‘I have to sign – for fish?’
‘The representative of the benefactor – that is Lady Vaesy, acting for His Grace, Lord Lumley – together with the agent of St Thomas’s – that is you, Doctor – must make their avowals in the covenant record,’ says the clerk, as though it’s a treaty between nations that Nicholas is required to sign, rather than some dusty ledger he’s certain no bishop since the days of the second Edward has ever bothered to read. ‘Then you may choose five fine carp from the Winchester House carp pond.’
Nicholas hopes there’s a meal afterwards, but somehow he doubts it.
Once back in daylight and almost in fresh air, Nicholas accompanies the little party at a brisk pace along Black Bull Alley in the direction of Winchester House. Almost immediately his sense of place and danger – he’s been a Banksider long enough now to pick up these things – sends his brain a warning message: you’re being followed.
The lad is barely out of childhood. He has a lean and hungry face washed clean of colour and hope. He’s not even fast on his feet. He moves with a forward-and-aft lurch, like a sick pigeon. His head – crowned with a dirty woollen cap – bobs intently with each ungainly stride. He’s just about keeping up with them, a little off to their side in the middle of the lane. It’s partly his dodging of the carts and the pedestrians, the labourers with wicker panniers slung over their shoulders, the women carrying sacks of winter fruit, that’s given him away to Nicholas in the first place. He’s a cut-purse, and he’s chosen Kat Vaesy as his target because she’s carrying the alms bag on a cord over her shoulder. Nicholas is about to suggest that she hands the bag to Gabriel Quigley when the lad makes his move.
It should take a practised thief no more than a dozen heartbeats to complete the click, leaving the victim – the buzzard or the hick – to walk on unaware that anything is amiss until the time comes to reach for the purse. But this young lad is not practised. As he darts behind the clerk, his hand already reaching out towards Katherine Vaesy, Nicholas turns and, with a deftness that surprises even him, seizes the outstretched wrist with the hardest grip he can bring to bear.
It’s like grasping the body of a small bird. The bones seem so delicate beneath his fingers that Nicholas instinctively eases his grip. The lad stares at him in astonishment, wild-eyed, terrified. A small knife lands almost silently in the mud.
For a moment no one knows quite what to do. The clerk, Quigley and Katherine Vaesy all stare at Nicholas and the lad, as if the pair are putting on some form of entertainment. Then Quigley shouts, ‘Call for the bellmen! It’s a branding for you, rogue, at the very least. You deserve the gallows!’
‘Bring him to Westminster House,’ says the clerk sternly. ‘We’ll hold him there for the constable.’ He adds his weight to Quigley’s threats. ‘It’s the Counter for you, my fine lad, and a hot iron on the cheek, so that godly folk might read such sinfulness plainly in your face!’
Nicholas and Katherine Vaesy say nothing. She’s watching Nicholas intently. She seems to understand what he’s thinking: this boy will be lucky if he escapes with the trimming of an ear, the judicial knife leaving him for ever marked as a felon. He looks half-starved, there are tears in his eyes. He probably wanted the purse so that he could buy food.
But what is really in Nicholas’s thoughts is this: this pitiful member of what Quigley and the clerk would probably label ‘the undeserving poor’ might be the very next eviscerated corpse that washes up on the riverbank. When he lets go of the boy’s wrist, it’s not only with a sense of compassion, but also of fear. Released, the lad vanishes into the crowd like a fish thrown back into the stream.
‘He twisted loose,’ says Nicholas lamely.
Katherine Vaesy purses her lips in a wry smile of comprehension and approval. She knows exactly what he’s done.
And then Nicholas senses a second disturbance close by. A rough male voice is calling out his name. Looking up, he sees Ned Monkton’s impressive bulk breasting its way towards him through the crowd.
21
‘How long do we have, Ned?’ Nicholas asks. The oily flame of a tallow lantern casts furtive pools of light over the uneven arch of the mortuary crypt ceiling at St Tom’s. He thinks he and Ned must look like grave-robbers.
‘Long enough,’ Ned replies. ‘The sisters will want to clean him up, so that the warden can write a report to the coroner, but I can hold them off for a time. I’ll say you thought you’d seen marks of the contagion.’
‘Where was he found?’
‘The creek by the old Battle Abbey ruins. The watch brought him in about an hour ago – it took me a while to find out where you’d gone.’
‘Battle Abbey? That’s this side of the river–’
‘Aye. He was found by a couple of lads from the stews out searching for trinkets on the shore.’
The body has a broken, purposeless frailty about it. It’s slicked with mud and river-filth, a creature of the water dragged out of its element. Only the lower legs look made of flesh, where Ned has washed away the slime in search of the telltale incisions – and found them.
‘Bring that lantern closer, Ned,’ says Nicholas as he sees the raw edges of the wounds gaping like mouths stopped at the moment of blasphemy.
‘Don’t look much, does he? Thin as a sick greyhound.’
‘Have you got whatever it was you used to clean the legs?’
Ned picks up one corner of the winding sheet that’s been folded, surprisingly carefully, at the feet of the corpse. ‘It was all I could lay my hands on in a hurry.’
Knowing Ned’s reputedly fearsome temper, Nicholas wonders how he’s staying so unnervingly calm as he looks upon another victim of his brother’s killer. With a good deal of scrubbing, they remove most of the watery grime from the body. Only then does Nicholas see the full picture.
His first cursory glance at the face has already shown him the telltale slippage of the flesh and muscle around the left side. For confirmation, he inspects the shoulders and the arms. ‘Apoplexy,’ he says, as much to himself as Ned.
‘What’s that?’ asks Ned. ‘Some sort of pox?’
‘It’s from the Greek – to strike suddenly. It’s when the body is felled without any warning. Sometimes it’s fatal, sometimes not. If you survive, you can be left without speech, or motion in the limbs.’
‘My uncle Harry was taken like that,’ Ned says, almost in awe of Nicholas’s diagnosis. ‘Lingered a couple of days afterwards, couldn’t speak nor move. Aunt Hilda said it was God what struck him down for his blaspheming tongue.’
‘And there’s a deep laceration – just here – beside the windpipe.’
‘Looks like someone started to cut his throat, then thought better of it.’
‘It might have been done after the incisions on the leg, to finish the bleeding process.’
‘There was the same wound on Jacob’s neck.’
‘And on the child at Vaesy’s lecture – Ralph Cullen.’ Nicholas purses his lips. ‘Help me turn him over.’
The body makes a noise like a fish on a slab as they roll it. Nicholas sees at once the deep tear in the small of the back. It takes him no more than a few moments to establish that the liver has been removed, not at all precisely.
‘Is that what killed him?’ Ned asks.
‘No. I suspect it was done post mortem, like the cut to the neck. Like what he did to Jacob.’ Nicholas lifts up the cadaver’s left leg. ‘This is what killed him. A little bit closer with the lantern, please, Ned.’
For the first time since Fulke Vaesy’s anatomy lecture, Nicholas can sense the killer’s breath on his cheek.