‘How so, Lady Vaesy?’ asks old Lopez, the Portuguese Jew, one of the queen’s doctors.
‘Lady Vaesy is not suggesting the impossible,’ says Lumley. He seems to be enjoying this. ‘Abbess Hildegard was practising medicine in the Palatine five hundred years ago. Before the Moors were ejected from Spain, they could count any number of female physicians. Yet all we have in England are a few practitioners of folk law.’
‘Whom we shall shut down, just as soon as the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London allow us,’ says Beston, who’s utterly misunderstood John Lumley’s meaning.
‘It is not right to challenge the order God has imposed upon us,’ says Baronsdale firmly. ‘On the way here, I saw a band of itinerants grubbing for food in the ditches. Would you have them raised to the state of princes?’
‘I would have them fed,’ says Kat.
Beston pulls a face, suggesting Kat’s got it all wrong. ‘And they are fed, madam.’
‘Have you asked them, sir?’
‘There is no need. For those who have fallen upon calamity through no fault of their own, the state and the Church provide alms and charity. The ones Master Baronsdale was referring to were of another sort entirely.’
‘Ah, yes,’ says Kat. ‘The undeserving poor. I wondered when we’d get around to them.’
‘Exactly, madam – tinkers, feckless vagabonds and the like. For them, there is the law: the scourge and the whip.’
‘God’s order?’
‘Incontrovertibly,’ says Baronsdale.
The physicians leave. John Lumley is almost the last to go. He kisses Kat’s hand and gives her a conspiratorial smile. ‘Thank you, Kat. Deliciously piquant, as usual – the food, I mean.’
‘Commend my affections to Lizzy, my lord,’ she replies. She likes John’s new wife almost as much as she liked Jane.
‘I shall, madam, gladly.’
As Lumley turns away, Fulke Vaesy favours his wife with no leave-taking other a hard stare of reproach. He calls angrily for a servant to saddle his horse.
Once more mistress of Cold Oak manor, Kat walks in the orchard to rid herself of the cloying remembrance of her husband and his companions. She pauses before the row of beehives standing like white headstones amongst the trees. She thinks back to when she was fifteen, the year she married Fulke. He’d been thirty-five then, the very age she is now, and physician to John Lumley. She can still picture her father’s letter. He’d not even had the courage to tell her to her face:
Daughter, be dutiful unto me and agree to my will, which is that you make a marriage…
Kat cannot make that young girl fit the person she is now. That person – that child – had harboured fanciful dreams of a life rich with bliss, a handsome gallant of a husband by her side, a house full of children, a life married to the man she already adored – a man most certainly not Fulke Vaesy.
And then, with that letter, her father had slammed the door on every one of them.
She wonders idly if Fulke still wants her, the way he did when she was fifteen. She hopes so. Twenty years of hunger would be small enough penance for what he did to her.
6
A little before noon on a dreary Wednesday in mid-October, a young man in a dirty canvas doublet, his beard and coarse black hair matted and wild, fights his way through the crowds on London Bridge. A band of apprentice boys going south for some sport amongst the stews and taverns on Bankside call him a vagabond and kick out at his shins as he passes, but most people make way for him. He looks like a fellow you’d not care to tussle with.
Several times already he’s been stopped by the city’s law officers, who touch their cudgels discreetly, to let him know they will take no nonsense from a vagrant. With these men he becomes deferential, somehow smaller, fills less space. He means them no trouble. He’s not a peddler or a purse-diver, he assures them – just an honest man who’s fallen on difficult times. They let him pass.
He carries no visible possessions other than the clothes he wears and a leather bag slung over his left shoulder. It used to hide his physician’s gown, when he was drinking in the White Swan and didn’t want every man and his dog stopping by to discuss their maladies. But he threw away the gown a few paces back, not even bothering to watch as it sailed out on the wind through a narrow gap between the timber-framed houses that cling precariously to the side of the bridge. It’s probably wrapped now around the mast of some salt-bleached Baltic trader moored in the Pool. All that remains in the bag is a parcel wrapped in cloth. He’d throw that after the gown, too, but the houses here are too close-packed to get a decent shot.
He emerges into Southwark beneath the great stone gatehouse that guards the southern end of the bridge. Ringed about its top, like the points of a crown, is a grinning crop of traitors’ heads, all the colours of an artist’s palette, from bleached white to the purple-black of rotting plums. Used to people staring at him now, he senses the eyeless sockets peering down at him as he passes below. Pop up here with us, Nicholas Shelby, they seem to be saying to him. You’re dead anyway, so what does it matter? The view’s grand and there’s all the maggots you can eat.
Southwark is its usual venal self today: the mud and shingle rising towards the houses along the bank, the occasional grand building poking above the hovels like a pearl sitting in horseshit. The drabs, the cats and the flesh-brokers have braved the cold to ply for business. The more successful of them wear winter cloaks neatly trimmed with rabbit fur; the rest look as grey as the sky and close to starvation. They don’t trouble him; they know wild men are dangerous. And though he longs for the warmth of female arms around him, they could only ever be Eleanor’s, so that comfort has gone for ever. Besides, he has no money left to pay for a whore. He doesn’t even have enough for a jug of knockdown. For the first time in weeks he’s sober.
With the wind at his back, he heads deeper into Bankside, skirting St Mary’s church, making for the bear-garden and the open fields beyond. The flags flying skittishly above the Rose theatre signal there’s a play on: The Lord Admiral’s Men are performing Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. If he had just a penny left, he’d pay to stand in the pit with the groundlings, hoping the warmth of their bodies might comfort him.
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.