by Eve Langlais
Now Sarah sat in the stone embrasure of the window that looked out over the front court of her husband’s manor house and twisted that day’s third handkerchief in her hands as she listened with only half an ear to the pleas of her lady–in–waiting.
“He is the most excellent doctor, having studied under the greatest Jewish physicians in the courts of the Mohamedans,” she was saying. “Please, my lady. Merely hear him out.”
Her children were playing below. They had borrowed–or stolen–a small cask from the cooper, and they were now rolling it about the yard. Ann and Mary were shrieking with the wildest, most unladylike laughter that drifted up to the open window where Sarah sat. They were working together to keep the cask from their older brother Richard, who alternated between gamely trying to wrest it away and pretending to view their antics with the full jaded disgust of his thirteen years of maturity. Little Henry toddled behind all of them with a stick that someone really should take away from him, striking indiscriminately at anyone who was slow enough to let him catch up.
It would take their nurse hours to beat the mud out of their wool and velvet gowns, and Sarah was sure that Henry’s hose would once again need mending. She smiled ruefully down at the pair in her lap that she had been working on before the last fit of coughing seized her.
“Lady Marston, do you attend to a word that I speak?”
Sarah looked up and met her servingwoman’s exasperated eyes. “Yes, Bess, I do bend my ear to you. I have already consulted with many of the ‘most excellent’ doctors. I have been bled until I should have no blood and purged until I grew faint. I have been poulticed and blistered and candled and every other thing that their dark arts could dream of. I have drunk brews that made me sick unto death, and I bathed in the dew of a new moon and buried a mouse in the light of a full one.”
“I know it, my lady, and yet one more–”
“No,” Sarah said, looking down at her children again. “These doctors do no more than hurry me to my grave. I go there with more speed that I desire already.”
“The request comes from your lord husband,” Bess said softly.
Sarah closed her eyes against the squeezing in her heart. And then, even as she swallowed hard against it, she began coughing again, a long fit that shook her thin shoulders and tore at her throat, the bubbling, bloody foam speckling the spotted handkerchief that she clutched to her mouth.
She coughed even as her head spun with the lack of air until the last of her breath had been squeezed from her lungs, and then she sucked in another lungful only to cough it out again. The spasm did not leave her until she was weak and shaking, her ribs, bruised from too many such fits, aching.
Bess sat on her stool at her lady’s knees through the whole attack, her alarm and despair mostly hidden behind her careful mask.
Sarah blinked away the tears in her eyes, the tears that came from the pain and the sheer force of the fit that had seized her. She swallowed carefully so as not to trigger another attack, and she said, carefully, “Did he tell you in troth that he wished me to see this excellent doctor?”
Bess bit her lip. “I should not have spoken so freely, my lady, of what he asked of me privily but that I feared you would not yield to my pleas.”
“You were not mistaken,” Sarah said dryly. She had extracted from John, her lord husband, the vow that he not speak of her illness again in her presence. Of all the pains of her dying, that had been the greatest–to see the grief that it had already wrought in her husband. And so she had forbidden him from speaking of it at all, insisting that however long they still had together must be filled with what happiness they could wring from the last dregs of her life.
Her ban had hurt him, but he had bowed to her final wish, and slowly, she had seen her old John come back to her, the one she had fallen in love with that blissful summer at her uncle the Duke’s estate. It was that John that she wished to kiss her hand even if she dared not allow him to kiss her lips for fear that her contagion might spread. It was that John with whom she wanted to spend the long evening hours by the fire, playing the lute even if she no longer had the breath or voice to sing.
Sarah sighed and looked down at the forecourt again. Now the nurse had discovered the trouble that her charges had found, and she scooped up the youngest and divested him of his weapon as she scolded the older three to a slightly abashed semblance of order.
“If it would please my lord, I shall see this doctor,” she said softly, wondering what the cost would be this time. Would she be scarred by his lances, or made sick by his concoctions? How many of the few hours that she had left would she lose to this charlatan?
“Thank you, my lady,” Bess said, wringing her hands in an excess of relief. “Thank you.”
“Thank not me but your master,” Sarah said. “This is his boon that I grant.”
“Yes, my lady,” the servingwoman said. “Shall I send him in?”
Sarah looked at her, raising her eyebrows in surprise. “Does he wait without, even now?”
“Yes, my lady,” Bess repeated, this time with great meekness. “I knew you held out hope, that you had not given yourself entirely over to the despair as it seemed.”
Sarah didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t that she despaired, not exactly. But she had lived in her own body these thirty–and–one years, and she knew it as no one else could. She felt the weakness in her muscles, the effort with which she drew every breath, and she chose not to live in delusion any longer. Was recognizing the imminence and inevitability of her death truly giving in to despair?
But this was an argument that she had no will to begin, much less the stamina to win, and so she merely said, “If he stands ready to await my pleasure, it shall never be greater than it is now. Send him in.”
“Yes, my lady,” Bess said again, bobbing her head, and she stood and bustled from the room.
Sarah sighed. Bess meant well, just as John did. But they would not accept the truth that she could no longer avoid. It was almost as exhausting to live amongst their denial as it was to do the actual dying.
