by S. W. Perry
‘Who can say, duck?’
‘Then can you tell me where he might be?’
‘How should I know? Try the jumping-shop at the sign of the Blue Bear.’
‘But surely his duties are here, with you?’
‘Duties? He don’t know the meanin’ of the word. Sometimes he attends to them, sometimes he don’t. Mostly he don’t.’ She carefully gathers the vegetable peelings from the step and drops them into a fold in her kirtle for later use.
‘Then who looks after you?’
The woman laughs through her gums. ‘Us Magdalenes know how to fend for ourselves, duck. Every now and awhile the parish sends a churchwarden to look us over. Couple of times a year a physician comes down to give us ease—’
‘That’s dreadful,’ says Bianca with a guilty blush. While she’s sent salves and balms to the Magdalene when she’s been asked, she’s never actually been inside.
‘We manage,’ the woman says contemptuously, and directs a gobbet of phlegm into the drain. ‘Last time the pestilence came, they shut us away completely – for a fortnight. No food, no water, other than what we managed to save before they nailed up the door and painted a fucking great cross on it.’
‘This physician – when did he last come?’ asks Bianca, telling herself the question has nothing whatsoever to do with Katherine Vaesy.
‘Not long ago. A few weeks – a few days. Once you’ve been in the Magdalene a while, time don’t really work the same way it does for others.’
‘Can you remember what he looked like?’
‘Handsome enough, saving he looked more like a day-labourer than a quack. I had this elbow, see. Got a bit raw.’
Bianca squats down, heedless of the fact that the hem of her serge overgown is now firmly in the mire of the street. Looking through the open door, she gets a murky, insubstantial view of human bodies lying about listlessly in the fetid semi-darkness. She’s almost grateful for the open drain between her and the old woman.
‘He came with someone, I believe.’
‘That he did.’
‘A rich lady. A titled lady.’
The old woman shrugs as she slices at the vegetables. ‘Aye, she’s here every now and then.’
‘So you’ve seen Lady Vaesy before?’
‘Vaesy – is that her name?’
‘Does she bring you charity?’
‘Sometimes she brings charity, sometimes she brings us new friends.’
Bianca has to put a hand down to the earth to steady herself. ‘She brings you what?’
‘Friends, duck. Folks like us – down on their luck, troubled in the wits or the body. Must think we’re some sort of midden: a place to dump God’s cast-offs.’
In a moment of inspiration Bianca asks, ‘Did she happen to bring a young girl and a boy – a crippled boy – sometime last summer?’
‘Aye, I remember them. A sweet young thing she was.’ She frowns as she searches her memory. ‘Name began with an L—’
Bianca begins to rise to her feet, disappointed. Then it strikes her – this old crone can’t read. ‘Was her name Elise?’
‘That’s it – L for Elise,’ says the old woman with a fond smile. ‘And the poor little mite was called Richard, or Rolland, or something like that.’
‘Ralph. His name was Ralph,’ says Bianca, her heart beating fast. ‘And can you recall if ever there was a young lad with a moon face, about fifteen – slow in the wits? His name would be Jacob.’
‘Oh, I remember Jacob well enough, the poor little addle-pate.’
‘How long was he here?’ Bianca asks, remembering the long, desperate search Ned and his father had made for Jacob. ‘It must have been about a month—’
‘No! Three or four days at the most.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m not entirely witless, duck. None of them she brings here stay long.’
‘Do you know where they go when they leave?’
‘No. They just go. The Magdalene ain’t a prison, duck. We’s all free subjects of our sovereign majesty here,’ the woman says proudly, waving her paring knife at Bianca to make her point. ‘If we want to up and leave, there’s nothing to stop us – less you count the open road and likely starvation.’
John Lumley’s private chapel is a very different place in daylight. And it’s a world away from Ned Monkton’s grim vault at St Tom’s. Not a shared coffin or a dirty winding sheet to be seen. But today it’s still a place of death.
