The Devlin Diary (4 page)

She examines the mademoiselle carefully, first checking the hue and temperature of her skin to help determine which of the humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, or black bile—are out of balance. The patient is burning up yet complains of chills, indicating a morbidity of the blood. She is languorous, her vital spirits low. She responds to Hannah’s litany of questions with one-word answers, and even these seem to require more strength than she possesses.

Hannah takes up one of Louise’s wrists to feel her pulse: it’s weak and sluggish. Her plump, pale, childlike hand has delicate long fingers and perfectly clean, trimmed nails. A hand that has never known work and never will. Hannah feels it trembling with fever and with fear. The king’s mistress is afraid not only of dying, she understands, but more immediately of losing everything: her beauty, her lavish rooms overlooking the Thames, her rubies and emeralds, her monarch’s love. And even though Louise de Keroualle is surrounded by wealth of a kind that most people cannot even imagine, a stab of pity pierces Hannah’s heart.

She lifts the soft, weightless blanket to make a further examination of the mademoiselle’s body, the necessary inspection of her female parts. The mademoiselle gave birth only three months ago, and for this reason Hannah will not bleed her. Even in the overly sanguinary, she has found that bloodletting can increase a new mother’s weakness and fatigue, even engender melancholy in some cases. She scrutinizes Louise’s thighs for scurvy and her toes for signs of gout. These investigations are routine, however, an afterthought. She has already found exactly what she expected to find, almost from the moment she walked into the room.

“You may rest now,” she says, smoothing the duvet back into place. Louise’s eyes are closed, her breathing labored but steady; she’s already sinking deep into a feverish sleep. Hannah sits down on the embroidered settee next to the bed and opens her medicine case. The removable top shelf contains jars of ointment and bottles of tinctures and syrups. The space underneath cradles instruments: a scalpel and a dou
ble-edged knife, called a catlin, for minor surgeries, a lancet for opening veins. She takes out a few simple decoctions of chamomile, fennel, and nettles and sets them on the bedside table. She’ll ask the maid to combine them with a pitcher of small beer and instruct her to give Louise one cup every hour, until Hannah returns tomorrow morning with the other medicines the mademoiselle will require.

She extracts the most familiar bottle, a glass vial in the top right corner. This is not for Louise but for herself. The liquid inside is as dark as strong coffee, slightly viscous from the sugar solution and bitter in spite of it.
Papaver somniferum,
mithridate,
diacordium,
tincture of opium, theriac, treacle, laudanum, poppy syrup: so many names for what is essentially the same thing, her salvation. She stirs the contents with a slim glass wand, then leans her head back, mouth open. From the wand she lets six drops fall on the back of her tongue. As she swallows, the acrid taste makes her spine shiver. She has come to anticipate with pleasure this one quick convulsion, for it means that soon she will feel some relief.

Hannah returns the bottle to its place among the others and thinks about what she will say and how she will say it. People seldom profit by being the bearer of bad news. How seriously should she take Arlington’s threat of jail? Her father once told her that she should never underestimate what people will do for love or for money, especially at court. She stands and takes a moment to prepare herself before she goes in search of Lord Arlington and Madame Severin, to tell them that the king’s favorite mistress has the clap.

The Tuesday before Michaelmas term

I
T WAS A
dream come true. Claire Donovan stood, awed and excited, in the center of Trinity College’s Great Court, gazing at the sixteenth-century structures enclosing the renowned courtyard. Each spired and crenellated building on the Great Court’s periphery was a monument in its own right: the Tudor brick-and-mortar Great Gate, the vine-covered Master’s Lodge, the imposing, peaked-roof hall, the elegant chapel. Until yesterday, she had seen the college only in photographs.

