Book of Souls

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.”