And, lastly, the one person who – to her surprise and delight – she knew: Jacob Monkton, the moon-faced poulterer’s lad from Scrope Alley.
‘Did the angel save you too, Jacob?’ she’d asked innocently. But he’d merely greeted her with sharp little noises, as though angry sprites were pinching his flesh. That was Jacob’s way. Most people in Southwark called him an addle-pate, though Elise knew he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
No, none of these could have been the Devil, thinks Elise, as she scurries over the crossroads and into the bushes beyond.
But that hadn’t meant the Devil wasn’t on his way.
10
‘Do you think we can trust him?’ asks Bianca as Rose laces her into her best carnelian bodice. They’re in Bianca’s chamber above the taproom of the Jackdaw. Rose is preparing her mistress for the meeting with the vintner from across the river. For the occasion Bianca has donned her blouse of Haarlem linen – no one can get linen as white and as fine as the Dutch – a kirtle of green brocade and her favourite bodice. The blouse will show off what remains of her Italian colour, and the green and the carnelian will flatter her amber eyes. If the finished article can’t get her a penny off a cask of imported malmsey, she thinks, she might as well pack up and go back to Padua.
‘If he’s even half a man, he’ll forsake the Vintry and take up residence here on Bankside at the first sight of you,’ giggles Rose as she moves in to tie off the last of Bianca’s points. ‘He won’t give a whirligig for the price of malmsey!’
‘I was speaking of our Master Nicholas, actually. We still know so very little about him. What say you?’
‘Master Nicholas? I think he’s a young gentleman dispossessed of his inheritance and unrequited in love,’ says Rose, a perpetually cheery young woman with a mass of brown curls that she’s forever brushing from her eyes.
‘Don’t be foolish, girl.’ Bianca lifts one arm so that Rose can tug the folds of the blouse straight.
‘Then he’s a lonely troubadour, searching for a mysterious damsel who comes to him in his dreams,’ suggests Rose, who in her spare time likes nothing better than to have Bianca recite romantic penny-ballads to her.
‘I can’t imagine they have troubadours in Suffolk, Rose. There’s little there but swamp and sheep. I know; I asked him.’
‘Then perhaps he’s sold his soul to save the woman he loves; condemned to wander eternity alone,’ says Rose, with more perspicacity than she knows.
‘At least we know now he wasn’t sent by the Grocers’ Guild to shut me down,’ says Bianca. ‘And not even the Bishop of London would go to the trouble of having his spy throw himself into the river, just to convince.’
‘I say a pox on the pizzles of the Bishop of London and the Grocers’ Guild,’ declares Rose.
‘He has physic, that much I’m sure of.’
‘How do you know, Mistress?’
‘You should have seen the look in his eye when I said I’d treated him with theriac.’
‘You said you were down to the last vial your father left you, Mistress.’
Bianca spreads her arms and turns a circle for Rose to check that all is correctly laced and in good order. ‘But we couldn’t let him die, could we? He’ll be our talisman. I know he will. And under that rough exterior he’s quite the gallant, don’t you think?’
‘Marry, Mistress!’ says Rose, feigning innocence through her curls. ‘And there was I, thinking it was the vintner you wanted to distract.’
On the Mutton Lane stairs no one seems to know what to do. They stare at the pale spreadeagled thing in the water and cover their mouths in shock. Someone mutters a prayer. Eventually a wherryman manages to snag the corpse with his boathook. He shouts for assistance, but no one – save Nicholas – wants to help fish a half-frozen corpse out of the river.
Alerted by the commotion, two slaughtermen in blood-stained leather aprons arrive from the shambles. They have the body out of the water in no time, laying it on the planks like a grotesque and sodden mannequin. It’s then that the waiting wherry passengers find an urgent need to choose another landing place. In a moment, the only living people left on the Mutton stairs are the two slaughtermen and Nicholas Shelby.
Nicholas is looking into the pale, bloated face of a young lad of maybe fifteen years. It has a bovine simplicity about it, a gentle moon of a face. The gulls have had the eyes. There are gnawmarks where perhaps a pike has had a nibble. But decay has not yet fully set in.
He must have been in deep water for a day or two before rising to the surface, Nicholas thinks. The veins show darkly below the mottled skin, as though he’s already begun his journey of transformation into a creature of the river.
But the most striking thing of all is the torso. It’s been opened up, the chest and upper abdomen little more than a gaping cavern the colour of rotten salt-meat. Inside, through the snapped-off ends of the ribs, the spine is clearly visible, tied in with cords of yellow fat. There is no heart, no entrails, nothing but a few gobbets of dark flesh where the knife has passed them by. The lad has been eviscerated.
‘You could ’ang that up in East Cheap market. I’d ask five shillings for it,’ one of the slaughtermen says.
‘He’s a bit ripe,’ says the other, laughing cruelly. ‘Call it game, an’ charge six.’
Nicholas Shelby doesn’t hear them. He’s too busy staring at the corpse. On the side of the left calf – deep enough to show a glint of white bone – the knife that did the filleting has also carved an inverted cross, deep into the alabaster flesh.
11
The parish constable arrives without anyone having appeared to summons him, as though he has a nose for the anonymous dead the river throws up almost daily. He’s a savage-looking fellow with a permanently suspicious frown and an unkempt beard. He carries a wooden cudgel, his unofficial mace of office. He’s accompanied by one of the parish watchmen: on Bankside, the law officers go around in pairs even in daylight. Nicholas doesn’t recognize them. They’re not the friendly fellows who took pity on him during his fall.
‘Anyone know who he was?’ the constable asks in a disinterested voice, glancing at the corpse leaking river water and live elvers that squirm on the jetty.
‘Looks a bit like young Jacob Monkton,’ says one of the bystanders who’s found the courage to return for a closer look at what the tide has cast up, ‘the poulterer’s son from Scrope Alley. The lad with the addled wits.’
‘Aye, it’s him aright,’ says another. ‘Someone should run and tell his brother, Ned. He’s been looking for Jacob a goodly while. Best cover him up before he gets here, though. If Ned sees him like this, he’ll start knocking holes in the brickwork. You know what he’s like.’
‘Whoever he is, he’s a treasonous young fellow, by the state of him,’ laughs one of the slaughtermen. ‘Looks like he got restless after they hanged and drawed him – decided to hop it before they got round to the quartering.’ He roars with laughter at his own great humour.
‘The internal organs have been excised,’ Nicholas Shelby tells the constable quietly.
‘Knowledgeable, are you?’ asks the constable.
‘No, not really.’
‘He must have fell off the bridge, got caught up in one of them–’ the constable says, pointing downriver to where the waterwheels are turning in the arches of London Bridge. Even at this distance, the noise they make as they spin in the current is clearly audible, an ominous whump… whump…