by S. W. Perry
An inverted cross.
The mark of necromancy. The Devil’s signature.
The Tollworth brook, Surrey,
the same afternoon
The hind turns her head as she sups from the ford, ears pricked for danger. Her arched neck gives a sudden tremble, the way Elise’s own neck used to tremble when little Ralph clung too tight and she could feel his warm breath upon her skin.
She knows I’m close, thinks Elise. And yet she does not fear me. We are the same, this fallow deer and I. We are fellow creatures of the forest, driven by thirst to forget there may be hunters watching us from the trees.
Dragonflies dart amongst the columns of sunlight that pierce the canopy of branches. She can hear the thrumming of their iridescent wings even above the noise the stream makes as it courses over the mossy stones, even above the rumble of distant summer thunder. She sinks to her knees, puts her lips gingerly to the water. It burbles over her tongue, over her skin, flows into her. Cold and sharp. Bliss made liquid.
Elise recalls it was by a stream like this, on another hot summer’s day not long past, that she first succumbed to the delirium that only this cool water can keep at bay. Exhausted, starving, she had imagined the weight she was bearing upon her young back was not her crippled infant brother but the holy cross, and that she was dragging her sacred burden through the dust towards Golgotha…
By a stream like this… on a day like this…
The figure had appeared from nowhere, a silhouette as black as that sudden flash of oblivion you get when, by mistake, you glance into the sun. An angel come down from heaven to save them.
‘Help us,’ Elise had pleaded, peeling poor little Ralph’s withered legs from her back as the desperation overwhelmed her. ‘He cannot walk, and I cannot carry him another step. In the name of mercy, take him—’
Forcing the memory from her mind, Elise slakes her thirst in the ford like the wild animal she has become. And as she drinks, she cannot forget that it was her own desperate wail of need that had alerted the angel to their presence. If she had not cried out, perhaps the angel would not have seen them. Perhaps all that followed would have stayed firmly in the realm of bad dreams.
If she were able, Elise would shout a warning to the hind: ‘Drink swiftly, little one – the hunters may be nearer than you think!’
But Elise cannot cry out. Elise must remain silent; if needs be, for ever. A single careless word, and the angel might hear her and return – for her.
2
Vaesy’s desk is strewn with sheets of parchment covered with symbols and figures. At one end stands a collection of glass vessels. Some, notes Nicholas, contain the desiccated remains of animals, others coloured oils and strange liquids. At the other end is an astrologer’s astrolabe and a beaker of what looks suspiciously like urine – the astrolabe to measure the position of the heavenly bodies when the owner of the bladder relieved himself, the urine to reveal by its colour whether his bodily humours are in balance. Nicholas can make out, seen through the beaker’s glass, the skeletal hand of a monkey held together with wire, distorted by the yellow liquid into a demon’s claw. He has entered a place where medicine and alchemy mix – a perfectly unremarkable physician’s study.
‘You asked to see me, Dr Shelby,’ the great anatomist says pleasantly. Out of the dissection room, he seems almost amiable. ‘How may I be of service?’
Nicholas comes straight to the point. ‘I believe the subject of your lecture today was murdered, Sir Fulke.’
‘Mercy, sirrah! That’s a brave charge,’ Vaesy says, easing himself out of his gown and setting down his pearl-trimmed cap.
‘The child was thrown into the river to hide the crime.’
‘I think you’d best explain yourself, Dr Shelby.’
‘I can’t imagine how the coroner failed to notice the wound, sir,’ Nicholas says. He can, of course – laziness.
‘Wound? What wound?’
‘On the right calf, sir. Small, but very deep. I suspect it might have severed the posterior tibial canal. If not staunched quickly, it would eventually have proved fatal.’
‘Oh, that wound,’ says Vaesy breezily. ‘A hungry pike, most likely. Or a boathook. Immaterial.’
‘Immaterial?’
‘The Queen’s Coroner did not make the child available for dissection so that you, sirrah, could study wounds. The wound was immaterial to the substance of my lecture.’
