The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (2 page)

Judah del Medigo was an observant though not a believing Jew. The day he received the news, he locked his doors, covered his mirrors, and settled down on a low stool in the basement of the Doctor’s House in the Third Court of Topkapi Palace to weep and grieve. Being a realist, he did not pray to have his loved ones brought back to him. There was no reason to hope they might still be alive. The Venetian report had left no doubt as to their fate. Yet before dawn on his sixth day of mourning, the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician found himself scrambling across the dark silent streets of Istanbul in response to a ransom note that had been slipped under his door on the previous night.

The woman is dead,
the note read
. The boy is safe. You have until dawn to appear at Pirates Cove with 2,000 gold ducats. If the ransom is not paid at sun-up the boy will be delivered to the Istanbul slave market and sold to the highest bidder.

The ransom note read like a fraudulent ruse to extract money from a grieving parent. And the doctor knew better than to trust any bargain made with the Corsican pirates who prowl the waters of the Mediterranean. But what if just this once, the Corsicans proved to be as good as their word? What if his son was still alive? He could not afford to risk that chance.

So the next morning, well before sun-up, the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician was found plodding through the sleeping city of Istanbul clutching a pouch full of gold coins. When the doctor clambered down the bank of Pirates Cove he saw no sign of life in the woods that ringed the shore or on the beach. Only one small portion of the landscape moved in the stillness: a deserted fishing boat bobbed up and down against the small dock anchored in the curve of the cove. If anything, the tattered sail that fluttered from the flagpole of the abandoned skiff underscored the flat emptiness of the scene.

By now a rim of sunlight had appeared on the horizon. The witching hour had come and gone, but there was no one there to collect the ransom.

As the doctor stood gazing into the void, reluctant to give up his last remaining glimmer of hope, he heard what seemed to be the sound of a twig breaking behind him in the silent woods.

When he turned his head toward the sound, he was taken from behind by a pair of unseen arms and felt hot breath on the back of his neck.

“Did you bring the gold?” The question was voiced in a growling, deeply accented Corsican dialect.

The doctor nodded his assent.

“Hand it over.”

He reached into his pocket for the pouch, only to find it yanked from his fingers by a hairy hand that made immediate use of it to rap him smartly on the back of his head. A sharp pain flashed through his body. Then blackness.

When he opened his eyes his attacker had made off with the gold, and the woods behind him were as unruffled as they had been when he first arrived at the rendezvous. He had been duped. How could he have been such a fool as to put his faith in a passel of Corsican pirates?

But wait. Out of the corner of his eye he became aware of something moving on the deck of the abandoned skiff. Transfixed, he watched as a trap door was slowly thrust into view from below the deck of the craft and two pairs of bronzed, muscled arms emerged bearing what seemed to be a black-hooded body wrapped in a tarpaulin.

Mesmerized by what he took to be a mirage brought on by the blow to his head, the doctor stumbled to his feet expecting that at any moment the illusion he was seeing would disappear into the wind. Instead, the sailors carrying the wrapped figure moved forward to the prow of the ship where they propped it up against the mast and began to unwind the straps that enclosed it.

They did say he was alive
, the doctor reminded himself. But could he take them at their word?

One of the sailors pulled out a knife.
Oh my God, they are going to
kill him in front of me.

But no. The sailor used his knife to slit the black hood at the neck, releasing a single golden curl onto the forehead. Then a nose. Now a chin appeared. Above it, a mouth. Then a pair of clear blue eyes. At last a whole living boy was revealed, arms stretching out toward the shore.

The sailors led their captive down a small gangway from the deck of the skiff to the pier. And, with a gentle push, Danilo del Medigo was released into his father’s waiting arms.

It was at that moment that Judah del Medigo became a believer in miracles. And if a battle-scarred, somewhat arthritic old campaigner can be said to have floated through the streets, the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician floated home from Pirates Cove that day to the Doctor’s House in Topkapi Palace, cradling his son in his arms.

There he settled his son on a pallet beside his own bed and wrapped him in a lavender-scented quilt. But not before he had washed and barbered and massaged the boy into a state of cleanliness and ease.

