by S. W. Perry
‘I want a headstone, at St Bride’s churchyard, where he’s buried,’ he cries, remembering that Vaesy had told him that’s where the remains had been taken. ‘But I need a name to put on it! Why won’t you tell me his name? Why is Coroner Danby hiding it? Why did Fulke Vaesy bleed him empty before I got to the Guildhall?’
Why?… why?… why?
The clerk is so terrified he drops his pen and his mortuary rolls and flees.
Madmen are not generally welcome at Whitehall. Nicholas escapes being thrown into the dungeons only because he’s put on his doctoral gown in an effort to give himself more dignity. As it is, the halberdiers who throw him out ensure he crawls away like a whipped dog.
He returns to the riverbank. He stands in the shallows as though he’s waiting for converts to baptize. He’s indifferent to the ice-cold water and the bruises the Whitehall halberdiers have inflicted. The arak is coursing through him like fire.
He’s contrived to convince himself this is the spot where the child was pulled from the river – the Wildgoose stairs on Bankside. It’s not. He’s on the northern shore, a little east of the Queenhithe moorings, at the foot of Garlic Hill. But in his present state he could be standing on the banks of the Rhine and still believe he was in Southwark.
Only now he’s in possession of a name.
‘Were you there when they pulled my Jack from the river?’ he shouts alarmingly to a stout woman grubbing for shellfish on the shingle.
Jack, if it’s a boy… Grace, if it’s a girl…
To the inhabitants of the tenements along the riverbank, raving drunks and madmen are as common as the tide. The woman lays down her basket of whelks and oysters, straightens up and massages her aching back with her muddy hands.
Nicholas wades out of the water like a survivor from a shipwreck. ‘A boy of about four or five,’ he says, slapping his thighs with hands turned rosy by the cold. ‘Crippled in the legs—’
To his amazement, she answers, ‘Oh, aye. I remember such a fellow.’
The heat of the arak in his veins turns into a warm flood of hope and yearning. ‘You do?’
‘In the summer – around last St Swithun’s Day, if I recall.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘I thought you said his name was Jack,’ the woman says, frowning.
‘Did you speak to him?’
The woman gives him a sly squint. ‘D’you think these here cockles jump into this basket by themselves?’
Nicholas fumbles in his purse for a penny. The woman turns the coin over in her hand to see if it’s been clipped. Apparently satisfied, she nods across the broad expanse of grey-brown water to where the low roofs of Bankside stand like a palisade before the Rose theatre and the bear-pit.
‘It wasn’t on this shore,’ she explains. ‘I’d gone across the bridge to fish the other bank. That’s when I set eyes on them.’
Something akin to joy surges in Nicholas’s deluded breast. ‘Them? You saw Eleanor, too?’
‘Was that her name – Eleanor?’
‘She was my wife.’
The woman gives him a suspicious stare. ‘Your wife? Mercy, she can’t have been more than thirteen. I thought at the time, how can a maid of such tender years bear the weight of a crippled young boy on her back without complaint?’
Even in his present delirium Nicholas is still able to distinguish the difference between Eleanor and a thirteen-year-old maid. His heart sinks. ‘I want to know about the child,’ he demands, reaching out to clutch the woman’s arm.
‘What is there to tell?’ she asks nervously, avoiding his outstretched hand and causing him to lose his balance on the shingle. She’s decided she doesn’t like the look of him after all. Too much of a zealot by half, she thinks. She shrugs. ‘He had the marks of Christ’s crucifixion on his limbs, and a lamb with a halo trotting at his side, for all I know. What’s it got to do with me?’
Now believing that she’s been trying to gull him all along, Nicholas tries to snatch back his coin. The woman evades his grasp. She throws down the penny as if it’s burning her palm and puts as much distance between herself and the madman as she can, leaving her basket where it lies – and Nicholas with no notion of how close he’s come to the truth.
The descent is not yet complete, there is still a little way to fall.
