The Conscience of the King

It was a lovely house that Dr Simon Forman had rented in Lambeth, close to the river and with an orchard so luxuriant as to be able to supply a shop. On this cold, crisp morning the frost hung on every branch and twig and the breath steamed out of men's mouths. The orchard was a white hanging garden, a fantasy world of stillness and frozen beauty. Gresham would miss Simon Forman, self-proclaimed doctor, astrologer and dealer in secrets. For most of his life he had been courted by rich and poor alike for his medical skills, while being hounded near to death by the Establishment who considered him both a quack and an evil magician. Gresham had never made use of Forman's skills as an astrologer. On countless occasions he had needed his services as a doctor, and adviser on poisons.

Poor old Forman had died in September, taken by a fit while rowing alone across the Thames. According to his widow, Anne, Forman had predicted his own death a week beforehand. Well, if it pleased her to believe it, it did no harm, Gresham thought.

The days after Forman's death had seen a flurry of coaches and

Serving-men queuing at the widow's door, asking for papers and any letters their distinguished mistresses had sent to Forman. The rush had now subsided, and today's visitor was a quiet, bearded, thoughtful figure. Dr Napier was from Buckinghamshire and had been a close friend and an apprentice of Forman's for years. He was at the Lambeth house now to collect his inheritance — all of Forman's medical books and manuscripts and the details of his famous cures. It had taken Dr Napier a week already to see what he wished to remove back to Linford and what he felt could be destroyed. He was not a man accustomed to moving quickly. He was a man whose medical judgement Gresham trusted implicitly and, knowing that the heir to his old friend was in the Lambeth house, he had asked to meet him.

'Congratulations, my lord, on your recent honour,' Napier said ponderously, but genuinely enough. The King's proclamation had been almost instant, unusually so for such an indolent man. The formalities would wait.

‘I think it more a payment in advance than payment for services rendered, Dr Napier,' replied Gresham with a grin, 'and in order to earn my fine title I need a medical opinion.'

'You may have it, such as my skills are,' replied Napier, privately flattered and not enough of a deceiver to hide it nearly as well as he thought.

‘I will not dance around the edge, Dr Napier,' said Gresham.' Enough secrets had passed before Napier's eyes, and not one of them leaked, for Gresham to be sure in him. ‘I need to know if Prince Henry's death was from natural causes, or from poison.'

Napier's face blanched a little, but he maintained professional composure, ‘I know only what the gossip says about His Highness's illness.'

‘I have detailed the course of the illness here in this paper,' said Gresham, handing the document over to Napier, in summary, it is this. The Prince first became ill in the spring. Low spirits, weight loss and what he called a giddiness and a lumpishness in his forehead. He tried to drive out the illness by hard exercise and a spartan diet, to no effect. Increasing tiredness, headache, and by autumn severe bouts of fever and diarrhoea. His stool light yellow, like pea soup. Bleeding from the nose. He collapsed. Eyes couldn't endure light, lips started to turn black, complained of incredible dryness in his mouth. Convulsions, fits, serious pain. The rest you know.'

Napier made a noise that sounded something like 'Hmmph!' and sat down to read the papers, which included all the treatments given to the Prince. 'Idiots!' he exclaimed a short while later. 'Complete idiots!'

'Why so?' enquired Gresham. 'It's said they asked every leading doctor in the land for advice.'

'It's a great pity that the only one who could have helped them died in September,' responded Napier gruffly. 'The idiots shaved his head and put the warm bodies of pigeons to it, as if that ever did anything except give a poor servant a good dinner of pigeon pie shortly afterwards. Oh, and look here at this…' Napier flicked the paper he was reading with disgust. 'A unicorn's horn with stag bone and pearl…'

'Sounds impressive to me,' said Gresham.

'Sounds impressive is correct,' snapped Napier, 'but that's all it is. The unicorn is a mythical beast. Even if it weren't — and it is! — the chance of grinding up some chalk and selling it at a king's ransom to the King's idiot doctors is a business proposition very few of London's apothecaries could resist. Pah! Unicorn horn? You might as well prescribe the devil's pizzle!'

Gresham nearly asked if the good doctor had a store of that, but decided that for all his evident qualities, a sense of humour was not Napier's strong point.

