by Alys Clare
I looked at her, taking in the alert, interested expression in her light eyes. I thought in that moment that it was more than likely she might know the household at Wrenbeare; she was too young, surely, to have attended Lady Clemence unless it had been as a very young child apprentice, but she could easily have been consulted by Agnes Lond as she tried and failed to conceive.
I had two choices. I could present my enquiry as if it were simply a general one, and the result of a stray thought that had occurred to me. Or I could come clean, reveal my interest in the Fairlight family and ask her how much she was prepared to tell me.
I was still looking into her eyes. As well as being beautiful, they were also full of intelligence. She would see through my ruse of a disinterested query even as I spoke it, so I opted for honesty.
‘I don’t need more mandragora, thank you,’ I said. ‘It worked just as you said it would, and afterwards the dogs were none the worse for it.’
She nodded. ‘Good. Go on.’
And then there was no option but to plunge straight in. ‘Do you know the family of Sir Thomas Fairlight, at the house known as Wrenbeare on the edge of the moors?’
Her bright expression turned sombre and I realized she’d heard the news. ‘Yes.’ Slowly she shook her head. ‘I cannot believe what has happened to poor Lady Clemence.’ She hesitated. ‘And Denyse found her body, I’m told.’
‘She did.’
Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘You were there?’
‘Yes.’ Since I’d come to her for information, it seemed only fair to give some too. ‘Not at the time, but soon after. I was summoned by Theophilus Davey, the coroner.’
She nodded. ‘Master Davey, yes. He wanted your opinion concerning the body?’
‘He did. There was no doubt she was dead, for the heart was missing.’
Judyth’s face paled. ‘Her heart … But why? Why should anyone do something so very brutal?’
‘I don’t know.’ Her horror at what I’d just told her was evident in her expression and I decided to capitalize on her compassion. ‘Some people are saying Denyse killed her mother.’
‘But not you?’
I shook my head. ‘No, but it may not be easy to still the gossiping tongues unless the true culprit can be quickly found.’ I felt guilty over the way I was misleading her, but I really did need her help. ‘I thought you might know the family, as indeed it seems you do, and, in answer to the question you just asked, what you can do for me is tell me everything you can about them.’ I saw the quick frown cross her brows and I hurried on. ‘This was, as you just said, a brutal crime, and what I’ve learned so far suggests that the reason for it lies in the past: to be specific, that it is somehow connected with Sir Thomas and what he may or may not have done.’
‘Sir Thomas,’ she repeated very softly. ‘I see.’ Then, a smile quickly appearing and as quickly vanishing again, she added, ‘Well, I don’t see, really. Why don’t you say what’s on your mind?’
I paused briefly to think, then began. ‘Clemence Sulyard married Thomas Fairlight when she was a very young woman. He married because he needed a wife to disguise his true nature, and she accepted him because nobody else had asked for her. She was plain and ungainly, and she perhaps felt she had failed in the prime duty of a maiden, which is to be attractive. Then, with marriage, she realized she was also failing in the main duty of a wife, because it was three years before her first daughter arrived and another six until the second one followed.’
‘Thomas Fairlight was not attracted to women.’
‘Yes, I know, but he must have forced himself to bed his wife from time to time for the two daughters to be born.’ I was on shaky ground here but I made myself go on. ‘Unless we are to believe that there were but two acts of generation, each of which resulted in the birth of one of Clemence’s two children – which could be true but for the fact that I’m told she had miscarriages between the births – then we must surely assume that intercourse was reasonably regular.’ I was confusing even myself. Judyth kept resolutely silent, and I had the distinct impression she was enjoying my discomfiture and determined to let me struggle on unaided. ‘Someone else I spoke to said that Clemence was not good breeding stock, and then, when I realized that her daughter Agnes is childless, I wondered whether the ease or the difficulty with which a woman conceives, carries and bears healthy children is passed on to her daughters. If she has any,’ I added somewhat lamely. I was beginning to feel very foolish under Judyth’s silent scrutiny.