A chill autumn night, a little after one. The drizzle turns the stones of Greyfriars a slick, dark silver. The watch hears muffled curses from the adjacent cemetery. They arrive just in time to prevent Nicholas Shelby being beaten to a pulp and what’s left of him being thrown into the river. His assailants disappear into the lanes.
Every watchman’s dog knows Nicholas as an old friend now. When they encounter him, they wag rather than snarl. He wakes painfully to the slippery kiss of snuffling jowls. He groans, curses and rolls over on his face, like a man trying to find a more comfortable position in which to sleep. One arm stretches out to grub at the soaking earth, as if he’s trying to pull a sheet over him.
If it was somewhere other than Greyfriars churchyard, the watch might let it pass. But Nicholas has been brawling on holy ground. The local justice of the peace is a very godly man and a great champion of the Vagrancy Act. So the watchmen haul Nicholas off to the Wood Street counter, where he spends the night on hard boards amongst a score of other prisoners, insensible to the stench and the squalor. He lies on his back, snoring like a parson. The watch leaves tuppence with the gaoler, so at least he’ll have some breakfast when he sobers up.
At Barnthorpe, the family has been troubled by the absence of letters. With the harvest safely gathered in, brother Jack borrows his father’s horse and rides down to London to investigate. Ann has told him what to expect, though she hasn’t revealed the worrying details to his parents. Jack visits the lodgings on Grass Street. Someone else is living there now.
He doesn’t give up easily. He finds his way to the Swan. There he talks to a brace of young physicians. We rather hoped you might tell us where he is, they say. If you see him, tell him Simon Cowper bears him no grudge.
Where else to look? There must be upwards of two hundred thousand souls in London. How do you find just one amongst such a multitude? Especially if – as it seems – he doesn’t want to be found.
For Nicholas Shelby, lapsed member of the College of Physicians, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth as though he’d never existed.
5
Cold Oak manor lies in a meadow bordering the Thames at Vauxhall, west of Lambeth Palace. Like many of the nearby houses and white-painted weatherboard cottages, it serves as a bolthole from the noise and stench of the city, and as a place of comparative safety should pestilence come. It is a fine house with mullioned windows, a tiled roof and a long meadow sloping gently down towards the river. Cold Oak belongs to Sir Fulke Vaesy, though he is seldom here. It is where he has all but incarcerated his wife, Lady Katherine – a nunnery no longer being available, since the late King Henry threw down the religious houses. For Kat’s part, the arrangement suits her just fine. She has her own household; she is well regarded by the neighbouring families. It is a pleasant enough life, except when he comes to visit.
Vaesy is here now. He’s been ambushed into it by the President of the College of Physicians, William Baronsdale, who expects his senior fellows to have tidy domestic lives.
‘Your place at Vauxhall would be ideal,’ Baronsdale had told Vaesy, when the question had been raised of how the College should celebrate the forthcoming Accession Day in a style fitting to Her Majesty. ‘We’ll all meet at Cold Oak to make our plans. What say you, Sir Fulke?’
What could he say? ‘To the Devil with that, I can’t bear to be in the same room as that witch of a wife’?
So here he stands, playing the part of the eminent man of physic, while the servants unwrap the newly arrived visitors like gift parcels on New Year’s Day. Looking on, while they bear away cloaks and hats for safe-keeping. Tutting when they leave little puddles of rainwater on t
he floor.
‘Come, Wife, and greet our guests,’ he calls to Kat, as though he and Lady Katherine are paragons of domestic harmony. In his heart he wonders what size of brick Kat will drop into the millpond this time, just to humiliate him. He already suspects the fellows of the College snigger behind his back: Have you heard? Fulke Vaesy can’t keep his wife in her proper place. And a man who can’t control his wife has only himself to blame if his servants thumb their noses at him and call him ‘sirrah’.
Kat has dressed in a simple gown of blue taffeta, the collar drawn back to show the lace sitting modestly around her neck. Her once-golden hair is bound severely beneath an embroidered French hood. She knows, from observing herself in the mirror glass in her chamber, and by the dove-like cooing of her maid, that enough of her once considerable beauty is on show today to turn the heads of her husband’s guests. If any of them shows so much as a gelding’s interest in her, she will flirt. Just to infuriate him.