Deniker’s corpse is laid out on a makeshift table, draped in a linen shroud. Lumley stands beside it in contemplation for a while. Then, defiantly, he makes the sign of the Cross over the body. ‘You may as well know, Dr Shelby, that I intend to pray for the soul of Francis Deniker, whether the law permits it or not,’ he says harshly, his eyes taking on a dull, watery sheen. ‘Robert Cecil may call me a heretic if he wishes. My conscience and my heart are not his playthings.’ He lays one palm against the side of Deniker’s covered face. ‘Poor, gentle Francis – that he should come to such an end,’ he says. Then, to Nicholas: ‘God’s wounds, Shelby! I never knew a man bring more tumult in his wake than you.’
Somewhere in Nicholas’s mind a dam breaks, releasing a torrent of helpless rage. How dare Lumley – rich and well connected enough to choose what faith he embraces, to indulge his curiosity with books that a lesser man would find himself in a cell for reading – blame him for any of this? Wasn’t it Lumley who used his influence to procure Ralph Cullen’s body for Fulke Vaesy to toy with, in the name of physic? Wasn’t it Lumley who brought Francis Deniker down from Durham, knowing full well what would happen to him if his true identity was discovered? What would he have had me do – look the other way? Pretend I never saw those wounds on the child’s leg?
Lumley pulls aside the shroud. He stares into Deniker’s face. He begins to quietly sob, the tears melting into his beard like hailstones on hot sand.
But Nicholas barely hears him. He’s too busy cataloguing the telltale signs of Francis Deniker’s struggle: the bruises on the forearms, the scratches around one eye, the nostrils clogged with dried blood, the tiny fragment of cloth stuck between two teeth like the remains of a hastily consumed meal – probably a scrap of pillow cover.
‘I don’t recall him having a wrestler’s nose when he was in your privy chamber,’ Nicholas says brutally. ‘He’s been smothered, probably by a pillow held down over his face. Look: the force has crushed the nasal bone and the septal cartilage.’
Lumley puts a fist between his own nostrils and his upper lip to staunch the sniffling. When he’s composed himself he says, ‘Smothered? I thought these hurts were caused when he was cut down and laid on the floor. Francis hanged himself – there was a written testament lying on his bed.’
‘A suicide note?’
‘Yes.’
‘A suicide note from a Jesuit priest who presumably believed self-destruction was the fastest way to an eternity of sulphur and brimstone?’
‘Dr Shelby, I can see the words he wrote seared into my mind every time I close my eyes. He sought your death because he feared you would betray him to the Privy Council.’
‘Yesterday I assured everyone present in your privy chamber that I would not reveal what I witnessed there. I meant it.’
‘Clearly not all of us believed you, Dr Shelby.’
‘So, after much fervent prayer, Francis Deniker decided he couldn’t carry the weight of all that sin and live? He must have been a busy man last night – plotting my murder, all that writing of notes.’
‘Have a care for where you are, sirrah! Do you doubt the account?’
‘Even the players at the Rose couldn’t make a fiction like that convincing. This cord about his neck – it’s the one he wore around his vestments yesterday, is it not?’
‘I ordered it left in place, for when the coroner comes.’
‘And what will you tell him – that your secretary hanged himself with a Romish trinket, after he’d tried to kill one of Robert Cecil’s agents?
Who, by the way, discovered him giving his master the papist Mass?’
‘I’ll take a leaf out of your book, Dr Shelby. I’ll lie.’
Some blows, Nicholas thinks, have to be taken without flinching. He softens his tone. ‘May I ask who found him?’
‘His servant, at dawn. The door to his chamber was jammed by an overturned chair. We had to break in. He’d hanged himself from a beam.’
‘Were you present?’
‘No, but they called me at once.’
‘So you saw him hanging?’
‘Not exactly. I helped get him off the floor.’
Nicholas looks puzzled. ‘The floor?’
‘That’s where he was found. Look at the cord, Dr Shelby. It must have held just long enough, then broken under his weight.’
Nicholas takes up the frayed end of the cord and inspects it more closely. He sees immediately how some of the strands have been cut through. He imagines the killer rolling Deniker’s smothered body off his bed, wrapping the cord around his neck, pulling it tight, then picking away with the point of a blade until the material rips into a plausible tear.
