by Robin Blake
There was no sign of him at his writing desk in the anteroom, so I tried the archive door itself, which was unlocked. I heaved it open, and called out the clerk’s name. My voice fell dully and without echo in the labyrinthine chamber, stuffed as it was with rolls of vellum and leather-bound ledgers heaped together in a maze of racks. Getting no answer, I ventured in but found no one there. Atherton, it seemed, had deserted his post, but it did not matter to me. His function was to locate requested documents and sign them out on removal, to prevent their loss. But I knew where to find the rolls I was looking for, and I could consult them on the spot.
The Burgage Rolls were preserved in a part of the cellar space that was far from the door and out of its sight, yet fortunately close to a light through which came some pale rays of afternoon sun. By this I inspected the rolls and wrote some notes. I had almost finished the work when I felt the faint breath of a cold draught on my neck and felt sure someone had opened the door.
‘Atherton – is that you?’
There was no reply.
Five minutes later I had finished my note taking and replaced all the rolls. Returning to the antechamber I found a man sitting at Atherton’s desk bent over a sheet of paper and writing, while consulting the open ledger in front of him. It was Denis Destercore.
‘What are you doing in the Records Office?’ I demanded. ‘What are you copying, without the say-so of the clerk?’
‘The clerk is not here.’
‘I know he’s not here, which is why I guess you are copying without his leave.’
‘I might say the same of you.’ He nodded to the papers in my hand. ’I see you have been copying from the rolls.’
‘I am a lawyer in practice here in town, whereas you—’
‘Have equally legitimate business. I may be a stranger but, as you know, I am acting as agent in the election.’
‘What are you copying?’
Destercore sighed impatiently.
‘Though it is not your affair, I am not. I am proving. And I have done it before, with Atherton’s approval. Look if you like.’
He laid down his pen and lifted the book to show me the gold-leaf title printed on the spine: Liber Liborum Prestoniensis, the register of burgesses, or freemen.
‘You are tallying the names of freemen against the voters on your lists – is that it? You are testing their rights to vote.’
Destercore only looked at me with a steady, challenging gaze, then picked up the pen once more.
‘Now, if you will excuse me,’ he said, laying the volume back on its stand, ‘I need to get on.’
I left him to it, thinking that, for all I knew, he had the mayor’s or a magistrate’s authority to be where he was, and doing what he was doing. I gave some thought to his manner towards me. Destercore had not been impolite – the rudeness had more likely been on my part – but nor had he been imperturbable. There was a taut quality to the man suggesting that he felt threatened or was afraid that at any moment his performance would be found in some way wanting.
A little further along Church Gate, near the entrance to Water Street, were the premises of our bookseller Sebastian Sweeting. I could see even at this distance that his shop was lit, and found myself being drawn helplessly like a moth towards that welcoming illumination. I had not forgotten my musing earlier in the day about the politics of birds and, in particular, whether it was true what my father had told me of crows holding a solemn parliament or court. Still curious about the matter I entered, thinking I might find some book or information on the subject. The proprietor was seated, as usual, on a stool behind his counter with a large snuffbox before him, from which he took a pinch at intervals. He was alone. The remarkable fact about this bookseller was that one never saw him read so much as a single sentence from any book, yet he had in his head a complete inventory not just of all the volumes he held in his current stock but, it seemed, of all the books he had ever sold, with a thorough working knowledge of their matter and content. I was confident he would be able to tell me (and perhaps sell me) something on the subject of avian politics.
He greeted me with a laconic grunt, and swivelled the snuffbox in my direction. This was his invariable behaviour when a customer entered, for Sweeting projected a level appearance at all times, excited or surprised by nothing. I took a pinch, sneezed, and made my enquiry. For a moment he paused to think, then without a word wandered into the recesses of the shop, manhandled a ladder into place and ascended to a shelf almost at the ceiling, from where he plucked two fat folio volumes.
