by S. W. Perry
‘She had a lucky escape, I understand. Had it not been for your determination… well, it doesn’t bear dwelling upon, does it?’
Nicholas smiles. ‘She was the instrument of her own salvation, my lord. A lesser heart might have given up.’
‘I hear Captain Brabant’s men had to prevent Monkton from killing Gabriel with his bare hands – is that right?’
‘That might have been a better outcome. It would have been a kinder death than the one he faces now.’
‘You must put that out of your mind, Nicholas. As you rightly told me that morning we rode out of Nonsuch, Gabriel knew the path he was taking.’
‘Still, it’s a little too much of an eye for an eye for my liking, my lord.’
‘I still think of Kat,’ Lumley says sadly. ‘One cannot easily put so long a friendship out of mind. Tell me again, how did it happen?’
Nicholas shrugs. ‘It’s hard to say, my lord. It was dark. She was in the stern of the wherry. We were rowing back to Cecil House. One moment she was there, the next – gone. Somewhere off the Lambeth marshes, I’d guess.’
‘Was she bound?’
‘Brabant didn’t think it necessary: Quigley was in too much pain from the wounds Ned and Bianca had given him to cause any trouble. And Katherine Vaesy had been sitting quietly all the way from the Mutton Lane stairs.’
‘Did she drown? Or did she make it to the bank?’ asks Lumley, addressing his question to the sky. ‘Whatever the truth, wherever she is, I hope she’s at peace. At least she’s free of her husband.’ A thought occurs to him. ‘Speaking of Sir Fulke, did you know he’s been dismissed from the chair of anatomy, stripped of his fellowship of the College? It was the Privy Council’s doing. Nothing to do with malpractice – it was the scandal, and his connection to a Jesuit, that they couldn’t stomach.’
Nicholas says nothing.
‘The most extraordinary thing is,’ Lumley continues as they walk, ‘her disappearance has quite brought Lizzy out of her shell. It’s as though some malign skein connecting her to the past has been cut. I know she was in awe of my first wife, Jane FitzAlan – never thought herself Jane’s equal – but now Kat has gone, well, Lizzy’s found a worth in herself she never knew she possessed. Why, the very day I last left Nonsuch, she barely noticed my departure because she was so engrossed in a book she’d taken from the library!’ He shakes his head in sad reflection. ‘Even so, I know Kat’s crimes have troubled her deeply. We both thought Kat was an angel; but Jesu, what a malign mark she has left on so many lives.’
They walk on together in silence, towards Petty Wales and the great Bulwark Gate to the Tower. Halting in its shadow Lumley says, ‘You must bring Mistress Merton to Nonsuch when she’s fit to travel. Lizzy and I are of a mind to build a physic garden there. We would welcome her counsel.’
‘I shall, my lord – with gratitude.’
‘God protect us poor, weak men from redoubtable women, eh, Nicholas?’
‘Indeed.’
‘I keep asking myself: how did the two of them come to this? Could I have prevented it? Was I remiss in my care for Gabriel? For Kat?’
Nicholas can find little compassion for Quigley. But for Katherine Vaesy? How had the Devil entered her soul? ‘Twenty years is a long time to carry so much hate,’ he says. ‘Perhaps the child Vaesy destroyed with his incompetence was not his, but Mathew Quigley’s. Have you thought of that possibility?’
Lumley’s cold, grey northern eyes glisten. ‘It’s cruel, I know, but a part of me wishes John Warren was still alive, so he could see the consequences of breaking his daughter’s heart.’
At the north end of Petty Wales the sky disappears behind a cliff-face of ragstone and flint. They’ve reached the forbidding entrance to the Bulwark Gate, on the western side of the Tower. Here even passers-by with nothing on their conscience lower their voices and avert their eyes. The shadows seem colder than elsewhere.
Lumley presents his seal and letter of admittance signed by William Cecil. As they pass through, Nicholas steels himself for what must come.
‘Are you ready?’ asks John Lumley. ‘A man of healing may well find this too much to stomach.’
