Not that the Dutch troops and their mercenaries had all been saints, not by any means. But he’d learned a lot that summer: how to tell a man his wound is nothing, that he’ll soon be up and supping ale in Antwerp, and sound convincing, when in fact you know he’s dying; how to drink with German mercenaries and still keep a steady hold on a scalpel; how never, ever to gamble with the Swiss… No one had cared then whether he belonged to the appropriate guild. There was no distinction made between physicians who diagnose and surgeons who get their hands bloody. No time to study the astrological implications when a man is bleeding to death before your eyes.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ Vaesy’s voice pulls Nicholas back to the present, ‘if you have studied your Vesalius diligently, you will note the following–’
With the help of his ivory wand and numerous quotations from the Old Testament, the great anatomist takes his audience on a journey around the infant’s organs, muscles and sinews. By the time he finishes, the dead child is little more than a filleted carcass. Dunnich, the barber-surgeon, has opened him up like a spatchcock.
To his own surprise, Nicholas is in a state bordering on numb terror. He thinks, God protect the child Eleanor is carrying from such a fate as this.
But there’s more. There’s the bucket beneath the dissecting table. It’s almost empty. There’s scarcely a pint of blood in it. And then there’s that second wound, the one on the child’s lower right leg, which Vaesy has apparently missed altogether, for the great anatomist has failed to utter a single word about it in all the time he’s been standing over the corpse. Nicholas describes it now in his mind, as if he were giving evidence before the coroner: one very deep laceration, Your Honour, made deliberately with a sharp blade. And a second made transversely across the first – towards its lower point.
An inverted cross.
The mark of necromancy. The Devil’s signature.
The Tollworth brook, Surrey,
the same afternoon
The hind turns her head as she sups from the ford, ears pricked for danger. Her arched neck gives a sudden tremble, the way Elise’s own neck used to tremble when little Ralph clung too tight and she could feel his warm breath upon her skin.
She knows I’m close, thinks Elise. And yet she does not fear me. We are the same, this fallow deer and I. We are fellow creatures of the forest, driven by thirst to forget there may be hunters watching us from the trees.
Dragonflies dart amongst the columns of sunlight that pierce the canopy of branches. She can hear the thrumming of their iridescent wings even above the noise the stream makes as it courses over the mossy stones, even above the rumble of distant summer thunder. She sinks to her knees, puts her lips gingerly to the water. It burbles over her tongue, over her skin, flows into her. Cold and sharp. Bliss made liquid.
Elise recalls it was by a stream like this, on another hot summer’s day not long past, that she first succumbed to the delirium that only this cool water can keep at bay. Exhausted, starving, she had imagined the weight she was bearing upon her young back was not her crippled infant brother but the holy cross, and that she was dragging her sacred burden through the dust towards Golgotha…
By a stream like this… on a day like this…
The figure had appeared from nowhere, a silhouette as black as that sudden flash of oblivion you get when, by mistake, you glance into the sun. An angel come down from heaven to save them.
‘Help us,’ Elise had pleaded, peeling poor little Ralph’s withered legs from her back as the desperation overwhelmed her. ‘He cannot walk, and I cannot carry him another step. In the name of mercy, take him–’
Forcing the memory from her mind, Elise slakes her thirst in the ford like the wild animal she has become. And as she drinks, she cannot forget that it was her own desperate wail of need that had alerted the angel to their presence. If she had not cried out, perhaps the angel would not have seen them. Perhaps all that followed would have stayed firmly in the realm of bad dreams.
If she were able, Elise would shout a warning to the hind: ‘Drink swiftly, little one – the hunters may be nearer than you think!’
But Elise cannot cry out. Elise must remain silent; if needs be, for ever. A single careless word, and the angel might hear her and return – for her.
2
Vaesy’s desk is strewn with sheets of parchment covered with symbols and figures. At one end stands a collection of glass vessels. Some, notes Nicholas, contain the desiccated remains of animals, others coloured oils and strange liquids. At the other end is an astrologer’s astrolabe and a beaker of what looks suspiciously like urine – the astrolabe to measure the position of the heavenly bodies when the owner of the bladder relieved himself, the urine to reveal by its colour whether his bodily humours are in balance. Nicholas can make out, seen through the beaker’s glass, the skeletal hand of a monkey held together with wire, distorted by the yellow liquid into a demon’s claw. He has entered a place where medicine and alchemy mix – a perfectly unremarkable physician’s study.
‘You asked to see me, Dr Shelby,’ the great anatomist says pleasantly. Out of the dissection room, he seems almost amiable. ‘How may I be of service?’
Nicholas comes straight to the point. ‘I believe the subject of your lecture today was murdered, Sir Fulke.’
‘Mercy, sirrah! That’s a brave charge,’ Vaesy says, easing himself out of his gown and setting down his pearl-trimmed cap.
‘The child was thrown into the river to hide the crime.’
‘I think you’d best explain yourself, Dr Shelby.’
‘I can’t imagine how the coroner failed to notice the wound, sir,’ Nicholas says. He can, of course – laziness.
‘Wound? What wound?’
‘On the right calf, sir. Small, but very deep. I suspect it might have severed the posterior tibial canal. If not staunched quickly, it would eventually have proved fatal.’
‘Oh, that wound,’ says Vaesy breezily. ‘A hungry pike, most likely. Or a boathook. Immaterial.’
‘Immaterial?’
‘The Queen’s Coroner did not make the child available for dissection so that you, sirrah, could study wounds. The wound was immaterial to the substance of my lecture.’
‘But there was almost no blood left in the body, sir,’ Nicholas points out, as diplomatically as he can. ‘The child must have bled out while alive. Blood does not flow post mortem.’
‘I’m perfectly well aware of that, thank you, Dr Shelby,’ says Vaesy, his easy manner beginning to harden.
‘I do not believe the wound was made by any fish, sir. There were no other bite marks on the body.’
‘So you’ve decided the alternative is murder, have you? Are all your diagnoses made so swiftly?’
‘Well, he didn’t drown. That’s obvious. There was very little water in the lungs.’
‘Are you suggesting the Queen’s Coroner does not know his job?’ asks Vaesy icily.
‘Of course not,’ says Nicholas. ‘But how are we to explain–’
Vaesy raises a hand to stop him. ‘The note from Coroner Danby’s clerk was clear: the child was drowned. How he came to such an end is no concern of ours.’
‘But if he was bled before death, then he was murdered.’