‘How is young Jack, my sweet?’ Nicholas had asked in the last spoken exchange between husband and wife, sensing the growing drowsiness in Eleanor’s voice even through the wall.
‘Grace is fine, Husband – thank you.’
Jack, if it’s a boy – named for Nicholas’s elder brother; Grace, if it’s a girl, in memory of Eleanor’s grandmother.
When he’d spoken again he’d received no reply, only a muttered, ‘For mercy’s sake, hush!’ from his mother-in-law.
At the end of the working day Nicholas Shelby has never hesitated to discuss a difficult diagnosis with his wife, or to make her laugh loudly by mimicking some particularly pompous or difficult patient. But tonight, with Eleanor so close to her time, how can he even mention what he’s seen at the Guildhall? He must endure it alone, with only the sound of his own breathing for company.
He touches the plaster, letting his fingertips rest there a while. Though the wall is barely thicker than the span of his hand, it feels as cold and as impenetrable as a castle’s.
Suddenly, he fears the night to come. He fears he will have bad dreams. Dreams of dead infants hoisted on Spanish pitchforks. Dreams of a child bled dry and floating on the tide. Whole columns of grey, empty-eyed, lifeless children marching across a barren landscape that is half muddy Thames riverbank, half flat Dutch polder. And every one of them his and Eleanor’s. More than anything, he fears his own imagination.
In fact, he sleeps surprisingly soundly. He stirs only when the lodging’s prize cockerel beats – by a good half-hour – the bell at Trinity church.
Unable to see Eleanor, and with no patients to visit the next morning, Nicholas seeks out the clerk to William Danby, the Queen’s Coroner. While it might not matter to Fulke Vaesy that a nameless little boy could end his short life in such a manner, in the present circumstances it matters greatly to Nicholas Shelby.
The wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father.
Damn me for it, if you dare, he tells an imaginary Sir Fulke as he heads for Whitehall. Some of us still remember why we chose healing for a profession.
The clerk to the Queen’s Coroner is a precise, bespectacled man in a gown of legal black. Nicholas finds him in a room more like a cell than an office, filling out the weekly city mortuary roll. He writes with a slow, methodical hand on a thin ribbon of parchment, carefully transferring the names of the dead from the individual parish reports.
What must it be like, Nicholas wonders as he waits for the man to acknowledge him, to spend your day tallying up the deceased? What happens if you misspell a name? If a Tyler in life becomes a Tailor in death, simply through inattention, are they still the same person to posterity that a wife or a brother remembers? Such mistakes can easily happen, especially in times of plague, when the clerks can’t write fast enough to keep accurate records.
Names… Jack for a boy. Grace for a girl. Names unknown, save unto God…
‘The boy they found at the Wildgoose stairs–’ he begins, when at last the clerk looks up.
The man lays down his nib. He places it well to one side of the parchment roll to prevent an inky splatter obliterating someone’s existence. He ponders a moment, trying to place one child amongst so many. Then, as though he’s recalling some unwanted piece of furniture, ‘Ah yes, the one we allowed to the College of Physicians–’
‘I wondered if he had a name yet.’
‘If he had, I can assure you we would not have agreed to the request for dissection.’
‘Someone must know who he was, surely.’
The clerk shrugs. ‘We asked the watermen who found him. And the tenants in the nearby houses. None admitted to knowing the boy. Perhaps he was a vagrant’s brat. Or a mariner’s child, fallen off one of the barques moored in the Pool. Sadly, there are many such taken from the Thames at this time of year: fishing for eels, grubbing for meat scraps at the shambles. They wander into the water and the next thing they know–’ He makes a little explosive puff through his lips to signify the sudden watery end to someone’s life.
Nicholas waits a moment before he says, ‘I believe he was murdered.’
A defensive flicker of the clerk’s eyes. ‘Murdered? On what evidence do you make such a claim?’
‘I can’t prove it, but I’m almost certain he was dead before he went into the water. If nothing else, justice demands an investigation.’
‘Too late for justice to worry herself much now,’ the clerk says with a shrug. ‘I assume the College has already had the remains shriven and buried at St Bride’s.’
‘So I am told.’
‘Then what do you expect me to do – beg the Bishop of London for a shovel, so we can dig him out from Abraham’s bosom?’
The pain on Nicholas’s face is clear, even in the gloom of the little chamber. ‘He was somebody’s son,’ he says falteringly. ‘He had a father, and a mother. A family. He should at least have a proper headstone.’
The clerk is not an uncaring man. The names he writes on the mortuary rolls are more to him than just a meaningless assembly of letters. His voice softens. ‘Have you passed by the Aldgate or Bishopsgate recently, Dr Shelby? There are more beggars and vagrants coming into the city from the country parishes than ever before. Some bring disease with them. Many will die, especially their infants. That is a sad fact indeed. But it is God’s will.’
‘I know that,’ says Nicholas.
‘Then there’s the tavern brawls, the street-fights after the curfew bell rings, children and women falling under waggon wheels, wherry passengers slipping on the river stairs…’
‘I appreciate Coroner Danby is a busy man–’
The clerk picks up his pen. ‘And thank Jesu the pestilence has spared us so far this summer. No, sir, I fear there will be no time to spare for investigating the death of a nameless vagrant child. There are barely enough hours in the day to arrange inquests for those who do have a name.’
Nicholas has often treated patients whose grasp on reality is failing. He’s prescribed easements for those who hear voices, or see great cities in the sky where the rest of us see only clouds. He’s treated over-pious virgins who say they converse nightly with an archangel, and stolid haberdashers who tell him a succubus visits them in bed after sermon every Sunday to relieve them of their seed. He doesn’t believe in possession. He believes in it about as much as he believes it necessary for a physician to cast an astrological table before making a diagnosis, something most doctors he knows seem to consider indispensable. Yet, as he leaves Whitehall, it has not occurred to him that his natural concern for Eleanor’s safety is a tiny breach in the wall of his own sanity. Or that the soul of a dead infant boy might have discovered the crack.
Their father has taught the Shelby boys never to leave a task unfinished. Sown fields do not reap themselves. Nicholas visits the sisters at St Bartholomew’s hospital who prepared the infant for Vaesy’s examination. Their recollection is hazy. They welcomed three dead infants to the mortuary crypt on the day before the lecture, none of them memorable.
He speaks to the watermen down by the Wildgoose stairs on Bankside, where the child was pulled from the river.
‘Why, sir, we know the very fellows who found the body,’ one of the watermen tells him. Then, with heartfelt regret, ‘But working on the water don’t pay for itself, Master–’
It costs Nicholas twice the price of a wherry fare to get the names. And when he locates them, the men turn out to have been somewhere else on the day.
I thought I’d been in London long enough not to get gulled so easily, he thinks as he walks back across the bridge. He feels dispirited. Oddly ill-at-ease. He longs to share his fears with the one person he knows would listen sympathetically. But that’s impossible. How can he dare even whisper of child-murder when Eleanor is so close to her time?