by S. W. Perry
Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018 by Corvus,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © S. W. Perry, 2018
The moral right of S. W. Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 492 4
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 495 5
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 493 1
Printed in Great Britain.
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For Jane
Medicine is the most noble of the Arts,
but through the ignorance of those who practise it…
it is at present far behind all the others.
HIPPOCRATES
… lay that damned book aside,
and gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy soul.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
The Tragicall History of Dr Faustus
1
London, August 1590
He lies on a single sheet of fine white Flanders linen. Eyelids closed, plump arms folded across his swollen infant belly, he could be a sleeping cherub painted upon the ceiling of a Romish chapel – all he lacks is a harp and a pastel cloud to float upon. The sisters at St Bartholomew’s have prepared him as best they can. They’ve washed away the river mud, plucked the nesting elvers from his mouth, scrubbed him cleaner than he ever was in life. Now he stinks no worse than anything else the watermen might haul out of the Thames on a hot Lammas Day such as this.
Male child, malformed in the lower limbs, some four years of age. Taken up drowned at the Wildgoose stairs on Bankside. Name unknown, save unto God. So says the brief report from the office of the Queen’s Coroner, into whose busy orbit – twelve miles around the royal presence – this child has so impertinently strayed.
The chamber is dark, unbearably stuffy. A miasma of horsedung, salted fish and human filth spills through the closed shutters from the street outside. Somewhere beyond Finsbury Fields a summer thunderstorm is boiling up noisily. Plague weather, says present opinion. If we escape it this year, we’ll be luckier than we deserve.
The chamber door opens with a soft moan of its ancient hinges. A cheery-looking little fellow in a leather apron enters, his bald head gleaming with sweat. He carries a canvas satchel trapped defensively against his body by his right arm, as though it were stuffed full of contraband. Approaching the child on the table, he begins to whistle a jaunty song, popular in the taverns this season: ‘On high the merry pipit trills’. Then, with the exaggerated care of a servant preparing his master’s table for a feast, he places the satchel beside the corpse, throws open the flap and proceeds to lay out his collection of saws, cleavers, dilators, tongs and scalpels. As he does so, he polishes each one on a corner of the linen, peering into the metal as though searching for hidden flaws. He is a precise man. Everything must be just so. He has standards to maintain. After all, he’s a member of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons, and while he’s here in the Guildhall of the College of Physicians – a surprisingly modest timber-framed building wedged between the fishmongers’ stalls and bakers’ shops to the south of St Paul’s churchyard – he’s on enemy ground. This rivalry between the meat-cutters and the balm-dispensers has existed, or so they say, since the great Hippocrates began tending patients on his dusty Aegean island.
After two verses, the man stops whistling and engages the child in a pleasant, one-way conversation. He talks about the weather; about what’s playing at the Rose; whether the Spanish will try their hand against England again this summer. It’s a ritual of his. Like a compassionate executioner, he likes to imagine he’s strengthening his subject’s resolve for what lies ahead. When he’s done, he leans over the child as though to bestow a parting kiss. He places his left cheek close to the tiny nostrils. It’s the final part of his ritual: making sure his subject is really dead. After all, it won’t reflect well if he wakes up at the first slice of the scalpel.
‘Who are you planning to cut up for public sport today, Nick?’ shouts Eleanor Shelby to the lathe-and-plaster wall that separates her from her husband. ‘Some poor starving fellow hanged for stealing a mackerel, I shouldn’t wonder.’
For several days now Eleanor and Nicholas have communicated only through this wall, or via scribbled note passed secretively by their maid Harriet. Whenever Nicholas approaches the door of the lying-in chamber, Eleanor’s mother Ann – who’s come down from Suffolk to oversee the birth and ensure the midwife doesn’t steal the pewter – snarls him away. She’s convinced that if he gets so much as a glimpse of his wife he’ll let in the foulness of the London streets, not to mention extreme bad luck. Besides, she tells him crossly whenever she gets the chance, who’s ever heard of a husband setting eyes on his wife during her confinement? Imagine the scandal!
To add to Nicholas’s present misery, every church bell from St Bride’s to St Botolph’s begins to chime the noonday hour, the latecomers making up by effort what they’ve lost in time-keeping. Now he must shout even louder if his wife is to hear him.
‘It’s learning, Sweet. Cutting up is what East Cheap butchers do in their shambles. This is a lecture, for the advancement of science.’
‘Where any passing rogue may peer in over the casement for free. It’s worse than a Southwark bear-baiting.’
‘At least our subjects are dead already, not like those poor tormented creatures. Anyway, it’s a private dissertation. No public allowed.’
‘Insides are insides, Nick. And, in my opinion, that’s where they should stay.’
Nicholas slips his stockinged feet into his new leather boots, tugs out the creases in his Venetian hose and wonders how to say farewell before the bells make conversation through the wall impossible. Normally there’d be the usual passionate endearments, followed by a lot of letting go and grabbing back, kisses interrupted and then jealously resumed, breathless promises to hurry home, a final reluctant parting. After all, they’ve been married scarcely two years. But not today. Today there is the wall.
