Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (23 page)

“Please do not leave so soon, Doctor,” Edgar said weakly.

“I have other patients, monsieur.”

“Please. Just a little company, I pray.”

The doctor sat and folded his hands on his lap.

“Was I dreaming?”

“When?”

“The night I saw you staring into a bowl of water.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. It is not for me to say.”

“Are you using witchcraft to heal me?”

The doctor laughed heartily. “No. I only use science. The critical elements are cleanliness and my plague lozenges. Would you like to know what they contain?”

Edgar nodded.

“They are my own formulation, one I have been refining since my doctoral years in Montpelier. I pluck three hundred roses at dawn and pulverize them with sawdust from the greenest cypress wood and mix in a precise blend of iris of Florence, cloves, and calamus root. I trust your mind will be too feverish to remember this list as it is a secret! I am counting on my lozenges to make me very rich and very famous!”

“You are ambitious,” Edgar said, managing a smile for the first time.

“I have always been so. My maternal grandfather, Gassonet, was an ambitious fellow, and he had a profound influence on my thoughts.”

Edgar tried to prop himself up. “Did you say, Gassonet?”

“Yes.”

Edgar was jolted. “That is not a common name.”

“Maybe so. He was a Jew. Lay yourself back down! You look flushed.”

“Please continue!”

“He was a great scholar from Saint Remy. From a young age he taught me Latin, Hebrew, mathematics, and the celestial sciences.”

“You are an astrologer?”

“I most certainly am. I still have the brass astrolabe that Grandsire bequeathed me. The stars have a present influence on all things on earth, including the diagnosis of the body’s ailments. Give me your birth date, and I will draw your chart tonight.”

“Tell me, can your stars tell me the date I will die?” Edgar asked.

Nostredame looked at his patient suspiciously. “They cannot, sir, but that is a very curious question, if I may say. Now, I advise you to chew three more lozenges, then go ye to sleep. I will return in the afternoon. There is a woman sicker than you on the rue des Ecoles who told me in her pitiful state this morning that if I did not come back to her soon, she would have to sew up her own shroud.”

For two more days, the doctor visited his patient and administered his prescriptions. Edgar was anxious to talk to the man and weakly pressed him to stay longer, but the doctor would protest and complain about the number of poor souls afflicted in the district. Then, one evening, when Nostredame flew in with lozenges and a pot of soup, he found Edgar sobbing uncontrollably.

“What troubles you, Monsieur?”

Edgar pointed to his groin, and cried, “Look.”

The doctor lifted the sheets. Both his inguinal folds were covered in bloody pus. “Excellent!” the doctor shouted. “Your buboes have ruptured. You are saved! If we keep you clean, I promise you, you will make a full recovery. This is the sign I have sought.”

He took his knife from his satchel and cut one of Edgar’s good linen shirts into bandages and cleaned and dressed the suppurating abscesses. He fed the man some soup and sat down wearily on the chair.

“I confess, I am tired,” Nostredame said. The setting sun was casting a golden glow into the room, which made the bearded, red-robed man look beatific.

“You are an angel to me, Doctor. You have delivered me from death.”

“I am gratified, sir. If all goes as expected, you will be restored to health within a fortnight.”

“I must find a way to pay you, Doctor.”

Nostredame smiled. “That would be most appreciated.”

“I have little money here, but I will write my father, tell him what you did, and ask him to deliver a purse.”

“That is most kind.”

Edgar bit his lip. He had rehearsed this moment for the past few days. “Perhaps, Doctor, I can give you another gift in shorter order.”

Nostredame raised an eyebrow. “Ah. And what would that be, Monsieur?”

“In my chest. There is a book and some papers I pray you to see. I believe you will find them of the greatest interest.”

“A book, you say?”

Nostredame retrieved the heavy book from under Edgar’s clothes and returned to the chair. He noted its date of 1527 on the spine and opened a page at random. “This is most curious,” he said. “What can you tell me about it?”