‘But there was almost no blood left in the body, sir,’ Nicholas points out, as diplomatically as he can. ‘The child must have bled out while alive. Blood does not flow post mortem.’
‘I’m perfectly well aware of that, thank you, Dr Shelby,’ says Vaesy, his easy manner beginning to harden.
‘I do not believe the wound was made by any fish, sir. There were no other bite marks on the body.’
‘So you’ve decided the alternative is murder, have you? Are all your diagnoses made so swiftly?’
‘Well, he didn’t drown. That’s obvious. There was very little water in the lungs.’
‘Are you suggesting the Queen’s Coroner does not know his job?’ asks Vaesy icily.
‘Of course not,’ says Nicholas. ‘But how are we to explain—’
Vaesy raises a hand to stop him. ‘The note from Coroner Danby’s clerk was clear: the child was drowned. How he came to such an end is no concern of ours.’
‘But if he was bled before death, then he was murdered.’
‘And what if he was? The infant was an unclaimed vagrant. He was of no consequence.’
If Vaesy is so familiar with the good book, thinks Nicholas, how is it that mercy and compassion are apparently such alien concepts to him?
‘Shouldn’t we at least try to identify him – find out if he had a name?’
‘I know exactly what his name is, young man.’
‘You do?’ says Nicholas, caught off-balance.
‘Why, yes. His name is Disorder. His name is Lawlessness. He was the offspring of the itinerant poor, Dr Shelby. What does it matter to us if he drowned or was struck down by a thunderbolt? Had he lived, he would surely have hanged before he was twenty. At least now he has made a contribution to the advancement of physic!’
Nicholas tries to curb his growing anger. ‘He was once flesh and blood, Sir Fulke. He was an innocent child!’
‘Never fear, there’ll be plenty more where he came from. They breed like flies on a midden, Dr Shelby.’
‘He was someone’s son, Sir Fulke. And I believe he was murdered. You have influence – delay the interment of the remains. Ask the coroner to convene a proper jury.’
‘It’s far too late for that, sirrah. The child is already delivered to St Bride’s.’ Vaesy’s veined cheeks swell as he gives Nicholas a patronizing smile. ‘He should thank us, Dr Shelby. He’s better off in consecrated ground than as carrion cast up on the riverbank.’ He takes Nicholas by the elbow. For a moment the young physician thinks he’s found some previously unsuspected empathy in the great anatomist. He’s wrong, of course. ‘Your wife, Dr Shelby – I hear she is expecting a child.’
‘Our first, Sir Fulke.’
‘Well, sirrah, there you have it: the wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father.’
‘Sensitivities?’
‘Come now, Shelby, you’re not the first man to get in a lather at a time like this. I once knew a fellow who became convinced his wife would miscarry if he ate sturgeon on a Wednesday.’
‘You think this is all in my imagination?’
Vaesy puts a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. The sleeve of his gown smells of aqua vitae. ‘Dr Shelby,’ he says unctuously, ‘I hope one day to see you as a senior fellow of this College. I trust by then you will have learned to lay aside all unprofitable concern for those whom we physicians are in no position to help – else we would weep tears for all the world, would we not?’
The wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father.
‘The arrogant, over-stuffed tyrant!’ mutters
Nicholas as he runs towards Trinity church, the brim of his leather hat pulled tight over his brow. It’s raining hard now, one of those intense summer squalls that mist the narrow lanes and send the coney-catchers and the purse-divers heading for the nearest tavern to pursue their thievery in the dry. A crack of thunder rolls like a cannonade down Thames Street. ‘He thinks I’m overwrought. He thinks I’m no tougher than one of those novice sisters at St Bartholomew’s.’
But there’s a fragment of truth in what Vaesy has said. In his heart Nicholas knows it. The memory of that pitchforked child; his witnessing of the dissection; the Grass Street wall he cannot breach – all these have done nothing to ease his fears for Eleanor and the child she carries.
