The words slip out of Vaesy’s mouth as though someone else has control of his tongue. ‘Robert Cecil.’
Silence.
Lumley stares at his friend in bewilderment. ‘I had no idea Robert Cecil was a man knowledgeable of physic,’ he says. ‘I thought the law was more his field.’
Almost gagging on a morsel of hare, Vaesy splutters, ‘A s-s-slip of the tongue, John. The hawking must have tired me out. I meant to say Galen. It was most definitely Galen; he described the flow of the blood throughout the body! Twelve hundred years ago. It was indisputably Galen. I can’t imagine what prompted me to say otherwise.’ He takes a hurried sip from his glass. ‘Must be this excellent Rhenish.’
Lumley scoops up a little of the sauce on his right index finger. ‘Aye, I’m sure you’re right,’ he says, licking his fingertip. ‘As you say, all very simple and elegant. The problem I have is this, Fulke: is it true?’
Out in the cloisters, away from the grim oppression of the foul ward, Alice Welford seems altogether a lighter woman. She moves with a fluidity Nicholas hadn’t noticed before. As they walk he listens intently to the story of Mary Cullen’s short and troubled life.
‘Mary was a good girl – better than you’d think, considering this great trial she’s come to,’ Alice says wistfully. ‘That rogue Riordan came whistling through when she’d barely turned fifteen. Handsome bastard, he was – told everyone he’d fought almost to the death in the Irish wars. Truth was, he’d never been further west than Oxford.’
‘How old would this boy of hers be now?’ Nicholas tries hard to keep his voice slow and even.
‘Little Ralph? He was born the summer the harvest failed–’
Ralph.
To Nicholas, the name arrives like the view seen from the top of a hard-climbed hill. Ralph Cullen. ‘That would make him, what: four?’ he says, remembering the year his father had struggled to pay for his tuition at Cambridge because the fields at Barnthorpe had yielded half what was expected of them.
Alice Welford nods.
‘And Ralph was born with a malformation of the legs?’
‘As if the good Lord hadn’t given him enough to contend with, what with Michael Riordan for a sire and a souse-head for a dam.’
Nicholas allows himself a pause; he doesn’t want to sound too eager for information. Although he trusts Alice Welford not to invent, this is still Bankside. ‘You mentioned Mary had two children by this Michael Riordan. Who was the second?’
‘Oh, that was Elise, God bless her soul.’
Another name. Another slight lifting of the curtain’s edge.
‘Only she wasn’t the second,’ says Alice, ‘she was the first, if you follow me. By about eight or nine years.’
‘Elise was Ralph Cullen’s older sister?’
‘That’s right. Though whether Michael Riordan was the father is anyone’s guess – what with him travelling the road or getting taken up in the Bridewell. His visits were more erratic than the plague. And about as welcome, as far as we were all concerned.’
‘So that would make Elise about thirteen or so now?’
‘Give or take.’
The answer to his next question, he knows, might pass a sentence of death on Elise, daughter of Mary Cullen. If it’s ‘yes’, there might well be a fifth victim. ‘Tell me, Alice, was Elise Cullen also born crippled?’
Alice Welford takes his arm, like an aunt reminiscing with a favourite nephew. ‘Elise? Mercy, no! That child was born bonny. She has the constitution of a lion’s cub, like them they keep in the menagerie at the Tower. Needed it, mind.’
‘So she’s alive?’
‘No thanks to her mother. One of her customers at the Cardinal’s Hat managed to set fire to the mattress Elise was sleeping on, burned her on the face. I think that was enough for the poor lass. One morning, while Mary was in her stupors, Elise took up little Ralphie and left.’
‘Where is she now?’ Nicholas asks, as calmly as his racing thoughts will allow. ‘She ought to have the chance to make a settling with her mother, before she’s taken up.’
‘That I do not know, Master Nicholas. Honest, I don’t.’
‘Someone must know where’s she gone,’ Nicholas says, the tantalizing image of Elise Cullen already beginning to evade his grasp. ‘She can’t just have vanished.’
‘All I could learn from Mary was that sometime around last Pentecost the two little conies just disappeared.’
‘I have to find her,’ Nicholas says, now beyond caring what Alice Welford might make of his sudden interest in a young girl he has apparently never heard of until this moment.
Alice shakes her head. ‘I wish I could help you, truly I do. The thought of poor Elise carrying little Ralph on her young back down some dangerous road all by herself breaks my heart. I just hope she’s found somewhere safe for them both. They was always inseparable. Yes, that’s what she’d do – find a haven. And I’ll tell you this, Elise wouldn’t let nothing this side of Satan’s front door stop her.’
When Nicholas returns to the Jackdaw, Bianca says, ‘They’re back again.’
‘Who’s back?’
‘Leicester and Walsingham. The two snoopers Timothy spotted before Christmas. They’re sitting in the taproom as bold as two toads on a waterlily.’ She’s managed to make her face a mask of indifference, but she can’t disguise the concern in her eyes, or the tightening of her jaw. She leads him to the door. And there they are, huddled together at a corner bench; dressed like watermen, yet ignored by the other wherry crews.
Bianca has seen men like this before; she knows the type well enough. They’re tyranny’s minor mercenaries; little men who grow large off the fear their masters instil in others. She’d seen their sort in Padua, when the Office of the Holy Faith had come to her father’s house to accuse him of writing books contrary to God’s teachings. Only then they’d worn the rough brown cloaks of the clergy, not the assumed garb of Thames wherrymen. But they had the same look in their eyes: You might turn your noses up at us, but if you know what’s good for you, fear us.
‘Perhaps they just like the ale here,’ Nicholas says, trying to reassure her. ‘What is there for them to find? The Jackdaw is the least seditious drinking house in Southwark. You said so yourself.’
‘I just don’t like them, Nicholas. They offend me.’
‘Shall I throw them out?’
‘No, I suppose we’ll just have to suffer them. But I’m not having them run up credit. And tell Timothy to serve them last, from the old casks.’ She gathers her kirtle around her and steps boldly into the taproom, but not before saying, ‘You were looking a proper Jack-o’-dandy when you came in just now.’
‘Was I?’
‘Something’s happened, Nicholas, hasn’t it? Are you going to tell me? Or is everyone in this tavern hiding their hearts from me?’
‘Of course I can’t be absolutely certain that Ralph Cullen was the crippled infant taken from the river,’ Nicholas admits later, when he’s recounted his conversation with Alice Welford, ‘but I’d wager money on it.’
‘The poor little lambs,’ Bianca whispers, holding the tips of her fingers against her lips. ‘How they must have suffered so.’
The Jackdaw is almost empty, Rose and Timothy are tidying away. And although they left a good hour ago, the presence of the two informers still lingers. They seem far more threatening in the absence, as though the walls, the floor and the ceiling beams have become their proxy eavesdroppers.