by Ann Swinfen
‘Well done, Kit. I was not sure whether I was asking too much of you. Look, I have just acquired this new work on optics. You read Italian, do you not? Optics is throwing up some interesting mathematical problems. You may borrow it, if you like.’
‘Oh, yes!’ I was like a fledging bird, its mouth gaping. New knowledge, scholarship, was food for my hungry mind. I would never be able to attend university, so I gobbled up whatever scraps fell my way. I ran my fingers lovingly over the book, a squat little volume bound in dark green leather.
For the next hour, Harriot and I discussed the theories in the book and also worked on some problems in three-dimensional geometry. I had become interested recently in how artists can best represent three-dimensional objects on the flat plane of their canvases, and whether there might be useful mathematical solutions to the problem. My sessions with Harriot were a constant joy to me, refreshing as cool water in the desert. Here I had no need to think about the deceits of my life or the conflict of my beliefs. Here nothing mattered but the pure mind, separate from the distractions of body and soul. I went home whistling, with the precious book on optics tucked into my satchel. I had intended to discuss with my teacher the mathematics of musical harmony, but the thought of a precious new book to read had put it quite out of my mind.
For the next few days I forgot the man Poley, glimpsed so unexpectedly in the street, forgot even the fascination of optics, for there was an outbreak of the bloody flux in the western outskirts of London. I laboured with my father from dawn until late into the night, administering medicines to strengthen the gut. The sickness spread to our patients in the hospital, and to those who came in from the countryside to wait patiently in the old abbey cloisters until we could attend to them. The flagstones in the cloister were puddled with vomit and liquid, bloodstained faeces amongst the churned snow. Twice a day, one of the hospital servants threw a bucket of water over them, but the stench remained.
‘We must make up more of the tincture to heal interior bleeding, Kit.’ My father was heavy-eyed after three long days of labour in the wards. ‘If you will pound the herbs I will make up the mixture.’
I nodded. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in the base of a copper pan which hung beside the hearth. Even in its distorted image I could see that my own face was drawn with weariness. Before we had returned late from the hospital, Joan had gone to her bed, leaving a pot of soup on a trivet near the fire and on the table, covered with a cloth to keep off the flies, a slab of pie fetched from the pie man round the corner.
‘I think we should eat first, Father.’
I pulled out his carved chair and beckoned.
‘Oh, very well.’ He gave a laugh which was part sigh. ‘We are both so tired we may make a mistake. Is the soup hot?’
‘It soon will be.’
I hung the pot on its hook and swung it over the fire, then threw on another log. The fire spat out a shower of sparks, but began to burn up brightly and I held out my hands to it. Walking home through the snow I had become more chilled than I realised. My boots were sodden and I prised them off with stiff fingers. Soon we were both spooning up the soup eagerly. Joan was not a particularly skilled cook, but the soup was substantial and warming, flavoured with a mutton bone and thick with carrots and onions. Between us we finished the entire pot.
‘I hope this pie is safe,’ my father said, judiciously cutting it into two equal pieces.
‘Safe? Joan will have bought it from Goodman Quiller. His meat is clean, if sometimes a little tough.’
‘I am thinking of the sickness. If the bloody flux has spread to the butchers, the meat may be contaminated.’
I cast a wary glance at my piece of pie. Butcher Quiller’s wife had a light hand with pastry – her pastry put Joan’s to shame – and the meat looked fine grained and free of gristle. A quivering golden jacket of clear jelly encased the meat inside the pastry. My stomach groaned with hunger. Even the soup had barely taken the edge off it. I poked the pie tentatively with the tip of my knife.
‘Do you think it is safe?’
‘Don’t worry.’ He smiled at me. ‘There’s been no sign of illness yet amongst the butchers. I am going to eat mine.’
With that he set to, and I ate my own share greedily. Afterwards we worked at renewing our supplies of medicines until well past the calling of midnight by the Watch in the street.