At the foot of the stairs she pauses briefly to give John Lumley a dutiful curtsey. She’s known Lord Lumley for more than twenty years. She was a bridesmaid at his wedding to the late Jane FitzAlan, his first wife. Jane was Kat’s dearest friend, and she still misses her wise counsel. So John Lumley she will not flirt with. They are too close.
‘Welcome, gentlemen all,’ she says, addressing the assembled men of medicine. ‘It is a great sadness to feel so well in the presence of so many eminent physicians. Think of the wisdom I am denied!’ Her smile broadens with the appreciative murmur of laughter. ‘There are meats and pies in the parlour, and malmsey for those not too Puritan to drink at noontime. My husband will show the way.’
The guest parlour is a spacious wood-panelled room with a view over the orchard. On the table the servants have set plates of brawn, pastry chewets stuffed with minced lamb and dishes of spiced comfits. A maid is on hand to pour malmsey and smallbeer from pewter jugs. Some of the physicians wish to smoke, so a dish of embers is sent for, as they take out their clay pipes and stuff the bowls with nicotiana.
‘Lady Katherine is clearly a woman of rare facility, Sir Fulke,’ says Baronsdale as he indicates the laden table, without looking at her.
‘Proverbs tells us that a good wife is like a merchant’s argosy, bringing bread from distant places,’ Vaesy says with a wan smile.
Katherine replies with her eyes: in that case, Husband, may you founder on the sharpest reef and drown in the deepest of depths, where the worms that slither in the mud can feast on your bones. What she actually says is only a little less inflammatory.
‘Then how long must we wait, Mr Baronsdale, until a woman’s “rare facility” allows her to practise medicine?’
Baronsdale’s face is a picture of bewilderment. She might as well have asked him when the College could expect to license a monkey, or one of those strange beasts they keep in the menagerie at the Tower. Her husband seems equally nonplussed. The anger flares in his eyes.
‘I do not quite understand, Lady Katherine,’ says Samuel Beston, who once treated her father for pebbles in the bladder. ‘A woman, you say—’
‘Wife, be attentive to the serving, if you please,’ Vaesy warns with a smile as empty as her own.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kat notices John Lumley’s usually dour face crease with a barely constrained smile. He is the one person in this room she has no need to convince.
‘Come, Mr Beston,’ she says, revelling in her husband’s discomfort, ‘have I suggested we turn the world on its head?’
‘But, madam, there is an order in all things that must be observed,’ says Baronsdale. ‘And that is God’s order. Besides, a woman would not have the learning—’
‘But she could acquire the learning, couldn’t she?’
‘How so, Lady Vaesy?’ asks old Lopez, the Portuguese Jew, one of the queen’s doctors.
‘Lady Vaesy is not suggesting the impossible,’ says Lumley. He seems to be enjoying this. ‘Abbess Hildegard was practising medicine in the Palatine five hundred years ago. Before the Moors were ejected from Spain, they could count any number of female physicians. Yet all we have in England are a few practitioners of folk law.’
‘Whom we shall shut down, just as soon as the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London allow us,’ says Beston, who’s utterly misunderstood John Lumley’s meaning.
‘It is not right to challenge the order God has imposed upon us,’ says Baronsdale firmly. ‘On the way here, I saw a band of itinerants grubbing for food in the ditches. Would you have them raised to the state of princes?’
‘I would have them fed,’ says Kat.
Beston pulls a face, suggesting Kat’s got it all wrong. ‘And they are fed, madam.’
‘Have you asked them, sir?’
‘There is no need. For those who have fallen upon calamity through no fault of their own, the state and the Church provide alms and charity. The ones Master Baronsdale was referring to were of another sort entirely.’
‘Ah, yes,’ says Kat. ‘The undeserving poor. I wondered when we’d get around to them.’
