by S. W. Perry
The cold drizzle washes the colour out of Bankside. It beads the painted signs above the shop fronts and lodging houses with strings of watery pearls. The air smells of fresh horse-dung and the marrow scent of butchered bones emanating from the Mutton Lane shambles.
He pauses beneath the sign of a winged god holding a quill – Hermes, the guardian deity of writers and poets. He knows that most of the city’s booksellers lie behind St Paul’s, north of the river, where the Stationers’ Company can keep an eye open for proscribed writings or anything that might offend the Puritan Bishop of London. So perhaps this one has something to hide: Romish tracts or Italian erotica.
Inside, the shop is dingy. It smells of rag pulp and ink. Nicholas pulls the cloth-bound parcel out of his bag and opens it for the shop owner's inspection.
‘How much will you give me for these?’ he asks, looking down at his once-treasured collection of medical books.
A narrow lane ghostly with river mist. The upper storeys of the timbered buildings loom over him like the interwoven boughs of some dense, dark arbour. Raindrops cling to the jutting beams, unsure whether to freeze or fall. Jesu, the night is wicked cold.
Nicholas blows on his numb fingertips. He’s tired of pacing the lanes, tired of killing time. Time means memories. And the only way to kill the memories is more mad-dog.
The gaming house is called the Blackjack. Firelight beckons to him through the leaded windows. Inside, a young fellow with a fiddle is sawing out a jig. The tapster eyes Nicholas suspiciously, but wild men are not uncommon on Bankside, and this one at least has a little money to spend. It’s not a tapster’s job to ask how he came by it. ‘You’re not from the lane, are you?’ he asks casually.
‘I’ve come across the bridge.’
‘Searching for something? Work? A woman?’
‘The Wildgoose stairs. It’s hard to find them in the dark. I got lost,’ says Nicholas, realizing this exchange and his brief conversation with the bookseller earlier in the day are the nearest he’s come to normal human contact in weeks.
‘Follow the riverbank,’ the tapster says, signalling the direction with one thumb. ‘It’s that way.’
The lanes are tomb-dark when Nicholas leaves the Blackjack, with only the occasional candle burning in a window to steer by.
He’s following the course the tapster gave him. At one point he wonders if he should head inland for the Pike Garden. But he can imagine what discomfort awaits him there, vainly seeking sleep beneath a hedge. He’s bound to wake every half-hour or so with biting cramp brought on by the hard earth and the cold. He can’t remember when he last had the luxury of undisturbed sleep on a comfortable bed. Sometime in late July, he imagines.
The river mist is thickening. The inhabited world has somehow faded away while he was looking elsewhere. The vapour writhes around his legs like steam bubbling on the surface of a boiling cauldron. It plays tricks with him, making him hesitate, slowing him down. In the stillness he begins to hear voices in his head. At first the words are indistinct, ghost-like, then clearer:
Go away, Master Nicholas! It’s unseemly for you to see her.
It’s the Grass Street midwife he can hear. Then Eleanor’s mother Ann:
You’ll let the miasma in! You’ll bring misfortune! Away with you!
Suddenly, out of the mist, comes the rattle of the midwife’s holy stones as he casts them onto the floor of the lying-in chamber. He hears Fulke Vaesy’s voice like the tolling of doom’s own bell: A healthy womb is the fertile soil… the wholesome furrow in which the seed of Adam may take root.
The seed of Adam. Or the seed of a sinful father?
Nicholas finds himself at the bottom of an alleyway. He has no precise memory of how he got here. Ahead of him a wooden jetty thrusts out into the mist, weed-encrusted mooring poles set on either side at intervals of perhaps ten feet. Empty wherries bob on the tide, straining at their mooring ropes. Beyond them: blackness, and deep water. He realizes, with an odd sense of homecoming, that he’s reached the Wildgoose stairs.
You killed them, Nicholas, says his own voice in his head. You know you did. You put Eleanor’s child – your child – on the dissecting table for Fulke Vaesy to butcher. Accept it. Take the punishment.
