The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

by Ann Swinfen

‘Now, you must drink this, and in a few minutes you will vomit the contents of your stomach. You will not like it, but it is the quickest cure.’

  He sniffed the liquid and his mouth curled in distaste.

  ‘What is it? How do I know you are not another poisoner?

  I shrugged. ‘You will have to trust me.’

  There was eupatorium cannabium in the mixture, root and bark of sambucus nigra (which are violently emetic and purgative), and root of viola tricolor, salvia officinalis to soothe his throat after the acid of his stomach was voided, and the calming matricaria recutita and mentha piperita. There were other, more precious things, but we do not give away the secrets of our healing potions.

  ‘There has been no poisoner here but yourself and that fool of a keeper,’ I said. ‘Oysters, kept for days in this heat! Are you mad? And over-indulgence in rich food and wine! You have no one to blame but yourself, Master Poley, whoever you may be.’

  He gave me a searching look that I did not like, then he did as he was told and drank the mixture.

  The next half hour was not pleasant. After he had vomited three times, I gave him an enema. ‘In the case of food poisoning,’ I could hear my father’s voice saying, ‘it is best to purge the gut from above and below. It will leave the patient weak, but it is the quickest cure. Keep him warm, and nothing but spring water and dry bread for three days.’

  Through all this, Simon was grimly silent, assisting me, but with his mouth pursed up as if he had chewed on bitter aloes. Neither he nor the patient referred again to my youth.

  At last Poley lay back, exhausted and pale. I bathed his face and hands, and gave my instructions about his diet. There was no need to tell him to keep warm, although the raging fire had died back a little. Simon took a step towards the door, but I shook my head.

  ‘We will stay a little longer.’ I turned to the man. ‘How do you feel yourself now?’

  ‘The fierce pain has gone,’ he said.

  I laid my hand on his brow.

  ‘You are cooler, but I think it was not fever. Too much heat in a chamber can be as dangerous as too much cold.’

  ‘You are as gentle as a maid, young physician. What is your name?’

  ‘Christoval Alvarez. I am assistant to my father, Dr Baltasar Alvarez.’

  ‘He has a good reputation.’

  I gave him a little small ale to drink, and left more beside the bed. ‘Nothing to eat until tomorrow, and then only dry bread,’ I reminded him, ‘or I will not speak of the consequences.’ My father might advise spring water, but spring water is not easily come by in London. I remembered the sweet well water of my childhood home, and the springs that rose in the hills. In London, small ale is safer than water, and weak enough even for a sick man.

  I was leaning over him one last time, lifting his eyelid to check that his eyes looked clear and healthy, when he startled me by giving me a jovial punch on the chest. I leapt back, nearly overturning the table.

  ‘You’re a fine physician, boy. I could eat an ox now!’

  I glared at him, bundled my things into my satchel carelessly and grabbed my cloak and doublet. And left the room, in such haste that I forgot to ask for my fee.

  ‘I hope you know the way out of this place,’ I said breathlessly. The blow had been extraordinarily hard for a sick man.

  Simon looked relieved to be out of that chamber with its smell of vomit. ‘Never fear, I know the way. But it will be difficult down below, where there are no torches. Scrivens has taken the lantern with him.’

  He led the way, which was easy enough at first, back along the corridor and down the first flight of stairs, where a glimmer of light from above partly lit the way. Then came the turn in the stair and the plunge into the darkness below. I remembered how worn and uneven the stones were. A false step and we would fall headlong down the whole flight. As if he felt my fear, Simon gripped me by the arm and began to guide me down, his other hand braced against the wall.

  ‘Who was that man?’ I asked in a whisper, though I knew not why I whispered. I could feel him shrug in the dark, we were pressed so close together.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He whispered too, as though fearful of being overheard. It made us oddly intimate in the dark.

  ‘Not a Catholic priest, I think.’

  ‘No.’ He gave a faint snort of laughter. ‘Too fond of the good things in life!’

