A Court Affair (59 page)

For the first time since I realised that I had cancer, I felt as if hope hadn’t entirely forsaken me. But it was only, I think, that I wanted
so much
to believe. I tried to deny it, to pretend and ignore it, when I continued to worsen, to hide beneath the balm of the medicines Dr Biancospino gave me, bittersweet elixirs that made me feel as if I were floating just below the surface of a placid river, the water either warm or cold, whichever my feverish or chilled body most wanted, hiding from the pain that lurked above, waiting to lunge and grab and sink its fangs back into me.

It was getting harder and harder. Every day I felt my energy, my strength, slipping further away, and myself falling, fainting feebly into the arms of lethargy even though I
tried
to hold on,
tried
to fight it. Every moment I was awake, a part of me wanted only to sleep. The least little movement could bring an excruciating burst of pain, as if Death himself reached out his cold, skeletal hand to squeeze my heart and steal my breath away or land a hammer blow against my bones. I began to suffer pains in my shoulders, an aching, almost unbearable pressure, as if someone endowed with great strength were standing behind me, pressing with all his might, bearing down upon them. And sometimes I had similar pains in my hips, chest, and back. Sometimes I thought pain had stealthily, one by one, replaced all the bones that made up my spine; it seemed to be made of pure pain now. I was also often troubled by headaches, when I had hardly ever had them before. My eyes were now glad of the gloom inside Cumnor, as I shrank from the sun I had once so dearly loved to be out and about in; now it made my eyes ache as if it were piercing them with needles of molten light. I had to turn my face away, squeeze my eyes shut tightly, and fight with all my might the urge to sink down right where I was, weak and weary, and go to sleep even as the pain thrummed all along the length of my body from top to toe like a plucked lute string.

Some days getting out of bed was just
too
much for me, though I tried faithfully every day, as Dr Biancospino said I should, telling me it was good for me to sit up, put on my pretty clothes, and stir myself a bit. To lie abed would only weaken me more and invite bedsores, he said; it was better to keep moving, albeit with all due caution and care. And I always tried to do just that, to dress and be up and sitting in my beautiful flowered chair beside the fire on the days when Dr Biancospino came to call. I wanted him to see how hard I was trying, and the vain woman in me wanted him to see me looking my best. Sometimes I even dared to venture outside, to sit on a bench in the park, just to get away from the stale odours of the sickroom, the fever sweat, chamber pot, and medicines, and the perfume that tried to mask it all, though as time passed, those days became fewer and rarer, going up and down the stairs hurt so much, like knives of agony stabbing into my ribs and back, and by the time I reached the top, or bottom, I was breathless and exhausted, and it took all the will I had to go on.

Finally a day came when Dr Biancospino admitted it too, that all his remedies had been in vain, like a sliver of ice tossed into a pot of boiling water in an attempt to cool it.

It was a Saturday—I remember it well—a grey and dreary day that typified this dismal, cold, wet summer. I had declined an invitation to join the other ladies for cards; just the thought of their catty chatter and the thrusts and jabs Mrs Forster and Mrs Oddingsells aimed at each other was more than I could stand. I was sitting by the fire, just letting the day pass by. I had put on a pretty dress and hood of pale pink brocade shimmering with silver threads and frills of delicate silver lace, and I had a beautiful pale yellow shawl the colour of fresh-churned butter that Robert had sent, embroidered with brightly coloured fruits, flowers, birds, and animals, which I never tired of looking at.

When Dr Biancospino arrived, I was stroking the arm of my chair and admiring an intricately embroidered pale pink flower with a cherry red heart, embellished with golden and silver threads that glimmered in the firelight. Dr Biancospino drew up a stool and took my hands in his. He met my eyes and said that it was time for him to speak boldly of a more aggressive, but
very
dangerous way in which we might attack my cancer—a procedure most would consider more barbaric butchery than surgery, as it would result in lifelong pain and the most drastic and permanent disfigurement, if the shock of the knife cutting or an infection afterwards did not kill me. He described it to me, and I forced myself to listen, even though I felt sick and faint with horror. I wanted to run away from his words, I didn’t want to hear them, I didn’t want to think about what he was describing, but I hadn’t the strength to run, and there was nowhere to run to. I had to sit, listen, and face the truth. And he was right, it made perfect sense; if the disease was to depart, so too must the infected breast. So I braced myself, my fingers digging hard into the arms of my chair, and forced myself to listen as he described the procedure. The patient was made to lie flat upon a table, bound with leather straps, then large, new, and well-sharpened fishhooks attached to a series of ropes, strung overhead as pulleys, were inserted into the diseased breast, and the ropes pulled to lift it up, off the chest. The surgeon then, as quickly as he could, cut away the diseased breast and cauterised the wound with hot irons. The pain was excruciating, even with a potion to dull it, and many never left the table alive; the pain caused their hearts to stop, and those who did live often succumbed to fever and infection within a few days’ or weeks’ time. The rare ones who survived had pain and disfigurement replace cancer as their constant companion until Cancer came back to take the life he had already staked a claim to when he first marked their breast.

