‘He’s so much older than I am. And the size of him–’
She sobs into Jane’s gown, her nose streaming with such a flood of misery that she’s left a small section of her friend’s bodice looking as though the jowls of an old and sickly lapdog have rested there.
‘I’ve never seen Fulke Vaesy laugh, not once!’ she sniffs. ‘And he’s so loud when he speaks, as though he’s delivering a sermon!’
So loud in fact that she barely hears the shattering of the dreams inside her own head.
And then had come the wedding night. No one had warned her what to expect, not even her mother. ‘You will do your duty to your husband, and to God,’ was all her mother had told her, as though Kat were being sent on a difficult but necessary pilgrimage.
Of course she’d heard all sorts of fanciful stories, seen the animals in the fields in springtime, but nothing could have prepared her for Fulke’s sweaty grappling, for the panting like a rutting hog, for the gasped obscenities while he tried to chew her ear off. Imagine – obscenities from a man who boasted of his piety!
And the pain! And the weight of him!
Perhaps Kat could have found the fortitude to suffer even that lewd indignity once every couple of years or so, if it had meant children to nurture and love. But he had taken even that from her, with his damnable physic.
She would weep now, but the tears stopped flowing long ago. That well is dry. There is only the silt of hatred in it now. How can it be, she wonders, that a poisoning that has continued for so long does not kill?
As if to escape to a better place, Kat’s thoughts carry her to the time before the pain began. She is fifteen years old again. The season is summer, not winter. She is racing through the deer park on one of John Lumley’s horses, Jane barely an arm’s length away. Their galloping mounts are neck-and-neck, spume flying from the bridles. Grazing deer scatter wildly before them. As she rides, Kat is shouting out the name of the man she loves, shouting it against the roar of the wind as her horse flies across the park, yelling it like a hosanna, in the certainty that no one but Jane can hear it. Jane Lumley is laughing too, infected by her friend’s joy.
Two young women delighting in a conspiracy of love.
For the moment, the name Kat shouts is a secret only they share. But in two days’ time, when John Lumley returns from business in London, Lady Jane is going to reveal it to her husband on Katherine’s behalf, in the sure and certain knowledge it will bring them all the greatest happiness.
Two days.
Such a small morsel of time. Not much of a prelude before the chill wind ushers in two long decades of darkness.
On a chilly afternoon that same week, Nicholas and Bianca take a bracing stroll along the riverbank towards the Paris Garden. Bianca thinks a brisk walk in the cold might put at least a temporary stop to his infernal edginess.
He’s been like this ever since he sent Timothy across the bridge with the letter. Out on the water the wherries and tilt-boats ply back and forth between the river stairs and the wharves. The passengers huddle in their cloaks.
‘How can you be sure Lord Lumley will help? He may be just like all the others,’ she asks.
‘John Lumley is a man who likes uncovering mysteries,’ Nicholas replies. ‘That’s why he built his library at Nonsuch. That’s why he sent Fulke Vaesy to Italy to study anatomy. From what I know about him, he’s not the sort of man to shut his mind to a proposition without first studying the facts.’
Bianca wonders what Nicholas will do if John Lumley turns him down. She knows his recovery is still incomplete. Whenever they walk along the river like this, she catches him sneaking the occasional melancholy glance across the water. Who is he searching for, when he steals these private glances into the distance? Now she thinks she knows.
There was someone I couldn’t cure – someone very dear to me.
Just for a moment an unexpected jealousy comes over her.
Reaching the Falcon stairs, they see a young lad of about Jacob Monkton’s age fishing from the end of the jetty. He wears a tattered wool jerkin. His hands and face are grubby. He’s probably from one of the Bankside tenements. Nicholas watches him for a while. Then he turns and looks back along the river towards the bridge, scanning the buildings along the southern bank.
‘When did Ned Monkton’s brother go missing?’ he asks suddenly, turning to her.
‘Jacob? A good month before he was found,’ she answers, brushing a curl of hair from over one eye.
‘But I saw his body. He’d only been in the water a couple of days at the most. So where was he in the meantime?’
‘You think Jacob was kept a prisoner somewhere?’
He nods. ‘And perhaps the others, too.’
‘But where?’
‘Remember what Slater, the waterman, said about how the bodies might wash ashore?’
‘So it must be somewhere between here and the Lambeth marshes.’
‘Otherwise the killer would have to risk bringing an eviscerated body some distance to the river, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t chance that, surely.’
Bianca puts a hand over her mouth, as if to stop her thoughts from escaping. ‘What a horrible thought – poor Jacob in chains, confined like a condemned prisoner.’
‘I didn’t tell you this the day I found him, but Jacob certainly struggled at the end. I saw the wheals on his wrists and ankles. How do you keep a strong young lad like that compliant for a whole month? Or stop him from calling for help?’
‘I could make a potion to take away the power of speech – easily,’ Bianca tells him confidently, though inside her, the image of what Nicholas has just described starts a cold entanglement of terror in her stomach.
‘But also make them compliant to your will – for that long?’
‘It’s simple, if you know the right plants. I’d probably use hemlock or wolfsbane, maybe a few others – keep the mix subtle, so that it didn’t kill the subject outright. You’d have to keep administering it, of course.’
Nicholas looks towards the great bridge with its lofty parapet of timbered houses, the waterwheels turning in the current beneath the arches. Then he slowly lets his gaze return along the jumble of buildings clinging to the riverbank.
And stops.
As though he’s caught a glimpse of something he had not expected to see.
He stands almost motionless, just a gentle nod indicating that he’s not entered some form of trance. Bianca realizes he’s looking in the general direction of the Jackdaw.
In fact his eyes have settled on a distant roof. He can just make it out above the surrounding tenements. It’s the building he passed that Accession Day in November, when Jacob Monkton’s eviscerated body came to him on the tide. The building adjacent to Bianca’s physic garden. The deserted Lazar House.
‘Jesu and all the angels,’ he whispers, his voice almost drowned out by the shouts of the wherrymen on the river. ‘How could we have been so blind? He’s been doing it right under our noses!’
The tattered remnants of the stolen coat, now padded out with discarded rags, flap around her in the wind as she scuttles, giving her body the appearance of a crippled rook struggling to take flight. She sleeps in cattle byres and under fardels of brushwood. She speaks without words to Ralph and Jacob, to the two women who sit and hug each other whenever she stops to rest, and to the old man with a stump for one hand who needs constant reminding of his surroundings.