by S. W. Perry
But Cecil doesn’t wait for an answer. He raises a bejewelled hand. The liveried coachman takes up the reins. As the coach door closes, Cecil’s parting shot is full of malice. ‘Take my advice, Lord Lumley – don’t feel too comfortable at Nonsuch. I’ll winkle you out of your shell yet.’
And with that, the Lord Treasurer’s son is borne away in magisterial splendour towards Thames Street.
John Lumley says not a word until he and Nicholas are free of the shadow of the Tower. Around their feet the last of winter’s dead leaves dance in the strengthening breeze. An ox-waggon passes, laden with sacks of seed, heading for the wharves.
‘He’s right, of course,’ says Lumley over the noise of the turning wheels.
‘My lord?’
‘Robert Cecil – about my “shell”. He will prize me out of it eventually. The size of my debt to the Crown makes it inevitable.’
‘I wish there was something I could suggest—’
‘Lizzy tells me I should offer to make the queen a gift of Nonsuch.’
‘You mean, give it up?’
‘Make a contract: cancellation of my debts in exchange for the deeds of her father’s palace. Lizzy and I to stay on, as life-tenants. That way, the library will be secure.’
‘Then perhaps that’s what you should do, my lord. Even Robert Cecil can’t take away from you what’s not yours to lose. Occasionally we must accept that some gifts are not ours to keep.’
John Lumley’s wide smile catches Nicholas completely off-guard. ‘You know, Nicholas, that’s not a bad idea. And it would stick in the Cecil craw like a chicken bone, wouldn’t it?’
Looking down towards Galley Quay, Nicholas can see the wherries and the tilt-boats battling against the swell as they make their way upriver to Whitehall and Richmond, downstream to the city and the ships moored in the Pool. The tide is up. The water looks angry.
‘Perhaps, Nicholas, when you come to see you cannot blame yourself for things you have not the power to prevent, you might consider becoming my private physician. After all, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the library.’
‘That’s generous of you, my lord. But I think St Tom’s might have more need of me.’
Lumley smiles. It’s something he’s begun to do more of recently. ‘I understand. Should you ever change your mind—’
‘There is one favour I would ask of you, my lord.’
‘Then ask it.’
‘That you intercede with the Guild of Grocers.’
‘The Grocers? Whatever do you wish of them?’
‘A licence, my lord.’
Lumley looks at Nicholas in bemusement. ‘A licence?’
‘To practise as an apothecary.’
‘An honest trade, Nicholas, but a waste of your talents, if I may say so.’
Nicholas smiles. ‘It’s not for me, my lord,’ he says, ‘it’s for Mistress Merton.’
Heading west, alone now, Nicholas crosses New Fish Street towards St Paul’s. He does not hurry. For the first time in months there is no urgency driving him. Disjointed fragments of the great city’s life come to him as he walks: the smell of boiling pig skin from the scalding house on Pudding Lane, the shouts of the day-labourers touting for work on East Cheap. He is just one man among the crowd, unremarkable, drawing no one’s eye, catching no one’s attention.
On Grass Street he pauses to look up at the window of his old lodgings. A woman he does not recognize is leaning out, airing bed sheets that flap noisily in the breeze. After a while she gives up and pulls them back inside.
He stops for a while at Trinity church, but he does not enter the churchyard. He doesn’t want Eleanor to hear the question that’s been noisily troubling him since he saw Gabriel Quigley trying to quench his thirst at the windowsill of his cell: Would I kill a man – if by doing so I could cure the malady that took you away from me? He fears she will think him a monster if she catches his answer: Without hesitation!
Nicholas sits beneath the little thatched roof of the lych-gate until the bell chimes four. Then he gets to his feet and, with exaggerated care, brushes down his white canvas doublet. He begins to whistle a song he’s heard often on the Southwark streets: ‘On high the merry pipit trills’.
Turning his back on the city, he sets off down Fish Street Hill towards the bridge. Towards Southwark.
