Portrait of an Unknown Woman (36 page)
They were hardly aware of me
there, on a cushion in the corner of the parlor, under the window, in the fading light, with my embroidery. John, at his desk, was listening, enthralled, to Dr. Butts, on the bench, expounding his theories on the causes and treatment of plague in his reedy, high-pitched voice. I hadn’t minded at all that Dr. Butts couldn’t talk about anything except his knowledge of the human body. I’d hoped to learn so much from hearing England’s greatest physician discuss the science of medicine with my learned husband. But if I were honest, my first few experiences of listening to their professional conversations were proving a disappointment.
Perhaps my own education had been too much based on skepticism, on marrying the findings of learned men and books with the common sense of the simple wise women of the street. What had fascinated me in medicine was the examination of disease—the intellectual challenge of painstakingly assessing symptoms—and the gentle application of whatever minimal herbal remedies tradition suggested might calm and cure the patient, from aqua vitae to cleanse a wound or relieve the pain of an aching tooth, to herbal lotions and grease for smallpox and measles scabs.
Of course, those were simple skills, perhaps not sophisticated enough for the treatment of the kings and courtiers Dr. Butts dealt with. But some of the great theories that were taught at medical schools and occupied the minds of serious physicians of his stature, which I was now hearing for the first time, seemed uncannily like the superstitions of the odder salesmen on the street outside. They featured astrology, magic, and even, at times, the application of the unicorn horn sold by the likes of Mad Davy. I couldn’t take them seriously.
I stabbed a needle into the heart of a silk flower, puzzling over what was making me doubt all Dr. Butts’s knowledge. I didn’t have the experience to know whether the human pulse really beat in dactyls in infants and in iambs in the old, which he’d just told us had been the learned Pietro d’Abano’s contribution to medical knowledge, or whether there could be, as he said, nine simple varieties and twenty-seven complex varieties of musical rhythms in our pulses that made up part of the
musica humana
of our bodies, which could be described in terms of comparison with animals as, among other things, antlike, goatlike, or wormlike, and which changed as we aged. Yet, even if I didn’t know what caused plague, I couldn’t credit what Dr. Butts had just been saying about it either: that the particularities of one person’s horoscope, or the balance of the four bodily fluids within his body, contained the secret of whether or not he personally would get sick during an epidemic of plague, when other people all around were dying.
“It’s too dark for me to sew anymore,” I murmured. “If you’ll excuse me.” and I slipped away. Perhaps it was because they were so entranced with their ideas that they hardly noticed me go.
“Good night, my dear,” Dr. Butts said absently as I reached the door, but John was still gazing at him with that disciple’s look of hushed devotion and didn’t even turn round. (He looked like that at me most of the time too, I thought, suddenly critical; but did he always look so foolish when he did?)
I put the embroidery down on a table and climbed the stairs as quietly as I could, with the memory of that conversation still hot on me. It took me a long while, as I prepared myself for bed, to reason myself back to a kind of understanding. Of course John had to follow every t
urn of his new master’s mind. It was only right for him to do so with respect; and natural too, since John, an orphan like me, had always sought out the kindly guidance of older men. Equally, I told myself firmly, it was only right for Dr. Butts to reexamine every kind of old folk remedy in the light of the university men’s new thinking. Yet I still thought some of Dr. Butts’s ideas for treatment were frivolous and silly at best; at worst they were cruel and thoughtless.
When John stumbled into the darkened room an hour or so later, and got into the bed beside me, I found I couldn’t look into his eyes. So I shut mine and pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want to look into his face and see the reverent stupidity I thought I’d glimpsed downstairs—a look which, for a moment, had stripped his features of the beauty I usually saw in them. That wasn’t a look I’d seen much of in the men who surrounded Father, whose minds were always as sharp as sword blades, whose eyes sparkled with lively, skeptical questions. Apart from my weeks of lying-in, it was our first night together without making love.
Margaret only laughed when I asked her.
“Heavens, no,” she said cozily, settling her hands on her belly, which was already round with another baby. “To tell you the truth, Meg, I’m actually relieved to be out of the hothouse atmosphere Father creates around himself. All that obsessiveness. I don’t miss it a bit.”
“And you don’t miss the way Father’s friends go to the very heart of the ideas they’re discussing?” I persisted, disconcerted. “You don’t feel we’ve settled for second best by marrying husbands who don’t have it in them to do that?”
She grinned, almost impishly. She’d stopped behaving like England’s most learned woman since she left Chelsea for Will’s home at Eltham. She looked better for it too. She was glowing with happiness. She shook her head.
“I love Will just the shambling way he is!” she said with no doubt in her voice, and no offense at the question. “Of course I love Father too, but he’s impossible,” she said, seeing me still looking unconvinced. “Always in the grip of an idea . . . doesn’t come to meals . . . sits up half the night in the New Building writing . . . and fills the house with priests and protégés who end up staying on for years. I know it drives Alice half mad with frustration, however well she hides it. She never has her husband or her house to herself. It’s no life for a wife.
If you really want to know, Meg, I only wish Will would do what John’s done and find some nice sensible new master to adore. Preferably someone abroad, whom he’d have to write to rather than go and see. Will spends far too much time hanging round Father, doting on him. And I’d like him to be with us at Eltham, so I didn’t have to traipse up to London or Chelsea so much with the children.
