by S. W. Perry
Why can’t I do anything?
Why?… why?… why?
The day after the funeral service for mother and child, held at Trinity church, Nicholas stands in the lying-in chamber at Grass Street. Now it’s just another empty room – a sloping floor that creaks when you walk on it, irregular pillars of oak holding up a low sagging ceiling, a small leaded window giving onto the lane, the shutters open for the first time in weeks.
Just another room.
He puts out one hand to touch the uneven plaster. He thinks of the recent nights he’s spent on the other side of this wall, straining his senses to catch Eleanor’s soft, feminine murmurs, longing to be with her. He stares at his splayed fingers pressed against the surface, barely recognizing them as his own. The room is silent now, empty. He could call to the wall for eternity and never receive a reply. Weak with grief, he lets go of the wall and sinks to his knees.
Just another room.
Someone else’s hand.
Someone else’s tragedy.
His gaze comes to rest on a patch of plaster beside the door frame, where he and Eleanor had planned to make a mark each birthday to record their child’s growth. They’d agreed to stop at thirteen. If it’s a boy, they’d decided, he’ll grow too fast. If it’s a girl, at thirteen she’ll think such fancies childish. Now the wall will stay unmarked for ever.
Time has become something ugly and distorted for him now. Minutes have become confused with years. Crouching by the door, he remembers the incredibly slow pace of their betrothal. Their parents had given them a year’s indulgence, to see if their attachment was anything but a foolish passing fever. When it had become clear it was not, the serious business had begun: acreages measured for the dowry, searches conducted to ensure there were no undeclared mortgages hanging over houses or holdings, no errant uncles with papist tendencies, no undisclosed cattle thieves amongst recent ancestors. Day passing slowly into day, with always another day to wait. It all seems so long ago now, yet at the same time it’s unfolding in his mind as though for the first time. Years, days, hours – how it is that time tricks you so?
The next day a letter arrives at Grass Street. He has Harriet read it to him because his eyes don’t seem able to focus the way they used to:
… the harvest is well in hand… your brother Jack is a tower of strength, as usual… your mother is well… she’s received the fine psalter you sent her and reads a psalm from it each night before we sleep. It looks expensive. You must be doing well. Eleanor’s father asks you to kiss his daughter for him. And the best of news: your sister-in-law has been safely delivered of another sturdy acorn.
4
Across the gentle slopes of the North Downs three men ride out to fly their hawks and bring home coney and pigeon for the pot. It’s early September, feels more like autumn. The air is still, the sky shroud-white. When the birds fly from the glove they instantly become mere darting shadows, almost lost against the trees. The world’s span has shrunk to the next hedgerow.
Down sunken lanes and across meadows strung with bejewelled spider-silk, past manor house and parish church, through fords that Caesar’s legions once muddied with their boots, the hunters follow a long, lazy circuit from Ewell through Epsom and back across Cheam Common. The fruit-pickers in the orchards appear from the mist like ghosts, hoping for a glimpse of them.
For these riders are no ordinary men. Servants hurry after them across the fields, bearing hampers of mutton and cheese, skins of the best Rhenish wine. This is not hunting as any humble man might imagine it.
‘’Tis beyond doubt, Master Robert, you have a fine bird there,’ says John Lumley to his nearest companion, as a sudden flurry of bloody feathers drifts on the slack air. ‘Your Juno is putting my Paris to shame.’
Lumley is the host of today’s agreeable expedition. His long, mournful Northumbrian face seems made for the weather, his deep shovel-cut beard glistens with dew. In addition to being patron of the College of Physicians’ chair of anatomy, Lumley is also the over-mortgaged owner of Nonsuch, the magnificent hunting lodge built in the rolling Surrey countryside by Elizabeth’s father, King Henry. Nonsuch. So beautiful there is none such place to match it. Nonpareil, as the Frenchies would have it. Prettier by far than Greenwich, more striking even than Cardinal Wolsey’s vast temple to vanity at Hampton Court. And what its owner really means, when he compliments young Robert Cecil on the quality of his falcon, is: I wonder if you’re training her to pluck out my heart, so you can steal Nonsuch from me and hand it to the queen as a gift? You think it would raise your stock in her estimation.
