by S. W. Perry
‘Then in the absence of consequence, will you walk with us, Dr Shelby?’
His instinct is to make some excuse; courtly talk eludes him at the best of times. But he fears he’ll simply appear rude. ‘Gladly, madam, though I fear the profit of it will be mine alone,’ he replies.
This seems a suitable answer, for Lady Lumley’s women fall back with a swirl of their gowns to take up station a few paces behind.
‘It is good to see my husband enjoying his conversations again,’ Lizzy says conspiratorially as they set off along the path. ‘He thrives on the views of the younger fellows. Sir Fulke drives him almost to madness.’
‘There are physicians I used to sup with who would dare to say Lord Lumley is not alone in that regard.’
Lady Lumley grins engagingly. ‘To share a confidence with you, Dr Shelby, it will be a relief not to see him at Nonsuch for a while. Especially after that dreadful business with Betony.’
The name means nothing to Nicholas. ‘You have me at a loss, madam. Betony?’
‘Our silent talisman. Our mute kitchen maid.’
‘Oh, the girl you gave a gift to on your return from London.’
‘Mercy, were you spying on us, Dr Shelby?’ Lizzy asks with a smile.
‘No!’ says Nicholas, just a little too vehemently. ‘I just happened to notice – that’s all. Lord Lumley told me about her over supper one night.’
‘Indeed – that was our Betony. The more impressionable servants believe her silence to be saintly, Dr Shelby. Though why she will not speak is a mystery that no one in Nonsuch has been able to explain – not even my very learned and sometimes infuriatingly inquisitive husband.’
‘Has she suffered this malady long?’
‘Who can tell, Dr Shelby? My husband only found her this last St Wulfstan’s Day – hiding in Cheam churchyard. She came to us a vagabond. What her real name is, only Our Lord in heaven knows.’
How long does Nicholas make small talk with Lizzy Lumley after that?
He himself will never be certain. At the time it felt like hours, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Certainly no longer than it took to walk to the pretty grove of Diana with its mossy statue of the huntress, then back again to the privy garden.
His overriding memories are of the rattling clamour of his thoughts – and of Alice Welford’s voice coming out of nowhere: They was always inseparable… That’s what she’d do – find a haven… Elise wouldn’t let nothing this side of Satan’s front door stop her.
35
Nicholas enters Master Sprint’s cavernous realm of heat and noise with Alice Welford’s words still ringing in his ears. He’s here because Elizabeth Lumley says if anyone has come close to ending Betony’s silence, it is the Nonsuch head cook. At once he’s assailed by shooting flames, acrid smoke and spitting fat. The air is rent by the hammering of cleavers and the quivering thwack of knife blade against bone and muscle.
Along one wall he can see four huge brick fireplaces. In one of them a carcass of venison roasts slowly on a spit-iron, turned by two kitchen-hands stripped to the waist and sweating in the fierce heat. At a long table women sieve flour through cloths stretched tight over wooden frames, while the younger scullions variously pluck, trim, pare and generally clean up the mess.
‘You should see it when the queen comes to Nonsuch,’ Sprint replies when Nicholas asks him how he can stand it hour after hour. ‘It gets so hot then that Satan himself would cut off his own pizzle for a cold bath.’
‘Lady Lumley suggested I speak to you – about Betony. She says you know more about the maid than anyone.’
‘Aye, and that’s little enough, Master Physician. Joanna and I have coaxed all we can.’ As he shakes his head the folds of his neck appear to rotate the other way. ‘Our reward? Not a single word. All we can do is guess.’
‘And what’s your guess, Master Sprint?’
‘I can tell you one thing – that child wasn’t born to live in empty echoes.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think she could speak, if she desired it. I think she’s frightened to.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Out with Joanna, cleaning the hen coops. I can call her, if you like.’
‘In a while. I thought I’d speak to you first; you seem to have taken her under your wing.’
Sprint smooths his apron self-consciously. ‘My belly might not suggest it, Dr Shelby, but I had a hard start in life too – much like Betony, I suspect. I’m told the parish found me under my mother’s corpse in a ditch. Lord Lumley made me a scullion’s help in the kitchen. I’d be white bones, if not for him. He’s a good Christian man. He who says nay is welcome to debate the issue with me.’