For quite some time after I’d finished speaking the silence continued, although thankfully Judyth had looked away and was now staring out over the lavender bushes that encircled the little space where we sat. Then, at last, she sighed and said, ‘I will forgive your ignorance, Doctor, since I know full well that what limited professional experience you have so far had of women and their bodies is largely book-learned, although no doubt that is in the process of changing.’ She shot me a quick glance. ‘It is true that some women are not good breeding stock, as you put it.’ Her light emphasis on the words made me squirm, and I understood then how harsh and dismissive they must have sounded. ‘Sometimes there are very apparent reasons why a woman desperate for a child does not conceive. I can help if, for example, a particularly young and innocent couple are not entirely sure of the correct procedure, or if, as I have known, a thin and undernourished girl does not menstruate regularly and requires a better diet to make her body work as it should.’ She paused. ‘Sometimes the fault is beyond my help, as when a woman conceives with no difficulty but cannot carry a child beyond a few weeks or months, or when babies are born but are so sickly and frail that they do not survive.’ She sighed. ‘There is joy in my work, Doctor, but also unbelievable pain.’
I nodded. I didn’t feel able to speak, having nothing to say and doubting my voice would sound as steady as I’d like.
Presently she said, ‘In asking about Lady Clemence’s ability as a breeder, you do no more than follow what almost every other physician does, for you are all men and you view conception, pregnancy and birth as exclusively female matters. Why, can you tell me, do you all fail to realize that there is another side to the process?’
‘But the male role is over and done with right at the start!’ I protested. ‘The rest is up to the woman.’
‘Perhaps,’ she agreed. ‘Yet what makes up the baby? What turns a woman’s unfertilized egg into the foetus that nestles inside her womb and emerges as a living child?’
‘The sperm of the man,’ I replied promptly and impatiently. ‘Naturally, I know that!’
‘You may know it but you do not understand the implications,’ she said sternly. ‘You do not have the experience that I have, so sit and listen to what I’m telling you.’ She too sounded impatient, and in her case the mood was verging on anger. ‘I have known cases of women married to men and unable to bear a child; dismissed, no doubt, as poor breeders.’ I seemed to hear the dismissive tones of countless men in those two harsh words. ‘Then, widowed, those same women remarry and go on to bear healthy child after healthy child. Just why, Doctor Gabriel, do you imagine that happens?’ Leaning closer – so close that I could feel the heat emanating from her, see the fury in her eyes – she added in a hissing whisper, ‘And what of the old king, eh? Six wives, and but three children from all those hundreds, thousands of couplings, one of them dead before he reached manhood, one of them a sad, twisted woman whose sick mind told her it carried a child in her barren body when in truth it was no more than a growth! All of them, all six queens, poor breeding stock? Really, Doctor?’
She leaned back, panting slightly.
And I knew she was right.
It was something that had struck me on occasion before. Judyth was quite right to cite my limited medical experience of women and breeding, however, and I had not studied or indeed thought about the subject very much.
I thought about it now.
After quite a long time I said, ‘So you think it might have been
Sir Thomas who was the poor breeder?’
‘I do.’
‘And, if you are right, just what do you think ailed him?’
She gave me a long, pitying look. ‘What do you think?’
Riding home, I thought about all that she had told me. I should have realized; I knew that. My excuse – and after her critical analysis of me and my shortcomings I felt I needed one – was that, although I knew a great deal about the condition she suspected of causing Sir Thomas’s failure, it was in another guise and at a different stage of development. Now, kicking Hal to a canter, I wanted to be in my study, the long record of my years at sea spread out before me so that I could go back over all the cases I treated and documented.
As if to make up for what he saw as his earlier lapse, Tock was waiting, ready to take Hal and tend to him. I hoped he hadn’t been standing there all the time I’d been out but suspected he probably had. Samuel, picking up that I was in a hurry, did not detain me as I ran inside the house. There was no sign of Celia, and Sallie, after asking if I wanted dinner soon, shut herself up in her kitchen.