  That was not what I had meant. I have known Catholic priests in my homeland who lived and dressed and dined like princes, aye, and had their women, too, and their bastards, as brazen as if they answered to no God.

  ‘His eyes,’ I said. ‘The way he looked at us. That was no priest.’

  ‘One more step,’ he said, ‘and we are at the bottom of the stair. Then to the right.’

  We reached the keeper’s lodge at last. Remembering my fee, I asked him for it, for it was he who had sent for my father. He blustered that I should have had the fee from Master Poley, but Simon spoke for me and with reluctance he handed it over.

  Outside the grim fortress I drew a deep breath. The cold London fog, tainted with the smoke of many fires and the sewer scent of the river, seemed pure after the smell of human misery that filled the Marshalsea. I realised that all the while we had been inside the prison, my heart had been struggling like a pigeon trapped in a chimney. Only now did it steady and slow.

  It had grown nearly dark while we were inside, but there was still cock-fighting nearby, for I could hear the shriek of a wounded bird, suddenly cut short as its neck was wrung. As we walked back towards the Bridge we passed the lighted windows of taverns. Inside, firelight gleamed on pewter tankards and flushed faces. And the Winchester geese were open for business, hanging out of their windows in their scanty clothes, calling to us to come in for a good time. I wondered how they could endure the cold, but then, I suppose, they would wonder how I endured my trade.

  ‘You did well,’ I said, ‘helping me. It’s not pleasant, if you are not used to it.’

  We were passing a flaring torch set up outside one of the better taverns, so that I caught his smile as he turned to me.

  ‘I was wrong to doubt you, Kit. You know your business. I’m sorry I spoke as I did.’

  By way of answer, I punched him on the shoulder in friendly fashion and said I must hurry home before the gates of the City were closed for the night. ‘Do you live near here?’

  He jerked his head towards a nearby alley.

  ‘Down there. It is better than it looks.’

  ‘Better than Duck Lane?’

  He laughed and raised his hand in farewell.

  I never expected to see him again.

  Chapter Two

  On the evening of the Sabbath, a week or two after my visit to the Marshalsea, we overtook the Lopez family as they turned out of Wood Street, heading, as we were, for the Nuñez home. I fell into step with Sara, who was leading her small son Anthony by the hand.

  ‘A blessed Sabbath to you, Kit,’ she said.

  ‘Shalom.’

  It was our custom to gather on the Sabbath at the house of Dr Hector Nuñez on Mark Lane, not far from the Tower. Many of our people lived in this part of London, in Aldgate and Tower Wards, and the Nuñezes’ large house had been established as a place for meetings and services long before my father and I came to England. No doubt we would have settled here too, if my father had not been given the house in Duck Lane as part of his salary from the hospital. It was a good bargain for the governors of the hospital. Duck Lane was known locally, with savage irony, as ‘Paradise’.

  ‘I wish that we lived in Wood Street,’ I said enviously.

  Sara gave me a sympathetic look.

  ‘Ah, yes. I remember those houses in Duck Lane. We lived in one for a few weeks after we were married.’

  I grimaced. Ours was an ancient building, one of a row of small houses which leaned drunkenly together in an alley behind the hospital. The wind whistled through holes in the walls where the daub had been pecked out by birds, or else had
shrunk and fallen away. Depending on the direction of the wind, the single chimney (added after the house was first built) either smoked, dousing the fire in its own soot and ash, or else sucked the flames so high that our fuel burned away twice as fast as it should. There was bulbous, cracked glass in the downstairs windows, and nothing but ill-fitting shutters upstairs.

  ‘But then you moved to Wood Street,’ I said.

  ‘No, for several years we were in Little Britain, round the corner from your house. It was one of the hospital houses, too, but larger, with a private garden at the back.’

  ‘I know them. Much better than our hovel.’

  The Lopez family now leased a house cheek by jowl with some of London’s richest merchants. Dr Roderigo Lopez no longer worked at the hospital, for he had a private clientele amongst the great courtiers and was physician to the Queen’s Majesty herself. I could hardly believe that a man who moved in such circles would consent to know people like us, but he maintained his ties with the community and was always courteous to my father, if somewhat condescending.

