‘Anyway,’ Bianca says, dabbing off the excess comfrey and valerian paste and wiping her fingers on a linen rag, ‘it was just a little spat. They were drunk. I don’t think Ned Monkton intended to use that blade. He’s not a killer. He’s grieving. That was his little brother they fished out of the river at the Mutton Lane stairs on Accession Day, after all.’
Her words remind Nicholas of what he’d been about to tell her on Black Bull Alley. ‘I know – I heard someone on the jetty say so.’
‘Poor little sprat. The way he was found – isn’t that’s enough to drive any brother to madness?’
‘The constable decided he fell into one of the waterwheels beneath the bridge. That’s what the coroner’s verdict will say. That’s the version that will go down in the parish mortuary roll.’
Nicholas hears her place the balm pot on the table a little more forcefully than perhaps she’d intended. ‘What do you mean by “version”, Nicholas? Do you imply that’s not how he died?’
‘Jacob’s death had nothing to do with any waterwheel.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I was a physician, once. I know what I saw.’
‘You are a physician still, Nicholas Shelby. You do not unbecome something simply by crossing a river – or casting yourself into one, for that matter. You cannot unstitch yourself like an old shirt in order to make a new one. Now, tell me what you mean by “version”.’
‘You clearly know the Monktons,’ he says, the ache in his skull slowly fading. ‘If you tell me everything you know about young Jacob, then I’ll tell you how he really died. Do we have a compact?’
It appears they do. True to her word, Bianca tells him how Jacob was the darling of his older brother’s eye, how Ned protected and cared for him because Jacob’s brains didn’t work the way other people’s brains work – protected him with his considerable fists, if anyone so much as looked at Jacob the wrong way. Little Jacob, who gazed in wonderment at each new day as though nothing in it was even remotely familiar to him. Jacob, whom the unkind said should have a cell of his own in Bedlam. Jacob, who went missing from the hovel on Scrope Alley that the Monktons call home a whole month before his eviscerated body washed up at the Mutton Lane stairs.
When she has no more to tell him, Bianca puts away the balm and throws the linen rag into a basket for Rose to clean. There is a look of sadness on her face as she gazes out through the parlour window to the dark yard beyond. No matter what she thinks of Ned, she admires the loyalty in him, feels deep sadness for young Jacob. Sometimes, she thinks, you have to forgive a hurt if the one who causes it is suffering too.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ she says. ‘Tell me how young Jacob Monkton really died.’
Joshua Pinchbeak has had an encounter with God. He can prove it. He bears the physical scars of it and he bears them proudly. He will tell anyone who’ll listen how God spoke to him out of a whirlwind of fire and light. A physician once told him he was only suffering from a stroke of the palsy, but Joshua Pinchbeak knows better.
The encounter had blazed with such excoriating intensity that it was a whole day and a night before his senses returned. An entire month passed before his limbs regained some of their former strength. The ordeal has left him with one arm that does not work, and a tongue that can barely speak the warning God wants him to shout to all who will listen. His left leg drags as he walks and one side of his face has slipped, like a bank of earth after a heavy rain. But he has survived the whirlwind, and he understands why. Joshua, a simple weaver’s son, has been chosen to bring God’s warning to every man, woman and child he can reach. A terrible warning: the end of days is coming soon. Prepare!
Joshua has read the scriptures. He’s devoured every word. He knows that God makes His chosen face a trial of faith. After all, didn’t He make Job crawl on his belly like a worm, took every possession, every joy, every last hope away from him? But Job was up to the trial. Not once did Job deny his Lord, and in the end Job was rewarded. Every age must have its Job, and Joshua Pinchbeak, itinerant preacher and messenger of the end of days, believes he is this one’s.
In market squares and on cathedral steps from York to Exeter, in sunlight that burned him and rain and wind that scoured him, he has tried to make them listen, to fear what is coming. His earthly reward has been nothing but more pain.
Because he is not ordained, because he doesn’t have a doctorate of theology from Oxford or Cambridge, from Basle or Strasbourg, from Padua or Heidelberg, the clergy chase him from the church door. They have brought him before the assizes. They have tried to make him confess that he is a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anabaptist, a Lollard, that he’s possessed by Devils, that he’s a blasphemer, that he’s just making it all up. He has languished in the filth of a dozen prison cells. But he will not stop shouting his warning. Prepare!
He has taken a great risk in coming to London to preach. If he is challenged, St Paul’s Cross will be far harder to escape from than a country churchyard, or the crossroads at Kingston where he preached yesterday. He is exhausted from the long journey south. He is thirsty and half-starved. To sleep in the open tonight will be a great ordeal. But if just one man or woman heeds his warning, he will bear these trials willingly. He will not complain. What possible pain can Joshua Pinchbeak suffer that he has not already endured?
14
This evening at the Jackdaw the more observant customers notice an unusual quiet in Bianca Merton. This evening she does not go amiably from table to table exchanging pleasantries, delighting the crowd with her stinging put-downs when some fellow who’s had a little too much cheer suggests she might like to accompany him to one of the Jackdaw’s lodging rooms. Even Rose and Timothy find themselves spared the usual chivvying.
‘You’ve asked her to be your mistress once too often,’ says a wherryman named Slater to his companion, Walter Pemmel. ‘Now you’ve ruined it for all of us.’
‘Never!’ protests Walter, who’s old enough to remember the reign of Bloody Mary. ‘It’s ’cause I told her I was already wed. She’s a-pining for what she can’t ’ave.’
The truth, of course, is that this evening Bianca Merton is troubled as she’s seldom been troubled before. She’s finding the story Nicholas has told her almost impossible to bear. And tonight, like him, she will find sleep elusive; and, when it comes, disturbed by dark dreams.
Lizzy Lumley has come down to Cold Oak manor. She does so every November, as close to Katherine Vaesy’s name-day as her duties at Nonsuch or the Lumley town house on Tower Hill will allow. Her husband has insisted she bring Gabriel Quigley and Francis Deniker, his clerk, with her. ‘Bad roads and bad men, Lizzy,’ he’d protested. ‘There are more cut-purses between here and Vauxhall than there are trees.’
Tomorrow morning the two women will ride east to Long Southwark, dispensing alms from the Lumley rents to the destitute sick. It’s what aristocratic women do, when sewing or reading their psalters fails to satisfy. Indeed, Lizzy’s charitable nature is famed throughout Surrey. At every Sunday sermon the Reverend Watson assures Lord Lumley it will earn her a special place in heaven. Mindful of the new faith, he stops short of praying for her beatification.