A Bed of Spices (9 page)

It was not uncommon for high-born ladies to read, for there were many tasks required of the mistress of a household—one must tend the books of the kitchens and read the records of harvests, brewings of ale, and mixes of grapes for the wine they made. Where Rica knew she differed was in her longing for the knowledge Father Goddard gave her. She gulped mathematics and Latin, the philosophies of the masters and the words of the Holy Book itself. There was a magic in the words written upon a page that she had yet to find equaled elsewhere, a magic all the more precious for its rarity.

She owned two books. One was a book of hours, a devotional her father had given her, lavishly illustrated with vines and devils and soldiers. The other was a brisk manual of household rituals, duties, and directions for all manner of things Rica found useful.

But the bound manuscript the priest had placed in her hands tonight was the Bible, a text he had used more than once for her edification. Rica frowned perplexedly as she slipped her fingers into the place he had marked with a silk ribbon, wondering what illumination he hoped to give her now.

As the pages fell open, her breath left her. She closed her eyes and a rush of emotion bolted through her. The dear priest, wishing to reassure her that her thoughts were normal, had given her a sacred poem of love to read, unknowingly releasing within Rica’s soul a renewed and pounding ache of hunger.

The words had been written thousands of years before, but they rang with freshness for Rica.

With a trembling heart, she began to read the Latin aloud in a whisper, “The song of songs, which is Solomon’s. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine…”

As if burned, she dropped the bound pages, terrified of the visions crowding now into her mind.

But even as she knelt, bowing her head, she could feel his mouth upon hers, could feel longing like honey flow sweet through her veins. The song of songs, her mind whispered.

Solomon’s song.

Rica set out for Strassburg early the next morning, pleading a need for fabric and sundries. Riding with her was Olga, the red-faced servant woman who had been in Rica’s father’s employ for nearly twenty years, and the ever-faithful Leo.

Olga had a sister married to a blacksmith, and they stabled the horses there. Olga and her sister climbed the stairs to the solar above, waving cheerfully at Rica as she departed. It was a secret between the old woman and the young girl.

Out in the street, free of servant and father and house, Rica felt a sudden, soaring sense of happiness crowd through her chest. Leo loped along beside her, tongue bobbling, his ears alert as he examined the wondrous array of sights around him. A snorting, muddy pig ran past, and hard on its heels came a boy, calling and cursing after him. Leo whined and glanced at Rica.

“No,” she said.

He lowered his head and kept trotting along beside her. She smiled.

It was early yet. The sun had begun to penetrate only the widest of streets, but the exhilarating noises of the city had already begun in earnest. The sounds of workmen’s tools rang out—the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer against his anvil; the rasp of a carpenter’s saw.

Harnesses rattled and wagons squeaked and horses clopped on the stones of the streets. Bells rang from both cathedrals to mark the hour, their music echoing and bouncing through the narrow canyons between the half-timbered houses overhanging the streets and shops.

Rica made her way toward the new cathedral, knowing there was an astrologer nearby whom she could trust. Perhaps, too, there would be some fine fabric or bangles for sale in the square to give weight to her shopping excuse.

She passed great houses surrounded with walled gardens. Outside the gates huddled clumps of beggars, waiting for the soaked trenchers left from the morning meal. A pair of nuns passed her, heads demurely lowered as if to remind her of her place as a woman. There were seven nunneries in Strassburg—a fact her father had threatened her with more than once.

Near the cathedral, the streets were warming in the sunshine, the stone walls taking in heat. Rica loosened her cloak in relief.

The astrologer’s shop was dim and smelled of something foreign. Parchment charts, intricately detailed and colored, covered the walls. On a stool near the front of the room sat an elderly man with a long beard. He nodded at her respectfully. “Good day, my lady,” he said.

Rica smiled. “Good day.” Hastily, she sketched the urgent nature of her request, without actually going into any detail that would give her away. She asked for a reading or guiding indicators for the coming months.

The astrologer had pale blue eyes growing rheumy with age, but they were shrewd as they measured Rica. “Is it a matter of love that concerns you?” he guessed. “I might save time by looking only in those quadrants and houses if it be so.”

