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 First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © S. W. Perry, 2019

The moral right of S. W. Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this
book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the
work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or
localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 496 2

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 497 9
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 499 3

Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26–27 Boswell Street
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WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk
For Lilian and Vera Jones
 Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.
(This is a place where the dead are pleased to help the
living.)
INSCRIPTION IN THE ORIGINAL THEATRE OF ANATOMY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
PADUA 1594

Physicians are like kings – they brook no contradiction.

JOHN WEBSTER
The Duchess of Malfi
1614
 Tilbury, England. Winter 1591

I
n the dusk of a desolate November evening an urchin in a mud-stained
and threadbare jerkin, long-since stolen from its rightful owner, hurries
along the Thames foreshore beneath the grim ramparts of Tilbury Fort.
The chill east wind claws at his puckered pale flesh. The hunger that
has driven him down to the narrowing band of shingle gnaws within him, as
if it would tear itself out of his belly and go crawling off by itself in search
of sustenance elsewhere. He is risking the tide because he knows a place
where the oysters are plump and good. On balance, the strand is a safer
route than striking inland in the gathering darkness.
His destination is a small channel that runs deep into the Essex shore, a
wilderness of marsh and reed, of dead-end tracks that lead to creeks where
you can drown in stinking mud before you can get to the Amen at the end of
the Lord’s Prayer. He knows this because the wasteland is where he lives,
on its southern fringe, in a ramshackle camp of vagabonds and peddlers,
swelled by the destitute and the maimed from the wars in Holland and by
discharged sailors from the queen’s fleet.
The river is the colour of the lead coffin he once saw when he broke into
a private chapel to get out of a storm. It is studded with ships: hoys and
flyboats from Antwerp and Flushing, barques from the Hansa ports of
Lübeck and Hamburg, fur traders from the white wastes of Muscovy. As
night approaches, they are beginning to dissolve before his eyes, like old
coins tossed into oil of vitriol. All they leave behind is the tarry smell of
caulked timber and the tormenting scent of food cooking on galley hearths.
Before the boy can reach the channel he must first climb over the great
iron chain that runs out into the water, the boom that blocks the river lest
the Spanish come again, as they did in ’88.
He is unwilling to jump the chain because the hunger has given him
cramps in the stomach. He’d crawl under it, but that would mean slithering
through pools of rank green slime. So instead he puts one tattered boot into
a slippery iron link and starts to ease himself over.
And as he does so, something amongst the rotting kelp that clings to the
chain detaches itself and drops to the pebbles.
A crab! A dead crab.
Dare he eat it? He’s ravenous enough. But how long has it been there,
trapped amongst the weeds and the barnacles? The urchin knows you can
die from eating bad food. It makes you double up like a sprat being fried in
a pan. It makes you scream. He’s seen it happen.
But famine has made him canny. He knows exactly what to do. He’ll
wash the crab clean of mud in the nearest pool, take a long sniff beneath the
carapace and judge then if it’s worth breaking open.
It is only when he lifts the crab from the pebbles that the boy realizes it is
not a crab at all.
It is a human hand.
 PART 1