Just because you hunt with a fellow, it doesn’t mean you trust him. Not in these uncertain times.
Juno settles on her master’s outstretched glove with a blurred thrashing of her wings and a tinny peal of the little bells tied to her leather jesses.
‘Did you see how artfully she took her prey?’ Robert Cecil asks boastfully, reaching into his saddlebag and rewarding the bird with a morsel of raw rabbit flesh, while a servant runs across the muddy field to recover the corpse. ‘I’ll warrant my Juno can open up a body a deal more swiftly than even your friend Fulke Vaesy. And she doesn’t cost me forty pounds per annum, either.’
Lumley thinks, I wonder if you’ve also taught her to spy on me, count the size of the debts I owe the Crown. Save yourself the trouble – just ask your father.
In his seventy-first year, and by no means in the best of health after long and arduous service to his monarch, Robert’s father William Cecil sits upon his horse so comfortably that you’d think they’d been joined since birth, which in private moments the horse probably laments they have been. When lesser men wish to compliment William Cecil on how audaciously his falcon has plucked a pigeon out of the sky, or sent a coney tumbling stonedead through the grass, they do not cry, ‘Well done, William!’ Most call him ‘Your Grace’ or ‘my noble Lord Burghley’, the pre-eminent of his numerous titles. At Whitehall they call him ‘my Lord Treasurer’, which is his office of state. There’s only one person in all England who calls him whatever she pleases, and that is the queen. Mostly she calls him ‘Spirit’. Nicknames are a favourite game of hers. At court a nickname means you’ve arrived. At twenty-seven, Robert Cecil is still waiting for his. He considers it long overdue – along with his knighthood.
‘Is it true what I hear, Lord Lumley – that Sir Fulke is the greatest anatomist in all England?’ Robert asks casually.
‘I believe so, Master Robert.’
‘It must be most instructive – observing at such close quarters God’s miraculous handiwork. I should like to attend one of his lectures, if court duties afford me the leisure.’
‘The College would be honoured, I’m sure.’
Old Burghley chuckles. ‘Slicing a man to pieces on the dissection table… court business – much the same basket of apples, if you ask me! What say you, Lumley?’
Lumley, who has spent a lifetime at court bending to the wind of the queen’s changeable temper, merely smiles.
‘And who was the subject of Vaesy’s recent lecture, my lord?’ Robert Cecil asks. ‘Some hanged felon? It’s right, don’t you think, that those who refuse to be governed should give something back at the end? Lord knows, they thieve enough from us while they’re alive.’
‘A young boy – about four or five.’
‘Are we hanging children now?’ asks Burghley with a scowl.
‘A drowned vagrant, Your Grace, taken from the river. Of no name or consequence, as far as we could determine.’
‘Where’s the benefit in cutting up a child?’ asks Robert Cecil. ‘Is there not more to be learned from the body of a grown man? Are the organs not closer to perfection?’
‘Sir Fulke recently travelled to Padua, where he was able to observe the professors there dissect a crippled child,’ Lumley explains. ‘The infant taken from the water was similarly afflicted. Sir Fulke is trying to discover if deformed limbs are God’s intention or merely a result of our own human imperfec
tion.’
John Lumley’s words fall heavily, like a whole flock of downed pigeons. Lumley might be a seasoned courtier, but he’s just proved he’s not above stepping in dog-shit when he’s not looking where he’s going. For Robert Cecil’s body is not streamlined like Juno’s, or as effortlessly agile. He’s crook-backed. His splayed legs do not rest comfortably on the flanks of his horse. He’s not made as elegantly as a courtier should be made. As a consequence, he feeds hungrily on insults. Even unintended ones.
‘So Vaesy’s been to papist Padua, has he?’ he asks icily. ‘On your commission?’
Lumley wonders why his mouth has suddenly dried up. He appeals to Burghley to get him off the hook. ‘He went there purely for matters of academic discovery – to the university. I can assure Your Grace, Sir Fulke is unswervingly true to the queen’s faith.’
Robert Cecil smiles wanly. But there is steel in the smile, nonetheless. ‘All I know, my lord, is that when Juno opens up a carcass with her talons, she does it not for the discovery, but for the thrill of it.’
The dream comes to him every night without fail.