Nicholas reflects on Lumley’s words for a moment. Then he says, ‘Yes, I’m ready. What kind of man is a hunter who can’t look his quarry in the eye?’
By the light of the yeoman-warder’s lantern they climb the spiral stairs, their footsteps on the worn stones sounding like a slow tally of lives ended and forgotten. Nicholas has the nightmare sensation that the stairwell is coiling itself up behind him, cutting off his escape, as though he were being worked through the gut of some monstrous worm.
‘They say he made the wildest claims when Master Topcliffe first put him to the hard questioning,’ says the warder as he climbs ahead of them.
‘Claims? What sort of claims?’ Lumley asks, breathing hard now with the effort of the climb.
‘That he was no Jesuit, but a physician – engaged upon secret work that would raise England high in the eyes of posterity. That there was a plot against him. That he’d been betrayed by those he trusted.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Being a gentleman of the court, you must know how these papist traitors are, my lord. They’ll lie to the last breath.’
If ‘papist traitor’ causes Lumley to grit his teeth, Nicholas is unable to detect it. All Lumley says in reply is, ‘So I’m led to believe.’
The warder blunders on. ‘Master Topcliffe himself told me he feared he’d never get this rogue to confess. But I said to him, “Master Richard,” I said, “the Devil’s not yet fashioned the Jesuit who can keep his vile intent from you, when you’ve a mind to winkle it out of him.” I told him straight. No messing.’
‘I’m sure you did,’ says Lumley despondently.
Reaching a narrow landing, the warden puts his key to the lock with a great rattling of iron. The door, barely large enough to admit a child, swings open on ancient hinges. John Lumley stoops to enter. He’s been here before, Nicholas remembers. He knows what it’s like to be incarcerated in a chamber like this. Perhaps it’s not just the climb that’s causing him to breathe so hard.
The cell tapers like a carpenter’s wedge, a narrow arrow-slit of a window at the far end. The walls are half-panelled. They’re covered with countless carved messages, some little more than a weak scratching of despair, others scoured out in rage. One, Nicholas sees, is written in Latin: Parce mihi, Domine, nihil enim sunt dies mei… Spare me, O Lord, for my days are as nothing…
Gabriel Quigley’s broken body kneels in the tiny space by the window, his back towards Nicholas. A length of chain snakes from a ring-bolt in the floor to an iron fetter around his right ankle. He seems to be at prayer, the soles of his feet turned outwards. Nicholas notices they are almost black with livid bruises. But it’s not spiritual ease Quigley’s seeking – he’s licking moisture off the windowsill.
‘Stand up for the gentlemen, you Romish dog,’ growls the warder.
Richard Topcliffe has done his work with chilling efficiency. As if waking from a long hibernation, Gabriel Quigley tries to rise. But he can manage no more than a half-crouch. Using the casement sill for support, he turns to face them. He’s dressed in a heavily stained linen shirt and soiled hose. His eyes are devil-red where the minor blood vessels have ruptured. Diagonally across one side of his face runs the black, festering furrow made by the teeth of the saw Bianca wielded. He stinks of his own piss, his own vomit and – irony upon irony – his own blood.
Something appears to be eating him away from within. Nicholas thinks he knows what it is: it’s the rotting of the self that occurs when a man’s been shown the previously unimagined possibilities of his own humiliation by a torturer.
I’m not the physician – I’m the disease.
‘For the love of mercy, get him some water to clean himself with,’ Lumley snaps to the warder. ‘And a blanket. It must be colder than Hecate’s tit up here at night.’
The warder i
s unmoved. ‘Orders from the Privy Council, my lord. The Jesuit is to have no more ease than this. There are worse places here we could have put him in – trust me.’
‘May we speak with the prisoner a while – alone?’ Lumley asks.
‘A short while, Masters,’ says the warder.
The single chair is out of Quigley’s reach. Lumley moves it to within the arc of his chain and helps him to sit. The setting of his limbs into the angle of the chair makes Quigley cry out in pain. He stares at the open door as the warder leaves, as though he fears something terrible is about to come through it.
