Leonard Tourney - The Cuckolds Bride

The Cuckolds Bride

A Doctor William Gilbert Mystery

By

Leonard Tourney

First published by Lume Books in 2022

Copyright Leonard Tourney 2022

This edition published in 2022 by Lume Books

30 Great Guildford Street,

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The right of Leonard Tourney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Table of Contents

But we do not propose just now to overturn with arguments either these errors and impotent reasonings or the other many fables about the lodestone, as for example the assertion that a lodestone placed unawares under the head of a sleeping woman drives her out of the bed if she be an adulteress.

William Gilbert, De Magnete . 1600

Prologue

Off the eastern coast of England, year of our Lord 1570

Dame Fortune turns her wheel, sometimes slowly, sometimes with cruel suddenness. Who can dispute this, save he is a great fool or born yesterday? The young English doctor was neither.

He reflected on this as the vessel emerged from the river into the open sea. He stood on the ships quarterdeck, his hands clutching the rail, his knuckles corpse-white and cold. It was early summer, but the salt air was frigid. The sea was turbulent, and the vessel rocked and dipped in response. Only a few days before he had been happy, on the verge of advancement and a new life in London. Now he was a fugitive, accused of deception, malpractice, murder. How did this happen to him, he who thought himself to be honest, capable, and well-intended? How could everything have gone so wrong?

The vessel was a caravel with a Dutch master and crew. The shipmaster, an old bewhiskered fellow with a missing arm and bad limp, had cast a wary eye upon the doctor when he begged for passage. He had responded to the doctors appeals in a butchered English, made him pay double what the voyage was worth, for the ship was battered and filthy and stank of herring.

The shipmaster asked no questions of the young doctor. Perhaps he was used to Englishmen fleeing their country in the dead of night. Perhaps the shipmaster had discerned the mark of Cain on the doctors forehead, or sensed his desperation to escape and decided to leave well enough alone. The Englishman had a smooth, boyish face, was tall and thin as a post. He had narrow shoulders and soft, uncalloused hands. But what of that? He might still be a threat. A desperate man is a dangerous man, as all the world knows.

The doctor knew that even the Channel might not be a sufficient wall to protect him from the great enemies he had made. There was the family of the deceased. There was the College of Physicians with its rules and regulations, its strict licensing whereby he might be expelled from his profession forever, unable to practice his art, his long years of study at Cambridge come to naught.

But foremost was Cecil. William Cecil, now Lord Burghley, the Queens chief minister, a man of fearsome power, who might with his little finger extinguish the doctor without trial or hearing, without pity or regret, and certainly without understanding of what the doctor had done or why. This great man was now his enemy.

The wind and salt spray stung his beardless face, blurred his vision, spurred tears as he thought of his loss. Behind him, England was disappearing into a heavy fog. His previous life was vanishing as well. He must change his name, learn new tongues. He would become an exile, driven to wander. Lord Burghley had agents and spies everywhere. The young doctor would have no rest, no peace.

Compulsively, he reviewed each moment that had brought him to this pass, each misstep, each blunder, each false hope. He worked through his memories methodically. So he had been trained. It was the way his mind habitually worked, for he was a scientist as well as physician. As much as he was able, he relived each event, summoned up from his memory each exchange of words, recalled expressions on faces, seeking clues to guile, deception, malice where before, in his innocence, he had found none.

He did this over and over and despaired, for worse than his fate as an exile was the fear that he would never learn what had happened to bring this fate upon him. He would live in doubt of his own innocence. He prayed now not to God, in whom he yet believed despite all that had transpired, but to Fortuna, the ancient Roman deity, whom the poet Hesiod called the daughter of Oceanus. A fitting supplication now that he was in a tumultuous sea and prisoner of the sea gods good will. He was bound for Amsterdam, a city of strangers. But he had one friend there, a friend he knew would understand andperhapshelp.

The doctor remembered that, by tradition, Fortuna wore a blindfold, hence her capriciousness. Turning her wheel. He knew he could not ask her to remove the blindfold, to see him as he truly was, innocent. But he could appeal to her better nature.

O Fortuna, the doctor prayed, do turn thy wheel .

Five days before his flight from England, the young doctor had looked down at the flaccid body lying upon the examination table. His patients naked chest was sickly white and covered with coarse hairs that repelled him, but the doctor applied the black squirming creatures as he had been taught, placing six; one on each breast, two upon the mans soft belly, two lower still, just above the cloth that hid the bulge of the mans genitals. The patient, a cobbler the doctor reckoned was about fifty, breathed deeply and seemed to fall asleep as the leeches began their work. Slowly, they began to swell with blood. This sight, too, disgusted the doctor. He had been well trained for this procedure, but he had little faith in its efficacy.

His mentors at Cambridge, disciples all of Aristotle and the old Roman, Galen, were persuaded that such a treatment would draw out bad blood, restore the harmony of the bodys elements, and thereby cure a multitude of ills. William had not made himself loved or admired by his skepticism, either with his learned professors or fellow students. But he had been an earnest, dedicated student and thought of himself now as a competent physician. Yet since receiving his medical degree he had achieved little success in his vocation. He was twenty-six, but knew he looked but twenty or less with his thin, sinewy body, narrow shoulders, and pale skin. His effort to grow a beard to give himself a certain clinical gravitas in the eyes of his fellow townsmen had been a failure. A few blond hairs on his chin and the mere suggestion of a mustache were not enough to inspire confidence. They were hardly enough to proclaim him a man and not a callow youth more fit to play a womans part in some vulgar comedy than attend the sick.

In due course, the treatment was completed. His patient snored on. Carefully, the doctor pulled the swollen leeches from the cobblers body, inadvertently yanking the mans chest hairs so that he cried out in his sleep, awoke, and cursed the doctor.

Damn you, boy, can you not be more careful? I came to you for relief of pain, not to suffer it from your hands.

Doctor, not boy, the doctor corrected.

Well, then Doctor , if you will. For I suppose a man may call himself as pleases him, whether he deserves the title or no.

The cobbler sat up abruptly and got himself down from the table. Scowling, he put on a much-stained shirt and apron, reached into a purse at his belt and withdrew a coin. He glanced at the coin and handed it to the doctor. Thats what we agreed, is it not?

Two, said the doctor.

Reluctantly, the cobbler made another visit to his purse. That seems a great price to pay for so brief a treatment. Especially since the work is done by creatures, rather than yourself, who do little more than preside at the feast.