  ‘He’s perhaps five years older than I am,’ my father had told me some time ago, when I asked about this. ‘We knew each other as young men in Portugal. Though of course Ruy came to England long ago, and was taken under the wing of Hector Nuñez and Dunstan Añez.’

  I nodded. They were the two leaders of our people in London. Dunstan Añez was Purveyor of Groceries and Spices to Her Majesty the Queen and a man of substantial fortune. Ruy Lopez’s wife, Sara, was Dunstan’s daughter and more than twenty years younger than he.

  Now I walked beside her in silence for a while, our footsteps muffled by snow. Attending service at our makeshift synagogue always made me uneasy, not only because of the risks we ran if the authorities caught us. For the lie that was my life seemed to loom more monstrous there. It was like a growth in my throat, like those cancerous growths against which we physicians have no weapons, but must behold helplessly, aware of our weakness. We know we are unable to offer the patient anything but the dulling effects brought by syrups of poppy or meadowsweet, effective for a brief time during surgery, but little relief in the long enduring pain as a body consumes itself. My secret, my lie, which had seemed an innocent enough stratagem for concealment and escape when it began, had recently started, like a cancer, to eat away at me from within.

  Does God exist? I had first begun to doubt Him in those last months in Portugal. On the ship off Finisterre my doubts hardened in me, the first seed of that growth in my throat. For if God did indeed exist, why did He not strike me down, liar that I was, when I joined the men and boys in our makeshift synagogue?

  ‘You are very quiet today, Kit,’ Sara said.

  I shook my head to drive away these terrifying thoughts. Sara had always been good to me, welcoming me as a lost and motherless child when we arrived in London, taking us into her home until Dr Nuñez found a position for my father, feeding me on nourishing food, for she said that I looked like a fledging fallen from a nest. It was she who began at once to teach me English. Born in Crutched Friars in London, she spoke English more naturally than Portuguese. I had a quick ear and was eager to learn, for I never wanted to return to Portugal.

  ‘Sara,’ I said, for we were passing the north end of London Bridge and I was suddenly reminded of the last time I had crossed it, ‘have you ever heard of a man called Poley?’

  She began to shake her head, then paused. ‘Poley? I’m not sure. I think, perhaps, Ruy might have mentioned that name once.’

  But the men, talking earnestly about some shipment of pepper which had been delayed, were drawing ahead of us and she could not catch her husband’s attention.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I was called to attend one Poley at the Marshalsea a little while ago. He had eaten bad oysters and thought someone had poisoned him.’ I hesitated, not sure how to put into words my reservations about the man. ‘He was no Catholic priest, and it is priests – is it not? – who are mostly held there, before they are exiled or executed.’

  ‘And other traitors.’ Sara shivered, and I think it was not simply the bitter cold of the day, for all of us lived on the edge of fear, the whispered betrayal, the knock on the door in the night. She glanced down at Anthony, but he was watching his sisters arguing behind us, glancing over his shoulder and tugging at his mother’s hand.

  ‘Well,’ I said, remembering those eyes and the man’s sudden unexpected lunge towards me, ‘traitor he might be. I saw him not at his best, but I can imagine he might be one of those who smiles at your face while slipping a knife between your ribs from behind.’

  We had no opportunity to speak further then, for Sara’s brother William joined us and we all made our way together to the Nuñez house. At the door I took Anthony’s hand and led him to the men’s portion. The house was built round an old hall, two or three hundred years old, I suppose, though later wings had been added and it was now a fine City house, fitting for a doctor and merchant of Hector Nuñez’s standing, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and partner in the Spice Trust. This hall suited our purposes well, for the main part served for the men, while the women occupied the minstrels’ gallery. Dr Nuñez’s wife, Beatriz Fernandez, baked the unleavened bread for Passover with her own hands, and would rather go hungry than eat food which had not been prepared according to the strictest dietary rules. Most of us lived too close to the Christians to observe the traditional customs. We could not be as careful as she. Our community had no rabbi, and the services bore little resemblance to those I remembered in Portugal, though there, too, services had been conducted in secret.