Then I was up the stairs and in my study, precisely where I wanted to be, my books open, a quill in my hand, paper and ink at the ready. And there were my drawings, my paragraphs of description, my detailed accounts of what I’d tried with this man or that, of what had helped, what had had no effect, what had caused pointless pain and made matters worse. I read, I looked, I made notes, I learned.
And what I learned was frightful.
We called it the French disease, the morbus Gallicus, and without doubt the French reciprocated and attributed its origins to the English. But in truth nobody could know for sure where it came from, for all that it had been around for decades and probably centuries. Setting aside my own notebooks, I got up and fetched a tome from my shelves. It was the fifth book in the series Practica in arte chirurgica copiosa, a work by an Italian surgeon, Giovanni de Vigo, written in 1514, in which he set out the ghastly progress of the disease from the first brownish, ulcerated pimples on the genitals to the headaches, rash, fever and joint pains that followed after a month or six weeks, so severe that the patient would emit cries of anguish. Sometimes the symptoms would abate, but only to reappear a year or more later.
I ran my eyes down de Vigo’s words, then fetched a second book, written thirteen years later by a Frenchman, Jacques de Bethencourt, which, making no bones about it, he entitled A New Litany of Penitence. For if he too had little idea where the sickness emanated from, he, like everyone else, knew full well how it was spread. Morbus venerus, he called it; venereal disease. It arose, or so he maintained, from illicit love, and so it was the malady of Venus.
Finally I looked at a work written in 1530 by a Veronese physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, in which he repeated the tale of a shepherd named Syphilus, who he claimed was the first man to suffer from the French disease. He ascribed the unfortunate shepherd’s name to the disease, and upon reading that, I was reminded that I’d heard other doctors in the Mediterranean refer to it thus, although to the best of my knowledge we did not do so in England.
The innumerable cases that I had observed and treated had been among my sailors. And that was why I had been so slow to comprehend: because I had never had a patient in whose body the disease still surged after a decade, two decades, three. It was an awful thought, to contemplate somebody who, believing themselves to have been sick in their youth but with the malady long past and all but forgotten, suddenly discovered on their body – and in their mind – evidence to the contrary.
The disease was feared and despised. And there was no hiding it, for its symptoms were all too evident. In its last phase there were abscesses, debility and madness and the sufferers were ostracized; despised because the marks they bore were perceived as the stigmata of sin.
There was no cure.
The most I had ever managed was an alleviation of symptoms. I would administer guaiacum, also known as holy wood, and mercury in the form of injections and ointments. Sometimes I’d suggest a sweat bath, as it was believed that profuse salivating and sweating could flush out the poisons. The only thing that did any lasting good was the mercury, and that produced the most terrible side-effects: gaping sores on the lips and inside the mouth, loss of teeth, even kidney failure.
I set aside my books, leaning back in my chair in despair at what I’d read; at the unwelcome reminder that all of us, even learned physicians, are helpless in the face of the virulent power of disease.
After some time, I went back to work.
Judyth had told me something which, although I was reluctant to believe, I suspected was correct: that a woman who has been infected with the disease can, if the sickness is in an active state at the time, pass it on to the child she carries. And a child so infected is sickly, does not thrive, has rashes and sores on the body and inexplicable fevers. There are also quite often deformities, since the bones and the organs do not develop as they should. As I turned the pages, eyes scanning the wise words of others, I accepted that Judyth had been correct.
And I began to understand the truth.
I stood up, stiff from sitting so long hunched over my books. The tray of food that Sallie had brought up unknown hours ago sat untouched. I wasn’t hungry.
Now I was on my feet I was restless. I paced up and down the room, impatient for something, although I didn’t know what. I felt that I had made a discovery that was somehow very relevant to what was happening, but I couldn’t for the life of me think how.
I couldn’t contain my sudden energy. I dashed out of the room, down the stairs and outside to the yard. Anticipating my need, Samuel was already tacking up my horse.
FIFTEEN
It was already quite late in the afternoon, judging from the angle of the sun. I knew I should go to see Theo, for he would have been throwing himself into the investigation of Lady Clemence’s death all day and could very well have much to tell me.
