by S. W. Perry
A heavyset woman of about fifty sits on a stool beside the patient, watching her anxiously while singing a calming repetitive ditty. She wears a simple woollen kirtle, her grey hair spilling from beneath her coif. At first Nicholas assumes she’s the bawd, and the poor creature on the mattress is one of her drabs. The anger rises in him like a fire. Why has she waited so long before bringing her to a physician? She can’t possibly have been making any money out of this miserable wretch for a good year or more. He’s about to tell the bawd harshly that she’s lost her investment and, if that’s the only good thing to come out of the poor woman’s affliction, he’s glad. But then he sees that the woman on the stool is close to tears.
‘Who is this?’ he asks the foul-ward sister, indicating the patient.
‘Mistress Mary Cullen, sir. Brought in from Pale Lane in Bermondsey.’
He turns to the woman on the stool. ‘And you are?’
‘Widow Welford, Your Honour,’ says the woman on the stool, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. ‘Alice Welford. A neighbour.’
‘A neighbour – is that what you call yourself?’ asks Nicholas, wondering what kind of neighbour would wait until someone was close to dying of syphilis before seeking help.
Alice Welford smiles nervously, softening her boxy features and becoming almost motherly. ‘I used to look after Mary here when she was a squeaker, no higher than my knee. She used to come round for her bowl of paplar, regular. She’d have starved otherwise – her own mother was cup-shot by ten in the morning most days.’ She raises an imaginary glass to her mouth. ‘Runs in the Cullen family, I fear. I ended up doing the same for Mary, looking after her daughter – before this happened.’ She tilts her head to study Mary’s ravaged face. ‘Poor little duck. Is there any hope for her?’
Nicholas draws Alice aside. Mary Cullen may be blind and delirious, but who’s to say her hearing’s not acute?
‘I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing to be done,’ he says. ‘It was too late months ago. Why didn’t you bring her here earlier?’
Alice Welford frowns. ‘Mercy, sir, I would have done, I swear. But I haven’t seen Mary for a year at least. She turned up on my step just over a week ago. Hardly recognized her, the state she was in.’
‘She came to you for help?’
‘I tried – God’s precious wounds, I did. I paid out of my own purse for a balm from some napper in St Saviour’s market. Said he’d studied physic in Vienna. Didn’t work, of course.’
‘Well, you’ve done your best.’
‘How long – can you tell?’
Nicholas gives a sad shrug. ‘It’s hard to say. No longer than a few days.’
‘Only I can’t really afford to pay for a bed here, you see.’
‘I’ll make sure it’s put down to the parish.’
‘I should have taken her in years ago,’ the woman tells Nicholas vehemently, ‘before that sharper Michael Riordan showed up.’
‘Is that the husband?’
‘Mercy, no! Even Mary wasn’t that addle-brained. One of the canting crew, Michael was. A thief. Have your purse away faster than you could blink.’
‘Don’t tell me he put her on the street for money?’
‘No, but he might as well have. Left her with two sprats and nothing else. Not even a pot to piss in – saving Your Honour’s pardon.’
Nicholas smiles. ‘I’m not an Honour, I’m just Nicholas.’
He’s used to hearing the life stories of his patients. If this is the only epitaph Mary Cullen will ever get, well, what’s a couple of minutes spent listening to it?
Alice Welford studies him with eyes made wise by endurance. ‘Well, Nicholas,’ she says, savouring the name as though it’s something exotic – which to her it probably is, given that she’s unlikely to be on first-name terms with any other physician in London, ‘you can’t blame Mary for turning to the jumping-house to earn a crust, seeing as how that bastard Riordan left her with an infant son what couldn’t even stand on the two legs God gave him – can you?’
19
At Nonsuch, Fulke Vaesy has come for a morning’s hawking. Lizzy Lumley sends word to the kitchens to prepare for a man so intimately acquainted with flesh. The anatomist’s visits are seldom a comfortable experience for her; there will be endless talk of medicine, the College, the latest discoveries in science. She fears most of it will be beyond her comprehension. It will remind her she is not another Jane FitzAlan.
