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Portuguese?—on Fleet Street had been hustled into an oxcart by heavily armed men. No one had seen him since.
    â€œA Spanish spy could look as tall and well favored as you, young sir,” said Ned the tailor, removing his spectacles and giving my face a measuring look. “If I may say so. And be evil through to his very soul.”
    Now my master had Nicholas send a tavern-boy to the Admiralty, with the message that one of the Queen’s men was stricken. “Be quick!” my master added. The boy vanished into the dark street.
    Nicholas had been pleased that a gentleman physician, tenant of the tavern, could attend to the crisis so quickly. But now he began to urge, in a hushed voice, that we hurry the sick man upstairs. “With speed, if it please you. Men do not drink and sup with a sick man lying before them.”
    That was true enough. Gentlemen, with brightly colored stockings and plumed caps, were entering the tavern, laughing as they stepped inside, only to be silenced by the sight of Titus stretched before them.
    â€œWhat is your diagnosis, Thomas?” asked my master as we carried our patient up the stairs.
    â€œAdder’s venom?” I suggested. It was true that the snake’s poison could be milked and kept in a vial. Our landlord remained downstairs, where we could hear his voice through the floorboards, lifted in a convincing show of good cheer.
    My master stretched a blanket over the shivering surgeon in our chamber. “Such venom is a possibility, in truth,” said William. “Although it’s unlikely.”
    My master knew well what was wrong with our sufferer, and so did I, but he was testing my judgment.
    I bent over our patient. His tongue and gums showed no lesions, but I knew the disease had passed far beyond that stage. Any examination of the gentleman’s male member, and every other body part, would show no pustule, dry or wet—the malady was by many years too far advanced for that.
    I said, “I fear this is no such easy complaint as poison.”
    We stepped to the sideboard, where, in richer days, a pitcher of wine always used to be kept. I said, in a low voice, “My lord, he is a very sick man.”
    â€œDo I need to pay an astrologer for his future, Thomas?” asked my master, with a bite to his voice.
    â€œMy lord, your fellow doctor suffers from the pox.”
    The subject of the pox was a painful one for both my master and myself.
    That winter, a few days after Twelfth Night, with my master attending a noble woman in Windsor, I had removed a splinter from a shipwright’s eye. As a medical man I was green, having nothing of my master’s experience. But the shipwright, a West Country man like myself, begged me to pluck the wood from his eye, and I took up the challenge.
    It was the first time I had ever used tweezers for such a delicate operation. The offending object was a stubborn little prick of spruce, and painful.
    I had been so relieved to have the operation done—the shipwright’s thanks still ringing in my ears, his silver in the purse at my belt—that I took a wherry across the river. I wanted to taste some of the south bank’s stronger beer, and wanted to dance to some of the minstrels.
    To my own surprise, I turned a corner, entered a door, and stumbled right into a stew—a brothel. Once in, I kept on, into the entryway, led in by a mix of curiosity and ignorance. And perhaps a dash of lust.
    Finding myself eye-to-eye with the white-bearded man in the short entry hall, I heard his phlegmy laugh, and his greeting: “Go on, young sir, and have a cup of beer with honest women.”
    It was a simple room, with a broad plank table, a large fireplace, and sweet-smelling rushes scattered on the floor, new hay and field flowers among them. With the smoke of seasoned wood and the perfume of hops in the air, it smelled like any clean inn along the road. Four women sat at the table, looking like