The Physician from Basle

 1
Nine months earlier. 23rd February 1591

I
t is a day made for second chances, a day ripe for confession, for
penitence, for admitting your sins and seizing that unexpected God-
given chance to start afresh. A dying storm has left thin wracks of
ripped black cloud hanging in the saturated air, above a pale empty
world awaiting the first brushstroke. It is simply a matter of applying the
paint to the canvas. Let today slip by unused, and Nicholas Shelby – lapsed
physician and reluctant sometime spy – knows he must return to London,
no nearer to accepting the new life he’s been so cruelly dealt than when he
left.
His father has sensed it, too.
‘Your Eleanor died in August last,’ Yeoman Shelby observes with
devastating calmness, as the two men shelter from the last of the downpour
in the farm’s apple press. ‘It’s now almost March. Seven months. Where
were you, boy? Where did you go?’
How much of an answer does a father need? Nicholas wonders, close to
shivering inside his white canvas doublet. Would it help to know that for a
while I was busy drinking myself stupid in any tavern I could find that
hadn’t already banned me? Or that I was losing every patient I had, because
word had soon spread that Dr Shelby was raging in his grief like a deranged
shabberoon? Or that I was busy rejecting everything I learned at Cambridge
– attended at a cost you could scarcely bear – because when the time came
and Eleanor and the child she was carrying had need of it, my medical
knowledge turned out to be little more than superstition? Or that, on top of
everything else, there had been a murderer I had to stop from killing again?
 There are some questions, Nicholas thinks, that should remain for ever
unanswered, if only for the sake of those who ask them.
‘How could you do that to us, boy – vanishing off the face of God’s good
earth like that?’ his father is saying, his words delivered to the dying rain’s
slow drumbeat. ‘Your brother wore himself thin, searching that godless
place called London for a sign of you. Your mother wept like we’d never
heard her weep before. Do you not know we loved Eleanor, too?’
Nicholas has been dreading this moment ever since he returned to
Suffolk and the Shelby farm. Now he sits on the cold stone rim of the press,
straight-backed, head up, a damp curl of wiry black hair slick against his
brow, unable to give in to the desire to slump, because a Suffolk yeoman’s
son is not grown to wilt, even if the weight of all that’s happened since
Lammas Day last is almost too much for his broad countryman’s shoulders
to bear. Sickened by the excuses he hasn’t even tried to make yet, at first all
he can bring himself to say is ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
Yeoman Shelby has rarely struck either of his sons, and not at all since
they’ve grown to manhood. But as he comes closer, Nicholas wonders if
he’s about to land a blow in payment for the extra pain his youngest has
caused the family by his vanishing. He catches the heavy, musty smell of
his father’s woollen coat, the one he’s worn in winter for as long as
Nicholas can remember. Dyed a now-faded grey, it smells as though it’s
been buried in a seed basket for all of Nicholas’s twenty-nine years. But the
scent is oddly comforting. Nicholas has the overwhelming urge to reach out
and cling to the hem, as if he were an infant again.
‘The only way I can explain it is this,’ he says, staring at his hands and
thinking how his fingers, nicked and coarsened by boyhood summers
helping with the harvest, seem so unsuited to healing work. ‘Imagine if you
woke up one morning and discovered that all the wisdom accumulated over
fifteen hundred years of husbanding the land didn’t work any longer – that
you couldn’t grow anything any more; that you couldn’t feed your family.’
‘It’s called an evil harvest, boy. It’s happened before.’
‘Exactly! And there was absolutely nothing you could do about it, was
there?’
Nicholas looks up at his father with moistening eyes. He snorts back the
tears, frightened that he’s about to weep in the presence of a man who has
always seemed immune to sentiment. ‘That’s how it was when I tried to
save Eleanor and our child,’ he says thinly.
His father lays a hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘I know you well enough,
Nick. You would have moved heaven and earth, if you but could. But
sometimes, boy, it’s just the way God wants things to happen.’
Nicholas gives a cruel laugh. ‘Oh, I’ve heard that said before. Did you
know the great Martin Luther – fount of this new religion we’re all
supposed to embrace so unquestioningly – tells me in his writings that God
designed women to die in childbirth! He says it’s what they’re for! Well, for
the record, I’ll have none of such knowledge.’
‘Parson Olicott would say that what you learned at Cambridge is God’s
wisdom revealed through man,’ his father replies, caution in his runnelled
face. ‘He’d say our Lord would offer us no false remedies. He’d call you a
blasphemer for suggesting otherwise.’
‘The remedies Parson Olicott gets called upon to administer, Father,’ says
Nicholas, running his fingers through a tangle of hair that the rain has
flattened to his scalp like black ribbons discarded in a ditch, ‘are for ills of
the soul, not the body.’
‘But if the soul is in good health, does not the body follow?’
Though a humble farmer, a man who only learned to write when he was