“I have myself performed this operation but rarely, and only upon six women,” Dr Biancospino said gravely. “Two died upon the table, one survived three days, the other a day short of a fortnight, only to die in an inferno of festering pain and fever. One lived for another four years before the cancer returned; the other is still alive—for now—but she lived to dance at her daughter’s wedding and hold her first grandchild. I will not lie to you, Amy, if you agree to gamble with your life, the dice are not loaded in your favour, and I cannot predict—I cannot even hazard a guess—whether you will win or lose, or if you win time, how much.”

“I understand,” I said softly, grimacing as I levered myself up from my chair and walked across the room to stand before the beautiful Venetian looking glass Robert had sent me, its silver frame a-bloom with golden buttercups.

I stood there for a long time, staring at myself, so thin and pale and wan, remembering the Amy I used to be, rosy-cheeked, plump, round, and robust. I remembered a time when Robert had called me his “gold and pink alabaster angel” when I used to wait for him in bed, longing and ready for his embrace, with my golden hair spread across the pillows, and my nakedness tantalisingly veiled in a bed gown of pale pink lace. If I submitted to this surgery, I could never again take sensual delight in being a woman; I could never give or receive carnal pleasure, lest the lover recoil in horror at the sight of the ugly, scarred, sunken hollow where my left breast had once been, with the right one beside it as a reminder of the creamy pink-tipped dessert to delight a lover it used to be. This was my only chance to live, but was it worth taking—was it a life worth saving? The cancer had already ravaged my body, spoiled my beauty, stolen my flesh, and sapped my vitality. Was what Dr Biancospino’s knife would do any worse? My sore and oozing breast was not fit to be seen; it was an object to arouse disgust, not desire. Would a scarred and sunken crater on my chest be any less so? But what did I have to live for? What did I have to hope for? Everything that mattered to me was already gone. Robert would never love me again; he would never renounce the Queen and come back to me; he wanted me dead or divorced. And what other man would have me as I was now or if I submitted to and survived the surgeon’s knife? My beauty was gone, and I didn’t have that magical, magnetic confidence like Elizabeth that sometimes allows plain or ugly women to attract admirers. I didn’t even have a fortune any more. When Robert married me, I was a Norfolk heiress, with three manors and a flock of 3,000 sheep, apple orchards, and fields of barley. Now all I had left was me, a tired and damaged, disease-ravaged woman eight years past twenty who had failed at everything in a woman’s life that matters.

I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I did not realise Dr Biancospino had come to stand behind me until I saw his face reflected in the glass behind me.

“If you choose to have the surgery, to fight and maybe even win, and defy Death, you will still be beautiful,” he said, “and any man who thinks otherwise is a shallow fool.”

“Thank you,” I said quietly as the tears dripped down my face. I
wanted
to believe, I
wanted
to hope, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it! But I didn’t want to disappoint dear Dr Biancospino. “I … I need time to think,” I said. “I am so very tired, I just want to lie down and rest for a while, and later … later I will think on all that you have said to me and … and then decide.”

He turned me round to look at him, and his eyes burned into mine, and I felt the fire of his soul trying to will me to live, to fight for my life, even at the cost of my breast. He raised his hand and caressed my tear-dampened cheek.

“Believe!”
he whispered urgently.
“Believe!”

