‘Dr Shelby was about to mention your lecture, Fulke.’
‘Was he now?’
Nicholas bites his tongue. ‘I was going to say how instructive I found it, Sir Fulke.’
Vaesy beams, thinking good reviews can only make Lumley’s forty pounds a year that bit more secure.
Lumley pulls on the hem of his gloves in preparation for departure. ‘Was there anything else, sirrah? Master Quigley suggested you wished to speak to me on an important matter.’
Nicholas clutches at the only straw left to him: delay. ‘Perhaps I might be allowed to correspond with you, my lord – to seek your views on matters of new physic. I’d value them greatly.’
To his relief, Lumley seems flattered. ‘By all means, Dr Shelby. I shall look forward to it. I always like to hear from the younger men in the profession – minds less set. Don’t you, Fulke?’
Vaesy doesn’t seem to understand the question.
As Nicholas walks away he can almost hear the drowned boy whispering his approvaclass="underline" You are my only voice. Don’t let them silence me. Don’t give up.
On his way home Nicholas stops by the East Cheap cistern to wash the dust from his face. It’s hot, he’s eaten too much, listened to enough worthy back-slapping to last him a decade. Close to the fountain stands a religious firebrand reciting the gospels, punctuating his readings with dire warnings of man’s imminent destruction, to anyone who will listen. Few bother. A lad in a leather apron leads a fractious ram by a chain in the direction of Old Exchange Lane. A rook alights on the branches of a nearby tree and begins to caw loudly.
These are the minor details that will stay seared into Nicholas’s mind for ever. They have no particular importance. They are mere dressing for the centrepiece of the masque: Harriet.
She’s hurrying towards him, not even bothering to lift the hem of her dress from the filth of the street. He opens his mouth to call out.
Boy or girl? Jack or Grace?
He doesn’t care which. A boy will be the greatest physician in Europe, a girl the mirror of her mother. But the words cannot fly his mouth. They are glued there by the awful expression on Harriet’s flushed face.
Silence.
Elise has sworn never to allow a single word to pass her lips, no matter how long she lives or how desperate she becomes. A single careless word might bring the angel back.
Silence is a hard restraint. It is by no means her natural state. Her mother used to tell her that God Himself would soon go deaf from her constant chattering. But that was before Mary Cullen had descended into her own mute world of drunken insensibility, informing her on the way that God had crippled her little brother Ralph as a punishment for Elise’s ungovernable tongue. Now silence is Elise’s only protector.
She would beg for food, but she knows what will happen if she does: people will spit at her, throw stones that buzz like bees past her head or strike her painfully in the back. They will call for a man with a whip to chase her away, or threaten her with a branding, even having an ear sliced from her head to mark her for the vagrant they say she is.
So Elise does not beg. Instead, she lives off scraps of food thieved from window ledges and unattended tables, sleeps on the hard earth beneath the briars. She is utterly alone, without even little Ralph for company now. The only human voice she hears and does not flee from is her mother’s, whispering to her the old story: that there is somewhere better than here, my darling, and if you go down to the Tabard and beg a cup of arak on credit, I will tell you how to get there.
3
What follows Nicholas Shelby’s return to Grass Street is as predictable as the unravelling of a scarf when an errant thread is tugged, and just as unstoppable.
Ann cannot meet his wildly searching gaze. She turns from her son-in-law as though he’s a ranting madman. But this time neither she nor the midwife bars his entrance to the lying-in chamber.
Eleanor’s skin is feverish to the touch. His fingers come away chilled by her sweat. The flesh around her belly is as hard as iron. It does not yield to the pressure of his palm. Her eyes are closed, her breathing little more than the panting after a lost fight. She seems already to have put a great distance between them.
‘There is no sign of imminent birth,’ the midwife tells him. ‘Barely a single drop of blood discharged from the privy region – just some small quantity of her water.’ She makes it sound as though things are only a little awry, not quite as expected, no real need to worry. Do I sound like that, he wonders, when I’m delivering grim news?
It’s the first time he’s entered this chamber since it was closed off for the birthing. It feels like a foreign land to him. He glances to a collection of dark-red pebbles at the foot of the bed. ‘What are those supposed to do?’
‘They are holy stones, stained by the blood of St Margaret,’ the midwife replies, not a little frightened by the intensity in his stare.
‘She needs medicine, woman, not superstition,’ he shouts, sweeping them away with an angry wave of his hand. They rattle on the uneven floorboards like noisy accusations. ‘Harriet!’ he calls. The girl appears at his side. She seems to have caught some of Eleanor’s deathly pallor. ‘Run to the apothecary by All Hallows for a balm of lady mantle and wort. Hurry!’
‘No balm can alter God’s will, Nicholas,’ says Ann, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘It is not good to fight what is ordained.’
Ann is not a thoughtless woman; she’s already lost two children of her own, a boy in childbirth, another daughter who lived less than a month. Trials, she believes, are sent by God to test our mettle. Her words are intended to bring strength to her son-in-law. Instead, they only make him angrier.
‘It might help induce the birth,’ he shouts. ‘It has to be better than prayer and holy stones!’
Eleanor is fading away before his eyes. But it takes almost two full days. And not once during that time does Nicholas get so much as the paltry comfort of knowing she’s aware he’s beside her – not a squeeze of his hand, not even a slack smile of recognition. Nothing.
When he’s not sitting on a stool by the bed, moistening her lips with a wet cloth, he’s to be found leafing frantically through his books: Galen’s Art of Physic, Vesalius’s Fabrica, half a dozen more. He’s searching for some scrap of redeeming knowledge that he thinks he might have forgotten. But he’s forgotten nothing. Eleanor is going to die not because of what Nicholas has forgotten, but what he never knew.
On the second day, around eight in the evening, in his desperation he even considers a caesarean delivery. He’s heard about such a procedure, though he’s never actually seen one performed. And he knows that even if the child is saved, the mother will die. To his knowledge, there has only ever been one instance of both surviving, and that was in Switzerland. How can he possibly plunge a knife into the belly of his beloved Eleanor in order to save their child? But if he doesn’t…
Her breathing is getting slower and deeper. Now and again comes a sound like the one his winter boots make when he steps by mistake into the mud of the Finsbury fields. He grips Eleanor’s cold hand and screws his eyes as though peering into the sun.
Why did they wait so long to call me?
Why did I go to that wretched feast?
Why do the swiftly passing minutes of her final struggle mock me so cruelly? What good is my knowledge now?