At the same time, the physician in him managed to conduct what he hoped was an unobtrusive examination of his son’s physical condition. And Judah del Medigo fell asleep that night with the miracle boy nestled beside him, confident that, considering the shocks he had suffered, the boy was amazingly fit. No broken bones or bruises, no signs of being starved or beaten.

Not until the next day did Judah become aware that, although his son was healthy enough, he seemed to exist in a state of passivity, hardly moving, not speaking unless spoken to. Perfectly obedient and accommodating, never rebellious or defiant, this pale wraith bore little resemblance to the vigorous, lively boy his father had left in Rome just a few months before. When the doctor tried to distract him with tempting morsels of food or chat, the boy accepted the offerings with a nod but showed no sign that he enjoyed his father’s pleasantries any more than the eggs and meat and pilaf that Judah poured into him, hoping to renew the energy that had always been so much a part of his nature.

Certainly the doctor was beyond joy to be reunited with his lost son. He thanked God every morning in his prayers for the boy’s miraculous delivery. Yet he couldn’t shake off his awareness that come spring, he was bound to the Sultan on campaign and would have to either leave the boy behind or take him along. Could he in good conscience leave his troubled son behind in the care of strangers? Or expose him to the hardships of campaigning? Or must he now resign his position in order to devote himself to the boy’s rehabilitation?

While he was struggling to come to a decision, a note from the Sultan arrived. Suleiman was proposing that during the upcoming campaign, the doctor’s son join the royal children in the so-called Princes School attached to the Sultan’s harem, where he would be as well taken care of as a prince. The offer was tempting. But after two sleepless nights and many prayers, Judah regretfully tendered his resignation as Chief Body Physician, pleading pressing family obligations.

In the interim he would bend his efforts to find a replacement body physician to serve Suleiman on the battlefield. Knowing that his decision was the right one put his mind at ease.

But Suleiman the Magnificent was not a man to be denied his will by a mere doctor. Like the popes at Rome and certain Christian princes whose instinct for self-preservation exceeded their religious scruples, the Ottoman sultans favored Jewish doctors. Unhampered by medieval Christian screeds against “pagan science,” Jewish physicians had continued to practice the teachings of Asclepius and Hippocrates. Armed with this knowledge, they had emerged from the Middle Ages as an elite cadre of medical practitioners, Judah del Medigo foremost among them.

The Sultan had pursued the renowned Jewish physician through the courts of Europe for several years before finally bagging him. And he was not about to allow the unexpected appearance of a motherless boy to rob him of his campaign physician. Certainly not at this moment when the gout that it was said only Jewish doctors had a cure for was beginning to make it uncomfortable for him to mount a horse.

To initiate what he confidently expected to become a fruitful dialogue, Suleiman called in his physician for a friendly chat, reminding him that the campaign season would not commence for many months, that there was no urgency to make such an important decision, and urging the doctor to take some time to reconsider resigning.

“You have my assurance that in the Harem School your son will do his learning as a part of my own family under the watchful eye of my own mother, the Valide Sultan,” he coaxed. “Surely,” he went on, “that would be a much safer arrangement than dragging the boy off to the battlefield or leaving him behind with strangers.” Then, to add a little sweetener to the sherbet, he offered to assign the boy an armed guard to escort him from the Doctor’s House in Topkapi to the Princes School in the harem each day that Judah was absent on campaign.

The prospect was tempting. Judah wavered. His head told him that the Sultan’s offer was a solution to his problems. But his fatherly heart told him that the boy was not yet ready to deal with yet another abandonment by the only parent now left to guide him through the labyrinth of dark memories that haunted him.

What the Sultan was offering the doctor was time to ferret out what had happened during the boy’s captivity on the pirate ship, and to find the key to his son’s despair. A boy’s natural grief for the loss of a much loved mother could account for weeping, fainting, even vertigo — but not for virtual paralysis. What cruelty had the damned Corsicans inflicted on Danilo to cause such damage?

That question might never have found an answer had not some lost soul stumbled in the dark into the Sultan’s personal domain, a swampy moraine outside the wall of the Third Court. If an interloper ever managed to get anywhere near the Sultan’s
selamlik
, a warning fired from a Janissary’s musket would have scared him off, pronto. Which is what happened that night. But as the shot reverberated across the palace wall into the Third Court, it also shattered the silence in the Doctor’s House, where Judah del Medigo and his son lay sleeping.

