The Bloodletter's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

that a Hapsburg emperor paid a visit to a lunatic asylum.
    Two assistants pulled the wooden latch-beam aside and opened the iron-girded door. The hinges groaned as the great doors swung wide, giving way to the cobbled street where the king’s entourage surrounded the royal coach, helping the monarch descend and lighting his way with flaming torches held high.
    Dressed in an ermine-trimmed cape, the Holy Roman emperor, King Rudolf II, strode into the asylum, accompanied by a half dozen advisors and servants. He stopped after just three paces, arrested by the smell of human feces and rancid urine.
    The director bowed.
    “Your Excellency, I am honored beyond words at your visit.”
    The king looked at the man as if he were examining a dead insect.
    “This is where you treat the mentally diseased?” he asked. “It smells worse than a Spanish slaughterhouse!”
    The king snatched a lace handkerchief proffered by a servant. He covered his nose and mouth and breathed in exasperated gasps, his long Hapsburg lip quivering below the white cloth.
    “The diseased mind produces an unclean body, Your Majesty. It is one of the many vices we must purge.”
    “The place smells of shit!” protested the king, his lips curling in disgust.
    At this, several men hooted from the darkness at the end of the long hall.
    “And a Hapsburg farts roses, I hear!”
    The king sucked air between his teeth, and the flesh at his temples tightened.
    “Let me see these men who dare to insult the Hapsburg name!” he roared.
    “You understand, Your Majesty, they only insult you because they are bedeviled by disease,” pleaded the director.
    “Show me the offenders!” the king shouted.
    Reluctantly the director led the way down the dark hall, reaching for a torch from the entry.
    As he strode ahead, the light illuminated the dirty, bloodied faces and brown, decayed teeth of the patients, who for the most part retreated hastily from the flame like night beetles, scurrying into the recesses of their filthy cells. One man ignored the commotion and stared straight ahead, pressing his louse-scabbed forehead hard against the rusted bars and leering at the naked women in the cell across the way. The light of the torch reflected off the oily skin of their bald heads.
    “These women have no clothes!” said one of the king’s entourage, squinting hard to focus on them.
    “Has the disease made their hair fall out?” asked the king’s advisor. “They are as bald as baby mice!”
    “We can clean them more readily this way,” said the director. “It is easier to undress them once than to fight them every day. The lice bury their nits in the fabric of their skirts, and the fleas infest their underclothes. We shave their heads to keep them free of the vermin, for unlike the men the insects drive them to distraction.”
    The king wrinkled his face in disgust. At the far reaches of light, he saw movement on the ground. It appeared as if a cluster of animated melons were watching him approach.
    “What in Jesus’s name is that?”
    “These are the men who called insults, Your Majesty.”
    In the flickering light, the king made out three heads with no bodies, twisting on the ground. He started at the sight, unable to make sense of the dark vision before him. He grabbed the torch from the director and strode toward them.
    In unison, the heads swiveled in the dirty sand and straw. Now he realized that they were men, buried up to their necks.
    “Hail to the king!” said a head, now beseeching, not mocking.
    “This way, my lord!” cried one. “Free me from this hell!”
    “Just liberate me and I will not cut flesh—not by my mother’s eyes, will I! Fetch the spade and loosen me from the earth, so that I may walk again!”
    “I have an itch that bedevils me between my legs. Unbury me so that I might scratch the vermin who bite me!”
    The director jumped in front of the king and seized the torch.
    “Please, I beg of you, Your Majesty. Do not approach