The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (96 page)

CHAPTER 1
RANSOM

A
fter a long and successful career in the service of the great and powerful, Judah del Medigo was not surprised when out of the blue a courier arrived in Rome ordering him to report immediately to his new master, Suleiman the Magnificent, at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

Sudden arbitrary orders were the price the doctor knew he would have to pay when he signed on as the Sultan’s new Chief Body Physician. Just as he knew that doctors do not say no to sultans. So the doctor reluctantly kissed his wife and son goodbye and boarded the first ship bound for the eastern Mediterranean, leaving his family behind in Rome to pack up and follow him.

When news reached him at the Ottoman court that the city of Rome had been sacked and burned soon after he left, del Medigo was not unduly alarmed. He felt sure — with good cause — that his wife and son would escape the sack unscathed. He had left them in the fortified Colonna Palace in Rome under the protection of his wife’s patroness, Isabella D’Este, the Marchesana of Mantova, and he knew Isabella to be a woman of infinite resources and a practiced survivor.

Not until the doctor had heard nothing of his family for some weeks did he begin to worry. Even then, he mentioned his concern only casually to the Venetian
baillo
when they met at the Ottoman court. He knew that the Venetians made it their business to pick up odds and ends of information and, sure enough, that very evening the
baillo
presented himself at The Doctor’s House with a rolled-up dispatch from one of his informants.

Wordless, the Venetian pressed his spy’s report into the doctor’s hands, gently patted him on the shoulder, turned on his heel and left without a word. When the doctor unrolled the document and read it, he understood why.

Madonna Isabella D’Este reached home safely,
he read
. Sadly, members of her household were captured by Mediterranean pirates off the Isola D’Elba
.
Their ship, the Hesperion, put up a brave defense but its crew and passengers were lost at sea.
Then, being Venetians, they added,
Most of the lady Isabella’s valuable treasures were also lost.

The blow hit the doctor with the force of a pole axe. He had never doubted that the indomitable Marchesana Isabella would protect his dear ones. Isabella was an Este by birth and, say what you will about the Estes, they take care of their own. Now suddenly the Marchesana was apparently safe in her palace in Mantova but her confidential secretary, the doctor’s wife, and their son Danilo, had been lost at sea.

Judah del Medigo was an observant though not a believing Jew. The day he received the news, he locked his doors, covered his mirrors and settled down on a low stool in the basement of The Doctor’s House in the Third Court of Topkapi Palace to weep and grieve. Being a realist, he did not pray to have his loved ones brought back to him. There was no reason to hope they might still be alive. The Venetian report had left no doubt as to their fate. Yet before dawn on his sixth day of mourning, the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician found himself scrambling across the dark silent streets of Istanbul in response to a ransom note that had been slipped under his door on the previous night.

The woman is dead,
the note read
. The boy is safe. You have until dawn to appear at Pirates’ Cove with 2,000 gold ducats. If the ransom is not paid at sunup the boy will be delivered to the Istanbul slave market and sold to the highest bidder.

The ransom note read like a fraudulent ruse to extract money from a grieving parent. And the doctor knew better than to trust any bargain made with the Corsican pirates who prowl the waters of the Mediterranean. But what if just this once, the Corsicans proved to be as good as their word? What if his son was still alive? He could not afford to risk that chance. So the next morning, well before sunup, the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician plodded through the sleeping city of Istanbul clutching a pouch full of gold coins.

When the doctor clambered down the bank of Pirates’ Cove he saw no sign of life in the woods that ringed the shore or on the beach. Only one small portion of the landscape moved in the stillness: a deserted fishing boat bobbed up and down against the small dock anchored in the curve of the cove. If anything, the tattered sail that fluttered from the flagpole of the abandoned skiff underscored the flat emptiness of the scene.

By now a rim of sunlight had appeared on the horizon. The witching hour had come and gone but there was no one there to collect the ransom.

As the doctor stood gazing into the void, reluctant to give up his last remaining glimmer of hope, he heard what seemed to be the sound of a twig breaking behind him in the silent woods.

When he turned his head toward the sound he was taken from behind by a pair of unseen arms and felt hot breath on the back of his neck.

“Did you bring the gold?” The question was voiced in a growling, deeply-accented Corsican dialect.

The doctor nodded his assent.

“Hand it over.”

He reached into his pocket for the pouch only to find it yanked from his fingers by a hairy hand that made immediate use of it to rap him smartly on the back of his head. He felt a sharp pain. Then blackness.

When he opened his eyes his attacker had made off with the gold, and the woods behind him were as unruffled as they were when he first arrived at the rendezvous. He has been duped. How could he have been such a fool as to put his faith in a passel of Corsican pirates?

But wait. Out of the corner of his eye he became aware of something moving on the deck of the abandoned skiff. Transfixed, he watched as a trap door was slowly thrust into view from below the deck of the craft and two pairs of bronzed, muscled arms emerged bearing what seemed to be a body wrapped in a tarpaulin.

Mesmerized by what he took to be a mirage brought on by the blow to his head, the doctor stumbled to his feet expecting that at any moment the illusion he was seeing would disappear into the wind. Instead, the sailors carrying the wrapped figure moved forward to the prow of the ship where they propped it up against the mast and began to unwind the straps that enclosed it.

They did say he was alive
, the doctor reminded himself. But could he take them at their word?

Then one of the sailors pulled out a knife.
Oh my God they are going to
kill him in front of me.

But no. The sailor used his knife to slit the black hood at the neck, releasing a single golden curl onto the forehead. Then another. Then a nose. Then a chin appeared. Above it, a mouth. Then a pair of clear blue eyes. At last a whole living boy was revealed, arms stretching out towards the shore.

