A Court Affair (55 page)

“No, Madame,” he said adamantly to Mrs Forster, in a voice loud enough for me to hear through my half-opened door, which was as far as he would come, “better that I walk away
now
and have no part of this. I shall write to Lord Robert and tell him that in my opinion his lady has no need of the physick he recommends and that there is nothing I can do for her and that I must decline to undertake her treatment. If he disagrees, then with all due respect, better that he seek the advice of a physician with greater experience of her particular malady. And, in confidence, I tell you, Madame, I will
not
be hanged to cover another’s sin!”

And in truth I could not fault him, and I readily forgave him. Why should he throw away his life and a promising career to be Robert’s scapegoat? Had I been in Dr Bayly’s shoes, I think I might have done the same, though it would have hurt my heart and weighed heavily upon my conscience to turn my back on a soul in the throes of so much suffering. But if I could do nothing to ease that suffering,
why
should I risk being blamed when the inevitable occurred, when it could mean the gallows or ruin for me and the loss of everything I had worked so hard to achieve? Dr Bayly was not a bad man. He did the right and honourable thing and walked away rather than let Robert buy and use him for his own ends.

The days came and went. Sometimes they passed so fast, I lost count of them. Sometimes they dragged by like convicts trudging along weighed down by chains and shackles. My once-rosy cheeks were now as white as chalk, and even my gums had lost their healthy pink hue. My whole body was sore and ached as though I had been beaten and was mottled with bruises I could not explain; I knew I had done nothing to cause them. I suffered fevers that waxed and waned without rhyme or reason. Some days I found the strength to walk; other days I crawled. Often I awoke feeling as though I had not slept at all. I tried to rise but instead fell back into the arms of Sleep. Some days doctors came, an endless procession of them; they came to bleed me, and I would lie and watch listlessly as my blood poured into a basin, and marvel at how watery pale it looked, as though the bloom had faded from my blood as well as from my rosy cheeks. But the doctors just smiled and said I must eat plenty of rare red meat, juicy and red, the bloodier the better, even though the very thought of it made me sick, and drink red wine, and stuff myself with all the red berries my stomach could hold, all red like blood to brighten and strengthen my own.

I preferred to be outside in the park whenever I could, for Cumnor Place itself, despite Mrs Forster’s reassuring words upon my arrival, continued in a state of cold, perpetual gloom, which I could never grow accustomed to. Every time the wind rattled the windows, my heart felt as if it were trying to leap out of my chest and run away, just like I wanted to run away, but no matter how much I wanted to win back my life, to outpace Death, I could not run away from myself, from the disease and pain-racked body that housed my soul. There was no way to escape my fate and nowhere to hide from it. Death’s hand cupped and fondled my breast like a lover, but His touch withered and rotted instead of excited, it festered and inflamed my flesh instead of my passions, and it gave pain in the place of pleasure.

Mrs Forster tried to help me all she could. I drank barley water until I feared my bladder would burst just to please her. And I tried every remedy she recommended and tested the skills of this wise or that cunning woman, even those reputed to be witches, who came on the sly in the night to dose me with mysterious tonics and elixirs, some sweet, others bitter, to apply poultices either hot or cold, and to smear ointments on my breast that smelt so bad they made me even sicker. In one form or another—salves, ointments, poultices, plasters, and gums—my breast was slathered with olive oil, turpentine, rhubarb, castor oil, quicksilver, bitterage of gold, sulphur, vinegar, licorice, tincture of lead, a paste made of fox lungs and tortoise livers, crushed coral, chalk, and boar’s tooth, pulverised pearls, and alabaster, oil of roses, hemlock, cinnamon, deadly nightshade, treacle, mandrake, valerian, linseed oil, goat’s dung, crab’s eyes, and viper’s fat. But most of them hurt more than they helped. I would lie in my bed, my breast stinging, burning, and throbbing, impaled by stabbing pains beneath the dressing, and tears would fill my eyes, I felt such hopelessness and despair.

