‘Mistress Mary Cullen, sir. Brought in from Pale Lane in Bermondsey.’
He turns to the woman on the stool. ‘And you are?’
‘Widow Welford, Your Honour,’ says the woman on the stool, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. ‘Alice Welford. A neighbour.’
‘A neighbour – is that what you call yourself?’ asks Nicholas, wondering what kind of neighbour would wait until someone was close to dying of syphilis before seeking help.
Alice Welford smiles nervously, softening her boxy features and becoming almost motherly. ‘I used to look after Mary here when she was a squeaker, no higher than my knee. She used to come round for her bowl of paplar, regular. She’d have starved otherwise – her own mother was cup-shot by ten in the morning most days.’ She raises an imaginary glass to her mouth. ‘Runs in the Cullen family, I fear. I ended up doing the same for Mary, looking after her daughter – before this happened.’ She tilts her head to study Mary’s ravaged face. ‘Poor little duck. Is there any hope for her?’
Nicholas draws Alice aside. Mary Cullen may be blind and delirious, but who’s to say her hearing’s not acute?
‘I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing to be done,’ he says. ‘It was too late months ago. Why didn’t you bring her here earlier?’
Alice Welford frowns. ‘Mercy, sir, I would have done, I swear. But I haven’t seen Mary for a year at least. She turned up on my step just over a week ago. Hardly recognized her, the state she was in.’
‘She came to you for help?’
‘I tried – God’s precious wounds, I did. I paid out of my own purse for a balm from some napper in St Saviour’s market. Said he’d studied physic in Vienna. Didn’t work, of course.’
‘Well, you’ve done your best.’
‘How long – can you tell?’
Nicholas gives a sad shrug. ‘It’s hard to say. No longer than a few days.’
‘Only I can’t really afford to pay for a bed here, you see.’
‘I’ll make sure it’s put down to the parish.’
‘I should have taken her in years ago,’ the woman tells Nicholas vehemently, ‘before that sharper Michael Riordan showed up.’
‘Is that the husband?’
‘Mercy, no! Even Mary wasn’t that addle-brained. One of the canting crew, Michael was. A thief. Have your purse away faster than you could blink.’
‘Don’t tell me he put her on the street for money?’
‘No, but he might as well have. Left her with two sprats and nothing else. Not even a pot to piss in – saving Your Honour’s pardon.’
Nicholas smiles. ‘I’m not an Honour, I’m just Nicholas.’
He’s used to hearing the life stories of his patients. If this is the only epitaph Mary Cullen will ever get, well, what’s a couple of minutes spent listening to it?
Alice Welford studies him with eyes made wise by endurance. ‘Well, Nicholas,’ she says, savouring the name as though it’s something exotic – which to her it probably is, given that she’s unlikely to be on first-name terms with any other physician in London, ‘you can’t blame Mary for turning to the jumping-house to earn a crust, seeing as how that bastard Riordan left her with an infant son what couldn’t even stand on the two legs God gave him – can you?’
19
At Nonsuch, Fulke Vaesy has come for a morning’s hawking. Lizzy Lumley sends word to the kitchens to prepare for a man so intimately acquainted with flesh. The anatomist’s visits are seldom a comfortable experience for her; there will be endless talk of medicine, the College, the latest discoveries in science. She fears most of it will be beyond her comprehension. It will remind her she is not another Jane FitzAlan.
The Nonsuch cooks prepare a fine meal of pulled hare in blood-and-claret sauce, but to Lizzy’s despair, even the food cannot escape being pressed into the service of scientific debate.
‘Answer me this, Fulke,’ says John, lifting the fine pewter sauce jug from the table and examining it, ‘when the blood in this sauce was in the hare, it carried the animal’s life-force, did it not?’
‘Indeed it did,’ answers Vaesy. But in his head he replies with a question of his own: Have you laid aside your papist sympathies, John, or have you been consorting with England’s enemies again in secret? It’s important I know, lest Robert Cecil holds me guilty by association.
‘Yet once the blood is in the sauce,’ Lumley continues blithely, ‘it has no vitality whatsoever.’
‘That also is true.’
‘You and I could swallow a gallon of it, yet we wouldn’t suddenly leap up and start trading blows like two hares in springtime.’
Vaesy gives his host an indulgent smile. He explains that, in his medical opinion, the life-force does not leave the body with the blood. It remains within the organs, an invisible residue from the God-given life-force that’s carried on the air we breathe. But once again, like a spy’s cipher, every word of this explanation has an alternative meaning: You’re not hiding fugitive Jesuit priests at Nonsuch, are you, John? Only if you are and I’m to have any hope of becoming a queen’s physician one day, I’ll have to tell Robert Cecil about it.
‘Must we talk of blood at the table, Husband?’ asks Lizzy, eyelids tight shut.
‘But this is scientific discourse, Sweet,’ Lumley says, laying a fond hand on his wife’s shoulder. ‘You’ll find it interesting.’ Then, to Vaesy, ‘Take the sickness described by Abulcasis of Cordoba, for example – are you familiar with him?’
‘The Moor describes many maladies in his writings. Can you be more specific?’
‘I’m talking of the bleeding sickness, Fulke. When those who suffer from it cut themselves, the flow is most profuse, almost unstoppable. It can only be quenched with difficulty. Sometimes the bleeding cannot be stopped at all, and the afflicted die.’
‘That’s quite enough blood for one supper!’ cries Lizzy, rising from the table. ‘I’m going to invigorate my life-force with a stroll in the privy garden.’
The two men barely notice her leave, or her parting sigh of exasperation. Lumley calls a servant to pour more Rhenish.
‘Surely, Fulke, that must prove that the invigorating life-force is contained within the blood itself,’ says Lumley ardently. ‘After all, when the tyrant Nero sent word to the philosopher Seneca that he should open his veins and die, that’s exactly what happened – he died! And the same would happen to you or I. So the secret must lie somewhere in the blood.’
Vaesy lifts his spoon and waggles it in front of his chest to indicate his lungs. ‘But you discount something important, John: before the blood can become vitalized, first it must mix with what we physicians call in the Greek pneuma – the vital spirit with which God has filled the air around us.’
Lumley nods to show he’s keeping up, crosses his arms over his stomach and leans back comfortably in his chair. He enjoys these exchanges. It’s why he’s a patron of the College.
‘This pneuma is drawn in with every breath we take,’ continues Vaesy. ‘It is then boiled in the liver by the heat of the body, into what we term a concoction.’ He lays the spoon face-down on the table. Little rivulets of blood-and-claret sauce trickle down its back. He points to them. ‘Thus the enriched fluid flows in a tidal motion from the liver to the organs, as they may require it.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Very simple. Very elegant. One of Our Lord’s cleverer creations.’
‘And the medical authority for this comes from where?’ asks Lumley as he gestures for a servant to remove his trencher.