When are folk going to stop thinking I intend to murder them? Ned asks himself sadly. The poor fellow’s pissed himself.
He calls after the man to stop, but that simply adds impetus to his pace – something else Ned Monkton is used to. Which hurts him a little. Because all he was trying to do was tell the stranger that St Tom’s hospital lies in quite the opposite direction.
An hour later, in a modest little house on St Andrew’s Hill, a short walk north from the Blackfriars river stairs, the once-great anatomist puts his servant – whose name is Ditworth – through an inquisition of which any Spanish cardinal would approve.
‘Tell me again, sirrah,’ Sir Fulke Vaesy insists, ‘did this rough fellow you spoke to have no knowledge of Shelby’s whereabouts? None at all?’
‘No, Master. I swear it. He said he had none, other than abroad.’
‘You’re sure he’s not been arraigned to any prison on Bankside?’ Vaesy demands to know, yet again.
‘No, sir. I visited them alclass="underline" the Clink, the Counter, the Marshalsea, the Queen’s Bench… no prisoner by the name of Shelby anywhere.’
Vaesy returns to his seat by the window. Outside on St Andrew’s Hill where it gives onto Thames Street, Londoners are hurrying about their business. Not one wastes a single glance on the very ordinary home of the man who once held the chair of anatomy at the College of Physicians.
Vaesy thinks: if Nicholas Shelby – he can’t bring himself to call him Doctor – hadn’t poked his nose into my wife’s affairs when he did, revealing a nest of serpents I hadn’t for a moment suspected existed, I’d still be that man. I’d still be welcome in the grand houses of London. I’d still have the favour of the queen. Nor would I be reduced to bleeding or leeching the very worst sort, people who once would have stood aside as I passed. And to think that the man whose meddling brought about this calamity was very nearly appointed the queen’s physician! At least my letters to the Privy Council put an end to that.
In his heart, he hadn’t really wished Shelby to suffer the same tribulation as the late Dr Lopez. He wasn’t a vindictive man. A few months in the Tower, while innocence was eventually established, would suffice. Just enough of a fall to bring ruin in its wake, the way Shelby’s interference had ruined him.
Vaesy has tried hard to find out if his denunciation has had the desired effect. He’s asked around. But his old colleagues at the College of Physicians, who had once bowed their heads to him, now won’t give him the time of day. Nor will the courtiers with whom he was once on first-name terms. So he has been forced to send Ditworth across the river to Bankside to see what he can uncover.
Remembering that the hapless Ditworth is still standing in the chamber waiting to be dismissed, Vaesy says, ‘Abroad? Just abroad?’
‘Yes, Sir Fulke.’
Vaesy sighs. Well, exile is better than nothing. An eye for an eye…
‘Did you ensure no one could have known it was I who sent you to Bankside?’
‘Yes, Sir Fulke. I did.’
‘You weren’t stupid enough to mention my name, or give your own?’
‘No, Sir Fulke.’
‘And you did not take the same wherry out and back?’
Ditworth assumes the expression of a man who has overcome his enemies by superior guile. ‘I was most careful not to, Sir Fulke. Besides, the big fellow I spoke to at the building site was naught but a common labourer. He wouldn’t have had the brains to be suspicious.’
As they lie abed in the Paris Garden lodgings, Ned says to Rose: ‘The fellow who came to the Jackdaw asking questions about Master Nicholas – he wasn’t a Banksider. I’m sure of it.’
Rose turns over and throws an arm about her husband’s chest. Her fingers barely reach his breastbone. She grasps the wiry auburn hairs that coil there, as though trying to stop herself sliding down a steep woodland bank. ‘You’ve been kicking my ear about that fellow all evening,’ she says sleepily. ‘What makes you think so?’
‘He didn’t know where St Tom’s was, an’ he seemed to think it was Master Nicholas who owned the Jackdaw, not Mistress Bianca. Everyone on Bankside knows the Jackdaw belongs to her. An’ all that wanting to know if Master Nicholas had been taken up in irons. There’s something amiss. I know it.’
Rose says, ‘You think he might be the fellow who wrote the denouncement?’
‘Wouldn’t ’ave ’ad the balls. He was naught but a little arseworm.’
Rose’s mouth turns down in disapproval. ‘Sometimes they’re the sort to start an anonymous slander.’
‘Are you telling me he was checking to see if it ’ad done its mischief?’
‘Why else would he bother to come across the river, just to ask where Master Nicholas is?’
‘Maybe if I could find the wherryman who brought him, they could tell me whereabouts on the north bank they picked him up,’ Ned says.
‘But what if he saved himself the risk of a soaking and walked across the bridge instead?’ Rose says. ‘You’d never trace him then.’
Ned sits bolt upright.
‘What is it?’ Rose asks, gazing up from his lap into a tangled auburn canopy.
‘He came across the river! He definitely came across the river.’
‘How can you be sure, ’Usband?’
‘Because I remember now: the back of his hose was soaked. I thought he’d wet himself. But he could either ’ave slipped getting in or out of the wherry or – more likely – the boatman ’ad some sport with him on the crossing. So they might well remember ’im.’
Rose reaches out and lays a cautionary hand against her husband’s chest. ‘Promise me, if you find him, you won’t go back to your old ways,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to lose you to a noose, Ned Monkton.’
Ned leans down and kisses her. ‘’Av’ no fear, Goodwife Monkton,’ he says gently. ‘This Ned’s a different man to the one he once was.’
9
For Nicholas and Bianca the first two days of the voyage across the Narrow Sea are like waiting for a jury to reach a verdict. Every time another sail is sighted, their hearts beat faster: is it a fast galleon dispatched to apprehend them?
By Nicholas’s reckoning, the voyage should take less than three days. It ends up taking almost five. It is not the weather that delays them, as the sea is unusually benign. But a fisherman must make a living. Van der Molen meanders the tubby little vessel through waters he knows to be rich in fish. Nicholas and Bianca give as much assistance as they can without getting in the way, hauling on nets, shovelling the slippery silver bounty into casks of salt, washing the blood off the deck with buckets of brine.
Even when they make landfall it is not really land at all, more like scraps of marshy carpet floating on the sea, with only the occasional stunted tree to break the bleak skyline. Eventually these islands off the Brabant coast close in, forming a recognizable river. Even so, Van der Molen announces they have another twelve leagues to run – perhaps a day’s travel, if the wind holds – before they enter the waters of the River Dieze.
Bianca is worried about the letters of safe-passage and credit that Nicholas carries. She fears the reverse of the shock they had at Woodbridge.
‘If you are a recusant, and you’re fleeing abroad because your Catholic faith means you can’t practise in England any more, why are you carrying letters of safe-passage and credit from a queen’s minister?’
Nicholas has thought this through. ‘Because I was his physician. Because I have cared for his child. Despite our different faiths, he feels bound to help me, knowing the accusations laid against me are false. He’s offering me a new start.’