by S. W. Perry
Foolishly he tries to stand his ground. ‘I owe it to my father, who mortgaged his farm to send me to Cambridge. I owe it to those who need a physician and get only a fraud who quotes false remedies in Latin and robs them of their coin. I owe it to… to…’
‘Go on – say it! To Eleanor.’ Bianca’s voice is loud, hard and dismissive. It sets a pair of rooks shrieking in the old hornbeam tree beyond the far wall.
‘Alright, yes. To Eleanor, and our child. But it doesn’t mean I don’t lo—’
‘I don’t care what it means, Nicholas,’ she says, cutting him off before he can say the word.
She stalks off to where she left her leather mittens. Crouching down, she puts them on and picks up her garden knife, then stabs it into the wet soil.
‘Be gone with you, Dr Shelby,’ she calls over her shoulder as he stands there, not knowing what to do or say. ‘I’ll have no more of you. Go to the Barbary shore. Walk the endless deserts of Araby, for all I care. Leave me here to plant something that has at least a chance of growing to bud.’
11
St George’s church lies just off Long Southwark, close to where the Earl of Suffolk had his great house in the time of the queen’s father, the eighth Henry. The mansion has long since gone. There is nothing there now but lowly tenements built up against the cemetery wall. Two days after his encounter with Bianca in her physic garden, Nicholas Shelby wanders amongst the headstones and the crosses in the hazy early-morning sunshine, searching for the grave of Solomon Mandel. Under his left arm is a flat parcel wrapped in sackcloth.
When he finds the spot, Nicholas looks around to ensure he is not observed. Kneeling, he palms aside the freshly dug soil and buries the menorah he took from Mandel’s house. He is not sure it is the right thing to do. But in the absence of any other plan, it seems to him at least appropriate.
After a brief, silent prayer for the soul of Solomon Mandel, he heads north towards London Bridge, wishing that all his dilemmas could be as speedily laid to rest.
At the top of Fish Street Hill, Nicholas heads east into Aldgate ward. It is market day here and the lanes are packed. He weaves between customers bound for the fish stalls; dodges out of the way of goldsmiths’ apprentices running errands; ducks around haberdashers laden with baskets of braids, ribbons and silk lacings. To his relief, he sees no sign of contagion; no watchmen preventing entry to contaminated lanes; no crosses on doors to warn of disease lurking within. In this quarter at least, the city appears untroubled.
He stops at a food stall on the eastern end of Tower Street. There he buys a slice of manchet bread and brawn for breakfast, served to him by a stout woman with a kindly smile. She leans across the counter to get a better look at him, insisting she recognizes the young physician who used to practise on Grass Street. He tells her she’s mistaken. He has long since made himself a non-citizen of this part of the city.
He would prefer to enjoy his meal at his own pace. But his neighbour on the bench is an eel-seller taking a break from the market, his apron smeared with fishy conger-blood that leaves Nicholas’s stomach close to turning. He wolfs down his food and hurries on.
He crosses the open ground of Tower Hill, the scaffold standing like an abandoned raft becalmed on an empty sea – a sea that on Robert Cecil’s globe might well be labelled Mare Incognitum. He pauses in its shadow, staring up at the grim gibbet like a country green-pate recently come to town. It was here, he recalls, that the killer of Ralph Cullen, Jacob Monkton and the others met his deserved end. In his thoughts he returns to that night in the crypt below the old Lazar House, the night Bianca had very nearly become the next victim of the killer stalking Bankside. He had come so close to losing her for ever. Have I lost her now? he wonders.
From that memory it is but an easy jump to an earlier one, from a time before Eleanor’s death. Before his fall from prosperous young physician to wild-eyed vagrant. Before Bianca found him.
It is a sweltering Lamas Day, three summers past. A nameless boy-child – at least, nameless then – is lying on Sir Fulke Vaesy’s dissection table, awaiting the knife as though he’s nothing but a slab of meat to be chopped for the pottage pot. A vagabond child of no importance. An object not for compassion, but for mere instruction. Nicholas is staring in disbelief at the obvious signs of murder. He’s wondering why the great anatomist is unable – or unwilling – to see them, too.
Ralph Cullen.
Nameless no longer, thanks to him and Bianca.
