S Perry - The Serpent’s Mark

‘I thought you were still in the Low Countries,’ Nicholas says, hoping Wylde won’t notice how moderately he’s drinking his wine.

‘I took leave for Sir William’s funeral, and to muster new volunteers.’

‘Sir William – dead?’ Nicholas has a vision of the white-haired Sir William Havington shot down in one last, ill-advised foray against the Spanish.

‘In his bed. Quatrain fever, or so the physician said.’ Sir Joshua raises his cup to toast his late father-in-law. ‘Here’s to a life honourably lived.’

Nicholas acknowledges the toast and takes a small sip of wine.

‘Rhenish not up to scratch?’ asks Sir Joshua quizzically.

‘It’s excellent. It’s just that I don’t sup so much now, not after…’ Nicholas pauses, deciding there are some things Joshua Wylde doesn’t need to know. ‘And your son? How does Samuel fare?’

Sir Joshua stares into his cup as though expecting to find the answer written in the lees of the wine. ‘Don’t mistake me, Nick. I hold the boy in the deepest affection, always have.’ His mouth twists with ill-disguised guilt. ‘But I must confess it: to be long in his presence troubles me deeply. His sickness is an affront to a man like me. A reproach from God.’ He spreads his hands as though seeking sympathy. ‘The Wylde family won its first honours at Crécy. We’ve been warriors, every one of us, from that day hence. Why the good Lord chose to reward my services to Him with an heir who suffers from the falling sickness – well, I must have offended in some manner. Perhaps He thinks I haven’t slaughtered enough heretics for Him yet.’ Wylde takes his deep draught of Rhenish as though it were a medicine. ‘I do my best for Samuel. He is not alone. I make sure he has company – companions.’

‘Companions?’

‘He can’t mix with the village lads, you see. They taunt him. They say he’s possessed by devils.’

‘That’s what a lot of ignorant folk say about the falling sickness.’

‘Young Tanner Bell is with him. Came across from Havington Manor,’ says Wylde. Then he notices the blank look on Nicholas’s face. ‘Tanner – Dorney’s younger brother. You remember Dorney Bell, surely.’

Nicholas remembers Dorney all too well – a beanpole in a dented steel breastplate that made him look like a stand on which to hang plate armour. He remembers Dorney’s country-boy ability to have the company laughing, even in the worst of the Dutch rain. But neither breastplate nor humour had saved Dorney Bell. He’d died in Nicholas’s arms on his nineteenth birthday, a Spanish ball lodged in his spine.

‘I really should be thankful Samuel still lives,’ says Wylde, emitting a grunt of guilty laughter. ‘There were physicians who told me he’d never see fifteen summers.’

‘The falling sickness is indeed a cruel malady, Sir Joshua.’

‘He’s as weak now as his mother was, and she was scarcely seventeen when she died. Had she been made of hardier stuff, she might have survived the whelping.’

‘Then perhaps there’s still hope.’ Nicholas says, trying not to wince at Wylde’s apparent callousness.

‘Oh, there’s hope aplenty, according to the new doctor my wife has engaged.’

Nicholas’s eyes widen. ‘You’ve remarried?’

‘ Isabel ,’ Wylde explains portentously, seeing the look of surprise on his guest’s face. ‘We were wed in Utrecht last year.’

‘She’s Dutch?’

‘English to her soul. She’s a Lowell.’ He frowns, as though the lineage escapes him. ‘Don’t know them, myself. But she’s handsome enough. Young, too. Should breed well.’

‘Forgive me,’ says Nicholas with a smile, ‘but I never thought of you as the wooing kind. I thought there was no space in your heart for anything but killing Spaniards.’

‘Nor is there, Nick. But perhaps she might whelp me an heir – one with the proper constitution to take up the work when, like Sir William, I am aged and can no longer wield a sword.’

‘How did you meet?’ Nicholas asks, only too happy to keep the conversation away from his own marital history.

‘She sought me out.’

Wylde has never struck Nicholas as the likely victim of an opportunistic woman, however comely.

‘She’d heard of my reputation!’ Sir Joshua says, just to make things clear. He leans forward until his beard juts close to Nicholas’s face and adds in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘Swore she would have no husband other than a Christian knight who knew his duty to the new religion. What was I to do? I can’t sire an heir to the Wylde name off any common Hogen-Mogen whore, can I?’

‘No. No, of course not,’ replies Nicholas, almost lost for words. ‘Is Lady Wylde here or still in Holland?’

‘She’s at Cleevely. Looking after Samuel. She moved him there from the Havingtons’.’

As Sir Joshua takes another swashing gulp of wine, Nicholas notices a sudden cunning gleam enter his deep-set eyes. ‘Christ’s blood! I swear there was ordination in our meeting today, Nick. I’ll be damned if there wasn’t. Another hour and I’d have been aboard the Madelaine . She’s out in the river, taking on provisions at this very moment.’ He regards Nicholas in silence a while, then tilts his head in contemplation. ‘Busy, are you – at present?’

‘Busy?’

‘A thriving practice? Lots of patients? I can’t believe a man with your skills finds himself underemployed.’

Nicholas shrugs. ‘To be honest, I’m at something of a loose end. It’s been a difficult year…’

‘Then you can do me a service.’

‘I can?’

‘This new physician Isabel has pressed upon me – for Samuel. She’s much taken with him. Says he can work miracles.’

‘That’s a dangerous claim, Sir Joshua.’

‘A modest one, from my experience of physicians, Nick. Saving your presence, of course.’

‘What’s his name? Perhaps I’ve heard of him.’

‘Arcampora. He’s Swiss.’

Nicholas shakes his head and tries not to look too sceptical. ‘Not a name I know, I’m afeared.’

‘I’ve only met him once, in Holland – when Isabel brought him to me. Told me he’d studied at Basle. Swore on his life that he could cure Samuel’s malady.’

‘I don’t wish to dash your hopes, Sir Joshua, but from all I’ve read, the falling sickness is not amenable to any lasting physic. I hope this fellow is not a charlatan. They’re as common as weeds, and just as stubborn, I fear.’

‘Then set my mind at rest.’

‘How?’

‘Visit Cleevely. Give me your honest opinion.’

‘Me?’

‘I’ve seen you at your chosen toil, Nick. As I told my bully-boys out there, you’re the best damned physician I know. You’d be doing me no small service.’

‘I fear I have to tell you something, Sir Joshua–’ Nicholas begins.

But Wylde cuts him off with a wave of his hand. ‘I’ll pay your London prices, Nick – don’t fear on that score. If this Arcampora fellow is as good as he claims, my mind will be set at ease. And if not, then my purse will be all the heavier for your discovery – the fellow’s costing me an earl’s ransom.’

Nicholas has no desire to become entrapped in the briars of Joshua Wylde’s relationship with his sickly son, who clearly disappoints him so. But he remembers the look on Samuel’s face, that day on the Woodbridge quayside: the desperate desire to please an unmatchable father. And, unquestionably, he could do with the money – at present he has no means of income. He thinks it might tide him over while he haggles with the warden at St Thomas’s on Bankside; tries to get his old position back as a part-time physician to the poor of Southwark – a shilling a session, and all the sprains, fractures and hernias you can treat. He’s good at the practical physic. It’s the astrology, the piss-reading and the dogma he has no time for. Besides, were it not for Sir Joshua Wylde, his own bones might even now be mulching some desolate Dutch polder.