The next day we rose at dawn after little sleep, but when we reached the hospital soon afterwards there were already fresh crowds gathered in the old cloisters, begging for treatment. Grimly, we got to work. For the most part, my father passed the babies and children to me, and there were many of them that morning. A young woman, poorly dressed, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, held out a tiny bundle to me.
‘My baby, doctor, he’s been vomiting for two days and passing bloody stools. He won’t feed.’ She gave a shuddering gasp. ‘He isn’t dead, is he?’
The woman wasn’t much older than I, perhaps eighteen, and the baby, when I unwrapped the dirty cloth in which his naked form was wrapped, was tiny and emaciated. For a moment I feared that he was dead, but then he stirred and made a faint mewing cry like a distressed kitten. He was as filthy as the cloth, smeared with blood and faeces. In my work with my father I have had to grow accustomed to many unpleasant sights, but even so my stomach heaved at the sight.
I told the woman to sit down on a stool and sent one of the hospital servants to fetch a basin of warm water and rags, and one of the small pieces of blanket we keep for babies. As I washed the child, I saw even more clearly how thin he was, his ribs standing out stark under the skin like a row of twigs, his rapid heart beat visible to the naked eye. Even as I washed him, he vented a thin stream of diarrhoea, but his stomach was so hollow I could not believe there was much left inside.
The mixture we had made up the night before was too strong for a baby, so I diluted it with goat’s milk, something my father had introduced into the hospital, having found in Portugal that it answered well in the treatment of delicate stomachs. The hospital authorities had viewed it with suspicion at first, but by now it was accepted practice. This infant was too young to drink from a cup or even to take the medicine from a spoon, but we have pottery vessels with a spout, onto which we fit a finger cut from a thin leather glove, with a hole pierced in the end. Sick babies can usually be persuaded to take medicine in this way. As the child had been refusing to eat, I made the mixture more palatable by stirring in a little honey.
At first I feared all my efforts would come to nothing, for the baby twisted his head away and whimpered, refusing to suck from the leather-tipped spout, but at last I managed to squeeze a little on to his tongue. The taste of the honey must have pleased him, for he took the rest readily enough.
‘You must stay here for the rest of the day,’ I told the mother. ‘The child will need another dose this afternoon and again this evening. Keep him wrapped in this clean blanket and if you need a fresh one, ask one of the women servants. I will see you again later.’
‘Will he live?’ The tears had dried on her face and her eyes were bright with hope.
‘I think there is every chance. Now that he has taken both the medicine and the milk. Keep him warm. Do you have family waiting for you at home?’
She shook her head. ‘I lost my first child. Dickon is my only one. And his father is at sea.’
‘Stay here today, and you will be given bread and soup in the refectory. Say that Dr Alvarez sent you.’
I stroked the tuft of fine black hair on the baby’s head, then turned aside to the next patient.
It was a long day and I lost count of how many patients I saw who were suffering from the bloody flux. There were, as well, some of the usual cases needing treatment. A blacksmith’s apprentice with a nasty burn on his hand. A packman whose pony had trodden on his foot. A woman who said she had fallen downstairs, although I had seen the same woman before and knew that she fell regularly against her husband’s fist when he was drunk, but feared him too much
to admit to it. However, the day ended well, with the sick baby over the worst, no longer bleeding or vomiting but feeding normally. I told the mother to return the next day so that I could be sure he was cured, but I went home in the comforting thought that, despite my weariness, I had done a good day’s work at my chosen profession. In bed that night I read the same page of Harriot’s book on optics three times, the beautiful Italian words dancing before my eyes. In the end I abandoned it and blew out my candle. My head was too thick to grasp the finer points of the argument.
The next day I was glad to see that the baby was no longer so grey and gaunt.
‘He is feeding well now?’ I asked.
The mother nodded. ‘He even slept a little in the night.’ She gave me a wan smile.
‘Good. Here is a bottle of the mixture, and one of our baby flasks. Give him a third this morning, then again in the afternoon and evening. Keep him clean and warm. If he is ill again, or if you are ill yourself, come back to the hospital at once. Don’t wait two days next time.’
‘I will. God go with you, Doctor.’
