‘And what if he was? The infant was an unclaimed vagrant. He was of no consequence.’
If Vaesy is so familiar with the good book, thinks Nicholas, how is it that mercy and compassion are apparently such alien concepts to him?
‘Shouldn’t we at least try to identify him – find out if he had a name?’
‘I know exactly what his name is, young man.’
‘You do?’ says Nicholas, caught off-balance.
‘Why, yes. His name is Disorder. His name is Lawlessness. He was the offspring of the itinerant poor, Dr Shelby. What does it matter to us if he drowned or was struck down by a thunderbolt? Had he lived, he would surely have hanged before he was twenty. At least now he has made a contribution to the advancement of physic!’
Nicholas tries to curb his growing anger. ‘He was once flesh and blood, Sir Fulke. He was an innocent child!’
‘Never fear, there’ll be plenty more where he came from. They breed like flies on a midden, Dr Shelby.’
‘He was someone’s son, Sir Fulke. And I believe he was murdered. You have influence – delay the interment of the remains. Ask the coroner to convene a proper jury.’
‘It’s far too late for that, sirrah. The child is already delivered to St Bride’s.’ Vaesy’s veined cheeks swell as he gives Nicholas a patronizing smile. ‘He should thank us, Dr Shelby. He’s better off in consecrated ground than as carrion cast up on the riverbank.’ He takes Nicholas by the elbow. For a moment the young physician thinks he’s found some previously unsuspected empathy in the great anatomist. He’s wrong, of course. ‘Your wife, Dr Shelby – I hear she is expecting a child.’
‘Our first, Sir Fulke.’
‘Well, sirrah, there you have it: the wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father.’
‘Sensitivities?’
‘Come now, Shelby, you’re not the first man to get in a lather at a time like this. I once knew a fellow who became convinced his wife would miscarry if he ate sturgeon on a Wednesday.’
‘You think this is all in my imagination?’
Vaesy puts a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. The sleeve of his gown smells of aqua vitae. ‘Dr Shelby,’ he says unctuously, ‘I hope one day to see you as a senior fellow of this College. I trust by then you will have learned to lay aside all unprofitable concern for those whom we physicians are in no position to help – else we would weep tears for all the world, would we not?’
The wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father.
‘The arrogant, over-stuffed tyrant!’ mutters Nicholas as he runs towards Trinity church, the brim of his leather hat pulled tight over his brow. It’s raining hard now, one of those intense summer squalls that mist the narrow lanes and send the coney-catchers and the purse-divers heading for the nearest tavern to pursue their thievery in the dry. A crack of thunder rolls like a cannonade down Thames Street. ‘He thinks I’m overwrought. He thinks I’m no tougher than one of those novice sisters at St Bartholomew’s.’
But there’s a fragment of truth in what Vaesy has said. In his heart Nicholas knows it. The memory of that pitchforked child; his witnessing of the dissection; the Grass Street wall he cannot breach – all these have done nothing to ease his fears for Eleanor and the child she carries.
After one of Vaesy’s lectures it is the habit of the young physicians to celebrate their survival by getting fabulously drunk. Their favoured tavern is to be found at the sign of the White Swan, close by Trinity churchyard. The knock-down has been flowing a while when Nicholas arrives, eliciting angry mutterings from the other customers about young medical men being more ungovernable than apprentice boys on a feast day. Nicholas throws his dripping hat onto the table as he sits down, noting morosely the once-jaunty feather drooping like the banner of a defeated army. ‘Am I the only one?’ he asks as he signs to a passing tap-boy. ‘Did anyone else see those wounds?’
‘Wounds?’ echoes Michael Gardener, a Kentish fellow who’s already looking like a well-fed country doctor at the age of twenty-four. ‘What wounds?’
‘Two deep incisions on the poor little tot’s leg. The right leg. Vaesy missed them completely.’
‘Master Dunnich probably made them by accident; you know how careless barber-surgeons are,’ says Gardener, running his fingers through his luxuriant beard. ‘That’s why I never let them near this.’
‘Did you see them, Simon?’
‘Not I,’ says Cowper, his face shiny from the ale. ‘I was too busy trying not to catch Vaesy’s eye again.’
Gardener raises his jug to Nicholas and, with a hideously lewd grin on his face, calls out, ‘Enough of physic! A toast to our fine bully-boy! Not long now and he’ll be back in the saddle.’
‘He’s a physician,’ someone in the group laughs. ‘It’ll be the jumping-shops of Bankside for our Nick!’
Simon Cowper, now quite in his cups, affects an effeminate simper. ‘Oh, sweet Nicholas, why must you pass the hours in such low company, while I must content myself with sewing and the psalter?’
Nicholas is about to tell Simon just how wrong he is to caricature Eleanor in such a manner, but the words dissolve on his tongue. Why spur his friends to further teasing? He sighs, gives a good-natured smile and empties his tankard.
And, just for a while, the dead child on Vaesy’s dissection table fades from his thoughts.
Dusk, and Grass Street little more than a dark slash of overhanging timber-framed houses cutting through the city towards the river near Fish Hill.
Nicholas lies alone on his bed, his head resting on the bolster, his eyes towards the wall. He pictures Eleanor lying snugly on the other side, barely inches from him but so inaccessible that she might as well be in far-off Muscovy. She’s asleep now, a welcome respite from the heaviness that keeps stirring within her.
Eleanor is the thread in the weave of his soul. She is the sunlight on the water, the sigh in the warm wind. The lines are not his. He’s borrowed them from the overly poetic Cowper, his own sonnets being distinctly wooden. Eleanor is the perfect bride that his elder brother Jack used to describe in their moments of hot youthful fancy: impossibly beautiful, wholly devoid of any amorous restraint, in need of urgent rescue and usually with a name from mythology.
For Jack, the myth turned out to be a yeoman’s daughter named Faith: extremities like the boughs of a sturdy oak, popping out acorns regularly every other year. But Nicholas, to his immense and perpetual astonishment, has found the real thing; though if there was any rescuing needed, it was Eleanor who performed it. He can’t quite believe his luck.
Often, in his mind, he relives the moment they first danced a pavane together. It was at the Barnthorpe May Fair. Thirteen years of age, within a week of each other. He the prickly second son of a Suffolk yeoman, she the lithe-limbed, freckled meadow sprite, as hard to hold in one place as gossamer caught on a summer breeze. They’d known each other since infancy. Nicholas calls it his first lesson in medicine: sometimes the remedy for a malady can be staring you in the face, but you’re just too stupid to see it.
For the past two hours now Harriet, their servant, has played a secret game of go-between. Whenever Ann and the midwife insist that Nicholas and Eleanor stop talking, Harriet finds a reason to visit the two chambers: a little warm broth for Eleanor… some mutton and bread for Nicholas… floor rushes that need changing before morning… piss-pots to be emptied… She uses these excuses to carry whispered messages, taking to these tasks with all the furtive skill of a government intelligencer carrying encrypted dispatches.