by S. W. Perry
Nicholas doesn’t answer.
‘I could make use of your talents, Physician. You should consider it.’
‘I have employment, thank you, Master Cecil. At least, I think I still have.’
‘Bringing comfort to the destitute at St Thomas’s? What a wanton waste!’
‘To you, perhaps.’
‘Come now, clever men can prosper in this land – with the right patron. You may forget any hope of advancement under Fulke Vaesy. He’ll never make queen’s physician now – not after what that wife of his appears to have been up to. Is it true: human organs, blood, kept in jars for the purpose of witchcraft?’
But Cecil doesn’t wait for an answer. He raises a bejewelled hand. The liveried coachman takes up the reins. As the coach door closes, Cecil’s parting shot is full of malice. ‘Take my advice, Lord Lumley – don’t feel too comfortable at Nonsuch. I’ll winkle you out of your shell yet.’
And with that, the Lord Treasurer’s son is borne away in magisterial splendour towards Thames Street.
John Lumley says not a word until he and Nicholas are free of the shadow of the Tower. Around their feet the last of winter’s dead leaves dance in the strengthening breeze. An ox-waggon passes, laden with sacks of seed, heading for the wharves.
‘He’s right, of course,’ says Lumley over the noise of the turning wheels.
‘My lord?’
‘Robert Cecil – about my “shell”. He will prise me out of it eventually. The size of my debt to the Crown makes it inevitable.’
‘I wish there was something I could suggest—’
‘Lizzy tells me I should offer to make the queen a gift of Nonsuch.’
‘You mean, give it up?’
‘Make a contract: cancellation of my debts in exchange for the deeds of her father’s palace. Lizzy and I to stay on, as life-tenants. That way, the library will be secure.’
‘Then perhaps that’s what you should do, my lord. Even Robert Cecil can’t take away from you what’s not yours to lose. Occasionally we must accept that some gifts are not ours to keep.’
John Lumley’s wide smile catches Nicholas completely off-guard. ‘You know, Nicholas, that’s not a bad idea. And it would stick in the Cecil craw like a chicken bone, wouldn’t it?’
Looking down towards Galley Quay, Nicholas can see the wherries and the tilt-boats battling against the swell as they make their way upriver to Whitehall and Richmond, downstream to the city and the ships moored in the Pool. The tide is up. The water looks angry.
‘Perhaps, Nicholas, when you come to see you cannot blame yourself for things you have not the power to prevent, you might consider becoming my private physician. After all, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the library.’
‘That’s generous of you, my lord. But I think St Tom’s might have more need of me.’
Lumley smiles. It’s something he’s begun to do more of recently. ‘I understand. Should you ever change your mind—’
‘There is one favour I would ask of you, my lord.’
‘Then ask it.’
‘That you intercede with the Guild of Grocers.’
‘The Grocers? Whatever do you wish of them?’
‘A licence, my lord.’
Lumley looks at Nicholas in bemusement. ‘A licence?’
‘To practise as an apothecary.’
‘An honest trade, Nicholas, but a waste of your talents, if I may say so.’
Nicholas smiles. ‘It’s not for me, my lord,’ he says, ‘it’s for Mistress Merton.’
Heading west, alone now, Nicholas crosses New Fish Street towards St Paul’s. He does not hurry. For the first time in months there is no urgency driving him. Disjointed fragments of the great city’s life come to him as he walks: the smell of boiling pig skin from the scalding house on Pudding Lane, the shouts of the day-labourers touting for work on East Cheap. He is just one man among the crowd, unremarkable, drawing no one’s eye, catching no one’s attention.
On Grass Street he pauses to look up at the window of his old lodgings. A woman he does not recognize is leaning out, airing bed sheets that flap noisily in the breeze. After a while she gives up and pulls them back inside.
He stops for a while at Trinity church, but he does not enter the churchyard. He doesn’t want Eleanor to hear the question that’s been noisily troubling him since he saw Gabriel Quigley trying to quench his thirst at the windowsill of his cell: Would I kill a man – if by doing so I could cure the malady that took you away from me? He fears she will think him a monster if she catches his answer: Without hesitation!
Nicholas sits beneath the little thatched roof of the lych-gate until the bell chimes four. Then he gets to his feet and, with exaggerated care, brushes down his white canvas doublet. He begins to whistle a song he’s heard often on the Southwark streets: ‘On high the merry pipit trills’.