She reached out and put her hand on my arm. I laid mine briefly over it.
‘And with you.’
By the end of ten days my father and I were both exhausted, but the outbreak had been halted. Fortunately it had affected none of the butchers, for then, my father predicted, it would have been carried on tainted meat throughout the city. Only a few died, two or three infants – though not the child I had treated – and one old woman, so we were content with our work.
On the first day when I had not needed to rise with the rooster, I was sitting with my father at the table in the kitchen, eating a breakfast of new bread, figs and small ale. I was holding a ripe fig which sat on the palm of my hand like a plump woman in purple skirts sinking down on to a low stool. It smelled softly of southern sunshine and was just at that perfect moment of ripeness when, as we say, it has the cloak of a beggar and the eye of a widow.
My father had made some jest about our needing to take care not to eat too many figs, and we were laughing when the knock came on the door. Joan opened it, and in walked the man Poley as if he were our landlord, come to demand overdue rent. He was finely dressed, in a doublet of slashed blue silk with silver buttons, each garnished with what looked like a ruby – but surely could not be – as large as a robin’s egg. His immaculate ruff spread wide as a trencher, and his cloak of golden velvet was lined with fur. Probably no more than coney-skin, I judged. My father scrambled to his feet and bowed, wiping his fingers on his napkin and dabbing at his mouth apologetically. My heart lurched painfully, for these obsequious manners he had learned in England were so alien to the distinguished professor of medicine at Coimbra university that I remembered from my childhood. I stood up quietly and slipped behind him into the shadows, hoping to edge away through the parlour door.
‘Dr Alvarez!’ Poley extended his hand amiably, as though bestowing a favour. ‘And young Christoval.’ He nodded towards me, for his sharp eyes had noted my attempted escape and foiled it.
‘May I?’ Without waiting for permission he sat down in my father’s carved chair while, at a gesture from him, we sank down side by side on one of the benches. I saw that I had crushed the fig to a broken pulp of seeds and golden flesh, and scraped my hand free of the mess on the edge of the table.
‘Not oysters for breakfast, then, Christoval, I see!’ He grinned knowingly and turned to my father. ‘Did your son tell you how he saved my life from a most virulent attack of food poisoning? Indeed I believe I may say that without his ministrations I might not be alive today.’
He turned to me. ‘You are surprised to see me no longer confined in the Marshalsea.’ Smiling, he tapped his nose. ‘Policy. Policy.’
I thought he smiled too much.
He stretched out his legs until his foot met and briefly fondled mine under the table. Hastily I tucked my legs back under the bench.
‘Now,’ he said, his manner quite changed. ‘To business. I have been making enquiries about young Christoval here. I learn that he is more than he seems.’
I swallowed painfully. It was as though the chill of hemlock began to seize my limbs. My father stiffened beside me.
‘Yes, I learn that young Christoval is a student of the mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot. He whom they call the “conjuror”.’
I opened my mouth to protest against this slur on my teacher, but he raised his hand to silence me.
‘I have spoken to Harriot,’ Poley continued, ‘and he tells me that Christoval is a gifted mathematician. Exceptionally gifted.’ He seemed always to address my father, but he watched me from the corner of his eye, and I sensed his foot groping again for mine. My heart began to pound. What did he want, this man with his genial exterior and the suggestion of threat in his voice?
‘Dr Alvarez,’ his manner became suddenly confidential, flattering, ‘I am sent to bring this young man to Sir Francis Walsingham, who wishes to look him over, with a view to offering him employment. As a mathematician.’
l determined to put a stop to this bland assumption that we would fall in with whatever plot he was hatching, for it seemed to me that no good would come of any further dealings with Master Poley.
‘I am already employed,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘I work as an assistant physician at St Bartholomew’s.’ My father touched my arm to silence me.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Poley said. ‘And what we have in mind would hardly take you from your duties. I would not wish to rob the poor and indigent of so promising a physician.’
He smiled that complacent smile, so that I longed to kick him hard, but I was mindful of my father’s fingers pressing into my arm.
