by S. W. Perry
‘That explains the accent I can hear in your voice. It was puzzling me.’
‘My mother was Italian, but my father made me speak English always. He wanted me to assist him in his business with the Englishmen who came to Italy to trade,’ she explains. ‘And what of you?’
‘Me? I was born in Suffolk.’
‘Is that in England?’
‘Almost.’
‘And does everyone speak Latin there?’
He looks at her blankly. ‘Latin?’
‘You rambled in it – when I bathed your fever. You cursed too profanely to be a priest, and you’re not rich enough to be a lawyer. So I wondered if all Suffolk folk have it.’
This startles him. Until now he had not imagined the intimacy of her bathing his sweat-drenched body. He doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful. So he blusters.
‘Oh, every man who has ambitions for his son has him learn Latin,’ he tells her breezily, looking at his fingertips. ‘We start at petty school. We’re reading Ovid by ten. If you can recite a few verses of the Bible in Latin, the magistrates will let you off your first capital crime with no more than a branding. Not that I’ve actually committed a capital crime – nothing above the occasional misdemeanour, really.’
‘So definitely not a bishop then?’
He shares her laughter. ‘And your father and mother – are they still in Padua?’
‘They’re both dead: my mother of the sweating sickness, these eight years past. My father died on the voyage to England. He was old, and it was a hard sea.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘The authorities in Padua may claim it’s an open city, but underneath they mistrust anyone from outside the Veneto, especially an Englishman. They thought him a threat. It was only a matter of time.’
‘It’s the same here. If the apprentice boys can’t push a foreigner off London Bridge when they parade, they count it a very poor year.’
She says, ‘I’ll make a note not to cross on feast days.’
First light on a raw November morning. Nicholas dreams that Eleanor lies beside him. She whispers softly that if he should ever sup in the Jackdaw’s taproom with Bianca Merton again, she will marry the wool merchant from Woodbridge with the comely calves who tried to court her while he was away in Holland. Nicholas is midway through his promise never to do so again when some sound, some groan or creak the Jackdaw makes as it emerges from its nightly torpor, wakes him. As he opens his eyes, the absence of Eleanor tugs at him like a retreating wave.
The attic is bathed in a watery grey light that spills grudgingly through the leaded window. He throws the latch to let in the cold morning air. Looking down, he sees the alley is empty, the houses opposite emerging only slowly from the shadows.
Then, below him, he hears the door of the Jackdaw open.
Even wrapped in a thick cloak and hood, he knows it’s Bianca. She looks up and down the lane, as though checking to see if she’s alone. Then, apparently satisfied, she sets off in the direction of the Mutton Lane shambles.
Where is she going at this early hour? he wonders idly. If it’s an errand, she’d send Timothy, or Rose. And why has she lowered the latch so carefully as she steps out into the new morning, as though she wants to avoid making the slightest noise? Is it because she fears someone will, by pure chance, look out of a window and see her?
It happens again – three times over the following week. Three times he watches her slip furtively away from the Jackdaw in the early hours. On each occasion he’s woken by the soft creak of her feet on the stairs. The latest was this morning, just as dawn was breaking. His last glimpse of her – before cursing himself for a suspicious busybody and carefully closing the window, lest she hear him – was as a fleeting shadow, barely visible beneath the sign of the basket-maker on the corner of Black Bull Alley.
Why do I do it? he asks himself. Why do I ease open the window with a guilty heart, just so I can peer out into the lane to observe her? The old Nicholas wasn’t a snoop. Why does the new one want to spy on his benefactor? Perhaps it’s for the same reason I want to know where she got the theriac from, he tells himself. Or perhaps it’s because simple trust is no longer enough.
Later, when the Jackdaw is fully awake, he finds Bianca in the kitchen. She’s making entries in her tally book in a small, confident hand. She looks up, framing her brow with slender fingers and running them back through her hair. It’s a habit, he’s noticed.
‘Ah, Nicholas. I’m glad to see you up and about. Will you do me a small service?’
