Emily Purdy - A Court Affair

I sit and drowse and dream by the fire as my hair dries into a wealth of spun gold curls; then Pirto gently breaks my reverie. “It is time to be dressing you now, love,” she says. She helps me to rise as I grimace and brace myself against the deafening though silent scream that only I can hear that my spine unleashes inside of me. Will a day come, I wonder, when it will stop screaming and simply snap in the ultimate protestation against my defiance of the pain? Though numbness may seem like a blessing at times, not being able to move at all or feel anything fills me with such fear, I think I will drown in it. Sometimes I think I feel too much, but to live and feel nothing at all is a living death and absolutely terrifies me.

Gently, Pirto eases the sheet from my shoulders. I know what comes next and lift my chin and obstinately stare straight ahead, focusing on the inky blackness outside my window; even though I fear losing my soul in darkness, it is still better than looking down and seeing the rot and ruin of my flesh. Although I have only just bathed, already the fetid stink of decay wafts up to my nostrils as the lump begins to weep ugly tears. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair; a body shouldn’t decay until after death! Although some people are not very particular about cleanliness and bathing, I have always been, yet, no matter how much I bathe, no matter what perfume I wear, the stench of death always hovers about me, seeping from my breast.

From the corner of my eye a movement distracts me. I turn and catch Pirto reaching for the big cork-stoppered earthenware jar that holds a special blend of powders that Dr Biancospino left for me. When mixed with water, it becomes a thick paste of lime, hemlock, and belladonna that, with the deft brushstrokes of a master artist, the exotic foreign doctor used to paint my breast with, creating hope where there was none before, and whitewashing the ugliness of mottled and festering red flesh and charred-looking dead black tissue. When it dried, it hardened so that my breast appeared to have turned to white marble, as though Pygmalion’s Galatea were starting to turn back into a statue after having lived, for the brief span allotted her by the gods, as a flesh and blood woman.

I remember that story. Years ago, in the early days of our marriage, when I saw him more often, Robert used to write poetry and sometimes make clever remarks with classical allusions, but I never understood what he meant. Seeing my puzzled face, he would frown, deplore my ignorance, and sometimes even shout at me or stomp out, grumbling that talking to me was about as sensible as trying to hold a conversation with the sheep. I asked my old swain, my first sweetheart, Ned Flowerdew, who succeeded his father as my father’s steward, to send to London for a book of mythology for me, something simple and easy to understand, writ for a child new to the subject perhaps. And each and every night while I waited for my husband to come back to me, I would sit by the fire, with my father dozing nearby in his chair, and my cats, Onyx and Custard, curled up next to me, and read the stories of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, my tongue tripping and tangling as I tried to sound out their peculiar names. But it was too little too late. By the time I knew who Aphrodite, Persephone, Artemis, and Athena were, Robert was already kneeling at the feet of the flame-haired Tudor goddess he worshipped and adored with all his ambitious passion, praying for his regal reward.

“Not that one!” I cry out, startling Pirto so that she jumps and nearly drops the jar. “The other one—the sticky one that looks like honey the wise-woman sent.”

Confusion and uncertainty furrow dear Pirto’s brow. “But I thought …”

“No, Pirto, no,” I plead as tears pool in my eyes and cause a quaver in my voice. And, seeing the tears that threaten to spill over, Pirto sighs as she, reluctantly, puts the jar back and reaches for the other, the one she thinks, perhaps rightly so, is more chicanery than cure.

The truth is, I don’t trust anyone any more, not even myself. I didn’t trust Dr Biancospino when he first came to me; like most “ill-bred country folk”, as Robert would no doubt disdainfully call us, I believed the lurid tales I had heard of the Italians and their skill at concocting and administering deadly poisons, stories of poison-doused gloves and gowns, and fiendish poisoners so adept at their nefarious craft, they could poison but a single side of a knife and sit down and boldly share a repast with their victim that would end in death for only one of them. I was so afraid he had been sent to kill me. He was like no one I had ever met before. An air of mystery hung about him, as exotic and peculiar as his accent and the blend of Italian and Arabic blood that flowed beneath his olive skin. He would only say that he had been sent by someone who wished me well and whom I had no cause to fear, someone who had heard all the disturbing rumours about my health and my husband’s intentions and wanted only for me to get well and have the best of care, free from the worry and suspicion of harm masquerading in the guise of medicine.

“This is a sincere and well-intentioned gift, else I would not be here, my lady,” he assured me.

He would only confirm that it was not my husband who had sent him, but the name of the person who had he would never reveal; he was sworn to secrecy.

“Madame, I have come to make you well if I can, not to play at guessing games,” he would smilingly chide me when I tried to guess my mysterious well-wisher’s name.

Then, in spite of myself, I began to trust him. He was able to do more for me than any English doctor or wise-woman I had seen. And, deep in my heart, as if it were buried alive, that trust kept fighting to claw its way back out of the premature grave I had consigned it to. Then the plain-wrapped parcel arrived from London, with no name writ upon it, nor could the courier tell me who it was from. Inside was a big leather-bound book, its worn gilt edges gleaming seemingly with malice. It was a long and learned, detailed and thorough, tome all about poisons, written by my Italian-Arab physician—Dr Kristofer Biancospino. When I read it, I felt the blood freeze inside my veins. There were horrors within its pages that still give me nightmares! And, stuck amongst its pages, like a bloodstain marring the creamy vellum, was a lone strand of long red hair that told me exactly who had sent it—my rival, my enemy—the Queen, Elizabeth. But my mind was too afraid and befuddled; I could not figure out if she meant to warn or merely frighten me, scare me into doing what I indeed did—send Dr Biancospino away so Death could regain the ground that He had lost while I was under that skilled physician’s care.

After I received the book of poisons with his name, Dr Kristofer Biancospino, on the title page, and a tale of terror, a litany of suffering, dispassionately detailed on every page thereafter, I would have no more of him or the medicines he gave me, some of which I knew to contain the deadly plants he wrote about—monkshood, mandrake, hemlock, thornapple, henbane, and belladonna, the deadly nightshade that has nothing to do with beauty despite its name, though I have heard it said that the Italian ladies dare to use it in their cosmetics and even put drops of it in their eyes to make their pupils larger, but I shudder at the thought of doing either. I think sometimes women go too far in their pursuit of beauty.

Again and again he came to my door, begging to come in, to just sit and talk with me, but I hardened my heart and barred my door against him and refused to answer the letters he sent. Right or wrong, I let myself become afraid of the one person who could help me.

Even now, on the table beside my bed—in the pretty little heart-shaped trinket box lined in rose pink velvet that Robert won for me in a game of skill, throwing coloured wooden balls through a hoop, at a country fair when we were courting—his last letter lay folded into a tight square, containing—if I were brave enough to take it—one last chance to save my life. A gamble, a risk, a life-and-death wager I might win or lose, he told me frankly, showing his respect for me by telling me the truth unvarnished, just as he had done when he first described this daring and dangerous procedure to me, but a chance that no English doctor, whether quack or from the College of Physicians, or even the Queen’s own doctor himself, could offer me, an operation nigh as excruciating and brutal as the hanging, drawing, and quartering condemned traitors were subjected to, but one, though it skirted death by a hairsbreadth, that might, if God were willing, save my life and let me live to be an old woman with silver hair and grandchildren. But the time to think had almost passed; today I must decide. It was now or never.