Book of Souls

Chapter 22

1532

Paris

Edgar Cantwell began to feel unwell while taking his evening meal at Madame Pucell’s boardinghouse. He had been vaguely aware of a soreness in his groin for a day or two but had thought nothing of it, a strain of the muscle, perhaps. He was eating a lamb chop and a plate of leeks when the chill hit him, flying through his body like a swarm of winged insects. His colleague, Richard Dudley, another English student, noticed the unpleasant look on his friend’s face and remarked on it.

“A chill, nothing more,” Edgar said, excusing himself from the table. He made it only to the parlor, where he was seized with an overwhelming nausea and threw up a copious amount of undigested food onto Madame’s chaise longue.

When the doctor visited him later that night in his bedroom at the top of the stairs, Edgar was doing poorly. He was pale and sweaty, and his pulse raced. The ache in his groin had progressed to exquisite pain, and his armpits too were sore. His nausea was unabated and he began to have paroxysms of dry coughing. The doctor lifted his sheet and directed his bony fingers straight for his groin folds where he palpated a cluster of firm lumps the size of hen’s eggs. When he pressed down on them, Edgar howled in pain.

He needed to see nothing more.

In the parlor, Dudley seized the doctor’s arm, and asked, “What is the matter with my friend?”

“You must leave this house,” the doctor barked. His eyes were wild and fearful. “All must leave this house.”

“Leave my house? Why?” the landlady exclaimed.

“It is the plague.”

Edgar was only scant months away from completing his studies and returning to England for good. He had grown to be a confident young man who compensated for his rodent-like looks with a quiet air of nobility and superiority. He had survived Montaigu, so he reckoned he could tackle anything in life. Three years earlier, he had transferred to the College de Sorbonne, and he had acquitted himself well there. His final examinations were looming, and if all went according to plan, he would return to his country with a prestigious baccalaureate in canon law. His father would be proud, his life would be set on a glittering course.

Now, he was alone and most probably dying in a fetid room in a small boardinghouse in this wretched, plague-infested city. He was too weak to drag himself off his soiled bed, and he barely had the strength to sip at a jug of bitter tea the doctor had left at his fleeting last visit. In his feverish and desperate state, he saw images running through his mind: a snarling boar that turned into the snarling face of a cane-wielding Bedier, a funeral procession of somber, black-robed men, his precious book, flung open with the name Edgar Cantwell, Mors, floating above the page, then the long, animated face of a reddish-haired young man with a long, reddish beard and crimson cheeks, so close, so real.

“Can you hear me, Monsieur Cantwell?”

He heard a voice, saw a full pair of lips moving.

“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

He felt a strong hand underneath his palm and exerted all his will to grasp it.

“Good.”

Edgar blinked in confusion into the man’s gentle, gray-green eyes.

“I met your doctor at the house of another victim. He told me he had an English student. I am fond of the English, and I am especially fond of students as I was one myself not so long ago. All the study and hard work, a pity to have it snuffed out by the plague, wouldn’t you agree? Also, I hear your father is a baron.”

The man moved away from the bedside and flung open Edgar’s window, muttering something about foul vapors. He was wearing the red robe of a doctor of medicine but to Edgar, he seemed a red angel, flying around the room, delivering a measure of hope.

“Your doctor is old and superstitious, the kind who is no use in the plague. I have discharged him and will personally assume your care, Monsieur. If you survive, you will find it in your heart to pay me, I am sure. If you do not, you will be added to my account in heaven. Now, let us get to work. This chamber is squalid and will not do!”

Edgar drifted in and out of consciousness. This red angel was a talker, and every time Edgar became sensate, he heard a torrent of words and exposition.

The only way to defeat the plague, the man was explaining, was to remove filth and effluents and administer apothecary medicaments. When the plague struck, he said, the streets had to be emptied of bodies and washed with fresh water, the corpses buried deep in quicklime, the trash burned, the houses of the victims cleaned with vinegar and boiled wine, the sheets kept clean and laundered, the servants to the dead and dying made to wear leather gloves and masks. He had no need to fear for himself, he chattered, as he had survived a mild case of the plague in Toulouse and was thus protected from future affliction.

But he insisted that nothing was as important as his medicines, and Edgar, scrubbed and clean, felt pleasant-tasting lozenges being pushed into his mouth followed by small mouthfuls of fresh, diluted wine. He heard the man telling him he’d return later with soup and bread, and Edgar was finally able to form some words and speak just above a whisper, “What is your name, sir?”

“I am Michel de Nostredame, Apothecary and Physician, and I am at your service, Monsieur.”