by S. W. Perry
At the bottom of the chest Nicholas finds an almanac – is it for astrology, or to predict the tides at Bankside? – and a few sheets of parchment filled with incomprehensible notes laid into a diagonally drawn grid, all scribbled in a small, tight hand.
And then he lifts out a fragment of paper. It’s about the size of a primero card. It looks as though it’s been torn from a larger sheet. He holds it up to get a closer look. It’s covered with what at first glance are random symbols and words:
… 3 qtr. moon… imperfect flow… »… dominant black bile… three onz. / one turn glass… new moon / mortem / three turns glass…
John Lumley leans over his shoulder. ‘What does it mean? It looks like an incantation. Is it a spell? Is it witchcraft?’
Nicholas reads again. And suddenly the meaning of the message takes on an awful clarity.
‘The symbols are astrological,’ he says.
‘A horoscope?’
‘Oh, it’s much more than that. Look: there’s Aries, and Libra… then the phase of the moon. That fixes the date on which the observations were recorded. The last line is the clearest. If I’m right, on the night of the new moon during the ascendancy of Taurus – sometime in late April, early May last year – it took three turns of the sandglass for one of Quigley’s victims to bleed to death. Little Ralph Cullen – God save his soul – wasn’t even the first.’
In Lumley’s privy chamber Lizzy sits as still as a statue, gripping her husband’s hand for support. She is wondering if King Henry built Nonsuch strong enough to withstand the shocks it has endured of late. Nicholas watches them both, detached, like a passer-by at a funeral.
‘It grieves me beyond sufferance, Mouse, but I cannot fault Dr Shelby’s reasoning. I have been harbouring a monster at Nonsuch.’
‘I always thought him a cold and secretive man, John. But this—’
‘He never got over Mathew’s death; I’ve always known that. But what terrible corruption in his soul made him take this course, only Satan himself knows.’
‘Something Joanna told me this morning – it makes sense now.’
‘Joanna?’
‘She said Gabriel came to her in the small hours. He told her that you’d called for Elise. He said he was to bring her to you.’
‘I never did such a thing, Mouse. We were together, you know it.’
‘She sent him packing – told him if you needed her so urgently at such an hour, you should come yourself.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Husband, have you quite forgotten the night’s commotions? Besides, at the time it meant nothing to me.’
‘But why would Quigley need to do her harm?’ Lumley asks. ‘He knows Elise can’t identify him. She didn’t see him. She said so in words he himself wrote down.’
‘Because she can identify his accomplice – the woman who imprisoned her and her poor brother. She can identify Quigley’s “angel”.’
‘So if Tom Parker hadn’t managed to raise a cry, she might have suffered the same fate as the one intended for Dr Shelby,’ Lumley says, appalled. ‘Thank Jesu I have such contrary servants.’
‘What will happen to Gabriel now, Husband?’
‘I don’t know, Mouse. I can’t imagine the Queen’s Bench will ever have tried such a case before.’
‘I know exactly what will happen,’ says Nicholas, remembering his footsore days trying to get the authorities to take an interest. ‘Absolutely nothing. He’ll use a lawyer’s defence: Prove it.’
‘But that fragment of parchment you found—?’
‘He could claim they’re observations of just about anything – the amount of water the shrubs in the privy garden need,’ Nicholas says cynically.
‘But I can bring the case to the ear of Sir John Popham, the Attorney General, if needs be.’
‘Do you remember, my lord, when Quigley advised you against placing Elise before a court? Well, he was right. With my history, I’m an unreliable witness. Bianca Merton has been accused of heresy and witchcraft. Elise Cullen is the bastard child of a Bankside bawd. Do I need to continue?’
‘You must ride to Tower Hill and confront him, John,’ Lizzy orders.
‘He hasn’t gone to Tower Hill, madam,’ says Nicholas. ‘He knows I’m alive. He’ll be wondering how long it will take for your husband to accept the truth of what I’ve told him. He’s probably already on his way to the coast. He’ll cross over the Narrow Sea and start again. They’ll find the next corpse in Bruges or Rotterdam.’
Silence, while the pale walls of Nonsuch wait patiently for the next assault.
‘Kat will be quite undone if she learns of this,’ Lizzy says. ‘It will destroy her. You know how much she loves him.’
