The East Indian by Brinda Charry

Author:Brinda Charry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The stranger who’d stepped up from the dark, the pox-ridden man, turned out to be a sailor named Noah Giles. He accosted me on Parson Blair’s doorstep as I returned from my reunion with my friends.

“You the moor with the corn powder stuff?”

“Yes, the unicorn-horn powder from India,” I said calmly enough, although I was dismayed. Had he returned to knife me for deceiving him?

“I have come for the second dose you promised me,” he said. “It was potent, although it is but moorish medicine. I have had attacks of the itches every hour it seems since this thing I caught from a whore in Spain took me, but since I took this stuff I’ve barely felt yeuky. And look!”

He stuck out his palms to me. The sores did not look any different than they had looked in the moonlight. In truth, they appeared worse in the glare cast by the lantern I shone straight on them. But I was not the one to tell Noah Giles that. I fetched a two-day supply of the powder from my little store, and he took it gladly.

“I was in the mind to kill you last night,” he said cheerfully as he left. “I cannot bide tawny moors and such—the whore in Spain was one, from Algiers, methinks. But ’tis good I let you be!”

I thanked him for his clemency, and after he left, I went in to tell Parson Blair, who had already sent Maria to the door to see what the chatter was about.

They were much taken up by my tale and wanted to inspect the medicinal powder for themselves. Maria declared she had heard say of people being cured of things worse than the French disease, and she told us of a maiden in Santo Domingo who had vomited a green thing long and thick as a grown man’s finger, which had wings, a great many feet, and a turned-up tail, and had taken off in flight after it emerged from the maiden’s insides, and how she had been administered handfuls of chalk to flush out the parts of the creature that had remained inside her. Parson Blair was inclined to dismiss Maria’s medical miracle, but he had a story of one Thomas Parr, Englishman, who had lived to the great age of 152 and even kept as mistress a woman aged five and thirty when he himself turned a hundred. His extraordinary health was attributed to his lifelong diet of subrancid cheese, coarse bread, and sour whey.

“Does he still live?” I asked interestedly.

“Sadly not. The good King Charles wanted to meet this ancient subject of his and summoned him to London. Master Parr, it appeared, gave up the ghost the day after the royal audience on account of the rich viands and strong drink he feasted on at the palace kitchen.”

Maria did not see how the parson’s tale was about the wonders of modern physic; the parson retorted that it was about the wonders of diet, the

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