‘Exactly, madam – tinkers, feckless vagabonds and the like. For them, there is the law: the scourge and the whip.’
‘God’s order?’
‘Incontrovertibly,’ says Baronsdale.
The physicians leave. John Lumley is almost the last to go. He kisses Kat’s hand and gives her a conspiratorial smile. ‘Thank you, Kat. Deliciously piquant, as usual – the food, I mean.’
‘Commend my affections to Lizzy, my lord,’ she replies. She likes John’s new wife almost as much as she liked Jane.
‘I shall, madam, gladly.’
As Lumley turns away, Fulke Vaesy favours his wife with no leave-taking other a hard stare of reproach. He calls angrily for a servant to saddle his horse.
Once more mistress of Cold Oak manor, Kat walks in the orchard to rid herself of the cloying remembrance of her husband and his companions. She pauses before the row of beehives standing like white headstones amongst the trees. She thinks back to when she was fifteen, the year she married Fulke. He’d been thirty-five then, the very age she is now, and physician to John Lumley. She can still picture her father’s letter. He’d not even had the courage to tell her to her face:
Daughter, be dutiful unto me and agree to my will, which is that you make a marriage…
Kat cannot make that young girl fit the person she is now. That person – that child – had harboured fanciful dreams of a life rich with bliss, a handsome gallant of a husband by her side, a house full of children, a life married to the man she already adored – a man most certainly not Fulke Vaesy.
And then, with that letter, her father had slammed the door on every one of them.
She wonders idly if Fulke still wants her, the way he did when she was fifteen. She hopes so. Twenty years of hunger would be small enough penance for what he did to her.
6
A little before noon on a dreary Wednesday in mid-October, a young man in a dirty canvas doublet, his beard and coarse black hair matted and wild, fights his way through the crowds on London Bridge. A band of apprentice boys going south for some sport amongst the stews and taverns on Bankside call him a vagabond and kick out at his shins as he passes, but most people make way for him. He looks like a fellow you’d not care to tussle with.
Several times already he’s been stopped by the city’s law officers, who touch their cudgels discreetly, to let him know they will take no nonsense from a vagrant. With these men he becomes deferential, somehow smaller, fills less space. He means them no trouble. He’s not a peddler or a purse-diver, he assures them – just an honest man who’s fallen on difficult times. They let him pass.
He carries no visible possessions other than the clothes he wears and a leather bag slung over his left shoulder. It used to hide his physician’s gown, when he was drinking in the White Swan and didn’t want every man and his dog stopping by to discuss their maladies. But he threw away the gown a few paces back, not even bothering to watch a
s it sailed out on the wind through a narrow gap between the timber-framed houses that cling precariously to the side of the bridge. It’s probably wrapped now around the mast of some salt-bleached Baltic trader moored in the Pool. All that remains in the bag is a parcel wrapped in cloth. He’d throw that after the gown, too, but the houses here are too close-packed to get a decent shot.
He emerges into Southwark beneath the great stone gatehouse that guards the southern end of the bridge. Ringed about its top, like the points of a crown, is a grinning crop of traitors’ heads, all the colours of an artist’s palette, from bleached white to the purple-black of rotting plums. Used to people staring at him now, he senses the eyeless sockets peering down at him as he passes below. Pop up here with us, Nicholas Shelby, they seem to be saying to him. You’re dead anyway, so what does it matter? The view’s grand and there’s all the maggots you can eat.
Southwark is its usual venal self today: the mud and shingle rising towards the houses along the bank, the occasional grand building poking above the hovels like a pearl sitting in horseshit. The drabs, the cats and the flesh-brokers have braved the cold to ply for business. The more successful of them wear winter cloaks neatly trimmed with rabbit fur; the rest look as grey as the sky and close to starvation. They don’t trouble him; they know wild men are dangerous. And though he longs for the warmth of female arms around him, they could only ever be Eleanor’s, so that comfort has gone for ever. Besides, he has no money left to pay for a whore. He doesn’t even have enough for a jug of knockdown. For the first time in weeks he’s sober.