  ‘We must make shift to do the best we can,’ my father explained to me.

  In Portugal we had passed for New Christians, Catholics, loyal to the Pope of Rome. Here in London we were Protestant refugees, like the Huguenots who had flooded into England since the bloody massacres in France. A hunted creature will take on any colouring it can to escape death.

  Yet is it any wonder that I questioned the existence of God as I stood among these men, murmuring and swaying to prayers which seemed to me empty of meaning? They call us Marranos, we who change our faith as we change our country, or seem to do so. It is an old Spanish word which means ‘pig’, an insult whose significance is not lost on us. We think of ourselves as Anusim, the ‘Forced Ones’, driven under duress to take whatever is the dominant religion in the country where we live. It is only thus that we can survive.

  That Sabbath day I felt more than usually uneasy all through the service. Perhaps it was the brief conversation with Sara about the man at the Marshalsea, the man Poley. For some reason I could not shake off the thought of him.

  As we came outside into the bitter air, I was eager to be away. We do not linger long after service, talking to our friends and neighbours as you will see the Christians do after a church service, for it is better for us not to be seen gathered together in large numbers. Indeed, when we attended church at St Bartholomew’s, my father and I, as we must in order to obey the law, we behaved like the good Protestants we pretended to be, exchanging news and gossip with our neighbours – the butchers of Smithfield and the bakers of Pie Lane and the women who look after the daily needs of the patients at the hospital.

  Now we turned to walk away from Mark Lane a little behind the Lopez family, who were making their way somewhat slowly through a group of men emerging from an inn, well-dressed men, gentlemen indeed. Young and full of high spirits, and genial with wine, calling out that they had just won a bet on a horse race. I saw Dr Lopez glance at them sharply before looking away, so that I followed his glance.

  There in the midst of the group, with his arm round the shoulders of a handsome youth with bright eyes and a gallant air, was the man Poley. At first I thought I had conjured him up out of my own imaginings. How could that sick prisoner from the Marshalsea, though certainly rich, be here in easy company with such gentlemen as these?

  ‘Ah, Robyn, sweet Robyn!’ the handsome young man
cried. ‘You shall dice with me for the colt, now that he has won his race. Come back to my lodgings, and we shall see which of us is the man that fair and fickle Dame Fortune shines upon.’

  He stumbled somewhat over this speech, for he was more than a little drunk.

  ‘Why, Anthony,’ said Poley affably, ‘you know that you are always the winner.’ Then, as if my own eyes compelled him, he looked across the narrow street and met them with a bold stare. He smiled. Not at me, but to himself, secretly. And I averted my face and hurried after my father.

  ‘Ah, good morning to you, Kit. Have you worked those problems I set you?’

  My mathematics tutor, Thomas Harriot, peered at me cheerfully through an untidy mop of hair. He constantly ran his hands through it, in despair at his own or his students’ inability to follow the crystal clear steps of logic to a perfect solution. And when success was achieved, he would push his hair up from behind, so that it stood on end like the crest of some exotic bird brought to England by one of the Queen’s sea captains.

  ‘I have,’ I said, hooking out a stool with my foot and sitting down opposite him. ‘I think I have established the correct proofs. The third one took me some time.’

  He grinned mischievously.

  ‘That was meant to test you. And you solved it? Excellent, excellent!’

  He took the sheets of paper from me and ran his eye over my careful workings. When his hand pushed up that crest of hair, I knew my solutions met with approval. Four years ago, when we had first arrived in London, my father used some of his small salary to provide tutors for me in music, mathematics and philosophy, while training me in natural philosophy and medicine himself. Now that I was working with him at St Bartholomew’s, the only studies I kept up were in mathematics. Two years ago I had been taken on by Harriot, a considerable honour, for he was recognised as the most gifted mathematician in England, though he had enemies. I suppose there will always be people who find mathematics a mystery akin to magic, and are suspicious of those who practice it.