For a moment Nicholas says nothing. He waits until his temper is under control before speaking again. ‘I am a physician, Mr Secretary. I have sworn an oath to do no harm.’
‘Very laudable. But that doesn’t apply to papist rebels, does it?’
Nicholas cannot prevent a sharp, cynical laugh escaping his lips. ‘Sir Robert, if I may speak bluntly–’
‘I’ve come to expect nothing less.’
‘You know full well that I gained my doctor’s gown at Cambridge. I’ve spent three years at the Palazzo Bo, one of the most liberal universities in Italy, studying anatomy under Professor Fabricius. I am a good friend of Signor Galileo Galilei, the eminent mathematician. The queen herself seeks my opinions on matters of physic and seems approving of them–’
‘Does this have any bearing on our friend downstairs?’
‘I am not beyond understanding matters of state,’ Nicholas protests. ‘Indeed, you would not have made me one of your intelligencers if I was. But I’m sorry – I cannot treat a man merely in order to deliver him to a greater harm. I refuse to be an executioner’s lackey.’
Cecil holds his gaze for a moment without replying. Then he beckons Nicholas to follow him up the steep stone stairs, his crooked little body bounding upwards with surprising agility.
They emerge into an oak-panelled hallway, fresh rushes strewn on the floor. An open door gives onto a terrace bordered by high privet hedges. The late-morning air is cool and smells of wood-smoke from a fire the gardeners have lit somewhere down towards the river. Cecil studies Nicholas like a father trying to gauge if an errant son is worth redeeming.
‘I think it’s time you and I had a little talk,’ he says.
Like everything about Mr Secretary Cecil, his pace around the terrace is urgent, driven. His gown ripples over his uneven back like black water burbling over rocks. Lengthening his stride to keep pace, Nicholas notices the wind is picking up, the clouds gathering. The storm is coming closer.
‘There isn’t time for me to summon the Bishop of London to give you a personal sermon on the duties we owe to our sovereign,’ Cecil tells him. ‘But now that Her Majesty is – apparently – favouring your continued presence, there are some things you must understand.’
‘Things? What manner of things?’
‘For a start, your oath to her takes precedence over all others. The queen is England. Your responsibility now is not solely to her as a patient. It is also to the health of her realm. And at this moment that health is in peril.’
Nicholas falters in his stride. Is Cecil suggesting the queen is stricken with a secret malady? Is that what this is about?
And then Cecil says something that in any tavern in England would stop the conversation dead.
‘We must accept the fact, Nicholas, that the queen cannot live for ever.’
Hearing a man of Robert Cecil’s position utter such words brings Nicholas to an involuntary halt. To speak of the succession – let alone Elizabeth’s demise – is forbidden. Men have had their tongues branded for it.
‘Don’t look so shocked, Nicholas,’ Cecil says, almost laughing at his expression. ‘If I cannot state a simple medical fact to a physician, then to whom may I state it?’
‘Is the queen sickening?’ Nicholas asks. ‘She seemed in good health–’
Cecil’s pale, inverted teardrop of a face turns towards him. There is an intensity in his eyes that seems too great to be constrained by such a little body. ‘She is well, as far as the Privy Council knows. But she is almost sixty-five. We have to look to the future. If the Spanish come at us again, will Her Majesty have the fortitude, the capacity, to stand against them as she has in the past?’
‘You think they’ll hazard another invasion?’
‘Of course.’
Cecil leads Nicholas through a neat gap in the hedge and down towards the riverbank, speaking in a low, contemplative tone. The Spanish king is dying, he explains as they walk. Philip could be dead already, given the torturous precautions that Cecil’s man in Madrid must take with his dispatches. And when kings are dying, sometimes they are inclined to make a last attempt at the great matters that have so far eluded them. And if they don’t, their successors might feel the compulsion to pick up their legacy with even greater zeal.
‘While you were listening to papist lecturers and drinking papist wine in Padua, Nicholas,’ Cecil goes on, ‘Philip of Spain sent another armada against us. Admittedly it was not as great an enterprise as the one a decade ago, and again by God’s mercy it was scattered. A great storm sent them all scurrying back to Coruña. But it shows the enduring determination of that servant of the Antichrist in Madrid.’
‘Where did they attempt to land?’
‘Ireland,’ Cecil says. ‘It is the rebellion in Ireland that is the crack in our armour. Now that the traitorous Earl of Tyrone has raised the peasants there against our settlers, we cannot rely solely upon the weather to save us. So now do you see why it is imperative that we put any rebel we take to the hard press?’
Nicholas considers this as he stands looking out across the river. He finds Cecil’s words persuasive. But not convincing.
‘A man might say anything when the pain becomes unbearable, Mr Secretary. You have your intelligencers in Madrid. No doubt you have them in Coruña, Lisbon or Cádiz, too. Surely they will give you warning of another attempt.’
‘I rely upon it.’
‘Then my assisting you to torture a single palsied Irish rebel is of no consequence to England, is it? But it is of consequence to my conscience.’
Cecil’s restless eyes have a sharpness in them that cuts into Nicholas’s inner thoughts.
‘Has your time living amongst the papists dulled your mettle, Nicholas?’
‘Of course not. But there’s another reason why I think it would be pointless.’
‘And what, pray, is that?’
‘This palsy he’s suffering – I’ve seen it before, on the battlefield when I was a physician to Sir Joshua Wylde’s company in the Low Countries. A blow to the neck or the back, or a shot received from a firing piece… these things can cause a loss of faculty in the limbs, such as your rebel is suffering. Sometimes it is instantaneous, sometimes gradual. It is caused by a fracture of the vertebrae. It appears that the nerves are unable to transmit their impulses either from the brain or the heart, depending upon which one you hold to be the source of the body’s animation. The most modern thinking is that it is the brain.’
‘You’re saying he won’t feel pain, even if we rack him?’
‘Very likely not.’
‘Nicholas, the Privy Council needs me to keep this wretch alive, at least until we have loosened his tongue. And you are the most practical physician I have yet encountered.’
‘I rather fear he’s cheated you out of your satisfaction, Sir Robert. He has no sensation in his limbs. If that holds true for the rest of his body, then thumb-irons or the rack will be as naught to him. Besides, I think this palsy will lead to his death, probably quite soon. Perhaps within hours.’
‘There must be something you can do?’
Nicholas considers telling him that the late Ambroise Paré, the French surgeon, recommended removing tissue around the spinal column to relieve pressure from the fractured vertebrae. But to the best of his knowledge, Paré never agreed to treat a patient in order that someone else might do him even more harm than the original hurt. Cecil, he decides, can find that out from some other physician.
‘I’ll do what I can, on one condition,’ he says.