Mathilde 01 - The Cup of Ghosts Read Online Free

appreciative of the Arab commentators Averroes and Avicenna, deeply interested in Galen and, above all, in the writings of Bernard de Gordon of Montpellier, whose Regimen Sanitatis he would swear by. Uncle Reginald was fascinated by the beat of the blood in the wrist or throat, the odour of his patients, their eyes, tongue and the texture of their skin. ‘Observe,’ he would bark, ‘examine, then reflect.’ He was pessimistic on what he could achieve and was always downcast if he felt tumours or lumps within the body. On herbs and potions, however, he was most skilled, arguing that that was one field of knowledge where he could both sow and reap the harvest. I became equally proficient in the mixture and effects of different plants: what proportion should be given, what results expected.
    ‘We must be humble,’ Uncle Reginald argued, ‘and recognise our limitations. Herbs are our weapons, the arrows in our quiver, the one thing we can control; that, and the cleanliness of what we do. Mathilde,’ he would lecture as he walked up and down some chamber, ‘the cause of infection I do not know, but its effects are all around us. So wash your hands, clean a wound, apply a pure poultice, and always remember that dirt and death walk hand in hand.’
    For eight years that was my life, my being, my very soul; from its first blossoming to the full ripening. Uncle Reginald! Whether I trotted beside him down a row of beds or was sent like some herald into the city to buy this or that. Other young women married, but my life was Uncle Reginald. God rest him. God knows, I have spent most my life, at least in physic, obeying him.
    My life, at least with Uncle Reginald, ended as I have said on Thursday 12 October 1307, when Philip of France, Philip ‘Le Bel’, he of the light blue eyes and silver hair, struck like a hawk and destroyed the Temple. My uncle and I had been visiting a farm the Temple owned just outside Paris, the fields around it being rich in herbs. We unexpectedly returned to the city. My uncle decided to stay in a small tavern close to the Porte de St Denis. From its cobbled yard I could see the soaring gallows of Montfaucon and the red-tiled roof of the Filles de Dieu, the Good Sisters, who always gave the condemned criminals, hustled up to be hanged from the great gibbet above its deep pit, a final cup of wine. On that heinous day my uncle acted like a man condemned to those gallows. He was troubled, agitated and ordered me to keep close in my chamber just beneath the eaves of the old tavern.
    I, of course, was desperate to return to Paris: a farmer’s daughter, I had become bored with the beauties of nature, its open fields, lonely meadows, brooding granges, rat-infested barns and silent, twisting track-ways. I was only too pleased to forsake them all and plunge into the city of Paris, as eagerly as any miser would a horde of silver coins. I’d grown to love the city, with its various markets: the Place Mordare for bread, the Grand Châtelet for meat, Saint Germain for sausages, the Petit Pont for flour and eggs, the great herb market on the quayside of the Ile de Cité, or Le Marché aux Innocents where you could buy anything you wanted. Noise and gaiety were my constant companions. People shoving and pushing, whispering and shouting:
    ‘Dieu vous garde!’
    ‘ Je vous salue! ’
    I’d been my uncle’s messenger to this place or that, coursing like a hare through the city. By my twentieth summer I was still fascinated by the chestnut-sellers from Normandy, the cheese-hawkers, the plump apple-sellers with cheeks as red as the fruit they sold. My uncle had taught me all about the tricks of the market. Innkeepers and wine merchants who mixed water with wine, or bad wine with good. Women who thinned their milk and, to make their cheeses look richer and heavier, soaked them in broth. Drapers who laid their cloths out on the night grass so in the morning they weighed heavier. Butchers who soaked their meat or