‘Charlatans?’ She lets out an explosive huff of contempt. ‘You sound just like Connell’s friend.’
‘Who?’
‘The very expensively attired Reynard Gault,’ she says, her amber eyes glinting with smouldering anger.
For a moment the name means nothing to him. Then he remembers his conversation with Connell at the wedding feast: Gault – the man Robert Cecil had sent to arrange his passage aboard the Righteous.
‘You’ve spoken to him?’ he asks tentatively. ‘How?’
‘Connell brought him to my shop. Apparently he has some power in the Grocers’ Company. Rooting out charlatans, because of the plague. I could have punched him.’
‘I swear I hadn’t intended you to find out this way,’ Nicholas says earnestly, desperate to ensure Bianca doesn’t realize that Cecil was behind Gault’s visit to Dice Lane. ‘I came here to tell you. But you’ve beaten me to the mark.’
‘When do you leave?’ Her voice has a skein of ice forming on it.
‘In a few days.’
‘Are you coming back?’
‘Of course! Just as soon as my commission from Cecil is concluded.’
‘And Farzad? And Solomon Mandel? Have you forgotten them so quickly?’
‘Farzad could be anywhere. If he’s alive, I don’t think he wants us to find him.’
‘What if the plague should spread to Bankside? Our need of a good physician will be all the greater.’
‘I’ve already told you: physic has no remedy. I’d be of no more use than the charlatans Gault has his eye upon.’
‘What changed your mind?’
The ice in her voice has thickened, he notices. He imagines he can hear it crackling. ‘Yesterday at Robert Cecil’s table, listening to Francis Bacon, I realized I’m not the only one who doubts the present practice of physic. You should have heard Bacon speak, Bianca. It inspired me. Cecil has shown me a future I had never imagined.’
‘He’s made you another of his promises, that’s what he’s done.’
‘It is not like that.’
‘And you’ve fallen for it.’ She looks away, her anger now alloyed with disappointment. ‘Oh, Nicholas! You’re worse than a giddy maid who believes a handsome rakehell when he promises her the world – if only she’ll hitch up her kirtle for a minute or two. Jesu, I thought you better than that!’
Foolishly he tries to stand his ground. ‘I owe it to my father, who mortgaged his farm to send me to Cambridge. I owe it to those who need a physician and get only a fraud who quotes false remedies in Latin and robs them of their coin. I owe it to… to…’
‘Go on – say it! To Eleanor.’ Bianca’s voice is loud, hard and dismissive. It sets a pair of rooks shrieking in the old hornbeam tree beyond the far wall.
‘Alright, yes. To Eleanor, and our child. But it doesn’t mean I don’t lo–’
‘I don’t care what it means, Nicholas,’ she says, cutting him off before he can say the word.
She stalks off to where she left her leather mittens. Crouching down, she puts them on and picks up her garden knife, then stabs it into the wet soil.
‘Be gone with you, Dr Shelby,’ she calls over her shoulder as he stands there, not knowing what to do or say. ‘I’ll have no more of you. Go to the Barbary shore. Walk the endless deserts of Araby, for all I care. Leave me here to plant something that has at least a chance of growing to bud.’
11
St George’s church lies just off Long Southwark, close to where the Earl of Suffolk had his great house in the time of the queen’s father, the eighth Henry. The mansion has long since gone. There is nothing there now but lowly tenements built up against the cemetery wall. Two days after his encounter with Bianca in her physic garden, Nicholas Shelby wanders amongst the headstones and the crosses in the hazy early-morning sunshine, searching for the grave of Solomon Mandel. Under his left arm is a flat parcel wrapped in sackcloth.
When he finds the spot, Nicholas looks around to ensure he is not observed. Kneeling, he palms aside the freshly dug soil and buries the menorah he took from Mandel’s house. He is not sure it is the right thing to do. But in the absence of any other plan, it seems to him at least appropriate.
After a brief, silent prayer for the soul of Solomon Mandel, he heads north towards London Bridge, wishing that all his dilemmas could be as speedily laid to rest.
At the top of Fish Street Hill, Nicholas heads east into Aldgate ward. It is market day here and the lanes are packed. He weaves between customers bound for the fish stalls; dodges out of the way of goldsmiths’ apprentices running errands; ducks around haberdashers laden with baskets of braids, ribbons and silk lacings. To his relief, he sees no sign of contagion; no watchmen preventing entry to contaminated lanes; no crosses on doors to warn of disease lurking within. In this quarter at least, the city appears untroubled.
He stops at a food stall on the eastern end of Tower Street. There he buys a slice of manchet bread and brawn for breakfast, served to him by a stout woman with a kindly smile. She leans across the counter to get a better look at him, insisting she recognizes the young physician who used to practise on Grass Street. He tells her she’s mistaken. He has long since made himself a non-citizen of this part of the city.
He would prefer to enjoy his meal at his own pace. But his neighbour on the bench is an eel-seller taking a break from the market, his apron smeared with fishy conger-blood that leaves Nicholas’s stomach close to turning. He wolfs down his food and hurries on.
He crosses the open ground of Tower Hill, the scaffold standing like an abandoned raft becalmed on an empty sea – a sea that on Robert Cecil’s globe might well be labelled Mare Incognitum. He pauses in its shadow, staring up at the grim gibbet like a country green-pate recently come to town. It was here, he recalls, that the killer of Ralph Cullen, Jacob Monkton and the others met his deserved end. In his thoughts he returns to that night in the crypt below the old Lazar House, the night Bianca had very nearly become the next victim of the killer stalking Bankside. He had come so close to losing her for ever. Have I lost her now? he wonders.
From that memory it is but an easy jump to an earlier one, from a time before Eleanor’s death. Before his fall from prosperous young physician to wild-eyed vagrant. Before Bianca found him.
It is a sweltering Lamas Day, three summers past. A nameless boy-child – at least, nameless then – is lying on Sir Fulke Vaesy’s dissection table, awaiting the knife as though he’s nothing but a slab of meat to be chopped for the pottage pot. A vagabond child of no importance. An object not for compassion, but for mere instruction. Nicholas is staring in disbelief at the obvious signs of murder. He’s wondering why the great anatomist is unable – or unwilling – to see them, too.
Ralph Cullen.
Nameless no longer, thanks to him and Bianca.
But so many doors slammed in his face on the way. So many blind alleys. So much contempt to swallow, from the likes of Vaesy and coroner Danby. He thinks now that had he been a queen’s physician with place and reputation, how simple it would have been to get them to listen to him. How many lives could have been saved? If Robert Cecil is offering him the chance to wipe that slate clean, simply by enduring the discomforts of a voyage to Morocco, then it is to be grasped – whatever Bianca might think about the contract. How can she not see that he is doing this for her as much as for himself? How can she not recognize his need to do something greater with his knowledge of physic than administer to the poor of Bankside?