Without hesitating, Nicholas Shelby steps onto the jetty and begins to walk out into the darkness.
The hedgerows are a different world in autumn. Her coat is too large. It lets in the wind and rain. Old when she stole it, it’s now in tatters. Elise longs for the days when the sunlight dazzled her as she kept watch over little Ralph, warmed her limbs, eased the muscles of her legs from the weariness of the road. She longs to go back to the time before the angel came.
She dreams of an early summer two years ago: she is lying on a truckle, the pull-out platform at the foot of a bed where a servant sleeps. But Elise is not a servant, though she suspects she’d be better off if she were. It has taken her all of a minute to realize that the Cardinal’s Hat is not the mystical place of imagined safety her mother is always telling her about. It is, in fact, a bawdy-house. The family have decamped here from their Bankside tenement, due to her mother’s inability to stay sober long enough to pay the rent.
They have come here with nothing. Her mother, Mary, does not even own the bed – though she is apparently trying to buy it. Elise knows this because several times a day her mother takes total strangers into it for money. This laborious purchase requires a religious devotion that even the Bishop of London would admire, with a great deal of devout groaning and grunting, and cries of Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!
With little Ralph left to crawl around the floor like a crippled crab, Elise has assumed all responsibility for him. She begs scraps from the Cardinal’s whores to feed him when Mary is too drunk or too busy to remember. She bathes him with water from the stone jug in the corner when Mary would happily let him stink. She even pours her mother’s arak out of the window when Mary is keeping the Cardinal’s Hat afloat all by herself.
When one of Mary’s customers knocks a tallow candle onto the truckle bed where Elise is sleeping, setting fire to the straw mattress and giving her a livid burn down one side of her young cheek, her mother seems indifferent. Elise, in extreme pain, has to go to St Thomas’s hospital by herself to beg for treatment. On the way, she decides things have to change.
Even then she waits. She is unwilling to abandon her mother entirely. She waits another eighteen months. By then Mary is clearly afflicted with a terrible malady that Elise can do nothing about. There is no money for physic.
A bright Bankside morning in June. Mary is snoring like a saint.
‘Remember that story Mam was always telling us, about there being somewhere better than this, somewhere where we’ll sleep on a goose-down bed and eat mutton every day?’ Elise asks as she hoists Ralph onto her shoulders, kissing his uncomprehending face on the way. ‘Well, I’ve remembered where it is. So it’s just you and me now, Ralphie. Don’t look back. We’re off to Cuddington!’
7
Until the moment he decided to go into that pitch-black river, Nicholas Shelby had believed in the Church’s teaching: that cutting off one’s own life before the allotted time is a great sin. And sin is easy enough to fall into, isn’t it? That’s why we need priests. So why has the sin of suicide proven so difficult to commit?
There was no fear that he can recall, just the darkness and the rank water pouring into his mouth. He remembers choking. He remembers praying that the end would come quickly, the sooner to be with Eleanor. But then, to his surprise, his body had begun to wrestle control away from his will. The ancient, instinctive fight to live had begun. He remembers his arms and legs thrashing and flailing, as though his body would have none of his mind’s wickedness. He remembers being carried on a strong current, the water roaring in his ears like the tormented howls of a bear in the baiting pit.
And the image of Eleanor drifting not nearer, but ever further away.
It’s been close. The disgusting sludge he’s ingested
while he’s been in the water almost does the job for him. But even in his delirium, he understands what’s happened: the river has vomited him out as though it can’t stand the taste of him.
For long, tortuous days he struggles against the fever, too weak to do much except lie in a bed he doesn’t recognize, sweating and puking like a child with the flux. He has no idea where he is. Indistinct figures administer to him. Through eyes inflamed by the river’s filth he can see them only vaguely. Sometimes Eleanor is amongst them. She tells him this spineless capitulation is not what she expects from a husband. Slowly, he begins to fight back.
At Nonsuch, John Lumley says to his wife Elizabeth, ‘He won’t have forgotten the slight, Mouse. It’ll fester in that scheming head of his like a pustule. I could kick myself for it.’
