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satisfaction.
    I hurried to the door, trying to believe that a patient must surely be downstairs, and, since the evening was well advanced, half expecting a knife wound or broken jaw, or some other drinking man’s injury. This would put silver in our purse, and we could finish our supper with a bubbling pudding or—one of my favorites—fresh-baked bread smeared with rare marmalade.
    To my distress, in stepped the man we both feared—the tavern owner and landlord of our chambers, Nicholas Nashe.
    â€œHave no fear, good Nicholas,” said my master lightly. “I’ll have your rent by tomorrow’s ebb tide, or I’m an ape.”
    I kept my mouth well shut, but wondered at my master’s bold assertion. He was rightly considered a man of honor, but we had so little food in our cupboard that the mice had abandoned it and taken to nibbling his anatomy books on the shelf.
    â€œThere’s a gentleman downstairs, my lord,” said Nicholas, in a confidential whisper. “Dressed in a surgeon’s mantle like your own, wearing a rapier with a rich agate-stone hilt, upon my faith.”
    â€œIs he ill, good Nicholas, or merely drunk?” my master asked in a tone of gentle exasperation. But it was a tone of relief, too—Nicholas was not demanding money.
    Our landlord placed his hands together prayerfully. “He is known as a sometime ship’s surgeon.”
    â€œIs he bleeding, or cold-sweating, or—”
    â€œMy lord, he is called Titus Cox, and he has swooned.”
    â€œHeaven protect us, I know the man!” My master was out of his chair. “But good Nicholas, he will not be the first gentleman to fall on the floor of the Hart and Trumpet and need assistance, surely.”
    â€œThe last words he spoke, my lord,” said Nicholas, “were ‘show me to Doctor Perrivale.’” Nicholas delivered this imitation of another’s voice, and a sick man at that, with theatrical skill, sounding in accent and tenor very much the mortally stricken gentleman.
    My master strode toward the door, but Nicholas tugged at his sleeve, holding him back.
    â€œHe said more, my lord, words that made little sense to my ears,” said Nicholas in a hoarse whisper. “In an effort to understand what the pitiable gentleman was trying to communicate,” he added, “I took the liberty, my lord, of slipping this from his sleeve.”
    It was a scroll of vellum, the finest sheepskin, sealed with a crisp scarlet crown of wax, and tied around with a blue ribbon. The sight of the seal stopped my breath. I had seen such bright sealing wax, and pretty ribbon, carried by leather-jerkined men in the street, hurrying on some state business. Court documents bore such seals, commissions to have noble criminals arrested.
    Death warrants, handed up to hangmen on the gallows, were marked with such wax, too.
    My master hesitated to touch the scroll. London was a tangle of spies and government agents. It was reckless to learn another man’s secrets.
    He set the document aside, unread, but only after he had studied the seal and peered cautiously into the shadowy shaft of this important document.

Chapter 6
    We hurried down the stairs.
    â€œTitus Cox is a good master of medicine, although he was never a man to cut a vein,” my master was saying, trying to force a breezy confidence into his words. “He always preferred the leech.”
    Nearly any illness responded well to a copious bleeding, measured by the cupful. Most medical masters preferred to sever a vein with a lancet, a sharp blade made for that purpose, but there were those who praised the river leech. My master had trained me in both methods, to answer the needs of every variety of patient.
    People needing a tooth pulled or an abscess pricked could see a barber. Such barbers were adept at binding wounds and draining pus, but most men and women with weight in their purses would prefer the attention of