Page 3 of The Phoenix Bride
He lifted the flowers, brandishing them at me like a rifle being aimed. “I thought I might marry you!” he said, grinning. And without responding, I slammed the window shut so I could run down the stairs and open the door to greet him.
Love is like that sometimes. We call it a burning, liken it to embers and flames, but often it is something less consuming. Like moon phases, waxing and waning, even disappearing entirely. But when that moon is full—oh, when it is full. It shines, and it shines, and it shines.
—
We had our house in Suffolk, near the sea air and the villages, but we went to London the spring after our marriage. We were not attached to court, but my sister and her husband were. We’d decided to visit them.
I wish we hadn’t.
In the carriage on the way, Will read a comedy to me, and he put on voices for each character. I laughed so hard at his performance of Malvolio that I started wheezing, and he had to clap me on the back. I didn’t notice that we’d reached London proper until I peered out of the window, to see townhouses looming over us, and to feel the stench of the river settle thickly on my tongue. My nose wrinkled, and Will pulled me into his lap.“Country rose, wilting in the city,” he teased, and I kissed him to keep him quiet.
My sister greeted us with great joy at her townhouse. Robert, who had never taken to either me or Will, was cool and detached.I havea meeting at court,he’d told us, and then excused himself from supper entirely. We had chicken boiled in butter and quince pastries and treacle-thick port wine, poured in such quantities that my sister became terribly drunk and had to excuse herself to sleep. Then it was just Will and me again, as it had been and as I thought it always would be. He said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
A walk, in London, in the muck and the heat! I had protested, of course, but only halfheartedly. Will sniffed out adventure, and there was no pointing him away from it. We rambled in a random direction, found a nearby park closed for renovations, a theater midperformance we could not enter; the city had closed its doors to us. But then, a bookseller’s, still open despite the lateness of the hour.
Will had never been a great reader, so he lingered with the bookseller at the counter, petting the shop’s tabby. Meanwhile, I stacked my arms high with books of music and philosophy and translated classics. The most expensive of them all, a first edition of Machiavelli’sFlorentine Histories,had cost more than our carriage. As we left, Will chided me gently for my exorbitance, but he hadn’t really minded. We rarely spent much in Suffolk, where we had everything we needed and nowhere to indulge.
At the townhouse, we fell into bed, exhausted. Will kissed my shoulder and draped his arm around me.
“Back home tomorrow,” he murmured to me, half asleep.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
—
The next day was normal. We said our farewells, clambered into the carriage. I read myFlorentine Historiesas we drove, Will napping in the seat beside me. We got back late, and he fell asleep soon after dinner; the exertions of travel, he told me.
The next morning, he was sick.
I thought he had a simple ague. Where our arms touched beneath the blanket, the skin stuck with sweat. I unpeeled myself from him and went to fetch a cloth. He watched me leave the bed. Coughing, he said, “Water, too, love.” When I returned, he was asleep. He had often caught chills, and I wasn’t overly worried. Too much time in the carriage, too much stink in the city air. Our return to the countryside would stamp out whatever London rot had taken root within his lungs.
But he was still unwell the next day, then the next. It became clear it was serious. The fever worsened. Strange lumps appeared on his groin and his armpits. He became sallow and unresponsive. The doctor came.
Plague,he said behind a beaked mask.
It was a slow dying. I stayed so near him, and yet I didn’t get sick at all; plague is often cruel in that manner. Sometimes, in the darkest moments, I leaned over him and breathed deeply, hoping I might somehow share his burden. I wrote to his sisters to come. We all huddled about the door and said,Soon the worst of it shall pass. I brought him bowls of soup with trembling hands. His cheeks hollowed, and his voice thinned.Soon, the worst of it shall pass,I told myself.Soon, it will.
He slept and slept. Then one day he did not wake up. It happened while I was sitting beside him, reading, holding his hand. He was asleep, but I read still. He had a rattling breath, like dice in a cup. He breathed in, breathed out, breathed in. There was a quick breath, a stuttering breath—and then the noise stopped.
I noticed almost immediately, and I dropped his hand.Perhaps he was still alive, slipping slowly away. Perhaps he was still aware, somehow, that I was beside him, and he felt my absence as he died. But I didn’t stay with him, and I bear that burden still. I panicked and ran to the kitchen, where his sisters were eating. I said,He is not breathing. In response, his eldest sister, Pleasance, screamed. She did not wail, like a mourner. She shrieked in pain, as if I had hit her around the head.
Afterward, I went to the music room. The scores I had purchased at the London booksellers were sitting on a stool by the spinet. I opened one and I played it. I don’t think his sisters have ever forgiven me for doing that. Will was dead, and I was playing the harpsichord. They must have thought me callous. They must have thought me cruel.
I was callous. I was cruel. I played and played and played, for hours and hours. Raw fingers, cold keys.
When was it, Cecilia, that you knew you loved me?
Spilled tea and sweet grasses and posies full of bluebells:I always knew, Will.I trusted too much in good things. The moon may shine, but the sun always burns it away.
My father has always been fond of proverbs. “Moses may be dead, but Adonai still watches,” he once said, disapproving, when I stumbled over a prayer. As he embraced me when I obtained my diploma in Lisbon: “To beget a son is to spin gold.” And as we boarded the ship to England: “No man is a prisoner, if he can escape.”
The saying of his that has remained with me longest, however, is one he invented himself. “The first virtue of a physician is caution,” he once told me, and he has told me the same many times since. “Courage is the surgeon’s lot; for a physician, it is caution. Caution above all else, Davi. Never forget.”
My father is a physician, just as I am. The men of my family have been physicians for centuries, and they likely will be for centuries more. But sometimes I wonder if I ought to have been a surgeon. I am fascinated by the structure of bodies, the mechanics of them, the coglike dependency of organ and bone. Such interests are better suited to a scalpel than a mortar. Had I become a surgeon, I might have been more than competent; Icould have been extraordinary. As it is, I am as skilled as anyone might wish their doctor to be. But the spark of genius is not there.
I don’t dwell upon it. Surgery is unsafe for both patient and doctor. A slip of the blade could mean the noose for a Jew. It is risk enough to be a physician, after all. Consider Roderigo Lopez, aconversowho treated Queen Elizabeth. He was a self-professed Christian, converted decades prior, but still stained with a Jewish past. When a treatment did not work, he was accused of poisoning the queen, and he found the ax for it. In Portugal, it remains illegal to practice our faith at all. Such things are why my father kept a crucifix above his table; why my mother bought bacon at the butcher; why I have always kept that second virtue of caution strapped to my arm, like a duelist’s buckler.
Now we have come to England, the farce is gone, but the fear remains.