Rica blushed. “Yes.”

He chuckled. “‘Twould have surprised me greatly had it been another matter, given your youth and beauty.”

Rica grinned reluctantly. “Are all maidens so foolish as to ask the heavens for guidance?”

He pursed his lips. “Is it foolish to try to divine the workings of our fate? Is it foolish to try to avoid disaster?” His gnarled white hand lifted and he pointed at her, not unkindly. “For it is a disaster you fear, is it not?”

Rica swallowed, but lowered her eyes before she gave her fear away. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and with a regal straightening of her skirts said, “I will pay you double your fee if you will find the answer I seek by afternoon.”

“it shall be done.”

She left the small shop. The square was filled with booths and trestle tables and makeshift counters made of overturned wagons. The peasants were prosperous this year, and business was brisk. A musician banged a drum and blew a pipe as a tumbler flipped by him. Rica paused, watching with awe the limber leaping and flipping of the acrobat, amazed at the fluid nature of his body. The small knot of onlookers cheered when he completed a double back flip and landed solidly on his feet, his grubby face beaming as he bowed.

A wandering Franciscan friar, garbed in a rough robe tied about his waist with a length of rope, approached her. His face was gaunt. “Your heart is heavy, my lady?” From his sleeve, he pulled a small bundle. “Perhaps a relic will ease your heart? The tooth of a saint to stave off the evil you fear?”

The friar had no doubt seen her enter the astrologer’s shop. “I fear no evil,” she said.

“But there is evil all about. The Black Death marches toward us. Will you not take the tooth of Saint Blaise for healing?”

“Saint Blaise?”

“Aye, my lady. Tis said this very tooth saved an entire family in Florence when the pestilence swept through.”

Rica thought of her father’s precarious health; Blaise was said to have healing properties. “Let me see it.”

Obligingly, the friar unwrapped the relic. Nestled in the length of linen was a very old, very yellow tooth. “All right,” she said, taking a coin from the pouch at her girdle. “Let me have it.”

Next to her, Leo made a small whining noise of greeting. Curious, she glanced around to see who it was that Leo would know in this teeming city.

Solomon.

Her heart shivered in both guilt and joy.
Solomon
. He walked with easy grace through the square, his black hair spilling from beneath his hat in glossy disarray, his figure lean and strong. He had a faint smile upon his mouth, as if he contemplated something secret and pleasurable. He did not see her.

But Rica was not the only woman in the square who saw him. Matrons turned as he passed, speculative gleams in their eyes. A young girl, perhaps eleven, stared after him long after he had passed, craning her neck until her mama yanked her dress.

As if struck by his beauty, a pietist rang his bells. The musician struck up a tune on his pipe. The tumbler began to sing a soft ballad.

The friar wrested the coin from her fingers, dropped the relic in her waiting palm, and disappeared in the crowd. And still Rica stood unmoving, as if turned to stone.

In contrast, her black-eyed Solomon seemed extraordinarily alive in the bright day. When he spied her, his expression sobered. For a moment, he paused. Then as the old cathedral bells began to ring the hour, he moved toward her.

Rica looked at her hands.

“Rica,” he said in quiet greeting. “What brings you abroad today?”

“I came to see the astrologer,” she said, gesturing toward the building behind her.

“Ahhh.” He made a gentle sound of wry amusement. “So did I.”

Rica raised her eyes. “Did you?”

A faintly ironic twist of his lips lent his face a harsh aspect for a moment. Then his black eyes softened. “It seems we are fated to meet, my lady. What are we to do?”

Warning and fierce excitement rippled through her. “I know not,” she whispered.

He lifted his chin toward the astrologer’s sign. “Perhaps he will have answers for us,” he said. “I came myself here to ask him my fate.”

Rica couldn’t help herself—she laughed. It was all too absurd to be ignored. “Perhaps you have learned it,” she said, spreading her hands. “Every corner you turn, you will find me standing there.”

A hot light flared in his eyes and he quickly shifted his gaze away from her. “Are you in a hurry today,
fräulein
?”

