The gaming house is called the Blackjack. Firelight beckons to him through the leaded windows. Inside, a young fellow with a fiddle is sawing out a jig. The tapster eyes Nicholas suspiciously, but wild men are not uncommon on Bankside, and this one at least has a little money to spend. It’s not a tapster’s job to ask how he came by it. ‘You’re not from the lane, are you?’ he asks casually.
‘I’ve come across the bridge.’
‘Searching for something? Work? A woman?’
‘The Wildgoose stairs. It’s hard to find them in the dark. I got lost,’ says Nicholas, realizing this exchange and his brief conversation with the bookseller earlier in the day are the nearest he’s come to normal human contact in weeks.
‘Follow the riverbank,’ the tapster says, signalling the direction with one thumb. ‘It’s that way.’
The lanes are tomb-dark when Nicholas leaves the Blackjack, with only the occasional candle burning in a window to steer by.
He’s following the course the tapster gave him. At one point he wonders if he should head inland for the Pike Garden. But he can imagine what discomfort awaits him there, vainly seeking sleep beneath a hedge. He’s bound to wake every half-hour or so with biting cramp brought on by the hard earth and the cold. He can’t remember when he last had the luxury of undisturbed sleep on a comfortable bed. Sometime in late July, he imagines.
The river mist is thickening. The inhabited world has somehow faded away while he was looking elsewhere. The vapour writhes around his legs like steam bubbling on the surface of a boiling cauldron. It plays tricks with him, making him hesitate, slowing him down. In the stillness he begins to hear voices in his head. At first the words are indistinct, ghost-like, then clearer:
Go away, Master Nicholas! It’s unseemly for you to see her.
It’s the Grass Street midwife he can hear. Then Eleanor’s mother Ann:
You’ll let the miasma in! You’ll bring misfortune! Away with you!
Suddenly, out of the mist, comes the rattle of the midwife’s holy stones as he casts them onto the floor of the lying-in chamber. He hears Fulke Vaesy’s voice like the tolling of doom’s own belclass="underline" A healthy womb is the fertile soil… the wholesome furrow in which the seed of Adam may take root.
The seed of Adam. Or the seed of a sinful father?
Nicholas finds himself at the bottom of an alleyway. He has no precise memory of how he got here. Ahead of him a wooden jetty thrusts out into the mist, weed-encrusted mooring poles set on either side at intervals of perhaps ten feet. Empty wherries bob on the tide, straining at their mooring ropes. Beyond them: blackness, and deep water. He realizes, with an odd sense of homecoming, that he’s reached the Wildgoose stairs.
You killed them, Nicholas, says his own voice in his head. You know you did. You put Eleanor’s child – your child – on the dissecting table for Fulke Vaesy to butcher. Accept it. Take the punishment.
Without hesitating, Nicholas Shelby steps onto the jetty and begins to walk out into the darkness.
The hedgerows are a different world in autumn. Her coat is too large. It lets in the wind and rain. Old when she stole it, it’s now in tatters. Elise longs for the days when the sunlight dazzled her as she kept watch over little Ralph, warmed her limbs, eased the muscles of her legs from the weariness of the road. She longs to go back to the time before the angel came.
She dreams of an early summer two years ago: she is lying on a truckle, the pull-out platform at the foot of a bed where a servant sleeps. But Elise is not a servant, though she suspects she’d be better off if she were. It has taken her all of a minute to realize that the Cardinal’s Hat is not the mystical place of imagined safety her mother is always telling her about. It is, in fact, a bawdy-house. The family have decamped here from their Bankside tenement, due to her mother’s inability to stay sober long enough to pay the rent.
They have come here with nothing. Her mother, Mary, does not even own the bed – though she is apparently trying to buy it. Elise knows this because several times a day her mother takes total strangers into it for money. This laborious purchase requires a religious devotion that even the Bishop of London would admire, with a great deal of devout groaning and grunting, and cries of Jesu! Jesu! Jesu!
With little Ralph left to crawl around the floor like a crippled crab, Elise has assumed all responsibility for him. She begs scraps from the Cardinal’s whores to feed him when Mary is too drunk or too busy to remember. She bathes him with water from the stone jug in the corner when Mary would happily let him stink. She even pours her mother’s arak out of the window when Mary is keeping the Cardinal’s Hat afloat all by herself.
When one of Mary’s customers knocks a tallow candle onto the truckle bed where Elise is sleeping, setting fire to the straw mattress and giving her a livid burn down one side of her young cheek, her mother seems indifferent. Elise, in extreme pain, has to go to St Thomas’s hospital by herself to beg for treatment. On the way, she decides things have to change.
Even then she waits. She is unwilling to abandon her mother entirely. She waits another eighteen months. By then Mary is clearly afflicted with a terrible malady that Elise can do nothing about. There is no money for physic.
A bright Bankside morning in June. Mary is snoring like a saint.
‘Remember that story Mam was always telling us, about there being somewhere better than this, somewhere where we’ll sleep on a goose-down bed and eat mutton every day?’ Elise asks as she hoists Ralph onto her shoulders, kissing his uncomprehending face on the way. ‘Well, I’ve remembered where it is. So it’s just you and me now, Ralphie. Don’t look back. We’re off to Cuddington!’
7
Until the moment he decided to go into that pitch-black river, Nicholas Shelby had believed in the Church’s teaching: that cutting off one’s own life before the allotted time is a great sin. And sin is easy enough to fall into, isn’t it? That’s why we need priests. So why has the sin of suicide proven so difficult to commit?
There was no fear that he can recall, just the darkness and the rank water pouring into his mouth. He remembers choking. He remembers praying that the end would come quickly, the sooner to be with Eleanor. But then, to his surprise, his body had begun to wrestle control away from his will. The ancient, instinctive fight to live had begun. He remembers his arms and legs thrashing and flailing, as though his body would have none of his mind’s wickedness. He remembers being carried on a strong current, the water roaring in his ears like the tormented howls of a bear in the baiting pit.
And the image of Eleanor drifting not nearer, but ever further away.
It’s been close. The disgusting sludge he’s ingested while he’s been in the water almost does the job for him. But even in his delirium, he understands what’s happened: the river has vomited him out as though it can’t stand the taste of him.
For long, tortuous days he struggles against the fever, too weak to do much except lie in a bed he doesn’t recognize, sweating and puking like a child with the flux. He has no idea where he is. Indistinct figures administer to him. Through eyes inflamed by the river’s filth he can see them only vaguely. Sometimes Eleanor is amongst them. She tells him this spineless capitulation is not what she expects from a husband. Slowly, he begins to fight back.