At the sound of the shot, the boy sprang up from his pallet as if he had been hit, clutching his heart in terror. “Stop, don’t shoot!” he pleaded. “Noooooooo . . .”

Then came a blood-curdling shriek of anguish. “Not Mama. Not her, I beg you. Take me . . . take me.”

The musket-shot had released a flood of dammed-up memories. And finally, between the sobs, came a confession.

“It was all my fault. The pirate ordered me to abandon my perch guarding Isabella’s baggages. Mama begged me to climb down. I wouldn’t listen to her. If I had come down the pirate wouldn’t have aimed the gun at me and she wouldn’t have thrown herself in front of me to take the bullet. She would be here now. Alive.” A long pause. “I killed her.”

A glance at his son’s face told Judah he could not allow this madness to go on. Gently but with great firmness he took the boy’s pale face between his hands and addressed him sternly. “Did you have a gun?” he asked.

When no response came, he demanded with fatherly authority, “Answer me.”

“No.” The answer was barely audible.

“So who did have a gun?”

“The pirate they called Rufino.”

“Then it was the pirate Rufino who killed your mother with his gun. Not you.”

“No. No.” The boy wrenched himself from his father’s grasp. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what happened.”

“Tell me,” the doctor urged him softly.

Somehow Judah had struck the right note. His son took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and began to relive his memory.

“Madonna Isabella left the
Hesperion
to finish the trip to Mantova by land because she was seasick,” he began, hesitantly at first but with increasing assurance as he went on. “Before she quit our ship she asked me to guard her baggage with my life and bring her things home safely to Mantova. There were treasures packed in those cases — a tapestry by Raphaello that she said meant more to her than her own life. When the pirates attacked the
Hesperion
, the crew put up a brave fight, but the ship sprang a leak in the hold and started to take on water. That was when Rufino and his crew began to remove Madonna Isabella’s valuables from our ship to theirs. All I could think of was my promise to watch over her goods. I climbed up on top of her cases to guard them. Rufino ordered me out of the way. I didn’t move. He said he would count to three.

“One.’ The pirate raised the musket to his shoulder. I saw Mama moving toward us.

“Two.’ He placed his thumb on the trigger.

“Three.’ He squeezed. The shot rang out just as Mama threw herself into the line of fire. Nothing seemed to happen . . . then she fell at my feet.”

There were no tears in the boy’s eyes when he spoke. Simply a blank emptiness. “That bullet was meant for me. I killed her.”

“That bullet was shot by the pirate, not by you,” Judah insisted.

“But if I had stepped down . . .”

“It would still be the pirate that killed your mother. There is no pity in these men. Murder is their business. When I first saw you at Pirates Cove you were tied up in a tarpaulin. They had bound your ankles, taped your wrists, and covered your head in a hood. You were their prisoner. They would have killed you.”

“You don’t understand, Papa. They never would have killed me. They tied me up to save me from drowning. They saved my life.”

“Are you telling me that these bandits rescued you out of pity?”

“Of course not. I may be confused, Papa, but I am no fool. I know they saved me to sell in the slave market in Istanbul. But they did fish me out of the sea and save me.”

“After they threw you in?”

“No, after I jumped in. They put Mama’s body in a wooden box and shoved it off the side of the ship. When I saw her body sinking under the waves I wanted to follow her, to be dead like her. So I jumped in. That’s when they tied me up, so I wouldn’t try to do it again.”

Judah had convinced himself that if he learned the secret of his son’s suffering at the hands of the Corsicans, that knowledge would guide him to a cure for the boy’s malady. But having relived his ordeal, the boy remained pale, silent, and still. Clearly reliving his nightmare had done nothing to alleviate Danilo’s guilt and pain. It would take months, even years, to rescue his son, Judah thought, from the pit of despair into which he had fallen. If there had been any doubt in Judah’s mind, there no longer was. There would be no campaigning this year for the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician. Danilo’s needs were far greater than the Sultan’s, and Judah’s first duty was to his son.