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a surgeon. Surgeons rarely cut or even set a splint, relying on books and star charts to advise their patients. My master, however, set his hand to every aspect of the medical profession, and studied every drug, including the newly imported tobecka , which some doctors considered a cure-all.
    I followed, but at the last moment I paused to work a wrinkle out of my stockings. They had been darned at the knee by my own needle. I worked the stitching around so it didn’t show from the front. There was no way of knowing what knight or poet might be drinking here tonight.
    The tavern was a cockpit of bright plumage. Every man dressed in tight-fitting stockings and a codpiece, to pad out his God-given manliness. Most of the men in the Hart and Trumpet that night had set aside a plumed cap, either soft and loose, in a manner considered French, or stiff and peaked, in a more English style. Even when a man of the town did not wear such a cap, he kept it nearby, as proof of his good taste.
    But the place was subdued just now, a mere pale imitation of its usual liveliness, despite Mrs. Nashe’s cheer and expert flattery—she was a woman who could nudge a Puritan into a smile.
    I caught a glimpse of Jane, Nicholas’s dark-haired daughter. She had brought me fresh-baked ale-cakes in recent weeks, and we’d shared a kiss or two when her mother was busy coaxing playwrights and drapers into paying off their accounts. Jane’s eyes asked a question I could not answer.
    A few gentlemen nodded greetings to my master, and extended the courtesy to me. I nodded in return, but kept what I trusted was a medical-man’s solemnity in my bearing. Heads inclined in our direction as we knelt to attend our patient.
    The man stretched out in the light from the hearth wore a velvet-lined mantle, and a city man’s rich sword. His limbs were rigid and his eyes darting about, an unholy smile twitching his lips. Watery saliva streamed down his cheek. As he tried to extend his hand to greet my master, the arm jerked, and his feet spasmed, making awkward, uncontrolled running motions in the flickering firelight.
    â€œMy lord, is it the falling sickness?” asked Nicholas.
    The symptoms did resemble epilepsia —epilepsy. But something about the way the stricken gentleman tried to rise, working hard to sit up, made me murmur a prayer. I had seen examples of epilepsy, attending a cobbler in Eastcheap who fell to the plank floor of his shop from time to time. The seizures were sometimes troubling to see, but they passed with no harm.
    Titus tried to speak, but made only a choking sound. His eyes were full of feeling, fear, and recognition. Silently, I asked Heaven to spare my master’s old friend.
    â€œIt’s been a score of years, Titus,” said my master gently, “since we drank wine together.”
    The stricken surgeon struggled to shape a word.
    â€œIs it a stroke of God’s hand?” the tavern owner was suggesting, the common phrase for a paralyzing fit. But the rigidity and trembling of the surgeon’s arms and legs recalled only one evil illness to my mind.
    â€œOr could it—” the tavern owner was saying, bending close to my ear. “Could it be poison?”

Chapter 7
    Nicholas’s last guess was far from foolish.
    There was much whispering about secret harm—poison, and the bodkin, a long, slender blade, easy to hide up a sleeve, the favorite weapon of both foreign and royal spies. People said that a Portuguese merchant had washed up well gnawed by fish, just downriver from Greenwich, the victim of both poison and stabbing with a slender knife. Portugal had recently been occupied by Spanish men-at-arms, and these days every Portuguese wine-seller was now suspect as a possible spy for King Philip of Spain.
    A tailor fitting my new jerkin a few months before, when we had silver pennies to rub together, had murmured to me that a man heard murmuring in Spanish—or was it