‘I’m sure he is. Were you there when the child was found?’
‘No, sir, I was not. But I must tell you plainly, when she came into the household I wondered what manner of creature she might be.’
‘Why say you so, Master Sprint?’
‘I’m a God-fearing man, Dr Shelby. I do not fear Him because the queen or the Privy Council tell me I must; I fear Him because He knows when we seek to hide our hearts from Him. So in truth, when Betony first came here, I wondered if He hadn’t sent her to test my faith.’
‘That’s quite an accusation to make of a maid,’ Nicholas says, trying not to smile at Sprint’s superstitious confession.
‘A few days after she arrived, I discovered some marks by the bread ovens,’ Sprint tells him, casting a glance towards where two kitchen women are kneading manchet dough, slamming the white slabs against the table with their broad, floury fists. ‘No one here would have dared do it. Betony must have made them when Joanna left her alone for a while.’
‘Marks? What sort of marks?’
‘Satanic images, Dr Shelby. Crosses – turned on their heads. Scratched with her fingernails, I reckon.’
Suddenly from the hearth comes the rattle of hot fat spilt on even hotter iron. A wave of heat sears the side of Nicholas’s face. At once Alice Welford’s voice jumps clear from the clamour in his head: One of Mary’s customers at the Cardinal’s Hat managed to set fire to the mattress Elise was sleeping on, burned her on the face…
‘Tell me something, Master Sprint,’ he says, trying to keep the rising surge of hope from his voice. ‘Betony was wearing an adult’s bonnet when Lady Lumley returned from London. I couldn’t see her that well. Does she have a scar of any kind on her face?’
‘Indeed she does, Dr Shelby,’ says Sprint. ‘A burn mark—’ He touches his beard. ‘Right here, on her jaw.’
Once again Southwark has decanted all its flavours into the Jackdaw. But this evening there is a change in the air; there has been for some days now. The customers sup their ale in a somewhat less boisterous manner. The fire seems a little less warm. When anyone asks Rose and Timothy what’s the matter with Mistress Merton, they receive only evasion in reply.
The truth is, the drunken overseer’s casual remarks have turned the Jackdaw’s mistress into a stalking gorgon.
As Bianca works the tables she recalls her father’s stern warning. ‘Never become any man’s chattel,’ he’d told her when the local Paduan boys began to really notice the daughter of the commerciante Inglese. ‘I’m a merchant, young lady, I know how prices can fall when the goods are too plentiful.’
Soon there had been a steady procession of young gentlemen discovering an urgent need to visit the house of the English merchant, Simon Merton. But his daughter had never liked the way Italian men made such a great play of venerating the Virgin while counting real women barely more important than their hawks or their hounds. She’d known instinctively how her life would be, if she married one of them – sewing and gossiping, gossiping and sewing, day after day, while her husband took boat rides on the Bacchiglione river with his courtesan. She’d decided then she would become a physician. She would do good in the world.
Bianca can remember walking hand-in-hand with her father in the Palazzo Bo. She co
uldn’t have been more than fourteen. The air had been full of the noise of carpenters sawing and hammering, putting up temporary wooden stands for a public dissection in honour of the great Vesalius. The senior professor of anatomy at the university was to give the lecture. The subject was the body of a hanged criminal. With the ghoulish innocence of the young, Bianca had asked to watch. Her father had refused.
‘But Julio and Esperanza’s parents took them to watch a heretic being burned in the Piazza del Santo,’ she’d protested angrily. Instead of answering, he’d introduced her to a terrifyingly august Italian in a black gown who’d turned out to be the university chancellor. ‘It appears my daughter wants to be a physician,’ Simon Merton had said. ‘Can you help her?’
The chancellor had given Bianca a patronizing smile. ‘Signorina, it will be one hundred years at the very least before a woman is allowed to graduate with a doctorate from Padua.’ He’d made it sound like some sort of achievement.