As the door shut behind Bess, Sarah arranged the furs and quilts around her shoulders and legs and pulled the window closed.
She had managed to silence Bess’ insistence that her problems arose from drafts and chills, but she knew it would be the first thing a new doctor would mention in order to establish his expertise. There seemed little point in arguing once again that many people spent all day working in the cold air with no ill effects because that would only start the usual lectures on humours and constitutions.
So she closed the window and shut out the sounds of her children, who were now arguing loudly with their nurse that they had not, in fact, been making any kind of trouble at all.
Sarah picked up Richard’s stocking and finished off darning the latest hole he had torn in the knee, cutting the fine wool yarn with the scissors from the chatelaine she wore on her waist. With a sigh, she smoothed it over her knee and then folded it in quick, automatic motions before she was interrupted by the scratch on the door.
“Please, enter,” she called, and the door swung open.
Bess entered first, wearing an apologetic expression on her pretty round face. “Lady Marston, my I present Don Argemirus?”
Sarah pasted a smile on her face and raised her gaze to the tall, dark–clad figure behind the servingwoman.
And the smile fell off her face as the light seemed to be sucked from the room.
Chapter Two
Don Argemirus was like no doctor that Sarah had ever seen. He was like no man that she had ever seen, like something out of one of the old romances that had fallen out of style–a priest–knight with the face of an angel, not a doctor of purges and poultices.
His hair was the bright gold of a wheat field ready for harvest, curling around his face like that of a painting of Eros that had hung in the great stairwell of her uncle the Duke’s greatest manor house, with fine features that were so beautiful that they verged
on the feminine. His eyes were a keen and perfect blue under brows that were strikingly darker than his curling hair, and he looked out at the world through a fringe of eyelashes that were distracting in their thickness.
He was built like the gods of the paintings, too, muscles evident even under his black Spanish doublet and the short cape that he wore thrown back from his shoulders. And when he smiled, his teeth were as perfect as his face–white and even.
“Lady Marston,” he said, extending one leg out before him as he removed his hat to press it against his heart as he bowed. He wore no skullcap beneath it, and Sarah found herself staring at the top of those perfect golden ringlets, wondering what they might feel like between her fingers.
He straightened, and rather than replacing his hat, he set it on the table that sat before the fire out of consideration for the fact that he was now in the innermost chambers of the Baron and Lady Marston.
With great difficulty, Sarah found her voice. “Don Argemirus,” she said, managing to return his bow with a nod. “You have offered your services to my husband.”
Don Argemirus made a dismissive motion with his hand, and with a tiny bobbing curtsey, Bess left the room. Sarah had a moment of outrage. How dare a doctor, who waited upon her, send her servingwoman from the room?
But as the door shut behind the woman, Sarah couldn’t manage to summon the words of reprimand. Instead, she sat like a tongue–tied virgin as the man took one of the two high–backed oak chairs and carried it over to Sarah’s side.
“By your leave,” he murmured, but he sat without waiting for her answer.
Sarah was affronted. No, more than affronted–she was incensed that a doctor would take such liberties in her presence. She might have married below her station, but she was still a baroness, and whatever titles he pretended to, this man was no one at all.
She opened her mouth to deliver a scathing reply, but at just that moment, he raised his eyes to hers, and she fell silent, the words caught in her throat as a hot flush crept up her face, for he stirred in her sensations that she had thought the illness had stolen away.
Who was this man, that he could stir such thoughts in her? Was he a wizard in truth, as so many of these doctors pretended to be? Sarah struggled to control her suddenly fluttering heart, slowing her breathing before it could send her into another fit of coughing.
“Lady Marston, I heard in York of your plight and your beauty, and I would not be content until I saw you and determined if I could make myself of use to you,” he said.
“What does my beauty–or its vestiges that are left to me–have aught to do with your skill in the arts of physick?” Sarah asked bluntly, recovering some part of her equilibrium. This man, this stranger, seemed to make the room darker around him, even as he sat carefully so that the light of the window would not fall squarely upon him.
How could a man who was fair carry such darkness around him?
Don Argemirus merely laughed. “Nothing at all. Or perhaps everything. It matters much in how keen I am to assist, as I believe it may help the effectiveness of my course of treatment.”
“A cure that works only on the fair? Never have I heard such fond talk,” Sarah said. “If you have come to take my husband’s gold with your silver tongue, believe you that I have no patience for flatterers and thieves.”
His eyes glittered in his beautiful face, their paleness hard and bright. “I have no need of your husband’s shillings or pounds sterling. I have my own estates which render me independent of such trivialities. I am a gentleman philosopher, and I choose to travel the world to enrich my knowledge of its functions. I seek no reward but knowledge.”
Sarah’s gaze dropped to his hands, where two great rings glittered even in the shadows, and then raised to the chained brooches that were pinned to his shoulders to hold his scarlet–lined cape in place.
“Does your philosophy extend to the alchemical arts, perhaps?” she asked, for alchemists were the only scholars she knew whose pretense of knowledge afforded them such material rewards.