‘This has something for you,’ he said, lodging the books with difficulty under his arm. He began to descend the ladder, taking elaborate care. ‘But if you want to buy it, it’ll cost you.’
Arriving with his heavy freight he thumped the two books down on the counter, with a sound like distant cannon fire. The impact raised a cloud of dust and caused an atmospheric vibration that rattled the windows. On the edge of a narrow shelf above the other end of the counter a small bottle wobbled, then fell and shattered on the counter top. It had contained a syrup-like liquid, which was now oozing around the glass shards.
Sweeting quickly seized the two tomes and transferred them to a vacant chair, then went for a brush and mop-cloth. I carefully picked up the largest glass piece, which still had the bottle’s handwritten label attached. ‘Paracelsus, his Patent Preservative,’ I read, ‘supplied exclusive by Thos. Shackleberry. Firmly eschew all imitations! 6d.’ Clearly Sebastian Sweeting had been in the Market Place yesterday, and had paid his sixpence to the mountebank. This suggested there was an unsuspected side to the urbane, unruffled Mr Sweeting. I dipped the end of a finger into the spill and dabbed it onto my tongue. I tasted sweetness, with herbal and other flavours that I could not identify.
‘How is Mr Shackleberry’s Patent Preservative?’ I asked, dropping the glass onto Sweeting’s pan as he swept the sticky glass fragments into it.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, mopping with his cloth at the remaining stickiness. ‘I gave some to Mrs Sweeting last night and she says it was very pleasant, and could she have some more? Well, I thought, that won’t answer. There’s cordials and tonics on the one hand, which is frivolous, and there’s stinging galenicals and bitter pills and drenches on the other, which is serious physic. And I’m damned if I’ve paid sixpence for a mere bottle of sweet tonic. I took the bottle from her and told her she could have no more as I was going to return it to the fellow and demand my money back, which I have now saved myself the trouble of. Oh, well. Now, this book…’
He put on a pair of spectacles.
‘Take a look, won’t you?’
I opened the first of the volumes and found the title page.
THE WORKS OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Compared with the Former Editions, and many valuable MSS
Sweeting tapped the page.
‘I swear you will find a treatise in verse here called The Assembly of Fowls, or maybe it’s The Parliament of Birds. Very interested in birds was Chaucer.’
I turned the pages until I found the list of contents.
‘It’s a finely printed edition in two volumes, on good paper,’ Sweeting went on. ‘But there’s something unlucky about it. It took years to bring it to press and killed two editors in the meantime. That was twenty year ago, of course.’
He paused, perhaps realizing that he would not sell the book too quickly with a patter like that. He began again, more persuasively.
‘But there has been nothing like this before, you know. It’s the first edition of Chaucer’s writing that is printed in plain Roman type, not the Gothic. Very difficult to read, is the Gothic, specially on top of the poet’s antique English. So to have it in the Roman type, well, it is a great benefit.’
My finger found the item he had referred to earlier: The Assemblie of Bryddes. Looking further down I traced the different episodes of the pilgrims’ tales, told by each one to entertain the others on the road to Canterbury: The Knight’s Tale, The Squire�
��s, The Prioress’s. It was when my finger reached The Man of Law’s Tale that I decided to buy the book.
* * *
‘It would be much better if that fool Tewksbury did not go about bleeding people,’ said Luke Fidelis when I told him of my visit to the Oldswick house.
‘You don’t believe in its efficacy?’
‘Our blood is in us for a reason. I cannot see any purpose in taking it out.’
‘But letting blood is an old-established practice. Didn’t Dr Galen recommend it?’
‘That Roman windbag! For God’s sake, Titus, he thought the heart was some kind of furnace! If he saw fever, he let blood because he thought it was overheating. If he found heartburn, he did the same. Now that we know the heart’s a pump, the whole theory collapses.’
‘Tewksbury must have some reason—’
‘Reason doesn’t come into it. It is the laziness of habit. Doctors like him are devoid of all reason, all ideas and all method.’
