They have been with her throughout her otherwise solitary passage through Christmas into Twelfth Night, Epiphany and beyond. They only disappear when a real human presence sends her scurrying deeper under cover.
From her hiding place, Elise observes these other creatures – the ones of her former kind – with the uncomprehending eyes of a wild animal. She has learned the temerity of the mouse, the ferocity of the fox. Like the wild dog, she has learned to scavenge. And despite the cold and the hunger she has survived.
And she has discovered, to her joy, that her mother has not lied to her. The great house Mary told her about really does exist. It is a palace so magnificent that Elise believes she has reached the very gates of heaven.
From the edge of a coppiced wood she can see minarets towering towards the winter sky, gleaming the way she imagines mountains made of snow must gleam – though she has never seen such a thing as a mountain or a minaret in her life.
And having come all this way, it breaks Elise’s heart to think she dare not enter – because the Devil is so adept at disguise that he might even now be watching her from any one of the countless glittering windows.
24
In the lengthening shadows the greyhounds wait patiently, leashed in and lolling-tongued, tired and muddied after a long day hunting coney in the Surrey fields. On the lane, the liveried grooms calm the steaming horses. Everyone waiting. Guest, servant, horse or greyhound – each knows that before you can return to Nonsuch and rest, first you have to pause at the Lumley family chapel so that your master can pray before the mausoleum he’s raised to Jane FitzAlan and their three dead children. God’s blood, thinks Sir Fulke Vaesy, why can’t some people leave their dead to sleep untroubled?
As the two men walk back through the little churchyard towards the waiting horses, John Lumley says, ‘Tell me, Fulke, in the summer – if you recall – I asked you about a young physician I was of a mind to employ on a private venture.’
‘Nicholas Shelby?’
‘Yes.’
‘And I told you he had fallen from his station, descended into vagrancy. I trust you found someone else to send.’
‘The venture came to nothing. I was misinformed – the books were not for sale.’
‘Well, he would have been no use to you anyway. Sad, but an excess of emotion can unman a fellow, if he lets it.’
‘He appears to have resurfaced – on Bankside. He’s practising at St Thomas’s.’
Vaesy raises an eyebrow. ‘Has he really? Well, I hope he’s rediscovered sobriety in the meantime. I shouldn’t care to trust my health to him otherwise.’
‘In fact, he’s written to me.’
‘The impertinence–’
‘And I’ve replied.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘In truth, Fulke, I did encourage him to correspond – at the College, last August. He asked me then if he might communicate with me on matters of physic.’
‘Is there no limit to his presumption?’
‘Come now, Fulke, I enjoy hearing the views of the younger fellows. The passing years are inclined to dull one’s sense of inquisitiveness, unless you guard against it – don’t you find?’
Vaesy looks at his friend as if he’s speaking Polack. He snorts loudly. ‘Shelby was a good physician, I suppose. But he seemed to think it was a doctor’s place to get his hands bloody. I believe he got that extraordinary notion serving in Holland. That’s what comes from listening to people who wear wooden shoes.’
‘Don’t you think you’re being a little harsh?’
‘If it’s debate you’re after, I’m sure I could find you someone more appropriate. Someone whose learning is built on more traditional foundations.’
‘No new knowledge, eh? Just the rediscovered wisdom we lost after Adam’s fall?’ says Lumley with a smile. It is Vaesy’s firm conviction that all knowledge was handed by God to Adam, then lost after the first sin. He thinks medical discoveries are merely God’s way of letting us have a little of it back.
‘That is the opinion favoured by the Church,’ says Vaesy loftily.
‘Did you not tell me Shelby’s young wife had died, along with their child?’
‘Yes, but what reason is that to come to vagrancy?’ Vaesy asks. ‘It happens all the time.’
‘Perhaps it does, Fulke. But that doesn’t stop us asking why is it that, for all its accomplishments, medicine cannot always save even the innocent.’
It’s a question Vaesy has never once asked himself. It takes a moment for him to think of a suitable answer.
‘It is not the role of a physician to save life, John,’ he says with utter conviction. ‘We simply apply our knowledge. The rest lies in God’s hands alone.’
‘Are you suggesting that, in physic, prayer is more efficacious than study?’
‘For the answer to that question I fear you must ask a bishop,’ says Vaesy, placing one hand on his breast, ‘not a humble physician.’
Lumley allows a waiting groom to assist him into the saddle. Vaesy is hoisted unceremoniously into his. From this swaying, unreliable perch the great anatomist glances back at the little church from which they have so recently emerged. It looks exactly as it did all those years ago, when John Lumley buried Charles, Thomas and Mary here: insignificant. Just a simple English parish chapel.
Why does Vaesy feel the old stones are watching him, silent but accusing? He’d done all he could for the infants, hadn’t he? He’d used the knowledge with which his studies had equipped him. It was true – the rest really was up to God, wasn’t it?
The groom steps away from Vaesy’s horse like a ship’s master casting adrift a mutinous sailor. John Lumley raises a gloved hand and the party prepares to set off towards the glistening ashlar walls of Nonsuch. The greyhounds begin yelping ecstatically, in anticipation of dinner.
But before they’ve travelled further than the end of the churchyard, out of the corner of his eye John Lumley sees his apprentice falconer Thomas Parker running towards him down the lane. The lad comes to a halt beside Lumley’s mare, breathless, one arm outthrust in the general direction of the church.
‘There, my lord! Look – there!’
And as John Lumley turns his head to follow the boy’s outstretched hand, he sees two of the Nonsuch servants dragging something out of the hedge – something that at first glance bears more than a passing resemblance to a sack full of writhing serpents.
It is dusk when Nicholas returns to the Jackdaw. When he does, Timothy tells him breathlessly about a rich man’s servant who arrived on horseback barely an hour since.
‘Grand he was, in a fine tunic with martlets woven on it! Dare say Southwark will have that off his back, if he’s not across the bridge by nightfall,’ the lad says gleefully. Reluctantly he hands Nicholas the letter, as if he fears that by relinquishing the precious thing with its fine wax seal he’ll give up some of the magic that has mysteriously entered him from the touching of it.
Nicholas takes the letter to an empty bench and opens it. Before he’s read even a word, he prepares himself for polite rejection, or Secretary Quigley’s terse apology that his master is far too busy to correspond with a mere dispenser of potions to the poor. His eyes skim the letter quickly. Get it over with:
… and I commend such goodly endeavours to increase scientific discourse amongst men of learning… you are most heartily welcome at Nonsuch to avail yourself of the wisdom to be found in my humble library there…