Claire had always hoped to teach in a venerable academic institution, but until her fateful trip to Venice four months ago her ambition had never vaulted beyond Harvard’s ivy-covered walls, much less all the way across the Atlantic to England. She sighed audibly with pleasure at her surroundings. It didn’t get much more venerable than this. Founded by Henry VIII in 1546, Trinity’s antecedents stretched all the way back to 1317. Her new place of employment was not only one of the oldest schools in Cambridge but also the largest and traditionally the most aristocratic, being the college of choice of the British royal family. Its graduates included six prime ministers, numerous prize-winning physicists and mathematicians, world-famous poets, celebrated philosophers. Its members had tallied up over thirty Nobel
Prizes, more than most countries. Here at Trinity, Claire marveled, Francis Bacon had cut his teeth on philosophy and law, and Dryden had sharpened his wit. Here, Tennyson had composed his first book of lyrical poetry, and A. A. Milne had penned the light verse he’d been famous for before
Winnie-the-Pooh.
Here, Isaac Newton had secretly written the
Principia Mathematica,
and Lord Byron had famously kept a pet bear. It was also here, she reflected, that Virginia Woolf had been ignominiously barred from the library (at the time, women were not admitted unless accompanied by a fellow), and here that Soviet spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess had begun their infamous careers. Well, no one could accuse the place of being uneventful.

The last rays of sunlight slanted across stone paths and green lawns, transforming the chapel’s ivory-colored façade into a palette of buttery yellows and burnished golds. The house of worship’s spiky stone spires pointed up to the heavens like a row of lit torches against the twilight sky, and the courtyard’s gently splashing fountain cast a long, dome-shaped shadow across the grass. Groups of tuxedo-clad men walked along the paths, talking and laughing in a carefree manner. Occasionally they were joined by a woman, who, like Claire, wore a long gown and looked a little unsteady on her high heels. They were all headed to the same place: a huge, medieval arched doorway adjacent to the hall.

The college’s one hundred and sixty fellows—or many of them, at any rate—were gathering in Trinity’s grand dining hall for the annual fellowship admission dinner. Each year, three or four new fellows were sworn in, and a banquet was given to introduce them to all the other fellows. Although Claire wasn’t precisely a fellow—as a temporary lecturer, her status was different—she had generously been included with the other newcomers. She discreetly hiked up the top of her strapless, copper-colored satin formal another half inch and headed with the rest through the doorway and to the hall.

The hall’s lofty hammer-beam ceiling, elaborate Elizabethan woodwork, and bay-windowed alcoves were impressive even when the hall was unadorned. Tonight, the three long, narrow dining tables traversing its generous length were blanketed in white linen and sparkled with fine china and the school’s best silver. On a short riser at the north
end of the hall, the High Table waited for its illustrious guests. Above it, a sixteenth-century copy of Holbein’s life-sized painting of Henry VIII gazed magisterially down upon the room. Scores of candles filled the air with a glimmering luminescence; the milling, chatting, formally dressed fellows filled it with the pleasant anticipatory hum of a special occasion. People had already begun to sit down. There were no place cards, so everyone sat where they pleased, except at High Table, which was reserved for the master, the vice-master, the bursar, the junior bursar, the librarian, the dean, and a few of the senior fellows. Claire eagerly looked around for a familiar face to sit next to, without success. But then, there were only two faces that Claire would recognize: Hoddy, or Hoddington Humphries-Todd, a history fellow she had met in Venice, and Andrew Kent.

She was here because of Andrew Kent. Four months earlier, Claire had traveled to Venice to attend an academic conference after she’d discovered that a Cambridge historian was going to give a paper on the same topic as her unfinished dissertation, the 1618 Spanish conspiracy against Venice. The speaker had turned out to be Trinity fellow Dr. Andrew Kent, an accomplished historian whose first book,
Charles II and the Rye House Plot,
had been translated into a dozen languages and made into a BBC miniseries. During their five days in Venice, Claire and Andrew had cracked a four-hundred-year-old mystery involving Alessandra Rossetti, a courtesan caught up in the conspiracy.