‘Old Parsonage says you yourself are recommending water, raw egg and warm milk. How do you know they will work?’
‘I don’t. But I do know they will do no possible harm.’
I thought of poor Allcroft, and the milk I had spooned into his mouth.
‘Luke, you said earlier that you were on the track of this new illness, and you had to verify it. Have you?’
‘Yes, I am sure of it. It is something I discovered at the bedsides of the first patients I saw this morning.’
He drew from his pocket a medicine bottle, which he gave me to examine. I saw that the label was inked with exactly the words I had just read from the broken bottle in Sweeting’s shop.
‘One or two people told me that they had purchased this so-called “Preservative” and dosed themselves with it, but it had been singularly useless. At first my only thought was, how could it be otherwise? But suddenly I realized I might have stumbled on a common factor in this outbreak. I have spent the afternoon revisiting all the patients I saw earlier and what do you suppose?’
‘Go on.’
‘Every one of them that’s ill has been dosing themselves with it.’
‘You can see why, with this fear of contagion. They thought it would preserve them.’
‘But what if it should really do the opposite? What if it should ruin them?’
‘Ruin them? A quack medicine?’
‘Yes, if it happened to be the primary cause of the illness. Do you see?’
Then I remembered my visit to Oldswick, when the disease was at its height with him.
‘Old Parsonage did say something about dosing his master with some medicine he brought in on Friday. It must have been the same.’
‘It was. I told him to leave off, as I have now told everyone.’
I examined Fidelis’s idea from every angle.
‘Well, it is certainly paradoxical. A salve to make you sick – a poisonous palliative.’
‘Ha! Yes, though whether it poisons by accident or knowingly I cannot say. Our only way to settle it is by interviewing Mr Shackleberry himself, which we must do anyway if we are to put a stop to any further mischief. Will you help me find him? I know this is not strictly coroner’s business, but—’
‘It will be if anyone dies.’
‘That’s right. So where shall we find him?’
‘We will start with Oswald Mallender. If anyone knows, it will be him.’
* * *
As town constable, Mallender was expected by his masters the burgesses to give regular reports on incomers, together with estimates of their wealth and the degree of nuisance they might present. His self-importance alone ensured that he enjoyed this task more than all his others, since it gave him the opportunity to lord it over people who did not yet know what a fool he was.
We found him at home, in his house in Tithe Barn Street, where he was being fussed about in front of his parlour fire by Mrs Mallender, a woman even fatter than himself. It was not an opulent dwelling: two rooms below and two above, with a cramped attic for the servant. Indeed, the whole house seemed cramped with these two filling every room they stood up in.
‘How can I be of service, gentlemen?’
‘Do you know the whereabouts of the mountebank Shackleberry that’s been here in town doing card tricks and the like? He was selling a quack nostrum in Market Place yesterday before the May Queen’s election.’
‘The Irish fellow? Yes, I know him, of course.’
‘He had an assistant with him, a feeble-minded fellow called Dickon. Can you take us or direct us to them?’
‘Let’s see … why do you want this man?’
‘Because his so-called preservative is no such thing. It is noxious and suspected of being the cause of this outbreak of disease.’
Mallender looked from one of us to the other, smiling as in kindly tolerance towards the idiocy of others.
‘Oh, no, sirs. No, no. The corporation has met on this point and all agree that the sickness is a dangerous contagion. Those who have tried to combat the outbreak with extraordinary measures, such as this good man Shackleberry, have even been commended by the Mayor, and are to be treated with the greatest indulgence—’
‘Fiddlesticks,’ broke in Fidelis, irritated beyond measure. ‘The man should not be indulged. He should be put in irons.’
‘Not in the eyes of the corporation, sirs, and it is with the corporation’s eyes that I must look. Their worships have also issued a slate of measures against this contagion—’
‘Say this poisoning! It is not a contagion.’