‘Of course. Name it.’
‘Go down to the Mutton Lane stairs. Meet a wherry for me. About eleven, depending on the tide.’
‘Visitors?’
‘A merchant coming across from the Vintry. He’s got a shipment of imported malmsey. My present supplier’s decided he wants an additional sixpence a cask just for the risk of doing business in Southwark. I don’t want this one falling prey to the dabs and purse-divers before I get the chance to wring a good price out of him.’
He asks, as casually as he knows how, ‘Sleep well, last night?’
The answer is a pretty smile and a flash of those brilliant amber eyes.
‘Like the infant Jesus in the arms of Mary. And you?’
When Nicholas steps out of the Jackdaw he finds Bankside teeming with people. What’s brought them onto the street? he wonders. A new play on at the Rose? A bear-baiting in the Paris Garden? Then he remembers the date. It’s the seventeenth day of November: Accession Day. We’re celebrating the anointing of our sovereign lady, England’s Gloriana, our most noble, high and puissant Elizabeth.
For warmth he’s borrowed a buffin-lined coat, a forfeit for an unpaid tab at the Jackdaw. The frost snaps noisily beneath his boots. Outside St Mary Overie the urchins are begging alms from passers-by, their young faces as hard and grey as the winter sky. In the doorways of the stews the doxies huddle together and hope for trade, if only for a few brief moments of promised heat. A flat smoke-haze hangs above the chimneys. The Tabard is doing a brisk trade in steaming sack-posset; but Nicholas knows he’ll have to hurry if he’s to make the Mutton Lane stairs on time.
In the pale mid-morning light, the houses hugging the far bank of the Thames look no more solid than their watery reflections. They’re the frontier of a foreign land he can’t remember visiting.
On the way to the Mutton Lane stairs he passes the old Lazar House. Once home to Southwark’s lepers, it stands now like an empty prison amongst the close-packed tenements of uneven timber beams and sagging brickwork. It’s lain empty and abandoned since before Elizabeth’s reign even began. Yet its grim, forbidding air remains. Not even vagrants seek shelter here, as Nicholas himself can attest. He’s not superstitious, but he can’t help muttering as he hurries by, ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine’ – grant them eternal rest, O Lord.
His use of the Latin makes him realize how free he is, here in Southwark. If anyone across the river heard him muttering prayers in Latin, they’d probably denounce him for a papist.
At the Mutton Lane shambles they’re preparing the last of the winter pigs driven in from the Kentish fields. The steam from their slaughtered carcasses billows into the still air. The lane reeks of blood, offal and damp hog-skin. There’s a small knot of people on the jetty, waiting to catch a boat across or, like Nicholas, for a passenger to arrive.
No one pays him much attention. And why should they? He looks a deal better today than the last time he came this way. Beneath the buffin-lined coat he’s still wearing his white canvas doublet, but Rose has managed to get most of the stains out of it, pounding away with the black-soap as though she was trying to exorcise his demons for him. She’s darned his hose. Timothy has brushed his boots. His hair is still unkempt and there’s a lingering look in his eyes that warns you to step aside, but his beard is trimmed tight against his jaw and neat enough. These days the watchmen hardly recognize him. And he doesn’t stink of knock-down any more.
As he approaches the end of the jetty he hears a shout, swiftly followed by another. He looks out over the ranks of spiteful little wave-crests. A wherry is holding off just beyond the shore.
And between the boat and the stairs, arms outstretched as though exhausted after swimming a vast distance, a body falls and rises on the tide.
Elise squats by an empty crossroad, watchful like the hind in the forest. She is watching for the Devil.
The Devil has many disguises. If he can assume the form of a woman, an angel even, then how easy will it be for him to take the form of the waggoner who passed by a few moments ago, or whoever next comes down the road?
There are only a few people Elise can be certain are definitely not the Devil. The widow Alice Welford is one of them.