Upon Mrs Forster’s recommendation, I consulted a boastful Frenchwoman who described herself as a “wise wizardess”. She thought the flesh of my afflicted breast had a look she described as
“peau d’orange”,
like the pitted skin of an orange peel, and she spent hours rubbing my breast with oranges and put me on a diet of nothing but the juice and flesh of oranges for a month, hoping to cure “like with like”. But this “cure” only left me with a sore and burning throat and my skin sticky with the rancid odour of rotting flesh masked by the smell of oranges. Some even recommended charms that I should wear on my person or uttered spells over my body. There was a Cornish woman, whom I felt sure must be a witch, who burned seven crabs alive whilst she chanted and danced naked beneath a full moon, then mixed them with oil and rubbed the resulting concoction onto my breast with a heron’s feather. Another tried to burn the cancer out by applying a coating of sulphuric acid; he and his assistant held me down as I thrashed and screamed. Afterwards, my breast was so very red, inflamed, and swollen that it bled at the slightest touch. Another told me to be brave as he touched a hot iron to the bulging, tumorous mass. And other doctors, both dubious and esteemed, travelling charlatans and nostrum peddlers, came and went, with their leeches and lancets, enemas, plasters, purges, and potions, all of them leaving me feeling more tired and spent and mired in even greater pain and despair than when they found me.

Mrs Owen, who had been a wife and mother to two fine doctors, did her best to recall remedies that might ease if not cure me, and swore by the efficacy of enemas for all human ails. She fed me licorice pastilles until the very sight or mention of them sickened me and served me weekly with a vile and nasty purging beer in which watercress, treacle, licorice, rhubarb, red dock, raisins, honey, rue, lime, garlic, liverwort, feverfew, sassafras, figs, sugar, comfrey root, aniseed, lavender, saffron, egg yolks, and mashed hazelnuts were blended into the strongest beer.

They all meant well, I am sure, but nothing really helped, though, to make them feel better, I nodded and smiled and thanked them and said I felt a little better even when I didn’t at all.

But it was all to no avail. And many a night I woke up thrashing and screaming, my face wet with tears from a dream in which they all—Robert; his royal paramour, my jewel-encrusted enemy, the Queen; all the doctors and charlatans, witches and wisewomen I had seen; and Mr and Mrs Forster, Mrs Owen, and Mrs Oddingsells, the Hydes, and Sir Richard Verney—ran after me, chasing me, each touting a particular remedy and brandishing it high in the air—bottles of pills and potions, leeches, lancets, purgatives, charms, magical spells, roots and herbs they swore were a sovereign remedy—whilst I, in a stumbling, fear-blind panic fled before them, desperate to outrun them and these cures that were supposed to make me better but instead only made me more ill, running as fast as I could, encumbered by my full, heavy skirts, whilst Fear tugged at my hair, pulling me back, slowing me down, dragging me to the ground. And they all fell on me at once, forcing my mouth open wide, cramming and pouring their pills and potions down, forcing me to swallow, opening my veins to bleed me, putting leeches to suckle on my diseased breast, and lifting my skirts to inflict the immodest indignity of an enema. It was a
horrible
dream, and I
hated
it so much that if I wasn’t so very tired, I would have been afraid to go to sleep. I always awoke exhausted and feeling as if I had been running for my life the whole night through.

I think my illness made Robert repent some of his former cruelty and indifference, at least a little, at times. He seemed to remember and think of me more often after I became ill. After I came to Cumnor, I began to regularly receive pretty parcels from London. One day it might be an elegant black velvet hat fringed with gold, a cloak and muff made of the most magnificent sables lined with golden satin very like the colour of my hair, a bolt of heavenly blue silk to make a new gown, or green velvet slippers the colour of the grass to remind me in winter of when I used to walk barefoot and carefree in summertime, a bed gown of buttery yellow damask festooned with ribbons and lace, a rainbow of embroidery silks or a cunning mechanical songbird that actually sang, with its feathers beautifully enamelled, and my wonderful green chair, soft as a cloud that an angel in Heaven might have envied, all abloom with a garden of embroidered flowers, and, though he had never given a thought to it before, now Robert
always
made sure there were fragrant apple logs for my fire, just like I always had at Syderstone and Stanfield Hall. They were all such kind and thoughtful presents, not something just snatched from a shelf in a shop or from amongst a peddler’s wares; it was as though each one had been chosen carefully. And, for a time at least, I let myself dare to dream, and be deceived, that the cancer had done what I had been trying for so long but failed miserably to do—revive Robert’s tender feelings and remind him how much he used to care for me. But, oh, at what an exorbitant price! Now, if ever he came to my bed again, I had a body that would turn his lust to disgust!

