by S. W. Perry
‘These, madam, come from trying to govern an unruly household,’ Lumley replies with a theatrical wag of one forefinger.
They are an oddly mismatched couple, Nicholas thinks. There must be a full twenty years between them. On the surface they seem complete opposites. Yet they clearly adore each other. Nicholas’s heart sinks – Robert Cecil had not warned him that the man he is to destroy is a doting husband to an adoring wife.
As he watches Lady Lumley greeting the rest of the assembled household, Nicholas’s attention is caught by one of the servants. Standing beside the man he now knows to be Sprint, the head cook, is a girl of perhaps thirteen or so. She keeps looking around uncertainly from within the wide wings of a bonnet. It’s clearly not her own – it’s an adult’s bonnet and far too big for her. She looks like a fox cub that’s woken from a deep sleep to find itself in an unfamiliar place.
And he can’t help but notice that while everyone else is chattering, exchanging pleasantries, rejoicing at Lady Elizabeth’s safe return, the child remains silent. She doesn’t even join in when the chamber-maids begin to sing a pretty hosanna to welcome their mistress home. Is this the mute servant John Lumley had mentioned at that first supper? For a reason Nicholas can’t explain, he’d assumed Lumley was talking about an adult. He studies the girl more closely.
Her silence has an almost physical strength to it. It’s far more than shyness, it’s as though something inside her has been fashioned not from flesh, but stone. She seems clearly part of the household, yet as distant from it as he is from Eleanor. He cannot take his eyes off her. For an instant he even harbours the wild notion she might be Elise Cullen. But there are several girls of her age amongst the Lumley staff, so he quickly rejects the idea as his own wishful thinking.
As Nicholas watches, Lady Lumley reaches into her cloak and pulls out a small ivory comb. She clearly means it as a gift, a trinket brought from London for a favoured member of the household. The girl takes it, studying it intently as though she had never seen such a thing before. ‘Does it please you, Betony?’ Nicholas hears Lady Elizabeth ask gently.
The child makes a discreet bob of acknowledgement.
But she utters not a single word in reply.
34
In the Jackdaw’s parlour Rose is repairing Bianca’s best dorothea. When Robert Cecil’s men tore it from her clothes chest, along with her spare kirtle and nightgown, they’d compounded the outrage by trampling it underfoot. Several of the bone-stiffeners have been shattered beyond resurrection.
‘Look at it!’ cries Bianca as she holds the corset against her body. ‘It’s supposed to flatter. Now it looks more like something you’d constrain a dangerous lunatic in!’
‘Your Haarlem linen is almost dry,’ says Rose. ‘And I’ve brushed the carnelian bodice. He likes you in those. I’ve seen it in his eyes.’
‘Who, Rose? Who likes me in my carnelian bodice? Walter Pemmel, the Puritan rake? Will Slater, the wherryman who smells of waterweed? Tell me, Rose – I’m all ears.’
Rose decides it’s best to change the subject. Her mistress has developed an uncommonly raw nerve recently. ‘And all because someone does not write,’ she whispers – just loud enough for Bianca to hear.
Timothy comes in with a pensive look on his face. ‘Pardon, Mistress, but there’s a fellow becoming fractious in the taproom. Shall I have Ned Monkton throw him out?’
The fractious fellow turns out to be a grubby-bellied man with lank grey hair, claret-coloured cheeks and eyebrows that curl down over his eyelids like wood-shavings.
‘He’s the overseer at the Magdalene almshouse,’ Ned tells her softly. ‘Came in a few times while you were – away. No trouble, till now.’
Bianca can see at once the man is a practised souse-head. You could warm your hands on the veins that illuminate those cheeks, she tells herself. ‘Marry, what’s all this? – troubling my poor overworked taproom boy,’ she says pleasantly.
‘I know you,’ the fellow says, as Bianca sits down beside him. ‘You’re that maid what got herself invited to Whitehall for sack and sweetmeats.’
‘That’s me.’
‘They say you came back in the queen’s golden barge. I heard all about it.’
‘Then you won’t be surprised if I tell you the owner sends her affections and counsels you to be her mild and obedient subject,’ Bianca says with a laugh, deciding that’s a better reputation to have than flying down the street at night in the form of a bat. ‘And that includes being obedient in taverns.’
