A Bed of Spices (31 page)

But he had not known her. He thought her to be dead, thought it was Etta he saw now like a ghost on the road. That he could no longer see the difference stung Rica deeply.

For a moment, filled with pointed yearning, she watched him go. Then she turned before she could weaken, and ran back toward the castle.

Alone in her chamber, she dug in her trunk. Deep, buried below everything, rested the small painting of Cairo. With a trembling finger, she traced the curve of the mosque, and a swelling went through her, almost as if he had touched her again.

With sorrow, she remembered the wildness that marked last summer. The memory came to her awash in gold, like the light that had surrounded them through the magical long days they had spent by the Ill—Solomon reaching for her, his eyes shining with desire.

She gave a low cry. Because of that wild, selfish pleasure Etta lay cold and worm-eaten in the crypt.

Rudolf had disappeared, never to be seen again, whether in shame for lack of defending his bride or because he was dead it seemed they would never know.

Swiping away the tears on her cheeks, Rica put the painting back in its place. This forbidden passion she had conceived for the beautiful Solomon had always been a selfish and shameful thing.

Last summer, she had been a foolish child, filled with the sweet poems of the courts, those wildly romantic tales of illicit love that ended so tragically.

Grimly, she flung open the shutter and stared at the snow with a jaw clenched so hard her teeth felt as if they’d break.

She had sacrificed everything—her pride, her sister, her father. Her pride still ached at the way Solomon had rebuffed her the last day. She knew he’d lied, would have known it even if she had not seen his grief so plainly today.

But he had not loved her enough to face what lay before them. When it came time to choose between his studies and his love, he’d chosen his studies. It stung.

Etta, in some ways, had brought about her own death. But if Rica had not been so selfishly engrossed through those months, she would have been able to see more clearly the dangers that cost Etta her life.

The worst of it all, even worse than Etta’s death, was that the passions of the summer and the resulting tragedies had driven a wedge between Rica and her father.

Charles did not believe that Etta could maneuver so wild a plot as drugging her sister and taking her place on the altar. He did not believe for many weeks, until Helga made him listen to the stories of Etta collecting the herbs from the castle gardens.

Still, Charles did not speak to Rica except to give an order or instruction about some detail of the household. Rica had all but given up. She did not know how to reach his heart, how to ask him to forgive her, how to make right all the things that had gone wrong. She lived now a grim life. She still ventured sometimes to Helga’s cottage, but it was painful; Lewis remained in Charles’s employ, but he knew too much of the humiliation Rica had suffered for her comfort.

She still walked when she could with Leo. Only one place she did not go—to the copse of trees where Solomon had magically awakened the sweltering of her blood, where his strong hands and good mouth had stoked and satisfied the passion she had conceived for him.

And it had not been only her body he had awakened and teased to bright life, but her mind, her thoughts, her will to reason. She missed talking with him more desperately than anything.

Did he ever remember?

Bitterly she covered her mouth to hold back the cry of anguish that would come out if she let it. Even through her guilt and sorrow, she was aware of something asleep stretching awake within her. Her body felt newly tender, as if the slightest brush would bruise her. Simply seeing his face today for one moment had been enough to awaken all the sleeping coals of her lust.

Lust. It was only lust, and would abate. For never again would she speak to Solomon ben Jacob. He thought her dead. It would remain so.

Five candles and the fire filled Charles’s solar with flickering light and warmth, and still he huddled in a thick wool blanket. Wind whipped the shutters again and again, whistling through the cracks and sending the candle flames to spluttering. He hated winter. The damp cold seeped into his very bones, and his joints ached with it. The lonely sound of the wind chilled his heart.

Rica came in, head lowered, carrying a tray of hot mead and fresh bread. Without speaking, she put it on the table. From beneath his lids, he watched her settling things, shaking out a cloth to cover his rough table and pouring his mead, a drink that gave him oblivion these cold nights. It was the only way he could find rest unless Helga was there to rub his limbs and comfort him in her other, more pleasing ways. But she came to him little these days. She thought his treatment of his daughter too harsh.