First, however, they’d had to overcome their mutual antipathy. Claire had initially thought Andrew pompous, highly critical, and overly competitive. Happily, she’d spent enough time with him to learn that beneath his cool English reserve he was also thoughtful, kind, occasionally funny, often brilliant, and fully deserving of the awards and accolades that had been showered upon him. He’d believed in Claire and the results of her research so completely that he’d stepped aside to let her give the final lecture on the Spanish conspiracy, an act both generous and encouraging. Not to mention the fact that he’d coughed up three thousand euros of his own money to bail her out of a jam when she’d mistakenly taken one of Alessandra Rossetti’s diaries out of the Biblioteca Marciana, the Venice library.
He’d offered her the temporary position at Trinity, and they’d begun a friendship of sorts.

Exactly what sort she couldn’t yet say. Throughout the summer, as she’d been completing her dissertation and preparing to move to England for the next nine months, they had corresponded almost entirely by email. The tone of Andrew’s electronic missives had been friendly but not personal, and she had responded in kind. Anything else would have been unthinkable, really. As far as she knew, Andrew was still involved with Gabriella Griseri, the glamorous Italian television presenter. And now he was Claire’s colleague, and a relationship of that sort would be unwise, wouldn’t it? She certainly didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize her new job. It was a teaching position any newly minted historian would kill for. Claire could think of a half dozen former classmates who were probably gnashing their teeth with envy—and no one more loudly than her ex-husband Michael, an assistant professor of ancient history at Columbia University. Claire allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. She’d made certain that he’d known about her new job before she’d left home.

“Dr. Donovan.” Claire heard the words, but the name didn’t register; she was too busy looking for Andrew.

“Dr. Donovan.”

Claire scanned the other side of the room.

“Dr. Donovan!”

She turned around. “Oh!” Andrew Kent was standing behind her. “It’s you,” she said.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he asked.

“Of course I heard you.”

“I said your name three times.”

She reddened slightly. “I’m not used to it.”

“Your own name?” He looked alarmed, as if he was having immediate regrets about hiring her.

How did Andrew Kent so easily manage to make her feel idiotic, inept, and irritated simultaneously? Claire took a breath and tried to remain calm; now was not the time to let an instant retort get the better of her. “I’m not accustomed to the
Dr.
Donovan,” she explained.
“For one thing, the ink on my degree is barely dry. For another, only physicians are addressed as ‘doctor’ in the U.S.” She didn’t add that at American universities it was considered pretentious for someone with a PhD to use the title of Doctor, but she figured that Andrew Kent already knew that. At Trinity, everyone with a PhD was known as Doctor: it was
de rigueur.
After that, only the most accomplished rose to the level of Reader; Professor was reserved for those at the very top of the academic heap.

Andrew nodded. “Yes, and in England we address surgeons as ‘Mister.’”

“Why is that, anyway?”

“I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps we don’t want them to forget that they were once barbers.”

Claire laughed a little, Andrew smiled, and for one long, golden moment they were the only two people in the room. Perhaps it was the tuxedo, but he was even more handsome than she remembered. His dark, unkempt hair had been cropped and tamed, and his skin had a sun-kissed glow that was quite attractive. No more Scotch tape wrapped around the broken earpiece of his eyeglasses, either. In fact, no glasses at all. His large, inviting brown eyes regarded her warmly. Claire was reminded of a certain evening in Venice, a certain cobbled street, a certain few words that Andrew had said to her. What were they? “You’re the most argumentative, obstinate, infuriating, exciting, and fascinating woman I’ve ever met”? Yes, that’s exactly what he’d said; she hadn’t been able to forget it. She knew he hadn’t intended to say it, but there was no escaping the fact that he had. Her heart beat faster at the memory. Or was it racing because she was finally here, seeing him again?

“You’re looking well,” Andrew said. He cleared his throat. “That’s a very nice gown.”

“Thank you.” Claire had paid way too much for the dress, but she liked the way its shimmering, copper-colored satin brought out the gold highlights in her brown hair and hazel eyes. She wondered if he’d noticed; it was impossible to tell. “Very nice” was probably the most effusive compliment she would hear from him. Andrew was English, after all, but she was prepared to make some allowances for that. She
only hoped that they didn’t become mired in the awkward small talk that always seemed to precede their real conversations.