But so many doors slammed in his face on the way. So many blind alleys. So much contempt to swallow, from the likes of Vaesy and coroner Danby. He thinks now that had he been a queen’s physician with place and reputation, how simple it would have been to get them to listen to him. How many lives could have been saved? If Robert Cecil is offering him the chance to wipe that slate clean, simply by enduring the discomforts of a voyage to Morocco, then it is to be grasped – whatever Bianca might think about the contract. How can she not see that he is doing this for her as much as for himself ? How can she not recognize his need to do something greater with his knowledge of physic than administer to the poor of Bankside?
Turning his back on the empty gibbet, he hurries on into the city.
John Lumley’s London town house stands at the northern end of Woodroffe Lane where it meets Hart Street, close to the city wall. It is a handsome, timber-framed mansion sitting in its own small orchard. As Nicholas approaches, he sees that the path to the house is lined with chests and bundles wrapped in canvas. An empty four-wheeled cart stands nearby. Lumley himself, dressed in black velvet breeches and an unlaced doublet, is instructing four male servants on the technicalities of safe and efficient loading. His long, melancholy face brightens as he sees Nicholas at the gate.
‘Your chosen hour is fortunate, Nicholas,’ he says in his gentle Northumbrian burr. He rubs his spade-cut grey beard with the back of one hand. ‘I had planned to leave for Nonsuch within the hour.’
Remembering Robert Cecil’s warning, Nicholas asks, ‘Is it the contagion, my lord? Are you abandoning the city? I saw no sign of it on my walk here.’
‘Mercy, no, Nicholas. The queen has made it plain she intends to come to Nonsuch during her summer progress. I must needs be ready for her.’ A rare smile lightens his brow. ‘I can’t complain. After all, Nonsuch is hers now.’
To Nicholas’s eye, the patron of the Lumleian chair of anatomy at the College of Physicians looks a far less troubled man than when last they met.
‘That must be a goodly weight lifted from your shoulders,’ he says.
‘When I inherited it from my late father-in-law, the Earl of Arundel, it came along with all the debts he owed to the Crown. Now it is returned to the queen, those debts are forgiven. And she graciously allows me to remain there until my span on earth is ended. So it is more than the lifting of a weight, Nicholas. It is the raising of a veritable mountain range.’
‘And your library? It will remain intact?’
‘All part of the legal agreement. Now I have only my recusancy to keep me awake at nights. And Her Grace seems inclined to allow me even that, so long as I keep it to myself and don’t upset her Privy Council with dangerous popish utterances.’
‘Then you are that rarest of things, my lord – a man who has outwitted the Cecils,’ Nicholas says with a smile, remembering how Robert Cecil had sent him to Nonsuch to spy upon this gentle academic. To expose his Catholicism. To bring him down. Of all the failures in his life, Nicholas is proudest of that one.
‘How may be I be of service on this fine morning, Nicholas?’ Lumley asks, brushing a strand of grey hair from his high temple.
‘I am in need of wise counsel, my lord,’ he says humbly.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve upset the College again,’ Lumley says, almost smiling as he leads Nicholas into the privacy of the orchard.
‘Not yet. But I might soon be offered the opportunity to upset them beyond their wildest imagining.’
He tells Lumley of Cecil’s
offer. Lumley is not a physician, but he knows the College better than most. If anyone can give him an honest assessment of the lure the Lord Treasurer’s son has waved before him, it is John Lumley.
‘It all comes down to whether you trust a Cecil,’ Lumley says, in much the same tone he’d use when asking if you might trust a cornered beast in the bear-ring.
‘I know that in the past he has intended you harm, my lord. But I have never yet known him to break his word.’
Lumley considers this for a moment. Then he nods. ‘He does have a point, Nicholas. The College could certainly prosper with some young blood in its veins.’
‘That is what I believe, my lord.’
‘And I have heard the rumours about Dr Lopez. He is a man whose time is most surely constrained. It’s a shame – I quite like him.’
‘I wouldn’t wish harm to come to him, my lord – not on my account. Not for this.’
