Bruised Chamomile Leaves

Why had the town beadle sent an empty cart to the bathhouse cooling vaults thirty minutes before anyone sounded the alarm for a drowned man?

Zlatka pressed her knuckles into the knot of gristle beside Alderman Bures’s shoulder blade. The stone slab beneath the fat man was warm, oiled with cedar tallow, and his groan rattled the brass steam vent beside his ear.

"Breathe into the steam, Alderman," Zlatka said, leaning her forearm across his upper spine. Her sleeves were rolled above her elbows, her linen apron damp with lavender vapor. "You told me Magistrate Volkov signed the transit permit at dawn. The night watch hadn't even called five bells."

Bures gave a muffled yelp as her thumbs found the tight tendon near his collar. "The magistrate is thorough, girl! He knows these old timbers are a fire trap and a plague pit. When a tragedy happens—ah! Sweet saints, go easy on the left side—a prudent civic officer prepares the carts."

"My father was not a tragedy waiting on a cart," Zlatka said. Her voice remained level, though the muscle under her palms bunched like knotted hemp. "He came to the baths before three bells with three bundles of dried valerian to steep the head vats. At sixth bell, they pull him out of the plunge basin and declare the spring cursed."

"An accident," Bures wheezed into the leather headrest. "The heat thickens the blood, the cold plunge stops the heart. Simple anatomy, girl. Any barber-surgeon in Bohemia will sign the parchment."

Zlatka wiped her hands on a coarse hemp towel. "Barber-surgeons look at dead men through wine cups. I look at them with my fingers."

She took her brass tin of juniper salve from the ledge, unpinned her apron, and stepped into the vaulted corridor.

Outside the cooling rooms, the air turned sharp and subterranean. Meltwater from the basalt clefts trickled along the gutters, smelling of sulfur and wet slate. Two municipal guardsmen stood before the arched doorway of the funerary vault, their halberds leaned against the whitewashed wall while they shared a loaf of rye.

The younger bailiff, a boy named Tomas whose mother took the sulfur cure for her wrists, straightened his belt when Zlatka approached.

"The room is sealed by the municipal magistrate, Mistress Zlatka," Tomas said, keeping his chin tucked. "Orders are to keep everyone clear until the cart team arrives from the lower gate."

Zlatka stepped within a handspan of his chest. "Under the Guild Charter of 1342, no citizen of the thermal spring may be removed for interment before the family has washed the brow with juniper water and closed the joints. You want to tell Father Stanislav at the parish gate that you sent an unwashed master botanist to the lime pit?"

Tomas looked at his companion, who found a sudden interest in the crust of his bread. Tomas stepped aside and lifted the heavy iron bar from the latch. "Ten minutes. The cart horses are already turning the corner of Mill Lane."

The cooling vault was cold and dim, illuminated only by a square transom near the ceiling. In the center of the flagstone floor, on a slab of damp sandstone, lay Dragomir.

A plain linen shroud covered him to the chin. Zlatka pulled the cloth back to his waist.

Her father’s face was composed, the silver-gray beard combed straight by habit rather than mortuary care. There was no water-foam at his nostrils, no pink froth around his lips—the unmistakable marker of a man whose lungs had fought against intake water.

She set her lantern on the corner of the slab and went to work.

Her fingers moved over the cold flesh of his neck, testing the jugular groove. The skin was firm, but when she pressed her thumb hard against the side of his throat, the pale mark remained dead white. The blood had settled.

She hooked her arms beneath his shoulders and rolled him onto his side.

Across his shoulder blades, the small of his back, and the backs of his calves, the skin showed deep, mottled patches of dark plum lividity.

Zlatka leaned close to the sandstone slab, bringing the lantern down until the tallow flame illuminated the lower curve of his ribcage.

If Dragomir had died floating in the turbulent surge of the cold plunge pool, the settling of his blood would have distributed evenly across the lowest gravitational points of a tumbling body, or clustered along his front where he drifted face down. Instead, the purple discoloration was sharp, flat, and squared across the dorsal plane.

He had died lying flat on his back upon dry, hard boards. And he had remained lying on his back for at least three full hours before anyone lifted his body and dropped it into the bathhouse water.

She pressed her thumb against his sternum. Her nail caught on a crust of dried plant matter clinging to his wool undertunic. She rubbed the dry flakes between two fingers and brought them to her nose.

Chamomile. Not the dried, yellow florets from the apothecary jars, but fresh leaves crushed raw between grinding stones, mixed with the sharp, bitter tang of concentrated valerian oil.

"He didn't drown, Father," she whispered into the chill vault. "You went to sleep on someone's bench."

The vault door creaked open behind her.

Marika stood in the entrance, her broad frame filling the doorway. The head washerwoman carried a split-willow laundry basket piled with sodden linens, her apron wet from the steaming wash-basins above. She pulled the door shut behind her, dropping the wooden latch with a muffled thud.

"Tomas said you had five minutes left before the wagon backs in," Marika said, her low voice echoing off the stone vaults. "Jaromir is out of the flumes. He found walnut wedges jammed in the master intake."

Zlatka did not look up from her father's hands. "The water didn't kill him, Marika. Look at his back. The blood set before sunrise. He was dead before the first bather stepped through the outer gate."

Marika stepped to the slab, resting her calloused hands on the rim of her basket. She looked at Dragomir’s still face, then reached into her pile of wet towels and withdrew a folded gray tunic.

"I pulled this from his locker in the cedar annex," Marika said, laying the coarse wool across the dead man’s knees. "The bailiffs searched his coat for notes, but they threw his working tunic into the laundry chute without looking."

Marika unfolded the right sleeve. Near the cuff, pressed deep into the weave of the fiber, was a thick, gummy smear the color of dark amber.

Zlatka touched the smear. It was tacky, stubbornly adherent, and gave off the sharp, pungent scent of green alpine timber.

"Pine resin," Zlatka said, her brow furrowing. "Fresh-cut mountain pine."

"We haven't burned pine in the boilers for ten years," Marika said quietly. "Nothing burns in the lower furnaces except dried beech and aged oak. Pine spits sparks and cracks the flues."

"And there isn't a standing pine within three miles of the gorge," Zlatka added. She brought her fingers to her nose again, noting the green sap's unseasoned bite. "Whoever carried him to the plunge had fresh resin on their sleeves."

From the alleyway outside the transom, the rattle of iron-rimmed wagon wheels echoed against the damp cobbles, followed by the harsh whistle of the municipal carter.