Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1 (52 page)

‘My love!’ he exclaimed. ‘Here is Dr Fielding come to me with the best of news.’

Her face was radiant. ‘I told him to tell you privately.’

‘He did. No-one else knows. My love, I am so glad!’

Her eyes were wet with tears. ‘It is like a redemption,’ she said. ‘I feel as if a cross has been lifted from my shoulders.’

‘I shall go to Walsingham the moment our baby is born and thank Our Lady for her favour,’ he promised. ‘I shall endow the shrine with a fortune, if it is a boy.’

‘Please God that He grants it,’ she murmured.

‘Why should He not?’ Henry demanded. ‘When it is our desire, and right for England, and we ask it as holy children of the church?’

‘Amen,’ she said quickly. ‘If it is God’s will.’

He flicked his hand. ‘Of course it must be His will,’ he said. ‘Now you must take care and rest.’

Katherine smiled at him. ‘As you see.’

‘Well, you must. And anything you want, you shall have.’

‘I shall tell the cooks if I want anything.’

‘And the midwives shall attend you night and morning to make sure that you are well.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘And if God is willing, we shall have a son.’

It was Maria de Salinas, my true friend who had come with me from Spain, and stayed with me through our good months and our hard years, who found the Moor. He was attending on a wealthy merchant, travelling from Genoa to Paris, they had called in at London to value some gold and Maria heard of him from a woman who had given a hundred pounds to Our Lady of Walsingham, hoping to have a son.

‘They say he can make barren women give birth,’ she whispers to me, watching that none of my other ladies have come close enough to overhear.

I cross myself as if to avoid temptation. ‘Then he must use black arts.’

‘Princess, he is supposed to be a great physician. Trained by masters who were at the university of Toledo.’

‘I will not see him.’

‘Because you think he must use black arts?’

‘Because he is my enemy and my mother’s enemy. She knew that the Moors’ knowledge was unlawfully gained, drawn from the devil, not from the revealed truth of God. She drove the Moors from Spain and their magical arts with them.’

‘Your Grace, he may be the only doctor in England who knows anything about women.’

‘I will not see him.’

Maria took my refusal and let a few weeks go by and then I woke in the night with a deep pain in my belly, and slowly, felt the blood coming. She was quick and ready to call the maids with the towels and with a ewer to wash, and when I was back in bed again and we realised that it was no more than my monthly courses returned, she came quietly and stood beside the head of the bed. Lady Margaret Pole was silent at the doorway.

‘Your Grace, please see this doctor.’

‘He is a Moor.’

‘Yes, but I think he is the only man in this country who will know what is happening. How can you have your courses if you are with child? You may be losing this second baby. You have to see a doctor that we can trust.’

‘Maria, he is my enemy. He is my mother’s enemy. She spent her life driving his people from Spain.’

‘We lost their wisdom with them,’ Maria says quietly. ‘You have not lived in Spain for nearly a decade, Your Grace, you do not know what it is like there now. My brother writes to me that people fall sick and there are no hospitals that can cure them. The nuns and the monks do their best; but they have no knowledge. If you have a stone it has to be cut out of you by a horse doctor, if you have a broken arm or leg then the blacksmith has to set it. The barbers are surgeons, the tooth drawers work in the market place and break people’s jaws. The midwives go from burying a man sick with sores to a childbirth and lose as many babies as they deliver. The skills of the Moorish physicians, with their knowledge of the body, their herbs to soothe pain, their instruments for surgery, and their insistence on washing – it is all lost.’

‘If it was sinful knowledge it is better lost,’ I say stubbornly.

‘Why would God be on the side of ignorance and dirt and disease?’ she asks fiercely. ‘Forgive me, Your Grace, but this makes no sense. And
you are forgetting what your mother wanted. She always said that the universities should be restored, to teach Christian knowledge. But by then she had killed or banished all the teachers who knew anything.’

‘The queen will not want to be advised by a heretic,’ Lady Margaret said firmly. ‘No English lady would consult a Moor.’

Maria turns to me. ‘Please, Your Grace.’

I am in such pain that I cannot bear an argument. ‘Both of you can leave me now,’ I say. ‘Just let me sleep.’

Lady Margaret goes out of the door but Maria pauses to close the shutters so that I am in shadow. ‘Oh, let him come then,’ I say. ‘But not while I am like this. He can come next week.’

She brings him by the hidden stairway which runs from the cellars through a servants’ passage to the queen’s private rooms at Richmond Palace. I am wearily dressing for dinner, and I let him come into my rooms while I am still unlaced, in my shift with a cape thrown on top. I grimace at the thought of what my mother would say at a man coming into my privy chamber. But I know, in my heart, that I have to see a doctor who can tell me how to get a son for England. And I know, if I am honest, that something is wrong with the baby they say I am carrying.

