by S. W. Perry
‘Oh, Lizzy, tell me, please. Excitement here at Cold Oak is when the bees refuse to swarm.’
‘A religious firebrand. He was ranting at travellers passing by the crossroads. You should have heard him! We’ll have to work fast tomorrow – apparently the world is about to end.’
‘That’s the problem with being so close to London. We get a lot of Puritans and Anabaptists on the road. Most are harmless enough.’
‘Not this one, Kat. He seemed quite out of his wits,’ Lizzy says. ‘Kept shouting about how Armageddon was at hand. He looked more like a vagrant than a man of God, mind. I think he was half-starved, poor loon.’
‘I’ll make sure I avoid Kingston in future,’ says Kat with a shudder.
‘He said he was heading for the Cheapside Cross, to warn people of what was in store for the ungodly. His name was Joshua. Joshua Pinchbeak.’
‘You spoke to him?’ says Kat, her eyes widening in horror.
‘Why not?’
‘John would have the night-terrors if he knew.’
‘He said his name was Joshua, and that if I didn’t listen to him, the walls of Jericho would come tumbling down upon my head.’
Kat lays a hand on her friend’s wrist. ‘Then thanks be to God that John made you see sense. Imagine if you’d been alone—’
‘What if this Joshua was right?’
‘Lizzy!’
‘What if the end of days really is near? The times are full of strife and bloodshed. The pestilence may come again. Who knows what God is planning for us?’
‘Let’s pray your friend Joshua was wrong, and Armageddon is still a way off,’ says Kat in the tone of an elder sister. ‘Besides, I’ve work to do; I’m planning more beehives in the orchard this spring.’
Lizzy says, ‘Well, if he’s right, I for one intend to go to my maker in the hope that my sins will be forgiven. And I shall be comforted, I like to believe, by the love of my husband.’ An awful silence while she reflects on what she’s just said. She colours. ‘Oh, Kat, I’m so sorry. How thoughtless I can be sometimes! I really didn’t mean—’
Kat smiles. ‘Don’t reproach yourself, Lizzy. The great anatomist is quite out of my thoughts. Has been for years. When he comes to Cold Oak, I pretend he’s the fellow who takes away the night-soil from the chamber pots.’
It’s a lie, of course. Fulke Vaesy slops around her mind like foul water at the bottom of a drain. Lady Katherine Vaesy is in a quandary. She cannot divorce her husband; the Church will not allow it. And, without money of her own, she cannot leave him. Her father made the contract and she must bear its unyielding terms year after year. Her husband cannot prove the marriage null, and so he too must suffer it – year after year. Thus husband and wife are bound inescapably to each other, bound not by love but by chains of ice. But she does not tell Lizzy Lumley this. She puts on a brave face.
‘And I’m glad for you, Lizzy,’ she says. ‘I truly am. Glad for John, too. You’ve made him happy again.’
Lizzy looks down at her trencher, her meal half-eaten. ‘But I’m not Jane FitzAlan, am I? I’m not the golden first wife. And I haven’t given him children to replace the three darlings he lost.’
Kat shakes her by the arm, gently, so that Gabriel and Francis do not notice. In her mind is the thought that she, too, was once just like this, fearful of inadequacy in the face of almost unbearable infatuation.
‘You must not speak like that, Lizzy. Jane is dead. John loves you – I know it.’
‘Sometimes I wander in the library, when he’s not there. He has so many books on physic that I hope I might find something amongst the pages, some secret knowledge that would give me the gift to read his innermost thoughts, to see deep inside him, to learn if he is happier with me than he was with Jane.’
By the light from the hearth and the candle flame on the table, Kat can see a silver trace of tears against the amber gleam of her friend’s cheek.
‘You have no need to do such a thing, Lizzy,’ she says urgently. ‘You must remember: I saw him married to Jane, and I’ve seen him married to you. Doubting him is a disservice John Lumley does not deserve.’
‘But sometimes I fancy I might learn the answer to why I cannot give him children. There must be a reason, Kat, other than some sin I have committed in the eyes of God.’
‘You’re the most sinless woman I know, Lizzy. Besides, it’s not too late. You’re not an old maid, for mercy’s sake. There’s still time.’