In the days before Mary took them off to the Cardinal’s Hat, Alice Welford would look after her and Ralph when Mary either couldn’t or wouldn’t. No, Alice would have been a disguise even the Devil could not have contrived.
Then there were those whom Elise had met in the Devil’s cage. She acquits them now in her memory: first, the two women who sat from dawn to dusk just hugging each other. One had empty sockets in her face where her eyes should have been. She wore a little bell on a cord around her neck, which tinkled softy as she rocked back and forth smiling sightlessly at nothing. Then the young fellow, spindly and warped, who endlessly brushed the palm of one hand across his cheek. And she can acquit, too, the old man with the wispy beard and just one hand, who’d asked her name four times before she realized he forgot the instant she told him.
And, lastly, the one person who – to her surprise and delight – she knew: Jacob Monkton, the moon-faced poulterer’s lad from Scrope Alley.
‘Did the angel save you too, Jacob?’ she’d asked innocently. But he’d merely greeted her with sharp little noises, as though angry sprites were pinching his flesh. That was Jacob’s way. Most people in Southwark called him an addle-pate, though Elise knew he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
No, none of these could have been the Devil, thinks Elise, as she scurries over the crossroads and into the bushes beyond.
But that hadn’t meant the Devil wasn’t on his way.
10
Do you think we can trust him?’ askes Bianca as Rose laces her into her best carnelian bodice. They’re in Bianca’s chamber above the taproom of the Jackdaw. Rose is preparing her mistress for the meeting with the vintner from across the river. For the occasion Bianca has donned her blouse of Haarlem linen – no one can get linen as white and as fine as the Dutch – a kirtle of green brocade and her favourite bodice. The blouse will show off what remains of her Italian colour, and the green and the carnelian will flatter her amber eyes. If the finished article can’t get her a penny off a cask of imported malmsey, she thinks, she might as well pack up and go back to Padua.
‘If he’s even half a man, he’ll forsake the Vintry and take up residence here on Bankside at the first sight of you,’ giggles Rose as she moves in to tie off the last of Bianca’s points. ‘He won’t give a whirligig for the price of malmsey!’
‘I was speaking of our Master Nicholas, actually. We still know so very little about him. What say you?’
‘Master Nicholas? I think he’s a young gentleman dispossessed of his inheritance and unrequited in love,’ says Rose, a perpetually cheery young woman with a mass of brown curls that she’s forever brushing from her eyes.
‘Don’t be foolish, girl.’ Bianca lifts one arm so that Rose can tug the folds of the blouse straight.
‘Then he’s a lonely troubadour, searching for a mysterious damsel who comes to him in his dreams,’ suggests Rose, who in her spare time likes nothing better than to have Bianca recite romantic penny-ballads to her.
‘I can’t imagine they have troubadours in Suffolk, Rose. There’s little there but swamp and sheep. I know; I asked him.’
‘Then perhaps he’s sold his soul to save the woman he loves; condemned to wander eternity alone,’ says Rose, with more perspicacity than she knows.
‘At least we know now he wasn’t sent by the Grocers’ Guild to shut me down,’ says Bianca. ‘And not even the Bishop of London would go to the trouble of having his spy throw himself into the river, just to convince.’
‘I say a pox on the pizzles of the Bishop of London and the Grocers’ Guild,’ declares Rose.
‘He has physic, that much I’m sure of.’
‘How do you know, Mistress?’
‘You should have seen the look in his eye when I said I’d treated him with theriac.’
‘You said you were down to the last vial your father left you, Mistress.’
Bianca spreads her arms and turns a circle for Rose to check that all is correctly laced and in good order. ‘But we couldn’t let him die, could we? He’ll be our talisman. I know he will. And under that rough exterior he’s quite the gallant, don’t you think?’
‘Marry, Mistress!’ says Rose, feigning innocence through her curls. ‘And there was I, thinking it was the vintner you wanted to distract.’
On the Mutton Lane stairs no one seems to know what to do. They stare at the pale spreadeagled thing in the water and cover their mouths in shock. Someone mutters a prayer. Eventually a wherryman manages to snag the corpse with his boathook. He shouts for assistance, but no one – save Nicholas – wants to help fish a half-frozen corpse out of the river.
