by S. W. Perry
‘That’s understandable. I’m not overly partial to them myself.’
‘We got stung by a physician at St Saviour’s market – my father and me,’ Monkton explains. ‘Standing on a box, he was, shouting as how he had all these secret mixtures what could cure all known ills.’
Nicholas winces. ‘It’s an easy gull, Ned, especially if someone’s desperate. You’re not the first. You’re not even in the first thousand.’
The news seems to satisfy Ned Monkton. He shrugs, as though he’s remembering nothing weightier than being tricked at cards. ‘Told us he’d study the alignment of the heavens to work out the best remedy.’
‘How much did that cost?’
‘With the mixtures he made? A week’s income – every last farthing.’
‘I’m guessing it didn’t work.’
‘Just left Jacob shitting like a goose for a week.’
‘I’m sorry, Ned; there’s a lot of charlatans about.’
‘Not so many as was.’
‘Please tell me you didn’t—’
‘No, nothing like that. Realigned his fucking heavens for him, though.’
Nicholas allows himself a brief, sympathetic laugh. ‘I’ve wanted to do that myself, once or twice.’
‘After I got out of the stocks, I went to see your Mistress Bianca. She’d just taken on the Jackdaw. People was saying as how she had the knowledge of apothecary. I begged her to make a potion for Jacob.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she had no time for the likes of me. Wouldn’t even take my coin.’
‘Did she tell you why?’
‘She said nothing she could mix would help. I reckoned she thought a poulterer’s son beneath her.’
To his surprise, Nicholas feels for this rough young fellow – so devoted to his brother, using his fists to protect him from the scorn and the cruel taunts of the uncaring. And what must it have cost him, he wonders, to see Jacob’s butchered body carried into this very crypt, laid beside the corpses huddled together in their shrouds and waiting their turn in the single battered coffin?
‘She gave you the soundest medical advice anyone in London has had for a while, Ned,’ he says, as gently as he knows how. ‘She was being honest with you. She was telling you the truth.’
When Ned Monkton nods thoughtfully, Nicholas knows he’s made a breakthrough. ‘And you know in your heart she’s not a witch, don’t you?’ he adds. ‘She can no more fly than we can.’
Ned Monkton’s face reddens with shame. ‘I knows it’s a grievous fault, Master Shelby,’ he admits, ‘but I gets a bit mixed up when I’m in drink. It makes me think on Jacob so, and then I gets monstrously quarrelsome.’
‘I don’t blame you, Ned. If it was my brother, I’d probably be the same. Tell the truth, I have been the same.’ He holds Ned’s gaze a moment, before asking an uncomfortable question. ‘Would you have used that knife on me, Ned?’
Ned’s jaw works slowly as he considers his reply. ‘Maybe… probably not.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t. Ugly things, knife-wounds. Even the smallest can prove fatal.’ Nicholas nods towards the line of wrapped bodies. ‘You think it’s nothing worse than a small puncture, the next thing you know you’re lying there with your lungs full of blood, dead. Besides, if you’d killed me, how would I find the man who murdered your Jacob?’
Ned Monkton stares at him. ‘Murdered?’
The single word sounds, in this grim place, like the dead groaning in their winding sheets.
‘Yes, Ned. Your Jacob didn’t fall into a waterwheel, like the constable claimed. He was murdered. There’s a killer loose on Bankside, Ned. And I need to stop him, before he kills again.’
Out on the river a dung-boat makes its way on the tide, bearing the city’s waste to the fields and gardens beyond the Fleet ditch. The oarsmen wear cloths across their faces to keep out the smell. On the south bank the sails of the grain mills turn in the wind like the hands of the fashionable new clocks that men like Robert Cecil and John Lumley keep in their studies to impress their friends. Nicholas Shelby, lapsed physician, hurries along Bankside towards the Jackdaw, carrying with him a dark and troubling burden.
Counting young Jacob and the infant from Vaesy’s demonstration, there have been four corpses marked with an inverted cross taken from the river since August. There could be more, though Ned Monkton’s partiality to ale makes accurate recollection troublesome.