It’s a few minutes before he even acknowledges that Lumley is beside him. Then, in recognition, he lifts one hand to clutch Lumley’s sleeve. Nicholas notices the fingers no longer line up. Nor do they have nails.
‘I am forsaken, my lord,’ Quigley cries in a hollowed-out voice. ‘They made me say I was a Jesuit! They made me say I desired to deliver the queen in chains to the mercy of the Pope! That I plotted her death. I am condemned out of my own mouth. For the love I know you bear me, my lord, tell them they’ve made a mistake. Tell them it’s not true.’
Nicholas stares at the creature hunched in the chair. If nothing but sudden blindness could shut out the sight of what Gabriel Quigley has become – of what he, Nicholas Shelby, has brought about – he thinks he might almost welcome it. Only the image of Ralph Cullen’s body, of Jacob Monkton’s eviscerated carcass, prevents him from calling for the warden to let him out of the cell.
I’m not the physician – I’m the disease.
With what little strength Topcliffe has left him, Quigley tugs at Lumley’s gown. ‘You are a man of great learning, my lord. Your library nurtured my skills. Part of the glory will be yours. Tell them to let me go. I have to go on.’
Lumley drags himself away from Quigley’s grasp as Nicholas says, in a bitter voice, ‘Glory? What glory? There’s no glory in what you’ve done, Quigley.’
Quigley’s bloodshot eyes turn on Nicholas. A dull light of comprehension flickers in them – and loathing.
‘Tell me, Quigley, when were your crimes going to end?’ Nicholas asks. ‘When you’d butchered the last crippled child in London? When you’d bled the life out of the last helpless beggar? What were you going to do then? Find another malady to cure by murder?’
Quigley shakes his head violently. The pain of his injuries makes his mouth gape in protest. ‘Murder? No! You must understand: I have learned wondrous things in this work. I have come so close to understanding how God’s purpose works in the body: in mine, in yours—’ Then, pleadingly, to John Lumley, ‘in Mathew’s.’
Lumley just looks on in horror.
‘I lost someone I loved, too,’ Nicholas says without pity. ‘The grief almost killed me – I couldn’t save her. But not once did I ever think of butchering someone else’s wife to find out why!’
Quigley studies him for a moment, as though trying to read his thoughts. Then, utterly unrepentant, he says hoarsely, ‘And you’re the poorer physician for it, Shelby. No vision – that’s the trouble with your sort. You should stick to prescribing balms for scrofula.’
It would be so easy, Nicholas thinks, to smash his fist into Quigley’s already-ruined face. That his inevitable end will be unimaginably more painful is small recompense for not doing so. ‘Did you know their names, Quigley?’ he asks, crossing his arms lest the temptation prove irresistible.
‘Names? Whose names?’
‘The people you butchered. Ralph Cullen, for a start.’
Quigley shakes his head slowly, painfully. It dawns on Nicholas that his victims’ humanity is something Quigley dare not allow himself even to glimpse.
‘Ralph was the little boy with the withered legs,’ he explains. ‘Ralph’s mother was a drunken bawd from Bankside. You’d think God might have given him a little more of His much-vaunted love. His sister Elise carried him on her back, all the way from Southwark to Surrey, looking for a little hope in life. Instead she found Katherine Vaesy, and you.’
Quigley lowers his head and lets it sway gently in denial.
‘Then there’s Jacob Monkton, the lad you eviscerated. Did you learn much from him – other than how to torture an innocent lad who wouldn’t harm a fly? Did you know his father and his brother have almost nothing in the world? And most of what they did have went on paying a charlatan like you to find a cure for his malady.’
The swaying of the head increases. Nicholas wonders if a small shard of guilt has found its way beneath Quigley’s carapace.
‘And what about the preacher? What about the blind woman with the bell around her neck – and her sister? Or the old man with one hand? I’ve no idea what they were called, Quigley. Have you? Perhaps you should have asked them, before you drained the blood out of them. At least you’d have been able to thank them properly for their contribution to your studies! Do you actually have any blood in your own veins, Quigley? Or is there just the piss of your own self-importance flowing there?’
