully protected by the ruling princes of their territories, some converted to escape the flames.

In Mainz, a curious thing occurred. Throughout the summer of 1349, the Jews of that city secretly collected arms with which to protect themselves. When the killing mob descended in August, two hundred of them died over several days of fighting. The Jews, at last defeated by the greater numbers, retreated to their homes and set fire to them.

Within twenty years, Jews settled in nearly all the communities once more, but they were under much stronger restrictions. Thus did the era of the ghetto begin.

Strassburg—Summer 1348

I should like to hold my knight

Naked in my arms at eve

That he might be in ecstasy

As I cushioned his head against my breast
.

—Countess of Dia

My poor heart she has caught

With magic spells and wiles

I do not sigh for gold

But for her mouth that smiles;

Her hue it is so bright

She half makes blind my sight.

—Judah ha-Levi

Charles der Esslingen
stood near the embrasure of his chamber and looked to the courtyard below. His solar filled the top floor in the keep of the old castle, and the builders had been generous with light so high, where arrow slits and protection were no longer necessities. Buttery May sunshine splashed into the room, warming the sweet herbs in the rushes beneath his feet.

It was a glorious view, and all he surveyed belonged to him; all had been won with his sword in his youth. There was the keep and the manor, the upper and lower baileys with their whitewashed walls. Beyond was a meadow dotted with sheep, their newly shorn bodies oddly naked. There was a forest, thick with game birds and animals, a vineyard where grew some of the finest Rhenish grapes in the empire, and an orchard where apple and pear trees flourished. In the distance, beyond his eye’s reach, was a smattering of peasant dwellings and the fields with their new crops.

In the greening baileys, the morning bustle had begun. Scullery maids washed pots in a tub nearby the open kitchen door. Another girl gathered herbs in her apron from the garden close to the wall. A vassal paced the walk in obvious boredom.

As Charles lifted his cup, his daughter Frederica bustled from the kitchen, headed with purpose across the grass. Taking in the busy swish of her skirts, he half smiled, feeding his hawk a crust of bread. “On her morning rounds,” he commented to the bird, who cocked an eye toward the yard.

The vassal on the walk called out to Rica in some jest Charles could not hear. She paused to laugh over her shoulder, and the sound rang through the hazy morning, teasing and ripe, like the girl herself.

Charles stepped closer to the embrasure to watch her progress. Chickens scurried in alarm before her, squawking in protest of the flying skirts. Within the confines of the bailey, she was bareheaded, and her hair glistened in the morning sun as if laced with silver and gold, the tresses flowing well past her waist. The dark woolen cotehardie she wore clung to the curves of breast and hip that had been so long in coming, and even the billowing surcoat hid little of the final result of her long wait for a woman’s body.

The vassal on the walk had kept pace with her, calling out. Ignored, he finally stopped, but looked after the girl with such wistfulness and frustration that even her father had to laugh.

Rica slipped into the brewhouse. Charles turned from his post, still smiling softly at the besotted youth on the walk. Poor fool was hardly alone.

He sipped from the cup of wine his servants had brought him, along with a dry bit of stale bread from last night’s supper. Rica teased him over his indulgence in early morning food—she teased everyone about something—but Charles grappled with weakness enough as it was. Without food in the morning, he sometimes shook like an old woman.

A soft sigh came from the corner. Charles eyed his second daughter over the rim of his wooden cup. Head bent over her needlework—her endless, endless needlework—she was utterly still but for the flying fingers.

Etta. Her hair, too, streamed over slender shoulders and a fine, lush woman’s form. The face was oval, as pale and flawless as a field of fresh snow at evening, her lips red and tender. As if she sensed his gaze, she lifted her eyes to her father. Fringed with almost unnaturally long lashes, the irises were a deep purplish blue.

His daughters. Twins. So utterly identical that no one would have been able to tell them apart but for the tragedy that made the physical similarities almost a parody. The tragedy that was, perhaps, his judgment from God for the violence of his youth.

Etta, for all her shining loveliness, had no besotted youths trailing in her wake. She rarely went abroad. She never spoke to anyone except Rica, who swore that Etta was not simple-minded, only deeply wounded somewhere in the darkest heart of her.

Without a smile or any acknowledgment, she lowered her gaze back to the tapestry on her lap. A familiar pluck of grief touched his heart. To have lost his beloved and beautiful wife so violently ten years before was sorrow enough. That his six-year-old daughter had been so brutalized was beyond his imagination.

The dark thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a vassal at the door of his chamber.

“Ah, Rudolf,” Charles said in greeting. “Come in. Tell me what you have learned.”

The young man settled on a bench nearby the wall and rubbed his hands to warm them by the fire. “The pestilence is widespread, my lord. They say there has never been such as this.”