‘I know as well as any Christian man, that wound is the mark of Satan,’ Ned had told him.
‘Did anyone else notice them?’
‘Perhaps some of the sisters might have, but they’re mostly ex-patients, poor women with not the brains they was born with. One or two of them make my Jacob look like a scholar.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’
‘Aye, when Jacob came in and I saw he was marked in the same way, I told the hospital warden and the matron.’
‘What was their reply?’
‘They said I was imagining it. And if I wasn’t, I should hold my peace anyway.’
Nicholas is not surprised. The hospital survives on charity and the goodwill of the aldermen and its benefactors. The very last thing it wants is to have the Bishop of London’s men turn up in search of devilry. Besides, what does the city care for the dead poor who float up from the river’s depths? Better to let them sink back down, undisturbed.
Two insubstantial visions jostle for attention in Nicholas Shelby’s mind as he reaches the Jackdaw. They are Ned’s description of the two other corpses. One is of a heavyset woman of around thirty. She has an eyeless, bovine face and a little bell on a cord tied around her neck.
‘Are you telling me the killer put out her eyes?’ Nicholas had asked.
‘No,’ Ned had replied, ‘it must have happened long before – the sockets was healed over.’
The other vision is of an old, emaciated man with a wispy beard. ‘Maybe an old cut-purse,’ Ned had offered, describing in some detail the stump of ill-tailored flesh where one of the hands should have been.
Nicholas can imagine them laid out in the mortuary crypt – just as the little boy and Jacob Monkton were laid out. He can see the sisters washing the naked bodies, preparing the winding sheets, chattering inconsequentially to keep up their spirits as they lather over those deep, obscene lacerations. One vertical wound, the other slashed across it. The inverted cross. All that’s godly, decent and good turned on its head.
‘At least now you can report what you’ve discovered to the parish aldermen,’ Bianca tells him later that night when the Jackdaw has closed. Timothy and Rose are busy cleaning the pottage bowls and the wooden trenchers in the parlour. The embers are glowing like a hoard of golden treasure in the hearth. Outside in the lane the tavern’s painted sign swings gently in a cold wind blowing off the river.
‘Judging by Ned Monkton’s efforts to get someone to listen, it’s not going to be easy,’ Nicholas replies. ‘Think on it, Bianca: tavern brawls, duels between gallants, robberies, accidents, drunken husbands who beat their wives, souse-heads who fall under waggons or into the river, wildfowlers on Lambeth marshes who point their firing-pieces a little too carelessly… There aren’t enough coroners in all England to deal with so much unexpected death. Who’s going to have the time to care about a few vagrants?’
‘But Jacob wasn’t a vagrant,’ Bianca says. ‘The family is poor, but they’re not vagabonds. Ned’s father is a poulterer. Even Ned has a job, though only God knows how he’s managed to hang on to it.’
‘Probably because there’s few else who’d do it,’ says Nicholas with a shudder. ‘By the way, I don’t think you need to fear Ned any more. He’s an honest enough sort of fellow in his own way. Grief and drink, that’s all – enough to change any man for the worse.’ He realizes he could be describing himself. He hopes that in the firelight Bianca hasn’t noticed the colour flooding into his cheeks.
‘And his little brother was a God-fearing subject of your sovereign majesty –
our sovereign majesty – Elizabeth,’ she says heatedly. ‘Not the most gifted of them, I’ll grant you, but whoever killed Jacob – and the others – and threw their bodies into that filthy river will have to answer for it. Isn’t that what your vaunted English law says?’
‘Yes, but it’s the same law that will brand a poor man with a white-hot iron for straying from one parish into another without permission or gainful employment,’ says Nicholas. ‘It’s the same law that excuses a rich one the scaffold for manslaughter, if he can recite from the Bible in Latin. I don’t think the law is going to be much use when it comes to justice for Jacob Monkton.’
His eyrie in the attic is warm and there is a smoky tang in the air from the smouldering fire downstairs. Rose has set a tallow candle by the mattress, a bowl of water and fresh linen in the corner. As Nicholas bathes his body he smells the bitter, aromatic scent of the wormwood and alum she has mixed with the water, on Bianca’s instruction. He longs for sleep, but there is too much on his mind. Beyond the little window the lane is lost in darkness.