The Nonsuch cooks prepare a fine meal of pulled hare in blood-and-claret sauce, but to Lizzy’s despair, even the food cannot escape being pressed into the service of scientific debate.
‘Answer me this, Fulke,’ says John, lifting the fine pewter sauce jug from the table and examining it, ‘when the blood in this sauce was in the hare, it carried the animal’s life-force, did it not?’
‘Indeed it did,’ answers Vaesy. But in his head he replies with a question of his own: Have you laid aside your papist sympathies, John, or have you been consorting with England’s enemies again in secret? It’s important I know, lest Robert Cecil holds me guilty by association.
‘Yet once the blood is in the sauce,’ Lumley continues blithely, ‘it has no vitality whatsoever.’
‘That also is true.’
‘You and I could swallow a gallon of it, yet we wouldn’t suddenly leap up and start trading blows like two hares in springtime.’
Vaesy gives his host an indulgent smile. He explains that, in his medical opinion, the life-force does not leave the body with the blood. It remains within the organs, an invisible residue from the God-given life-force that’s carried on the air we breathe. But once again, like a spy’s cipher, every word of this explanation has an alternative meaning: You’re not hiding fugitive Jesuit priests at Nonsuch, are you, John? Only if you are and I’m to have any hope of becoming a queen’s physician one day, I’ll have to tell Robert Cecil about it.
‘Must we talk of blood at the table, Husband?’ asks Lizzy, eyelids tight shut.
‘But this is scientific discourse, Sweet,’ Lumley says, laying a fond hand on his wife’s shoulder. ‘You’ll find it interesting.’ Then, to Vaesy, ‘Take the sickness described by Abulcasis of Cordoba, for example – are you familiar with him?’
‘The Moor describes many maladies in his writings. Can you be more specific?’
‘I’m talking of the bleeding sickness, Fulke. When those who suffer from it cut themselves, the flow is most profuse, almost unstoppable. It can only be quenched with difficulty. Sometimes the bleeding cannot be stopped at all, and the afflicted die.’
‘That’s quite enough blood for one supper!’ cries Lizzy, rising from the table. ‘I’m going to invigorate my life-force with a stroll in the privy garden.’
The two men barely notice her leave, or her parting sigh of exasperation. Lumley calls a servant to pour more Rhenish.
‘Surely, Fulke, that must prove that the invigorating life-force is contained within the blood itself,’ says Lumley ardently. ‘After all, when the tyrant Nero sent word to the philosopher Seneca that he should open his veins and die, that’s exactly what happened – he died! And the same would happen to you or I. So the secret must lie somewhere in the blood.’
Vaesy lifts his spoon and waggles it in front of his chest to indicate his lungs. ‘But you discount something important, John: before the blood can become vitalized, first it must mix with what we physicians call in the Greek pneuma – the vital spirit with which God has filled the air around us.’
Lumley nods to show he’s keeping up, crosses his arms over his stomach and leans back comfortably in his chair. He enjoys these exchanges. It’s why he’s a patron of the College.
‘This pneuma is drawn in with every breath we take,’ continues Vaesy. ‘It is then boiled in the liver by the heat of the body, into what we term a concoction.’ He lays the spoon face-down on the table. Little rivulets of blood-and-claret sauce trickle down its back. He points to them. ‘Thus the enriched fluid flows in a tidal motion from
the liver to the organs, as they may require it.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Very simple. Very elegant. One of Our Lord’s cleverer creations.’
‘And the medical authority for this comes from where?’ asks Lumley as he gestures for a servant to remove his trencher.
The words slip out of Vaesy’s mouth as though someone else has control of his tongue. ‘Robert Cecil.’
Silence.
Lumley stares at his friend in bewilderment. ‘I had no idea Robert Cecil was a man knowledgeable of physic,’ he says. ‘I thought the law was more his field.’
Almost gagging on a morsel of hare, Vaesy splutters, ‘A s-s-slip of the tongue, John. The hawking must have tired me out. I meant to say Galen. It was most definitely Galen; he described the flow of the blood throughout the body! Twelve hundred years ago. It was indisputably Galen. I can’t imagine what prompted me to say otherwise.’ He takes a hurried sip from his glass. ‘Must be this excellent Rhenish.’