But there were other packages that were not so pleasant. I never knew where or when I would find them—if they would come by messenger, or if I would find them lying at my door or on my windowsill waiting for me. Sometimes I even found them on the bench in the park where I liked to sit, or inside the drawers of my writing desk, or in my sewing basket. They were vile,
evil
tokens sent by someone who wished the worst on me. There were little dolls made of wax, always with a thorn driven through the breast. The wax had a rough texture that I found was caused by nail clippings being mixed in, and each doll wore a skirt made from bloodstained linen, like that used to staunch a woman’s monthly courses, and there was always a lock of golden hair just like mine glued to their heads. Pirto always tried to persuade me to throw them in the fire, but I was afraid to, nor could I bear to bury them, to put an effigy that was clearly intended to be me into the ground … it was too much like a grave. Another time a box arrived containing a gruesome wreath woven of prickly black hawthorn sprigs, black silk ribbon, desiccated toads, lizards, and rats with their tails braided together. Sometimes I found tiny wooden coffins with the little wax dolls inside, always with a lock of golden hair and a thorn impaling the left breast, and my name carved crudely upon the lid. And once, most cruelly, for it came masquerading as a beautifully wrapped gift from London, a locket, a rectangle of gold with black enamelled accents and a wreath of exquisite enamelled flowers, that opened to reveal a smiling, sapphire-eyed, ivory skeleton. Inscribed inside the coffin lid in bold black enamelled letters were the words:

“DEATH IS NEVER FAR AWAY.”

With a cry of horror, I flung it out the window; I could not bear to have it near me. The attempts to poison me had failed, and now Robert, or one of his lackeys, had resorted to witchcraft, to try to scare me to death with these ghoulish little horrors. And as my fear and desperation mounted, entwining, plaiting together with the pain to keep me from resting easily in my bed, more and more often I fell to my knees and prayed to God to deliver me from my desperation, to deprive these dark, sinister spells being worked against me of their power. “I am already cursed with cancer;
please,
save me from these witches and devils who work their dark magic against me!” I begged. The phantom grey friar bent his cowled head and seemed to pray along with me, but that only increased my terror.

One day Tommy Blount came riding up with a saddlebag full of apples and a treasure trove of new tales to tell me.

Dear Tommy, he always made my heart glad. One night, as we sat late by the fire in the Long Gallery, resting on piles of deep red velvet cushions strewn upon the hearth, roasting apples sprinkled in sugar and cinnamon in the big stone fireplace, with cups of steaming Lambswool warming our hands—he’d gotten the recipe from Pirto and had it brewed special just for me—his eyes told me what his lips were too shy to say.

But I turned my face away, saddened by the thought of what he would become someday. I couldn’t bear it. For I knew it was inevitable. A day
would
come when the riotous gingery curls would be cropped and tamed, subdued to lie flat, submissive as a wife, beneath a pearled and feathered velvet cap, and the sudden and sincere smiles would be replaced by false and affected ones, and those gentle, sympathetic eyes, windows a kind and sincere soul looked out of, would harden and see all through the stained glass of self-interest and regard the world as a great chessboard and everyone and everything on it as pawns to be manoeuvred, traded, bartered, and sold, and the child’s love of stories would be driven out to make room for facts, figures, politics, and court gossip and intrigue. It might be a slow death, but that sweet sincerity
would
die, and the charm that remained would be like a shell abandoned on the beach by the ambitious crab it had grown too small and cramped an abode for. I had seen it all happen before, and I didn’t want to see it happen again. I had once loved a kind and eager boy of seventeen and over ten years of marriage watched him grow into a hard and ruthless stranger who would do
anything
for riches, fame, and glory, to feed the always hungry flames of the ambition that burned within him where his soul had once been. I was glad I would not live long enough to see it happen to Tommy. It was too sad to mourn the death of a soul even as the body still lived.

Even though I turned away, he reached for me. I know I should not, but I let him kiss me. It had been
so
long since I had felt the tender touch of a man’s lips and hands and been the one to light the flame of his desire and feel it flare inside me as well as him. With this disease, I didn’t think I could any more. I thought the desires of the flesh were lost to the land of memory and dreams. I didn’t think my damaged body could still feel, much less ignite, desire any more, but I was wrong. I was wrong; I knew that as I melted blissfully into the arms of Tommy Blount, savouring and returning his warm, ardent, apple-sweet kisses. I suppose I could blame it on the heat of the fire, the lateness of the hour, the beer in the Lambswool, or wanting to grasp Life with both hands and be pulled up by it even as Death dragged me down, but that would be dishonest. A good excuse doesn’t always make a wrong right. The only intoxication was the heady sensation of being in a man’s arms and feeling like a desirable woman again.