by S. W. Perry
‘John Lumley is a man who likes uncovering mysteries,’ Nicholas replies. ‘That’s why he built his library at Nonsuch. That’s why he sent Fulke Vaesy to Italy to study anatomy. From what I know about him, he’s not the sort of man to shut his mind to a proposition without first studying the facts.’
Bianca wonders what Nicholas will do if John Lumley turns him down. She knows his recovery is still incomplete. Whenever they walk along the river like this, she catches him sneaking the occasional melancholy glance across the water. Who is he searching for, when he steals these private glances into the distance? Now she thinks she knows.
There was someone I couldn’t cure – someone very dear to me.
Just for a moment an unexpected jealousy comes over her.
Reaching the Falcon stairs, they see a young lad of about Jacob Monkton’s age fishing from the end of the jetty. He wears a tattered wool jerkin. His hands and face are grubby. He’s probably from one of the Bankside tenements. Nicholas watches him for a while. Then he turns and looks back along the river towards the bridge, scanning the buildings along the southern bank.
‘When did Ned Monkton’s brother go missing?’ he asks suddenly, turning to her.
‘Jacob? A good month before he was found,’ she answers, brushing a curl of hair from over one eye.
‘But I saw his body. He’d only been in the water a couple of days at the most. So where was he in the meantime?’
‘You think Jacob was kept a prisoner somewhere?’
He nods. ‘And perhaps the others, too.’
‘But where?’
‘Remember what Slater, the waterman, said about how the bodies might wash ashore?’
‘So it must be somewhere between here and the Lambeth marshes.’
‘Otherwise the killer would have to risk bringing an eviscerated body some distance to the river, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t chance that, surely.’
Bianca puts a hand over her mouth, as if to stop her thoughts from escaping. ‘What a horrible thought – poor Jacob in chains, confined like a condemned prisoner.’
‘I didn’t tell you this the day I found him, but Jacob certainly struggled at the end. I saw the wheals on his wrists and ankles. How do you keep a strong young lad like that compliant for a whole month? Or stop him from calling for help?’
‘I could make a potion to take away the power of speech – easily,’ Bianca tells him confidently, though inside her, the image of what Nicholas has just described starts a cold entanglement of terror in her stomach.
‘But also make them compliant to your will – for that long?’
‘It’s simple, if you know the right plants. I’d probably use hemlock or wolfsbane, maybe a few others – keep the mix subtle, so that it didn’t kill the subject outright. You’d have to keep administering it, of course.’
Nicholas looks towards the great bridge with its lofty parapet of timbered houses, the waterwheels turning in the current beneath the arches. Then he slowly lets his gaze return along the jumble of buildings clinging to the riverbank.
And stops.
As though he’s caught a glimpse of something he had not expected to see.
He stands almost motionless, just a gentle nod indicating that he’s not entered some form of trance. Bianca realizes he’s looking in the general direction of the Jackdaw.
In fact his eyes have settled on a distant roof. He can just make it out above the surrounding tenements. It’s the building he passed that Accession Day in November, when Jacob Monkton’s eviscerated body came to him on the tide. The building adjacent to Bianca’s physic garden. The deserted Lazar House.
‘Jesu and all the angels,’ he whispers, his voice almost drowned out by the shouts of the wherrymen on the river. ‘How could we have been so blind? He’s been doing it right under our noses!’
The tattered remnants of the stolen coat, now padded out with discarded rags, flap around her in the wind as she scuttles, giving her body the appearance of a crippled rook struggling to take flight. She sleeps in cattle byres and under fardels of brushwood. She speaks without words to Ralph and Jacob, to the two women who sit and hug each other whenever she stops to rest, and to the old man with a stump for one hand who needs constant reminding of his surroundings.
They have been with her throughout her otherwise solitary passage through Christmas into Twelfth Night, Epiphany and beyond. They only disappear when a real human presence sends her scurrying deeper under cover.