Charles grunted, chewing his hard crust of bread.

“They say that India is gone, so littered with bodies the stench travels for a hundred miles. Italy has suffered the same fate for nearly a year. France is in chaos… now the pestilence moves north.”

“And what, pray tell, have the famed doctors and astrologers to say?”

“A demon in the air and an alignment of planets,” Rudolf said in disgust. “It should be plainly obvious it is a punishment from—”

Charles raised a weary hand and pressed with the heel of his palm to his chest, trying to ease the ache there. Thin rumors had wound through the countryside for many months, telling of the disease. With the rumors came grim prophecies of death for all mankind. “Heard you a tale of its look?”

“Yes, the sufferers—”

“I need no more gruesome stories. Tell the guards to watch for it in travelers along the river. We will admit no such victims here.”

“Yes, my lord.” Rudolf stood, and he cleared his throat. His nerves were betrayed by the clutch of his fists at his side. “Have you given thought to my suit?”

“I have.” Settling himself upon a stool, Charles waved toward a bench and Rudolf sat, back straight. Against the sunlight, his hair took on a glorious blaze of yellow, the ends curled at his shoulders, his handsome face earnest. Rudolf had served him well. The link to his powerful family would help erase the less noble blood running through Charles’s own veins. Beyond that, Rudolf was the most besotted of the field of Rica’s admirers. He would make a good husband to her. “I will agree to the betrothal—”

Rudolf jumped to his feet in exuberance. “Oh, thank you, my lord!”

Charles forestalled any further display. “There is a condition.”

“Anything.”

“She is headstrong,” he warned.

Rudolf gave him a rueful smile. “Of that, my lord, I am all too aware.”

Charles walked to the embrasure. Rica stood now in the gardens, conversing with a servant. He gestured to Rudolf, who joined him.

“She is also a romantic girl,” Charles said slowly. “Her head is filled with the tragic poems written by the ladies and knights of the courts.” He paused. “I want you to take the summer to woo her, so I am not forced to wed her against her will.”

“And if I cannot capture that wild heart?”

“I think I know a little of the romantic dreams of young girls.” Charles inclined his head. “You are not without your gifts… I watch the eyes of the women here.”

Rudolf flushed darkly. “Foolish wenches with only coupling to fill their brains.”

“Seemed a lovely pastime when I was a youth,” Charles said mildly, but raised a hand once again to forestall Rudolf’s protestations. This was the only flaw of the young man—a certain grim piety that manifested itself at odd times. “Speak not to Rica of religion and God,” he cautioned. “She is not concerned with matters of the spirit at this point in her life. Women grow more serious when their bellies swell.”

“She is all I wish as she is,” Rudolf murmured, leaning out to watch her, his eyes glowing. “Whatever I must do to win her—” He straightened and clasped his hands behind his back. “You need not worry. For the summer I will be a model of courtly love.”

“Good.” Charles turned away. “If summer’s end finds her still reluctant, I will tell her of the betrothal and you will be wed. By All Saint’s Day, you will have a wife—willing or no.”

From the corner, the ordinarily silent Etta cried out, and Charles started. Both men stared at her, but she ignored them, her gaze fixed on a cut on her palm. She whimpered in terror as blood trickled over her hand and began to run down her arm.

Charles sprang forward, for once not annoyed with the girl. Her aversion to blood was well known and understandable given the trauma of her childhood.

“There, my sweet,” he murmured, taking her arm. He plucked a length of fabric from the basket beside her and twisted it around her hand. “Your scissors slipped, that’s all.”

But as the blood soaked through the cloth, Charles felt a tremor of foreboding pass through his belly. As Etta fixed terrified eyes on his face, he felt as if there were something he should be seeing, something just beyond his reach.

He dismissed it. “Rudolf, fetch Olga.” To Etta, he added, “She will attend you quickly. All will be well.”

Rica knelt in
the confessional, smelling the sour, sharp scent of beeswax that had been rubbed into the wood. Stone flags met her knees. Beyond the screen, blocked with sheer white linen, the old priest wheezed, as he always did in the spring.

She clasped her hands together. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she murmured. “It has been six days since my last confession.”

Pursing her lips, she tried to remember the pockets of wickedness that riddled those six days. She had nearly-forgotten to be shriven at all, and now, breathless with the run across the courtyard, she found her mind a blank. “I borrowed my sister’s scarf without telling her, the good one she embroidered for Assumption.”

“Mmmm.” The priest coughed, the sound shallow but wheezing.

Beginning was difficult, but once reminded, she seemed to recall an avalanche of transgressions to confess each time—there were so many ways to err! “I spoke sharply to Cook this morning and disobeyed my father’s order to wear my hat when I leave the castle grounds. It was too hot.”