With a mutter, he scratched his belly. Helga was stubborn, but he would not be bullied. Not by his willful child or by a midwife who—

“Pappi,” Rica said in a quiet voice. “I cannot live this way, seeing you and never talking. I am lonely. Have I not paid long enough?”

He closed his eyes. “I should have sent you to a convent.” In truth he did not know why he had not. Shifting, he looked at her. “Will you tell me what man it was that dishonored you?”

She sighed. “I have told you—I lied. Helga tells you, too. I am still a virgin.” The softness left her voice. She glared at him. “Why are you so stubborn?”

“Because I know you have lain with a man, Rica. It may be you are still a virgin, but I saw the look of a man on you that day.” It was the most he had said to her. “Will you tell me?”

Her chin lifted. “No.”

“So be it.” He turned back to the fire.

With a noise of irritation, she stalked out. He heard her skirts swishing over the rushes. When the sound faded, he sank lower in his chair. They would not bully him. Not her, or Helga, either.

Aching simply to escape the pall that clung now to the castle like mold, Rica took Olga with her to Strassburg two days before Lichtmess. She wanted to buy a special candle for Etta and find some new fabric with which to amuse herself. By the saints, it seemed the winter would never end!

“What’s here?” Olga asked as they rode toward Olga’s sister’s house. The roads were crowded and ahead was some sort of procession.

“I don’t know.”

Townspeople shouted and stared and raced after a band of people moving through the center of the street. A high keening sound, coupled with cries and moans, rang out into the cold winter air. Rica tugged back on the reins of the horse, a rustle of unease whispering over her nerves.

After a moment, she sorted the crowds of townspeople from the band in the street. They walked barefoot on the icy ground, and a trail of blood followed them. Their clothes were ragged, filthy; their hair unclean and uncombed. They looked like a horde of beggars but for the whips they used to beat their naked backs.

“‘Tis the flagellants,” she said and could not keep the disgust from her voice. “They think to save us from this plague. Come, let’s go around them. I do not care to watch this spectacle.”

They detoured through an alleyway but found themselves blocked once more by the long trailing band as they emerged. The horses, spooked by the scent of blood, backed nervously and Rica was nearly crushed against the wall.

“Dismount!” she cried to Olga. “We must wait till they pass.”

So in horror, they watched the ragged group. Along the street, the robust townsfolk moaned in sympathy and wept and tossed out pennies. Rica stared at them with dawning awareness of the petrifying fear that ate at them. A fat housewife screamed and fell to her knees, waving her hands as the flagellants cried, “God spare us!”

“Has all of mankind gone mad?” Rica whispered to Olga.

The servant woman shook her head, staring like the rest at the violent spectacle. Rica looked back.

And there, in the midst of the most violent scourging she had yet seen, was Rudolf.

His hair had not been cut or washed since the wedding by the look of him, and he still wore ragged bits of finery. Tatters of velvet hung down from a belt. Malignant wounds and tracings of scars showed over the emaciated, bared torso, and his beard was a dirty tangle hanging from his chin. His eyes were wild.

A tumult of emotions rose in Rica’s breast—fear and horror and grief. As he stumbled down the street, she remembered the rash his hair shirt had given him.

Rica shoved the reins into Olga’s hand, and without thought, moved forward, pushing furiously through the crowd, her gaze caught on Rudolf. People grabbed her arms and her gown; she violently pulled free, intent on her goal.

A boy, no more than twelve, took hold of her hair. “Lady, you must not enter the circle, or they will have to begin anew.”

Rica slapped him. “I don’t care.”

Before anyone else could grab her, she raced into the moaning crowd, her fists upraised. She sliced through the throng like a sword, her mouth open to let free a scream she heard but did not know she made until her throat tore with the power of it.

She struck Rudolf with both fists, one landing with a thunk against his mouth, the other against his ear. “Murderer!”

A half-dozen hands grabbed her. Rica screamed, kicking and pummeling at all of them in her rage. An elbow caught her cheekbone with a jarring smash. Shaking off the pain, she landed a fierce kick and one more fist to Rudolf’s face before the hands dragged her away. And still she screamed, “Murderer!” She pointed at him. “He killed my sister!”