A sudden jolt of dread courses through his body. ‘Where is Elise? Has anyone seen her?’
‘She’s with Master Sprint in the kitchens, I think.’
‘Are you certain? Have you seen her?’
‘No, but Lizzy has.’
Nicholas has to fight the urge to seize Lumley by the collar of his gown and shake him. ‘When? When did she see her?’
‘Within the hour.’
‘And Quigley?’ asks Nicholas, the relief breaking in him like a wave.
‘Quigley? What of him?’
‘Where is he?’ Nicholas’s voice is raised almost to a shout. He suspects it’s the first time a lord has been spoken to in such a manner by a humble Bankside dispenser of physic. But protocol is the last thing on his mind.
‘On his way to London – to my house on Tower Hill,’ Lumley replies passively.
‘Did you send him? Or was it his idea?’
John Lumley’s face pales as he realizes what Nicholas is implying. ‘He was due to leave on the morrow—’
‘And I suppose he suggested to you that he should leave early, report Deniker’s death to the coroner on the way?’
‘Dr Shelby, what are you suggesting: that Gabriel is behind this?’
‘Francis Deniker didn’t attempt to kill me. He wasn’t the type. And he didn’t kill himself. We both know that, my lord. I’m guessing Lady Lumley is not a practised murderer. So if it wasn’t you, that only leaves Quigley.’
By the time they reach the library all the strength seems to have flowed out of John Lumley. He’s teetering like a frail old man. His hands shake as he lifts the latch.
Once inside the study, Nicholas sees the fire has been freshly built and candles lit for Lumley to take his habitual evening journey amongst the shelves. ‘Forgive me,’ he says, ‘but I’m not well versed in the way of courtiers, my lord. I assume a man of your high position keeps records.’
‘Records, Dr Shelby? What sort of records did you have in mind? I keep many private papers.’
‘A journal of household business: what your servants do on your behalf, who they meet, where they go upon your commission – that sort of thing. A man of your rank would have to, wouldn’t he, if only to provide an alibi when someone like Robert Cecil has him examined by the Privy Council?’
Lumley crosses to his desk. Beside his quills, inkwell and pounce-pot is a handsome leather-bound book, his business journal. ‘If you’re right, Dr Shelby – which I cannot accept – why did Gabriel not simply kill the child when she came into Nonsuch – remove the only living witness?’
‘He didn’t know who she was. And on Bankside, Elise never actually saw him. She told us so. Until yesterday, all Quigley knew was that she was a vagrant mute found under a hedge – until I persuaded her to tell her story.’ The self-recrimination in Nicholas’s voice is clear to both men.
‘What do you want to know?’ Lumley asks, unlocking his journal and opening the leather cover.
‘Fulke Vaesy’s dissection of Ralph Cullen took place on Lammas Day last year. Where was Quigley then?’
Lumley flicks through the pages until he finds what he’s looking for. ‘He was in London for me. He was meeting Signor Carrapelli, the agent of my Florentine bankers. He returned to Nonsuch on’ – his finger traces the entries – ‘the twenty-ninth of July.’
‘Just before Ralph Cullen was taken from the river.’
‘It could be mere coincidence.’
‘Try last Accession Day.’
Again John Lumley riffles through the journal. ‘There you are, Dr Shelby – he was here, at Nonsuch, visiting my tenant farmers.’
‘Try a few days before. Jacob Monkton had been in deep water awhile.’
Lumley flicks back a page or two. Just for a moment he closes his eyes. ‘He was in London. Returned via Kingston on the sixteenth.’
‘Jacob’s body was taken from the river the next day.’
‘But Gabriel goes often to the city, to my town house on Tower Hill – always on my commission,’ Lumley protests. ‘It means nothing.’
‘What about the end of January this year? That’s when the preacher was found.’
Reluctantly Lumley reads: ‘January twenty-fourth. Rode in from London at four of the clock G.Q. with documents from Sir Joseph Laslet regarding the sale of my holdings in Sussex.’
‘From London.’
‘It’s entirely circumstantial!’
‘The Privy Council has hanged men for less circumstance than this.’