He calls her Mouse out of deep affection. A less mouse-like woman would be hard to imagine. Lizzy is twenty-five years his junior and as skilled as the chatelaine of a grand household should be. She wears her fair hair seemingly, beneath a white-linen coif, but her grey eyes glint with good humour and generosity. She buys trinkets for the chamber-maids when she goes to London. She treats the grooms, the kitchen scullions and the gardeners like friends. Lizzy Lumley is the perfect remedy for her husband’s northern chill – literally so, for she’s always chiding him about his reluctance to have the many Nonsuch hearths lit.
They are together in his reading chamber, a cosy room set off the great library. John is attending to his correspondence. Lizzy is at her needlework, a small white spaniel snoring contentedly on her lap. From the window the Lumleys can look down into the inner court, where a marble fountain in the form of a rearing horse flows with clear spring-water. The fountain is not just for show, the water being piped into the house so that the Lumleys may wash their hands under a spigot when they prepare for bed. No need for a servant to bring them bowls when they wake. When King Henry built Nonsuch, he built it for luxury.
‘What slight is that, Husband?’ asks Lizzy, looking up from her sewing. ‘And who won’t forget it?’
‘Do you remember in the summer I spoke of the little boy they took from the river – the drowned vagrant child?’
‘How could I forget, John?’
Indeed, how could she forget? The subject of children is one of the few thorns marring the otherwise-perfect bloom of their marriage. The other being her husband’s colossal debts to the Crown. When he’d told her of the drowned infant destined for Fulke Vaesy’s dissection table, she’d almost wept. Such talk of a young life cruelly ended brought back the ghostly presence at Nonsuch of the three infants borne by John’s late wife Jane, all dead in infancy, and the very real absence of any from her own womb to replace them.
‘When the Cecils last came hawking,’ John continues, ‘I somewhat carelessly mentioned that Sir Fulke’s lecture was about deformity in the limbs of crippled infants.’
‘Ah,’ sighs Lizzy, imagining the crook-backed Robert Cecil she knows: full of thin-skinned Protestant zeal for sniffing out insults to himself and the realm – especially to himself. ‘But that was ages ago. I’m sure by now he’ll have forgotten all about it,’ she says bravely. ‘Besides, you meant him no slight – did you?’
‘Intention is not the point, Mouse. You know what he’s like: for a Christian man, Robert Cecil has a strange understanding of mercy and forgiveness.’
‘Well, if anyone’s deserving of God’s mercy, it’s the poor little mite Sir Fulke cut up into pottage-meat.’
‘You’re right, of course, Mouse.’
‘Anyway, why do you bring it up now?’
‘His father’s written to me again,’ he says, lifting the letter as if it’s a particularly soiled rag, ‘regarding the Henrician loan. It set me thinking.’
‘Oh, that,’ says Lizzy despondently. ‘I thought the queen had agreed to another easement of terms.’
‘She has, but that won’t stop Robert Cecil trying to steal Nonsuch from me and making her a present of it.’
John Lumley’s fears are warranted. He’s inherited Nonsuch from his late father-in-law, Henry FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel. One of old Arundel’s parting gifts was to embroil him in a plan to buy up on the open market an ancient loan the late King Henry had made to a cartel of Florentine bankers. ‘We’ll cream a percentage off the interest by taking on the paper risk,’ Arundel had told him. ‘After all, who can you trust in this world if not a Florentine banker?’
But the Florentines had paid just one instalment, and that was thirty years ago. They haven’t answered Lumley’s letters since. With Arundel now in the grave, John Lumley is the sole debtor. It’s only his friendship with the queen that forces Burghley to sign these waivers on the interest.
‘All I know is that John Lumley is more than a match for little crook-backed Robert Cecil,’ says Lizzy to the snoring spaniel. ‘Isn’t that so, Nug?’
‘You’re a wondrous boon to me, Mouse. I’d go down without you – you know that?’
‘The queen is steadfast in her friendships, John,’ Lizzy assures him with a smile. ‘She’ll not abandon you, whatever the Cecils tell her.’
