The descent is not yet complete, there is still a little way to fall.
A chill autumn night, a little after one. The drizzle turns the stones of Greyfriars a slick, dark silver. The watch hears muffled curses from the adjacent cemetery. They arrive just in time to prevent Nicholas Shelby being beaten to a pulp and what’s left of him being thrown into the river. His assailants disappear into the lanes.
Every watchman’s dog knows Nicholas as an old friend now. When they encounter him, they wag rather than snarl. He wakes painfully to the slippery kiss of snuffling jowls. He groans, curses and rolls over on his face, like a man trying to find a more comfortable position in which to sleep. One arm stretches out to grub at the soaking earth, as if he’s trying to pull a sheet over him.
If it was somewhere other than Greyfriars churchyard, the watch might let it pass. But Nicholas has been brawling on holy ground. The local justice of the peace is a very godly man and a great champion of the Vagrancy Act. So the watchmen haul Nicholas off to the Wood Street counter, where he spends the night on hard boards amongst a score of other prisoners, insensible to the stench and the squalor. He lies on his back, snoring like a parson. The watch leaves tuppence with the gaoler, so at least he’ll have some breakfast when he sobers up.
At Barnthorpe, the family has been troubled by the absence of letters. With the harvest safely gathered in, brother Jack borrows his father’s horse and rides down to London to investigate. Ann has told him what to expect, though she hasn’t revealed the worrying details to his parents. Jack visits the lodgings on Grass Street. Someone else is living there now.
He doesn’t give up easily. He finds his way to the Swan. There he talks to a brace of young physicians. We rather hoped you might tell us where he is, they say. If you see him, tell him Simon Cowper bears him no grudge.
Where else to look? There must be upwards of two hundred thousand souls in London. How do you find just one amongst such a multitude? Especially if – as it seems – he doesn’t want to be found.
For Nicholas Shelby, lapsed member of the College of Physicians, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth as though he’d never existed.
5
Cold Oak manor lies in a meadow bordering the Thames at Vauxhall, west of Lambeth Palace. Like many of the nearby houses and white-painted weatherboard cottages, it serves as a bolthole from the noise and stench of the city, and as a place of comparative safety should pestilence come. It is a fine house with mullioned windows, a tiled roof and a long meadow sloping gently down towards the river. Cold Oak belongs to Sir Fulke Vaesy, though he is seldom here. It is where he has all but incarcerated his wife, Lady Katherine – a nunnery no longer being available, since the late King Henry threw down the religious houses. For Kat’s part, the arrangement suits her just fine. She has her own household; she is well regarded by the neighbouring families. It is a pleasant enough life, except when he comes to visit.
Vaesy is here now. He’s been ambushed into it by the President of the College of Physicians, William Baronsdale, who expects his senior fellows to have tidy domestic lives.
‘Your place at Vauxhall would be ideal,’ Baronsdale had told Vaesy, when the question had been raised of how the College should celebrate the forthcoming Accession Day in a style fitting to Her Majesty. ‘We’ll all meet at Cold Oak to make our plans. What say you, Sir Fulke?’
What could he say? ‘To the Devil with that, I can’t bear to be in the same room as that witch of a wife’?
So here he stands, playing the part of the eminent man of physic, while the servants unwrap the newly arrived visitors like gift parcels on New Year’s Day. Looking on, while they bear away cloaks and hats for safe-keeping. Tutting when they leave little puddles of rainwater on the floor.
‘Come, Wife, and greet our guests,’ he calls to Kat, as though he and Lady Katherine are paragons of domestic harmony. In his heart he wonders what size of brick Kat will drop into the millpond this time, just to humiliate him. He already suspects the fellows of the College snigger behind his back: Have you heard? Fulke Vaesy can’t keep his wife in her proper place. And a man who can’t control his wife has only himself to blame if his servants thumb their noses at him and call him ‘sirrah’.
Kat has dressed in a simple gown of blue taffeta, the collar drawn back to show the lace sitting modestly around her neck. Her once-golden hair is bound severely beneath an embroidered French hood. She knows, from observing herself in the mirror glass in her chamber, and by the dove-like cooing of her maid, that enough of her once considerable beauty is on show today to turn the heads of her husband’s guests. If any of them shows so much as a gelding’s interest in her, she will flirt. Just to infuriate him.
At the foot of the stairs she pauses briefly to give John Lumley a dutiful curtsey. She’s known Lord Lumley for more than twenty years. She was a bridesmaid at his wedding to the late Jane FitzAlan, his first wife. Jane was Kat’s dearest friend, and she still misses her wise counsel. So John Lumley she will not flirt with. They are too close.
‘Welcome, gentlemen all,’ she says, addressing the assembled men of medicine. ‘It is a great sadness to feel so well in the presence of so many eminent physicians. Think of the wisdom I am denied!’ Her smile broadens with the appreciative murmur of laughter. ‘There are meats and pies in the parlour, and malmsey for those not too Puritan to drink at noontime. My husband will show the way.’
The guest parlour is a spacious wood-panelled room with a view over the orchard. On the table the servants have set plates of brawn, pastry chewets stuffed with minced lamb and dishes of spiced comfits. A maid is on hand to pour malmsey and smallbeer from pewter jugs. Some of the physicians wish to smoke, so a dish of embers is sent for, as they take out their clay pipes and stuff the bowls with nicotiana.
‘Lady Katherine is clearly a woman of rare facility, Sir Fulke,’ says Baronsdale as he indicates the laden table, without looking at her.
‘Proverbs tells us that a good wife is like a merchant’s argosy, bringing bread from distant places,’ Vaesy says with a wan smile.
Katherine replies with her eyes: in that case, Husband, may you founder on the sharpest reef and drown in the deepest of depths, where the worms that slither in the mud can feast on your bones. What she actually says is only a little less inflammatory.
‘Then how long must we wait, Mr Baronsdale, until a woman’s “rare facility” allows her to practise medicine?’
Baronsdale’s face is a picture of bewilderment. She might as well have asked him when the College could expect to license a monkey, or one of those strange beasts they keep in the menagerie at the Tower. Her husband seems equally nonplussed. The anger flares in his eyes.
‘I do not quite understand, Lady Katherine,’ says Samuel Beston, who once treated her father for pebbles in the bladder. ‘A woman, you say–’
‘Wife, be attentive to the serving, if you please,’ Vaesy warns with a smile as empty as her own.
Out of the corner of her eye, Kat notices John Lumley’s usually dour face crease with a barely constrained smile. He is the one person in this room she has no need to convince.
‘Come, Mr Beston,’ she says, revelling in her husband’s discomfort, ‘have I suggested we turn the world on its head?’
‘But, madam, there is an order in all things that must be observed,’ says Baronsdale. ‘And that is God’s order. Besides, a woman would not have the learning–’
‘But she could acquire the learning, couldn’t she?’