The men who had grabbed her from the procession dumped her ignobly in front of a baker’s shop. She banged her head on the wall as she fell, and the dizzying impact kept her down for a moment. When she jumped up to see where Rudolf had gone, all she saw was the swaying, moaning crowd.

Spent, she collapsed on the step and buried her face in her hands. Etta! She missed her desperately, with a searing, deep pain it seemed would never ease. She wanted to weep in loss and rage, but her eyes burned with dryness. Since the day of Etta’s wedding, she had managed not a single easing tear. It was as if something had hardened inside of her.

After a moment, she straightened and brushed her skirts. Her barbette had been lost in the scuffle, and her cloak had suffered a great rent. With a sigh, she examined the damage, then gingerly touched her cheek.

She pushed her hair away from her face and turned to go back to Olga and the horses. So deep was she in her thoughts that she stumbled blindly into a stranger on the street, a man who reached out kindly to steady her.

A sharp waft of frankincense rose from the wool of his cloak. Clutching her belly against the sudden pain, Rica looked up in shock.

Solomon.

For a long, suspended moment, they stared in silence at each other. Rica drank hungrily of his face, seeing the hollows in his cheeks that had not been there before, and a haunted look around his eyes. He had been ill. The knowledge bit through her with swift terror, and combined with the beloved scent enveloping her and the spent energy of the moments just past, Rica felt suddenly faint.

His firm grip held her steady. “I saw what happened and came to see if you are wounded.”

His voice poured over her spine, familiar and beloved and even richer than she remembered. Rica stared at him, unable to speak for the roaring in her ears.

After a moment of hesitation, he lifted his hand and touched the edge of her cheek. “You will be bruised,” he said, and gave her a small impersonal smile. “But you are not hurt elsewise, are you?”

He
still
did not recognize her. Rica stepped away from his touch, fury rising up in her breast like a wild beast. “No,” she said.

Only then did she see the tear at the edge of his eye, a tear he tried to blink away as she stood there staring at him. It escaped his eye and he swiped the pad of his thumb over his cheek to catch it. He backed away. “Do not go so close to them again,” he warned. “There is madness in their number.”

He grieved for her, Rica thought. Her emotions, so tangled and lost since the death of her sister, screamed his name—
Solomon
!

As if he’d heard her silent plea, he paused and a fierce expression crossed his face. It was puzzled and alarmed and grim at once.

In panic, Rica bowed her head and hurried away. It was best this way. He thought her dead, and they had been mad to begin the first time. She would not begin anew.

Solomon made his way back to his father’s house, away from the flagellants who gathered in the square to beg God for deliverance and show their humility with more of the whipping and wailing and screaming. He had seen their number before and was appalled to see them here now. Their presence boded ill for the Jews.

But as he hurried back to warn his father, his mind was not on the danger, but upon the girl in the street. He had been walking along with the crowd, listening as well as he could to muttered conversations so he would be able to tell his father how the feeling went among the townsfolk. The spectacle sickened him, and he kept his eyes averted, but a great buzz had flown up from the crowd when the girl broke through their number to attack a ragged man.

She screamed and pummeled the beggar with her fists, wildly thrashing against arms that tried to restrain her. It was only then that Solomon had recognized her target as the knight from der Esslingen’s employ.

It was Rica’s husband, now mad as a rabid dog, with wild unseeing eyes. Even as the girl struck him and screamed at him, he did not cease in his actions. Fiercely he struck his body again and again with a leather thong tipped with metal ends.

As volunteers hauled the girl from her mission, Solomon was riveted. All of his body leapt in response to the flush in her cheeks, the power of her young, strong body, the passion in her attack. In sudden, searing hope, he’d run to reach her.

And by ail he was, he knew it was Rica, not Etta.

Her voice today was not so light, and in her eyes, he had seen a swift yearning he could not have imagined. This girl was too much alive to be the passive and vacuous Etta. Had he not seen the difference between them in Helga’s yard? Rica’s eyes were darker, her lips fuller, her brow high and intelligent.