‘Kat?’ echoes Nicholas. ‘Are you telling me Quigley had a wife?’
‘Jesu, no,’ says Lumley with a grim laugh. ‘Even I’m not so blind as to think Gabriel’s heart had space for such affections.’
‘Then who’s Kat?’
‘Katherine Warren,’ says Lumley, his grey eyes misting over with old memories. ‘Blessed with an angel’s beauty – that’s what we all used to say of Kat. She was a young maid sent to my late wife by her father, to learn a woman’s duties in a great household. She fell in love with Mathew – would have married him. Nothing would have pleased us more.’
‘Would have married? What happened?’
‘Her father forbade the match, because of Mathew’s sickness.’ Lumley pauses, a foolish look on his face as if he’s realized he’s telling a story Nicholas has heard before. ‘But of course you probably already know her, Dr Shelby. Kat Warren is now Lady Katherine Vaesy.’
44
At Vauxhall pale shafts of evening light cut through the mist rolling off the river. Kat Vaesy pulls her gown tighter against her body as she walks. Lost in thought, she barely notices the figure in a mud-stained riding cloak hurrying towards her from the house. When he calls to her harshly, she fears for a moment it’s Fulke. But this man is much leaner, there’s no bombast to his gait. And then she sees his face – and knows this is something far, far worse than any unannounced visit from her husband.
‘I had to see you, Kat,’ Gabriel Quigley says, seizing her arm.
‘Gabriel, let go, you’re hurting me!’ Kat demands, unnerved by the intensity in Quigley’s eyes. ‘Why have you come here? We agreed never to—’
‘The vagrant child you took up from the Effra ford last summer,’ he says, interrupting her, ‘the crippled boy—’
‘What of him?’
‘Did he have a sister?’
‘Yes, of course he did. I left her for you at the Lazar House, with the others.’
‘Well, I never saw her there. And now she’s at Nonsuch. We are discovered!’
‘At Nonsuch? How can she be? I ensured she was tranquil before I left. All you had to do was take her—’
‘She’s told Lord Lumley everything. It’s only a matter of time…’
Kat Vaesy takes Quigley by the shoulders of his riding cloak and – though she loves him for being Mathew’s brother – shakes him, like the little boy she has always suspected him to be. ‘Gabriel, the child cannot be at Nonsuch. The child is dead. Afterwards, you put her in the river with the others. Didn’t you?’
‘It was the summer before my first confinement in the Tower, Dr Shelby,’ Lumley tells Nicholas solemnly. ‘I’d returned from London to find Nonsuch in a state of great joy and celebration. Jane met me at the gatehouse. She told me Kat Warren and Mathew were to be wed. I couldn’t have been happier for them.’
‘And then Katherine’s father got in the way?’ Nicholas says.
‘Aye. He could not be moved by their love, or by my attempts to intercede on their behalf. I tried to reason with him. But a father’s governance is sacrosanct, is it not? That’s what God has ordained. And to be blunt, Mathew’s future was indeed bleak.’
‘So she married Vaesy instead.’
‘There was twenty years between them. I suggest
ed a delay, until Kat was a little older. I hoped a postponement might cause Fulke to look elsewhere. But John Warren said he didn’t want his daughter sitting in a bower all day plucking forget-me-nots and moping over lost love, not when she could be bearing sons.’
Lizzy gently rests her fingertips on her husband’s arm. ‘John, there was something Kat said to me at Cold Oak, when we last dined together – something about never letting Fulke Vaesy near me, if I should’ – she pauses to glance at Nicholas, colouring at the thought of revealing intimacies to a near-stranger – ‘if I should find myself bearing your child. What did she mean by that?’
Lumley stares at his feet and slowly shakes his head. ‘After the marriage, Kat soon fell with child. At the birth Vaesy intervened. Something went wrong – he never told me what.’
‘I know she lost the infant. I know she almost died,’ Lizzy says. ‘But I didn’t know it was Fulke’s fault.’
Lumley seizes a fistful of his beard as though he intends to rip it from his flesh in a gesture of atonement. ‘Vaesy was my physician then,’ he says. ‘He was also my friend. I hold myself partly to blame. I should have tried harder to persuade John Warren to listen to his daughter.’