“And how was your journey?” he asked.

Oh, dear. What could she say about a six-hour flight and a taxicab ride from Heathrow to London? Nothing terribly exciting, that was certain. She assured him it had been fine, though uneventful. “And your book?” Claire asked. “How’s it coming along?”

This was more than a polite question; in fact it was something she deeply cared about. The subject of Andrew’s book-in-progress was the 1618 Spanish conspiracy against Venice. He had already asked Claire’s permission to quote from her dissertation.

“Very well, in fact,” he replied, noticeably relaxing. “Ever since I returned from Venice, everything seems to be falling into place. Like it’s writing itself, although I’m hesitant to say that out loud for fear of invoking some kind of jinx. Thank you for sending your dissertation on, by the way. I’ve found it enormously helpful. And very well written.”

Claire felt herself blushing, just a little.

Andrew cleared his throat again and looked as though he was about to ask Claire a question. She leaned closer in anticipation. Before he could speak, they were interrupted by an attractive woman who put her hand on Andrew’s arm. “Andy, I’ve saved us a seat right next to Richard and Paula,” she announced. Her manner implied that Andrew’s coming away with her at once was a matter of urgent necessity.

Not that Andrew appeared to notice this. He calmly thanked the woman and turned back to Claire. “May I introduce Dr. Carolyn Sutcliffe, modern and medieval languages. Carolyn, this is Dr. Claire Donovan, the—”

“New temporary lecturer from Harvard,” she finished for him in a nasal yet plummy voice that Claire suspected became even plummier when she was speaking to Americans. “Of
course
I know who she is.” Carolyn Sutcliffe offered her hand for a limp handshake. She was about Andrew’s age, Claire guessed, in her late thirties or thereabouts, petite, with dark auburn hair that curled under at the nape of her neck. She wore a long, scoop-neck black dress and a short strand of pearls. “Andy and Gaby have told me
so
much about you.”

Gaby? Who on earth was Gaby? Claire’s confusion must have been evident in her expression, for Carolyn quickly explained.

“Gabriella Griseri,” she said. “We go
way
back. She’s one of my
dearest
friends.”

Such dear friends, Carolyn seemed to be saying, that she was willing to stand guard on Gabriella’s boyfriend whenever the Italian bombshell was absent, and keep him safe from the clutches of undeserving American women. Carolyn’s hand still hovered over Andrew’s arm like a raptor’s claw, ready to snatch him away at the earliest opportunity.

Claire decided she’d been much too kind in her first assessment; or perhaps it was Carolyn Sutcliffe’s pushy demeanor that made her seem less attractive. But she was obviously a woman and basically presentable, if one overlooked the slightly manic gleam in her eyes. Which apparently Andrew did, for he didn’t seem to resent Carolyn’s company at all.

“I suppose we should all sit down,” Andrew said. He looked at Claire. “Would you like to—”

“There’s an empty seat right next to ours,” Carolyn interrupted, offering Claire her first sincere smile. “Why don’t you join us?”

“Thank you.” Perhaps, Claire conceded, Dr. Sutcliffe wasn’t so bad after all. They set off in the direction of the long table in the middle of the hall.

“You’ll sit next to one of our most senior fellows,” Carolyn added. “You’ll have
such
fun.”

When they arrived at the table, Claire discovered that the available chair wasn’t “right next” to Carolyn and Andrew but across the table from them. While within view of each other, it would be nearly impossible for Claire and Andrew to carry on a conversation. She took her place next to an elderly gentleman whose name, she soon learned, was Professor Humboldt Residue, natural sciences.

“Delighted to dine with such a lovely young lass,” Professor Residue said at the top of his lungs. His speckled, age-spotted head lacked hair, but there were healthy tufts of it growing in his ears. He smiled broadly at Claire. How could she rebuff such an enthusiastic welcome? Especially
since Hoddy, the only other person at Trinity whom she knew besides Andrew Kent, didn’t seem to be present.