Besides, he has work to do for Robert Cecil; an informer’s work. So he grits his teeth, swears at his horse and consoles himself with the knowledge that at least Lady Katherine will not be there today. He knows this because, before accepting any invitation from John Lumley, he sends a servant to Cold Oak, to discover from his wife’s household if she’s been invited, too. For not even Nonsuch, with its multitude of chambers and corridors, is large enough to rule out the possibility of an encounter. Cock-fights, thinks Vaesy, are best kept where they belong – in the tavern yard. He laughs brutally at the image of a feathered Katherine squawking viciously and lashing out with spurred talons. The noise is loud enough for his servant, riding beside him, to look across in alarm.
When he’d married the young Katherine Warren, twenty years ago, Vaesy had savoured the difference in their ages. He had looked forward to playing the master to the maid, forming his young bride into the perfect, dutiful mistress of his household. A biddable wife. An example of dutiful, healthy Christian womanhood – just the type of bride a future President of the College of Physicians and a queen’s doctor should possess.
On their wedding night he had told her what he tells his young men of physic today: that a healthy womb is like the fertile soil in Eden’s garden, the wholesome furrow in which the seed of Adam might take root. Jesu, how wrong he’d been with Katherine. If only he’d known the corruption hiding inside her, he’d have left the marriage unconsummated. At least that way he’d have had an escape route – annulment. Not even Baronsdale, President of the College, the man who likes his fellows to have unimpeachable marriages, would hold him to the contract then.
Looking back, the signs had been there from the start: wilfulness, a lack of modesty, an unhealthy desire to enquire into things that a girl of fifteen had no business knowing. He’d blamed John Lumley’s first wife for that. If Jane FitzAlan hadn’t infected Katherine with those abominable ideas when they were together in the early days at Nonsuch, perhaps she would have remained the innocent he had once believed her to be.
He’d done his best to warn Katherine, God would be his judge on that. Finding her alone one afternoon in the Nonsuch library, he had told her angrily, ‘It is not pleasing to Him for a woman to seek to know such things as are found here!’
She had merely glanced at him and carried on reading.
Had she not understood that she was being blasphemous as well as disobedient? Did she not comprehend that when God creates us, he places each of us to his appointed sphere? For a woman to inhabit the realm of learning and reason – a man’s realm – is an abomination, one that sadly Jane FitzAlan had seemed all too willing to embrace.
In the years since then, he’s often wondered if God hadn’t taken the three Lumley children from Jane as a warning. Perhaps that was why he’d been unable to save them, despite his command of physic. A punishment not just for Jane, but also for him – for failing to make her see the risks she was taking with her wilfulness. And knowing full well the extent of God’s wrath when He’d been defied, Vaesy thinks now that the punishment continued with Katherine.
He feels the sweat break out on his forehead as he remembers that awful day when he’d discovered the true extent of his own wife’s internal corruption. The sin of disobedience to God’s ordained order had grown inside her until it had become a living entity.
Blasphemy and disobedience – that’s what had swallowed the wholesomeness growing inside Katherine’s body, swallowing it as surely as the serpent swallows a helpless chick fallen from the nest.
He recalls now with horror the wailing of the midwife as the monster sought to force its way out into the world like a slithering contagion, twisted and vile. His own son, made into a serpent by Katherine’s rebellion against God’s order!
He had thought that if he acted swiftly, if he excised this thing inside her, all might still be saved. Katherine would see how dangerous her wilfulness could be. She would repent. God would be merciful and allow her womb to heal. In time, if she prayed enough, she might still bear him healthy offspring.
He’d known immediately what he had to do.
It would be a fight between the light and the darkness. But he would not enter the battle unarmed.
The weapon was his secret; no other physician knew of it. He’d made sure of that. It had cost him a king’s ransom to buy the silence of the exiled Huguenot physician who’d shown him the apparatus. His greatest fear had been that it might become public knowledge. If that were to happen, its use would quickly become commonplace – a blacksmith could fashion one in minutes. Before you knew it, farriers would be delivering babies. There’d be no profit for a physician at all.
Hurrying to his medical chest, Vaesy had retrieved the scissorlike device and, without taking it from its silk bag lest anyone see it, had carried it to his wife’s birthing bed. There he’d shouted at the midwife to remove her miserable carcass at once. Then he’d set to work.
But the sin was embedded so deep in Katherine that it had proved unwilling to leave. The struggle had been like an exorcism. She had screamed in torment as he’d fought to grip that monstrously deformed head between the prongs of the device. He’d closed his eyes and called up a passage from the Book of Mark to strengthen his resolve: blasphemies, pride, folly… all these evils come from within…
Looking at his hands now, as they grip the reins of the horse so tightly that its head tosses against the pull of the bit, Fulke Vaesy recalls how they shook that day – until at last they’d felt the resistance end and the sin leave Katherine’s body in a slithering, bloody tumble.
Wasn’t that proof enough? Vaesy asks himself as his horse steps reluctantly over a little bridge across a racing stream. What other physician could have won such an infernal battle, save one favoured by God?
The court has spent Christmas at Greenwich Palace. The Cecils, father and son, wait on the broad water-front terrace for the barge that will carry them upriver to their house at Covent Garden. The drizzle has turned the land, the sky and the river into a world of unpolished pewter.
‘I’m not sorry to have seen the back of that year, Robert,’ Burghley tells his son as he pulls his cloak closer to keep out the damp. His age and failing health have made dealing with Elizabeth’s ever-growing cantankerousness a trial he can do without. ‘I suppose we may thank our Saviour for keeping the Spanish too busy with their meddling in the Low Countries to send a fleet against us again. And Ireland is relatively quiet for once. I will pray long and hard for God’s help to endure whatever this new year has planned for us.’
‘My prayers are simple, Father, and brief,’ says Robert. ‘No plague. No plots.’
‘Ah, the simplicity of youthful hopes,’ Burghley says with a wry smile. ‘Perhaps I should consider casting off some of the burden the queen expects me to carry. I might even seek her leave to retire to Theobalds – hand it all to those who still have the vigour.’
Vigour. Never is Robert Cecil more conscious of his crooked back and his twisted legs than when his father tries not to mention them. Through gritted teeth he says, ‘You’d miss it, Father – the thrill of the battle. It’s in your blood. And there’s still work to be done.’
‘There’s always work in England for a queen’s servant, Robert.’
‘Do I not work, Father? She knows how hard, yet there is not even a knighthood in sight. I am Burghley’s son, yet I am unrecognized.’
‘It will come, Robert. Be patient. Perhaps this year.’