When it wakes him, always at the same point, Nicholas knows there will be no more sleep to be had. He will toss and turn until dawn. So, in an effort to stop the dream plaguing him, he demands that Harriet bring him a jug of arak from the pantry. He keeps it by his bed, refusing to let her remove the bottle except to replenish it – which she now does every morning.
The dream is not a dream of loss. It’s a call to follow. And it’s always the same: Eleanor walking along the riverbank, stepping carefully across the pebbles, her bare feet splashing through the pools and rivulets. She is accompanied by a child who clings to her hand – the little boy from Fulke Vaesy’s dissection table. He’s been stuck back together as if he were made from clay. Always they are too far ahead of him to reach.
And what wakes him is the sound of the tide rushing in between.
For some time now, Nicholas Shelby has absented himself from sermon. It has been noted.
‘We feel most sorely for our brother in Christ,’ says the priest at Trinity church to Nicholas’s mother-in-law, Ann. ‘But is it not unduly wilful for a man to deny himself God’s healing balm when he hath most need of it?’
‘He is beyond all reason, Father,’ Ann replies sadly.
She is not an uncaring woman, but she knows she can do no more for her son-in-law. She decides to return to Barnthorpe. She tells herself it’s because the roads will soon become impassable. But in truth, winter is still a good while away.
When Nicholas is again absent for Sunday sermon, the church authorities decide – regrettably – that grief is an insufficient excuse for wilful non-attendance. They write to him at Grass Street.
‘What does it say?’ Nicholas asks, ordering Harriet to open the letter.
He has moved his bed into the room they’d used for the lying-in chamber. He’s refused to let Harriet remove the thick woollen drapes from the little window, parting them enough to let in only a single shaft of dusty light. Harriet is too afraid to clean the room now, and Nicholas hasn’t appeared to notice. It’s mid-morning. He’s still abed. The jug is empty. She speaks to him from the doorway because he stinks of sweat and arak. And he hasn’t been near the Grass Street barber in a fortnight.
‘They’re fining you a shilling, Master, for recusancy. They say they’re being compassionate – they could have fined you twelve.’
‘Tear it up,’ Nicholas tells her brusquely. He’s decided he has no wish to worship a God as uncaring as theirs. They belong to a world that is already alien to him. He pulls the bed sheet over his head, desperately seeking a few more moments’ anguished sleep.
Receiving no response, the churchwardens send another letter. It is rather less compassionate than the first. In it they warn Nicholas that if they find any hint of a refusal to accept the queen’s religion, they have it in their power to fine him more than he earns in a whole year. This threat moves him no more than the first.
On Holy Cross Day, in the middle of September, Simon Cowper spots him coming out of the Star on Fish Street Hill. The bell at St Margaret’s has just tolled five in the afternoon. His friend’s white canvas doublet looks as though its owner has been rolling about in the street. He’s obviously drunk.
‘I thought you favoured the White Swan,’ Simon says amiably.
‘Full of sour-faced Puritans averse to dice, loud debate and dancing. No fun at all,’ Nicholas growls, by which he means he’s been thrown out on his ear.
‘People have been asking after you; Michael Gardener and the others…’
‘Why?’ It’s a challenge rather than a question. Nicholas doesn’t care about the answer; his present concern is making it across Fish Street Hill to the sign of the Troubadour. Simon has to pull him out of the way of an oncoming waggon.
‘We understand the sore hurt you endure, Nick. Really we do,’ Simon tells him, holding on to his friend’s arm to stop him falling where he stands.
‘Do you now? Is that a fact?’
His eyes are raw, Simon Cowper notes, as though he hasn’t slept for days. ‘Nicholas, I know this is a grievous trial for you—’
Nicholas’s interruption is harsh and contemptuous. ‘Tell me, Simon, what precisely do you think you know?’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘What does any doctor know? What does Fulke Vaesy know? God’s blood! The man can’t tell a stab wound from a hernia.’ He stares at Simon like a madman, spitting out the words. ‘And what about me? What sort of physician am I? What do I know?’
‘Nick, perhaps if you went to sermon again—’
But Nicholas isn’t listening. ‘I’ll tell you what Dr Nicholas Shelby knows,’ he says, pulling his arm away from Simon’s grasp and holding up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand to make a crooked zero, ‘he knows about this much of nothing.’
