‘They’d do it to catch a Jesuit priest or a Spanish agent,’ Nicholas tells him bitterly, wondering if the murderer is going to have to kill his next victim in public at St Paul’s Cross during Sunday sermon before anyone shows a passing interest.
Nicholas has one last hope. It springs from Gabriel Quigley’s unexpected presence at the St Magdalene’s almshouse, and something Katherine Vaesy had said to him.
‘You’ve never struck me as someone who’s on cordial terms with a lord,’ Bianca says, when he tells her what he plans to do. They are sitting by the taproom fire. Timothy and Rose hurry past with jugs of ale and trenchers of food for the customers. ‘Perhaps I should consider charging you rent, Master Shelby.’
‘Lord Lumley might not even reply to the letter. I’d be surprised if he remembers who I am,’ Nicholas replies with a forlorn laugh. ‘We only spoke about a dozen words to each other, in the yard at the College of Physicians last August.’
‘Then why do you think he will listen to you now?’
‘It’s just a feeling I have. He’s not like Baronsdale and the others at the College. If he was of a mind to, he could just turn up for the feasts and admire his portrait hanging in the Guildhall. After all, he doesn’t have a doctorate in medicine. But no, he sends Vaesy all the way to Padua, at his own expense, to learn about the latest advances from the experts. Isn’t that the mark of a man with an open mind?’
‘But what are you going to tell him?’
‘That someone has been doing exactly what Sir Fulke does, only on living bodies rather than dead ones.’
‘Is that really what you think?’ Bianca asks with a shudder.
‘Sometimes he removes just one organ, sometimes all of them. In Ralph Cullen’s case he didn’t take any, just the blood. But in every case I’ve seen so far he’s severed the tibial artery – while his victims are still alive.’
‘I’m an apothecary, Nicholas; I grow plants and mix balms and distillations. I haven’t read your precious Galen. I don’t know what a tibial artery is.’
‘It’s a blood vessel, in the leg. Close to the bone. And actually Realdo Colombo is the man to consult. In his De Re Anatomica he contradicts Galen on a number of points.’
‘I’m sure that’s very brave of him, Nicholas. Contradiction must be such a dreadful trial for a physician.’
‘We bear it when we must,’ he says, to let her know he can take a joke.
‘These vessels – what is their purpose?’
‘They carry the blood around the body,’ he explains. ‘The Greeks used to think they carried only air, but that’s because they were studying cadavers. Now we know they carry the tide of the blood.’
‘Our blood has a tide? I just assumed we were full of it, like a jug is full of ale.’
‘Oh, quite the opposite. It’s a river, inside us. That’s what Galen says. He states that the blood is made in the liver, and our organs pull it towards themselves when they need nourishment, the way a lodestone attracts metal. That creates a tide. On the way, the blood passes through the heart–’
‘And what does the heart do? Apart from being the seat of love and valour.’
‘Think of it as being rather like an oven,’ he says, trying not to sound as though he’s giving her the blessing of a diagnosis. ‘The heart heats the blood together with the divine spirit in the air we breathe: what we call pneuma. The mixture flows back from the heart to the liver. That’s what causes the heart to vibrate – it’s being moved by the tidal flow of the blood, a bit like an open door moving to the wind.’
‘Rivers, ovens and doors? And wind?’
‘Yes.’
She gives him a look of unimpeachable innocence. ‘And that’s what makes your heart flutter, is it?’
‘According to the ancients.’
‘I think I understand now why you don’t write sonnets, Nicholas,’ she says, raising one eyebrow in gentle mockery.
‘Of course, Vesalius and Servetus disagree with Galen over the precise nature of how the blood flows across the heart,’ he continues blithely. ‘One of them thinks there are tiny holes which allow it to pass through, the other doesn’t.’
Bianca throws back her head and stares at the sagging beams of the taproom ceiling. ‘Rivers, ovens, doors and wind. And a disagreement between physicians over holes. Who could ever imagine such a thing?’
‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’
She looks straight at him, the core of each eye a droplet of molten amber in the light from the taproom fire. She reaches out and lays one hand against his cheek. ‘Never think it, dear Nicholas. Never ever think it.’
Later, Nicholas calls Timothy to bring him paper, nib and ink. By the light of the tallow candle Rose has placed in the attic, he begins his letter to John Lumley. He chooses his words carefully, knowing that each day Lord Lumley will receive any number of requests for favour and patronage:
I humbly beseech my noble lord to recall with favour our short meeting at the College of Physicians this summer past, and I hope to find Your Grace still amenable to the offer of correspondence on matters of physic…
Then, expressing an academic interest in the workings of the human blood system as described and debated by Vesalius, Colombo and Servetus, he asks the patron of the Lumleian chair of anatomy if perhaps he might even be allowed to study at the Nonsuch library. In truth, he means to tell John Lumley his story face-to-face.
At no point in the letter does he refer, even obliquely, to the presence on Bankside of a murderer with an interest in draining his victims of their blood. Nor does he write of Elise Cullen, even though he knows Lumley will have people about him – his servants, his tenant farmers, the tradesmen and merchants who keep Nonsuch functioning – who would know if a girl of some thirteen years, alone and helpless, had recently been taken up by the authorities, or given alms and shelter by the local churches. Despite Alice Welford’s belief that Elise might have tried to reach Cuddington, these lines of enquiry must wait until he’s learned the measure of the man he hopes will be his salvation.
When he’s finished, he folds the paper over on itself, seals it with wax from the candle and places it beside his mattress.
When the dawn begins to pluck the outline of the northern bank of the river from the darkness, Nicholas rises and goes downstairs. Bianca and Rose are already up, preparing the Jackdaw for the day. He asks if he can borrow Timothy, send him on an errand across the bridge to Lord Lumley’s town house on Woodroffe Lane behind Tower Hill. He will not carry the letter himself. He no longer belongs to the city to the north.
23
If Fulke Vaesy could have just one of the Cecils’ fine possessions, it would not be Burghley House at Covent Garden, or the vast estate at Theobalds; not even the Cecils’ apparently endless treasury. At this precise moment it would be Master Robert’s fine Italian carriage. For Vaesy is no born horseman. And the road to Nonsuch has suffered much this winter.
He’d prefer by far to stay in London. But John Lumley is his friend and – more important – his patron. If he hopes one day to succeed the old Jew Lopez as the queen’s physician, then he must come when summoned, like a lapdog to its mistress.