From her hiding place, Elise observes these other creatures – the ones of her former kind – with the uncomprehending eyes of a wild animal. She has learned the temerity of the mouse, the ferocity of the fox. Like the wild dog, she has learned to scavenge. And despite the cold and the hunger she has survived.
And she has discovered, to her joy, that her mother has not lied to her. The great house Mary told her about really does exist. It is a palace so magnificent that Elise believes she has reached the very gates of heaven.
From the edge of a coppiced wood she can see minarets towering towards the winter sky, gleaming the way she imagines mountains made of snow must gleam – though she has never seen such a thing as a mountain or a minaret in her life.
And having come all this way, it breaks Elise’s heart to think she dare not enter – because the Devil is so adept at disguise that he might even now be watching her from any one of the countless glittering windows.
24
In the lengthening shadows the greyhounds wait patiently, leashed in and lolling-tongued, tired and muddied after a long day hunting coney in the Surrey fields. On the lane, the liveried grooms calm the steaming horses. Everyone waiting. Guest, servant, horse or greyhound – each knows that before you can return to Nonsuch and rest, first you have to pause at the Lumley family chapel so that your master can pray before the mausoleum he’s raised to Jane FitzAlan and their three dead children. God’s blood, thinks Sir Fulke Vaesy, why can’t some people leave their dead to sleep untroubled?
As the two men walk back through the little churchyard towards the waiting horses, John Lumley says, ‘Tell me, Fulke, in the summer – if you recall – I asked you about a young physician I was of a mind to employ on a private venture.’
‘Nicholas Shelby?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I told you he had fallen from his station, descended into vagrancy. I trust you found someone else to send.’
‘The venture came to nothing. I was misinformed – the books were not for sale.’
‘Well, he would have been no use to you anyway. Sad, but an excess of emotion can unman a fellow, if he lets it.’
‘He appears to have resurfaced – on Bankside. He’s practising at St Thomas’s.’
Vaesy raises an eyebrow. ‘Has he really? Well, I hope he’s rediscovered sobriety in the meantime. I shouldn’t care to trust my health to him otherwise.’
‘In fact, he’s written to me.’
‘The impertinence—’
‘And I’ve replied.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘In truth, Fulke, I did encourage him to correspond – at the College, last August. He asked me then if he might communicate with me on matters of physic.’
‘Is there no limit to his presumption?’
‘Come now, Fulke, I enjoy hearing the views of the younger fellows. The passing years are inclined to dull one’s sense of inquisitiveness, unless you guard against it – don’t you find?’
Vaesy looks at his friend as if he’s speaking Polack. He snorts loudly. ‘Shelby was a good physician, I suppose. But he seemed to think it was a doctor’s place to get his hands bloody. I believe he got that extraordinary notion serving in Holland. That’s what comes from listening to people who wear wooden shoes.’
‘Don’t you think you’re being a little harsh?’
‘If it’s debate you’re after, I’m sure I could find you someone more appropriate. Someone whose learning is built on more traditional foundations.’
‘No new knowl
edge, eh? Just the rediscovered wisdom we lost after Adam’s fall?’ says Lumley with a smile. It is Vaesy’s firm conviction that all knowledge was handed by God to Adam, then lost after the first sin. He thinks medical discoveries are merely God’s way of letting us have a little of it back.
‘That is the opinion favoured by the Church,’ says Vaesy loftily.
‘Did you not tell me Shelby’s young wife had died, along with their child?’
‘Yes, but what reason is that to come to vagrancy?’ Vaesy asks. ‘It happens all the time.’
‘Perhaps it does, Fulke. But that doesn’t stop us asking why is it that, for all its accomplishments, medicine cannot always save even the innocent.’
It’s a question Vaesy has never once asked himself. It takes a moment for him to think of a suitable answer.
‘It is not the role of a physician to save life, John,’ he says with utter conviction. ‘We simply apply our knowledge. The rest lies in God’s hands alone.’
‘Are you suggesting that, in physic, prayer is more efficacious than study?’