‘But Dorotea Bucca was professor of physic at Bologna almost two hundred years ago,’ she’d protested. ‘I read it in a book.’
Her father had beamed with pride.
Not so the Paduan. ‘The Bolognese would elect a toad as a professor if they thought it would bring a few more ducats through the door,’ he’d told her scornfully.
When she’d come to England – after her father’s death – she’d rapidly discovered that it would be more like five hundred years before anyone would allow a woman to study medicine, let alone practise. Not only that, but the Grocers’ Guild wouldn’t even let her set up as an apothecary.
What would her father make of it: his daughter, the would-be physician, now mistress of a Bankside tavern? Worse still, what would her mother say? Bianca thinks she knows. She can hear her mother’s wildfire Italian voice saying, ‘I don’t care two figs that you’re a tavern-mistress in the city of the ungodly – only that you’re an unmarried tavern-mistress!’
Why have the overseer’s drunken ramblings upset me so? she wonders. Nicholas Shelby is already wed. He is a partner – whether willing or otherwise – in an indissoluble marriage, one that cannot be fractured even by death. He is not mine to love, even if I were to allow myself the luxury of that emotion.
But then just who is this Lady Katherine Vaesy – the one that rogue from the Magdalene says is all over Nicholas like a plague rash?
Nicholas’s feet beat out a tattoo that echoes beneath the arch of Henry’s great clock tower as he runs. The sun is setting, the towers and minarets of Nonsuch silhouetted against the sky like some fabled palace in far-off Araby.
Ahead of him he can see the entrance to the royal apartments, flanked by statues of ancient gods and heroes – myth made solid by the mason’s hand.
Myth made solid.
Ever since the moment Alice Welford told him about the existence of Elise Cullen, Nicholas has sought to put flesh on her insubstantial bones. But she’s always remained tantalizingly indistinct, a whisper calling to him from within a great silence. Now she is real.
He’s only minutes away from John Lumley’s privy study. He has a truth to tell. He has a key with which to turn a lock. A name to break open a cipher.
He bounds up the steps, throws open the heavy oak door and takes the great staircase three steps at a time.
He hurries along the upper gallery, the fresh rushes on the floor deadening his footfall. The startled faces of the few servants he passes make no impression on him. He has no interest in the magnificent straight-backed chairs set along the corridor where the awed of Surrey can wait while Lord Lumley considers their petitions and their suits, even though each chair cushioned with cloth-of-gold costs more than Nicholas has ever earned in a year. He does not turn his head to admire the paintings – three Holbeins, a brace of Dürers, an Antonio Moro and a Frans Floris. They leave him unmoved. The artists might as well have left the pigment unmixed in the mortar. The Passion of Christ, carved from black marble, and which Francis Deniker’s inventory values at £117 6s. 10d., if it’s worth a farthing, leaves him cold. He has thoughts only for what he intends to say to John Lumley.
He already knows it will be part revelation, part confession. For the revelation: everything he knows about Elise Cullen and her murdered brother. His confession will be that he’s come to Nonsuch on a pretence, that his real intention was to enlist Lumley’s help in finding the man who killed Ralph, Jacob Monkton and the others. He will say nothing about Robert Cecil. And therein lies the guilt. Confession always comes with a price attached. And Robert Cecil will expect him to pay it. Find a killer. Abandon Bianca.
Gabriel Quigley opens the privy-chamber door to Nicholas’s erratic knocking. The way Lumley’s secretary stands in the frame, his arms folded across the breast of his gown of legal black, makes Nicholas remember all the aldermen’s clerks, the churchwardens, the petty officials who have barred his way so far. He struggles to remain polite.
‘Master Secretary, forgive the intrusion, but I really must speak to Lord Lumley.’
‘Lord Lumley is not here,’ says Quigley, a little too quickly. The slight tightening of his pockmarked cheek makes him look as though he’s just winced. It’s an evasion, revealed before the muscles of the face can smother it. Nicholas knows he’s lying.
‘It’s important I see him, Master Quigley,’ he says, trying to look past the secretary without appearing distrustful.
‘I shall tell you again: he’s not here.’