Mallender wagged one sausage-like finger.
‘Hold up, sir! Will you contradict the corporation? They will not have it! Against this contagion, they say again, measures are planned and will be enacted with dispatch in this emergency. You may read them.’
He produced a paper and handed it across. It was headed Contra Pestis and contained a dozen numbered orders for such things as the establishment of a pest house, the control of laundry, the closing of the theatre and rounding-up of stray dogs. These methods had been used traditionally to combat the plague: the most extreme of them was the provision for people to be shut up forcibly in their homes.
‘God forbid that it should come to any of this,’ intoned Mallender with sanctimony. ‘In the midst of all this election activity, and Lord Strange just arrived in town for his grand theatricals tomorrow. Yet we must be ready.’
‘This is so much rank shit!’ said Fidelis passionately, throwing the paper aside so that it floated down and landed close to the fireplace at the feet of the seated Mrs Mallender. Seeing her, as if for the first time, he bowed and apologized for the word he had used.
‘Oh no, don’t mind me, Doctor,’ she tittered. ‘I like to hear a professional man swear, I do.’
Meanwhile with laboured breath, Mallender had stooped to retrieve the note.
‘You must have greater care, Doctor, with a fire in the room. This paper has corporational authority. If it had been burned that would have constituted a contempt. This paper is to go to the printer tomorrow, with a special dispensation to work the press on a Sunday. That is how serious the corporation takes this matter. And, nota bene, Dr Tewksbury attended them and was consulted.’
‘Dr Tewksbury!’ snorted Fidelis. ‘They might as well consult a horse’s arse.’
This conversation was leading nowhere, and I decided to put a stop to it.
‘Well, if you are acting under the advice of another medical man,’ I put in smoothly, ‘there is nothing more to be done here. Mr and Mrs Mallender, we bid you a very good night.’
Out in the street Fidelis began to laugh.
‘“Corporational authority”! The man thinks he is the corporation. So, what do we do now? We are checked.’
‘Come back to my house and drink some wine. We will think of something.’
After Fidelis had greeted Elizabeth, I showed him into the library and slipped into the kitchen to fetch wine. I found Matty sitting at the table with a spoon in her
hand and a small bottle in front of her, of a colour and shape that I knew well. She had already poured a dose into the spoon, and was now opening her mouth and holding her nose, ready to receive it.
Chapter Fourteen
I THINK THE MIND is a closely packed archive of impressions, memories and fears, tens of thousands of them, and every one tightly scrolled and tucked into its proper place ready to be consulted if necessary. But sometimes, for some reason, one of these bursts its ribbon and springs open quite spontaneously. Something like that happened to me then. Elizabeth and I had brought up this girl in our service, from a snotty child on a farm to the dignity of womanhood itself, and we had loved her and cared for her from the start. But now all at once I had a horrid vision of her death, lying in the same filth and degradation I had seen in that room in Stoney Gate.
With a cry I stepped forward and, in dramatic fashion, raised my hand and dashed the spoon from Matty’s hand. It went flying across the room, rang like a bell as it struck one of our Delft jugs on the dresser, then came down on the floor. The spoon’s contents spattered across the table. Matty screamed.
‘Sir! What did you do that for?’
‘That is a very dangerous preparation, Matty. Dr Fidelis believes it may be putrid.’
Matty blinked as her eyes filled with tears.
‘But I thought there was no harm, because they’ve been taking it all over.’
‘Precisely, Matty. And people have been falling ill all over – do you understand?’
I seized the bottle and went through to the stone sink outside the door, where I poured and flushed the contents away.
‘How much of it have you had?’ I asked, returning to her.
‘None, not yet.’
‘Thank God!’
‘I only just got it, you see. But I’d been that worried about this sickness, so I sent Barty out to get me a bottle. He said he knew where to find it.’
‘Did he? Well, that is very good news!’
Her tearful face turned into a puzzled one.
‘But you have just told me—’