‘For the answer to that question I fear you must ask a bishop,’ says Vaesy, placing one hand on his breast, ‘not a humble physician.’
Lumley allows a waiting groom to assist him into the saddle. Vaesy is hoisted unceremoniously into his. From this swaying, unreliable perch the great anatomist glances back at the little church from which they have so recently emerged. It looks exactly as it did all those years ago, when John Lumley buried Charles, Thomas and Mary here: insignificant. Just a simple English parish chapel.
Why does Vaesy feel the old stones are watching him, silent but accusing? He’d done all he could for the infants, hadn’t he? He’d used the knowledge with which his studies had equipped him. It was true – the rest really was up to God, wasn’t it?
The groom steps away from Vaesy’s horse like a ship’s master casting adrift a mutinous sailor. John Lumley raises a gloved hand and the party prepares to set off towards the glistening ashlar walls of Nonsuch. The greyhounds begin yelping ecstatically, in anticipation of dinner.
But before they’ve travelled further than the end of the churchyard, out of the corner of his eye John Lumley sees his apprentice falconer Thomas Parker running towards him down the lane. The lad comes to a halt beside Lumley’s mare, breathless, one arm outthrust in the general direction of the church.
‘There, my lord! Look – there!’
And as John Lumley turns his head to follow the boy’s outstretched hand, he sees two of the Nonsuch servants dragging something out of the hedge – something that at first glance bears more than a passing resemblance to a sack full of writhing serpents.
It is dusk when Nicholas returns to the Jackdaw. When he does, Timothy tells him breathlessly about a rich man’s servant who arrived on horseback barely an hour since.
‘Grand he was, in a fine tunic with martlets woven on it! Dare say Southwark will have that off his back, if he’s not across the bridge by nightfall,’ the lad says gleefully. Reluctantly he hands Nicholas the letter, as if he fears that by relinquishing the precious thing with its fine wax seal he’ll give up some of the magic that has mysteriously entered him from the touching of it.
Nicholas takes the letter to an empty bench and opens it. Before he’s read even a word, he prepares himself for polite rejection, or Secretary Quigley’s terse apology that his master is far too busy to correspond with a mere dispenser of potions to the poor. His eyes skim the letter quickly. Get it over with:
… and I commend such goodly endeavours to increase scientific discourse amongst men of learning… you are most heartily welcome at Nonsuch to avail yourself of the wisdom to be found in my humble library there…
He almost laughs out loud. Humble. The library at Nonsuch is rumoured to contain more knowledge than those of Oxford and Cambridge combined.
‘It’s from John Lumley!’ he announces to Bianca with a broad grin. ‘We’re in.’
‘And your other bright notion, Master Physician?’ she asks with an inner shudder.
‘Tomorrow. When we have the light to see what we’re doing.’
As if that will make it more appealing, she thinks – as she considers his invitation to just about the last place on Bankside that anyone in their right mind would wish to visit.
In the months Elise has spent in hiding she’s grown used to her own stink, the stink of the fugitive.
But now her captors have bathed her – just as the angel had bathed her. They have given her fresh clothes to wear: a linen undershirt and a simple woollen kirtle, both made for a considerably larger girl. The garments smell of soapwort. This new, overwhelmingly clean scent offends her. It frightens her, too. She wonders if perhaps she’s been washed for the slaughter.
Now they have confined her in some sort of cellar, a place full of barrels and baskets, sacks of flour and carcasses hanging from the ceiling. After what she’d seen in the Devil’s house, the carcasses sent her wild again – until she saw, by the light of the single candle they had allowed her, that they were only the salted joints of winter pork.
They have given her a proper mattress to sleep on – though naturally she has not slept at all. They have even given her food, laughing in wonderment as she stuffed it into her mouth with her hands.
But when they left, she noticed, they took care to lock the door.