He remembers how he sat here no more than a few weeks ago – though it feels more like an age – staring out over the river and imagining Eleanor sitting alone in Trinity church, waiting for him to come to her. He accepts now that the distance between them is unbridgeable. It is wider than the greatest river any man could possibly imagine. His image of her has become tantalizingly indistinct. It trickles through his fingers like Rose’s wormwood water. It flows down into the alley where it mixes with the rain. It streams towards the river where it mingles with the tide, and so to the Narrow Sea and the great ocean beyond. And as it flows, Nicholas realizes at last that she is becoming lost to him for ever.
In Holland, he recalls, he’d met a man named Jannsen, a maker of spectacles. This Jannsen had told him how his young son had been playing with some lenses in his workshop, when by chance he’d moved one lens in front of another. The boy had yelped in terror. Because seen through the two lenses, a tiny spider on the bench below had suddenly appeared the size of a rat. Jannsen believed it might be possible to make a device that would bring things too small to see with the naked eye into plain sight. What if that were really possible? Nicholas wonders. Perhaps then he could see across the vast gulf that separates him from Eleanor.
It is only a fancy; he knows that. And because it is only an impossible fancy, it fills him with an unbearable sense of loss.
Bianca Merton pauses at the top of the narrow stairs. The door to the attic chamber is ajar, a gentle light from the tallow candle seeping past the frame. Treading softly, she moves closer. Through the narrow space she can just make out Nicholas Shelby’s back as he sits on the mattress by the window. By the slow rise and fall of his shoulders she knows he is weeping.
Slipping silently away, she goes to her own chamber on the floor below. Rose is already asleep on the pull-out truckle bed, snoring softly. Careful not to wake her, Bianca crosses to the far side of her own bed, takes a key from the collection on the cord around her waist and kneels before a small iron-hooped chest by the wall. Slipping the key into the lock, she turns it cautiously to make no sound and lifts the lid.
On a nearby window ledge, just within reach, is the candle Rose has set as a night-light. Bianca reaches out and draws the sconce to her, setting it down on the floor by her left knee. The meagre light of the flame makes no impact on the dark depths of the chest. Familiarity alone makes Bianca’s fingers explore the inside with accuracy. She inhales the scent of lavender, put there to keep the moths away.
Her fingers come to rest on a package wrapped in cloth. Using both hands – it is heavy, though barely the size of a small cushion – she lifts it out and places it on the floor. Her breathing matches the rhythm of Rose’s gentle burbling. Untying the thick ribbon, she unfolds the cloth. The intricate wheels and pointers of her father’s astrolabe catch the flickering candlelight.
Bianca smiles in reminiscence: she is eleven again, sitting on her father’s knee in the sunny courtyard of their house in Padua. He is teaching her how to use the device to fix the position of the constellations, how to cast a horoscope.
Yet for all his skills at divination, he’d failed to predict that his life would end in a cold, dank cell. When the Holy Office of the Faith had come hammering on his door, accusing him of heresy and sorcery, he’d been the only one taken by surprise.
She puts the astrolabe aside and pulls out a thick, leather-bound book. It is written in Latin – a language she cannot read. But she knows the title well enough: ‘A miraculous insight into diverse and wondrous systems of physic’.
Next out of the parcel come three vials of liquid. Each is stopped and sealed with wax, an alchemical symbol painted on the glass. One contains argento vivo; the second lignum sanctum; the third, theriac. She stands them beside her father’s book, three sentinels to protect his secrets.
A merchant of cures. That’s how she’d described him to Nicholas. But to Bianca his merchandise had been dreams. Dreams of distant lands and wondrous sights. Dreams of unimaginable knowledge.
The last item she takes from the parcel feels heavy in her hand, though it is barely six inches long. It gleams as she lifts it to her mouth and kisses its cold silver majesty. She holds it to her heart.
It is her father’s inverted crucifix.