Lumley shakes his head. ‘I cannot countenance what you are implying.’ He’s struggling to keep the growing despair out of his voice, and failing. ‘Gabriel has been with me since he was a lad. I trust him implicitly – with my life, if necessary.’
‘Face it, my lord: he’s been in London around the time each body washed up on Bankside. If we take Elise’s testimony as accurate, there have been at least six victims, including her brother. Then there’s Father Deniker, the seventh – I think it’s fair to count him amongst them. I would have been the eighth.’
‘This cannot be, Dr Shelby—’
‘When Quigley found out I’d seen some of the bodies, he panicked. In his extremity he came up with an insane idea to kill me and make it look as though Francis Deniker was to blame. You would have believed him, too – for all your enquiring mind.’
‘Oh, merciful Jesu—’
‘All this time I’ve been searching for a monster without a soul, an implacable creature I thought I couldn’t even begin to touch,’ Nicholas says, shaking his head in wonder. ‘And he turns out to be just an angry little man with a pockmarked face who panicked the moment he thought he might be exposed. If he’d had a fraction of Francis Deniker’s fortitude and courage, I’d still be looking for him.’
Lumley slowly closes his journal, like a man shutting away a life that’s been lost to him. He goes to the window and stares out at the gathering darkness. Nicholas hears him mutter: ‘Oh, Gabriel… Gabriel… what have you done?’
The first thing that strikes Nicholas about Gabriel Quigley’s chamber is the monkish austerity of it. Nothing on the walls, no personal items on the simple wooden chest beside the bed. It could be a cell. He can smell the man now: the flat odour of severity and denial, of plain wool and unyielding leather.
‘How long has he lived in the household?’ Nicholas asks. ‘It looks as if he’s barely been here.’
‘Since he was a lad, apart from when he went to study medicine,’ Lumley says bleakly.
‘He’s a physician?’
‘When he was seventeen I paid for him to attend Oxford. But he struggled, poor lad. In the end they rejected him. So no, Dr Shelby – Gabriel is not a physician.’
‘But he has access to enough knowledge to think himself one, doesn’t he? Enough to think he can use a scalpel.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And after Oxford?’
‘A couple of years studying law at Lincoln’s Inn. Then he returned to Nonsuch and became my secretary. His failure weighed much on his mind – I know that. All he had ever wanted to do was match the promise of his brother, Mathew.’
Suddenly Nicholas is standing in the graveyard at Cheam church, that Sunday after the sermon. He’s looking down at a eulogy carved into a headstone: Mathew Quigley… Laid in earth 13th May 1572… No gentler man ever spilt his blood for Christ.
Now the dates make sense to him.
‘So Mathew Quigley was Gabriel’s brother?’
‘Yes – the older by a couple of years.’
‘I saw the eulogy on his headstone in Cheam churchyard – but I couldn’t work it out. “Spilt blood” – what does that mean? How did Mathew die?’
Lumley’s eyes moisten. Nicholas thinks he’s going to weep again. But he controls himself. ‘Is it not a form of martyrdom to die so young? To be cut off with so much left to do, to leave behind only memories that bring everlasting pain to those who loved you? You would know about that – from what Sir Fulke Vaesy told me.’
‘What does it mean? I need to know.’
‘Mathew suffered from the Hebrew malady, Dr Shelby. I’m sure you’re familiar with it. When he cut himself, he would bleed so profusely that the flow was almost unstoppable. It left him very weak and sorely troubled. In the end it killed him.’
A wave of ice-cold nausea sluices through Nicholas Shelby’s belly. ‘Dear Jesu!’ he whispers. ‘Gabriel’s killing them because he thinks he’s going to find a cure!’
Lumley shouts for a servant to bring an iron crow. Inside five minutes Nicholas is prizing the lock from the only secure hiding place in Quigley’s chamber – a wooden chest beside the bed. Lumley doesn’t attempt to stop him. The man once bold enough to politic with earls, to risk his very neck to strengthen a Catholic claim to the throne of England, now seems completely in thrall to a Suffolk yeoman’s son with a crowbar.