The Serpent's Mark by S. W. Perry

Author:S. W. Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

13

The guildhall of the College of Physicians is a fine timbered building on Knightrider Street to the south-west of St Paul’s. Though modest in size, it exudes an air of almost Puritan rectitude. The learned Fellows who pass through its door are no less sober in dress and character. A bright ribbon tied around the knee, too extravagant a feather in your cap, and you’ll be taken for a dangerous renegade. Nicholas remembers how Eleanor used to tease him that one day she would wake up to find herself the wife of just such a staid and stern physician.

Eleanor had been the very antithesis of conventional: a lithelimbed, freckled meadow-sprite daughter of a neighbouring Barnthorpe yeoman, as hard to hold in one place as gossamer caught on a summer breeze. How could she ever have loved such a country dullard as I? he wonders. She’d had time enough, after all, to see his many faults – they’d known each other since childhood. Yet when he’d asked her to marry him – barely three years ago now, at the Barnthorpe May Fair – she’d coolly asked him why it had taken him so long to pluck up the courage.

Wondering if his imaginings in John Lumley’s orchard might have been somewhat premature, Nicholas rubs a precautionary hand across his eyes. He cannot enter this stolid place unmanned by tears.

Shown into a stuffy, low-ceilinged chamber on the first floor, Nicholas is allowed a moment’s enjoyment of the noise of carts passing by in the street and the smell of the wet-fish stalls, before a clerk in formal gown closes the window. The physicians would have the Lord Mayor expel the fishmongers from Knightrider Street, but the Fishmongers’ Guild was incorporated first – by a good two hundred years. So the physicians must either sweat or smell fish. The impasse does not bode well for Nicholas.

Behind a long polished table, their backs to the window, four Censors sit like hanging judges, resplendent in formal gowns and starched ruffs. Led by Arnold Beston, a wiry little man with a squint in his left eye that gives him a permanently doubting expression, they are charged with maintaining the College’s professional standards. It’s clear to Nicholas from the start that they consider him lacking in every single one.

‘Mr Shelby, where is your doctor’s gown?’ asks Beston.

‘I don’t have one,’ says Nicholas bravely.

‘You don’t own one – or you were never awarded one?’

From the other end of the line, Censor Frowicke stabs at a sheet of paper with a finger. ‘It says here – Michaelmas ’86, under Professor Lorkin.’

‘Then where is the gown, Mr Shelby?’ asks Beston.

‘I threw it away. Into the Thames. October last, if I recall. My memory of that time can be unreliable.’

Silence, save for the low rumble from the street. Thank God they can’t smell the fish, thinks Nicholas.

‘You threw your gown away?’ asks Frowicke in disbelief. ‘Whatever for?’

‘I had no want of it any more. I do remember regretting that.’

Beston’s face softens. He likes contrition.

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