An hour later he stands before the site of the old religious hospital of St Mary Rounceval, once home to an order of French nuns long since suppressed by the queen’s late father and now converted into private dwellings. At his back is the broad open space around the Charing Cross. Beyond that, the great royal deer park north of Whitehall. His mouth is dry with anticipation.
Giving Pelham’s name to the porter, Nicholas is directed to a modest house at the far end of the main courtyard. There he is welcomed cordially by a plump woman of about fifty. She wears a grey kirtle and a white cloth bonnet. Her pale eyes are dulled by travail and disappointment, but her smile remains resolute.
‘What is your business with my father, Dr Shelby?’
‘I believe he may once have had a patient – a woman – whose son I have recently encountered,’ he says, reciting the explanation he’s come up with on the walk from Knightrider Street. ‘The boy has the falling sickness, and I wondered if perhaps Dr Pelham might give me some insight into the mother’s health.’
‘Then I fear you’ve had a wasted journey, sir. Conversation is very trying for my father these days. His wits aren’t what they were.’
Nicholas tries to disguise his disappointment. ‘I really would be grateful for the opportunity. I’ve walked a long way – from Bankside.’
Mistress Pelham’s ‘Oh’ implies that Bankside might be on the far side of the Alps. ‘You’d best come in, then. But, please, don’t hope for much.’
She leads him to a small room at the back of the house. It smells of unwashed linen and stale breath, though the rest of the house is spotless. A window opens onto a small patch of barren ground bordered by the tall hedges of a grand formal garden running down to the river. In a chair in front of the window sits an old man, as translucently grey as a dead moth caught in a spider’s web. His skin is mottled with blemishes the colour of old plums left out in the rain.
‘Father, say good morrow to Dr Shelby. He’s come all the way from across the river to speak with you. Isn’t that nice of him?’
Charles Pelham studies Nicholas for a while, his left foot hammering ineffectively at the floorboards. Slowly his eyes narrow with suspicion. ‘I know you, young man,’ he says at length.
‘You do?’ says Nicholas, surprised but hopeful.
‘You’re the Lord Mayor. You’ve brought me my money!’ Pelham twists the wick of his neck towards his daughter and says viciously, ‘I told you he would come. You’re naught but a lying souse-head, Meg Pelham!’
‘Meg was my mother,’ the woman explains wearily, as though it’s a correction she has to make all too frequently. She kneels beside the chair. ‘It’s me, Abigail, your daughter – remember? And this is not the Lord Mayor, Father; he’s another doctor: Dr Shelby.’
‘If he’s not the Lord Mayor, then he’s a cut-purse come to steal my pension!’
‘I did warn you,’ says Abigail, looking up apologetically.
‘May I at least try?’
‘If you can. But please do not tax his wits unnecessarily.’
Nicholas squats down on the other side of the chair. He says as gently as his mounting frustration will allow, ‘I was hoping you might advise me, in a professional matter, Dr Pelham. I wondered if you might remember an old patient of yours, from the past…’
‘I was the queen’s personal physician, you know,’ Pelham announces proudly. ‘I don’t talk to anyone except the president of the College of Physicians.’
I’m not surprised, Nicholas thinks dispiritedly – you’d both get on like a house on fire.
‘Don’t exaggerate, Father,’ says Abigail. She looks at Nicholas through eyes that brim with the hopelessness of a prisoner who knows there can be no end to their incarceration. ‘My father was never the queen’s physician, Dr Shelby – just as you were never the Lord Mayor. As I said, it’s his wits.’
Nicholas struggles to keep the disappointment from his voice. ‘Is there no truth to his words? None at all?’
‘Oh, he had ambition aplenty. And for a while he was assistant physician to the household of the late queen. But he was confined to treating the grooms, maidservants, chamberers – that manner of person.’
‘Never the queen herself?’
‘Heavens, no.’
‘Was he at court when Mary died?’
‘No, Dr Shelby. The papists finally managed to have him dismissed early in ’58. I remember it well. I was sixteen. It was snowing the day we left our lodgings at court. I thought it was beautiful. I didn’t know it then, but it was the day the marriage interests ended.’
‘Then you’re quite sure your father was never admitted to the queen’s privy chambers? I’m thinking around the time of her second false pregnancy.’
‘Quite sure. That Romish persecutor of God’s children would never have allowed him in intimate contact with her body – he was not of her superstition. My father was only tolerated in the queen’s household because of his skill.’
Nicholas is caught off-guard by the vehemence in her voice. ‘Then I am sorry to have troubled you, Mistress Pelham.’
‘And I am sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, Dr Shelby.’
Nicholas resigns himself to the wherry ride back to Southwark. It will be early evening by the time he reaches Poynes Alley. The Banksiders will be strolling in the Paris Garden, taking the air around St Saviour’s, ambling up and down St Olave’s Street, filling the taverns and the ordinaries with their boisterous chatter. He thinks he might drop by the Jackdaw, because the solitude of his Poynes Alley lodgings does not appeal to his mood. He makes one last effort to gain something from his visit to St Mary Rounceval.
‘I happen to have seen a brief note from your father, written a few months before the late queen’s death – about the time you left her court,’ he tells Abigail Pelham. ‘It referred to his treatment of a patient he named only as “M”. Have you any idea who that might be?’
‘I cannot help you, Dr Shelby. I’m sorry.’
‘I came by this note in a rather unconventional way. Can you recall your father losing any of his papers?’
‘You’ve seen how he is, Dr Shelby. He loses things all the time.’
‘Might it have been stolen?’
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know.’
‘Has anyone asked to see any of his papers recently?’
A flash of anger gleams in Abigail Pelham’s embittered eyes. ‘Why are you asking all these questions, Dr Shelby? You said you’d come here about a patient of his. Now you’re talking of stolen papers.’
‘Mistress Pelham, I don’t wish to pry, but the young lad I spoke of earlier – the son of one of your father’s patients – is in grave danger. Your answers could help him.’
She considers this a while, and he knows she’s wondering if it’s time to close the curtain, to shut out the world beyond the barren cell she now inhabits. To his relief, she decides to keep it open a little longer.
‘It was just before Christmas last. A woman came here asking to speak with Father, just as you have today. I saw them together, going through his documents. She was raising her voice with him because he couldn’t tell her what she wanted to know. I asked her to leave. She could have taken something – I couldn’t tell you for certain.’
‘Do you remember her name?’
‘Yes, she was a striking woman. She said her name was Isabel Lowell.’
Isabel Lowell… English to her soul… Sir Joshua Wylde’s voice echoes in Nicholas’s head. And then John Lumley’s: John Lowell and Peter Kirkbie… part of a cabal at court…