Lumley scoops up a little of the sauce on his right index finger. ‘Aye, I’m sure you’re right,’ he says, licking his fingertip. ‘As you say, all very simple and elegant. The problem I have is this, Fulke: is it true?’
Out in the cloisters, away from the grim oppression of the foul ward, Alice Welford seems altogether a lighter woman. She moves with a fluidity Nicholas hadn’t noticed before. As they walk he listens intently to the story of Mary Cullen’s short and troubled life.
‘Mary was a good girl – better than you’d think, considering this great trial she’s come to,’ Alice says wistfully. ‘That rogue Riordan came whistling through when she’d barely turned fifteen. Handsome bastard, he was – told everyone he’d fought almost to the death in the Irish wars. Truth was, he’d never been further west than Oxford.’
‘How old would this boy of hers be now?’ Nicholas tries hard to keep his voice slow and even.
‘Little Ralph? He was born the summer the harvest failed—’
Ralph.
To Nicholas, the name arrives like the view seen from the top of a hard-climbed hill. Ralph Cullen. ‘That would make him, what: four?’ he says, remembering the year his father had struggled to pay for his tuition at Cambridge because the fields at Barnthorpe had yielded half what was expected of them.
Alice Welford nods.
‘And Ralph was born with a malformation of the legs?’
‘As if the good Lord hadn’t given him enough to contend with, what with Michael Riordan for a sire and a souse-head for a dam.’
Nicholas allows himself a pause; he doesn’t want to sound too eager for information. Although he trusts Alice Welford not to invent, this is still Bankside. ‘You mentioned Mary had two children by this Michael Riordan. Who was the second?’
‘Oh, that was Elise, God bless her soul.’
Another name. Another slight lifting of the curtain’s edge.
‘Only she wasn’t the second,’ says Alice, ‘she was the first, if you follow me. By about eight or nine years.’
‘Elise was Ralph Cullen’s older sister?’
‘That’s right. Though whether Michael Riordan was the father is anyone’s guess – what with him travelling the road or getting taken up in the Bridewell. His visits were more erratic than the plague. And about as welcome, as far as we were all concerned.’
‘So that would make Elise about thirteen or so now?’
‘Give or take.’
The answer to his next question, he knows, might pass a sentence of death on Elise, daughter of Mary Cullen. If it’s ‘yes’, there might well be a fifth victim. ‘Tell me, Alice, was Elise Cullen also born crippled?’
Alice Welford takes his arm, like an aunt reminiscing with a favourite nephew. ‘Elise? Mercy, no! That child was born bonny. She has the constitution of a lion’s cub, like them they keep in the menagerie at the Tower. Needed it, mind.’
‘So she’s alive?’
‘No thanks to her mother. One of her customers at the Cardinal’s Hat managed to set fire to the mattress Elise was sleeping on, burned her on the face. I think that was enough for the poor lass. One morning, while Mary was in her stupors, Elise took up little Ralphie and left.’
‘Where is she now?’ Nicholas asks, as calmly as his racing thoughts will allow. ‘She ought to have the chance to make a settling with her mother, before she’s taken up.’
‘That I do not know, Master Nicholas. Honest, I don’t.’
‘Someone must know where’s she gone,’ Nicholas says, the tantalizing image of Elise Cullen already beginning to evade his grasp. ‘She can’t just have vanished.’
‘All I could learn from Mary was that sometime around last Pentecost the two little conies just disappeared.’
‘I have to find her,’ Nicholas says, now beyond caring what Alice Welford might make of his sudden interest in a young girl he has apparently never heard of until this moment.
Alice shakes her head. ‘I wish I could help you, truly I do. The thought of poor Elise carrying little Ralph on her young back down some dangerous road all by herself breaks my heart. I just hope she’s found somewhere safe for them both. They was always inseparable. Yes, that’s what she’d do – find a haven. And I’ll tell you this, Elise wouldn’t let nothing this side of Satan’s front door stop her.’