Lizzy wipes away the tears on the sleeve of her kirtle. She smiles bravely. ‘And nor are you, Kat. It would be such a wonderful thing to see you happy again. Dispensing charity to the needy might make you pleasing to God’s sight, but it can’t warm your body on a cold night the way a loving husband can.’
‘That cannot be, Lizzy,’ says Kat.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You must promise me one thing. Promise it as though tomorrow might really be the end of days. Promise me on your immortal soul.’
‘Of course, Kat. I’ll promise you anything,’ Lizzy says, suddenly a little scared by her friend’s intensity.
‘If you ever do find yourself carrying John’s child, do not let Fulke near the lying-in chamber. Even if he tells John it is good physic for him to be there, trust yourself only to the midwife. If you have to crawl out of bed and slam the door in his face yourself – keep him away!’
When Nicholas enters the Jackdaw’s parlour the following morning he finds Bianca balancing a large clay ewer precariously on one shoulder. She’s trying to aim the neck at a wooden washing tub set on the table.
‘I must get this linen clean or it won’t be ready for tonight,’ she says in a practical manner, as if their last conversation had involved not the slightest mention of violent death and mutilation.
‘Here, let me take it,’ he offers, lifting the jug from her. He waits while she crushes soapwort leaves in her palms and then, at her command, begins to pour the hot water into the tub. Then, as she starts to knead the steaming linen, he says in a resigned voice, ‘You’re going to tell me it’s all in my imagination – what I said last night about Jacob Monkton and the little boy Sir Fulke Vaesy dissected. You’re going to tell me I was seeing things – just like Vaesy himself told me.’
‘Of course I’m not,’ she says, drawing a soapy finger from the tub to brush a loose curl of hair from her face. ‘Just as you cannot un-make a physician of yourself, you cannot un-see what you saw. I believe everything you told me. It’s just rather hard to comprehend, that’s all.’
‘Sir Fulke Vaesy is a very eminent man of medicine,’ Nicholas says, wondering why he’s bothering to defend his former profession. What does he care for Vaesy now? Or the College of Physicians, for that matter? They are part of someone else’s life. ‘But what kind of anatomist can oversee a dissection and not even notice that someone’s been there before him?’
‘Perhaps he’s just not as clever as he thinks he is. But I cannot say I’m surprised. All that learning, and still the barber-surgeons have to do the cutting for you. Years of study, yet you call upon apothecaries to mix your medicines. I sometimes wonder what you physicians actually do to earn those fancy gowns you wear.’
‘I threw mine away. And you’re not the only one to wonder.’
Bianca’s soapy finger has left some suds clinging to her temple. She brushes them aside with the back of her wrist. ‘Well, Master Lapsed-physician-without-a-gown, tell me again – just so I can take it all in.’
‘This is what I know for sure: the infant on Vaesy’s dissection table had been bled dry. Jacob Monkton had been eviscerated. Both had an inverted cross cut deep into their flesh, close to the extremities, severing a major blood vessel. I believe they were drained of blood via those wounds. Before they died.’
‘How do you know the cross was inverted? Wouldn’t that simply depend on which way were you looking at it?’
‘The transverse cut was at the end nearest the ankle,’ he tells her. ‘It would be more natural to make it a
t the upper end or in the middle.’
‘Unless the bodies were upside-down, suspended by their feet. Then the crosses would be the right way up, wouldn’t they? There’d be nothing satanic about them at all.’
‘Apart from the fact that they were made to drain out the victim’s life-blood,’ Nicholas murmurs to himself. He’d tell Bianca about the marks on Jacob Monkton’s limbs; it adds weight to her suggestion that the bodies were suspended. But he doesn’t want to risk distressing her further.
‘And that’s what killed them – the blood?’ she asks.
‘There was virtually none left in the infant, and Jacob’s evisceration came after death – I’m pretty sure of that.’
‘So why would the constable say Jacob fell into a waterwheel?’
‘An easy life, most likely. I didn’t recognize the man. He’s probably newly appointed. He can probably barely write his name, so a report to the coroner would be a labour he’d most likely rather do without. Then there’s the fact that there was no obvious culprit to hand, no witnesses to a killing. Much easier to tell the coroner it was an accident. Especially if you’re right about Jacob’s malady of the mind.’