The man squawks with derision. ‘The queen? I’d rather she gave me a decent annuity for looking after them addle-pates I’ve been set in charge of at the Magdalene,’ he says, breathing fumes of knock-down over her, ‘’cause the parish pay me fuck-all for it – if you’ll pardon my grammar.’
Bianca decides Timothy and Ned are right – the Jackdaw can do without this particular patron. ‘I think it’s time you went home, don’t you? Careful of the cut-purses on the way. I wouldn’t want you to come to harm.’ She lifts one hand, intending to signal to Ned. But then the Magdalene’s overseer kicks the world out from under her feet.
‘That husband of yours is a right enough fellow, though – ain’t ’ee?’
Bianca stares at him. Last time she checked, matrimony was a state utterly unfamiliar to her.
‘My husband?’
‘Aye, the physician. Where is ’ee? Call ’im out – I ain’t too proud to sup with the bone-setter from St Tom’s.’
Ned Monkton’s huge arm is already reaching out, in anticipation of Bianca’s command. She stops him.
‘Do you mean Nicholas Shelby?’
‘Aye. The one who came down from St Tom’s – for the ceremony.’
Bianca gives him the eyes of death. ‘Firstly, I’ll have you know Nicholas Shelby works for me. Well, he did. And secondly, there’s been no marriage ceremony, unless I was asleep with a pillow over my head when it happened.’
The overseer vents more fumes into the already fuggy atmosphere of the taproom. Bianca shifts sideways an inch or two. ‘Listen, Mistress, I’m talking about the ceremony at the Magdalene a few weeks back. The one with the fish.’
‘Fish?’ Bianca is beginning to feel her command of this exchange slipping through her fingers.
‘Aye, St Tom’s sends a physician for the inmates. The Bishop of Winchester gives the hospital a sack of fish in return. Dates back to King Canute. Fuck knows what good it does any of them.’
‘I have not the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
Unconcerned, the overseer ploughs on. ‘Mostly, the physic don’t work, and the fish stinks worse than the Magdalene does. But we have to do it, else the inmates don’t get the medicine. More’s the point, I don’t get to keep the alms money. Your husband was the physician, last time. I hadn’t seen his face there before.’
‘Dr Shelby is not my husband,’ Bianca says indignantly.
The overseer decides of his own accord that it’s time to leave. He rises uncertainly to his feet, bestowing a parting belch of knock-down fumes on her. ‘Well, if he ever should be, you want to keep him on a tight leash. That Lady Katherine Vaesy was all over him like an outbreak of the buboes.’
At breakfast Lord Lumley announces that the household will attend Cheam church for a thoroughly conventional, approved Protestant Sunday sermon.
Nicholas’s relief is palpable. Robert Cecil is deluded, just as I’d hoped, he tells himself. John Lumley’s library is merely eclectic, not heretical. His conversation at supper is designed solely to provoke. His mind encourages discourse, not sedition. He is no threat to the realm.
Now I can now safely broach the subject of the Bankside killer, he decides. I can enlist John Lumley’s help. Then I can go back to Southwark, having discharged Robert Cecil’s instructions to the full. I’m off the hook.
He joins the household as they assemble in the outer courtyard with a lighter conscience than he’s had since the day he arrived. It occurs to him – wi
th a guilty start – that he still hasn’t written to Bianca.
The winter sun flecks the chalk-and-flint walls of Cheam’s Saxon church with slivers of golden light. The hamlet is a cluster of houses and barns, some as old as England itself, others new with whiteboard fronts and straight chimneys, all lying in a small valley between Cheam Common and the Banstead Downs. At the church porch a serious-looking man in a rector’s gown greets them. He bows deeply before John Lumley. ‘My lord, you are – as always – doubly welcome. And the Lady Elizabeth.’
‘Reverend Watson, I trust I find you in God’s good peace, sir,’ Lumley answers. ‘This is Dr Nicholas Shelby, a young man of physic. He’s come from London to study a while at Nonsuch.’
‘A physician?’ says Watson. ‘Oxford or Cambridge?’
‘Cambridge.’
