So that’s why I’ve been summonsed, thinks the great anatomist. This isn’t a casual chat about anatomy, this is an interrogation. A cold stone of fear suddenly hardens in his stomach. He can name men who have come to Cecil House and left their liberty at the door. There are cells – probably directly below where he’s sitting now – for those Lord Burghley considers enemies of the realm. The power of the Cecils is almost unlimited. And Robert Cecil thinks he’s a traitor because he’s been to Padua.
‘Master Robert,’ he says, suddenly full of humility, ‘I can assure you that physic was my only motive for going.’
‘And did you carry any letters between the noble lord and Padua, Sir Fulke? Any sealed letters?’
‘Only an introduction to the university chancellor. It was quite innocent, I promise you. I showed it to our president, William Baronsdale. He said it was the very model of such intercourse.’
‘Did it not occur to you it might have been encrypted?’
‘Encrypted? Why?’
‘To serve as secret communication between heretics!’
‘No!’
Vaesy feels the floor beneath his feet begin to crumble. He thinks he’s about to plummet conveniently into one of Burghley’s cells, where the manacles will be awaiting him. ‘Lord Lumley’s loyalty to the Crown is unimpeachable,’ he insists, somewhat croakily. ‘As is mine, Master Robert. Ask anyone!’
Burghley’s son draws himself up as though about to present a prosecution – a capital prosecution.
‘Your friend John Lumley has flown far too close to the wrong sun for his own good,’ he says. ‘By rights, he should have met a traitor’s end years ago!’
‘If Lord Lumley has ever been in error, Master Robert–’
Robert raises a hand to stop him. ‘John Lumley’s error – no, let us call it what it truly was: his treason – was to plot with his father-in-law, the Earl of Arundel, to marry the Scots whore, Mary Stuart, to the Duke of Norfolk. How easily some people forget. But not me, Sir Fulke. Not me.’
Vaesy fidgets uncomfortably. All this was years ago; Robert Cecil would have been barely out of his cot. But guilt by association, he knows, has been the undoing of many an innocent man. ‘That was all in the past, Master Robert,’ he says. ‘Norfolk paid with his life. Lord Lumley with his liberty. At the time I was merely Lord Lumley’s doctor.’
‘Even so, that marriage, Sir Fulke, would have established a Catholic claim to the throne. One lucky shot – one assassin’s ball fired though Elizabeth’s heart – and the Pope would have had England presented to him like a New Year’s Day present.’
‘I was never part of the faction, I swear it. I only ever saw the duke from a distance. We never exchanged but a word. And I would point out the queen was pleased to forgive Lord Lumley his… his… error.’
Robert Cecil laughs, though to Fulke Vaesy it sounds more like a bark.
‘My father’s hair is white and his constitution much troubled by Her Grace’s habit of forgiveness!’ He tests the tip of his quill. A small blob of ink blooms on his fingertip. It suggests to Vaesy the prick of a poisoned thorn. ‘You are oftentimes in Lord Lumley’s presence, in his house at Tower Hill, and at Nonsuch Palace. Is that not so?’
‘I am, Master Robert. But I would desist if you thought it best–’
‘He is open in your company?’
‘As any man is to his doctor.’
‘Exactly.’
So that’s it, thinks Vaesy. That’s why Robert Cecil has summoned me. He wants me to be his informer. He wants to make me his paid snoop, like the rogues he and his father employ to hang around in taverns listening out for careless drunken sedition. I’m to spy on John Lumley.
And if I refuse?
But Vaesy already knows the answer to that question: he will have made certain enemies of the two most powerful men in England.
Halfway up Black Bull Alley, Nicholas hears someone call his name.
‘Master Shelby!’
He stops, turns around.
‘It is Nicholas Shelby, the physician? I fancied I might bump into you soon enough!’
It takes a while for Nicholas to place the barrel chest, the ginger beard streaked with white, the wide forehead beneath the woollen cap. Faces seen during his fall have an uncertain claim on his memory. This one is no different.
‘It’s Isaac Bredwell, sir – the bookseller. Surely you must remember–’
And then Nicholas has him fixed: Isaac Bredwell is the man with the sign of Hermes hanging above his shop. He’s the bookseller who bought Nicholas’s collection of medical volumes, the man who has the last tangible pieces of the old Dr Shelby.
‘How do you know my name, Master Bookseller?’ he asks.
‘It was written in your volumes, sir. And fine volumes they were, too. Forgive me for saying so, but I did wonder later if they’d been stolen. You didn’t look much like a doctor when you entered my humble shop.’
Nicholas has only hazy memories of that day, but Isaac Bredwell’s strange little shop stands out more clearly than the rest.
He’d been surprised to find the bookshop there at all, wondering how the owner could possibly make a living in a place where barely one man or woman in five had the skill to read. The tiny place had smelled of linen pulp and of ink. Next to the piles of penny-ballads Nicholas had noticed a heavy wooden cudgel. Bredwell had told him it was to ward off the Puritan evangelicals, but Nicholas had reckoned he needed the weapon because either he was selling imported Italian erotica or papist tracts and he wanted a chance to fight his way clear of the government searchers, if they came calling.
‘If you’re in need of physic, Master Bredwell, I’m sorry, but I no longer practise,’ Nicholas says, as pleasantly as he can. ‘And if you want me to buy those books back, I fear I haven’t the coin.’
‘Not at all, sir,’ says the bookseller with a merchant’s smile as he falls in beside Nicholas. ‘I sold them on for a goodly profit, thank you all the same.’
‘Then I fail to see how I can be of service to you.’
‘It’s more a question of how I can be of service to you, sir,’ Bredwell says, apparently steeling himself to broach a difficult subject. ‘I hear you’re now in the service of Mistress Merton, at the sign of the Jackdaw.’
‘What of it?’
‘It occurred to me, sir, when you came into my shop, that you were a man in what I shall call extremis–’
‘It was raining. I was cold.’
‘Of course, sir. But let me put it this way: you won’t be the first man to enter Bankside as one fellow and leave as another.’
‘I fear you have me at a loss, Master Bredwell. Can you please speak plainly; I have business–’
‘Sir, if any man wants to practise the art of reinvention – which by the look of you now, I assume you do – there’s nowhere better in all London than here. We get all types, Master Shelby: purveyors of smuggled papist tracts, felons on the run from justice, foreign intelligencers off the barques moored in the river. And because of them, we get the Bishop of London’s men. Privy Council spies, too – all searching for the seditious and the heretical. It’s a simple case of filth attracting rats.’
‘Is that so? Thank you for the warning.’
‘Sometimes the innocent find themselves taken up in error, if you follow my meaning.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ says Nicholas. ‘But what does any of this have to do with Mistress Merton?’
Bredwell’s next questions stops Nicholas in his tracks.
‘How much do you really know about her?’
‘Bianca?’
‘Ah, so now it’s Bianca–’
‘If you have something to tell me, Master Bredwell, I charge you: be open or take your leave.’