He almost laughs out loud. Humble. The library at Nonsuch is rumoured to contain more knowledge than those of Oxford and Cambridge combined.
‘It’s from John Lumley!’ he announces to Bianca with a broad grin. ‘We’re in.’
‘And your other bright notion, Master Physician?’ she asks with an inner shudder.
‘Tomorrow. When we have the light to see what we’re doing.’
As if that will make it more appealing, she thinks – as she considers his invitation to just about the last place on Bankside that anyone in their right mind would wish to visit.
In the months Elise has spent in hiding she’s grown used to her own stink, the stink of the fugitive.
But now her captors have bathed her – just as the angel had bathed her. They have given her fresh clothes to wear: a linen undershirt and a simple woollen kirtle, both made for a considerably larger girl. The garments smell of soapwort. This new, overwhelmingly clean scent offends her. It frightens her, too. She wonders if perhaps she’s been washed for the slaughter.
Now they have confined her in some sort of cellar, a place full of barrels and baskets, sacks of flour and carcasses hanging from the ceiling. After what she’d seen in the Devil’s house, the carcasses sent her wild again – until she saw, by the light of the single candle they had allowed her, that they were only the salted joints of winter pork.
They have given her a proper mattress to sleep on – though naturally she has not slept at all. They have even given her food, laughing in wonderment as she stuffed it into her mouth with her hands.
But when they left, she noticed, they took care to lock the door.
25
‘They must have been truly great sinners to have been locked away in such a prison,’ Bianca says in awe. She is standing in the physic garden, cloaked against the cold. The only colour in the whole of London appears to be the bright amber of her eyes. Beyond the old brick wall the snowflakes are starting to swirl about the grey, impassive face of the Lazar House like spray against a cliff.
‘It wasn’t a prison, it was a hospital,’ Nicholas tells her. ‘And leprosy is a sickness, not a sin. The Moor physician Avicenna wrote a treatise on the disease over five hundred years ago.’
‘Have the English always been so enlightened?’ she asks, her face pinched by the cold. ‘In the Veneto we confined them on an island in the lagoon. People said they were cursed by God.’
‘I’m just surprised they haven’t pulled the place down yet, or turned it into tenements. Winchester House would make a tidy sum from the rents.’
‘That’s if they could persuade anyone to live in such a place,’ Bianca says, keeping her hands firmly tucked inside her cloak, lest they feel the ghostly touch of leprous fingers. ‘So where did they all go?’
‘When the queen’s father reformed the religious houses, the friars who looked after them left. The few patients who remained were sent to the confinement house at St Bartholomew’s. As far as I know, there’s not been a case of the disease reported in London since before I was born. The question is: how am I going to get in?’
He has already discounted the main entrance, an ancient stone archway facing south towards Winchester House, long ago bricked up to prevent cut-purses and vagabonds using the Lazar House as a refuge.
Bianca gives him a sharp look. ‘You’re not going inside?’
‘Why else are we here?’
‘Nicholas, don’t be so foolish. He might still be in there.’
‘If he is, he’d have lit a fire by now, just to keep warm. There’d be smoke coming from the chimneys.’
‘But you can’t be sure–’
‘If I need help, I’ll call to you.’
‘And what am I supposed to do then?’ she asks with an angry twist of her mouth. ‘Prove Isaac Bredwell right – turn myself into a bat and fly to your aid? I’m coming with you.’
‘No, you are not!’
‘Why?’
‘Because it might be dangerous.’
‘You said there was no one inside.’
‘It’s derelict. Unsafe.’
She places her palms firmly on her waist. ‘Am I now the hired man, and you the taverner?’ she enquires ferociously.
‘Look, if I’m not back before the bell at St Mary’s chimes ten, go back to the Jackdaw and bring a couple of the handiest customers you can find. Failing that, send Timothy to St Tom’s and fetch Ned Monkton. He’d be worth a couple of watchmen on his own.’
‘And quite how do you propose to get inside?’ she asks, nodding towards the physic garden wall, which must be at least ten feet high.
‘If I can find a foothold–’
‘Listen to me, Nicholas,’ she says impatiently, ‘if you’re right and this is where he confined those poor creatures, then he has to bring them in from the river – unless he’s found a way of passing through brickwork or hauling the weight of a human being over this wall. Wouldn’t it be more sensible if we went down to the shore to see if there’s an entrance between here and the Mutton Lane stairs?’
Further east, towards the bridge, the riverbank is planked and piled. But at the end of Black Bull Alley it spills out onto gently shelving ground. The Thames hurries by, muddy brown and utterly indifferent, fragments of foliage torn from the bank upriver by the Lambeth marsh bobbing gently on the current. Further out, the wherries and tilt-boats ply their trade. On the watery horizon Nicholas and Bianca can make out the masts of Queenhithe and the roofs of the buildings around the Vintry. Turning right, they begin to follow the boundary of the Lazar House grounds, a wall as old and sturdy as the one in the physic garden. It looks as though it’s been here since Brutus was king of Albion, seems to have grown out of the river silt like the black stumps of ancient trees that appear when the tide is unusually low. The brickwork is a dense, dark green with a thick coating of damp moss, the top capped with a deep greyish-white patina of filth from the gulls that perch there. Nicholas walks barely fifteen paces before he sees a gully running from the wall to the water, long ribbons of gulls’ mess pointing downwards like arrows indicating the way on a map. He stops.
‘Hurry up, I’m freezing,’ calls Bianca against the shrieking of the gulls.
Moving closer, Nicholas notices a stout lintel set into the brickwork. Below it is a black break in the wall – the entrance to a culvert.
The lintel is just about head-height, and when he peers in, Nicholas sees walls some six feet high, made of the same slippery, moss-covered stone as the riverside boundary itself. The floor is littered with pebbles that pierce the puddles of watery slime like tiny islands.
At the far end of the culvert a flight of stone steps leads upwards to ground level. And at its foot, lying like a bier in some ancient sepulchre, is a small wooden skiff, tethered by a loose rope to a ring set into the brickwork. Inside are two oars. There’s an iron socket set in the prow, presumably to carry a lantern.
With the tide out, the stink of river mud is overpowering. Is this how Ralph Cullen, Jacob Monkton and the others were consigned to the water? Nicholas wonders. He imagines the river at night, a single lonely light burning out on the current, the soft splash of a gutted body rolled into the dark water.
‘Perhaps it belongs to a fisherman,’ suggests Bianca at his shoulder.
‘I thought you said people avoid this place?’
‘Perhaps your monks forgot it when they left.’