‘Brothers then, eh? I was at Christ’s.’
Nicholas remembers his first year there – a sizar, little better than an unpaid servant for the students of better breeding, darning their hose and carrying their hawks when they went hunting. The divinity men had been the worst. He smiles thinly and shakes the priest’s hand. It feels as dry and dead as the stones of his church, though he can’t be much older than forty.
The local squires and the more prosperous yeomen line up to be acknowledged by the master of Nonsuch, according to their standing. Then their women. Then their children. The conversation is confined to the banal: the current price of wool; how it’s such a shame the Earl of Leicester isn’t around any more to see off Spanish impertinence; why it’s not worth going to see a comedy in London, now that Dick Tarleton is dead. It’s a scene, he thinks, that must be playing out in just about every parish church across England. Robert Cecil should be happy.
Inside, the air smells as old as the stones themselves. The walls have been hastily whitewashed to hide the painted images of the saints venerated by the old religion. The little window behind the altar screen has been stripped of its coloured glass and now admits nothing more majestic than the insipid light of a February afternoon. The Reverend Watson, it appears, is a stout defender of the new faith.
Lumley stops before a stone monument about the size of a large sideboard set against the chancel wall. On the top is a handsome plaque on which a woman kneels at prayer. Around the base stand three small children, hands clasped in eternal piety. Nicholas understands at once what he’s looking at: it’s the memorial to Lumley’s first wife and their long-dead children.
He fears for a moment that Lumley is going to kneel and offer prayers for the immortal souls of his dead children. Prayers to speed the departed out of Purgatory are forbidden. Purgatory as a real place no longer exists – the bishops have decreed it so. And if he does, it means everyone in the little church is complicit in the heresy. Robert Cecil will want to know. And if he learns of it from another source, he’ll know Nicholas has kept it from him.
Don’t ruin it now, he pleads silently.
To his immense relief, John Lumley merely reaches out and lays one hand briefly on the cold stone, before quoting to Watson, ‘“And God shall wipe away each tear. Death shall no more be, neither mourning, neither crying, neither sorrow”.’
‘The Book of Revelations,’ says Reverend Watson, nodding approvingly. ‘Shall we begin?’
The sun has almost sunk below the treetops. Watery beams of light spill between the branches. Nicholas waits by the church porch while John Lumley and Elizabeth finish taking their leave of the Reverend Watson and the congregation.
He smiles now to think he’d once been afraid of cemeteries. At ten, his brother Jack had bet him he couldn’t stay longer than an hour in the Barnthorpe churchyard at night. Jack had fled at the first owl’s hoot. Nicholas had lasted about ten minutes longer. But since his icy vigil on Christmas Eve he’s found they can be strangely comforting places. While he waits for Lumley he fills the time idly inspecting the nearer headstones.
Most of the inscriptions are illegible, the graves ancient. But one, close to the path, is newer. It’s a very ordinary headstone, flecked with a patchy dusting of moss. The words carved into the stone catch his eye:
Mathew Quigley
Laid in earth 13th May 1572
No gentler man ever spilt his blood for Christ
The grave of Gabriel Quigley’s father? Or perhaps an uncle. Maybe a distant relative. But Quigley does not strike him as a Surrey name, and indeed there are no other Quigleys buried nearby. And something about the last line of the eulogy troubles him: No gentler man ever spilt his blood for Christ.
It’s the sort of memorial he’d expect to find on the tomb of a Christian warrior, or perhaps even a martyr.
But Lumley’s secretary doesn’t seem like a man born of warrior stock.
A martyr then? Was this particular Quigley one of the three hundred or so Protestants burned by Bloody Mary Tudor when she temporarily returned the realm to the Pope’s authority? A moment’s thought tells Nicholas that cannot be. The date places Mathew Quigley’s death firmly in the present reign. He’s still puzzling when a voice hails him impatiently.
‘Physician, are you with us or no? His lordship is leaving!’
Nicholas looks up to see Gabriel Quigley beckoning – John and Elizabeth Lumley are almost out of the lych-gate. He puts the eulogy out of his mind and hurries after them, but not before he notices the look on Quigley’s damaged face. He’s caught Nicholas looking at the grave. And for some reason he seems to consider it an intolerable offence.
