The warden looks as sickly and as impoverished as his patients. But he’s canny enough to know the young fellow asking for a position could quite easily be a self-taught charlatan seeking an easy salary and a bed. He wouldn’t be the first. ‘Name for me the four dictums of surgery,’ he says, his attention returning to his accounts.
‘Firstly–’
‘In the Latin – if you wouldn’t mind.’
This man is no Fulke Vaesy. He looks more like a pensioned-off Bankside rat-catcher. But Nicholas does his best to oblige, though his grasp of the classical languages is somewhat rusty.
‘Firstly, to unite the parts disjointed. Secondly, to sunder such parts joined unnaturally. Thirdly, to cut out those parts superfluous…’ His Latin falters as he looks at the warden and sees that the man appears not to have heard a word. He’s still scratching away with his nib on a parchment. But then he looks up, a faint trace of admiration on his face.
‘And lastly?’
‘Lastly, to supply those parts wanting.’
Nicholas thinks of adding, ‘And fifthly, to charge an arm and a leg for the doing of it’, but he suspects the warden’s sense of humour is as susceptible to shock as his inmates.
Only when he has listed the symptoms of quinsy, swine-pox, tissick and dropsy, along with their cures, does the warden finally decide he’s heard enough. He engages Nicholas for two days a week, salary one shilling and fourpence per session – minus the fourpence, when Nicholas politely turns down the offer of bed and board in one of St Tom’s damp corners.
And so – in a manner somewhat less grand than before – Nicholas Shelby once again takes up the profession of physician. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he forsakes the Jackdaw and is to be found sitting in the cloisters at St Thomas’s, warmed by a brazier, while a seemingly never-ending file of Southwark’s shivering, sneezing, limping and spluttering pass before him. He treats tavern spit-turners for burns, weaver women for aching wrists, draymen for crushed fingers. For cases requiring minor surgery he uses the hospital’s collection of ancient and battered saws, lancets, drills, sewing-quills and rasps. To the astonishment of the barber-surgeon, he cleans them with brandy appropriated from the warden’s private store. It’s a trick he’d picked up in the Low Countries. Not once does he cast a patient’s horoscope before he makes a diagnosis, even if they ask him to.
He knows he’s sailing close to the wind – practising surgery with his bare hands. Even to touch a patient’s body is regarded by some of the older fellows of the College of Physicians as a breach of professional standards. But it seems the writ of neither the College nor the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons runs in Southwark, as happens north of the river. Besides, the warden appears only too happy to have someone qualified – and more importantly sober – to carry out the work, and the barber-surgeon seems only too glad of the help.
So Nicholas keeps his head down. He minds his own business. He tends to his patients as diligently as if they were paying him. Those in need of an apothecary he directs to Bianca Merton, trusting neither the competency of the sisters at St Tom’s nor the efficacy of their balms and potions.
And he chooses carefully the sister, the patient and, indeed, the moment to ask, ‘Do you recall if there was ever a woman who brought a young boy here, four or five years of age – a little boy with deformed legs?’
As Christmas approaches, Bianca musters her forces to ensure the Jackdaw outdoes its rivals in the lane, the Turk’s Head and the Good Husband. The taproom is garlanded with mistletoe and holly, some of it bought from hawkers, the rest cut illicitly from the hedges and banks around the Pike Garden and the orchards by the Barge House stairs. Hot spiced wine is prepared. Using a recipe she brought with her from Padua, Bianca has Rose prepare dainties of pastry and marchpane, which fly off the tray. When the landlord of the Turk’s Head suggests they’re papist wafers and threatens to report her, she lets him try one. Then another. He forgets the Church and offers her a shilling for the secret.
Christmas in London, she thinks, is a world away from Padua. Here there are no tableaux of the nativity paraded through the streets and squares, no swelling voices spilling out of the churches as Mass is celebrated. Here, despite the strictures of the new religion, the festivities seem more steeped in a pagan past. It has a dangerous edge to it, as though it wouldn’t take much to tear away the thin façade of propriety and expose a whole ensemble of fawns and sprites, antlers on their heads, cavorting in a woodland glade. No wonder the Pope thinks the English heretical.
Nicholas is troubled.
This will be his first Christmas without Eleanor. The approaching festivities serve only to heighten the pain he feels at her absence. He tallies in his mind the passing of the milestones: her death in the first week of August… his attempt at self-destruction in mid-October… He realizes his sanctuary with Bianca has lasted barely ten weeks. He wonders if the fragile start to his recovery will hold. And he dreads the prospect of a message from Ned Monkton, telling him another victim has arrived in the mortuary crypt at St Thomas’s. So he tries to keep his mind occupied. He willingly joins in the preparations. When he’s not at St Tom’s, he’s to be found busying himself with all manner of tasks: cutting a Yule log from a felled tree in the fields beyond the Rose playhouse, doing deals with vintners and brewers on Bianca’s behalf, visiting the markets and shops of Bankside for the ingredients with which Bianca will prepare leech and frumenty, brawn and souse for the Christmas table.
And the Jackdaw is gaining a reputation for something other than good fare and cheap ale. Often now, when a customer orders his stitch-back, he might ask Bianca if she will make a salve for his bunions, or seek advice from Nicholas on his wife’s backache. Some of the better-off even pay.
Three days before Christmas, Timothy announces that he thinks government watchers have returned to the Jackdaw, just as they did when Bianca first bought the tavern. From the parlour door, he points out two rough-looking fellows drinking in the taproom.
‘They say they’re wherrymen, but I’ve asked around and no one who works on the river seems to know who they are.’
‘Well, we’ve had a good run,’ says Bianca. ‘It’s over a year since I threw the last lot out.’
‘Aren’t you worried?’ Nicholas asks.
‘Of course not,’ she replies blithely. ‘There’s no sedition preached at the Jackdaw.’
If they are informers, who has sent them? Has the Grocers’ Guild or the Barber-Surgeons’ Company caught word that he and Bianca are practising without licences? Or are they Privy Council watchers, on the lookout for Romish intrigue and Jesuit priests in disguise?
‘Do you want me to throw them out?’ Nicholas asks.
Bianca just smiles nonchalantly. ‘Why draw attention to ourselves?’
And to show how contemptuous she is of these supposed spies, she at once names them ‘Leicester’ and ‘Walsingham’, after the two towering pillars – both now dead – of the queen’s secret state.
On Christmas Eve a mummers’ play comes to the lane. A crowd gathers to watch St George slay the dragon. St George is played by a handsome fellow with an earring, the dragon by a skinny boy with a paper hat in the shape of a serpent’s head. He hisses menacingly, terrifying the women and children and drawing volleys of good-natured abuse from the men. His face is painted with burnt cork, as it is a well-known fact that dragons come from either Turkey or Ethiopia, and hence are customarily dark-skinned.