The woman put her hand on the door’s handle. “The servant,” she said. “On the dock.”
“Yes?” said the Doctor.
“He talked to you?”
The Doctor looked into the woman’s eyes for a moment. “I asked him a question,” she said (this is one of the few times I have ever heard the Doctor directly lie).
“I thought so,” the woman said, opening the door for us.
We stepped into a large, dark room lit only by candies and lanterns. The floor underfoot felt warm and furry. At first I thought I’d stepped on a hound. There was a perfume of great sweetness in the room and I thought I detected the scent of various herbs known to have a healing or tonic effect. I tried to detect a smell of sickness or corruption, but could not. A huge canopied bed sat in the middle of the room. It held a large man attended by three people: two servants and a well-dressed lady. They looked round as we entered and light flooded into the room. The light started to wane behind us as the severe-looking woman closed the doors from outside.
The Doctor turned round and said through the narrowing gap, “The servant—”
“Will be punished,” the woman said with a wintry smile.
The doors thudded shut. The Doctor breathed deeply and then turned to the candle-lit scene in the centre of the room.
“You are the woman doctor?” the lady asked, approaching us.
“My name is Vosill,” the Doctor told her. “Lady Tunch?”
The woman nodded. “Can you help my husband?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.” The Doctor looked round the shadowy, half-hidden spaces of the room, as if trying to guess its extent. “It would help if I could see him. Is there a reason for the curtains being drawn?”
“Oh. We were told the darkness would reduce the swellings.”
“Let’s take a look, shall we?” the Doctor said. We crossed to the bed. Walking on the thick floor covering was an odd, disconcerting experience, like walking on the deck of a pitching ship.
The Slave Master Tunch had, by repute, always been a huge man. He was bigger now. He lay on the bed, breathing quickly and shallowly, his skin grey and blotched. His eyes were closed. “He seems to sleep almost all the time,” the lady told us. She was a thin little thing, scarcely more than a child, with a pinched, pale face and hands that were forever kneading each other. One of the two servants was mopping her husband’s brow. The other was fussing at the bottom of the bed, tucking in bed clothes. “He was soiled, just earlier,” the lady explained.
“Did you keep the stool?” the Doctor asked.
“No!” the lady said, shocked. “We have no need to. The house has a water closet.”
The Doctor took the place of the servant mopping the man’s brow. She looked into his eyes, she looked in his mouth and then she pulled back the coverings over the huge bulge of his body before pulling up his shirt. I think the only fatter people I have seen have been eunuchs. Master Tunch was not just fat (though goodness knows, there is nothing wrong with being fat!), he bulged. Oddly. I saw this myself, even before the Doctor pointed this out.
She turned to the lady. “I need more light,” she told her. “Would you have the curtains opened?”
The lady hesitated, then nodded to the servants.
Light washed into the great room. It was even more splendid than I had imagined. All the furniture was covered in gold leaf. Cloth of gold hung from the bed’s great frame. It was drawn up into a great sphincter shape in the centre of the ceiling and even formed the curtains themselves. Paintings and mirrors covered every wall and pieces of sculpture — mostly nymphs and a few of the old, wanton goddesses — stood on the floor or sat upon the tables, desks and sideboards, where a veritable profusion of what looked like human skulls covered in gold leaf were scattered. The carpets were a soft and lustrous blue-black, and were, I guessed, zuleon fur, from the far south. They were so thick I wasn’t surprised that walking on them had been unsettling.
Slave Master Tunch looked no better in the light of day than he had by candle glow. His flesh was everywhere puffy and discoloured and his body seemed a strange shape, even for one so large. He moaned and one fat hand came fluttering up like a doughy bird. His wife took it and held it to her cheek one-handed. There was an awkwardness about the way she tried to use both hands that mystified me at the time.
The Doctor pressed and prodded the giant frame in a variety of places. The man groaned and whimpered but uttered no intelligible word.
“When did he start to bloat like this?” she asked.
“About a year past, I think,” the lady said. The Doctor looked at her quizzically. The lady looked bashful. “We were only married a half-year ago,” the Slaver’s wife said. The Doctor was looking at her oddly, but then she smiled.
“Was there much pain at the start?”
“The Housemistress has told me that his last wife said it was about Harvest when he began to get the pains, and then his…” She patted her own waist. “His girth began to become greater.”
The Doctor kept prodding the great body. “Did he become ill tempered?”
The lady smiled a small, hesitant smile. “Oh, I think he was always… he was never one to suffer fools gladly.” She started to hug herself, then winced with pain before she could cross her arms, settling instead for massaging her upper left arm with her right hand.
“Is your arm sore?” the Doctor asked her.
The lady stepped back, eyes wide. “No!” she exclaimed, still clutching her arm. “No. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine.”
The Doctor pulled the man’s night dress back down and drew the covers over him. “Well, there’s nothing I can do for him. Best let him sleep.”
“Sleep?” the lady wailed. “All day, like an animal?”
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said. “I should have said best let him remain unconscious.”
“Is there nothing you can do for him?”
“Not really,” the Doctor said. “The illness is so advanced that he is hardly even feeling the pain now. It’s unlikely he’ll come round again. I can write you a prescription for something to give him if he does, but I imagine his brother has already dealt with that.”
The lady nodded. She was staring at the great form that was her husband, one fist at her mouth, her teeth biting on her knuckle. “He’s going to die!”
“Almost certainly. I’m sorry.”
The lady shook her head. Eventually she tore her gaze away from the bed. “Should I have called you earlier? If I had, would that—?”
“It would have made no difference,” the Doctor told her. “There is nothing any doctor could have done for him. Some diseases are not treatable.” She looked down — with a cold expression, it seemed to me — at the body lying panting on the great bed. “Happily some are also not transmissible.” She looked up at the lady. “You need have no fear on that point.” She glanced round at the servants as she said this.
“How much do I owe you?” the wife asked.
“Whatever you think fit,” the Doctor said. “I have been able to do nothing. Perhaps you feel I deserve nothing.”
“No. No, not at all. Please.” The lady went to a bureau near the bed and took out a small plain purse. She handed it to the Doctor.
“You really should have that arm seen to,” the Doctor said softly, while studying the other woman’s face, and her mouth, most closely. “It might mean—”
“No,” the lady said quickly, looking away and then walking off to the nearest of the tall windows. “I am perfectly well, Doctor. Perfectly. Thank you for coming. Good day.”