‘Where’s the benefit in cutting up a child?’ asks Robert Cecil. ‘Is there not more to be learned from the body of a grown man? Are the organs not closer to perfection?’
‘Sir Fulke recently travelled to Padua, where he was able to observe the professors there dissect a crippled child,’ Lumley explains. ‘The infant taken from the water was similarly afflicted. Sir Fulke is trying to discover if deformed limbs are God’s intention or merely a result of our own human imperfection.’
John Lumley’s words fall heavily, like a whole flock of downed pigeons. Lumley might be a seasoned courtier, but he’s just proved he’s not above stepping in dog-shit when he’s not looking where he’s going. For Robert Cecil’s body is not streamlined like Juno’s, or as effortlessly agile. He’s crook-backed. His splayed legs do not rest comfortably on the flanks of his horse. He’s not made as elegantly as a courtier should be made. As a consequence, he feeds hungrily on insults. Even unintended ones.
‘So Vaesy’s been to papist Padua, has he?’ he asks icily. ‘On your commission?’
Lumley wonders why his mouth has suddenly dried up. He appeals to Burghley to get him off the hook. ‘He went there purely for matters of academic discovery – to the university. I can assure Your Grace, Sir Fulke is unswervingly true to the queen’s faith.’
Robert Cecil smiles wanly. But there is steel in the smile, nonetheless. ‘All I know, my lord, is that when Juno opens up a carcass with her talons, she does it not for the discovery, but for the thrill of it.’
The dream comes to him every night without fail.
When it wakes him, always at the same point, Nicholas knows there will be no more sleep to be had. He will toss and turn until dawn. So, in an effort to stop the dream plaguing him, he demands that Harriet bring him a jug of arak from the pantry. He keeps it by his bed, refusing to let her remove the bottle except to replenish it – which she now does every morning.
The dream is not a dream of loss. It’s a call to follow. And it’s always the same: Eleanor walking along the riverbank, stepping carefully across the pebbles, her bare feet splashing through the pools and rivulets. She is accompanied by a child who clings to her hand – the little boy from Fulke Vaesy’s dissection table. He’s been stuck back together as if he were made from clay. Always they are too far ahead of him to reach.
And what wakes him is the sound of the tide rushing in between.
For some time now, Nicholas Shelby has absented himself from sermon. It has been noted.
‘We feel most sorely for our brother in Christ,’ says the priest at Trinity church to Nicholas’s mother-in-law, Ann. ‘But is it not unduly wilful for a man to deny himself God’s healing balm when he hath most need of it?’
‘He is beyond all reason, Father,’ Ann replies sadly.
She is not an uncaring woman, but she knows she can do no more for her son-in-law. She decides to return to Barnthorpe. She tells herself it’s because the roads will soon become impassable. But in truth, winter is still a good while away.
When Nicholas is again absent for Sunday sermon, the church authorities decide – regrettably – that grief is an insufficient excuse for wilful non-attendance. They write to him at Grass Street.
‘What does it say?’ Nicholas asks, ordering Harriet to open the letter.
He has moved his bed into the room they’d used for the lying-in chamber. He’s refused to let Harriet remove the thick woollen drapes from the little window, parting them enough to let in only a single shaft of dusty light. Harriet is too afraid to clean the room now, and Nicholas hasn’t appeared to notice. It’s mid-morning. He’s still abed. The jug is empty. She speaks to him from the doorway because he stinks of sweat and arak. And he hasn’t been near the Grass Street barber in a fortnight.
‘They’re fining you a shilling, Master, for recusancy. They say they’re being compassionate – they could have fined you twelve.’
‘Tear it up,’ Nicholas tells her brusquely. He’s decided he has no wish to worship a God as uncaring as theirs. They belong to a world that is already alien to him. He pulls the bed sheet over his head, desperately seeking a few more moments’ anguished sleep.
Receiving no response, the churchwardens send another letter. It is rather less compassionate than the first. In it they warn Nicholas that if they find any hint of a refusal to accept the queen’s religion, they have it in their power to fine him more than he earns in a whole year. This threat moves him no more than the first.
On Holy Cross Day, in the middle of September, Simon Cowper spots him coming out of the Star on Fish Street Hill. The bell at St Margaret’s has just tolled five in the afternoon. His friend’s white canvas doublet looks as though its owner has been rolling about in the street. He’s obviously drunk.
‘I thought you favoured the White Swan,’ Simon says amiably.
‘Full of sour-faced Puritans averse to dice, loud debate and dancing. No fun at all,’ Nicholas growls, by which he means he’s been thrown out on his ear.
‘People have been asking after you; Michael Gardener and the others…’
‘Why?’ It’s a challenge rather than a question. Nicholas doesn’t care about the answer; his present concern is making it across Fish Street Hill to the sign of the Troubadour. Simon has to pull him out of the way of an oncoming waggon.
‘We understand the sore hurt you endure, Nick. Really we do,’ Simon tells him, holding on to his friend’s arm to stop him falling where he stands.
‘Do you now? Is that a fact?’
His eyes are raw, Simon Cowper notes, as though he hasn’t slept for days. ‘Nicholas, I know this is a grievous trial for you–’
Nicholas’s interruption is harsh and contemptuous. ‘Tell me, Simon, what precisely do you think you know?’
‘I don’t understand–’
‘What does any doctor know? What does Fulke Vaesy know? God’s blood! The man can’t tell a stab wound from a hernia.’ He stares at Simon like a madman, spitting out the words. ‘And what about me? What sort of physician am I? What do I know?’
‘Nick, perhaps if you went to sermon again–’
But Nicholas isn’t listening. ‘I’ll tell you what Dr Nicholas Shelby knows,’ he says, pulling his arm away from Simon’s grasp and holding up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand to make a crooked zero, ‘he knows about this much of nothing.’
The last Simon Cowper sees of his friend is Nicholas’s back as he staggers off in the direction of the Troubadour – save for the moment when he turns and shouts back at him cruelly, ‘If you know so much, Simon, you’ll know to leave me be… and stick to writing shitty poems to your mistress!’
If you look beyond the grief, you’ll find it’s not self-pity that is destroying Nicholas Shelby. He is not the self-pitying kind. Rather, it is rage. Rage pure and simple. Rage against an uncaring God. Rage against his discovery that everything he’s learned – from the teachings of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, to the practical physic he picked up in Holland – is worth nothing at all. When he’d chided the midwife for placing holy medals on Eleanor’s birthing bed, for putting sprigs of betony and vervain on the sills of the little shuttered window, for any number of her frivolous superstitions, he could just as well have kept silent. His own vaunted knowledge has proved to be no better than any of it.
And he’s developing a dangerous confusion as he drinks and rages, losing the patience of one landlord after another. The dead infant on Fulke Vaesy’s dissecting table has somehow widened the breach in his sanity. It has wormed its way deep inside his head. Now he’s beginning to believe that the child was his and Eleanor’s.