The Bloodletter's Daughter by Linda Lafferty Page A

help me claim the throne
, Matthias thought, and he smiled as his entourage finally caught up to him on the ridge.

 

CHAPTER 5
     
    T HE W HITE L ADY
     
    The first time Marketa saw the White Lady of Cesky Krumlov, the girl was kneeling by the banks of the Vltava, rinsing a ring of blood from a white ceramic bowl. Her father had performed a bloodletting that morning, and his finest dish was crusted brown with a stain that clung to the ceramic after she had fed the garden soil with what remained of the patient’s bad humors.
    Her fingernails scratched at the crusted blood, and the sparkling cold water of the river flooded over the rim of the bowl, clearing the stain at last. Suddenly, she had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching her from above. She lifted her eyes from the water, up the stone walls that rose directly from the riverbank to the castle.
    The woman who stood there, far above the racing waters, was as fair as snow, dressed in white satin, her pale arms encased in transparent gauze. A gray sash draped to one side, looping down to a long train of white folds. Her hair was fashioned in ringlets, hay-colored and long against her neck, in the old style of a century ago.
    She smiled sadly down at Marketa from the heights of the palace wall. Marketa dropped the bowl in the mud of the river and heard it chip on a rock. She bent her dirty knees under her homespun dress and wet apron in a curtsy. She supposed the lady to be a Rozmberk of the Five-Petal Rose, the noble family of the castle and the same as kings to those of the village. Even as she curtsied, Marketa stared down at the chipped ceramic and thought of what her mother would say when the surgery bowl came back damaged. Her father’s patients noticed such things, especially the rich ones.
    When Marketa lifted her eyes, the woman in white had vanished. Marketa collected the crockery in the wet folds of her apron and turned back to the bathhouse, her heart thudding within her chest.

     
    Viennese peddlers often lodged in Marketa’s uncle’s tavern, and he would tell the family their tales at Sunday dinner. Uncle Radek had never married and grew up eating his sister’s Bohemian cooking. He felt it was his birthright to have a place at the Pichler table, whether or not they could afford to feed another mouth.
    The evening following the appearance of the lady in white, Radek invited himself to dinner. Marketa saw him leering at the meal on the table when she peeked as they said grace. He lusted after her mother’s cooking like a dog chasing a bitch in heat. The way he eyed the dumplings made Marketa blush, which did not come easy. Working in her mother’s bathhouse, Marketa had seen all manner of lechery.
    After the Pichlers had thanked God for his bounty, Zigmund Pichler nodded his head and pronounced, “
Dobrou chut
” before the family broke bread.
    As Lucie ladled out cabbage and lentil soup and
jatrove knedlicky
—liver dumplings—into his bowl, her brother Radek stuffed his mouth with fresh bread that the twins had baked that afternoon. He rolled his fat tongue over his food and addressed the table with an open mouth, his words making their way through a brown wad of buttered bread.
    “Another rich trader came bringing fine cloth and bright jewels for the Rozmberks,” he said, taking a long draught of pilsner and filling his mouth with a dumpling. “He says it was a waste of a hard journey—they no longer have the gold to buy his goods.”
    “As if the Rozmberks cannot buy anything their heart desires!” Lucie scoffed. “They drive coaches of gold, and the lady wears loops of pearls around her neck! The old bears in the moat dine on fattened calves—I have seen the carcasses with my own eyes! How could they not afford to buy pretty things?”
    “I am only telling you what I hear from my customers, and they have no reason to lie,” said Uncle Radek, digging with his thumb at a plug of dumpling between his molars. He sucked at his