‘I can’t tarry, Love. You know what Sir Fulke Vaesy thinks of tardiness. There’s bound to be a line somewhere in the Bible about punctuality.’
‘Don’t let him bully you, Nick. I know his sort,’ comes Eleanor’s voice, as if from a great distance.
‘What sort is that?’
‘When you’re the queen’s physician, he’ll grovel to you like a lapdog.’
‘I’ll be seventy by then! Vaesy will be a hundred. What kind of physician makes a centenarian grovel?’
‘The kind whose patients don’t pay their bills!’
Smiling at the muffled peal of Eleanor’s laughter, Nicholas shouts a final farewell. Nevertheless, his leave-taking feels hurried and incomplete, practically ill-starred.
At first sight, you would not take the young fellow stepping out of his lo
dgings at the sign of the Stag and into the dusty heat for a man of physic. Beneath a plain white canvas doublet, whose points today are left unlaced for ventilation, his body is that of a hardy young countryman. A coil of black hair spills ungovernably beneath the broad rim of his leather hat. And even if this were midwinter and not blazing August, his doctoral gown – won after a lengthy struggle against a whole battery of disapproving Cambridge eyebrows – would still be tucked away, as it is now, in the leather bag slung over one shoulder.
Why this unusual modesty, given that in London a man’s status is known by what he wears? He would probably tell you it’s to protect the expensive gown from the ravages of the street. A truer answer would be that even after two years of practising medicine in the city, Nicholas Shelby can’t quite help thinking that a Suffolk yeoman’s son has no right to wear such exotic apparel.
Keeping up a sweaty trot in the heat, Nicholas passes the Grass church herb-market and heads down Fish Street Hill, towards the College Guildhall. He squirms with embarrassment when the clerks there bow extravagantly. He’s still finds such deference uncomfortable. In a side-chamber he takes the gown from his bag and, like a guilty secret, wraps it around his body. He enters the dissection room by one door, just as Sir Fulke Vaesy comes in by the other.
He’s made it, with barely moments to spare.
Edging in beside his friend Simon Cowper, Nicholas expects to find the subject of today’s lecture is one of the four adult felons fresh from the gallows that the College is licensed to dissect each year, just as Eleanor had indicated. Only now does he see the tiny figure lying on the linen sheet, surrounded by the barbersurgeon’s instruments.
And Simon Cowper, knowing that Nicholas is an expectant father, cannot bring himself to look his friend in the eye.
Sir Fulke reminds Nicholas of a Roman proconsul preparing to inspect hostages from a conquered tribe. Resplendent in his fellow’s gown with its fur trim, a pearl-encrusted silk cap upon his head, he’s a large man with a fabled appetite for sack, goose and venison. He rises from his official chair and towers over the tiny white figure on the table. But Vaesy has no intention of getting his hands bloody today. It is not for the holder of the Lumleian chair of anatomy to behave like a common butcher jointing a carcass in the parish shambles. The actual cutting of flesh will be done by Master Dunnich, the cheery little bald fellow from the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons.
‘A healthy womb is like the fertile soil in Eden’s blessed garden,’ Vaesy begins, to the biblical accompaniment of summer thunder, much closer now. ‘It is the wholesome furrow in which the seed of Adam may take root—’
Is he delivering a lecture or a sermon? Sometimes Nicholas finds it hard to tell the difference. Through the now un-shuttered windows comes the smell of the street: fish stalls and fresh horse-dung. On each sill rest the chins of passers-by, craning their necks to peer in and gawp. The heat has made this lecture less private than Nicholas imagined.
‘However, this infant, found by the watermen in mid-river just yesterday, is the inevitable issue of disease, physical and spiritual. The child has clearly been born’ – the great anatomist pauses for effect – ‘monstrous!’
The beams of the Guildhall roof seem almost to flinch. Nicholas has a sudden protective urge to wrap the naked child in the linen sheet and tell Vaesy to stop frightening him.
By ‘monstrous’, Vaesy means crippled. The description seems overly brutal to Nicholas, who tries hard to study the child dispassionately. He notes how the withered legs arch inwards below the knees. How the yellowing toes entwine like stunted vines. Clearly he could not have walked into the river by himself. Did he crawl in whilst playing on the bank? Perhaps he fell off one of the wherries or tilt-boats that ply their trade on the water. Or maybe he was thrown in, like an unwanted sickly dog. Whatever the truth, something about the little body strikes Nicholas as odd. Most corpses fished from the river, he knows, are found floating face-down, weighted by the mass of the head. The blood should pool in the cheeks and the forehead. But this boy’s face is waxy white. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t been in the water long, he thinks, noting the absence of bite-marks from pike or water rat.
Is that a small tear on one side of the throat? And there’s a second, deeper wound – low down on the calf of the right leg, like a cross cut into old cheese. A dreadful image enters Nicholas’s mind: the infant being hauled out of the water on the end of a boathook.
