Ned’s jaw works slowly as he considers his reply. ‘Maybe… probably not.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t. Ugly things, knife-wounds. Even the smallest can prove fatal.’ Nicholas nods towards the line of wrapped bodies. ‘You think it’s nothing worse than a small puncture, the next thing you know you’re lying there with your lungs full of blood, dead. Besides, if you’d killed me, how would I find the man who murdered your Jacob?’
Ned Monkton stares at him. ‘Murdered?’
The single word sounds, in this grim place, like the dead groaning in their winding sheets.
‘Yes, Ned. Your Jacob didn’t fall into a waterwheel, like the constable claimed. He was murdered. There’s a killer loose on Bankside, Ned. And I need to stop him, before he kills again.’
Out on the river a dung-boat makes its way on the tide, bearing the city’s waste to the fields and gardens beyond the Fleet ditch. The oarsmen wear cloths across their faces to keep out the smell. On the south bank the sails of the grain mills turn in the wind like the hands of the fashionable new clocks that men like Robert Cecil and John Lumley keep in their studies to impress their friends. Nicholas Shelby, lapsed physician, hurries along Bankside towards the Jackdaw, carrying with him a dark and troubling burden.
Counting young Jacob and the infant from Vaesy’s demonstration, there have been four corpses marked with an inverted cross taken from the river since August. There could be more, though Ned Monkton’s partiality to ale makes accurate recollection troublesome.
‘I know as well as any Christian man, that wound is the mark of Satan,’ Ned had told him.
‘Did anyone else notice them?’
‘Perhaps some of the sisters might have, but they’re mostly ex-patients, poor women with not the brains they was born with. One or two of them make my Jacob look like a scholar.’
‘Did you tell anyone?’
‘Aye, when Jacob came in and I saw he was marked in the same way, I told the hospital warden and the matron.’
‘What was their reply?’
‘They said I was imagining it. And if I wasn’t, I should hold my peace anyway.’
Nicholas is not surprised. The hospital survives on charity and the goodwill of the aldermen and its benefactors. The very last thing it wants is to have the Bishop of London’s men turn up in search of devilry. Besides, what does the city care for the dead poor who float up from the river’s depths? Better to let them sink back down, undisturbed.
Two insubstantial visions jostle for attention in Nicholas Shelby’s mind as he reaches the Jackdaw. They are Ned’s description of the two other corpses. One is of a heavyset woman of around thirty. She has an eyeless, bovine face and a little bell on a cord tied around her neck.
‘Are you telling me the killer put out her eyes?’ Nicholas had asked.
‘No,’ Ned had replied, ‘it must have happened long before – the sockets was healed over.’
The other vision is of an old, emaciated man with a wispy beard. ‘Maybe an old cut-purse,’ Ned had offered, describing in some detail the stump of ill-tailored flesh where one of the hands should have been.
Nicholas can imagine them laid out in the mortuary crypt – just as the little boy and Jacob Monkton were laid out. He can see the sisters washing the naked bodies, preparing the winding sheets, chattering inconsequentially to keep up their spirits as they lather over those deep, obscene lacerations. One vertical wound, the other slashed across it. The inverted cross. All that’s godly, decent and good turned on its head.
‘At least now you can report what you’ve discovered to the parish aldermen,’ Bianca tells him later that night when the Jackdaw has closed. Timothy and Rose are busy cleaning the pottage bowls and the wooden trenchers in the parlour. The embers are glowing like a hoard of golden treasure in the hearth. Outside in the lane the tavern’s painted sign swings gently in a cold wind blowing off the river.
‘Judging by Ned Monkton’s efforts to get someone to listen, it’s not going to be easy,’ Nicholas replies. ‘Think on it, Bianca: tavern brawls, duels between gallants, robberies, accidents, drunken husbands who beat their wives, souse-heads who fall under waggons or into the river, wildfowlers on Lambeth marshes who point their firing-pieces a little too carelessly… There aren’t enough coroners in all England to deal with so much unexpected death. Who’s going to have the time to care about a few vagrants?’
‘But Jacob wasn’t a vagrant,’ Bianca says. ‘The family is poor, but they’re not vagabonds. Ned’s father is a poulterer. Even Ned has a job, though only God knows how he’s managed to hang on to it.’
‘Probably because there’s few else who’d do it,’ says Nicholas with a shudder. ‘By the way, I don’t think you need to fear Ned any more. He’s an honest enough sort of fellow in his own way. Grief and drink, that’s all – enough to change any man for the worse.’ He realizes he could be describing himself. He hopes that in the firelight Bianca hasn’t noticed the colour flooding into his cheeks.
‘And his little brother was a God-fearing subject of your sovereign majesty – our sovereign majesty – Elizabeth,’ she says heatedly. ‘Not the most gifted of them, I’ll grant you, but whoever killed Jacob – and the others – and threw their bodies into that filthy river will have to answer for it. Isn’t that what your vaunted English law says?’
‘Yes, but it’s the same law that will brand a poor man with a white-hot iron for straying from one parish into another without permission or gainful employment,’ says Nicholas. ‘It’s the same law that excuses a rich one the scaffold for manslaughter, if he can recite from the Bible in Latin. I don’t think the law is going to be much use when it comes to justice for Jacob Monkton.’
His eyrie in the attic is warm and there is a smoky tang in the air from the smouldering fire downstairs. Rose has set a tallow candle by the mattress, a bowl of water and fresh linen in the corner. As Nicholas bathes his body he smells the bitter, aromatic scent of the wormwood and alum she has mixed with the water, on Bianca’s instruction. He longs for sleep, but there is too much on his mind. Beyond the little window the lane is lost in darkness.
He remembers how he sat here no more than a few weeks ago – though it feels more like an age – staring out over the river and imagining Eleanor sitting alone in Trinity church, waiting for him to come to her. He accepts now that the distance between them is unbridgeable. It is wider than the greatest river any man could possibly imagine. His image of her has become tantalizingly indistinct. It trickles through his fingers like Rose’s wormwood water. It flows down into the alley where it mixes with the rain. It streams towards the river where it mingles with the tide, and so to the Narrow Sea and the great ocean beyond. And as it flows, Nicholas realizes at last that she is becoming lost to him for ever.
In Holland, he recalls, he’d met a man named Jannsen, a maker of spectacles. This Jannsen had told him how his young son had been playing with some lenses in his workshop, when by chance he’d moved one lens in front of another. The boy had yelped in terror. Because seen through the two lenses, a tiny spider on the bench below had suddenly appeared the size of a rat. Jannsen believed it might be possible to make a device that would bring things too small to see with the naked eye into plain sight. What if that were really possible? Nicholas wonders. Perhaps then he could see across the vast gulf that separates him from Eleanor.
It is only a fancy; he knows that. And because it is only an impossible fancy, it fills him with an unbearable sense of loss.