His wild demeanour begins to alarm even Harriet. Tearfully, she finds employment with a draper’s family on Distaff Lane. Nicholas barely notices. Nor does it seem to trouble him when, with increasing rapidity, his clients start to seek the safer counsel of other doctors.
The leaves are turning. It’s autumn. The curfew bells ring out at nine prompt. Then the taverns empty, the city gates slam shut, and men and women of modesty and goodly keeping bolt their doors. They read from their psalters, talk over the day’s business, tuck themselves up in their beds like hens in the coop. To keep the foxes at bay they have the bellmen, stout fellows who roam the empty streets bearing horn lanterns and accompanied by dogs the size of three-headed Cerberus. In the lanes of Grass Street ward, these watchmen save Nicholas from a kicking or a purse-cutting on more than one occasion. They are gentle with him. They know him. After all, didn’t he cure Ned Tate’s wife of the quatrain fever last Candlemas? When Davy Trow got that dose of French gout from a bawdy-house in Southwark, didn’t Nicholas prescribe mercury at half the usual price? With increasing concern for his safety they pick him up, brush him down and send him home.
His clients, however, are all gone now. They’d rather trust their symptoms to the fall of a dice than to a wild-eyed madman, a Tom-o-Bedlam, a fellow with the suffering of Christ in his eyes. Who’d want to be bled by a physician who can barely stand up, let alone hold a blade still?
‘I swear Lucifer has him by the throat,’ says the last one to go, a haberdasher named Hawes, whose child Nicholas cured last Easter of painfully inflamed gums. ‘Does he think he’ll not marry again? She was only a wife, for Jesu’s sake. A fine and comely one, I’ll grant you, but the way he’s carrying on, you’d think he’d lost the blessed Virgin herself.’
London is a dangerous place in which to lose your mind. Almost every second man carries a blade of some sort. Thus far, Nicholas has escaped with little worse than bruises as he gets expelled from almost every tavern between the Fleet ditch and Fish Street Hill. He picks quarrels for no apparent reason. He gives no thought as to how long his luck might hold.
At the sign of the Green Falcon he gets thrown into the gutter when he discovers – after more jugs of stitch-back than he can accurately count – that an expert cut-purse has neatly filleted away his coin, leaving no evidence of the attack other than a neat tear in his cloak. Given the number of people Nicholas had barged into on the way there, it could have happened at any point over a distance of quarter of a mile, say between the Old Jewry and the top of St Clements Lane.
His closest brush with a prison cell comes on a windy Friday afternoon in early October. On a drunken whim he returns to the office of Coroner William Danby at Whitehall. He’s become convinced that the child on Vaesy’s dissection table was Eleanor’s child – their child – delivered before her death. He also imagines, for no reason a sane man might entertain, that Coroner Danby gave the boy to Fulke Vaesy to cut up so that Nicholas would never learn the name of his only son. Wild-eyed amongst the sober lawyers and functionaries of Whitehall, he somehow gets as far as the office of the coroner’s clerk.
‘I want a headstone, at St Bride’s churchyard, where he’s buried,’ he cries, remembering that Vaesy had told him that’s where the remains had been taken. ‘But I need a name to put on it! Why won’t you tell me his name? Why is Coroner Danby hiding it? Why did Fulke Vaesy bleed him empty before I got to the Guildhall?’
Why?… why?… why?
The clerk is so terrified he drops his pen and his mortuary rolls and flees.
Madmen are not generally welcome at Whitehall. Nicholas escapes being thrown into the dungeons only because he’s put on his doctoral gown in an effort to give himself more dignity. As it is, the halberdiers who throw him out ensure he crawls away like a whipped dog.
He returns to the riverbank. He stands in the shallows as though he’s waiting for converts to baptize. He’s indifferent to the ice-cold water and the bruises the Whitehall halberdiers have inflicted. The arak is coursing through him like fire.
He’s contrived to convince himself this is the spot where the child was pulled from the river – the Wildgoose stairs on Bankside. It’s not. He’s on the northern shore, a little east of the Queenhithe moorings, at the foot of Garlic Hill. But in his present state he could be standing on the banks of the Rhine and still believe he was in Southwark.
Only now he’s in possession of a name.
‘Were you there when they pulled my Jack from the river?’ he shouts alarmingly to a stout woman grubbing for shellfish on the shingle.
Jack, if it’s a boy… Grace, if it’s a girl…
To the inhabitants of the tenements along the riverbank, raving drunks and madmen are as common as the tide. The woman lays down her basket of whelks and oysters, straightens up and massages her aching back with her muddy hands.
Nicholas wades out of the water like a survivor from a shipwreck. ‘A boy of about four or five,’ he says, slapping his thighs with hands turned rosy by the cold. ‘Crippled in the legs–’
To his amazement, she answers, ‘Oh, aye. I remember such a fellow.’
The heat of the arak in his veins turns into a warm flood of hope and yearning. ‘You do?’
‘In the summer – around last St Swithun’s Day, if I recall.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘I thought you said his name was Jack,’ the woman says, frowning.
‘Did you speak to him?’
The woman gives him a sly squint. ‘D’you think these here cockles jump into this basket by themselves?’
Nicholas fumbles in his purse for a penny. The woman turns the coin over in her hand to see if it’s been clipped. Apparently satisfied, she nods across the broad expanse of grey-brown water to where the low roofs of Bankside stand like a palisade before the Rose theatre and the bear-pit.
‘It wasn’t on this shore,’ she explains. ‘I’d gone across the bridge to fish the other bank. That’s when I set eyes on them.’
Something akin to joy surges in Nicholas’s deluded breast. ‘Them? You saw Eleanor, too?’
‘Was that her name – Eleanor?’
‘She was my wife.’
The woman gives him a suspicious stare. ‘Your wife? Mercy, she can’t have been more than thirteen. I thought at the time, how can a maid of such tender years bear the weight of a crippled young boy on her back without complaint?’
Even in his present delirium Nicholas is still able to distinguish the difference between Eleanor and a thirteen-year-old maid. His heart sinks. ‘I want to know about the child,’ he demands, reaching out to clutch the woman’s arm.
‘What is there to tell?’ she asks nervously, avoiding his outstretched hand and causing him to lose his balance on the shingle. She’s decided she doesn’t like the look of him after all. Too much of a zealot by half, she thinks. She shrugs. ‘He had the marks of Christ’s crucifixion on his limbs, and a lamb with a halo trotting at his side, for all I know. What’s it got to do with me?’
Now believing that she’s been trying to gull him all along, Nicholas tries to snatch back his coin. The woman evades his grasp. She throws down the penny as if it’s burning her palm and puts as much distance between herself and the madman as she can, leaving her basket where it lies – and Nicholas with no notion of how close he’s come to the truth.