The following day Nicholas continues his deception. He labours in the Nonsuch library, ostensibly studying the medical books. And though it’s a pretence, it’s a productive one. It’s rare for a young physician to have such a trove of learning at his fingertips.
He studies voraciously, even though a part of him questions what he’s reading. After all, what use was this wonderful knowledge when he was trying to save Eleanor?
How long must he stay at Nonsuch? he wonders. If he leaves now, Robert Cecil will say he hasn’t done his job. It will make Bianca’s safety even more precarious. And he still has to find the right moment to enlist John Lumley’s help in bringing the killer of little Ralph Cullen and the others to justice.
By late afternoon a gentle breeze from the west has made the air mild enough to entice him to take a break from his reading. He decides upon a stroll through the ornate Italian gardens, hoping it will clear his mind. Perhaps then he can compose his long-overdue letter to Bianca. If he’s honest with himself, he’s been dreading even picking up nib and quill. He fears that if he begins to write, unbidden thoughts will come – like the moment he stood watching her board the Cecil barge that day, when raw desire stole into his grief like an act of betrayal.
Nevertheless, as he walks he marvels. To a Suffolk yeoman’s son, the earth is made for ploughing and seeding, for pigs to grub and fatten upon. At Nonsuch the ground gives up a very different harvest: fine classical statues, leafy arbours, trellised walks and tight-clipped hedges. He passes Venus standing atop a pillar. He sees birds with their stone wings frozen at the moment of flight. There’s even a prancing marble horse like the one in the inner courtyard. He knows his father would scratch his head and wonder what possible use this inedible bounty could be. But looking back towards the palace, Nicholas notices they have all been set carefully. They provide a pleasing vista from the windows of the royal apartments. Monarchs, he realizes, have the power to remake the very world itself – merely to get a better view.
In a mood that comes remarkably close to contentment, Nicholas wanders down a gravel path along the side of the palace. Glancing through a mullioned window twice his own height, he sees Christ staring back at him from the Cross. He walks over, stands on his toes and peers in.
He’s looking into the shadowy interior of a private chapel, past stone pillars that seem to support an upper gallery. But there’s nothing much to see: a half-panelled wall, a few rows of simple wooden pews, a pulpit and an altar no more elaborate than the one at Cheam church.
Everything properly modest, properly Protestant. Not a trace of Rome anywhere.
A soft, happy chattering causes him to jump back onto the path.
Elizabeth Lumley emerges from an arch of close-cut privet. She has two women of her household in train. She wears a gown of sober winter Kendal, her face bright and flushed with laughter. It’s like Bianca’s when she’s teasing me, he thinks.
‘I give you good day, Dr Shelby,’ says Lizzy. ‘What a pity it is not yet spring. The privy gardens look so much more beautiful then. The queen herself says so. Doesn’t she, ladies?’
Nicholas replies with a smile, a formal bend of the knee and a ladleful of poetic flattery. ‘Madam, here is beauty enough for any man.’
It’s how he assumes the comely wives of eminent courtiers expect to be greeted.
‘A physician and a gallant,’ says Lizzy Lumley, turning to her ladies and clapping her gloved hands in delight. ‘So much more pleasing in manner than gruff Sir Fulke. If I am taken poorly, do you think he might read me poetry while he prescribes the physic?’
A spasm of delighted twittering from the ladies.
Nicholas blushes. He’s utterly out of his depth. ‘I fear you would soon find me tiresome, Lady Lumley. I read poetry as romantically as I order firewood,’ he says.
‘I can’t believe that, Dr Shelby.’
‘Oh yes – without question. My wife tells me so.’
My wife tells me so.
The words slip out so easily. Yet each one is like a stitch torn unexpectedly from a still-raw wound.
‘Mercy, whatever is the matter, Dr Shelby?’ Lizzy asks, noticing the pain in his eyes.
‘It is nothing, madam. Nothing of consequence.’
Nothing of consequence.
It is everything. It is everything and then everything again. He fights to regain his composure, knowing that if she were to press him, he’d have to tell her about Eleanor. And once that secret’s given up, who knows what others will follow?