by David Walton
He found he was clenching his fists so tightly he left fingernail marks in his skin. Not trusting himself to speak again, he left with a murmured good night. She was like that porcelain brought from Cathay along the Silk Road: rare and precious, but easily broken, and, once broken, irreplaceable. It made him angry to think of anyone hurting her, but that was fine. Anger was a safe emotion. Better anger than the grief he could sense like a deep well underneath, calling him to drown.
He retreated to his bedchamber, hoping for an hour of sleep before dawn, but Joan, too, was awake.
She sat rigid in a chair by their bed, knitting. The needles clashed in her lap like tiny swords, giving shape to a pair of hose that hung down below them.
"Haven't you slept?" Parris said.
No answer.
"I confirmed Vesalius," he told her, knowing she didn't care, but unable to help himself. "He corrected Galen, if you can believe it. A lot of people won't be happy about that."
"It's my happiness you ought to be concerned about." Her needles kept flashing.
Parris knew she was angry about the corpse. He gripped the back of his neck and massaged it. "How can I heal the body if I don't know how it works?" It was an old argument, raised more out of habit than any hope she would be moved by it.
"We agreed that you would stop bringing . . . the dead . . . into my house."
"You agreed."
"It won't bring him back, Stephen."
Parris retreated to the hearth. "I know that. Ten times over, I know it." He didn't want to have this conversation. He picked up the poker and gripped it in both hands as if he would bend it in half.
It always came back to Peter. Before his death, things had made sense. The future had been clear: Catherine would marry into a good family; Peter would inherit land and wealth and carry on the family name. Parris and Joan had been fond of each other, and their goals— Parris's to be London's preeminent physic and Joan's to establish their family in London society— had been well matched.
Then Peter died, and everything turned upside down. Joan, sensing her family's stability slipping away, had thrown herself into finding a match for Catherine, as if to pull them back on solid ground again. To Parris, it had the opposite effect: he no longer cared what people thought. His reputation as a physic was worthless if he couldn't truly heal. He retreated into his studies, pursuing more and more radical methods in his thirst for understanding.
Joan didn't understand this, but she didn't know the whole truth, either. It was too horrible to tell her— to tell anyone. Only Parris knew, and it ate away at his soul. He had killed his own son.
Day after day, while Peter grew sicker, Parris had given him capsules filled with elemental mercury. Mercury was widely used, a long- accepted treatment for a wide variety of diseases. The ancients had praised its medicinal powers. He had learned its uses at Cambridge. Every physic of his acquaintance had prescribed it at some point in their careers.
But the week after Peter's death, a letter had come from a physic in
Florence named Vecchio. Vecchio had performed experimental studies on the effects of mercury on healthy individuals. The results were sweating, racing heartbeat, muscular weakness, the skin peeling off in layers, the loss of hair, teeth, and nails. All of Peter's symptoms. It was a poison, and Parris had given it to his own son through sheer, unforgivable ignorance.
Joan still hadn't looked up from her knitting.
"What are you making?" he asked, to shift the conversation into safer territory.
"Hose for Catherine. What does it look like?"
Knitting was a strange new craft, but Joan had found someone to teach her how to do it. It allowed woolen hose to fit a woman's leg more neatly, and Joan was wild to have Catherine fitted out in the latest styles.
"No one will see them anyway, under her gown," he said.
She paused, dropping her hands in her lap. "What nonsense you talk. Her ankles will be visible."
"To whom will they be visible?"
"She's a young lady, Stephen. She needs to be out in society, finding a man to marry, raising a family."
He stared at the poker in his hands. No topic of conversation was simple anymore. "She's only sixteen."
"Old enough." The venom in Joan's voice made him look up.
"Why did you come home? What happened?" he said.
"She has a young man. At least, she fancies she does. The oldest son of Baron Hungate."
"And? You're always angling to find her a good match."
"Thomas Hungate is too good. And he's not courting her openly. I found them alone in the courtyard garden."
Parris felt a slow burn begin in his chest. "Doing what?"
"Nothing but sweet words, so far as I could see. But there's no chance he means to marry her. This is your fault. If you would take a hand in her future, she wouldn't be so vulnerable. She needs you."
"What she needs is to stay home."
"She's not a boy. She can't make her own way. She needs a man who will provide for her, and the older she gets, the harder that will be. You need to be involved in her life."
Joan continued to look at her clashing needles instead of at him, which somehow annoyed him even more than her chiding. He felt his voice getting louder. "I won't parade my little girl through a ballroom like a horse at auction."
"I'm not asking you to. Talk to your peers. Arrange a match with a good man, one who will take care of her."