It took the doctor over an hour to read through the papers. Seated by a blazing fire, a companionable cup of warmed ale in his hand, Gresham felt more relaxed than he had done in months. Mannion sat with him, while the four servants he had brought as bodyguards rested in the kitchen, where the noise suggested they were getting on well with two of the maids.

The pressures on Gresham were huge and the stakes high. But at least now he had direction, certainty and clear targets. The game was on, and he had an idea of the rules as well as the desired outcome.

Napier rose three times to consult books that were part packed away, and once to peer closely at a sheet of papers in Forman's cramped hand. Finally he came back to the fireside and sat down.

'My conclusion,' said Napier ponderously and with great assumed dignity, 'is this.' He paused to gain greater effect. 'You should understand that I did not have the chance to examine the patient myself, and that therefore at least an element of my conclusion must be conjecture.' He paused.

'And that conclusion is?' asked Gresham, hiding his impatience. All men have their hour, and need it.

'The symptoms are those of a specific fever. Even if that were not the case, the manner of the illness's growth and maturation argues against poison. The majority of poisons affect the digestion and stomach. Few of the known ones first affect the head, and indeed that is reported as being one of the hardest areas for a poison to reach. The illness developed over a long period when, according to these records, the Prince underwent several changes of diet, and periods of hardly eating at all. It would have been nigh-impossible for a poisoner to sustain an effective dosage over such a period of time.'

'So you believe the Prince was not poisoned?'

'No. On the contrary. I believe he was poisoned.'

Gresham felt a bolt pass through his body. 'How so?'

'I suspect the Prince was poisoned by drinking water. This fever of which I speak is often linked to foul water. The Prince was an abstemious man. I have no doubt he would order liquid drawn only from the finest well. Yet all it needs is for a servant to confuse two pails, or indeed for the servant who draws the water to be ill himself, or for the servant to save time by going to the nearest rather than the purest source. Or perhaps the servant left his master's water by a privy. Dr Forman was most insistent that on no occasion should water be drunk. Small ale is the least that should be permitted.'

'Well,' said Gresham, 'at least the Prince's father is safe from this fever.'

'How so?' enquired Napier. Gresham had forgotten the absence of a sense of humour.

'His Royal Highness is not renowned for drinking water,' said Gresham.

He endured the lecture on the problems created by excessive consumption of wines, thanked Dr Napier profusely and left Lambeth.

Gresham and Mannion sat in the rear of the boat as they were rowed home across the river.

'It costs a fortune, you know, every time you do this,' grumbled Mannion.

'It's a fortune I have. And we have to find Marlowe and Shakespeare.'

Gresham had ordered every contact, agent and informer they knew in London to locate them.

'They're both of them good at disappearing, that's all I can say,' said Mannion. It was a difficult time to trace someone; the winter weather was making travel difficult. In addition, it was as near certain as could be that neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare were in London, where wagging tongues were far more numerous, and there was no sign of Shakespeare in Stratford, the only other easy possibility for his whereabouts.

'What do you reckon Marlowe's game is? And Shakespeare's?' asked Mannion.

'Shakespeare's easier,' said Gresham, resisting the temptation to drag his finger in the water as they rowed smoothly in mid-stream. 'He's got himself into a mess he can't get out of, so he's just bolted, like a frightened rabbit. Marlowe may have had an idea where these manuscripts — the one's in the writers' original hand, the ones that prove authorship — were, but Shakespeare must have moved them by now. He's the only one who knows their hiding place, unless Marlowe, or the King, or you and I torture it out of him. He's terrified that one of us will get to him.' 'Why doesn't he just burn the lot?'

'Who'd believe him? The risk then is that we'd all torture him to death, believing he knew where they were, and he'd have nothing to buy us off with.'

'And Marlowe?'

'He's harder. He wants the truth about the plays he wrote under Shakespeare's name acknowledged. He wants his new play performed. And he wants revenge. All before he dies of the pox. Most of all he needs those manuscripts to prove his authorship. His problem is that the minute he raises his head he's a dead man. He's not just got me on his tail, he's on the run from the King. I think he's probably hunting Shakespeare as hard as we are. We need those manuscripts. And Shakespeare's the only one who knows where they are.'

'Be a laugh, wouldn't it,' said Mannion, picking his teeth again, 'if he had gone and destroyed them? If we're all charging around for something that don't exist?'

'Hilarious,' said Gresham. 'Positively side-splitting.' Yet the thought had occurred to him. Life was fond of such great jokes as that.