‘And you think the killer disposed of their bodies in the river, in the expectation they’d either sink or wash out into the Narrow Sea?’
He nodded. ‘And if they didn’t – well, who’d be interested in the remains of a crippled child and a boy with addled wits? In my practice at Grass Street we used to get two or three such unfortunates washed up in the Fleet ditch every month. The question you’re going to ask me, I suppose, is why? Why kill them in such a manner?’
‘Actually, I was going to ask if this child and Jacob Monkton are the only ones.’
He’s been trying not to consider that possibility. ‘You think there could be more? God grant that there are not.’
Bianca looks up from the tub. ‘The child was crippled, Jacob addled in the wits. Perhaps the killer thinks the world would be better off without the weak. I’ve met more than a few in this parish who think like that.’
‘He’ll have his work cut out then,’ says Nicholas. ‘Think of all the men crippled by the wars in Ireland and the Low Countries, women ruined by disease and hunger, children blinded and maimed in accidents… He’s got a fine choice in this city, if that’s what he’s killing for.’
‘But bleeding one victim and gutting the other? Aren’t there easier ways to dispose of a burden, if that’s what the killer thought they were?’
‘Of course there are. And they don’t require a measure of medical knowledge.’
‘You think he has a skill in surgery?’
‘A very small skill,’ Nicholas agrees. ‘Either that or he’s a supremely incompetent physician. The way Jacob Monkton’s body was eviscerated would shame even a half-trained barber-surgeon.’
‘Perhaps he was in a hurry, frightened of discovery—’
‘In which case, exsanguination is a strange way to kill. Even a small child will take time to bleed out.’ Again Nicholas sees the wheals on Jacob Monkton’s limbs. ‘No, he was in no hurry. In my judgement, he was taking his time. He had a purpose in mind. I just can’t imagine what it was.’
‘If those wounds really were made in the form of a satanic cross, Nicholas, the likes of Bredwell and Ned Monkton would say they’re a sign of devilry. And they wouldn’t be the only ones around here to think it.’
‘Then they’re superstitious fools,’ Nicholas replies, remembering the apocalyptic sermons the vicar of Barnthorpe used to preach to his congregation each Sunday, warning that the Devil lurks behind every tree, waits on each dark country lane for the unwary and those who let their faith slip even for a moment. He’d been astonished by the congregation’s open-mouthed acceptance, their readiness to blame the lameness of a cow or the confusion of a sick and bewildered old woman on some satanic agency.
Bianca confirms what he’s thinking. ‘That may be so, Nicholas, but I can tell you, if two women walk out together on a sunny afternoon on Bankside and it suddenly starts to rain, there’s more than a few in this city will instantly call them a coven!’
‘So going to the parish with this may not be the best of ideas,’ he muses.
‘Two corpses with the mark of Satan carved into them? There’ll be a full-blown witch-hunt by sunset. They’ll find some poor innocent, force a confession out of him and then we can all have a good hanging.’ She adds harshly, ‘That’s always good for business, if nothing else.’
‘We can’t just do nothing, Bianca. We can’t simply wait for the next poor soul to wash up on the tide. If there have been others, we need to find out.’
‘And just how will you do that?’ she asks.
‘They took Jacob Monkton’s body to the mortuary at St Tom’s – I heard the constable say so. The mortuary porter there will have made a note of injuries and marks for the coroner and for the parish mortuary roll. If there have been others, perhaps they’ll be on his records, too.’
Bianca drops the linen onto a nearby bench, where it lands with a heavy sodden thud – a little too much, for Nick’s taste, like the sound Jacob Monkton’s gutted corpse made on the Mutton Lane stairs.
‘The mortuary porter?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘At St Tom’s?’
‘He should be able to tell me, if anyone can.’
Bianca raises her eyes to the ceiling. ‘He might,’ she says, ‘if you hadn’t punched him in the face, and I hadn’t cursed him to the Devil. The mortuary porter at St Tom’s is your old sparring partner, Ned Monkton.’