"I will not. She's too young."
"She means nothing to you, then."
"She means everything to me."
"Only as a shadow of what you've lost."
Parris bit back a retort and swung the poker in a short arc through the air. For the last year, conversations with Joan had been a maze, every path leading to the same dead end. And perhaps there was some truth to it. Catherine was hurting, too, but his own pain had prevented him from getting too close to her. If she had been a boy, he could have included her in his work, taught her a physic's profession. But because she was a girl, the best thing he could do was keep her safe.
Even his work for the king was frustrating. The king— a boy only slightly older than Catherine— was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it. Edward could no longer disguise his bloody cough, and the disease had wasted deep grooves in his cheeks. Parris and his other physics bled him daily and gave him soothing draughts, but it made little difference. The consumption was eating him alive. It was only a matter of time.
Parris could diagnose ailments, provide relief from pain and discomfort, sometimes even slow the course of a disease, but cure it? Only rarely, and in such situations it was never clear if the cure was the result of anything he had done, or simply the favor of God. If he were a barber- surgeon, then at least he might cut out the off ending part, but inflicting that kind of pain on another human being was more than he could stomach. Besides, surgeons killed their patients as often as they helped them, if not from the procedure itself, then from the fevers that inevitably followed.
And what about the soul? Did it really exist? Of course it must— the Bible was clear on that subject— but if so, where was it? Could it be measured and cut open? Was it located in the heart, or the liver, or the inscrutable gray matter of the brain? When the body died, how did the soul get out? Did it blow away like a gas, or glide through some other, unknown dimension?
He had tried to find out. When any of his patients died, he prepared experiments to detect their souls' passing. He weighed their bodies as precisely as possible before and after death. He filled the air with flour dust and watched for any unexpected movement of the air. He devised instruments to detect sudden changes of temperature. Nothing worked. And the fact that he couldn't measure the soul made it difficult for him to believe that it existed at all. To believe that the boy he had loved lived on.
In England, caught up as it was in the politics of religion, such questions were dangerous. Questions of doctrine were questions of state, and many a theologian had go
ne to the block for asking the wrong ones. More than once, his colleagues had cautioned him to choose a safer field of inquiry.
He realized Joan was looking at him. "The questions won't go away," he said.
She sighed. "There are questions that don't have answers."
"I won't accept that."
Finally, the needles stopped moving, and she set the hose aside. As she did so, a slim object slipped out from between the folds and clattered on the floor. She reached for it, but Parris was quicker, and swept it up before she could. It was a rosary.
"What is this?"
"You know what it is."
He thumbed the beads. "This is Mariolatry. Popish superstition."
She stood and faced him down. "That was my grandmother's, and her grandmother's before that. Our families have been praying to the Virgin for generations, and you think now just because some king decides—"
"It's not about the king, Joan. It's the Scriptures. They never speak of Mary as anything but a simple woman."
"You don't pray to Mary anymore?"
"Of course not."
She dropped her voice until he could scarcely hear her. "And our son? Do you pray for our son?"
Parris stood rooted in front of her, wanting to take her hands in his but knowing she would reject the gesture. "Peter is dead," he said, the words tearing a piece out of his heart even now. "If he's with the Lord, he doesn't need our prayers. If he isn't, there's nothing our prayers can do for him."
She cried out and slapped his face. He caught her wrists and held them. "Death is a great evil," he said. "Don't you see? We need to fight it. To hold it at bay, even conquer it, if we can. How can I fight it unless I study it?"
"I can't live in constant dread that my husband will be locked in the Tower." She pulled her hands away and crossed them over her chest.
"It's important work. It has to be done. And precious few have the knowledge or skill to do it."
"Is it more important than your wife? Or your daughter?"
Parris knew this was the point in the conversation when he was supposed to break. When he consoled her that she was more important than anything, when he made empty promises he had no intention of keeping. But this time he felt so very tired of the charade. "Yes," he said. "It is more important."
She drew in her breath, and he knew a line had been crossed in their marriage, maybe one he could never step back over.
Her eyes were cold. "Not in the house. If I find a body in my house again, I'll go to my sister's and never come back."
Parris wondered if she could actually do it. She loved London, loved the society, and finding a noble match for Catherine was her only goal in life. How could she do that from Derbyshire? Nevertheless, he bowed his acquiescence. He was exhausted, but the prospect of climbing into bed while she stared down at him with reproachful eyes and clacking needles was too unpleasant. When his manservant, Henshawe, tapped at the door, he was only too happy to leave the room.
"What is it?" Parris said, shutting the door behind him.
"A messenger, sir. He says he has a gift from his master, a man named Christopher Sinclair."