forty, his father has just summed up the current thinking of the College of
Physicians in a nutshell.
‘That’s what we’ve thought for centuries,’ Nicholas says. ‘That’s what
the books tell us: bring the body into a balance pleasing to God. They
instruct us to bleed the patient from a particular part of his body if the
sanguine and choleric humours are out of kilter; purge him if the
melancholic humour suppresses the phlegmatic; read the colour of his water
– and always make sure the stars and the planets are in favourable
alignment, before you do any of it. Then present the bill. And if it all goes
wrong, say it was God’s will – or the stars were inauspicious.’
His father kneels and stares into his son’s eyes with the stoic acceptance
of the cycle of life and death, of hope and disappointment, that a man who
relies on the fickleness of the earth for his survival must learn. His face
looks carved out of holm oak. You’re barely fifty, thinks Nicholas, yet you
look like an old man. Is it the toil? Or have my own actions aged you? He
settles for what his mother and his sister-in-law, Faith, have always claimed:
grubbing away at the earth makes Shelby men look older than their years.
‘Listen to me, boy,’ his father says with a surprisingly gentle smile that
looks out of place on such a hard-used face. ‘Thrice in my lifetime I’ve
heard Parson Olicott tell me I’m to forget my religion and believe in a
different one. Every Sunday – until I was about fourteen – he’d tell me the
Pope was a fine Christian man, an’ that for my spiritual education I was to
study the pictures of the saints in St Mary’s…’
Nicholas wonders what that weathered stone Saxon barnacle, where the
Shelby family now have their own pew almost within touching distance of
the altar, has to do with his present agony; but he’s learned long ago that
when his father embarks on one of his homilies it’s best not to interrupt.
His father continues. ‘Then one Sunday shortly after King Henry died, I
hear Parson Olicott announce, “King Edward says the Pope is the
Antichrist!” Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. After
the sermon, Parson Olicott hands us lads a bucket of whitewash.’ He makes
a painting gesture with one hand, the fist clenched. ‘“Cover up those
paintings of the saints,” orders old Olicott, “’cause now they be heretical!”’
Nicholas has stared at the plain walls of St Mary’s every Sunday for as
long as he can recall, usually with intense boredom. It has never occurred to
him that his father was one of those who’d done the whitewashing.
‘Took us lads ages, I can tell you,’ Yeoman Shelby says. ‘But the next
thing I know – around the time I was paying court to your mother – there’s
Parson Olicott proclaiming that Edward is dead, Mary is queen, and the
Pope is once more our father in Christ. Imagine it!’
Nicholas indulges his father and imagines.
‘“Change the prayer book!” says Olicott. “Bring out the choir screens
again” – we’d hidden them in Jed Arrowsmith’s barn. “Scrub off the
whitewash! The bishops what made us paint over those saints are all now
heretics and must burn for it!”’ Yeoman Shelby sighs, as though all this
variable theology is beyond the understanding of a simple man. ‘To tell the
truth, Nick, when we got the whitewash off, I was surprised those paintings
had survived. But survive they had. Stubborn buggers, those Catholic
saints. Didn’t last, of course. Barely five years on, Bloody Mary is dead,
we’re all singing hosannas for Queen Elizabeth, and the Pope is the Devil’s
arse-licker again. And what’s old Olicott preaching?’
Another Random Scribd Document
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through the lungs. I did not hurry after the girl and her father and
brother as they ran over the blood-stained trail. I continued to hear
the coughing for a few moments. Then it was silent. When I came
up to them, just inside the timber, the three were standing in
triumph close to the dead body of the bull. Hardly more than twenty
paces from it was the yearling calf, dying, but not quite dead. The
brother had ended it with a revolver-shot.
And then I looked at the creature who had committed this double
murder. Many times I had done this same crime, but with me, crude
and rough, with all the inborn savagery of man, killing had not
seemed quite so horrible. And standing there, a little later,—red-
lipped, her face aflame, her eyes glowing, exquisite in her beauty,—
the girl had her picture taken in triumph as she stood with one
booted little foot on the neck of her victim.
When I hear of the vaunted human soul, and when men and women
tell me there is no soul but the soul of a human, my mind goes back
to that day. I might tell of a hundred other instances that are
convincing unto myself, but that one stands out with unforgettable
vividness.
I am sure, for instance, that the soul of a flower once saved my life.
This is not unusual, or even remarkable, for the souls of flowers
have saved unnumbered lives, as well as giving cheer and courage
to countless millions; and when we die it is still the Soul of the
Flower that watches over us in our resting-places. No place in the
world do flowers live more beautifully than in our gardens of the
dead, cheering us when we come with our grief to the place of our
lost ones, giving us courage to go on. Take the Soul of the Flower
away from us, and the world would be hard and bleak to live in.
To me, the soul is synonymous with life. I do not disassociate the
