His last action before leaving Poynes Alley is to walk back to the foreshore and look out across the river to the far bank, where the Sirena di Venezia lays moored alongside Galley Quay.
The following day, 3rd April, Nicholas Shelby starts to make the lodgings on Poynes Alley an approximation of a home, though he has no intention of staying a moment longer than necessary. Rose arrives, bearing clean sheets, a coverlet and a bolster all tied up with string. She’s tearful. She puts the linen down on the table, pulls a kerchief from her sleeve and blows her nose mightily.
‘It’s not fair,’ she sniffles. ‘Some bodies are born for each other.’
‘People invent things, Rose, even when there’s nothing there to invent,’ he tells her gently.
‘Well, it’s not right. The Jackdaw’s not right. And if you care for my opinion, Mistress Bianca is not right, either – even though she says she is. Which she always does. And isn’t.’
Smiling, he tells her it’s all for the best. Good friends can’t be expected to live like songbirds in a cage – especially if everyone around them keeps expecting them to sing a song of other people’s invention. Rose leaves, unconvinced.
Nicholas, of course, has not left the Jackdaw because of what people think. He has not left in order to save Bianca’s blushes. He has moved out because he knows he must distance the Jackdaw and its mistress from what he intends to do.
An hour later, Farzad arrives with a travelling chest containing Nicholas’s few possessions.
‘Mistress had three offers of marriage since you left, Master Nicholas,’ he says, grinning.
‘Not that rogue Marlowe?’ Nicholas asks, feeling suddenly very lonely.
‘Walter Pemmel for one. And Will Slater.’
Nicholas smiles. Pemmel and Slater have barely three teeth between them.
‘Old Gryndall the rat-catcher went down on one knee, though Mistress had to help him get back up again afterwards. I like very much in England now – you all crazier than anyone in Persia!’
‘Tell her my advice is to make them wait,’ Nicholas says. ‘Then to choose very carefully.’
From the candle-maker on Thieves’ Lane he buys tallow wicks to bring a little light to the evenings. He purchases a new mattress at the St Saviour’s market and spreads Bianca’s clean linen sheet over it. The old one he cuts up with the poniard he purchased for his journey to Gloucestershire, burning the straw and the stained canvas in the single hearth. The stuffing is mouldy. The smoke almost chokes him out into the lane before the flames finally take hold. But by next morning the air in the tenement is almost breathable, tainted only by the smell of the river and the countless unknown lives that have leached into the old timbers of the house.
He eats at the public ordinary on the corner of Poynes Alley and St Olave’s Street: eel or coney, oysters occasionally. Sack and ale he takes sparingly – not like the first time he came across the bridge after Eleanor’s death, when he would seize every offered opportunity to drink himself into oblivion in his increasingly desperate efforts to get her to stop talking to him from inside his head.
At night he lies alone in the little bed, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of his new surroundings: the lap of the tide against the beams of the balcony outside, the tolling of a different church bell, the cries and shouts of customers leaving a different tavern – the Walnut Tree, by the old abbey ruins on the south side of St Olave’s.
He cannot entirely escape the old pain of desolation, but now he can bear it, consign it to its proper place. He knows it is the pain of wounds healing, not of wounds mortal. And he finds he can think of Eleanor and Bianca increasingly as separate entities, and think of each without guilt.
Increasingly, he has visitors. His name is known in this part of Southwark: St Thomas’s hospital for the sick poor is barely ten minutes’ walk away. Word soon goes round that the physician who worked there in the cloisters for a while last year has returned. A small but steady trickle of visitors appears. He treats without complaint a procession of scalds and sprains, crushed fingers and sundered skin. If balms and salves are required, he directs the patient to Bianca at the Jackdaw, giving each a ha’penny of Robert Cecil’s money to offer as payment.
Four days after his arrival at Poynes Alley he rises early, takes a wherry across the river and returns to Knightrider Street. At the College guildhall he seeks out old Wotton, the clerk to the Fellows, a corpulent man – sixty if a day – with large, startled eyes that remind Nicholas of a freshly caught salmon. Wotton has been at the College for as long as anyone can remember. The president, Baronsdale, likes to joke that Wotton folded the great Galen’s togas for him. Wotton has the grace to say nothing about Nicholas’s appearance before the Censors, though he must know of it.
‘I’m trying to trace a Dr Charles Pelham,’ Nicholas says. ‘He practised in St Martin-in-the-Fields – around 1558.’
While Wotton searches a shelf for the appropriate roll, Nicholas pictures the physician’s loose, disjoined scrawclass="underline" I, Charles Pelham… attest that the infant born unto M on the third of March last is afflicted by the sacred disease. I have witnessed the several and diverse paroxysms…
Don’t lead, Nicholas tells himself as Wotton returns. You’re just seeking word of a long-lost family friend – a friend who’s never been anywhere near the court of Mary Tudor, let alone diagnosed her secret infant daughter as an epileptic.
Wotton fussily opens the roll and scans the lines of neat secretary hand. Stooping closer, he stabs an entry with his index finger. ‘Here he is, Mr Shelby: New College, Oxford… licensed by the Bishop of London… became a licentiate of this college in 1543.’ He steps back from the roll, a look of surprise in his round, moist eyes. ‘But no ordinary physician, by the look of it.’
Nicholas leans over the roll and sees the entry ‘vicarium regiis medicus’.
‘Pelham was a deputy physician to the royal household?’ he says, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.
‘So it would seem, sir. But as far as our most sovereign lady Elizabeth is concerned, Pelham is not a name I recall, and I’ve known all her medical men, from Thomas Bill to old Dr Lopez.’
‘Is it possible he could have been physician to the late Queen Mary’s household?’ Nicholas asks, now barely daring to breathe.
‘I can’t see why it shouldn’t be. The dates would be correct.’
‘Is he still alive?’
Wotton fetches the latest roll. ‘Apparently he is, Mr Shelby. We have him entered as dwelling by St Mary Rounceval. Whether he still practises, I cannot say – he must be over eighty.’
Nicholas struggles to keep his composure. St Mary Rounceval is barely a stone’s throw from the royal palace of St James.
From the doorway, a new voice breaks into Nicholas’s thoughts.
‘Is that old Mr Pelham you’re enquiring after?’
Looking up, Nicholas sees Wotton’s assistant, Oldbridge, watching him, his round pink face infused with a desire to please.
‘Marry, not a whisper of him for years, and then two gentlemen seek him out within a few months of each other.’
‘Who was the other?’ Nicholas asks.
‘A most striking fellow. Came around Christmastime last. Tall. Very angular in the features. A foreign physician; apparently most eminent. From Basle, I think he said.’
18
Nicholas considers taking a wherry, but the wind is from the west and the tide is ebbing. It will be faster to walk. He heads up Creed Lane, through Ludgate and down Fleet Hill towards the Strand. His mind is in turmoil. Is it conceivable, he wonders, that Charles Pelham was the physician who attended the birth of Mary Tudor’s secret child? And if he was, will he dare admit it to a stranger?