“You will tell us at once,” the steward said nervously. He would not mention the word “plague.”

“I’ll tell you the moment that any marks show, and you’ll call another nurse and I’ll hand over to her,” Alinor assured him.

“I’ll send over everything,” Mr. Tudeley promised, then descended the ladder and closed the hatch behind him. Alinor waited a moment and then went over and bolted it from her side, so that no one could come up the stairs unexpectedly. She and James were quite alone.

She went to where they had left him, limp as a corpse in the rug, and she unfolded him, as if she were unwrapping a precious parcel. As the carpet fell away, he sighed and seemed to gasp for air. Alinor lifted his head and shoulders a little and slid a bolster behind his head. He seemed to breathe easier and a little color came into his cheek. She found she was looking at his pale mouth and remembering how he had kissed her.

She unbuttoned his fine lawn shirt. The buttons were made from mother-of-pearl. She touched each one, seeing the sheen on it, and then opened his shirt so that she could see his chest and his belly.

His shoulders were broad, his chest and belly flat. He was well muscled as a man who rides and runs every day. A dark trace of hair ran from his belly down towards his breeches and Alinor, who had undressed her drunken husband more than once, unlaced his breeches without hesitation and peeled back the flap. For the first time she saw him naked. She saw the darkness of his thick hair, the strength of his sleeping cock, the muscled line of his haunches. She looked at him for no more than a moment and felt her desire like a fever of her own. Carefully, she eased the breeches from under him, bending over him and smelling the clean warm male scent of him; she had to stop herself dropping her head to kiss his belly and laying her cheek against his hot skin.

She peeled the riding breeches off him, down to his boots, and then she unlaced the boots and slipped them from his feet, then the fine hose. He lay before her naked, except for his open shirt and jacket.

There were no red spots of smallpox. She lifted one arm and then another and felt in his armpits. There were no swellings of the buboes that were a certain sign of plague. There was no sign, on any part of his smooth creamy skin, that anything was wrong with him except the heat of him: he was burning up with fever.

Gently she raised him higher on the bolster, and felt him nestle towards her and groan a little as if he were in pain. She buttoned up his shirt again to protect him from cold, and she felt a passionate tenderness as she did so, as if she were tending to Rob or Alys when they were babies. She left the rich carpet underneath him, and she covered him with one of the blankets from the other bed. Most physicians would heap blankets on a feverish patient and add a warming pan to burn out the fever. Alinor treated her patients as she had treated her children, keeping them cool and still. Again, she put her hand against his forehead. She could almost feel the heat pulsing through the blue veins at his temples. She put two fingers inside his shirt collar on his neck and felt the drumming of his heartbeat.