Turning his back on the city, he sets off down Fish Street Hill towards the bridge. Towards Southwark.
Historical note
In 1616, just seven years after John Lumley’s death, the English anatomist William Harvey delivered his revolutionary thesis in which he showed that the heart was indeed the driving force behind the circulation of the blood. It ended fifteen hundred years of Galenic teaching, almost all of it wholly false.
By that time, the glorious palace of Nonsuch had been back in royal hands for a while. The year after this story ends, John Lumley, overwhelmed by debt and his questionable religious affiliations, did indeed sign Nonsuch over to Queen Elizabeth. In return, his loans and mortgages – worth, in today’s currency, well over twenty million pounds – were cancelled. The queen allowed Lumley and his wife to remain there as custodians for the rest of their lives. Both outlived her. John died in 1609, Elizabeth Lumley eight years later. Their tombs are to be found in the Lumley chapel at Cheam, beside those of John’s first wife, Jane FitzAlan, and their three children. Many of the surviving volumes of Lumley’s priceless collection of books now reside in the British Library. The Lumleian Lectures are still presented each year by the Royal College of Physicians.
The forceps mishandled by Fulke Vaesy at his wife’s childbirth were introduced into England by the Chamberlens, a family of refugee Huguenot physicians who fled Paris in 1569. In the long-running battle between the physicians, the barber-surgeons and the midwives, forceps were invariably kept hidden, lest they became commonplace and thus lost their financial value. The true nature of Mathew Quigley’s haemophilia was not properly understood until the early nineteenth century.
In 1876 the Board of Examiners of the Royal College of Surgeons – the successor to the Company of Barber-Surgeons – resigned en masse rather than allow women to sit for a diploma in midwifery. It wasn’t until 1909 that a woman became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. The surgeons caught up two years later. Neither event – though great achievements for the women involved – can be considered exactly ground-breaking: five centuries had passed since Dorotea Bucca was appointed professor of medicine and philosophy at the University of Bologna, a post she inherited from her father in 1390.
A little over a century after John Lumley returned Nonsuch to royal ownership, Charles II gave the estate to his mistress, Barbara Villiers. Just like Lumley, she too was burdened by immense debt. Her solution was somewhat more extreme than his: she had Nonsuch – renowned as one of the most glorious Renaissance palaces in Europe – demolished.
It is now a municipal park.
Author’s note
This story is, of course, a fiction, though some of the characters in it did exist. We can never really know what it was like for them to live in Elizabeth’s England. Like all their kind, they thought differently, spoke differently, understood their world differently. But I’m sure their emotions were no less vibrant, no less unruly, than ours.
Fortunately for us scavengers of history, so many superb historians and writers have thoughtfully left their best dishes lying alluringly within reach, to provide us with at least
a taste of the world in which those characters lived. I am indebted to Ian Mortimer and Liza Picard, whose The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England and Elizabeth’s London respectively are such wonderful gateways to the world in which my story is set. John Stow’s A Survey of London, written in 1598, was equally indispensable; as was Jeffrey Forgeng’s Daily Life in Elizabethan England. I should also make mention of Lauren Kassell’s Medicine & Magic in Elizabethan London; Thomas Wright’s Circulation, a fascinating account of how William Harvey discovered the true function of the heart; Roy Porter’s Blood & Guts; and John Dent’s The Quest for Nonsuch.
I must also offer deep gratitude – though, sadly, neither is alive to receive it – to my English teacher, Mr Mortimer, and to Mr Pugh, my history teacher; both from Enfield Chase Secondary School. It’s indicative of schooling in the 1960s that I have absolutely no idea of their first names.
Nor must I fail to acknowledge the immense help I’ve received from my agent, Jane Judd, and from Sara O’Keeffe, Susannah Hamilton and the team at Corvus. I must also thank Mandy Greenfield for her eagle’s eye.
But the greatest debt – given that the writing life can be uncomfortably solitary, and not just for the author – I owe to my wife Jane. Without her belief and encouragement, I doubt a word of this tale would have survived to reach the printed page.
Read on for an extract from . . .
Tilbury, England. Winter 1591
In 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
It 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.’