The last Simon Cowper sees of his friend is Nicholas’s back as he staggers off in the direction of the Troubadour – save for the moment when he turns and shouts back at him cruelly, ‘If you know so much, Simon, you’ll know to leave me be… and stick to writing shitty poems to your mistress!’
If you look beyond the grief, you’ll find it’s not self-pity that is destroying Nicholas Shelby. He is not the self-pitying kind. Rather, it is rage. Rage pure and simple. Rage against an uncaring God. Rage against his discovery that everything he’s learned – from the teachings of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, to the practical physic he picked up in Holland – is worth nothing at all. When he’d chided the midwife for placing holy medals on Eleanor’s birthing bed, for putting sprigs of betony and vervain on the sills of the little shuttered window, for any number of her frivolous superstitions, he could just as well have kept silent. His own vaunted knowledge has proved to be no better than any of it.
And he’s developing a dangerous confusion as he drinks and rages, losing the patience of one landlord after another. The dead infant on Fulke Vaesy’s dissecting table has somehow widened the breach in his sanity. It has wormed its way deep inside his head. Now he’s beginning to believe that the child was his and Eleanor’s.
His wild demeanour begins to alarm even Harriet. Tearfully, she finds employment with a draper’s family on Distaff Lane. Nicholas barely notices. Nor does it seem to trouble him when, with increasing rapidity, his clients start to seek the safer counsel of other doctors.
The leaves are turning. It’s autumn. The curfew bells ring out at nine prompt. Then the taverns empty, the city gates slam shut, and men and women of modesty and goodly keeping bolt their doors. They read from their psalters, talk over the day’s business, tuck themselves up in their beds like hens in the coop. To keep the foxes at bay they have the bellmen, stout fellows who roam the empty streets bearing horn lanterns and accompanied by dogs the size of three-headed Cerberus. In the lanes of Grass Street ward, these watchmen save Nicholas from a kicking or a purse-cutting on more than one occasion. They are gentle with him
. They know him. After all, didn’t he cure Ned Tate’s wife of the quatrain fever last Candlemas? When Davy Trow got that dose of French gout from a bawdy-house in Southwark, didn’t Nicholas prescribe mercury at half the usual price? With increasing concern for his safety they pick him up, brush him down and send him home.
His clients, however, are all gone now. They’d rather trust their symptoms to the fall of a dice than to a wild-eyed madman, a Tom-o-Bedlam, a fellow with the suffering of Christ in his eyes. Who’d want to be bled by a physician who can barely stand up, let alone hold a blade still?
‘I swear Lucifer has him by the throat,’ says the last one to go, a haberdasher named Hawes, whose child Nicholas cured last Easter of painfully inflamed gums. ‘Does he think he’ll not marry again? She was only a wife, for Jesu’s sake. A fine and comely one, I’ll grant you, but the way he’s carrying on, you’d think he’d lost the blessed Virgin herself.’
London is a dangerous place in which to lose your mind. Almost every second man carries a blade of some sort. Thus far, Nicholas has escaped with little worse than bruises as he gets expelled from almost every tavern between the Fleet ditch and Fish Street Hill. He picks quarrels for no apparent reason. He gives no thought as to how long his luck might hold.
At the sign of the Green Falcon he gets thrown into the gutter when he discovers – after more jugs of stitch-back than he can accurately count – that an expert cut-purse has neatly filleted away his coin, leaving no evidence of the attack other than a neat tear in his cloak. Given the number of people Nicholas had barged into on the way there, it could have happened at any point over a distance of quarter of a mile, say between the Old Jewry and the top of St Clements Lane.
His closest brush with a prison cell comes on a windy Friday afternoon in early October. On a drunken whim he returns to the office of Coroner William Danby at Whitehall. He’s become convinced that the child on Vaesy’s dissection table was Eleanor’s child – their child – delivered before her death. He also imagines, for no reason a sane man might entertain, that Coroner Danby gave the boy to Fulke Vaesy to cut up so that Nicholas would never learn the name of his only son. Wild-eyed amongst the sober lawyers and functionaries of Whitehall, he somehow gets as far as the office of the coroner’s clerk.