The Mer- Lion (4 page)

Seamus managed a weary bow in her direction. Turning to leave, he hadn't taken more than a step or two when her elegant, bejeweled white hand on his arm stopped him.

"Seamus," she said, her blue black eyes shining with unshed tears, "Seamus, how can I thank you for Seaforth's life?"

Seamus, for all his strength, was unable to cope with the emotionalism of a woman. He turned pink with embarrassment and failed to meet her eye. The two stood there at an impasse, until finally the lady took his enormous hand in hers and brought it to her lips. At the touch of her soft lips, the spell was broken, Seamus was released from his immobile state. "Lady," he stammered, "don't— It's late—I—"

"Yes, I know." But she didn't release his hand. "Get you to bed, dear, good, sweet friend."

Looking down into that loving face, he held his breath lest he follow his impulse and kiss her. He breathed a large sigh of relief when finally she released his hand, and he fled from the room like a guilty child. Instinctively he headed for the haven of Nelly's large bed in an alcove off the kitchen. Slaveys, seeing the look in eyes glazed with fatigue and suppressed emotion, made way for his lumbering progress; men, one hastened to alert Nelly to the return of her man. When she rushed to his side, she found him fast asleep, fully dressed, sprawled on his back across the bed. Her attempts to shake him awake went for nought. Pushing and shoving him about, she determined that he had no major wound. Having to be satisfied with that, she unlaced his boots and tugged futilely on one. It didn't budge. Nor were her efforts to remove his tunic more successful; his dead weight was too much for her body heavy with his child, impervious to her efforts, he slept on, never knowing nor stirring when Nelly joined him in bed. Nor did he awaken when, before dawn, she crept from his side to rouse the kitchen staff. Through breakfast and supper he slept, totally oblivious to the sounds of a large staff preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals eaten by a staff numbering in the hundreds.
 

CHAPTER
2

Daylight had dimmed and nighttime was upon them again when Nelly tried once more to awaken Seamus. He woke up swinging, thinking he was back in Flodden. Two months, even six weeks before, she could have dodged his wild blows. Not today. Not with his child due within the month. His cuff sent her reeling across the room to slide down against the wall like a sack of wheat, landing on her bottom with a loud "oof." Seamus, befuddled by sleep, watched dumbfounded for a long minute. Then, realizing what he'd done and immediately contrite, he leaped to his feet, walked out of his loosened boots, and fell his full length on the stones.

"Are you hurt, Nelly girl?" he asked, looking up at her from the floor.

She shook her head. "No thanks to you. And you?"

He looked at her, she at him, and both broke into laughter.

The lackey, at whose instigation she'd awakened her man, stared at the two as if they had lost their senses. And when they made no attempt to get up immediately, he cleared his throat self-importantly to get their attention. "Seamus, the lady sent me for you," he announced, his disapproval of these two big people sounding in every syllable.

"Aye, be right with you," said Seamus, reaching for his boots. While he put them back on, Nelly, with a flurry of white petticoats, rose awkwardly to her own feet. Reaching into the pocket suspended from a cord around her waist, she brought forth a small flask of wine

and one well-squashed napkin containing a flattened slab of bread.

"Now, look what you've done," she began, but Seamus husked her.

"Nay, Nelry, that's just the way I like it," he protested, manfully chewing off a big chunk.

Nelly wasn't mollified; her expression softened, however, as she saw how hard he worked at his chewing while trying to smile at her. "Aye, eat hearty. Drink, too. You been weakened by your long sleep judging from that love-tap you just fetched me."

With that, she gave him a cuff that sent him staggering on his way, for Nelly was as big for a woman as Seamus was for a man. Passing through the kitchen, he paused now and then to wash down the bread with a hearty swig of wine. The lackey, following close on his heels, twice ran into him. Seamus, in disgust, motioned him to lead the way up the stairs to the courtyard
...
only to call him back while he took a piss on the manure pile outside the mew doors. His audience, irritated at first by the delay, was impressed in spite of himself by the strength and duration of the man's relievings.

