‘Do you really think Elise Cullen is still alive?’ Bianca asks.
‘It’s a possibility. She left the Cardinal’s Hat with Ralph sometime around Pentecost. He was found at Wildgoose stairs some two months later. And we have to face the possibility that his sister is one of the victims Ned Monkton missed, or who hasn’t yet washed up on the riverbank.’
‘But she could have escaped?’
‘Yes, she could. Elise Cullen may still be alive. But what she knows of the other deaths – who can say?’
Bianca leans across the table towards him, resting her chin in her hands, studying his face carefully. Her skin gleams with a sheen of perspiration from the heat of the taproom fire. An unruly twist of ebony-coloured hair has broken loose from beneath her simple linen coif. It hangs over her right temple, a brave standard waiting to be unfurled when battle is joined. Her eyes challenge him as she says, ‘A diagnosis, please, Dr Shelby.’
He considers his answer for a moment in silence, then says, ‘Ralph Cullen – if that’s really the little boy on Vaesy’s dissection table – was taken from the river at Wildgoose Lane. Jacob Monkton was taken out by the Mutton Lane stairs. Of the two other bodies Ned Monkton told me about, one washed up just this side of Winchester House, the other in front of St Mary’s.’
‘Is that significant?’
‘I believe it is.’ He looks around the taproom as though searching for someone. Then he rises to his feet, saying, ‘Be patient. Wait here a moment. I’ll find out if I’m right.’
Bianca’s gaze follows him as he walks over to one of the few remaining drinkers, a wherryman named Slater whose daughter Nicholas has treated for an excess of phlegm. The two men exchange words, though she cannot hear what is said. When Nicholas returns, there’s a grim smile of satisfaction on his face.
‘Well, I’ve been patient – in my own tavern,’ Bianca says, with a challenging frown on her face.
‘Will Slater said that if you throw a barrel into the river any further upstream than Lambeth marshes, the current could take it to either bank before it reached the bridge. But if you throw it in closer, the chances are it’ll come ashore on Bankside.’
‘Fascinating, Nicholas. But what does it mean?’
‘It means this: he’s putting them into the water somewhere between here and Lambeth. If we went up to the attic now and looked out of the window, there’s an outside chance he might actually be looking back at us.’
On a blustery January morning Nicholas watches, head bowed, as Mary Cullen’s body is carried from the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s to the chapel graveyard. The hospital’s assistant chaplain reads the lesson with almost indecent haste: for-she-that-suffereth-in-the-flesh-shall-cease-from-sin…
Nicholas doesn’t hear the rest. The hurried words are carried away on the wind almost before they leave the chaplain’s mouth. He wonders if such brevity is the lot of all who leave St Tom’s this way.
The only other witnesses to Mary Cullen’s speedy exit from this world – save for Nicholas, the assistant chaplain and the gravedigger – are Ned Monkton and Alice Welford. Ned has come because he’s custodian of the single coffin and must return it to the mortuary crypt, once Mary has no further need of it. But he’s also here because Nicholas has told him Mary Cullen’s story, as recounted by Alice, and he wants to pay his respects to the mother of the child who may – perhaps – have shared Jacob’s last days with him.
As Nicholas walks away to his next duty, Alice asks to speak to him.
‘Call me an addle-pate if you will, Master Nicholas,’ she says, pulling her patched gown tighter around her shoulders and sniffing through a nose made rosy by the chill, ‘but it’s only just come back to me. You know how it is when someone dies; suddenly you start remembering old exchanges, conversations–’
Of course I know, Nicholas wants to say, I’ve done little else since August. But the retort would be needlessly harsh, so he just nods.
‘When we spoke last, you asked me where little Elise Cullen might have gone–’
For Nicholas, the blustery chill is instantly forgotten. ‘You’ve remembered?’
‘After a fashion.’
‘Tell me,’ he demands with almost indecent urgency.
‘It was knowing poor Mary’s gone to a better place that set me thinking. There was a tale she used to tell Elise and little Ralph, almost from before they was out of swaddling…’
A tale. Almost as soon as it’s born, the hope begins to wither. On Bankside, tales and lies are coins of the same currency. Nicholas is about to tell Alice Welford he has a pressing appointment. But then something makes him hold back. It is an all-but-obliterated memory from his fall; the faint recollection of an encounter with a woman on the riverbank at the foot of Garlic Hill by Queenhithe, an encounter he’d dismissed either because he was too drunk or too angry to take it for what it might have been – genuine.
‘If I recall aright, it was like this,’ begins Alice. ‘Mary’s mother – old souse-head that she was – used to claim the Cullens had a cousin who farmed at Cuddington. Apparently he was a yeoman of some measure. Whenever times got really hard, Mary used to tell everyone that one day she’d take herself and the two sprats away to live with him. Now I recall it, it was definitely Cuddington.’
‘Are you telling me that’s where Elise might have been heading when she and Ralph left the Cardinal’s Hat?’
Alice shrugs. ‘Who can say? Maybe there really was a piece of proper meat in the pottage. Elise certainly thought so. I remember her jumping up and down and trilling like a pipit with excitement every time Mary spoke of how they’d all sleep on a big feather bed, eat roast meat every day of the week and travel to the Guildford fair in a grand carriage.’
‘Do you know where this place Cuddington is, Alice?’
‘Of course I do. Surrey, by Cheam Common. Everyone knows that.’
‘I’m from Suffolk, Alice,’ Nicholas says, gauging whether he can afford to hire a horse from one of the Bankside livery stables. ‘I’ve never been any further into Surrey than Long Southwark.’
‘Suffolk or not, you’d be wasting your time trying to,’ Alice tells him. ‘And so will Elise.’
A shadow of disappointment clouds Nicholas’s voice as he asks why.
‘Marry now, Master Nicholas, there can’t be Cullens still farming at Cuddington, can there? It’s not possible.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, they tore down every stone, didn’t they? Pulled up the very foundations.’
For a moment Nicholas thinks Alice Welford is talking about one of the plague villages, razed and ploughed over after the pestilence scoured it so unmercifully that the few survivors took themselves off to start their lives again from scratch somewhere new.
But then Alice says, ‘It was old King Codpiece what did it. The eighth Henry. Had Cuddington scrubbed out, every last piece of it. Put up that great palace of his in its place – the one they call Nonsuch.’
20
The funeral over, Nicholas receives a summons from the hospital warden.
‘I have a task for you – it’s civic,’ he announces in a tone that suggests to Nicholas he can’t find anyone less important to carry it out. He gives Nicholas an address barely ten minutes’ walk from the Jackdaw. ‘Be there by ten. You’ll be met by one of the bishop’s clerks from Winchester House. And remember, you’re the hospital’s emissary.’ He looks Nicholas up and down and sighs with disappointment. ‘Don’t you at least have a gown?’
Nicholas reaches his assigned destination in good time. But he almost walks straight past the low, straggling line of ancient herringbone brickwork and half-rotted beams, so busy is his mind with what Alice Welford has told him. He has to stop, turn back and take a second look, just to convince himself this is the right place.