‘So you’ve seen Lady Vaesy before?’
‘Vaesy – is that her name?’
‘Does she bring you charity?’
‘Sometimes she brings charity, sometimes she brings us new friends.’
Bianca has to put a hand down to the earth to steady herself. ‘She brings you what?’
‘Friends, duck. Folks like us – down on their luck, troubled in the wits or the body. Must think we’re some sort of midden: a place to dump God’s cast-offs.’
In a moment of inspiration Bianca asks, ‘Did she happen to bring a young girl and a boy – a crippled boy – sometime last summer?’
‘Aye, I remember them. A sweet young thing she was.’ She frowns as she searches her memory. ‘Name began with an L–’
Bianca begins to rise to her feet, disappointed. Then it strikes her – this old crone can’t read. ‘Was her name Elise?’
‘That’s it – L for Elise,’ says the old woman with a fond smile. ‘And the poor little mite was called Richard, or Rolland, or something like that.’
‘Ralph. His name was Ralph,’ says Bianca, her heart beating fast. ‘And can you recall if ever there was a young lad with a moon face, about fifteen – slow in the wits? His name would be Jacob.’
‘Oh, I remember Jacob well enough, the poor little addle-pate.’
‘How long was he here?’ Bianca asks, remembering the long, desperate search Ned and his father had made for Jacob. ‘It must have been about a month–’
‘No! Three or four days at the most.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m not entirely witless, duck. None of them she brings here stay long.’
‘Do you know where they go when they leave?’
‘No. They just go. The Magdalene ain’t a prison, duck. We’s all free subjects of our sovereign majesty here,’ the woman says proudly, waving her paring knife at Bianca to make her point. ‘If we want to up and leave, there’s nothing to stop us – less you count the open road and likely starvation.’
John Lumley’s private chapel is a very different place in daylight. And it’s a world away from Ned Monkton’s grim vault at St Tom’s. Not a shared coffin or a dirty winding sheet to be seen. But today it’s still a place of death.
Deniker’s corpse is laid out on a makeshift table, draped in a linen shroud. Lumley stands beside it in contemplation for a while. Then, defiantly, he makes the sign of the Cross over the body. ‘You may as well know, Dr Shelby, that I intend to pray for the soul of Francis Deniker, whether the law permits it or not,’ he says harshly, his eyes taking on a dull, watery sheen. ‘Robert Cecil may call me a heretic if he wishes. My conscience and my heart are not his playthings.’ He lays one palm against the side of Deniker’s covered face. ‘Poor, gentle Francis – that he should come to such an end,’ he says. Then, to Nicholas: ‘God’s wounds, Shelby! I never knew a man bring more tumult in his wake than you.’
Somewhere in Nicholas’s mind a dam breaks, releasing a torrent of helpless rage. How dare Lumley – rich and well connected enough to choose what faith he embraces, to indulge his curiosity with books that a lesser man would find himself in a cell for reading – blame him for any of this? Wasn’t it Lumley who used his influence to procure Ralph Cullen’s body for Fulke Vaesy to toy with, in the name of physic? Wasn’t it Lumley who brought Francis Deniker down from Durham, knowing full well what would happen to him if his true identity was discovered? What would he have had me do – look the other way? Pretend I never saw those wounds on the child’s leg?
Lumley pulls aside the shroud. He stares into Deniker’s face. He begins to quietly sob, the tears melting into his beard like hailstones on hot sand.
But Nicholas barely hears him. He’s too busy cataloguing the telltale signs of Francis Deniker’s struggle: the bruises on the forearms, the scratches around one eye, the nostrils clogged with dried blood, the tiny fragment of cloth stuck between two teeth like the remains of a hastily consumed meal – probably a scrap of pillow cover.
‘I don’t recall him having a wrestler’s nose when he was in your privy chamber,’ Nicholas says brutally. ‘He’s been smothered, probably by a pillow held down over his face. Look: the force has crushed the nasal bone and the septal cartilage.’
Lumley puts a fist between his own nostrils and his upper lip to staunch the sniffling. When he’s composed himself he says, ‘Smothered? I thought these hurts were caused when he was cut down and laid on the floor. Francis hanged himself – there was a written testament lying on his bed.’
‘A suicide note?’
‘Yes.’
‘A suicide note from a Jesuit priest who presumably believed self-destruction was the fastest way to an eternity of sulphur and brimstone?’
‘Dr Shelby, I can see the words he wrote seared into my mind every time I close my eyes. He sought your death because he feared you would betray him to the Privy Council.’
‘Yesterday I assured everyone present in your privy chamber that I would not reveal what I witnessed there. I meant it.’
‘Clearly not all of us believed you, Dr Shelby.’
‘So, after much fervent prayer, Francis Deniker decided he couldn’t carry the weight of all that sin and live? He must have been a busy man last night – plotting my murder, all that writing of notes.’
‘Have a care for where you are, sirrah! Do you doubt the account?’
‘Even the players at the Rose couldn’t make a fiction like that convincing. This cord about his neck – it’s the one he wore around his vestments yesterday, is it not?’
‘I ordered it left in place, for when the coroner comes.’
‘And what will you tell him – that your secretary hanged himself with a Romish trinket, after he’d tried to kill one of Robert Cecil’s agents? Who, by the way, discovered him giving his master the papist Mass?’
‘I’ll take a leaf out of your book, Dr Shelby. I’ll lie.’
Some blows, Nicholas thinks, have to be taken without flinching. He softens his tone. ‘May I ask who found him?’
‘His servant, at dawn. The door to his chamber was jammed by an overturned chair. We had to break in. He’d hanged himself from a beam.’
‘Were you present?’
‘No, but they called me at once.’
‘So you saw him hanging?’
‘Not exactly. I helped get him off the floor.’
Nicholas looks puzzled. ‘The floor?’
‘That’s where he was found. Look at the cord, Dr Shelby. It must have held just long enough, then broken under his weight.’
Nicholas takes up the frayed end of the cord and inspects it more closely. He sees immediately how some of the strands have been cut through. He imagines the killer rolling Deniker’s smothered body off his bed, wrapping the cord around his neck, pulling it tight, then picking away with the point of a blade until the material rips into a plausible tear.
A sudden jolt of dread courses through his body. ‘Where is Elise? Has anyone seen her?’
‘She’s with Master Sprint in the kitchens, I think.’
‘Are you certain? Have you seen her?’
‘No, but Lizzy has.’
Nicholas has to fight the urge to seize Lumley by the collar of his gown and shake him. ‘When? When did she see her?’
‘Within the hour.’
‘And Quigley?’ asks Nicholas, the relief breaking in him like a wave.
‘Quigley? What of him?’
‘Where is he?’ Nicholas’s voice is raised almost to a shout. He suspects it’s the first time a lord has been spoken to in such a manner by a humble Bankside dispenser of physic. But protocol is the last thing on his mind.