When Nicholas returns to the Jackdaw, Bianca says, ‘They’re back again.’
‘Who’s back?’
‘Leicester and Walsingham. The two snoopers Timothy spotted before Christmas. They’re sitting in the taproom as bold as two toads on a waterlily.’ She’s managed to make her face a mask of indifference, but she can’t disguise the concern in her eyes, or the tightening of her jaw. She leads him to the door. And there they are, huddled together at a corner bench; dressed like watermen, yet ignored by the other wherry crews.
Bianca has seen men like this before; she knows the type well enough. They’re tyranny’s minor mercenaries; little men who grow large off the fear their masters instil in others. She’d seen their sort in Padua, when the Office of the Holy Faith had come to her father’s house to accuse him of writing books contrary to God’s teachings. Only then they’d worn the rough brown cloaks of the clergy, not the assumed garb of Thames wherrymen. But they had the same look in their eyes: You might turn your noses up at us, but if you know what’s good for you, fear us.
‘Perhaps they just like the ale here,’ Nicholas says, trying to reassure her. ‘What is there for them to find? The Jackdaw is the least seditious drinking house in Southwark. You said so yourself.’
‘I just don’t like them, Nicholas. They offend me.’
‘Shall I throw them out?’
‘No, I suppose we’ll just have to suffer them. But I’m not having them run up credit. And tell Timothy to serve them last, from the old casks.’ She gathers her kirtle around her and steps boldly into the taproom, but not before saying, ‘You were looking a proper Jack-o’-dandy when you came in just now.’
‘Was I?’
‘Something’s happened, Nicholas, hasn’t it? Are you going to tell me? Or is everyone in this tavern hiding their hearts from me?’
‘Of course I can’t be absolutely certain that Ralph Cullen was the crippled infant taken from the river,’ Nicholas admits later, when he’s recounted his conversation with Alice Welford, ‘but I’d wager money on it.’
‘The poor little lambs,’ Bianca whispers, holding the tips of her fingers against her lips. ‘How they must have suffered so.’
The Jackdaw is almost empty, Rose and Timothy are tidying away. And although they left a good hour ago, the presence of the two informers still lingers. They seem far more threatening in the absence, as though the walls, the floor and the ceiling beams have become their proxy eavesdroppers.
‘Do you really think Elise Cullen is still alive?’ Bianca asks.
‘It’s a possibility. She left the Cardinal’s Hat with Ralph sometime around Pentecost. He was found at Wildgoose stairs some two months later. And we have to fac
e the possibility that his sister is one of the victims Ned Monkton missed, or who hasn’t yet washed up on the riverbank.’
‘But she could have escaped?’
‘Yes, she could. Elise Cullen may still be alive. But what she knows of the other deaths – who can say?’
Bianca leans across the table towards him, resting her chin in her hands, studying his face carefully. Her skin gleams with a sheen of perspiration from the heat of the taproom fire. An unruly twist of ebony-coloured hair has broken loose from beneath her simple linen coif. It hangs over her right temple, a brave standard waiting to be unfurled when battle is joined. Her eyes challenge him as she says, ‘A diagnosis, please, Dr Shelby.’
He considers his answer for a moment in silence, then says, ‘Ralph Cullen – if that’s really the little boy on Vaesy’s dissection table – was taken from the river at Wildgoose Lane. Jacob Monkton was taken out by the Mutton Lane stairs. Of the two other bodies Ned Monkton told me about, one washed up just this side of Winchester House, the other in front of St Mary’s.’
‘Is that significant?’
‘I believe it is.’ He looks around the taproom as though searching for someone. Then he rises to his feet, saying, ‘Be patient. Wait here a moment. I’ll find out if I’m right.’
Bianca’s gaze follows him as he walks over to one of the few remaining drinkers, a wherryman named Slater whose daughter Nicholas has treated for an excess of phlegm. The two men exchange words, though she cannot hear what is said. When Nicholas returns, there’s a grim smile of satisfaction on his face.
‘Well, I’ve been patient – in my own tavern,’ Bianca says, with a challenging frown on her face.