Finished, his codpiece tied and his points secured, Seamus followed his guide past the chapel and into the hall, behind the screen's passage, up the stair and into the upper chamber of the cross-wing and from there into the solarium. The room, the largest on the second story, was well lit and well peopled. Still a bit muddled, Seamus thought himself come to Bedlam, St. Mary's Hospital for the insane in London.

In the big four-poster bed in the middle of the room lay Seaforth, ignored by his men as they argued among themselves. The countess was deep in debate with Father Cariolinus, the aged family chaplain, and contending between themselves were two total strangers, both ill kept and shabby. The tonsured one Seamus surmised to be a priest-physician.

"God pray," he said silently, "let the man be a little skilled and not simply a horse-leech." Long before, Seamus had come to the decision that it would be better to die than be mangled at the hands of. most so-called physicians.

The grubby priest was arguing animatedly with an equally dirty, little man of indeterminate age, his short robe stained, splotched, and grime-encrusted, his boots badly patched and run down at the heels, his stockings sagging about his scrawny calves. This was undoubtedly the priest's barber-assistant. That he had been admitted to this chamber boded no good for the earl.

For the past four hundred years, ever since a papal decree that no priest willingly shed blood, the gorier aspects of medical care had been relegated to a lay brother whose only real expertise with the razor might lie in shaving his priest's tonsure. Such a man bled the patient, drew teeth, and, as Seamus recalled queasily, sawed off limbs.

Off to one side was still a third stranger. His young, apple-cheeked face looked more used to laughter than serious discussion, and his appreciation of the good life showed in the way his fur-trimmed, red woolen physician gown bellied out in front. Belying the overall impression of softness and baby-fat were the firm, muscular hands he clasped before him. Except for his robes, he didn't look like any physician Seamus had seen before. Priest and barber argued over the juxtaposition of Jupiter with Gemini, deter-rnining the best time for bleeding. The stranger ignored them. Instead, he studied the subject of all the discussion—the Earl-of Seaforth. Doped with opium—the room reeked of it—the man lay in his bed like one already dead. The pallor of his face was incongruous and frightening in a man who gloried in the hunt, the passage of arms, a tilt at the quattrain, and the breaking of a horse. For the first time, Seamus realized, the earl's famous prematurely silver white hair seemed appropriate, for today the earl looked every one of his forty-one years.

Seamus's presence was soon noted by the Lady Islean. Tall, lithe, she was so rosy-cheeked that the gap between her own and her husband's age was accentuated. Drawing Seamus close to the bed, she quickly outlined the situation in a low voice.

"We are all agreed that the wound has mortified." She drew back the quilt of wool from the arm and with a finger disturbed the bandages about the wound to let Seamus see the streaks of red and purple and black radiating out from the wound. The smell of rotting flesh was enough to make a strong man gag, but it seemed to bother the countess not at all.

"You get used to it," she observed as Seamus paled, continuing with her explanation: "We all agree that the arm must come off."

Again outwardly she showed no emotion. "But Father Cariolinus insists that such an act needs not only the sanction of the church but the services of the priest's assistant.

"I had heard," she continued, "that Andrew Boorde—over mere—was in Edinburgh, and just now returned from studying at Montpellier, where he actually spent a week watching a surgeon dissect a dead man. It is an act forbidden by the father...and Father Cariolinus here, in turn, forbids such a man to touch the earl. Boorde was, it seems, once a Carthusian priest and even suffragan bishop of Chichester. The good father fears he would menace not just my Lord's body, but also his soul."

Seamus said nothing, but looked hard at Boorde, who could not fail to overhear and who returned the look in kind, breaking the stare with a slow, deliberate wink.

That decided Seamus. "Lady, if he is the man you want, he is the man you'll have. Leave the priests to me."

In two strides, he crossed the-room to the priest and his assistant, collared one with each hand and quick-marched them toward the door. Totally flustered, Father Cariolinus scurried after, clutching in vain at the giant before him.

Boorde sprang to open the door before them, allowing the intertwined foursome to leave. Outside the door, Seamus shook his two victims like a terrier with a rat and pushed them down the hall. Gently but firmly he disengaged Father Cariolinus from his arm, picking him up and setting him down from the chamber door. "Go, priest, do what you do best. Say a few prayers for the man on the bed in there."