Edgar spilled out the entire tale, the long history of the book within the Cantwell family, his fascination with the tome, his “borrowing” of the book and the abbot’s letter from his father, his demonstration with a fellow student that the book was a true predictor of human events. Then he urged the doctor to read the letter for himself.

He watched the young doctor as he nervously pulled on his long beard with one hand and, with the other, held the pages up, one by one, to the last of the sunlight. He watched the man’s lip begin to tremble and his eyes well up. Then he heard him whisper the name, Gassonet. Edgar knew he was reading this passage from Felix’s letter:

But I cannot forget the one happenstance when as a young monk I witnessed a chosen sister issue not a boy but a girl. I had heard of such a rare occurrence happening in the past but had never seen a girl-child born in my lifetime. I watched this mute green-eyed girl with ginger hair grow, but, unlike her kin, she failed to develop the gift of writing. At the age of twelve years, she was cast out and given to the grain merchant Gassonet the Jew, who took her away from the island and did with her I know not what.

He concentrated his gaze on the doctor’s reddish hair and greenish eyes. Edgar was not a mind reader, but he was certain he knew what was in the man’s thoughts at that moment.

When Nostredame finished, he tucked the pages back into the book and placed it upon the table. Then he sat heavily back down and quietly began to weep. “You have given me something far greater than money, Monsieur, you have given me my raison d’être.”

“You have powers, do you not?” Edgar asked.

The doctor’s hands trembled. “I see things.”

“The bowl. It was not a dream.”

Nostredame reached for his satchel and pulled out a beaten copper bowl. “My grandsire was a seer. And his too, it is said. He used this to see into the future, and he taught me his ways. My powers, Monsieur, are strong and weak at the same time. In the proper state I can see fragments of visions, dark and terrible things, but I have not the ability to see the future with the precision that this Felix describes. I cannot say when a child will be born or a man will die.”

“You are a Gassonet,” Edgar said. “You have the blood of Vectis.”

“I fear it must be so.”

“Please look into my future, I beg you.”

“Now?”

“Yes, please! By your healing hand, I have escaped the plague. Now I want to see what lies ahead.”

Nostredame nodded. He darkened the room by closing the curtains, then filled his bowl from a pitcher of water. He lit a candle, sat before the bowl and pulled up the hood of his robe, pulling it forward until his face was hidden under its tented fabric. He lowered his head over the bowl and began to move his wooden stick over the surface of the water. In a few minutes, Edgar heard the same low vibratory hum emanating from the man’s throat he had heard the night of his feverish state. The humming became more urgent. While he could not see the doctor’s eyes, he imagined they were wild and fluttering. The stick was moving furiously over the bowl. The throaty sounds were building to a crescendo, growing louder and more frequent. Edgar grew anxious at the grunting and panting and regretted sending him down this fearful path. And then, in an instant, it was over.

The room was silent.

Nostredame lowered his hood and looked at his patient with awe. “Edgar Cantwell,” he said slowly. “You will be an important man, a wealthy man, and this will happen sooner than you think. Your father, Edgar, will meet a foul and terrible fate and your brother will be the instrument. That is all that I see.”

“When? When will this happen?”

“I cannot say. This is the full extent of my powers.”

“Thank you for that.”

“No, it is I who should thank you, sir. You have given me a history of my origins, and now I know I must not fight my visions as if they were demons but use them for greater good. I know now I have a destiny to fulfill.”

Edgar gradually recovered his strength and his health, and the plague soon burned itself out in the University district. He sat for his examinations and was passed from the Sorbonne as a baccalaureate. On his last full day in Paris, he spent the morning sitting in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, admiring its grandeur and majesty for the last time. When he returned to his boardinghouse, his friend, Dudley pressed him to go to the college tavern for a last drink but there, lying against his bedroom door was a letter, left by his landlady.

