15
I need a peace envoy, thinks Nicholas. I’ll send him with a letter. He enlists Timothy, the Jackdaw’s taproom lad. But what exactly do you write to someone who called your friend a witch-whore and drew a knife on you – even if it was after you’d punched them in the eye.
By the sixth draft, he thinks he’s got it. As a fall-back, he instructs Timothy that if Ned can’t read, then he’s to speak Nicholas’s words as diplomatically as he can. ‘Whatever you do, sound humble,’ he tells the boy. ‘Don’t make it sound like a legal arraignment. And if he looks like replying with his fists – run!’
The next day Nicholas sets off on the fifteen-minute walk from the Jackdaw to St Thomas’s hospital. Passing beneath the rotting traitors’ heads set on spikes around the roof of the grim stone gatehouse at the foot of London Bridge, he makes his way east along Bankside towards Thieves’ Lane. Beneath his feet the winter mud oozes through the city’s ulcerated skin like an incurable malady.
From a distance, St Tom’s looks exactly like the monastery it once was. It sits on open ground amid a ragged collection of skeletal trees, as if the bones of those it has failed to save have been pressed into service as vegetation. But it is no mean establishment. In addition to its care of the general sick, it boasts a foul ward for those who fall prey to the French pox – as common in Southwark as catching a cold – and a night-layers ward for the homeless. It is also the receiving point for the parish’s vagrant dead.
The gatekeeper studies Nicholas warily. ‘Show me your neck,’ he orders.
Nicholas pulls back the collar of his linen shirt.
‘Insane?’ The question is delivered in a flat monotone.
‘Medically speaking, no,’ says Nicholas, raising an eyebrow. ‘For coming here, very probably.’
The quip has no effect on the gatekeeper. He cares only that the visitor standing before him is not a lunatic, and that he’s not showing signs of pestilence – sufferers of either being forbidden from entering. Apparently satisfied on both counts, he allows Nicholas through.
The mortuary crypt lies beneath the old monastery chapel, down a stairwell that looks more appropriate to a dungeon than a hospital. It reminds Nicholas of the hole that a wasp might bore into a rotten fruit: black and with something very likely unpleasant at the bottom of it. As he descends, the ripe scent of death and quicklime rises to greet him.
At the bottom of the shaft a lantern draws grudging detail from the darkness. Nicholas sees a row of long bundles, each wrapped in a dirty winding cloth. He counts six of them. And at the end of the row lies a single plain wooden coffin. He knows the score: the same casket used for every burial – roll the corpse into the grave, carry the box back for the next customer. If this is where Ned Monkton works, he thinks, no wonder he drinks too much and sees bats with women’s faces.
A large figure looms out of the darkness. For a moment Nicholas almost expects it to be carrying a scythe. ‘Ned – is that you?’ he croaks, across a tongue that’s almost too dry to let the words escape. ‘It’s me, Nicholas Shelby. I sent you a letter–’
Ned Monkton is as big as Nicholas remembers him, ruddy-faced and wearing a dirty full-length leather apron over his tunic and hose. He steps a little too close to Nicholas for comfort.
‘You’ve got the fuckin’ nerve of Old Nick, coming here,’ he says, touching the livid bruise under one eye. Then, to Nicholas’s astonishment, he smiles. ‘But there’s not many on Bankside as would chance a swing at Ned Monkton. You’re a saucy fellow, ain’t you?’
Nicholas is about to tell him it’s a small enough payment for calling Bianca a witch-whore, but decides not to push his luck.
‘What do you want with me, Shelby? Your letter said it was to do with my Jacob?’
‘It is, Ned. I want to help.’
This takes Monkton aback. ‘Help? How the fuck can you help Jacob now? Don’t you know how he was found?’
‘Of course I know. I helped pull him out of the river. I’m so sorry, Ned, about what happened to him. I hear he was a goodly lad; despite the trials he bore in life.’
This seems to change Monkton’s mood. ‘Aye, there’s martyrs as don’t bear their suffering as bravely.’
‘I have some information, Ned. I also want some information. Call it a trade.’
‘Are you after selling me some quackery to bring him back to life, Shelby? ’Cause if you is, there’s a spare box right there what’d fit you just right,’ Monkton says, glancing at the coffin.
‘Why would I do that?’
Monkton studies him, an alarming squint of menace on his face. ‘You’re a physician, ain’t you? I don’t like physicians.’
‘That’s understandable. I’m not overly partial to them myself.’
‘We got stung by a physician at St Saviour’s market – my father and me,’ Monkton explains. ‘Standing on a box, he was, shouting as how he had all these secret mixtures what could cure all known ills.’
Nicholas winces. ‘It’s an easy gull, Ned, especially if someone’s desperate. You’re not the first. You’re not even in the first thousand.’
The news seems to satisfy Ned Monkton. He shrugs, as though he’s remembering nothing weightier than being tricked at cards. ‘Told us he’d study the alignment of the heavens to work out the best remedy.’
‘How much did that cost?’
‘With the mixtures he made? A week’s income – every last farthing.’
‘I’m guessing it didn’t work.’
‘Just left Jacob shitting like a goose for a week.’
‘I’m sorry, Ned; there’s a lot of charlatans about.’
‘Not so many as was.’
‘Please tell me you didn’t–’
‘No, nothing like that. Realigned his fucking heavens for him, though.’
Nicholas allows himself a brief, sympathetic laugh. ‘I’ve wanted to do that myself, once or twice.’
‘After I got out of the stocks, I went to see your Mistress Bianca. She’d just taken on the Jackdaw. People was saying as how she had the knowledge of apothecary. I begged her to make a potion for Jacob.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, she had no time for the likes of me. Wouldn’t even take my coin.’
‘Did she tell you why?’
‘She said nothing she could mix would help. I reckoned she thought a poulterer’s son beneath her.’
To his surprise, Nicholas feels for this rough young fellow – so devoted to his brother, using his fists to protect him from the scorn and the cruel taunts of the uncaring. And what must it have cost him, he wonders, to see Jacob’s butchered body carried into this very crypt, laid beside the corpses huddled together in their shrouds and waiting their turn in the single battered coffin?
‘She gave you the soundest medical advice anyone in London has had for a while, Ned,’ he says, as gently as he knows how. ‘She was being honest with you. She was telling you the truth.’
When Ned Monkton nods thoughtfully, Nicholas knows he’s made a breakthrough. ‘And you know in your heart she’s not a witch, don’t you?’ he adds. ‘She can no more fly than we can.’
Ned Monkton’s face reddens with shame. ‘I knows it’s a grievous fault, Master Shelby,’ he admits, ‘but I gets a bit mixed up when I’m in drink. It makes me think on Jacob so, and then I gets monstrously quarrelsome.’
‘I don’t blame you, Ned. If it was my brother, I’d probably be the same. Tell the truth, I have been the same.’ He holds Ned’s gaze a moment, before asking an uncomfortable question. ‘Would you have used that knife on me, Ned?’