‘I don’t think you need worry, Nicholas. Going to the land of the Moor for Robert Cecil won’t change Dr Lopez’s fate one jot. He’s like me: a heretic relying upon the queen’s favour for his continuing safety. And all the while the wolves of the Privy Council circle us, their beady little eyes watching for a moment of weakness. Waiting for us to stumble. But you – you could do fine work if you were allowed the opportunity. An expedition to the lands of the Moor to bring home knowledge: that could make your name.’
‘I remember when I first came to Nonsuch,’ Nicholas says. ‘You showed me works by their physicians Avicenna and Albucasis. I recall a particularly fine copy of the Canon Medicinae.’
‘It is amongst the books I treasure most, Nicholas. The Moors’ understanding of physic seems similar to ours, much influenced by the ancients. To go there and see for oneself would be a grand instruction, would it not?’
‘That’s what I thought. Sadly, Mistress Merton doesn’t agree.’
Lumley gives one of his long, wintery sighs. ‘I had a feeling there was something holding you back.’ He grasps Nicholas by the shoulder. ‘You must do what you believe to be right. I’ve said it before: your talents will surely be wasted if they are confined to Bankside. Perhaps it is time for you to re-enter the outside world.’
Nicholas thinks of asking Lumley to intervene with the Grocers’ Company, to lift the threat hanging over Bianca’s apothecary shop. But the Cecils’ influence is far greater than Lumley’s. It would only serve to set Robert Cecil against his old enemy once more. And Nicholas will not risk that.
‘My lord, if the pestilence spreads while I am out of the realm, might Mistress Bianca seek refuge at Nonsuch?’
‘Of course.’
‘She has but a few mouths dependent upon her,’ he adds, thinking of Ned, Rose and Timothy – Farzad, too, should he ever reappear. ‘They would work for their board, of course. They’re all young.’
Lumley laughs. ‘Nicholas, when the queen and her household descend on Nonsuch, we need more bodies to fetch and carry than Pharaoh needed slaves to build his pyramids. They will be welcome.’
‘Then I may go with a clear conscience. Thank you, my lord.’
Lumley lifts a cautionary hand. ‘If it comes to it, tell them not to delay. Should the plague increase greatly, no one from this city will be permitted to approach any place wherein Her Grace dwells.’
They walk on through the orchard. Nicholas asks after Ralph Cullen’s sister Elise, now safe with the household at Nonsuch. The news is good. She is diligent in her studies, Lumley tells him. When not at her hornbook, she is trilling like a pipit. She is even beginning to turn the heads of the male servants. For Nicholas, hearing of Elise’s progress, from the terrified mute child he first encountered, is like opening a door and discovering a warm summer’s morning outside, when all you had expected was snow.
When they part, Nicholas takes a different route to the bridge, down Seething Lane to Thames Street. He avoids the scaffold on Tower Hill entirely. I’ve done all that I can, he thinks. I’ve had enough of lingering in dark places.
Timothy has been brawling.
By habit a placid lad, more at home with his hands around his lute than around someone’s neck, he has responded with unusual violence to an injudicious insult thrown at him in the street.
‘You should have found the fortitude to ignore it,’ Bianca tells him, when she arrives at the Jackdaw to give herself a break from her duties on Dice Lane.
‘How could I, Mistress? They called me Farzad’s catamite. They said he was a heathen, and that he’d murdered poor Master Mandel.’
‘You know that’s not what anyone in possession of their wits believes. Next time, take pity on them for being a goose-cap.’
‘Yes, Mistress,’ says Timothy unconvincingly.
He’s had a lucky escape, Bianca thinks, sending him off to his duties in the taproom while she settles down in the kitchen to tend the only visible wound to his honour: a rent in his jerkin. She cannot blame him. She’s sure she would have done likewise, with some added cursing thrown in for good measure. And not simply because of the insult and her concern for Farzad. Nicholas’s impending desertion has made her own patience – never exactly steady at the best of times – even more brittle. Indeed, as she darns the woollen jerkin on her lap, she pricks her thumb three times in quick succession.
‘Rose, I’m hungry,’ she calls out in an irritated voice as she catches sight of her former maid passing the door. ‘Have we any manchet bread? A little mutton, too, perhaps?’
‘There’s mutton in the pantry, Mistress. The bread’s there, on the shelf.’