What I want to do more than anything is plant a really beautiful new garden at Well Hall,” she said, and her eyes sparkled at the idea, “somewhere the children will be happy playing. My dream is to have Will in it too, not lurking around here, getting all worked up about Father’s latest ideas.” She laughed sweetly. She meant it. I wished I had her gift for contentment.
The two women brought the man to the church door before they called me over. It was December by then, with the kind of snowless, loveless cold that turns earth to iron. I was shivering even under the cloak I’d thrown on by the time I’d walked the ten paces across the flagstones.
They were respectable-looking women in anonymous shrouds of gray wool. One, judging by her weight and gait, might have been my age; the other could have been her mother, but their anguish had turned both into ageless spectral sister hags. It was still dark; too early for crowds. I think they’d been waiting for a while. I think Mad Davy, hunched over at their side, wanted to make sure Father and John were out of the house before knocking at my door. For once he wasn’t grinning. He just jerked a thumb at the two women and trotted away. “He says you’re good with herbs,” the younger one quavered. “Can you do anything, missus?” and she pointed at the human-size pile of rags on a plank in the doorway. She was heaving, breathless, hiding her hands in her blanket, and her eyes, puffy and bruised with past tears, had an agony of hope in them. The older woman didn’t speak. She was breathing in great gulps of air and holding her sides; I didn’t know whether it was fear or exertion that had turned her face purple even in that cold and got her tongue. I had a feeling they’d been carrying the man themselves.
He was as good as dead, of course. I should have known from their faces. I had him brought into the quiet dry room by the stables where I saw the simple people who sometimes came asking for treatment. (There’d be someone most weeks, some desperate-looking soul who’d heard that I’d gone out to look after the poor during the sweating sickness and believed I might know a poultice for their ailments or a binding for their wounds.) When the servants had gone, puffing and blowing, I pulled away the blanket. The man underneath had injuries I’d never seen or even imagined possible. For a nauseating moment, I couldn’t do anything except stare. The wounds looked methodical. The body below the lolling head was crushed; arms broken straight across just above the wrist and elbow; legs broken straight across just above ankle and knee; and the surface in between a mangled stew of imploded ribs and twisted back and great dark bubbles of blue and red. There was blood coming from his
anus. There was blood coming from his ears. He wasn’t quite dead; there were little whimpering noises coming from the smashed mouth, under a blancmange of swellings and caked blood where eyes and nose could only be guessed at.
“I can clean him,” I whispered at the women, hushed by a brutality I could only guess at. My expression had already extinguished the last flicker of hope in their eyes. “I can make him comfortable . . . give him poppy oil. But shouldn’t we call the priest?”
They flurried. Looked around, looked at each other. Looked trapped. Shook their heads. Moved protectively toward each other, then toward him. Stood shielding him from me, as though I’d suddenly become part of their problem.
“I’ll clean him up a bit, then,” I whispered, into the harshness of their breathing, trying to give them relief. And I fetched a pail of the horse’s drinking water myself from the nearest stable. His bay head turned my way over the stall; gentle curiosity in his soft eyes, breath coming in white clouds, like mine. By the time I came back in with the bucket, slopping puddles on the floor, the women were at their man’s side, their backs shutting me out again, muttering at him. They shied away from me as I approached and went silent. But I heard the last word. “Amen.”
My hands were shaking as I approached that ruined, gargling body. I didn’t want to make things worse; I was frankly scared to touch these injuries. But before I could touch the corner of my cloth to his face, his mouth and slits of eyes opened. A word or two came out—or at least a sound or two that might have been words if his mouth hadn’t been so bashed about.
The women started back toward him; we all stared; and he shivered into stillness, with bubbles of sticky blood coming from ears and mouth. The white puffs that had been rising into the air from his face stopped.
“He’s gone, then,” the younger woman said. A flat voice, unexpectedly loud. She looked around, vaguely threatening, defying me to silence or contradict her. And when I nodded agreement, she stepped awkwardly toward him, then stretched her hand forward to touch his bloody forehead. Her palm was almost as torn and blistered and bleeding from the w
eight she’d been carrying as the dead man’s face. She touched at the puffed-up eye slits as if she could somehow shut them properly and dignify the face into a semblance of sleep. The older woman went to the body too and leaned down to kiss his forehead. “My Mark,” she said, then straightened up. No tears. She was probably his mother.
“Do you know . . . ,” I whispered, chilled to the bone by this death and the suppressed anger in these women’s grief, “. . . what happened?”
The younger woman looked back at me with something like pity on her face, or maybe contempt. “Don’t you?” she said. “Don’t you, missus?”
I shook my head, but I could see she was suspicious of my answer. “You should come round where we live, then,” she went on, as loudly and brutally as she dared. “We get a lot of it our way.” Then she looked harder at me; something changed in her. She laughed—more of a bark. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said. “He met the Scavenger’s Daughter, didn’t
he?” When I still didn’t respond, except with bewilderment, she shrugged, turned away, and muttered. “Ask your father. He knows.”
Her tone made me prickle; but I thought perhaps she was blaming me for not being able to save her brother’s or husband’s life. So I put a hand on the mother’s shoulder instead, and felt it shivering. “We could have him buried here?” I asked, and the older woman shook her head, unable to speak, clearly trying to choke down her grief for now, but dead against the notion of burial at St. Stephen’s.