But all my thoughts were bent on what had occupied me all day. I knew myself well enough to understand that I would be no use to Theo or anyone else until I had followed that particular trail all the way to the end.
So for a third time I rode out to Buckland.
I gambled on Josiah having packed up his fishing for the day, if indeed he had been down by the river, and being back at his house, perhaps thinking about his supper. I tethered Hal outside the fence enclosing his small garden and went up the path to the door.
It was open, and from within I heard Josiah humming to himself. I paused only to tap on the door, going on inside and calling out, ‘Doctor? It’s Gabriel Taverner. Is it all right if I come in?’
I went through the kitchen into the scullery, where he was bent over a bowl washing out a gutted trout. ‘Why bother to ask,’ he said mildly, ‘since you are already here?’
I grinned. ‘Sorry. I have to talk to you.’
‘Ah.’ Carefully he dried his fish and laid it on the marble slab on which the bowl sat, covering it with a piece of cloth. ‘Then you’d better come through and sit down.’
I think he knew why I was there, even before I’d said more than those few words.
We took our seats and without preamble I said, ‘You told me that Clemence Fairlight was of poor breeding stock, for in nearly twenty years of marriage she bore only two daughters, although she also suffered at least a couple of miscarriages.’
‘That is the truth!’ he protested hotly, as if I’d accused him of lying.
‘The childbearing history is true, I grant you,’ I agreed. ‘Although I dispute that the absence of more children was any fault of Lady Clemence’s.’
‘She—’ he began. Then, meeting my eyes, he stopped.
‘I have spent much of the day studying the opinions of learned men,’ I said softly. ‘Men who know so much more about their subject than I, and who have taken the trouble to observe and record.’ I leaned closer to him. ‘I understand that you cannot breach the confidential nature of the doctor’s relationship with
his patient, so I shall not ask you to.’ He relaxed infinitesimally. ‘Instead,’ I went on, ‘I shall tell you what I believe happened to Thomas Fairlight and to the unfortunate and recently dead woman who had the misfortune to become his wife.’
Josiah opened his mouth to protest, his eyes wide with distress. But then, slowly, he subsided. He nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said dully.
‘Last time I was here,’ I began, ‘you told me of Sir Thomas’s wild youth. Now what I believe is that in one of those early sexual encounters he was infected, and he suffered the onset of the symptoms that I myself treated so many times during my years as a ship’s surgeon.’
I waited to see if Josiah would protest, or make some comment. He did neither.
‘Now the nature of my work at sea meant that I rarely, if ever, had the chance to follow up a case of morbus venerus,’ I continued. ‘Sufferers went out of my care, or because of some injury or incapacity they left the sea, or they were killed. Thus it is that in my years as a doctor I have never seen what happens to a man – or, I suppose, a woman – who has carried the disease in their body for decades.’ I had his rapt attention now; I could tell by how very still he was sitting.
‘As I just said, I have today been rectifying this gap in my experience. I now know how the sickness, pretending to have left the body, in fact does nothing of the sort. How it lurks, unseen, unfelt, biding its time, sometimes putting in a brief appearance and providing the sufferer with a fresh outbreak of sores, pains, fever, perhaps some abscesses. Then, once again, the malady goes dormant. But as the years go on the recurrences grow more severe, and in time the patient’s mind is affected.’
I paused again, for I thought I had heard Josiah give a sigh. Looking up at me, he nodded and waved an impatient hand. ‘Continue,’ he said.
‘This afternoon I read a description of a man in the throes of the final stage of morbus venerus,’ I said. ‘I will summarize, if I may. He went deaf and almost blind. His character altered, so that where he had been amiable and cheery, he became violent, highly suspicious, convinced his loved ones were trying to kill him. He was in constant, agonizing pain, in his head, in his muscles. His memory went and he could not concentrate for more than a few moments at a time, after which his mind would soar away into horrible visions that he believed were real events, being enacted in the room where he lay. His face became strangely expressionless. He was unable to control his bladder or bowels. His heart pained him and its beat became inconstant and erratic. He—’