Historical note
In 1616, just seven years after John Lumley’s death, the English anatomist William Harvey delivered his revolutionary thesis in which he showed that the heart was indeed the driving force behind the circulation of the blood. It ended fifteen hundred years of Galenic teaching, almost all of it wholly false.
By that time, the glorious palace of Nonsuch had been back in royal hands for a while. The year after this story ends, John Lumley, overwhelmed by debt and his questionable religious affiliations, did indeed sign Nonsuch over to Queen Elizabeth. In return, his loans and mortgages – worth, in today’s currency, well over twenty million pounds – were cancelled. The queen allowed Lumley and his wife to remain there as custodians for the rest of their lives. Both outlived her. John died in 1609, Elizabeth Lumley eight years later. Their tombs are to be found in the Lumley chapel at Cheam, beside those of John’s first wife, Jane FitzAlan, and their three children. Many of the surviving volumes of Lumley’s priceless collection of books now reside in the British Library. The Lumleian Lectures are still presented each year by the Royal College of Physicians.
The forceps mishandled by Fulke Vaesy at his wife’s childbirth were introduced into England by the Chamberlens, a family of refugee Huguenot physicians who fled Paris in 1569. In the long-running battle between the physicians, the barber-surgeons and the midwives, forceps were invariably kept hidden, lest they became commonplace and thus lost their financial value. The true nature of Mathew Quigley’s haemophilia was not properly understood until the early nineteenth century.
In 1876 the Board of Examiners of the Royal College of Surgeons – the successor to the Company of Barber-Surgeons – resigned en masse rather than allow women to sit for a diploma in midwifery. It wasn’t until 1909 that a woman became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. The surgeons caught up two years later. Neither event – though great achievements for the women involved – can be considered exactly ground-breaking: five centuries had passed since Dorotea Bucca was appointed professor of medicine and philosophy at the University of Bologna, a post she inherited from her father in 1390.
A little over a century after John Lumley returned Nonsuch to royal ownership, Charles II gave the estate to his mistress, Barbara Villiers. Just like Lumley, she too was burdened by immense debt. Her solution was somewhat more extreme than his: she had Nonsuch – renowned as one of the most glorious Renaissance palaces in Europe – demolished.
It is now a municipal park.
Author’s note
This story is, of course, a fiction, though some of the characters in it did exist. We can never really know what it was like for them to live in Elizabeth’s England. Like all their kind, they thought differently, spoke differently, understood their world differently. But I’m sure their emotions were no less vibrant, no less unruly, than ours.
Fortunately for us scavengers of history, so many superb historians and writers have thoughtfully left their best dishes lying alluringly within reach, to provide us with at least a taste of the world in which those characters lived. I am indebted to Ian Mortimer and Liza Picard, whose The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England and Elizabeth’s London respectively are such wonderful gateways to the world in which my story is set. John Stow’s A Survey of London, written in 1598, was equally indispensable; as was Jeffrey Forgeng’s Daily Life in Elizabethan England. I should also make mention of Lauren Kassell’s Medicine & Magic in Elizabethan London; Thomas Wright’s Circulation, a fascinating account of how William Harvey discovered the true function of the heart; Roy Porter’s Blood & Guts; and John Dent’s The Quest for Nonsuch.
I must also offer de
ep gratitude – though, sadly, neither is alive to receive it – to my English teacher, Mr Mortimer, and to Mr Pugh, my history teacher; both from Enfield Chase Secondary School. It’s indicative of schooling in the 1960s that I have absolutely no idea of their first names.
Nor must I fail to acknowledge the immense help I’ve received from my agent, Jane Judd, and from Sara O’Keeffe, Susannah Hamilton and the team at Corvus. I must also thank Mandy Greenfield for her eagle’s eye.
But the greatest debt – given that the writing life can be uncomfortably solitary, and not just for the author – I owe to my wife Jane. Without her belief and encouragement, I doubt a word of this tale would have survived to reach the printed page.