Chapter Four
THE messenger was the darkest African Parris had ever seen. It took Parris a few moments even to make out his outline in the dim dawn light. He wore dark livery broken only by a thin red cross on the chest. He was impressively muscled, and at his waist hung a curved sword.
"He wouldn't come in, sir," Henshawe said. "He insisted on waiting outside for you."
"You are the surgeon," the African said in a voice exotic with accent.
"I'm Stephen Parris. A physic, not a surgeon."
"At least during the day." His visitor laughed without showing his teeth, a disturbing rumble that didn't crack his stone face.
Parris didn't smile. What could this stranger know of what he did at night? The African held out a pale wooden box banded with iron.
"This is the gift from your master?"
The African shook his head. "It is not a gift, and he is not my master."
Parris looked at Henshawe and then back again. "I thought—"
"Never mind. Take good care of it."
Parris took the box. "What is it?"
"That is not part of the message." The African turned to go. "My 'master' will call on you later this morning."
"What does he want with me?" Parris called after him.
No response. The African mounted his horse and spurred it away. The clatter of hooves echoed down the road and then faded from hearing.
Parris stared at the wooden box, which was nicked and worn, the iron bands rusted in places and held by a simple swinging clasp. The wood itself was strange, so pale as to resemble ivory, but soft, a bit sticky, and aromatic. Parris opened it.
At once he clapped the lid back down, startled to find something alive inside. He brought the box into the house and opened it again more carefully, peering through the crack.
It was a beetle.
Its body was shaped in a smooth dome the size of a silver half crown, its wing covers hard and shiny black. Moving its legs with slow purpose, it tried ineffectually to scale the sides of the box. Tiny curlicues of pale green traced along its wing covers and head. The insect itself was intriguing, but not nearly as baffling as the question of what it was doing here. Why would Sinclair, a stranger, send him an insect in a box, regardless of how exotic?
The creature was still bravely scrabbling at the wall of its prison. There was an indistinct mark on its head, and Parris turned around to see it better in the sunlight now slanting through his window. As he turned, the beetle changed direction and began an assault on the opposite wall of the box, still leaving its head in shadow. Parris tried again, and again the beetle turned. No matter how he spun it about, the beetle changed direction so that it faced away from the sun.
Intriguing. Was it avoiding the light? He held a candle to the box instead, and the beetle did not change direction, allowing him to examine the marking on its head more clearly. It was the sun it didn't like, then. He blocked the sunlight with his body, putting the beetle into shadow, and turned the box around in his hands. Still, no matter how he oriented the box, the beetle faithfully crawled directly away from the window. Somehow it could sense the direction of the sun, even without seeing it.
Did it have to be the sun? Maybe the beetle always walked toward the west, regardless of the time of day. He wouldn't know for sure until evening, when the sun was on the opposite side of the sky.
His thoughts drifted back to Sinclair. As enjoyable as it was to apply logic to the mystery of the beetle's movements, that could hardly be the reason for the gift. Why had it been sent?
A servant brought a breakfast plate of bread, cheese, and thinly sliced meat, and Parris realized he hadn't eaten since the previous afternoon. He ate everything, and as an afterthought dropped a few crumbs of bread and cheese into the box for the beetle. He had no idea what it ate— green plants, probably— but perhaps the crumbs would keep it alive.
Before he could close the box, however, the beetle lifted its wing covers, extended its frail filament wings, and took buzzing flight. Parris held up the plate to stop it and corral it back toward the box, but the beetle flew straight through the plate and out the other side. It was impossible. He would have doubted his eyes before believing such a thing could happen, except that the beetle then flew straight through the wall as well, still aimed unfailingly west.
He ran to the wall and felt around the spot, telling himself it had simply landed and stopped buzzing, but knowing it wasn't true. He searched for cracks and crevices into which it might have crawled, but found none. On the other side of the wall was a storeroom, filled with jars of preserved food and house hold supplies, but there was no sign of the beetle there, either. It must have passed through the next wall and out of the house. The walls were made of stone, finely cut and mortared. It was solid rock, and the beetle had flown right through it.
TWO hours later, Henshawe
showed Christopher Sinclair into the parlor, and Parris had to revise his impressions again. Sinclair was not a polished courtier with powder and lace like Francis Vaughan. He had a vertical scar across his mouth and oddly colored eyes which, though not truly as orange as a tiger's as Felbrigg had claimed, shone with an animal energy. He wore a robe and turban like a mussulman. Younger than Parris expected, he was probably in his thirties, though the turban hid the color of his hair. He was tall and strong and restless, with a face not handsome, but intriguing, full of expression, full of life.