two. When we breathe our last, our life—our soul—is gone. The two,
I believe, are one. When we pluck a flower we destroy neither, but
when we tear it up by the roots so that it dies, then has its soul, or
its life, gone the same way as that of man who dies. I have spent
many wonderful hours in those gardens of the dead which every city,
hamlet, and countryside must have. To me, there are only beauty
and the glory of God in a cemetery. It seems to me that there, if
never before, one must come to understand the brotherhood of all
life. It seems to me that the very stillness and peace of a resting-
place of the dead softly whisper to us the great secret which those
who are lying there have at last discovered—that life is the same,
that its only difference is in form and manifestation. I seem to feel
that I have come into the one place where there are only charity and
faith and good will, and I have always the thought—which to me
gives courage and hope—that this is why the flowers and the trees
are so beautiful and so comforting there. I have stood in other
cemeteries which, to the passing eye, have been barren and ugly,
where man has lent but very feebly a helping hand, but even there,
if I looked a little closer, I have found the Soul of the Flower, the
same peace, the same tranquillity, perhaps even greater courage to
inspire one to “keep on.”
I have a case in point, so convincing to myself that all the preaching
in the world could not change my sentiment in the matter. I
happened, at this particular time, to be traveling alone in the
Northland, and when a certain accident befell me, the nearest help I
knew of was at a half-breed’s cabin between twenty and thirty miles
away. Thirty miles is not a very great matter in a country of paved
roads and level paths, but it is a far distance in a country of dense
forest and swamp, without trails or guide-posts—and especially
when one is badly crippled. Like the most amateurish tenderfoot, I
took a chance along the face of a cliff near a small waterfall, slipped,
fell, and came tumbling down a matter of thirty feet with a sixty-
pound pack and my rifle on top of me. In the fall, my foot received a
terrific blow, probably on a projecting ledge of rock.
The man who has faced many situations is usually the man who is
cautious, and though I had just committed an inexcusable error in
my carelessness, I now lost no time in putting up my small silk tent
while I could still drag myself about. It was well I did so. For ten
days thereafter, I was not able to rest a pound of weight upon my
injured foot.
With the music and refreshing coolness of the waterfall less than a
hundred feet from my tent door, and the creek itself not more than a
quarter of that distance, I was most fortunately situated under the
circumstances. The first morning after my fall found me almost
helpless. Every move I made gave me excruciating pain. My entire
foot and ankle, and my leg halfway to the knee, were swollen to
twice their normal size. This first day I dragged myself to a sapling,
cut it as I lay on my side, and made me a rough crutch of it. The
second day, my entire lower limb was swollen until it had lost all
semblance to form, and was so badly discolored that a cold and
terrible dread began to grow in me. I had only thirty cartridges. I
fired ten that first day, in the futile hope that some wandering
adventurer might have drifted within the sound of my rifle.
Occasionally I hallooed. Night of the second day found me in the
beginning of a fever, and, at a cost of physical agony, I prepared
myself for the worst—placed my possessions within the reach of my
hands, and dragged myself up from the creek with a small pail of
water.
I shall never forget the dawn of the third day. Racked with pain, with
the fever in my blood, my leg now stiff as a board to the thigh, I was
still not blind to the beauty of the morning. The rising sun first
lighted up the waterfall, then it fell in a warm and golden flood
where I had made my camp. In that silence, broken only by the
music of the water, every soft note that was made by the wild things
came to me distinctly. It was a morning to put cheer and hope into
the heart of a dying man. Then my eyes turned, and, a few feet
beyond the reach of my hand, I found something looking at me.
Yes; to me, in that moment, it was a thing living and vibrant with
life, and yet it was nothing more than a flower. It grew on a stem a
foot high, and the face of it made me think of one of our home-
garden pansies; only, the flower was all one color, with longer petals
—a soft, velvety blue. It seemed to have turned to face the morning
sun, and, in facing the sun, it was squarely facing me—a piquant,
joyous, laughing little face, asking me as clearly as in words, “What
can possibly be the matter with you on this fine morning?”
I am not going into the psychology or soul-language of that flower. I
am not going to argue about it at all, but simply tell what it did for
me. Perhaps, if you want to lay it all to something, you may say it
was because I was out of my head a part of the time with fever. But
that flower was my doctor through the days of torture and
hopelessness that followed. Now and then a bird sang near me;
occasionally a wild thing would come and peer at me curiously, then
go its way. But the flower never left me, and only turned its face
partly away from me in the hours of its evening worship. For its God
