But how can she forget? The day he came to her as she lay in her birthing bed and committed butchery upon her and her child – butchery he passed off as merely unsuccessful physic – will stay with her until her last living moment, probably beyond.
One day, she thinks. One day I shall show him the contents of this Bible-box. And when he laughs and calls me a fool for not letting go of the past, I shall tell him the truth: that these treasures were meant for a child I planned – no, longed – to have.
By another man. By Mathew.
A primero game at a nearby table is progressing noisily towards its climax, the music of Timothy’s lute almost drowned out by the shouts of the players as they throw down their cards. Every part of Nicholas’s body yearns for the soothing oblivion of a couple of quarts of knock-down. He can feel it calling to him in the tingling in his fingers, making them curl as though they were already clasping the jug. He feels as though he’s walked a pilgrim trail and back again. And it’s not just the din of the tavern and the throbbing of his feet he wants to drown out, it’s also the questions in his head.
‘If the parish authorities won’t take action, then we have to,’ Bianca says blithely, doing what she always does when she’s trying to solve a tricky problem: running those long fingers through her unruly hair as though preparing herself for whatever battle – large or small – lies ahead. The bloom of the taproom fire on her skin, the brilliant white of her Haarlem-linen collar against the carnelian of her bodice, the green brocade of her kirtle that looks as deep as an ocean in the semi-darkness, all these would make her unbearably desirable, thinks Nicholas, were it not for one inescapable fact–
He pushes the thought from his mind. ‘And what exactly are you proposing?’
‘Let’s face it, no one is going to listen to a taverner with a hint of Romish in her voice, and her labourer. One of us is going to have to raise their station a little.’
‘And who did you have in mind?’ he asks.
With a challenging tilt of the head she looks him straight in the eye and says, ‘Well, you’re the one with the Latin.’
17
The first light snowfall of winter turns into a slippery grey gruel underfoot. On Bankside the lanes are busy as Christmas approaches. Despite the chill, most of the Jackdaw’s customers are outside, watching a man in bright-yellow Venetians and a gaudy coat festooned with ribbons. He’s attempting to walk along a rope strung between two carts, while breathing fire like a dragon.
The street entertainer is almost at the end of the rope when he begins to teeter. The crowd responds with the usual cacophony of jeers and cat-calls that it saves for poor performances at the Rose playhouse. He falls, landing with a stomach-turning thud on the hard ground. The torch he employs to provide the dragon’s fire sails through the air and lands spluttering in the snow.
By the time Nicholas gets to him, the man has been propped up against the wheel of the nearest cart. Squatting down beside him, Nicholas pulls back his coat and shirt to inspect the damage. One shoulder sags like a half-empty sack of flour. The neck muscles twitch alarmingly under the skin. His face is as pallid as the December clouds.
‘You’re lucky – nothing’s broken,’ Nicholas tells him. ‘But you’ve dislocated that shoulder.’
‘Are you a physician?’ the man snarls, his face creasing in agony. ‘A pox on you then. I don’t have coin to waste on a quack.’
‘Nor did my father when he sent me to Cambridge,’ Nicholas retorts. ‘Listen to me: I served in the Low Countries with the army of the Prince of Orange, treating the wounded. I can help you. It’ll cost you nothing. Tricky way to earn a living – a onearmed rope-walker.’
The man leans back his head and laughs through the pain. ‘The Low Countries – where?’
‘Brabant… Delft… what does it matter? A dislocated shoulder is a dislocated shoulder in any state.’
‘I was at the fall of Antwerp in eighty-five. In Sir William Parvis’s company.’
‘Ah, a most fine gentleman.’
‘Yes, he was. You know he died?’
‘Yes, he did. But I wasn’t his surgeon.’
The rope-walker grits his teeth and gives Nicholas a maniacal grin. ‘Then do what you must, Surgeon, and by the holy Virgin’s tit, do it fast!’
Nicholas unlaces his left boot and sets it aside. The slush against his bare foot feels like a thousand icy pin-pricks. He swiftly removes the fellow’s coat so that he can get a good purchase on the arm. He leaves the shirt alone, in the interests of speed. Making a quick check with his fingers, he determines which way the shoulder has dislocated. He’s lost count of the reductions – the reseating of dislocated joints – he’s performed in Holland: young recruits who’d not been trained to shoulder their firing-pieces correctly and got caught by the recoil; pikeblows taken against the steel pauldron-plate in the heat of battle; riders thrown from their horses. The trick lies in moving fast. He places a comforting hand on the man’s sound shoulder. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready when you are,’ his patient replies, closing his eyes.
Nicholas lifts the patient’s arm. Another pitiful groan. The audience begins to cheer – on Bankside, pain and suffering are valuable public attractions; the bear-pit is only five minutes’ walk away. At the Turk’s Head there’s cock-fighting in the yard every Thursday. If I really wanted to, thinks Nicholas, I could send Timothy around the crowd with a cap for tips. He puts his foot as deep into his patient’s armpit as it will go. The man’s mouth gapes like a fish’s as he groans in agony. His chest heaves.
Nicholas hauls on the arm like a sailor hoisting a sail. A scream rips through the crisp air like a scalpel. More cheers. And then he feels resistance. The screaming stops. The limb has reseated itself. The rope-walker’s face is that of a prisoner who’d just been told he’s being spared the rack. Nicholas even gets a round of applause.
‘Easy as falling off a rope,’ he says to himself in a satisfied tone. ‘And you don’t need to read Galen for seven years to do that.’
Perhaps Bianca was speaking the truth, he thinks. Perhaps you can’t just un-become a physician.
The next day, Nicholas goes to St Thomas’s and asks to see the warden.
He’s kept waiting an hour. He passes the time in observation. When he enters one of the wards, where ten patients lie on mattresses covered with surprisingly clean linen, the sisters pay him no attention whatsoever. He gets the impression that the barber-surgeon on duty knows how to perform the simple stuff – the letting of blood to balance the body’s humours, the treatment of fractures – but when he contrives to talk to the hospital’s only resident physician, he discovers the man prefers the ease of the dice-houses and taverns on Thieves’ Lane to labouring on the wards at St Tom’s. He says he plans to set himself up in practice in Woolwich. It appears there’s an opening.
The warden’s office is a poky little cell in the oldest part of the hospital, occupying what was once a corner of the monks’ beer cellar. Nicholas stands in the open doorway, filling it even though he is not overly tall, waiting for the warden to look up from his work. ‘I hear you might have need of a new physician,’ he says.