Lizzy waits for him to look up. Then she says, ‘Fulke Vaesy’s actions were his own, Husband, not yours. You were not culpable.’
‘But I could have stopped all this, a long time ago – if I’d understood,’ he says bleakly, looking around the privy chamber as though it’s suddenly become a prison cell. He puts his head in his hands and whispers, ‘Not dearest Kat as well – not the two of them together. Does this nightmare have no end?’
In the darkening orchard the mist is spreading like the creeping fingers of a ghostly hand. ‘Merciful Jesu, how did you let this happen?’ whispers Kat Vaesy into the shadows.
Quigley is unsure if Kat is addressing him or the spirit of his brother. ‘I’ll find another way to silence Shelby and the child, I promise you,’ he assures her.
‘How?’
‘When he returns to Bankside. I’ll pay someone to stage a quarrel, or a robbery. That’s easy enough to arrange in Southwark.’
‘And the maid?’
‘I’ll try to think of an enterprise to get her away from Nonsuch. But she’s not the immediate danger. After all, she’s a whore’s daughter – who will believe a word that comes out of her mouth? We’ll say the Devil has put a vile mischief into her heart.’
‘That still leaves John Lumley,’ says Kat. ‘I’m loath to do it, but there’s no alternative. I’ll have to denounce him to the Privy Council – anonymously, of course. I’ll claim he’s plotting an act of treason. He’ll be too busy defending himself from a cell in the Tower to interfere. It’s a shame, of course – I’ve always admired him.’
Quigley has to lean against a tree to steady himself. He can’t believe what he’s just heard. ‘But Lord Lumley has been your friend and champion for some twenty years! And what of Lady Elizabeth – your friend?’
‘Oh, Gabriel, do you still not understand? If some hard things must be done to honour Mathew’s memory, then they must be done without flinching. Did you not fortify yourself with that thought, every time you pressed home the scalpel blade? Or were you only ever doing this for the sport of it?’
The accusation stings. Quigley shakes his head violently, as though he’s trying to throw off the memory of Ralph Cullen, Jacob Monkton and the others. ‘Perhaps we should lie low for a while. Or we could go out of England, into France or Holland, continue our work there. Europe is more open to new science.’
‘We don’t have time, Gabriel. We’ve come so far. We’re so very close. We cannot let these people stop us.’ Kat’s face is as close to his as a lover’s. ‘Imagine it: you and me – revealing to the great scholars of Europe’s universities the true wellspring of the blood. How it is really propelled through the veins and the arteries. How it nourishes the organs. Where it goes when it has worked its miracle.’ Her voice becomes soft, urgent, enticing him with its promise. ‘You and I will overturn a thousand years of medicine! Think how foolish my husband and the rest of them will look – these masters of physic who have only ever studied a dead criminal, or cut open some poor stray dog.’ She searches Quigley’s eyes for the resolve she used to see in Mathew’s. ‘Don’t you remember what he used to say to us when we doubted?’
‘I hear it every time I close my eyes to sleep. Sapere aude – dare to know.’
‘Then you know we owe it to Mathew to go on. It’s all been for Mathew!’
Quigley is spellbound. He stares into Kat’s face with open adoration – not secretly, the way he’s done for twenty years, always hoping she’d return his gaze the way she’d returned his brother’s.
‘Gabriel,’ she says, her voice an urgent caress, ‘is there anyone else who knows? Anyone?’
And then he remembers.
‘Shelby spoke of a woman – she owns a tavern on Bankside. I believe they are close… very close.’
I have found myself caught up in a tempest… no matter how much I might wish it, I cannot stop the wind from howling…
It’s howling now, inside Nicholas’s head. He lies in his chamber at Nonsuch trying to seize hold of the swirling memories of the past forty-eight hours. But like all things storm-blown, they’re almost impossible to chase down and catch.
