‘And when you’re done, perhaps you and I might turn our minds to an issue that’s been much troubling me of late. I’ve not found anything in the library that might shed a medical light upon it.’
‘I’d be honoured, if you think I can help. What is it that concerns you?’
‘Speech, Dr Shelby – the ability to make ourselves understood, the property that separates us from the beasts,’ Lumley answers, wiping away a sliver of apple from the corner of his mouth. ‘Or rather the lack of it.’
He looks Nicholas so squarely in the eye that for a moment Nicholas thinks by ‘lack’ he means wilful withholding – duplicity, evasion, secrecy or any of the other sins Nicholas is currently accusing himself of.
‘Lord Lumley is referring to a servant newly brought to the household,’ Francis Deniker says. ‘A goodly soul, it seems, but mute.’
‘Sir Fulke Vaesy believes the Devil has stopped up her mouth,’ says Lumley. ‘I don’t believe him, not for a moment. But I would like to discover why someone who has a perfectly functioning tongue should deliberately deny themselves the use of it, when they know full well it was put into their mouth by the very same God who made the rest of them.’
33
His chamber in the inner gatehouse is one of the rooms the courtiers use when the queen visits. If Lumley were selling Nonsuch, his agents would call it ‘well appointed’. It has Flanders hangings on the wall, and a comfortable mattress. But Nicholas cannot sleep. He lies awake while Henry’s great clock on the outside wall chimes every half-hour, its mechanism making the floorboards tremble like an ailing heart.
‘Henry built the house for his one true love, Jane Seymour,’ John Lumley had told him over supper, barely three hours ago. ‘What a tragedy she did not live to witness the magnificence of the gift he intended for her.’
It occurs to Nicholas now that the king must have been grieving even as he watched the first stones being raised, barely six months after Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth. A house conceived in love, built on grief. The image is not lost on him. He wonders what its creator would make of Nonsuch now.
Nicholas had expected to find the place alive with activity. But with only the Lumley household in residence, it’s all but empty. And there’s an air of disquiet, despite the magnificence. It’s as if Nonsuch is bracing itself for impending catastrophe, frozen in the very moment joy turns to despair. He imagines the very bricks can sense why he’s come.
And Nicholas knows full well the ghastly procession of tragedy that will follow, if he finds what Burghley’s son hopes he will find. And not just for Lumley, but for his wife, and for Quigley and Deniker too – and who knows how many more of Lumley’s friends and acquaintances? He can imagine all too easily the arrests in the dead of night, the river journeys taken in fear, iron-bound doors slammed shut to extinguish the light – and the hope with it. Give us the dates upon which you visited the traitor Lumley… What treason did you hear uttered? Who else was present? Give us the names… When the indictment is finally read before the Privy Council, it will contain a long list of sworn statements, even if the signatures are a little unclear, due to the writers’ fingers mysteriously no longer functioning as they once did. Meanwhile Elizabeth Lumley will sit weeping in the solitude of Nonsuch, tormented by dreadful images of her husband’s suffering, and wondering if she will be allowed to see him just one more time before the hooded executioner beckons him forward. And I, Nicholas Shelby, will have set the whole grizzly parade in motion.
Is Bianca Merton’s life worth all that? Is there a tariff to be set for betrayal – one life worth more, another a little less? How did I, a man dedicated to serving the sick, come to bring about such pain?
There are so many troubling questions disordering his thoughts that he quite forgets John Lumley’s comments at supper about the mute in the Nonsuch kitchens. His last conscious thoughts are of the letter he hasn’t yet written to Bianca. He tries to compose the lines in his mind, but his impressions of the day are too disordered to marshal.
A quiet tapping on the door makes him turn his head. It’s Harriet, his maid from Grass Street, bearing breakfast. She’s struggling not to giggle at her master and mistress lying entwined in the chaos of the sheets like vines in the summer sun. He leans across the bed, the better to delight in the salty tang of Eleanor’s skin, expecting the scent of rose oil in her hair.
His hand meets nothing but cold linen. Only the tapping on the door is real. And the guilt that, in the moment before waking, he was unsure exactly whose face would have turned towards him on the pillow.
When Nicholas enters the library he finds Gabriel Quigley stooped over a desk, making entries in a ledger with a quill. The secretary does not acknowledge him, other than to wave him to a window seat. It seems daylight has not lightened the secretary’s mood.
While he waits for John Lumley to arrive, Nicholas takes in the view from the windows. It’s as though he’s gone to sleep in Surrey and woken in Caesar’s Rome. In the watery sunlight he can see arches of close-cropped holly, classical columns, statues of gods and emperors. There’s even a small pavilion where – he assumes – the queen may sit when she views the chase.
Turning away from the view, he begins to inspect the library. It takes only a few paces for him to see that the rumours were based on fact. There’s Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy; Bullein’s Dialogue against Fever Pestilence; Vicary’s Anatomy; three works by Thomas Gale… The ancients are here, too: Galen in the original Latin, Aretaeus in the Greek. More pages of medical knowledge than Nicholas has seen since he left Cambridge. And beyond the books on physic he can see treaties on cosmology, philosophy, theology – a store of wisdom so vast it humbles him.
But there are also books here that only a man with powerful friends – or a carefree attitude to his own safety – might possess. Volumes on necromancy… on occult practices… on matters that the new religion would consider highly detrimental to one’s immortal soul. He sees the words ‘Thomas Cantuarien’ embossed in gold leaf on a spine and realizes it’s by Archbishop Cranmer, Henry’s reforming Protestant prelate, sent to the flames by Bloody Mary Tudor. It stands alongside Pope Innocent’s polemic against witches. John Lumley, it seems, is walking a very dangerous tightrope.
A voice from behind him breaks into his thoughts. ‘I’ll wager the lost library of Alexandria can’t have had many more works in it than this.’
Nicholas turns. Lord Lumley is watching him from the doorway, severe in his scholar’s gown, a pearl pendant hanging on a gold chain around his neck. He looks more like one of Nicholas’s tutors at Cambridge than Robert Cecil’s version of a disciple of the Antichrist.
‘But then Alexandria never had Gabriel to keep it in order, or I dare say it would never have become lost in the first place. I trust you slept well, Dr Shelby.’
Better than the innocent, Nicholas assures him, hoping Lumley won’t notice the tiredness in his eyes.
‘In your letter you wrote of an interest in the carriage of blood through the human body.’
‘I believe I did, my lord.’
Lumley selects a shelf and extracts a large leather-bound book. He places it on a lectern. The stiff velum parts reluctantly, the pages rocking slowly as though the book can’t quite make up its mind which of its secrets to reveal.
It decides upon an exquisite woodcut showing a man standing in a landscape of trees and ancient temples. He is leaning nonchalantly on a stick. But Nicholas can see this is no simple Arcadian scene. The man’s skin has been flayed open to show the interior of the body in minute detaiclass="underline" muscles, veins and arteries perfectly drawn, the ink a dark and lustrous lifeblood. The head is in fact a skull, tilted upwards, the bulbous eyes fighting to pull themselves free of the surrounding muscle fibres as they seek a glimpse of heaven.