sed viderint medici

Commanding that a thing be done is a damn sight different from witnessing it in person. Sometimes one needs to be reminded of this.

His breathing is shallow and frantic, even as he hitches up against the keen point of the blade and twists in place hoping to see the blood run. The servants struggle to hold Ferdinand’s limbs in place, but they don’t dare press him too heavily; perhaps the memory of his old exactingness prevents them, or fear of provoking a fresh fit. These days their younger master fancies himself a wolf, with his hairy hide turned inward where no man else can see. His defects have become the stuff of gossip, they number them in the streets of Milan and they’re whispered of in the alleys of Rome. The Cardinal puts little stock in the significance of monsters, but at his brother’s bedside he half-expects claws and long teeth.

His otherworldly groans are setting the Cardinal’s teeth on edge, chasing away even the thought of prayer; the doctor’s ears must be stopped with wax on a daily basis to put up with the familiar misery of it. At length – it cannot be long, but seeing his brother suffer is a hateful thing – they cease to be howls and become words:

“It’s her who plagues me, the bitch of Malfi has her teeth in my flesh–”

Neither of them has so much as called their sister’s name in a dream since her husband’s death. Ferdinand’s lips begin to shape the syllables, but a fresh whip-stroke of fear seizes him and he bites down on his tongue instead.

“Ssh, ssh, ssh.” It’s difficult not to recall when his brother was young and fretted himself into nosebleeds. He’d weep and dribble and insist on being carried. “For God’s sake, suffer and be silent.”

The Cardinal pats his brother’s scabbed ankle, for whatever comfort this gesture will give. It’s God’s mercy that he’s given up on trying to kick his attendants in the teeth, and now lies more or less still, rigid with anguish. The doctor’s hands are steady with the lancet, and the streams are a scarlet to match the Cardinal’s own illustrious vestments.

They’ve bled him to provoke exhaustion, and when they’ve finished and have whisked the basin away to wrap him up he seems for a long moment to lie slack on the verge of unconsciousness, eyes rolled back into ecstatic white crescents and finally, terribly, closing their lids. The rising and falling of his wasted chest begins, perceptibly, to slow. But in the time it takes to tell a dozen paternosters he’s back to his frenzy, tearing at himself with his nails to rip away his bandages and sending his brother scattering.

It’s easy enough to imagine him rabid, from the spittle that flecks his lips and the desperation with which he laughs and grimaces, or to fancy him afflicted with any of the other madnesses that attend on dogs and their handlers. He staggers from place to place with no real direction, licks his wounds and gnaws at his fingers; he balks at the sight of water, unless it be a stinking puddle in the mud of a churchyard. The softness of his cheeks has dwindled away and such medicines as the physician can manage have left him hollow-eyed and dull, his breath stinks of the tomb, and he cannot bear the sight of mirrors.

Such freaks of melancholy suit his brother quite well. He had wanted once to command men’s admiration wherever he went, to be marveled at and dreaded. Two out of three isn’t so bad.