I know him for an unbeliever the moment I see him. He is black as ebony, his eyes as dark as jet, his mouth wide and sensual, his face both merry and compassionate, all at the same time. The back of his hands are black, dark as his face, long-fingered, his nails rosy pink, the palms brown, the creases ingrained with his colour. If I were a palmist I could trace the lifeline on his African palm like cart tracks of brown dust in a field of terracotta. I know him at once for a Moor and a Nubian; and I want to order him away from my rooms. But I know, at the same time, that he may be the only doctor in this country who has the knowledge I need.

This man’s people, infidels, sinners who have set their black faces against God, have medicine that we do not. For some reason, God and his angels have not revealed to us the knowledge that these people have sought and found. These people have read in Greek everything that the Greek physicians thought. Then they have explored for themselves, with forbidden instruments, studying the human body as if it were an animal, without fear or respect. They create wild theories with forbidden thoughts and then they test them, without superstition. They are prepared to think anything, to consider anything; nothing is taboo. These people are educated where we are fools, where I am a fool. I might look down on him as coming from a race of savages, I might look down on him as an infidel doomed to hell; but I need to know what he knows.

If he will tell me.

‘I am Catalina, Infanta of Spain and Queen Katherine of England,’ I say bluntly, that he may know that he is dealing with a queen and the daughter of a queen who had defeated his people.

He inclines his head, as proud as a baron. ‘I am Yusuf, son of Ismail,’ he says.

‘You are a slave?’

‘I was born to a slave, but I am a free man.’

‘My mother would not allow slavery,’ I tell him. ‘She said it was not allowed by our religion, our Christian religion.’

‘Nevertheless, she sent my people into slavery,’ he remarks. ‘Perhaps she should have considered that high principles and good intentions end at the border.’

‘Since your people won’t accept the salvation of God then it doesn’t matter what happens to your earthly bodies.’

His face lights up with amusement, and he gives a delightful, irrepressible chuckle. ‘It matters to us, I think,’ he says. ‘My nation allows slavery, but we don’t justify it like that. And most importantly, you cannot inherit slavery with us. When you are born, whatever the condition of your mother, you are born free. That is the law, and I think it a very good one.’

‘Well, it makes no difference what you think,’ I say rudely. ‘Since you are wrong.’

Again he laughs aloud, in true merriment, as if I have said something very funny. ‘How good it must be, always to know that you are right,’ he says. ‘Perhaps you will always be certain of your rightness. But I would suggest to you, Catalina of Spain and Katherine of England, that sometimes it is better to know the questions than the answers.’

I pause at that. ‘But I want you only for answers,’ I say. ‘Do you know medicine? Whether a woman can conceive a son? If she is with child?’

‘Sometimes it can be known,’ he says. ‘Sometimes it is in the hands of Allah, praise His holy name, and sometimes we do not yet understand enough to be sure.’

I cross myself against the name of Allah, quick as an old woman spitting on a shadow. He smiles at my gesture, not in the least disturbed. ‘What is it that you want to know?’ he asks, his voice filled with kindness. ‘What is it that you want to know so much that you have to send for an infidel to advise you? Poor queen, you must be very alone if you need help from your enemy.’

My eyes are filling with too-quick tears at the sympathy in his voice and I brush my hand against my face.

‘I have lost a baby,’ I say shortly. ‘A daughter. My physician says that she was one of twins, and that there is another child still inside me, that there will be another birth.’

‘So why send for me?’

‘I want to know for sure,’ I say. ‘If there is another child I will have to go into confinement, the whole world will watch me. I want to know that the baby is alive inside me now, that it is a boy, that he will be born.’

‘Why should you doubt your own physician’s opinion?’

I turn from his inquiring, honest gaze. ‘I don’t know,’ I say evasively.

‘Infanta, I think you do know.’

‘How can I know?’

‘With a woman’s sense.’

‘I have it not.’

He smiles at my stubbornness. ‘Well, then, woman without any feelings, what do you think with your clever mind, since you have decided to deny what your body tells you?’

‘How can I know what I should think?’ I ask. ‘My mother is dead. My greatest friend in England…’ I break off before I can say the name of Arthur. ‘I have no-one to confide in. One midwife says one thing, one says another. The physician is sure…but he wants to be sure. The king rewards him only for good news. How can I know the truth?’

‘I should think you do know, despite yourself,’ he insists gently. ‘Your body will tell you. I suppose your courses have not returned?’

‘No, I have bled,’ I admit unwillingly. ‘Last week.’

‘With pain?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your breasts are tender?’

‘They were.’

‘Are they fuller than usual?’

‘No.’

‘You can feel the child? He moves inside you?’

‘I can’t feel anything since I lost the girl.’

‘You are in pain now?’