“We’re desperate,” Sandys said, looking indeed quite desperate. “I’ve paraded five London physicians past his bed, and bringing him here to Wales is our last resort. So far he’s been bled, treated with leeches, given tinctures of nettles. He drinks nothing but asses’ milk, never cows’ milk. Oh, and we’ve given him several doses of sulfur, but to no effect.”
That was mildly interesting. “One of those fools you saw must have been Sydenham,” Piers said. “He’s obsessed with sulfur auratum antimonii. Gives it out for stubbed toes. Along with opium, of course.”
Sandys nodded. “Dr. Sydenham was hopeful that the sulfur would relieve my son’s symptoms, but it didn’t help.”
“It wouldn’t. The man was enough of a fool to be admitted to the Royal College of Physicians, and that should have told you something.”
“But you’re—”
“I joined purely as a kindness to them.” He peered down at Sandys’s son. He was certainly looking the worse for wear. “It likely didn’t make you feel any better to trudge all the way to Wales to see me.”
The man blinked at him. Then he said, slowly, “We were in a carriage.”
“Inflamed eyes,” Piers said. “Signs of a recent nosebleed.”
“What do you gather from that? What does he need?” Sandys asked.
“Better bathing. Is he always that color?”
“His skin is a bit yellow,” Sandys acknowledged. “It doesn’t come from my side of the family.” That was an understatement, given that Sandys’s nose was the color of a cherry.
“Did you eat a surfeit of lampreys?” Piers asked the patient.
The man looked up at him as if he had sprouted horns. “Larkspy? What’s a larkspy? I haven’t eaten any of it.”
Piers straightened up. “He doesn’t know the history of England. He’s better off dead.”
“Did you ask if he’d eaten any lampreys?” Sandys said. “He hates seafood. Can’t abide eels.”
“More to the point, he’s deaf as a post. The first King Henry ate lampreys, one of the many mad kings we’ve had in this country, though not as cracked as the current one. Still, Henry was thickheaded enough to have eaten a surfeit of eels and died of it.”
“I am not deaf!” the patient said. “I can hear as well as the next, if people would just stop mumbling at me. My joints hurt. They’re the problem.”
“You’re dying, that’s the problem,” Piers pointed out.
Sandys grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. “Don’t say such a thing in front of my son. He’s no more than thirty-two.”
“He’s got the body of an eighty-year-old. Has he spent much time consorting with actresses?”
Sandys snorted. “Certainly not! Our family goes back to—”
“Nightwalkers? Hussies? Mollishers, mopsies, or mackerels? Though mackerels brings fish back into this conversation and you already told me that the man can’t abide seafood. But what about fish of the female variety?”
“My son is a member of the Church!” Sandys blustered.
“That settles it,” Piers said. “Everyone lies, but churchmen make an art of it. He’s got syphilis. Churchmen are riddled with it, and the more pious they are, the more symptoms they have. I should have known the moment I saw that prayer book.”
“Not my son,” Sandys said, sounding as if he actually believed it. “He’s a man of God. Always has been.”
“As I was saying—”
“Seriously.”
“Hmm. Well, if not a mopsy—”
“No one,” Sandys said, shaking his head. “He’s never—he’s not interested. He’s like a saint, that boy is. When he was sixteen, I took him to Venus’s Rose, in the Whitefriars, but he didn’t take the slightest interest in any of the girls. Just started praying, and asked them to join him, which they didn’t care for. He’s a candidate for sainthood.”
“His sainthood is about to become a question for a higher authority. There’s nothing I can do.”
Sandys grabbed his arm. “You must!”
“I can’t.”
“But the other doctors, all of them, they gave him medicines, they said—”
“They were fools, who didn’t tell you the truth.”
Sandys swallowed. “He was fine until he was twenty. Just a fine, healthy boy, and then—”
“Take your son home and let him die in peace. Because die he will, whether I give you a solution of sulfur or not.”
“Why?” Sandys whispered.
“He has syphilis. He’s deaf, he’s diarrhetic, he’s jaundiced, he’s got eye and joint inflammation and nosebleeds. He likely gets headaches.”
“He’s never been with a woman. Ever. I swear it. He hasn’t any sores on his private parts or he would have mentioned it.”
“He didn’t have to be with a woman,” Piers said, nipping his coat out of Sandys’s hand and shaking his sleeve straight again.
“How can he have syphilis without—”
“It could have been a man.”
Sandys looked so shocked that Piers relented. “Or it could have been you, which is far more likely. The rosy ladies you visited as a youth infected the boy before he was even born.”
“I was treated with mercury,” Sandys protested.
“To no avail. You still have it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have important things to do. Like treat a patient who might live for another year.”
Piers strolled out, finding his butler Prufrock in the hallway. “I wonder how you ever get anything done,” he said to him. “It must be hard to run a household when you have to conduct all your business in the corridors so you can hear every golden word that falls from my lips.”
“I do not find it a particular problem,” Prufrock said, falling in beside him. “But then I have lots of practice. You don’t think that you were a trifle hard on Lord Sandys?”
“Hard? Was I hard? Surely not. I told him exactly what was wrong with his son, and what to do next—in short, go home and wait for choirs of angels, because there are no miracles on this side of the divide.”
“It’s his son that’s dying. And if I got you right, he gave the poor lad the illness. That’s a blow, that is.”
“My father wouldn’t have minded a bit,” Piers assured him. “If he had another heir, that is. But Sandys has a whole passel of children. An heir and more to spare.”
“How do you know that?”
“The Church, you fool. He put this boy into the Church and seems to have trained him up to it from an early age, too. The heir must be rousting about in brothels just like good old Pa. Sandys would never have allowed the spare near a Bible if he were, in fact, the heir. This one is expendable, which is a bloody good thing, under the circumstances.”
“Your father the duke would be greatly disturbed at the very idea that he’d passed on a disease of this nature,” Prufrock said.
“Perhaps,” Piers said, pretending to consider it. “And perhaps not. I’m amazed my father hasn’t married a fresh young thing of twenty. Or sixteen. Time’s a-wasting, and at this rate he’ll never have the spare he needs.”