After one of Vaesy’s lectures it is the habit of the young physicians to celebrate their survival by getting fabulously drunk. Their favoured tavern is to be found at the sign of the White Swan, close by Trinity churchyard. The knock-down has been flowing a while when Nicholas arrives, eliciting angry mutterings from the other customers about young medical men being more ungovernable than apprentice boys on a feast day. Nicholas throws his dripping hat onto the table as he sits down, noting morosely the once-jaunty feather drooping like the banner of a defeated army. ‘Am I the only one?’ he asks as he signs to a passing tap-boy. ‘Did anyone else see those wounds?’
‘Wounds?’ echoes Michael Gardener, a Kentish fellow who’s already looking like a well-fed country doctor at the age of twenty-four. ‘What wounds?’
‘Two deep incisions on the poor little tot’s leg. The right leg. Vaesy missed them completely.’
‘Master Dunnich probably made them by accident; you know how careless barber-surgeons are,’ says Gardener, running his fingers through his luxuriant beard. ‘That’s why I never let them near this.’
‘Did you see them, Simon?’
‘Not I,’ says Cowper, his face shiny from the ale. ‘I was too busy trying not to catch Vaesy’s eye again.’
Gardener raises his jug to Nicholas and, with a hideously lewd grin on his face, calls out, ‘Enough of physic! A toast to our fine bully-boy! Not long now and he’ll be back in the saddle.’
‘He’s a physician,’ someone in the group laughs. ‘It’ll be the jumping-shops of Bankside for our Nick!’
Simon Cowper, now quite in his cups, affects an effeminate simper. ‘Oh, sweet Nicholas, why must you pass the hours in such low company, while I must content myself with sewing and the psalter?’
Nicholas is about to tell Simon just how wrong he is to caricature Eleanor in such a manner, but the words dissolve on his tongue. Why spur his friends to further teasing? He sighs, gives a good-natured smile and empties his tankard.
And, just for a while, the dead child on Vaesy’s dissection table fades from his thoughts.
Dusk, and Grass Street little more than a dark slash of overhanging timber-framed houses cutting through the city towards the river near Fish Hill.
Nicholas lies alone on his bed, his head resting on the bolster, his eyes towards the wall. He pictures Eleanor lying snugly on the other side, barely inches from him but so inaccessible that she might as well be in far-off Muscovy. She’s asleep now, a welcome respite from the heaviness that keeps stirring within her.
Eleanor is the thread in the weave of his soul. She is the sunlight on the water, the sigh in the warm wind. The lines are not his. He’s borrowed them from the overly poetic Cowper, his own sonnets being distinctly wooden. Eleanor is the perfect bride that his elder brother Jack used to describe in their moments of hot youthful fancy: impossibly beautiful, wholly devoid of any amorous restraint, in need of urgent rescue and usually with a name from mythology.
For Jack, the myth turned out to be a yeoman’s daughter named Faith: extremities like the boughs of a sturdy oak, popping out acorns regularly every other year. But Nicholas, to his immense and perpetual astonishment, has found the real thing; though if there was any rescuing needed, it was Eleanor who performed it. He can’t quite believe his luck.
Often, in his mind, he relives the moment they first danced a pavane together. It was at the Barnthorpe May Fair. Thirteen years of age, within a week of each other. He the prickly second son of a Suffolk yeoman, she the lithe-limbed, freckled meadow sprite, as hard to hold in one place as gossamer caught on a summer breeze. They’d known each other since infancy. Nicholas calls it his first lesson in medicine: sometimes the remedy for a malady can be staring you in the face, but you’re just too stupid to see it.
For the past two hours now Harriet, their servant, has played a secret game of go-between. Whenever Ann and the midwife insist that Nicholas and Eleanor stop talking, Harriet finds a reason to visit the two chambers: a little warm broth for Eleanor… some mutton and bread for Nicholas… floor rushes that need changing before morning… piss-pots to be emptied… She uses these excuses to carry whispered messages, taking to these tasks with all the furtive skill of a government intelligencer carrying encrypted dispatches.
‘How is young Jack, my sweet?’ Nicholas had asked in the last spoken exchange between husband and wife, sensing the growing drowsiness in Eleanor’s voice even through the wall.
