Bianca Merton pauses at the top of the narrow stairs. The door to the attic chamber is ajar, a gentle light from the tallow candle seeping past the frame. Treading softly, she moves closer. Through the narrow space she can just make out Nicholas Shelby’s back as he sits on the mattress by the window. By the slow rise and fall of his shoulders she knows he is weeping.
Slipping silently away, she goes to her own chamber on the floor below. Rose is already asleep on the pull-out truckle bed, snoring softly. Careful not to wake her, Bianca crosses to the far side of her own bed, takes a key from the collection on the cord around her waist and kneels before a small iron-hooped chest by the wall. Slipping the key into the lock, she turns it cautiously to make no sound and lifts the lid.
On a nearby window ledge, just within reach, is the candle Rose has set as a night-light. Bianca reaches out and draws the sconce to her, setting it down on the floor by her left knee. The meagre light of the flame makes no impact on the dark depths of the chest. Familiarity alone makes Bianca’s fingers explore the inside with accuracy. She inhales the scent of lavender, put there to keep the moths away.
Her fingers come to rest on a package wrapped in cloth. Using both hands – it is heavy, though barely the size of a small cushion – she lifts it out and places it on the floor. Her breathing matches the rhythm of Rose’s gentle burbling. Untying the thick ribbon, she unfolds the cloth. The intricate wheels and pointers of her father’s astrolabe catch the flickering candlelight.
Bianca smiles in reminiscence: she is eleven again, sitting on her father’s knee in the sunny courtyard of their house in Padua. He is teaching her how to use the device to fix the position of the constellations, how to cast a horoscope.
Yet for all his skills at divination, he’d failed to predict that his life would end in a cold, dank cell. When the Holy Office of the Faith had come hammering on his door, accusing him of heresy and sorcery, he’d been the only one taken by surprise.
She puts the astrolabe aside and pulls out a thick, leatherbound book. It is written in Latin – a language she cannot read. But she knows the title well enough: ‘A miraculous insight into diverse and wondrous systems of physic’.
Next out of the parcel come three vials of liquid. Each is stopped and sealed with wax, an alchemical symbol painted on the glass. One contains argento vivo; the second lignum sanctum; the third, theriac. She stands them beside her father’s book, three sentinels to protect his secrets.
A merchant of cures. That’s how she’d described him to Nicholas. But to Bianca his merchandise had been dreams. Dreams of distant lands and wondrous sights. Dreams of unimaginable knowledge.
The last item she takes from the parcel feels heavy in her hand, though it is barely six inches long. It gleams as she lifts it to her mouth and kisses its cold silver majesty. She holds it to her heart.
It is her father’s inverted crucifix.
Joshua Pinchbeak sets down his pack by the Cross on Cheapside. He quenches his thirst from the fountain. He has never seen such a monument as the Cross before. It makes a considerable impression on him: three tiers rising almost thirty feet above the street, pillars on the corners framing shrines of the saints. He almost weeps to see how the reformers have smashed the statue of the Virgin and Child, hammering at the stone until the figures look as though they’re made of cold grey gingerbread. Does the new religion really think it can save itself by vandalism? he wonders.
Around him, women queue to fill their pots from the fountain. They look at him askance, alarmed by his wild appearance and the fervour in his eyes. He shouts at them: You must prepare for the end! It is coming soon. You must prepare! The words struggle to leave his slack mouth, the cold water streams over his chin. The women move hurriedly away.
And then a shadow falls across the water in the fountain.
Instinctively Joshua flinches from the expected violence of a constable’s hand laid heavily on his shoulder, or a watchman’s staff jabbed painfully into his back. But the pain does not come. He looks up.
What he sees makes every trial he has suffered since God spoke to him out of the whirlwind worthwhile. His reward is at hand. His suffering has moved God to pity. The Holy Virgin has come down out of her shrine to tell him his ordeal is over!
Joshua Pinchbeak knows it’s the Virgin, because she is hooded, and her head tilts slightly to one side, just like all the images he has ever seen of her, before the heretics whitewashed them over or smashed the glass they were painted on. Her smile is the smile that only the saints possess. Her voice is the song of heaven. The touch of her hand on his arm is just as he imagined an angel’s touch would be.
‘Come,’ she says softly, enticingly. ‘Come with me. And I will give you rest.’
16
Nicholas does a lot of walking in the days following his visit to Ned Monkton.
It is the start of Advent. A weak winter sun silvers the river. The frost sparkles as it cracks underfoot. Bianca has given him the buffin-lined leather coat to keep; the original owner now troubles the Turk’s Head for credit instead.
Rose has trimmed his beard tight against the cheek, and with some careful application of a wax that Bianca makes by boiling certain berries she picks near the river, even the hair on his head has been brought under a measure of control. He still doesn’t look like any physician William Baronsdale and his friends at the College would recognize. But at least he no longer looks like an out-and-out Tom o’ Bedlam.
In this new persona, Nicholas Shelby presents himself to the authorities. Perhaps now they’ll listen to him, now that he can prove one man is responsible for at least four murders.
‘It’s not my master you need to talk to, sir,’ says the clerk to the Southwark alderman, when Nicholas tracks him to his lair in Bridge House on the road to Bermondsey. ‘You need the coroner. He’ll have to inspect the bodies, sir, to determine if a crime has taken place.’
Nicholas explains calmly that the bodies have long since been given a Christian burial. ‘But they’ll have been entered in the parish mortuary rolls,’ he assures the clerk. ‘Jacob Monkton’s name will certainly be there. And the infant is already listed in the records of the Queen’s Coroner, William Danby.’
‘You know that to be a fact, do you?’
‘I was there when the child was cut up!’
Startled, the clerk seems to shrink into his chair. ‘You were party to this murder?’ he asks timorously.
‘I was there at the anatomy lecture,’ Nicholas explains, his tone slow and deliberate, ‘when the boy was dissected.’ He adds, for good measure so there can be no misunderstanding, ‘At the College of Physicians.’
‘I see,’ says the clerk, breathing a sigh of evident relief that he’s not in the presence of a self-confessed killer. ‘And what exactly is it you want Alderman Hawse to do?’
‘We want him to organize a search of empty buildings along Bankside. We think the murderer may be holding his victims somewhere for a time before he kills them.’
‘We? Who is we, if may I enquire?’
‘Myself and Mistress Merton.’
‘Merton?’ The clerk frowns as he ponders the name. ‘Isn’t she the mistress of the Jackdaw? The woman the Grocers’ Guild were trying to arraign a couple of months back for making unlicensed physic?’