was the sun. It faced the sun in the morning, wide-awake and open.
Late in the afternoon, it would turn a little on its stem, and with the
setting of the sun, its soft petals would begin to close, and it would
go to sleep, like a little child, with the coming of dusk. Day after day,
it grew nearer and more of a beloved comrade to me.
After the fourth day, it did not, for an instant, allow me to think that
I was going to die. Never for an instant did it lose its cheer and
confidence. It was there to say “Hello!” to me every morning, and
there to say “Good-night” to me when the shadows grew deep—and
all through the day it talked to me, and bobbed its little head in the
whispers of the breezes, and I had the foolish sentiment, at times,
that it was actually flirting with me. I do not think I realized how
precious it had become to me until, one day, there came a terrific
thunder-storm. I thought the first blast of the wind and beat of rain
were going to destroy my comrade, and, almost in a panic, I
dragged myself right and left, forgetful of pain, until I had built a
protection about my flower.
That was the sixth day, and, from that day, the swelling and the pain
began to leave my limb. On the tenth, I could move about a little on
my feet. On the fifteenth, I was prepared to undertake my journey
again. I felt a real grief in leaving that solitary flower. It had become
a part of me, had encouraged me in my blackest hours, had cheered
and comforted me even in the darkness of nights, because I knew it
was there—my little comrade—waiting for the sun. For me, it had
individualized itself from among all the other flowers in the forest.
And now, when I was about to go, I saw that the flower itself had
about lived the span of its life; in a very short time it would fade and
die. On the morning I left, the petals were drooping, and its tiny face
did not look up at the sun and at me as brightly as before, and I
fancied that I could hear its little voice saying, “Please take me with
you.” And I did. Call it foolish and trivial sentiment if you will, but the
flower and I went together, and afterward I wrote a novel and called
it “Flower of the North.”
I have often heard strong men say, “Oh, that is merely a matter of
sentiment. Life is too hard and real for a thing like that.”
I agree with them to an extent. Sentiment does not play a large part
in the world to-day. For sentiment, as that word is understood by the
millions, is the heart and soul of all that is good and great. Without
sentiment in the hearts of a man and a woman, there cannot be the
fullness of real love between them, even though the law has made
them man and wife. Without sentiment, no good act is ever done
from the heart out. Without sentiment—a sentiment that warms the
soul as a fire warms a cold room—there will never be a deep and
comforting faith. I have seen this “co-operation of rational power
and moral feeling” make plain faces beautiful, and I have seen the
lack of it make others hard as rock. Selfishness, egoism, the desire
to get everything possible out of life, no matter at what expense to
others, is its antithesis.
As I write these last pages, I have at hand facts which seem to show
that sentiment, and therefore faith, is as nearly dead as it has ever
been. For science in all the great nations of the earth is planning and
plotting frantically for the extermination of their fellow men, and
this, in the hour when all the world is crying out for a faith, is what
is being achieved:
Deadly gases that will make gunpowder and the rifles anachronisms,
that in the next war will depopulate whole regions, men, women,
and little children alike.
Perfection of the lethal ray, which will shrivel up and paralyze human
beings over vast areas, irrespective of whether they are combatants
or not.
Development of plans for “germ-warfare,” whereby whole nations
will be infected by plagues.
And then consider the words of one great military scientist of the
English-speaking race: “Germ-warfare was tried on a small scale in
the late war, and its results have been promising. The method of its
use was in the poisoning of water supplies with cholera and typhus
germs, and the loosing of dogs inoculated with rabies and of women
inoculated with syphilis into the enemy country. Here apparently is a
promising beginning from which vast developments are to be hoped
for.”
A promising beginning—vast developments expected for the future—
typhus—rabies—the commercial breeding of diseased women.
Yes; the world is crying aloud for a great faith, even as it smashes
itself into moral fragments on the rocks of its own egoism and its
own selfishness. But there has come a rent in its armor, and as it
commits crimes and plans for still greater crimes, it also begins to
realize its colossal wickedness. And in its terror it shrieks aloud for a
manifestation of the Divine Power. It demands proof.
And again I say that the proof is so near that the world looks over its
head—and does not see it. Not until man’s egoism crumbles will he
understand. For ghosts will not come back from the dead to quiet his
frenzies, nor will angels descend from out of the heavens. The
Divine Power is too great and all-encompassing for that. God,
speaking of that Power as God, is not a trickster. He is not a
mountebank. He is not a lawyer arguing his case. He is Life. And this
Life That Never Dies has no favorites. Such is my humble faith.

