The wound had turned gangrenous. Philip was clearly in pain, alternately sweating and freezing, at times delirious. The stink was almost unbearable. Still I sat with him. I held his hand. I whispered soothing words as the doctor told me of his plans to amputate.
My husband would rather die than be dismembered.
I don’t know what it was that prompted me to return to the Netherlands so shortly after I had left when I heard Philip had been wounded at Zutphen. The message I received from Philip’s uncle assured me that the thigh wound was superficial, that Philip was expected to recover quickly and was in good spirits. But some inner prompting caused me to take Elizabeth to my mother’s and retrace my previous journey north.
By the time I arrived, Philip had relapsed but the doctor’s were hopeful. Within a few days, the first signs of gangrene appeared. I knew I was going to lose him.
We had been married for over three years by this time. But I had only just begun to care for him. When our daughter was born looking so much more like a Sidney than a Walsingham, my heart opened not just to our baby girl but to my husband.
I made the initial trip to the Netherlands because I needed to tell him how sorry I was to have withheld my affection in the early days of our marriage. I had been deliberate about it and for this I was ashamed. But Philip seemed to hold no grudge. We had much lost time to make up and gave ourselves fully to the effort.
A cruel twist of fate, yet another, is causing me to lose love so soon after finding it.