He wonders if he’s having one now – because at the extreme edge of the flickering lantern light he can just make out a black hole cut in the cloister wall. It’s the entrance to a stone stairway. It looks to Nicholas more like a tomb with the door ajar.
Under his breath, Nikko the gunner’s mate starts muttering something about graves and ghosts. Brabant curses him and tells him to shut his mouth. But even he seems reluctant to take the next step.
‘The dead won’t bite you,’ rumbles Ned Monkton, coming to the rescue once again. He heads purposefully towards the archway. ‘Not unless you let them.’
At the top of a stone stairway festooned with cobwebs is a gallery that extends into the darkness. The walls are streaked with bat droppings, the floor no longer solid stone but baulks of timber covered by a thick layer of dust. It drifts up in little clouds as they pass. Nicholas hears Elise Cullen’s voice in his head: High walls… dark, and dusty… even the Cardinal’s Hat was cleaner.
Brabant has commanded silence, and though Nicholas wants only to call out Bianca’s name at the top of his voice, he knows that if she’s here – and still alive – it could be a death sentence. Stepping carefully – far too slowly for Nicholas’s liking – they cover three sides of the building without observing the slightest sign of recent habitation.
What am I looking for? Nicholas asks himself. What do I expect to find?
A dead man in a chamber lit by a thousand candles – that’s what Elise had said.
Or a dead woman.
‘There’s nothing here, sir,’ says Brabant. ‘We’re wasting our time. His Grace will have more profitable work for us than this.’
‘Thank Christ’s holy wounds for that,’ says Nikko. ‘I’ll take a Don’s broadside over this place, any day of the week.’
‘Amen,’ says Davey from the Ark Royal.
‘We’re done, then,’ says Brabant.
For a moment no one speaks. The lantern light makes sharpedged masks of their faces. Then Ned Monkton’s voice rolls like a heavy millstone out of the darkness:
‘There’s still the fourth side.’
Again, silence.
Then Brabant, spitting into the dust. ‘Fourth side of my arse! This place is giving my men the black dreads. It’s not doing much for me, neither. If there’s a Jesuit in here, he’s welcome to it. He and his friend the Pope can kiss my pimpled arse – we’re on our way out.’
Ned whispers hurriedly into Nicholas’s ear, ‘Do you really think this is where my Jacob died?’
Nicholas doesn’t know whether to nod or apologize. But something in his eyes makes Ned Monkton turn to Brabant and say, ‘Leave if you want, but you’ll have to walk over me to find the way out.’
Brabant lets out a weary sigh. He glances rapidly at Davey and Nikko and says, ‘You might be a big bastard, Monkton, but you’re shit at arithmetic.’ And draws a good length of steel from his scabbard – just to make his point.
‘Let them go, Ned,’ says Nicholas dispiritedly.
As Burghley’s men disappear into the darkness beneath the fading glow of Brabant’s lantern, Ned mutters, ‘Poxy sods’, and calls after them in a voice loud enough to be heard but not to carry: ‘We came in somewhere over there. Or maybe it was that way. Oh, and remember when I told you the dead don’t bite–?’
With only Ned’s guttering rush torch to light the way now, the two men make their way along the fourth wall of the Lazar House. Nicholas guesses they must be facing the edge of the Mutton Lane shambles. Most of the tiny windows are either boarded up or stopped with grime-encrusted glass. Those that are open let in the east wind. It lifts the dust into a low, swirling cloud about their feet, which reminds Nicholas uncomfortably of the night he walked off the jetty and into the river. He remembers how he’d imagined Eleanor beckoning him, how in his delirium he’d convinced himself he was to blame for her death, for the death of their child – for the death of little Ralph Cullen, too. For no reason he can think of, other than his own heightened state and the effect the Lazar House is having on him, one of Fulke Vaesy’s dire sermon-lectures jumps into his head:
‘In the Book of Ezra,’ Vaesy is saying, ‘the prophet states that the issue of a man and woman who lay together during her menstrual purge may be born leprous… may be born monstrous…’
An innocent crippled child – born monstrous, or so Vaesy would have it – murdered solely for the story that his own blood has to tell. Ralph Cullen, Jacob Monkton, the preacher and the others Elise had described in her testimony, all of them destroyed, reduced to a few lines of faux-academic scribbles on a sheet of paper. Medicine become its own monstrosity, in the hands of a man and a woman driven by some twisted notion of love.
And one last death to come – if it hasn’t come already.
Unless I’m right.
Unless this is the place.
Unless I’m in time.
Out of the darkness of the Lazar House, Nicholas sees something large and solid looming ahead of him. At first he can’t make it out. But as he approaches he sees it’s the entrance to a chapel, built out from the wall. The door is an elaborate wooden tracery, like an altar screen.
Ned lifts his torch to get the last light out of the dying flames. Through the screen Nicholas sees a woman crucified upsidedown, white as chalk.
But it’s only the torchlight scattering the shadows across the painted figures of the saints on the far wall. He turns and starts to walk away.
It is the little crypt where Father Rossi prays over the graves of her parents. It’s her father’s cell in Padua. It’s a prison specially made for her by the Worshipful Company of Grocers because they’re frightened of what will happen if they grant her a licence to practise apothecary. And it doesn’t matter whether its walls are in Padua or in London, she was a fool to think she could ever climb over them. Yet for all that, this low crypt deep in the earth appears almost welcoming. The candles set around the little chamber paint the stone walls with a blush of warm gold.
At the centre stands a plinth of coarse-cut ragstone. This, she assumes in a moment of lucidity, is the place where the inmates of the Lazar House would be brought at the end of their lonely lives – lives lived beyond the sight of the rest of the world outside. Down here, no one but the priests who prayed over them would have to look upon the visible signs of God’s displeasure.
On the plinth, the man with the pumice face has laid out all the holy relics of his obscene, perverted physic. The candlelight gleams on saw-edge and hook, on knife-blade and needle. She sees an hourglass – polished till it seems to hold not sand, but a myriad tiny stars. She sees pewter bowls, a set of scales and weights, astrological symbols and calculations drawn out in chalk on the walls.
But the items that terrify her most are not on the plinth, but set to one side: a wooden frame supporting what looks like an inverted cross, leather straps fixed to the extremities. And set around its base: a collection of glass jars containing things Bianca can barely permit to exist – things that might once have pulsed and throbbed inside a human body. She almost pleads for the return of the hallucinations. They must come soon – she’d swallowed the last of the asarabacca pulp several lifetimes ago. At least when they do, she thinks, they will take her clear away from this monstrous place.
‘A tavern-mistress?’ says Quigley, shaking his head in apparent disbelief. ‘How can she possibly comprehend an endeavour such as ours?’