Seamus returned to the chamber and took a stand within the door, barring with his body any from entering. The quacks gone, the physician quickly took stock of the men left in attendance. All, he was sure, had seen their share of bloody limbs at the highly popular drawing-and-quartering of traitors and criminals on High Street. If anything, Boorde feared that instead of withdrawing in disgust, they might press too close. He cleared the room of all but Seamus, four gentlemen of the bedchamber, two servers to do the mopping up, and the patient. The Lady Islean he sent to supervise the cooking of a special salve needed when the sawing and burning were done.

If the earl had been conscious, Boorde would have sedated him with a drink of Malmsey laced with more opium. But an unconscious man might choke on such; thus, a gag was made ready in case they might need it later. Building a fire in a three-legged pot he carried for the purpose, he laid out his tools: lancets, big, small and tiny, plus a medley of cauterers, a handful of which he put to hearing in the little pot. Out of the sack also came needles and tongs of many sizes, as well as bodkins and stoppered bottles and drawstringed bags. Last of all, he drew out three serrated blades, selecting the largest, with the crudest teeth. Carefully feeding his little fire until it burnt with a white-hot flame, he emptied one of his bags into a small metal crucible and hung that from the pot's handle.

While it heated, he launched into a monologue, as if lecturing apprentices:

"A fire in the chamber is good, to waste and consume evil vapors within the chamber. I do advise you neither to stand nor to sit by the fire, but stand or sit a good way off from the fire, taking the flavor of it, for fire does arify and dry up a man's blood, and does make stark the sinews and joints of man. In your bed lie not too hot nor too cool, but in a temperance. Ancient doctors of physic said eight hours of sleep in summer and nine in winter is sufficient for any man; but I do think the sleep ought to be taken as is the complexion of the man."

Seamus, still exhausted though he had slept the clock around and then some, had difficulty believing his ears. The smells, the heat, the deathlike earl—all this presided over by a merry man discussing the values of fire and sleep was too much. He had to get out of here for a second to breathe clean air.

"Physician," he interrupted, "is there aught else that you might need?"

The doctor looked about the chamber and nodded. "A table—a good, solid one, the length at least of that man there
...
and of the same width or more. And some wine. A Malmsey if you please."

Seamus felt like one released from Hell as he left the room, the two lackeys in reluctant tow. They had been drinking in the words of the doctor and were loath to leave. When Seamus returned with a trestle table brought up from the great hall below, the doctor was still carrying on.

"When you be out of your bed, stretch forth your legs and arms and your body, cough and spit." He demonstrated, then continued.

"After you have evacuated your body
..."
He paused. Seamus feared another demonstration, but the doctor wanted merely to check the temperature of the contents of the crucible. "Near at heat. Now, where did I leave off? Oh, yes. After you have evacuated your body and trussed your points, comb your head so and do so divers times in the day. And wash your hands and wrists, your face and eyes and your teeth, with cold water."

He stopped. The crucible was bubbling away, and from among his jars, he selected one, slowly emptying it into his concoction. The crucible hissed, and the room filled with the smell of roses. Seamus's stomach lurched, then steadied. As Seamus gently lifted the earl to the table and lashed him fast, the doctor sniffed, then savored the bouquet of the wine.

"A good vintage this, I ha' never had better. Oh, you'd best remove the bandages from his arm," he directed, then devoted himself to guzzling the wine.

Wiping his lips fastidiously on the arm of his gown, he upended the wine jug well above the furthest reach of the poison's streaking. The dregs he sloshed over his own hands to wash them. Just below the elbow, he made his first cut with the largest lancet, a bold brave stroke that caused blood to well up; whereupon the earl came awake, screaming. Seamus's hand over his mouth stilled further sounds, while the physician got up the gag. At Boorde's direction, Seamus let go. Seaforth opened his mouth to scream, and Boorde deftly popped in the gag. Whistling tunelessly, Boorde went back to work, cutting away as the patient's eyes bulged, and the veins and muscles in his neck stood forth in mute token to the strength of each muffled scream until finally, mercifully, he fainted.