Rica knew she should say yes, that she must rush to meet her servant. To stay in his company was to sin once again. But in spite of this, she found herself shaking her head. “I do not meet my maid until Nones.”

“Will you wait while I ask the astrologer what he sees?”

Softly she said, “We will be in the square, Leo and I.”

“I will find you.”

The astrologer dutifully
recorded Solomon’s request and said it might be late afternoon before the information was ready. Solomon impatiently nodded and rushed back out into the day, knowing he was mad. He should wander these busy streets today and admire every beauty he saw, to take his mind from the one. But he could not.

He had tried. Filled with the wispy, erotic memories of his dreams of Rica, he had admired every woman with even a single beauty to her keeping. But the eyes of one, the lips of another, the breasts of another, all seemed to echo some unforgettable part of the whole that was Rica. No matter how he fought it, it seemed every dry corner of his mind had been given new life with the presence and shape of her.

Outside the shop, he scanned the throng of people in the square anxiously and spied Rica haggling with a peddler over a belt. Her hair was caught back from her face under her barbette, and the dark blue eyes snapped with quick wit as she bargained. She laughed, showing her white teeth and the dimple deep in her cheek, as the peddler gave in with a bow.

Before she saw him, Solomon sprinted through the streets to a cookshop he knew, and paid for a pasty and a loaf of bread for them to share. He could not eat the meat, but the bread would do him no harm.

In a trice he was back, holding the meal in his hands. He slipped up beside Rica and murmured quietly, “I should not like to think people will put us together, my lady. There is a gate to the east of the city and from there a path leads along the river.”

“I do not think—” she began, turning to look at him. Her fear was plain.

“We will only walk, Rica. And eat.” He lifted the food to display it to her. “Just for today.”

“All right,” she whispered. Her throat moved as she swallowed. She shifted away, twitching her skirts from a pile of refuse in the gutter.

He bowed, his heart pounding hard in his chest, and led them through tiny alleyways and past stone dwellings with walled gardens. Another turn took them into a dark, deserted stretch near the east wall.

Once they had passed through the city gates, Solomon felt his tension begin to fade. The east gate was busy with the traffic from the river. Soon he and Rica were able to peel apart from the crowd to seek shelter in the trees.

They walked some distance in silence, Leo trotting happily alongside. It was a bright day, humid and filled with insects. Rica waved at a flurry of gnats that swirled around her face and swatted at mosquitos. “I have never seen a year with so many bugs,” she said with annoyance.

“It is the decay to the south that breeds them so thickly.”

She looked at him with horror in her wide eyes. “I had not thought—”

He glanced over his shoulder. They had left the main road, and the path they followed toward the grove of trees was deserted. He took her hand. “You could not know, Rica.”

For a moment, she let him hold her hand, then gently eased free of him. “I wonder how long it will be until Strassburg is laid low with this pestilence.”

“Perhaps it will not come at all.”

With a bitter twist of her lips, Rica looked at him. “Perhaps, Herr Doktor, the peasants might believe your soothing noises. I do not.” She plucked a silvery leaf from the low-hanging branch of a beech tree. “It will come.”

“No, Rica, it may not.” He gestured toward a sun-dappled stretch of grass. As she settled, he went on. “We do not know why or how the plagues come, or why they leave one place alone and destroy another. Perhaps Strassburg will be fortunate. We have been untouched thus far.”

“Perhaps.” Rica broke a hank of bread from the loaf. “Will you eat with me?”

He smiled and nodded, taking the bread she offered. “You do not believe me. Why?”

“I do not trust the word of
any
of you.” She tore into the bread with her fine white teeth and chewed lustily. “Do you know what the physician from the city said about my father’s condition?”

He chuckled. “Tell me.”

“He wanted to bleed him when the moon was in Jupiter.” Her gaze showed the idiocy with which she regarded this suggestion. “I didn’t let him. Now he will not come to us.”

“How did you come to such odd ideas about medicine?”

“Odd ideas?” She fished a chunk of beef from the pie with her fingers and held it ready near her lips. “Do you, Solomon, believe in the practice?”

“There is nothing that will break a fever more quickly,” he said, “though I see little else it helps.”