Read Online The Bloodletter's Daughter by Linda Lafferty - Free Book Online Page A

of blonde the same hue as mine, and here is one the raven black of the gypsy girl, Ruby!”
    “Oh and this!” she said, plucking a hair from her friend’s head.
    “Ow!”
    “This one is the flaming red of the witch Annabella!” Katarina teased, twisting the orange strand in the sunlight. “Your hair must be bewitched!”
    “Do not call her a witch!” Marketa snapped, twisting her head around to admonish Katarina. “The Church burns witches! Annabella is a cunning woman, capable of great cures.”
    “Calm down! I am neither the Church nor the king. I do not wish to harm our village healer,” said Katarina. “Now relax for goodness’ sake. Let me finish your hair.”
    Katarina went back to lifting Marketa’s tresses and braiding it with her soft hands.
    “If it were not so perfectly mixed, I could plait it into individual braids and no two would be the same color!” Katarina said.
    Marketa felt herself drifting off as Katarina pulled her hair gently with her soft hands and tugged it into long braids. The girls would sit in the soft grass by the river and Katarina would adorn Marketa’s hair with wildflowers, which thrived in the rocky soil and laced riotous colors through the fields and meadows of Krumlov.
    Katarina asked endless questions about Marketa’s father’s profession, about the sharpening of the blades, the four humors of the body that were released by surgery, the people he had saved, and the patients he had not. She wanted to know about thefleam, the razor-sharp blade he used to nick the skin, the cupping glasses to pull out blood, and the leeches themselves.
    Katarina had a curious habit of crossing herself anytime she asked a question, as if the science of Zigmund Pichler’s profession were somehow a sin.
    “Tell me again,” she would implore, her hand fluttering about her face and bosom. “About the humors. I have them all muddled up, Marketa. I am not as clever as you.”
    Marketa sighed because she couldn’t believe that a miller’s daughter, with a hundred recipes in her head, couldn’t hold on to four simple humors.
    “The black bile. Now that one stays with me, Marketa. The sadness, melancholy humor.”
    “Just the opposite of you, Katarina. It’s strange that you should remember only that one!”
    “Maybe it is because I have heard it said that King Rudolf is haunted by melancholy. But tell me the others!” she begged. “And how your father brings them into harmony.”
    Marketa smiled because Katarina was paying her father a compliment. A good barber-surgeon could cure the sickest man, woman, or child, if he could manage to balance the four humors.
    “Blood, the sanguine humor, is for laughter, music, and passion. That one you have in your veins, my friend, by the bucketful.”
    Katarina laughed, throwing her head back so that her white teeth gleamed in the sun and the light caught the granules of sugar that clung to her plump throat.
    “The others, Marketa. Please.”
    “Phlegm. The dull and sluggish.”
    “Like the grave digger’s son, who is not saddened at his occupation, but is just like an old mole, bored with life itself. Oh, how I wish he wouldn’t stare at me in the streets with his sad face.”
    “The last is yellow bile. It is the cruelest of them all. It causes outrage, ravenous lechery, even—murder.”
    Katarina widened her eyes. Legends and fairy stories captured her like nothing else. And to her, the cholers were a witch’s tale.
    “Murder,” she whispered.
    “Too much yellow bile causes lunacy. It boils up in the veins and scalds with burning lust or murderous passion. That is what the book says.”
    Katarina looked at Marketa in admiration, nodding her head.
    “You and your books. Ah, what a gift it must be to discover the world in those squiggly lines.”
    Marketa heard her mother call from across the river that she needed help in the bathhouse.
    She rose to her feet and kissed Katarina on the cheek.
    “I have to go now,” Marketa said.