He pictures Elise Cullen as she describes the horror she’s witnessed. He sees John Lumley weeping over Francis Deniker’s body in the chapel. He sees him again in his study, journal in hand as he tries to deny the truth that’s in plain sight. He sees Elizabeth Lumley’s despair as she finally accepts the truth about Katherine Vaesy. And, worse, he imagines Gabriel Quigley still at large, somewhere beyond his reach, preparing once more some helpless victim for his knife. Unable to sleep, Nicholas wishes he could catch these swirling thoughts and lock them away somewhere they cannot harm him – as Francis Deniker hid his heretical trinkets in a travelling chest with a good, solid lock on it.
And then John Lumley’s voice says softly in his ear: God has not yet made a storm that does not eventually abate, Dr Shelby.
And Nicholas – to his astonishment – discovers he’s right. The tempest stops howling. The competing thoughts in his head stop spinning. The chamber becomes utterly still, not even the trembling of Henry’s great clock troubling the night air.
One of these swirling images has given Nicholas the answer he’s been searching for. Throwing back the covers, he dresses hurriedly and sets off to rouse the master of Nonsuch, quite uncaring of the hour.
45
An hour before sunrise. Rush torches flare in the inner courtyard. Sleepy-eyed grooms check saddles and girth-straps, preparing the four horses for the fast ride to Richmond. From there it will be onwards by river to the city. Two servants, armed against cut-purses, have been sent ahead to wake the watermen.
Nicholas settles himself into the saddle. He’s wrapped against the pre-dawn chill in one of Lumley’s fur-lined riding cloaks. He leans forward and runs a hand along the palfrey’s neck, wondering quite who he’s trying to comfort: the horse or himself.
Lizzy reaches up to take her husband’s hand. Lumley leans down from the saddle and kisses her fingers. When the intimacy is over, Lizzy turns to Nicholas. ‘I still say this is madness, Dr Shelby. You could be delivering my husband into the hands of his enemies. Carry this knowledge with you – I will take pains to destroy you, if you do.’
‘In which case, madam, I will deserve it,’ says Nicholas.
Lizzy shakes her head. ‘To be honest, sirrah, I know not whether to count you amongst the saints or the sinners. If the plague comes again in the summer, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has the name of Nicholas Shelby scratched into its scales.’
The little party rides out of Nonsuch as the pale arc of dawn turns the trees on the eastern edge of the park into a spidery weave of black branches. Nicholas has tested his plan against all manner of catastrophes. He tells himself there’s no more he can do, that it�
�s futile to keep weighing the morality of the idea that came to him just at the moment when his thoughts were at their darkest. He’s resolved now.
He can think of no other way to stop Gabriel Quigley and Kat Vaesy, no other means of bringing them to justice. Fulke Vaesy wouldn’t listen. The Queen’s Coroner wouldn’t listen. The parish authorities and the Church wouldn’t listen. It’s too late for pleading. Now there’s no more time left.
This is the only way to be sure, he tells himself. And he must thank Francis Deniker for revealing it to him – even if it is from beyond the grave. Even if it proves what Quigley said in the gallery of the Nonsuch chapel was the truth: that Nicholas Shelby is not the physician, he’s the disease.
Slowly, magnificent Nonsuch fades behind them, a place of myth, unable to endure long against the violence of the real world. Soon it’s vanished from sight. ‘I pray you’re right, Nicholas,’ says Lumley to a chorus of screeching rooks. ‘Not so much for myself, but to stop them from further devilry.’ Then, remembering the love he’d once borne for Gabriel and Kat, he adds, ‘No, not devils – but good souls led astray. I know they have sinned mightily, but the price they shall pay will be a heavy one indeed.’
But Nicholas doesn’t feel like soothing Lumley’s conscience for him.
‘They didn’t stray, my lord. They’re not leash-hounds who’ve caught a scent and gone deaf to the call; they chose this path of their own free will. They knew what they were about. They made a mockery of the eulogy on Mathew Quigley’s grave.’
As they splash cross the Pyl ford, Lumley calls back to one of the two servants riding close behind, ‘Careful, Adam – according to Dr Shelby, you’re bearing the means of my deliverance. I don’t want it dropped in the mud.’
In the taproom, Rose believes her mistress is labouring over the tavern’s accounts. Ned Monkton worries she might be crafting a spell. Some of the customers fear she’s drawing up their reckonings. In truth, Bianca is planning her letter to Nicholas. She thinks, if he won’t write, then I will – and, mercy, how my news will stop him in his tracks.