“I am a seeker of truth. I do not mine the wealth of kings,” he said in such a tone that Sarah could not miss that he understood that she was still questioning his honesty.
“And what does your ‘truth’ tell you about me?” she asked.
“You suffer keenly from a disease that imbalances the humours toward heat and wetness,” Don Argemirus said. He held out his hand, and hesitantly, Sarah loosened the tight grip she had around Richard’s stocking and gave her hand to him.
The touch of his skin against hers sent a kind of jolt through her, something that was both alarm and a visceral awareness of him. He turned her hand over in his own so that her palm faced up. His skin was cool and dry, and he slid his grip up her wrist to hold his fingers against her fluttering pulse. The merest touch of his fingers roused other thoughts in her, wild thoughts of all the other things that his fingers, his mouth, his body could do to her.
The words he spoke were impersonal and cool in stark contrast to the storm he had roused in her body. “The bonny fat of your youth has been consumed in sweats in the night, and your lungs now labor under the excess of water and cannot be cleared, e’en though your kerchief is stained with the blood of your exertions.”
“It is a common enough affliction,” Sarah said, her fingers curling defensively. “And what remedy do you recommend me? Bleeding? Sweating? Purges? Physicks?”
“None of those shall cure you,” he said.
Sarah could stand it no longer. She pulled her hand from his grip and closed her eyes. Perhaps he was a witch in truth, for none but her John had ever roused such feelings, such thoughts inside her.
But even a witch could not save her now.
“Then why come you?” she asked. “If your medicines cannot prevail against my affliction, why add to it with your cruel words?”
“My medicines are not the last recourse,” he said.
She opened her eyes and looked into his, and the intensity of his gaze took her breath away. She could read some shade of what he meant there–an insult to her, a grave insult to her chastity and her devotion to her husband, as well as a ludicrous invitation to a crippled woman dying from a dangerous contagion.
“Don Argemirus, I cannot imagine what imp possessed you to beg audience with me,” she said frostily, dropping into the most formal register to emphasize her disdain. “You must know that such an offer, were it ever real, should be quite impossible for me.”
The doctor reached out, and Sarah could not make herself pull away as he caught a wispy lock of hair that had strayed from under her invalid’s cap. “I offer thee no insult but the chance at life. You will not live to see the turning of a new month, much less the greening of a new year without my aid.”
She shook her head because his eyes and touch had told a very different story.
But the doctor continued. “It is a bleeding but a bleeding of a different sort than that to which you have grown accustomed. It is a cure of which there is a saying, ‘if it does not kill, it cures.’ If it cures, it also changes. Thy heart will no longer belong to thy husband, and mortal ties will be loosed.”
“There is no cure that could work such changes,” Sarah scoffed, but her heart was still beating hard, and a tiny part of her mind whispered, If any had the cure, it should be this man.
He spoke flatly. “This one does. It works rarely, very rarely, but we have learned that it works best when there is…much for it to work upon at the start.”
“Much,” Sarah repeated, afraid of the word, for she knew that he meant all the strange feelings that he had stirred in her.
“When the feeling is great on both sides, the chances of success grow commensurately.”
And the feelings were great. They oughtn’t be–she ought not feel anything at all. She stared at this strange man, angry and confused even as the feelings seemed to batter against her like a ram at the gates.
“What import do you intend by this confession?” she mana
ged finally. “Do you suppose that I should exchange my honor and good name for…promises?”
“I make no promises, Lady Marston. The choice is yours. I offer you no insult and no bargain. You will do as your heart wills, but if you accept the cure and you survive, your will shall change.”
Some small piece of her thrilled at that thought even as the rest of her mind rebelled against it. She had ever been faithful to her John, her first, only, and truest love. There was nothing that even a witch could do to change that.
Sarah raised her chin. “You speak with the rantings of a madman.”
“You believe,” Don Argemirus said, almost with contempt. “Even now, you believe. And your lord husband shall believe, too, because he must have hope.” He stood. “I go now to tell him of my discoveries. Think on it, Lady Marston. Life is fleeting, and death is long.”
Chapter Three
Sarah could scarcely believe the words that her ears had heard, much less their meaning. She stared at the door for a very long time after the doctor had left, until it opened to reveal Bess’ abashed face as she came in bearing a tray on which sat a bowl of milk–porridge.
“Here is your dinner, my lady,” she murmured, setting it on the table.
Sarah set aside Henry’s hose and stuffed her handkerchief back into her sleeve before freeing herself from the wraps and furs and pushing off the embrasure of the window with both hands.
Her legs wobbled under her weight. Not only had the illness stolen her strength, but she was weak from her weeks in bed, and her crippled leg ached under her weight. She limped heavily over to the chair that sat before the table, too proud to ask for help as long as she could force her body to work on its own, and she sat heavily in front of the tray.
“Why did you leave me, Bess?” she asked her servingwoman reproachfully. Bess had kept faithfully to Sarah’s side through the visits and ministrations of far too many self–styled physicians in the past. Never before had she abandoned her mistress in the absence of a proper dismissal.