He took me by the hand and led me to my bed. Gently, he turned me round and unlaced my pink gown, carefully easing it, and my petticoats, down over my hips to pool round my feet like an open flower. I was surprised that he didn’t call for Pirto but chose to attend me himself, as though he had doffed the cap of physician and donned that of a lady’s maid instead, but I said nothing, and, as I had always done before, trusted myself in his confident, capable hands. He held my hand as I stepped out of my skirts, and when I sat down on the bed, he knelt before me and removed my pink slippers and turned up the hem of my shift, up above my knees, to untie the pink silken bows of my garters and roll down my stockings. He plucked out the pins that held my hood in place, and then he helped me to lie down, lifting my cold feet as I laid my head upon the pillows. He covered me and came to sit on the side of the bed, gazing down at me silently, never saying a word, just looking at me, stroking my hair, smoothing it over the pillows in waves of shining gold. Then he turned away and busied himself with the medicines on the table by my bed. He poured some wine into a goblet and added the familiar bitter white powder, that harbinger of strange dreams, derived from a pretty red poppy. Oh, how much I
loved
it for dulling the pain and, at the same time,
hated
it for the way it muddled my mind and made it feel heavy and befuddled upon waking, laboriously trying to separate reality from the realm of dreams. This time he added more of the powder, to make it stronger, to give me a deeper and longer rest, and I was glad. I wanted and needed it. I reached for the goblet and drank it down, almost greedily, never minding the burn and bitter aftertaste, then fell back against the pillows and shut my eyes.

He sat with me a little longer, stroking my hair, as my eyelids grew heavy and I started drifting off towards sleep and went, like a woman in love, into the arms of Morpheus. Was that the name of the god of sleep? It seemed a century ago that I had read the book of mythology to try to better myself for Robert. And it didn’t really matter any more; regardless of his name, the god of slumber I had found was both a cruel and tender lover, who, in league with the medicine, liked to play games with my mind and leave me hopelessly befuddled and afraid that I was losing my mind. But this day, I was too tired to care. Let them have their fun, let the god of sleep and the white powder play, as long as I got to sleep.

Dr Biancospino bent and pressed a chaste kiss onto my brow.
“Believe!”
he whispered again, and then he left me.

I slept long and deeply, dreams barely rippling, like a gentle breeze blowing upon the calm waters of my rest, so slight that I could not remember or be disturbed by them.

Morpheus, or whatever his name was, was kind that afternoon, but sometime late in the night I was roused by a persistent hammering that sounded as if it were coming from right outside my door. But I felt as if my head had been glued to my pillow, and my body to the mattress. I just could not rouse myself or even call out to Pirto. Surely no one was making repairs at this late hour? Surely no loose panelling or floorboard could be so urgent that it could not wait until day? It must have been midnight, the witching hour, or even later. And then it stopped, and I thought no more about it until the pressing need of my body to be relieved forced me from my bed. After I had availed myself of the chamber pot, before I climbed back into bed, I remembered the curious hammering and went and opened my door to look out.

My scream shattered the peace of what was left of the night, for there, nailed onto my bedchamber door, was a dried, wrinkled, and red sheep’s heart impaled with several sprigs of hawthorn, and, beside it, a small clay figure of a woman, with a nail driven through the middle of her chest, pinning her tiny body to the wooden door, and a lone hawthorn sprig piercing her left breast. A lock of golden hair was stuck to her head, and a bit of stained and bloody bandage formed a skirt around her hips to tell me who it was meant to be—
me!
I slid to the floor in a dead faint, dimly aware of numerous people in nightclothes with concerned and alarmed faces clustering around me, leaning over me with lighted candlesticks in their hands.

I awoke hours later in my bed. Everyone tried to tell me that it had just been an evil dream, a nightmare, and that I should think no more about it, but even though they had been removed, I knew what I had seen—dark omens, the signs of black magic, a death spell, nailed to my door. If cancer and poison couldn’t kill me quickly enough, then someone was determined to frighten the life out of me. And when, later that day, I thought I caught a glimpse of the dark-cloaked figure of Richard Verney walking in the park, deep in conversation with Mr Forster, I was
certain
I knew who it was. Mrs Forster tried to tell me that he had merely come on an errand for my husband, to deliver some papers to Mr Forster, who, as my husband’s treasurer, managed all his accounts, as well as a purse of gold for my own expenses, and that he had already gone away again, but I refused to believe it was an innocent errand rather than an evil one. Richard Verney was my husband’s creature, his most devoted minion, and he had already tried to take my life twice, first by poison and then by hiring Red Jack. Only my departure from Compton Verney had saved me, but now … now I knew that he and his evil, murderous intentions had followed me to Cumnor.