Quigley looks up and meets his angry gaze. He reaches to his own breast with his feeble, twisted hands. ‘We were almost there,’ he says, in a voice that sounds as though it’s being scratched out on glass with a rusty nail. ‘Your woman was going to provide the final proof.’
‘Proof? Proof of what?’
Quigley draws a long, slow breath. ‘I believe the answer lies somewhere inside the heart. Galen and the others were wrong – the blood has no tide. It isn’t heated in the heart. It doesn’t flow from the liver to the organs. Somehow it’s propelled around the body. If a vessel is cut and enough blood is lost, the heart will stop. Even Galen knew that, but he didn’t know why. The heart and the blood are more connected than we ever thought. And if you had not intervened, I could have discovered how!’
Suddenly, for Nicholas, the cell is full of people. He can see his mother-in-law, Ann, wringing her hands out of fear for Eleanor… Harriet breathless from the run from the Cheapside fountain… the midwife with her holy stones… Barely a single drop of blood discharged from the privy region – just some small quantity of her water.
Nicholas sinks to his knees. He’s so close to Quigley he can feel the man’s sour breath on his face. ‘Quigley, tell me, from what you’ve discovered, what would happen if the blood vessels ruptured internally – if there was no outside agency, no knife, no wound?’
When Quigley answers, it’s not because he wants to hand the gift of knowledge to Nicholas, but because he’s learned from Richard Topcliffe that not answering can swiftly bring a man more pain than he can possibly imagine. ‘The heart would drive the blood out into the body cavity, until there was not enough left in the vessels to support its work.’
‘And then?’
‘Then it would stop.’
Nicholas closes he his eyes.
Eleanor: the thread in the weave of my soul. The sunlight on the water. The sigh in the warm wind.
And I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her child.
They died not because of what I’d forgotten, but because of what I never knew.
Lumley’s voice makes Nicholas open his eyes again.
‘The heart is the seat of reason, of courage and of love, Gabriel,’ Lumley says, his words heavy with disgust. ‘Mathew would have told you that, if you’d listened to him. It’s the chalice into which God pours His mercy – not some merely mechanical engine.’ He steps back outside the compass of Quigley’s reach, as if he fears contamination. His last words to his secretary are filled with self-recrimination. ‘If I’d known what use you wished to make of my precious library, Gabriel, I’d have fed every single page into the fire with my own hands.’
Robert Cecil’s carriage is waiting by the Bulwark Gate. The door is open. Burghley’s crab-shouldered son watches Nicholas and John Lumley approach. He looks smaller than Nicholas remembers.
‘My noble lord of Nonsuch,’ Cecil says, with a courtier’s smile that suggests there is no setback that cannot be turned to an advantage, ‘I hear our sov
ereign lady is much in your debt.’
‘Is that so?’ There’s a hint of bravado in Lumley’s reply.
‘You have denounced a dangerous Jesuit. The Privy Council – and my lord father – seem to think you’re the most loyal man in England. Tell me, my lord, how did that happen?’
‘I merely did my duty to our sovereign, Master Robert, as must we all.’
‘What troubles me,’ says Robert Cecil, giving Lumley a mistrustful squint, ‘is quite how a Jesuit can hide himself away in your household for so long without you having the slightest idea he’s there. Explain that, if you can.’
‘The Devil is adept at disguise, Master Robert. As you yourself have said on many occasions.’
Cecil studies him the way the victim of a street-gulling studies the trickster with the dice – he knows he’s been had; he can’t quite see how. ‘During his questioning Quigley claimed it was actually your clerk, Francis Deniker, who was the Jesuit. I’m informed that Quigley swore his innocence almost until the end – until Master Topcliffe persuaded him of the truth.’
‘Well, wouldn’t you,’ says Nicholas, playing the trickster’s apprentice, ‘if you knew what you were facing?’
Robert Cecil offers Nicholas a smile so tight it would take a crowbar to prize it open. ‘Why do I have the feeling you’ve played me a very fast match, Dr Shelby?’
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?’