Alerted by the commotion, two slaughtermen in blood-stained leather aprons arrive from the shambles. They have the body out of the water in no time, laying it on the planks like a grotesque and sodden mannequin. It’s then that the waiting wherry passengers find an urgent need to choose another landing place. In a moment, the only living people left on the Mutton stairs are the two slaughtermen and Nicholas Shelby.
Nicholas is looking into the pale, bloated face of a young lad of maybe fifteen years. It has a bovine simplicity about it, a gentle moon of a face. The gulls have had the eyes. There are gnawmarks where perhaps a pike has had a nibble. But decay has not yet fully set in.
He must have been in deep water for a day or two before rising to the surface, Nicholas thinks. The veins show darkly below the mottled skin, as though he’s already begun his journey of transformation into a creature of the river.
But the most striking thing of all is the torso. It’s been opened up, the chest and upper abdomen little more than a gaping cavern the colour of rotten salt-meat. Inside, through the snapped-off ends of the ribs, the spine is clearly visible, tied in with cords of yellow fat. There is no heart, no entrails, nothing but a few gobbets of dark flesh where the knife has passed them by. The lad has been eviscerated.
‘You could ’ang that up in East Cheap market. I’d ask five shillings for it,’ one of the slaughtermen says.
‘He’s a bit ripe,’ says the other, laughing cruelly. ‘Call it game, an’ charge six.’
Nicholas Shelby doesn’t hear them. He’s too busy staring at the corpse. On the side of the left calf – deep enough to show a glint of white bone – the knife that did the filleting has also carved an inverted cross, deep into the alabaster flesh.
11
The parish constable arrives without anyone having appeared to summons him, as though he has a nose for the anonymous dead the river throws up almost daily. He’s a savage-looking fellow with a permanently suspicious frown and an unkempt beard. He carries a wooden cudgel, his unofficial mace of office. He’s accompanied by one of the parish watchmen: on Bankside, the law officers go around in pairs even in daylight. Nicholas doesn’t recognize them. They’re not the friendly fellows who took pity on him during his fall.
‘Anyone know who he was?’ the constable asks in a disinterested voice, glancing at the corpse leaking river water and live elvers that squirm on the jetty.
‘Looks a bit like young Jacob Monkton,’ says one of the bystanders who’s found the courage to return for a closer look at what the tide has cast up, ‘the poulterer’s son from Scrope Alley. The lad with the addled wits.’
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‘Aye, it’s him aright,’ says another. ‘Someone should run and tell his brother, Ned. He’s been looking for Jacob a goodly while. Best cover him up before he gets here, though. If Ned sees him like this, he’ll start knocking holes in the brickwork. You know what he’s like.’
‘Whoever he is, he’s a treasonous young fellow, by the state of him,’ laughs one of the slaughtermen. ‘Looks like he got restless after they hanged and drawed him – decided to hop it before they got round to the quartering.’ He roars with laughter at his own great humour.
‘The internal organs have been excised,’ Nicholas Shelby tells the constable quietly.
‘Knowledgeable, are you?’ asks the constable.
‘No, not really.’
‘He must have fell off the bridge, got caught up in one of them—’ the constable says, pointing downriver to where the waterwheels are turning in the arches of London Bridge. Even at this distance, the noise they make as they spin in the current is clearly audible, an ominous whump… whump…
‘Probably,’ is all Nicholas says, keeping his own counsel. He knows the lad didn’t die from crush injuries sustained by falling into a waterwheel. But he can also guess why the constable has already made up his mind that he did. The alderman will want a report; the justice of the Queen’s Peace will want a report; the coroner will want a report. Everyone will want a report – hours of work, and all for less than a shilling, to a man barely able to write his own name. Add to that the fact that the lad was of humble background and is known to have suffered from a malady of the wits, and an accident is by far the best verdict.