Joshua Pinchbeak sets down his pack by the Cross on Cheapside. He quenches his thirst from the fountain. He has never seen such a monument as the Cross before. It makes a considerable impression on him: three tiers rising almost thirty feet above the street, pillars on the corners framing shrines of the saints. He almost weeps to see how the reformers have smashed the statue of the Virgin and Child, hammering at the stone until the figures look as though they’re made of cold grey gingerbread. Does the new religion really think it can save itself by vandalism? he wonders.
Around him, women queue to fill their pots from the fountain. They look at him askance, alarmed by his wild appearance and the fervour in his eyes. He shouts at them: You must prepare for the end! It is coming soon. You must prepare! The words struggle to leave his slack mouth, the cold water streams over his chin. The women move hurriedly away.
And then a shadow falls across the water in the fountain.
Instinctively Joshua flinches from the expected violence of a constable’s hand laid heavily on his shoulder, or a watchman’s staff jabbed painfully into his back. But the pain does not come. He looks up.
What he sees makes every trial he has suffered since God spoke to him out of the whirlwind worthwhile. His reward is at hand. His suffering has moved God to pity. The Holy Virgin has come down out of her shrine to tell him his ordeal is over!
Joshua Pinchbeak knows it’s the Virgin, because she is hooded, and her head tilts slightly to one side, just like all the images he has ever seen of her, before the heretics whitewashed them over or smashed the glass they were painted on. Her smile is the smile that only the saints possess. Her voice is the song of heaven. The touch of her hand on his arm is just as he imagined an angel’s touch would be.
‘Come,’ she says softly, enticingly. ‘Come with me. And I will give you rest.’
16
Nicholas does a lot of walking in the days following his visit to Ned Monkton.
It is the start of Advent. A weak winter sun silvers the river. The frost sparkles as it cracks underfoot. Bianca has given him the buffin-lined leather coat to keep; the original owner now troubles the Turk’s Head for credit instead.
Rose has trimmed his beard tight against the cheek, and with some careful application of a wax that Bianca makes by boiling certain berries she picks near the river, even the hair on his head has been brought under a measure of control. He still doesn’t look like any physician William Baronsdale and his friends at the College would recognize. But at least he no longer looks like an out-and-out Tom o’ Bedlam.
In this new persona, Nicholas Shelby presents himself to the authorities. Perhaps now they’ll listen to him, now that he c
an prove one man is responsible for at least four murders.
‘It’s not my master you need to talk to, sir,’ says the clerk to the Southwark alderman, when Nicholas tracks him to his lair in Bridge House on the road to Bermondsey. ‘You need the coroner. He’ll have to inspect the bodies, sir, to determine if a crime has taken place.’
Nicholas explains calmly that the bodies have long since been given a Christian burial. ‘But they’ll have been entered in the parish mortuary rolls,’ he assures the clerk. ‘Jacob Monkton’s name will certainly be there. And the infant is already listed in the records of the Queen’s Coroner, William Danby.’
‘You know that to be a fact, do you?’
‘I was there when the child was cut up!’
Startled, the clerk seems to shrink into his chair. ‘You were party to this murder?’ he asks timorously.
‘I was there at the anatomy lecture,’ Nicholas explains, his tone slow and deliberate, ‘when the boy was dissected.’ He adds, for good measure so there can be no misunderstanding, ‘At the College of Physicians.’
‘I see,’ says the clerk, breathing a sigh of evident relief that he’s not in the presence of a self-confessed killer. ‘And what exactly is it you want Alderman Hawse to do?’
‘We want him to organize a search of empty buildings along Bankside. We think the murderer may be holding his victims somewhere for a time before he kills them.’
‘We? Who is we, if may I enquire?’
‘Myself and Mistress Merton.’
‘Merton?’ The clerk frowns as he ponders the name. ‘Isn’t she the mistress of the Jackdaw? The woman the Grocers’ Guild were trying to arraign a couple of months back for making unlicensed physic?’
‘She doesn’t need a licence,’ Nicholas says, a little more sharply than he intends. ‘This is the liberty of Southwark. The city corporation’s writ doesn’t run here. You know that as well as I. Now, if we can return to the matter of the killings—’