‘Then where is he? I’ll go and find him.’
‘Lord Lumley is not to be sought out like some common ostler or journeyman, Master Physician. If you have something of import to convey, I will pass it on when I next see him.’
And he shuts the door in Nicholas’s face.
Nicholas is momentarily at a loss. He stands staring at the door while his breathing settles. What to do? His secret – Betony’s secret – cannot be contained a moment longer.
At the far end of the passage stands a reedy servant lad. He’s lounging in the way servants do when they think they’re not observed. As he spots Nicholas, he straightens up. He smooths his tunic with the three Lumley popinjays stitched onto the breast. But if he has work to do, he doesn’t seem inclined to set about it. He just stands there, looking a little sheepish. Almost as if he’s been set to guard something and has been caught napping.
‘Do me a service, lad,’ Nicholas says. ‘Tell me where I might find his lordship at this hour.’
‘Sir, I cannot.’
‘You mean you can’t or you won’t?’
The lad is unable to prevent the nervous entwining of his slender fingers. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ he pleads. ‘I cannot help you.’
Nicholas thinks, I don’t need to be Robert Cecil’s spy to know I’ve been lied to twice inside a minute. Why is John Lumley suddenly a secret in his own house?
Then the answer comes to him: there’s no secret. Lumley is merely taking his customary evening swim through the nurturing waters of learning. He’s in his privy reading room and he’s told his household he doesn’t want to be interrupted.
Well, my noble lord, thinks Nicholas, you’re about to learn something you couldn’t possibly have imagined.
Nicholas is familiar enough with Nonsuch now to know that to reach Lumley’s privy reading room he must first pass the chapel he’d noticed from the outside, barely an hour ago. When he turns into the corridor on the first floor he sees another liveried Nonsuch servant ahead of him, not exactly blocking the way but standing motionless as he gazes out of a window at the privy gardens, now in deep shadow.
Two servants in the space of fifty paces. Both apparently with nothing to do but idle away the time. Now he’s sure they’re keeping a watch. But over what?
He can hear a faint voice. There’s a strange rhythm to it. It seems to be coming from a door opposite where the servant stands so casually. By its place in the corridor, Nicholas reckons it must be the entrance to the upper gallery of the private chapel. Perhaps it’s the Lumleys at prayer. Ag
ain? It’s possible; he knows the devout pray often.
But although the voice is faint, it’s quite unlike Lumley’s northern burr. It’s a different sound entirely. And why, he wonders, didn’t Gabriel Quigley simply tell me Lord Lumley was at his devotions – come back later?
‘I’m sorry, sir, this corridor is denied to all but the family,’ the servant says, turning from the window as he senses Nicholas approach.
One last deceit, Robert Cecil, says Nicholas to himself. After this I’m done with you.
‘Master Quigley set you to guard here, is that correct?’ he asks, taking an inspired gamble.
‘Yes, sir, he did,’ says the man.
‘Well, he’s sent me with new orders. He wants you on the other side of the royal apartments. And hurry.’
The servant looks at him in confusion. ‘But that’s not possible, sir. I must be here.’
Don’t give him time to become bold, says a voice in Nicholas’s head. It sounds suspiciously like Bianca’s. ‘Do you defy Master Quigley?’ he asks in a tone as icy as he can make it. ‘He has sent me directly with the instruction.’
The servant’s eyes are moist with indecision. His jaw works as if he’s chewing on a nut.
‘Well, do you?’
The man looks over his shoulder towards the door. Then back to Nicholas. ‘No, sir, of course I do not,’ he sighs wretchedly and sets off at a lope in the direction of the royal apartments, leaving Nicholas struggling to calm a heart that’s beating a wild volta of relief and anticipation.
The door is emblazoned with the Lumley crest: the three popinjays, their wings about to open for flight. Above the lintel is Henry’s royal coat of arms.
The door is too thick for Nicholas to judge how many people are in the chapel. But there’s no lock.
No lock – and careless guards. A secret, then, barely worth protecting. Or has complacency caused its keeper to underestimate the threat? Easing the door open as gently as he can, Nicholas slips inside.