Sucking the bloom of blood from her fingertip, Bianca lays aside her work. ‘No, there’s no bread here,’ she observes, inspecting the bread basket.
‘That’s odd,’ says Rose, coming in to check for herself. ‘I’m sure there was some here this morning.’ She scratches at her black ringlets in mystification.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Bianca says wearily. ‘Forget that I asked. I’ll take a little pottage later.’
‘It most certainly does matter, Mistress,’ Rose protests in an unusually strident tone. ‘It’s not the first time things have gone missing around here recently. I could swear by all the saints that someone has been at the pottage pot, too. There’s twenty-four measures in it, and several times now I’ve sold twenty and found it empty. I think we have a thief in the Jackdaw.’
Bianca sighs. ‘This is Bankside, dear. I’d be surprised if we didn’t. Just try to keep them out of the kitchen, if you don’t mind.’
‘Perhaps young Timothy has had it without asking,’ Rose says. ‘He’s turning into a right saucy little roister.’ And before Bianca can stop her, she shouts, ‘Timothy! Haul your lazy carcass in here this minute.’
When he appears, Rose demands to know, ‘Where’s that piece of manchet bread I left here?’
‘Why. Ask. Me?’ Timothy says jauntily, playing three descending notes on his lute. ‘It’s your bread.’
‘Strictly speaking, sirrah, it’s Mistress Bianca’s bread.’
‘Perhaps your husband had it,’ Timothy says with dangerous abandon, ‘to keep his strength up for all that correction he has to give you.’
For a moment a deep and terrible silence falls upon the kitchen, broken only by the bubbling of the pottage pot on the coals. Then Rose reaches for the nearest knife. She tugs at one earlobe, as if to suggest an ear-trimming.
But Timothy has already fled back to the relative safety of the taproom.
‘Is she here, Ned?’ Nicholas asks three hours later as he takes despondent sips from his tankard of ale. ‘If I ask Rose, she merely looks embarrassed, or starts weeping.’
‘She went back to Dice Lane an hour ago,’ Ned Monkton answers. ‘You should go to her there.’
‘I’ve tried. She won’t answer my knock.’
He takes another slow swallow of ale, resisting the urge to down it in one draught because the old dangerous desire is tingling in his fingertips. Once, drink had been his refuge from grief. He knows he dare n
ot hide there again, whatever pain he feels at Bianca’s refusal to see him.
‘Have courage, Master Nick. You two ’ave seen enough trouble an’ come through it not to make amends,’ Ned says, his giant frame leaning forward over the bench until the tip of his auburn beard is inches from Nicholas’s face. His voice is low. Conspiratorial. ‘She’ll come around, Master Nick. Look how she cursed me when you and I had that quarrel, before we knew one another.’
‘You called her a witch, Ned. A papist witch. That was unkind.’
‘And you caught me that lucky one – the punch what took me clean off m’ feet.’ He grins alarmingly. ‘Only fellow on Bankside who’s ever done that. Knocked down by a little fellow who’s been learned at Cambridge! You’ve no idea how long it took me to regain my reputation after that.’
‘The way she cursed you, when I got laid out afterwards, I was half-inclined to believe you, Ned,’ Nicholas says with a laugh.
‘And now here I am, looking after her tavern for her. It’s a long way from the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s, spending my days amongst the dead. So there’s hope for you, ain’t there?’
‘I suppose there is.’
‘And now I have Rose. Me, a married lad. Who’d ’ave thought it? It’s easy enough for a gentleman, spoutin’ a sonnet to his mistress – a maid goes all milky at that sort of thing. But you try doin’ it when you spend your day in a mortuary crypt and you stink of dead folk.’
The fiery-bearded mountain that is Ned Monkton reciting poetry to his beloved is something Nicholas has severe trouble imagining. But the thought makes him smile. And – as he’s sure Ned intended – it gives him hope. ‘Ned, I want you to make me two promises,’ he says.
‘Name them.’
Nicholas pulls a folded parchment from his doublet. ‘This is a letter I’ve written to Lord Lumley at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey. If the plague should come across the river, I need to know that you, Rose, Bianca, Timothy – and Farzad, if you can find him – will leave Bankside and seek shelter there.’