And whatever Arcampora may have in store for him, all these images of her comfort Nicholas more than he ever expected.
Arcampora is waiting for him beneath the tapestry of St Margaret of Antioch in the main hall. He’d seen it on his visit here with Mercy Havington. Then it had meant nothing to him. Now it is like an open shutter giving him a view of perdition. By the grey light spilling in from the windows, Nicholas realizes it’s morning, though which morning he cannot be sure. He settles on Easter Sunday, on the assumption that Arcampora is not the sort of man to allow his enemies unnecessary sleep.
The physician is dressed in his doctor’s gown, his raptor’s face harsh and angular. There’s no sign of Isabel Lowell or the servants. Perhaps they’ve been told to stay away, in case Dunstan and Florin find it necessary to encourage Nicholas to be more talkative.
‘Have you rested comfortably, Master Shelby?’ Arcampora asks.
‘On a cellar floor? What do you think? I’d like the opportunity to wash, please.’
A tight smile from Arcampora tells him that personal niceties are, for the moment, not on the agenda. The Professor falls again into that strange way of speaking of himself in the third person.
‘Do you know what Arcampora says to himself when Florin and Dunstan tell him they find you – what is the word? Spiare – spying in the woods?’
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘Arcampora tells himself: let Dunstan kill you. Save everyone a lot of trouble.’
‘Then why didn’t he? The bastard killed Tanner Bell.’
At the edge of his vision, Nicholas sees Dunstan shrug and pout, as though he’s been accused of wearing too bright a shirt to a sermon.
Arcampora studies Nicholas’s bloodied face with professional detachment. ‘Because yesterday was not an auspicious day to kill a man. Arcampora has decided this.’
‘And I suppose today is?’
‘Is too early to decide. Maybe Dunstan don’t kill you. Maybe Arcampora kill you instead.’
Nicholas tries a wan smile with his swollen lips. It hurts. ‘I assume at Basle you learned the oath of Hippocrates. The one about not killing your patients?’
‘But you are not a patient, Master Shelby. You are a spy. Therefore, in your particular case, the oath does not apply. The question is: who are you spying for?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘When you were last here, with Mercy Havington, I think you understood far more of what I said to you than you pretended to. So I ask again: who sent you?’
‘No one sent me. I was visiting Lady Havington again, that’s all.’
‘What was in the sack you were seen carrying?’
‘I told your friends here, I’d caught some coney from the journey. I object to paying tavern prices for my meals.’
‘Do you know the greatest insult you can pay an intelligent man?’ Arcampora asks. When he receives no reply from Nicholas, he supplies his own answer. ‘It is to treat him as a fool.’
Florin and Dunstan move closer. Nicholas braces himself for the first blow, wondering how the fastidious Isabel Lowell will react to having her tapestry of St Margaret spattered with blood.
And then Arcampora raises his left hand to call them off. He leans over Nicholas like a hawk mantling over its prey. His voice is harsh and utterly without compassion.
‘Answer me this, you know something of physic, yes? I realize this when you come here before – when you ask me about Samael.’
Had Nicholas not seen the chalk marks on the floor of the lodge, he might even now blame Arcampora’s accent for the mispronunciation of the boy’s name: Samael instead of Samuel. But now he knows the truth. He knows what this man genuinely believes he can do.
Samael, the Lord’s venom, the Serpent who lured Eve to the apple…
‘Yes, I know something of physic,’ he admits in a weak voice, the dread beginning to rise in him like floodwater.
‘You a physician, Shelby?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘What manner? You tell Arcampora.’
‘I studied medicine at Cambridge.’
‘I knew it! I tell Isabel you were not a hired blade for the heretic cause!’ Arcampora steps back and considers this for a moment. Then he asks, ‘Tell me, Dr Shelby, are you a heart man or a brain man?’
What new madness has taken hold of Arcampora now? Nicholas wonders. Surely he hasn’t called off the beating just so he can indulge in a medical debate.
‘Come now – if you studied physic at Cambridge, you must know of the dispute,’ he continues. ‘Do our imaginings, our joys, our angers, our lamentations, flow from the heart or from the brain?’
‘The brain, of course,’ Nicholas replies, puzzled by where Arcampora’s sudden and unnerving swerve is taking them both.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m not sure of anything, when it comes to medicine. Not any more. But, yes, Hippocrates says that what we sense and feel comes originally from the brain; not from the heart or the vitals. The thoughts are passed to the heart for action.’
‘Because?’
‘Because if it was the other way round, they would arrive at the brain too hot, too disturbed. We would constantly be in turmoil, like the beasts of the wild.’
‘Very good, Dr Shelby. Clearly you are no charlatan.’
Jesu, you sound like the College Censors, Nicholas thinks.
‘But there are those who say it is the other way around, that our lusts and our passions prove that the heart is the supreme organ. Shall we determine the argument once and for all?’
‘Determine? What are you talking about?’
‘A simple experiment, Dr Shelby. I cut out your heart and your brain to see who’s right – unless you tell me the truth about why you came back.’
There’s no doubting he’ll do it, Nicholas thinks. Arcampora’s eyes are those of a starving man contemplating a feast.
‘Dr Shelby, I ask you again: Who sent you here?’
Nicholas decides it’s time to try the explanation he’s spent his wakeful moments in the cellar perfecting – the one he hopes will keep him alive long enough for his letter to find its way from Munt’s warehouse to Cleevely.
‘Dr Arcampora,’ he begins in as strong a voice as his bruises will allow, ‘in a very few days you will receive a summons from Thomas Tyrrell and the Brothers of Antioch. It will call you and the boy you claim is heir to Mary Tudor’s crown to London, where certain people have an interest in examining him. By “certain people”, I mean of course His Eminence. I’ve been sent by his emissary, Signor Barrani, to make sure Samuel Wylde arrives safely.’
11
Lord Tyrrell’s courier arrives at Cleevely the following day, Easter Monday. He’s made the journey from London at such a pace that his horse is all but spent. Nicholas watches his arrival from a window. By the urgent way the man takes a letter from his leather satchel and presses it into Arcampora’s hands, Nicholas knows it’s the first of the messages he instructed Bianca to give Munt. The timing, he thinks, could not have been better.
In the hours that have passed since his conversation with Arcampora, he’s been treated better than he’d imagined. He’s been taken to a pleasant chamber overlooking the privy garden. A tub was brought from the kitchens, followed by pails of hot water. Even a set of clean clothes, which – after he’d soaked away a little of the pain – just about fitted him. He’d wondered if they were Joshua Wylde’s.