Through the window John Lumley watches the wind snatching at the water in the courtyard fountain. The spray makes the marble horse look as though it’s in full gallop, barely a stride away from dashing itself into oblivion against the white ashlar walls of Nonsuch. He can almost feel the fatal impact of sinew and bone against stone. ‘Aye, Mouse,’ he says. ‘But these days there are so many plots against her. I fear she cannot risk being as steadfast as once she was.’
Lizzy fixes him with a concerned eye. ‘There’s nothing else, is there, John – other than the money? You’d tell me if there was?’
Lumley doesn’t answer at first, though by the tone of Lizzy’s voice, he ought to. He just stares at the fountain. Then he says, almost to himself, ‘No, Mouse. Nothing. But that won’t deter Robert Cecil.’
Elise dreams of the angel again.
First comes the blinding sunlight, then the silhouette of a woman stepping out of the trees on that country lane. Next, the blessed relief as the angel lifts Ralph from her shoulders and hugs him to her breast, soothing his fractious mewling. ‘Rest awhile, child,’ the angel says. ‘What are you doing out here alone with such a burden?’
‘I am running away from my mother, who is a bawd and often in drink,’ Elise replies in her dream. ‘It is not safe to live with her any more.’
‘But where are you running to, child?’
‘Ever since I was a little girl, my mother has told me stories of a grand house and a rich relative, in a place called Cuddington,’ Elise says, reciting the tale Mary had told her so often, before her descent into arak-induced silence. ‘That is where we’re going. But God has crippled my little brother Ralph because I talk too much, so as a penance I’m taking him there on my shoulders. We shall sleep on a goose-down mattress and not have to eat scraps that make my insides hurt.’
‘But I know an even better place,’ the angel tells her.
Waking from the dream, Elise remembers wanting so much to believe the angel that she’d never thought twice about following her.
In the angel’s house she’d been baptized in a tub of warm soapy water. Elise had never had a bath before. At first she refused to climb in, terrified it had no bottom and that she would sink without trace into the depths. With almost unbearable gentleness, the angel had calmed her, bathing the right side of Elise’s face where the skin was gnarled like tree bark from the time that customer of her mother’s had set fire to the truckle bed.
When the angel had come to her again a few days later with the news it was time to move elsewhere, Elise had offered not the slightest objection.
Why should she? Who on earth would not trust an angel to lead you to heaven?
8
The second day of November, All Souls’ Day. The day to remember the deceased. The perfect day on which to return from the dead.
He is lying on a straw mattress, half-wrapped in a crump
led sweat-stained sheet, wearing someone else’s patched nightshirt. A splash of grey light slants across his chest. When he searches for its source, he sees a small leaded window set into the wall. And he sees it clearly.
Pressing his face to the glass, Nicholas imagines he’s weeping. Then he realizes he’s staring at raindrops pattering on the outside.
The window opens easily. He breathes in the chill air. Raindrops strike his face, run down his cheek. He is too exhausted to know whether to give thanks for his salvation or let the torment return. So he remains in a state of undecided numbness.
He’s looking out over the low rooftops towards the Thames. For an age he stares at the great grey watery beast that stalks across his field of vision, the tide tugging at the anchor chains of the little ships moored upriver of the bridge, the Long Ferry heading east towards Gravesend, carrying outbound passengers to the traders moored in the Hope Reach.
He can hear the bellowing of cattle. He looks to his left and down. Is that the entrance to Mutton Lane? If it is, then the sound must be coming from the slaughtermen at work in the Mutton Lane shambles. Close by, a church bell rings eight. If he’s right about the shambles, then it’s the bell at St Mary Overie. He can’t be more than a few hundred yards from where he went into the river.
But when was that? How much time has passed since then? He has no idea.
And then the door opens.
For a while he just stares at the young woman standing in the frame, not knowing what to say. He wants so desperately for her to be Eleanor.
But, of course, she isn’t.
She is, though, a comely young woman, Nicholas notes in a detached way, as if he were registering the beauty of a flower or a sunset. How else is he to regard feminine attractions now, after Eleanor?
