Leiden, 1574: the Spanish are outside the walls, the city is starving, and the burgomaster's wife holds the household — and half the town's nerve — together while her husband refuses to surrender. Ebers was a German Egyptologist who found the medical papyrus that still bears his name, one of the oldest medical texts in existence; he wrote historical novels to pay for the digging, and the scholarship shows. Fifty-four plates of siege-time streets, bridges and city walls, from Jan Brueghel the Elder to Edvard Munch, let the paintings carry the same besieged town the novel does.