A long time has passed since I wrote these pages. All day the
countryside has lain in that sleepy, golden shimmer that is the pulse
of Indian summer. The nights are touched with frost. There is glory
in the warmth of the sun.
I am in a little valley that I love—Sleepy Hollow, I call it. The
farmhouse is old and unpainted, and it has stood on its stone
foundation for almost a century. The barn is sagging in the middle,
and between the barn and the house is an old well that a long-dead
grandfather rigged when the timber in the hollow knew the howl of
wolves and the screech of bobcats. Crowding close up to the back of
the old house is an orchard of apple and cherry trees, so old they
could tell many an interesting story if they could talk.
And all about the sides and the front of the house are great trees—a
huge cottonwood, and ancient oaks from which the Indians may
have shot squirrels with their bows and arrows two hundred years
ago. The “woman of the house” has been in an invalid’s chair for
years, and the husband does little but care for her. Therefore Life
has crept up and almost inundated the place. The grass grows high
and uncut. Wild flowers bloom in the yard. Quail come to feed with
the chickens. And beyond this, all about, is the whisper of corn fields
in growing-time, the ripples of fields of wheat and oats and rye, the
music of the mowing-machine and the lowing of cattle. In this little
old house of Sleepy Hollow, there is a woman who has not walked
for years, and who will never walk again; and there is a little man
with a great fierce mustache who watches her tenderly, and who
knows that he must go on watching her until the end of her time—
and yet in this house there is happiness, and also a great faith. And
nature seems to rejoice in that faith. Birds build their nests under
the porches. There is melody in the trees. At night, crickets sing in
the long grass under the open windows, and the whippoorwills come
and perch on the roof under the old sycamore.
Here are suffering—and peace; few of the riches of man, but an
unlimited wealth of contentment and faith. These two, prisoned to
the end of their days, have found what all the world is seeking. The
little old house of the hollow, even with its tragedy, is glad. And life
has made it so, the understanding of life, the voice and living
presence of life as it whispers about me now in the golden sheen of
Indian summer.
And its whisper seems to be, “Men are seeking me, reaching out for
me, crying for me—yet they do not find me. They are looking far,
and I am very near—so far that they look over and beyond me when
I am waiting at their feet. When at last they see me, and
understand, then will they have discovered the greatest of all
treasures—Faith!”
 Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in the original
publication.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOD'S COUNTRY:
THE TRAIL TO HAPPINESS ***

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