Then the sailors led their captive down a small gangway from the deck of the skiff to the pier. And, with a gentle push, Danilo del Medigo was released into his father’s waiting arms.

It was at that moment that Judah del Medigo became a believer in miracles. And, if a battle-scarred, somewhat arthritic old campaigner can be said to have floated through the streets, the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician floated home from Pirates’ Cove that day to The Doctor’s House in Topkapi Palace cradling his son in his arms. There he settled his son on a pallet beside his own bed and wrapped him in a lavender-scented quilt. But not before he had washed and barbered and massaged the boy into a state of cleanliness and ease.

At the same time, the physician in him managed to conduct what he hoped was an unobtrusive examination of his son’s physical condition. And Judah del Medigo fell asleep that night with the miracle boy nested beside him confident that, considering the shocks he had suffered, the boy was amazingly fit. No broken bones or bruises, no signs of being starved or beaten.

Not until the next day did Judah became aware that, although his son was healthy enough, he seemed to exist in a state of passivity, hardly moving, not speaking unless spoken to. Perfectly obedient and accommodating, never rebellious or defiant, this pale wraith bore little resemblance to the vigorous, lively little boy his father left in Rome just a few months before. When the doctor tried to distract him with tempting morsels of food or chat, the boy accepted the offerings with a nod but showed no sign that he enjoyed his father’s pleasantries any more than the eggs and meat and pilaf that Judah poured into him hoping to renew the energy that had always been so much a part of his nature.

Certainly the doctor was beyond joy to be reunited with his lost son. He thanked God every morning in his prayers for the boy’s miraculous delivery. But as the Sultan’s Chief Body Physician, he was bound to accompany his master each spring to that year’s battlefield. Could he in good conscience leave his troubled son behind in the care of strangers? Or must he now resign his position in order to devote himself to the boy’s rehabilitation?

While he was struggling to come to a decision, a note from the Sultan arrived that might alter the picture. Suleiman was proposing that during the upcoming campaign, the doctor’s son join the royal children in the so-called Princes School attached to the Sultan’s harem where he would be as well taken care of as a prince. The offer was tempting. But after two sleepless nights and many prayers, Judah decided that he must regretfully tender his resignation as Chief Body Physician pleading pressing family obligations.

In the interim he would bend his efforts to find a replacement body physician to serve Suleiman on the battlefield. Knowing that his decision was the right one put his mind at ease. Now all that remained was to inform the Sultan.

But Suleiman the Magnificent was not a man to be denied his will by a mere doctor. Like the popes at Rome, and certain Christian princes whose instinct for self-preservation exceeded their religious scruples, the Ottoman sultans favored Jewish doctors. Unhampered by medieval Christian screeds against “pagan science,” Jewish physicians had continued to practice the teachings of Asclepius and Hippocrates. Armed with this knowledge, they had emerged from the Middle Ages as an elite cadre of medical practitioners, Judah del Medigo foremost among them.

The Sultan had pursued the renowned Jewish physician through the courts of Europe for several years before finally bagging him. And he was not about to allow the unexpected appearance of a motherless boy to rob him of his campaign physician. Certainly not at this moment when the gout that it was said only Jewish doctors had a cure for, was beginning to make it uncomfortable for him to mount a horse.

To initiate what he confidently expected to become a fruitful dialogue, Suleiman called in his physician for a friendly chat, reminding him that the campaign season would not commence for many months, that there was no urgency to make such an important decision, and urging the doctor to take some time to reconsider resigning.

“You have my assurance that in the harem school your son will do his learning as a part of my own family under the watchful eye of my mother, the Sultana Valide,” he coaxed. “Surely that would be a much safer arrangement than dragging the boy off to the battlefield or leaving him behind with strangers.” Then to add a little sweetener to the sherbet, he offered to assign the boy an armed guard to escort him from The Doctor’s House in Topkapi to the Princes School in the harem each day that Judah was absent on campaign. The prospect was tempting.

Judah wavered. His head told him that the Sultan’s offer was a solution to his problems. But his fatherly heart told him that the boy was not yet ready to deal with a new abandonment by the only parent now left to guide him through the labyrinth of dark memories that haunted him. What the Sultan was offering the doctor was time to ferret out what had happened during the boy’s captivity on the pirate ship, and to find the key to his son’s despair. A boy’s natural grief for the loss of a much-loved mother could account for weeping, fainting, even vertigo . . . but not for virtual paralysis. What cruelty had the damned Corsicans inflicted on Danilo to cause such damage?

That question might never have found an answer had not some lost soul stumbled in the dark into the Sultan’s personal domain, a swampy moraine outside the wall of the Third Court. If an interloper ever managed to get anywhere near the Sultan’s
selamik
, a warning fired from a Janissary’s musket would have scared him off, pronto. Which is what happened that night. But as the shot reverberated across the palace wall into the Third Court, it also shattered the silence in The Doctor’s House where Judah del Medigo and his son lay sleeping.

At the sound of the shot, the boy sprang up from his pallet as if he had been hit, clutching his heart in terror. “Stop, don’t shoot!” he pleaded. “Noooooooo . . .”

Then came a blood-curdling shriek of anguish. “Not mama. Not her, I beg you. Take me . . . take me.”

The musket-shot had released a flood of dammed-up memories that gradually dissolved into a series of racking sobs. And finally, between the sobs, came a confession.

“It was all my fault. She begged me to climb down. I wouldn’t listen to her. If I had come down, the pirate wouldn’t have aimed the gun at me and she wouldn’t have thrown herself in front of me to take the bullet. She would be here now. Alive.” A long pause. “I killed her.”