‘Grace is fine, Husband – thank you.’
Jack, if it’s a boy – named for Nicholas’s elder brother; Grace, if it’s a girl, in memory of Eleanor’s grandmother.
When he’d spoken again he’d received no reply, only a muttered, ‘For mercy’s sake, hush!’ from his mother-in-law.
At the end of the working day Nicholas Shelby has never hesitated to discuss a difficult diagnosis with his wife, or to make her laugh loudly by mimicking some particularly pompous or difficult patient. But tonight, with Eleanor so close to her time, how can he even mention what he’s seen at the Guildhall? He must endure it alone, with only the sound of his own breathing for company.
He touches the plaster, letting his fingertips rest there a while. Though the wall is barely thicker than the span of his hand, it feels as cold and as impenetrable as a castle’s.
Suddenly, he fears the night to come. He fears he will have bad dreams. Dreams of dead infants hoisted on Spanish pitchforks. Dreams of a child bled dry and floating on the tide. Whole columns of grey, empty-eyed, lifeless children marching across a barren landscape that is half muddy Thames riverbank, half flat Dutch polder. And every one of them his and Eleanor’s. More than anything, he fears his own imagination.
In fact, he sleeps surprisingly soundly. He stirs only when the lodging’s prize cockerel beats – by a good half-hour – the bell at Trinity church.
Unable to see Eleanor, and with no patients to visit the next morning, Nicholas seeks out the clerk to William Danby, the Queen’s Coroner. While it might not matter to Fulke Vaesy that a nameless little boy could end his short life in such a manner, in the present circumstances it matters greatly to Nicholas Shelby.
The wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father.
Damn me for it, if you dare, he tells an imaginary Sir Fulke as he heads for Whitehall. Some of us still remember why we chose healing for a profession.
The clerk to the Queen’s Coroner is a precise, bespectacled man in a gown of legal black. Nicholas finds him in a room more like a cell than an office, filling out the weekly city mortuary roll. He writes with a slow, methodical hand on a thin ribbon of parchment, carefully transferring the names of the dead from the individual parish reports.
What must it be like, Nicholas wonders as he waits for the man to acknowledge him, to spend your day tallying up the deceased? What happens if you misspell a name? If a Tyler in life becomes a Tailor in death, simply through inattention, are they still the same person to posterity that a wife or a brother remembers? Such mistakes can easily happen, especially in times of plague, when the clerks can’t write fast enough to keep accurate records.
Names… Jack for a boy. Grace for a girl. Names unknown, save unto God…
‘The boy they found at the Wildgoose stairs—’ he begins, when at last the clerk looks up
.
The man lays down his nib. He places it well to one side of the parchment roll to prevent an inky splatter obliterating someone’s existence. He ponders a moment, trying to place one child amongst so many. Then, as though he’s recalling some unwanted piece of furniture, ‘Ah yes, the one we allowed to the College of Physicians—’
‘I wondered if he had a name yet.’
‘If he had, I can assure you we would not have agreed to the request for dissection.’
‘Someone must know who he was, surely.’
The clerk shrugs. ‘We asked the watermen who found him. And the tenants in the nearby houses. None admitted to knowing the boy. Perhaps he was a vagrant’s brat. Or a mariner’s child, fallen off one of the barques moored in the Pool. Sadly, there are many such taken from the Thames at this time of year: fishing for eels, grubbing for meat scraps at the shambles. They wander into the water and the next thing they know—’ He makes a little explosive puff through his lips to signify the sudden watery end to someone’s life.
Nicholas waits a moment before he says, ‘I believe he was murdered.’
A defensive flicker of the clerk’s eyes. ‘Murdered? On what evidence do you make such a claim?’
‘I can’t prove it, but I’m almost certain he was dead before he went into the water. If nothing else, justice demands an investigation.’
‘Too late for justice to worry herself much now,’ the clerk says with a shrug. ‘I assume the College has already had the remains shriven and buried at St Bride’s.’
‘So I am told.’