15
I need a peace envoy, thinks Nicholas. I’ll send him with a letter. He enlists Timothy, the Jackdaw’s taproom lad. But what exactly do you write to someone who called your friend a witch-whore and drew a knife on you – even if it was after you’d punched them in the eye.
By the sixth draft, he thinks he’s got it. As a fall-back, he instructs Timothy that if Ned can’t read, then he’s to speak Nicholas’s words as diplomatically as he can. ‘Whatever you do, sound humble,’ he tells the boy. ‘Don’t make it sound like a legal arraignment. And if he looks like replying with his fists – run!’
The next day Nicholas sets off on the fifteen-minute walk from the Jackdaw to St Thomas’s hospital. Passing beneath the rotting traitors’ heads set on spikes around the roof of the grim stone gatehouse at the foot of London Bridge, he makes his way east along Bankside towards Thieves’ Lane. Beneath his feet the winter mud oozes through the city’s ulcerated skin like an incurable malady.
From a distance, St Tom’s looks exactly like the monastery it once was. It sits on open ground amid a ragged collection of skeletal trees, as if the bones of those it has failed to save have been pressed into service as vegetation. But it is no mean establishment. In addition to its care of the general sick, it boasts a foul ward for those who fall prey to the French pox – as common in Southwark as catching a cold – and a night-layers ward for the homeless. It is also the receiving point for the parish’s vagrant dead.
The gatekeeper studies Nicholas warily. ‘Show me your neck,’ he orders.
Nicholas pulls back the collar of his linen shirt.
‘Insane?’ The question is delivered in a flat monotone.
‘Medically speaking, no,’ says Nicholas, raising an eyebrow. ‘For coming here, very probably.’
The quip has no effect on the gatekeeper. He cares only that the visitor standing before him is not a lunatic, and that he’s not showing signs of pestilence – sufferers of either being forbidden from entering. Apparently satisfied on both counts, he allows Nicholas through.
The mortuary crypt lies beneath the old monastery chapel, down a stairwell that looks more appropriate to a dungeon than a hospital. It reminds Nicholas of the hole that a wasp might bore into a rotten fruit: black and with something very likely unpleasant at the bottom of it. As he descends, the ripe scent of death and quicklime rises to greet him.
At the bottom of the shaft a lant
ern draws grudging detail from the darkness. Nicholas sees a row of long bundles, each wrapped in a dirty winding cloth. He counts six of them. And at the end of the row lies a single plain wooden coffin. He knows the score: the same casket used for every burial – roll the corpse into the grave, carry the box back for the next customer. If this is where Ned Monkton works, he thinks, no wonder he drinks too much and sees bats with women’s faces.
A large figure looms out of the darkness. For a moment Nicholas almost expects it to be carrying a scythe. ‘Ned – is that you?’ he croaks, across a tongue that’s almost too dry to let the words escape. ‘It’s me, Nicholas Shelby. I sent you a letter—’
Ned Monkton is as big as Nicholas remembers him, ruddy-faced and wearing a dirty full-length leather apron over his tunic and hose. He steps a little too close to Nicholas for comfort.
‘You’ve got the fuckin’ nerve of Old Nick, coming here,’ he says, touching the livid bruise under one eye. Then, to Nicholas’s astonishment, he smiles. ‘But there’s not many on Bankside as would chance a swing at Ned Monkton. You’re a saucy fellow, ain’t you?’
Nicholas is about to tell him it’s a small enough payment for calling Bianca a witch-whore, but decides not to push his luck.
‘What do you want with me, Shelby? Your letter said it was to do with my Jacob?’
‘It is, Ned. I want to help.’
This takes Monkton aback. ‘Help? How the fuck can you help Jacob now? Don’t you know how he was found?’
‘Of course I know. I helped pull him out of the river. I’m so sorry, Ned, about what happened to him. I hear he was a goodly lad; despite the trials he bore in life.’
This seems to change Monkton’s mood. ‘Aye, there’s martyrs as don’t bear their suffering as bravely.’
‘I have some information, Ned. I also want some information. Call it a trade.’
‘Are you after selling me some quackery to bring him back to life, Shelby? ’Cause if you is, there’s a spare box right there what’d fit you just right,’ Monkton says, glancing at the coffin.