‘The causes of deformity such as we see here, gentlemen, are familiar enough to us, are they not?’ says Vaesy, breaking into his thoughts. ‘Perhaps one of you would be so good as to list them? You, sirrah—’
Instantly the eyes of every physician in the room drop to the laces of their boots, to the condition of their hose, in Nicholas’s case to the scars of boyhood harvesting etched into his fingers, to anything but Vaesy’s awful stare. They know the great anatomist will expect at least ten minutes’ dissertation on the subject, all in faultless Latin.
‘Mr Cowper, is it not?’
Of all the victims Vaesy could have chosen, poor Simon Cowper is the easiest: forever muddling his Galen with his Vesalius; ineptly transposing his astrological houses when drawing up a prognosis; when letting blood, more likely to cut himself than the patient. He stands now in the full glare of Vaesy’s attention like a man condemned. Nicholas’s heart weeps for him.
‘The first, according to the Frenchman, Paré,’ Cowper begins nervously, wisely choosing a standard text for safety, ‘is too great a quantity of seed in the father—’
A snigger from amongst the young physicians. Vaesy kills it with a look of thunder. But it’s too late for Simon Cowper; his delicate fingers begin to drum nervously against his thighs. ‘S-s-s-secondly: the mother having sat too long upon a stool… with her legs crossed… or… having her belly bound too tight… or by the narrowness of the womb.’
For what seems like an age, Vaesy torments the poor man by doing nothing but arching one bushy eyebrow. When Cowper exhausts his slim fund of knowledge, the great anatomist calls him a fuddle-cap and reminds him of his own favourite medical catch-all. ‘The wrath of God, man! The wrath of God!’ To Vaesy, sickness is mostly explained by divine displeasure.
Cowper sits down. He looks ready to weep. Nicholas wonders how wrathful God has to be to allow a crippled child to end up on Vaesy’s dissection table.
Two attendants step forward. One removes the starched Flanders linen, the other the corpse. Now Nicholas can see that the table it covered is little more than a butcher’s block with a drain drilled through it, a wooden bucket set beneath the hole. In place of the linen is set a sheet of waxed sailcloth, a vent stitched into the centre. From the stains visible on it, it’s been employed in this role before. The dead child is set down again, like an offering upon an altar.
‘The first incision into the thorax, Master Dunnich, if you’d be so kind,’ orders Vaesy to the little bald-headed barber-surgeon.
Immediately the stench of putrefaction fills the air like an old familiar sin. Nicholas knows it well. Even now, it never fails to turn his stomach. At once he’s back in the Low Countries, his first post after leaving Cambridge.
‘Isn’t there enough sickness for you here in Suffolk?’ Eleanor had asked him when he’d told her he was off to Holland to enlist as a physician in the army of the Prince of Orange, thus postponing their marriage.
‘The Spanish are butchering faithful Protestants in their own homes.’
‘Yes, in Holland. Besides, you’re not a soldier, you’re a physician.’
‘I can do some good. It’s why I trained. I fought hard for my doctorate. I won’t waste it prescribing cures for indigestion.’
‘But, Nicholas, it’s dangerous. The crossing alone—’
‘No more dangerous than Ipswich on market day. I’ll be back in six months.’
She had pummelled his arm in frustration, and the knowledge that she was refusing to weep until he’d gone only compounded his guilt.
&
nbsp; In the course of that summer campaign Nicholas had witnessed things no man with a soul should ever have to see. Things he will never tell Eleanor about. Sometimes he still dreams of the babe he’d found on a dung heap, tossed there on the tines of a pitchfork for sport by the men of Spain’s Popish army; and the starved corpses of children after the lifting of a siege. When the smell of roasting meat reaches him, he remembers the remains of women and greybeards herded into Protestant chapels and burned alive.
Not that the Dutch troops and their mercenaries had all been saints, not by any means. But he’d learned a lot that summer: how to tell a man his wound is nothing, that he’ll soon be up and supping ale in Antwerp, and sound convincing, when in fact you know he’s dying; how to drink with German mercenaries and still keep a steady hold on a scalpel; how never, ever to gamble with the Swiss… No one had cared then whether he belonged to the appropriate guild. There was no distinction made between physicians who diagnose and surgeons who get their hands bloody. No time to study the astrological implications when a man is bleeding to death before your eyes.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ Vaesy’s voice pulls Nicholas back to the present, ‘if you have studied your Vesalius diligently, you will note the following—’
With the help of his ivory wand and numerous quotations from the Old Testament, the great anatomist takes his audience on a journey around the infant’s organs, muscles and sinews. By the time he finishes, the dead child is little more than a filleted carcass. Dunnich, the barber-surgeon, has opened him up like a spatchcock.
To his own surprise, Nicholas is in a state bordering on numb terror. He thinks, God protect the child Eleanor is carrying from such a fate as this.
But there’s more. There’s the bucket beneath the dissecting table. It’s almost empty. There’s scarcely a pint of blood in it. And then there’s that second wound, the one on the child’s lower right leg, which Vaesy has apparently missed altogether, for the great anatomist has failed to utter a single word about it in all the time he’s been standing over the corpse. Nicholas describes it now in his mind, as if he were giving evidence before the coroner: one very deep laceration, Your Honour, made deliberately with a sharp blade. And a second made transversely across the first – towards its lower point.