25
They must have been truly great sinners to have been locked away in such a prison,’ Bianca says in awe. She is standing in the physic garden, cloaked against the cold. The only colour in the whole of London appears to be the bright amber of her eyes. Beyond the old brick wall the snowflakes are starting to swirl about the grey, impassive face of the Lazar House like spray against a cliff.
‘It wasn’t a prison, it was a hospital,’ Nicholas tells her. ‘And leprosy is a sickness, not a sin. The Moor physician Avicenna wrote a treatise on the disease over five hundred years ago.’
‘Have the English always been so enlightened?’ she asks, her face pinched by the cold. ‘In the Veneto we confined them on an island in the lagoon. People said they were cursed by God.’
‘I’m just surprised they haven’t pulled the place down yet, or turned it into tenements. Winchester House would make a tidy sum from the rents.’
‘That’s if they could persuade anyone to live in such a place,’ Bianca says, keeping her hands firmly tucked inside her cloak, lest they feel the ghostly touch of leprous fingers. ‘So where did they all go?’
‘When the queen’s father reformed the religious houses, the friars who looked after them left. The few patients who remained were sent to the confinement house at St Bartholomew’s. As far as I know, there’s not been a case of the disease reported in London since before I was born. The question is: how am I going to get in?’
He has already discounted the main entrance, an ancient stone archway facing south towards Winchester House, long ago bricked up to prevent cut-purses and vagabonds using the Lazar House as a refuge.
Bianca gives him a sharp look. ‘You’re not going inside?’
‘Why else are we here?’
‘Nicholas, don’t be so foolish. He might still be in there.’
‘If he is, he’d have lit a fire by now, just to keep warm. There’d be smoke coming from the chimneys.’
‘But you can’t be sure—’
‘If I need help, I’ll call to you.’
‘And what am I supposed to do then?’ she asks with an angry twist of her mouth. ‘Prove Isaac Bredwell right – turn myself into a bat and fly to your aid? I’m coming with you.’
‘No, you are not!’
‘Why?’
‘Because it might be dangerous.’
‘You said there was no one inside.’
‘It’s derelict. Unsafe.’
She places her palms firmly on her waist. ‘Am I now the hired man, and you the taverner?’ she enquires ferociously.
‘Look, if I’m not back before the bell at St Mary’s c
himes ten, go back to the Jackdaw and bring a couple of the handiest customers you can find. Failing that, send Timothy to St Tom’s and fetch Ned Monkton. He’d be worth a couple of watchmen on his own.’
‘And quite how do you propose to get inside?’ she asks, nodding towards the physic garden wall, which must be at least ten feet high.
‘If I can find a foothold—’
‘Listen to me, Nicholas,’ she says impatiently, ‘if you’re right and this is where he confined those poor creatures, then he has to bring them in from the river – unless he’s found a way of passing through brickwork or hauling the weight of a human being over this wall. Wouldn’t it be more sensible if we went down to the shore to see if there’s an entrance between here and the Mutton Lane stairs?’
Further east, towards the bridge, the riverbank is planked and piled. But at the end of Black Bull Alley it spills out onto gently shelving ground. The Thames hurries by, muddy brown and utterly indifferent, fragments of foliage torn from the bank upriver by the Lambeth marsh bobbing gently on the current. Further out, the wherries and tilt-boats ply their trade. On the watery horizon Nicholas and Bianca can make out the masts of Queenhithe and the roofs of the buildings around the Vintry. Turning right, they begin to follow the boundary of the Lazar House grounds, a wall as old and sturdy as the one in the physic garden. It looks as though it’s been here since Brutus was king of Albion, seems to have grown out of the river silt like the black stumps of ancient trees that appear when the tide is unusually low. The brickwork is a dense, dark green with a thick coating of damp moss, the top capped with a deep greyish-white patina of filth from the gulls that perch there. Nicholas walks barely fifteen paces before he sees a gully running from the wall to the water, long ribbons of gulls’ mess pointing downwards like arrows indicating the way on a map. He stops.
‘Hurry up, I’m freezing,’ calls Bianca against the shrieking of the gulls.