‘So, am I right in thinkin’ that if you’re from Corn’ill, and poor Lemuel Godwinson was from Camberwell, that would imply you’ve ’ad no preevus knowledge of the deceased?’
Strollot gives a smile of amusement for a common man’s clumsy attempt at legal formality. ‘Quite right, Master Monkton. Never saw him before in my life.’
‘Before you saw ’is body laid out in the crypt at St Tom’s, that is?’
‘Exactly.’
Not wanting to risk a quarrel with the bearded giant before him, the foreman asks cautiously, ‘Might I ask precisely where this line of enquiry is bound, Master Monkton?’
But before Ned – who is not sure himself – can answer, Barnabas Vyves interrupts.
‘I fear, Master Strollot, that it must have escaped your memory,’ he says helpfully – a little too helpfully, in Ned’s opinion.
‘You have met young Godwinson before. The deceased came into the Jackdaw’s taproom while you and I were discussing the next muster demand from the Privy Council, if you remember.’
Strollot spreads his arms, to show that even the most blameless of men can sometimes fall prey to an honest mistake.
‘Then I confess my error, gladly,’ he says generously. ‘One meets so many people when one is engaged upon one’s civic responsibilities.’
Civic responsibilities? thinks Ned, watching a line of sweat-beads break out on Strollot’s pink brow. He’s an alderman’s clerk, not the Lord Mayor. And he’s just been dug out of a hole by his accomplice; though accomplice in quite what, Ned would be hard pressed at this precise moment to say.
‘I think that must be the last of your questions, Master Monkton,’ the foreman says, wondering how he’s going to silence Ned if he chooses otherwise.
But Ned, wisely, admits that it is. He admits it all the way back to the Jackdaw – even while he tries unsuccessfully to convince himself that he must have been mistaken that day in the taproom. And that it wasn’t Gideon Strollot he saw pay Lemuel Godwinson for an errand run, but Barnabas Vyves. And that there is a plausible explanation why an alderman’s clerk from Cornhill should stir himself to sit on a coroner’s jury in Southwark – on the other side of the river.
16
Cork has not fallen. Cork is not even under siege, though from the conditions within the walls it would be easy to think it was. While Ormonde is out chasing the rebels through Munster, a steady trickle of sick and wounded men flows through the North Gate. Food is scarce. Hunger bites. The rain seems to have forgotten how to stop. Nicholas really fears an outbreak of pestilence. He has seen it happen before. He knows how quickly a town may become one great bone-yard, with the only difference between the living and the dead being the waiting.
Bianca raises the possibility of hiding aboard a ship bound for England. But like all good commanders, Ormonde has already made his preparations for the possibility of such an ambush.
‘He has imposed martial law,’ Nicholas reminds her when she suggests the idea. ‘We’d be deserting. That’s a hanging offence.’
Bianca’s only consolation is that Nicholas’s position as Ormonde’s advisor in matters of physic gives him access to the mail pinnace that plies between Cork and Bristol. While Nicholas pens a letter to Cecil, encoded with the cipher they use for privy correspondence, telling Mr Secretary Cecil that he will bring Spenser to London when Ormonde allows it, Bianca writes a letter to Rose at the Jackdaw. She accompanies it with her own versions of the stories the old Seanchaí told her and Nicholas that night on the ride to Kilcolman. They are to be read to little Bruno before bed. She takes care to give the story of the Merrow a happy ending – a marriage. In her mind, it is a way to remember the owner of the lace mantilla she had found at the cove, and whose body she assumes is lying at the bottom of the ocean.
With no hospital worth the name in Cork – the old friary’s medicinal garden has long since been turned over to vegetables – the wounded from Ormonde’s march from Dublin through Munster are housed in a warehouse at the Watergate. They lie on dirty straw, cared for by only a few camp-followers. Using the earl’s authority, Nicholas gets to work. He presses into service the town’s barber-surgeons and a number of women skilled in using the healing plants to be found in the surrounding countryside. He musters some of the refugees to help remove the filthy straw, scrub the dirt and the dried blood from the flagstones and lay fresh reeds cut from the marshes. He calls upon Cork’s licensed apothecaries and entreats them to assist Bianca. They bridle. A woman? To be set over us? He tells them she is licensed in London by the Grocers’ Company, the guild that controls the apothecary’s art. Still they resist. The Grocers might think it right, but God surely does not. Whoever heard of such a thing? What next: women physicians? When they witness the level of her skill, most of them change their opinion. Those who don’t are too afraid of her to complain further.
With the help of the barber-surgeons, Nicholas assembles a serviceable collection of knives, tweezers and lancets. Anticipating amputations, he sharpens saws and stores them in pairs, so that if one breaks halfway through, another is immediately to hand. From the local shambles he purloins a wickedly curved boning knife, so that when he cuts through flesh and muscle, it will automatically pull back from the bone, leaving a clear space for him to apply the saw. From the same place he gathers a stock of pigs’ bladders for stretching over the freshly stitched stumps.
In the chamber above the warehouse, Bianca sets a cauldron in the hearth for boiling brank-ursine, which she makes into poultices for setting broken bones. She gathers a collection of stone jars to hold the ingredients for plaisters: St John’s wort, pimpernel and comfrey; meadow rue for killing lice; juice of syanus, which the farmers call hurt-sickle, to close the lips of wounds. When not at Nicholas’s side, she goes out into the marshes beyond the walls to gather up marsh-mallows, using the roots to make a decoction to restore those who have bled too freely. She also boils the roots in wine, making a draught to ease the suffering of soldiers and refugees alike who are afflicted by the bloody flux, brought on by bad water and the damp climate.
Keep busy, she tells herself. Work is the answer to all those troubling questions that keep sleep at bay. Questions like: What manner of mother leaves her infant son behind to go swanning off to Ireland? And: What manner of wife would contemplate leaving her husband to face these trials alone?
With the makeshift hospital open for trade, they go to work. For his part, Nicholas finds the demands made on his skills invigorating, if exhausting. It is good, once again, to be practising a physic that he knows to be purely practical. No need to cast a horoscope before he deals with a wound or a fracture. A man in agony from a sword slash doesn’t care a damn if his doctor can recite the Aphorisms of Hippocrates in Greek or Latin. The owner of a torn spleen doesn’t give a fig for the argument currently dividing the College of Physicians – does the organ purge the body of black bile, as Galen claims; or produce blood, as Aristotle would have it do?
Surprisingly, Oliver Henshawe turns out to be the least of Nicholas’s worries. After what he had seen at the sight of the wreck, he had expected to find Henshawe utterly unmoved by the plight of his own wounded. Yet he seems genuinely concerned for his men.
‘You have an unusual faculty for this business,’ Henshawe tells him on one occasion, and not patronizingly, but with genuine admiration.