He sat on his bed, broke the seal and read with horror:

Dearest Son,
A mother should never be suffered to write such a letter, but I must inform you that your father and brother are dead. The tragic circumstances have overwhelmed me, and I pray you to return at the earliest to take charge of your father’s estate as the next Baron of Wroxall. Your father and William argued over some matter, and there was a violent struggle whereupon your father fell into the fire in the Great Hall and was burned on his shoulder. The burn healed not and led to a fever from which he died. William was much grieved, and by his own knife he took his own life. I am stricken with woe and misery and beg you to speed yourself back to my bosom,
Elizabeth

Twenty-three years later, in 1555, the old plague doctor sat in his attic study composing a letter. It was after midnight, and the streets of Salon-de-Provence were quiet, allowing him full concentration. This was his special time, when his wife and six children were in bed and he could happily work as long as he liked or until sleep overtook him, sending him tottering over to his study cot.

He had long since Latinized his name to Nostradamus as he imagined it sounded weightier and indeed, he had a reputation to nurture. His
Almanacs
were selling in large numbers throughout France and neighboring countries, and his fortune was growing. He no longer practiced his apothecary skills or medicine, instead turning his full attention to the more profitable life of an astrologer and seer.

Now, he held in his hand a copy of his new work, one which he hoped would bring him more notoriety, more accolades, and more money. The book had been printed in Lyon and would soon go on sale. His publisher had delivered a crateful of copies, and he took one of them and with his sharpest knife, cut away the title page:
LES PROFITIES, DE M. MICHEL NOSTRADAMUS.

He dipped his quill and continued his letter.

My dear Edgar
M. Fenelon, the French ambassador to England, informs me you are well. He tells me he visited with you at Whitehall Palace and that you have a good wife, two daughters, and a fine and prospering estate. I have consulted my charts and my bowl and you will certainly be graced with sons before long.
I could not be happier as you remain my English cousin who holds an esteemed place in my heart. As you well know, your Vectis book and papers have had a profound effect on my life and my endeavors. Knowing my lineage has given me the confidence to accept my visions for what they are, true and bona fide prophecies of great utility for all mankind. I have since desired to serve the public by using my skills to warn and educate princes and the masses alike what will become of them.
My own life has been reborn of late. My first wife and two dear children perished most cruelly from the plague, and with all my skills, I was powerless to save them. I have since remarried and my wife has borne three sons and three daughters who are a joy to me. I have recently published the first of my Prophecies, a great undertaking in which I am endeavoring to set out my predictions for many centuries to come in the form of one hundred quatrains for the interest and instruction of all who read them. I enclose the face page from the book for your amusement and I trust you will purchase a copy when it comes on offer in London. I have kept your family secret as you have asked me, and I likewise ask you to keep mine. You alone know that I am a Gassonet, and you alone know that the strange blood of Vectis flows through my veins.
Michel Nostradamus, 1555

EDGAR CANTWELL LOOKED and felt like a very old man. At age seventy-two everything had turned gray, his hair, his beard, even his shriveling, silvery skin. He was bothered by painful ailments from his abscessed jaw all the way down to his gouty toe, and his disposition was chronically sour. His main pleasures were sleeping and drinking wine, and he spent the lion’s share of his days in both pursuits.

His daughters Grace and Bess were solicitous to him, and their husbands were tolerable fellows, he supposed. His youngest boy Richard was a good, studious lad, already proficient in Greek and Latin at the age of thirteen but he could not look upon his fair head without thinking of the boy’s mother, who died of puerperal fever when he was only two days old.

But it was his oldest son, John, who was the bane of his existence, a source of anger and irritation. The nineteen-year-old had progressed to be no more than a drunk and a braggart who seemed to treat everything Edgar held sacred with an air of contempt.

He dimly recalled that in his day he had been a rebellious lad with a streak of licentiousness, but he had always obeyed his father and acquiesced to his wishes, even toddling off like a dumb lamb to slaughter to attend that horrible Montaigu.

His son did not subscribe to this kind of filial respect and obligation. He was a child of the times, his head turned by the trappings of Elizabethan modernity—dandyish clothes, frivolous music, theater troupes, and a far-too-cavalier approach to the serious business of God and religion. As far as Edgar was concerned, his son had more respect for a jug of wine or a lass’s rump than his father’s desires. If only Richard were the eldest, he would not have so dreaded the state of his legacy.