‘No, Sir Francis would only require your services from time to time, when there is much work to be done. It need not take you often from your care of the sick.’
‘Sir Francis requires my services as a mathematician?’ It made no sense. Sir Walter Raleigh, perhaps, or one of the directors of the Spice Trust, might find me of use, if navigational calculations were needed for some new voyage. But Sir Francis? I knew little of what Mr Secretary Walsingham did, apart from keeping an eye on the Spanish and gathering information on the Queen’s enemies.
‘Come!’ Poley pushed back his chair so violently that the legs squealed in protest on the flagged floor. ‘I will explain as we go.’
‘Father?’ I looked at him, appealing with my eyes for him to forbid me to go. But he had become cowed and submissive as he had grown older. All he desired was the quiet life of an insignificant doctor, with a few investments in the spice trade so that he might lay aside a little gold to keep us both when he was too old to practice any longer. Only in dire circumstances would he defy a man as powerful as Sir Francis Walsingham. He avoided my eyes and patted my hand encouragingly.
‘Go with the gentleman, Kit.’ His voice was gentle, almost placating. ‘I am sure Sir Francis means you no harm.’
At that moment I realised that Poley had not introduced himself to my father. Was it right that my father should urge me to go with this dubious stranger, young and unprotected as I was – a man, for all we knew, who might have nothing to do with Sir Francis Walsingham?
‘Father,’ I said, ‘this gentleman has not even told us his name.’
‘But you know who I am, Kit,’ he said, and even as he spoke I did not like it that he used my familiar name. ‘I am Master Robert Poley, at your service.’ He gave my father a mocking bow and, gripping my elbow painfully, he steered me out of the door. I could barely catch up my cloak with my free hand before he had me in the street and was hustling me east, through Newgate.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, struggling to fasten my cloak as he hurried me along with thrusts at my back.
‘To Seething Lane,’ he said abruptly, all pretence at genial manners gone now.
Seething Lane ran parallel to Mark Lane, where Hector Nuñez lived, but nearer to the Tower. I wondered whether I might be ab
le to run off and seek sanctuary at the Nuñez house. As if he read my mind, Poley spoke again.
‘You come warmly recommended by Dr Nuñez, too, as well as the conjuror Harriot. Dr Nuñez believes you will be able to give Sir Francis good service. Such a remarkable young man!’
He gave the last word a kind of ironic flourish, then said no more. He walked fast for a man whose normal movements were languid and affected, and I had to hurry to keep pace with him. His movements, like his manner, underwent these sudden changes which I found as disturbing as the inexplicable summons to Walsingham. I recalled what I had said of Poley to Sara. There was a hint of violence in his abrupt changes.
We had nearly reached Tower Ward when I suddenly stopped dead in the street and refused to go further.
‘What if I do not wish to work for Sir Francis?’ I said, a little out of breath with the pace he had been setting, my voice sounding high and childish.
A baker’s boy with a tray of bread balanced on his head collided with me as I stopped, and cursed me as he grabbed to save his bread from falling. I ignored him and stood my ground, the London crowds parting around us where we stood like a boulder in a river. Sailors hurried up from their ships by the Custom House towards the ale-houses of the City, women knocked their market baskets against our shins, and a furtive mongrel leapt suddenly between Poley and me, grabbed one of the fallen loaves, and darted away down Little East Cheap.
‘Not wish to work for Sir Francis?’ His smile was mocking. ‘Here’s a fine opportunity many a young man would envy! A young man employed by Sir Francis might rise in service to Queen and State, even become a great man himself. Why, Sir Francis has risen from no notable family to be the second greatest councillor to the Queen, after Lord Burghley. And Lord Burghley himself was simple William Cecil not so many years since.’
He gave a sigh of pure pleasure. ‘Under such a Queen as Gloriana, may her radiant face ever shine upon us, men of simple yeoman families may come to great riches and power. Why, I myself, humble Robert Poley, am not without influence, and have hopes of great things hereafter. Why should a young man like yourself not profit likewise?’