The Angel's Mark Read online

  By the time Nicholas gets to him, the man has been propped up against the wheel of the nearest cart. Squatting down beside him, Nicholas pulls back his coat and shirt to inspect the damage. One shoulder sags like a half-empty sack of flour. The neck muscles twitch alarmingly under the skin. His face is as pallid as the December clouds.

  ‘You’re lucky – nothing’s broken,’ Nicholas tells him. ‘But you’ve dislocated that shoulder.’

  ‘Are you a physician?’ the man snarls, his face creasing in agony. ‘A pox on you then. I don’t have coin to waste on a quack.’

  ‘Nor did my father when he sent me to Cambridge,’ Nicholas retorts. ‘Listen to me: I served in the Low Countries with the army of the Prince of Orange, treating the wounded. I can help you. It’ll cost you nothing. Tricky way to earn a living – a one-armed rope-walker.’

  The man leans back his head and laughs through the pain. ‘The Low Countries – where?’

  ‘Brabant… Delft… what does it matter? A dislocated shoulder is a dislocated shoulder in any state.’

  ‘I was at the fall of Antwerp in eighty-five. In Sir William Parvis’s company.’

  ‘Ah, a most fine gentleman.’

  ‘Yes, he was. You know he died?’

  ‘Yes, he did. But I wasn’t his surgeon.’

  The rope-walker grits his teeth and gives Nicholas a maniacal grin. ‘Then do what you must, Surgeon, and by the holy Virgin’s tit, do it fast!’

  Nicholas unlaces his left boot and sets it aside. The slush against his bare foot feels like a thousand icy pin-pricks. He swiftly removes the fellow’s coat so that he can get a good purchase on the arm. He leaves the shirt alone, in the interests of speed. Making a quick check with his fingers, he determines which way the shoulder has dislocated. He’s lost count of the reductions – the reseating of dislocated joints – he’s performed in Holland: young recruits who’d not been trained to shoulder their firing-pieces correctly and got caught by the recoil; pike-blows taken against the steel pauldron-plate in the heat of battle; riders thrown from their horses. The trick lies in moving fast. He places a comforting hand on the man’s sound shoulder. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready when you are,’ his patient replies, closing his eyes.

  Nicholas lifts the patient’s arm. Another pitiful groan. The audience begins to cheer – on Bankside, pain and suffering are valuable public attractions; the bear-pit is only five minutes’ walk away. At the Turk’s Head there’s cock-fighting in the yard every Thursday. If I really wanted to, thinks Nicholas, I could send Timothy around the crowd with a cap for tips. He puts his foot as deep into his patient’s armpit as it will go. The man’s mouth gapes like a fish’s as he groans in agony. His chest heaves.

  Nicholas hauls on the arm like a sailor hoisting a sail. A scream rips through the crisp air like a scalpel. More cheers. And then he feels resistance. The screaming stops. The limb has reseated itself. The rope-walker’s face is that of a prisoner who’d just been told he’s being spared the rack. Nicholas even gets a round of applause.

  ‘Easy as falling off a rope,’ he says to himself in a satisfied tone. ‘And you don’t need to read Galen for seven years to do that.’

  Perhaps Bianca was speaking the truth, he thinks. Perhaps you can’t just un-become a physician.

  The next day, Nicholas goes to St Thomas’s and asks to see the warden.

  He’s kept waiting an hour. He passes the time in observation. When he enters one of the wards, where ten patients lie on mattresses covered with surprisingly clean linen, the sisters pay him no attention whatsoever. He gets the impression that the barber-surgeon on duty knows how to perform the simple stuff – the letting of blood to balance the body’s humours, the treatment of fractures – but when he contrives to talk to the hospital’s only resident physician, he discovers the man prefers the ease of the dice-houses and taverns on Thieves’ Lane to labouring on the wards at St Tom’s. He says he plans to set himself up in practice in Woolwich. It appears there’s an opening.

  The warden’s office is a poky little cell in the oldest part of the hospital, occupying what was once a corner of the monks’ beer cellar. Nicholas stands in the open doorway, filling it even though he is not overly tall, waiting for the warden to look up from his work. ‘I hear you might have need of a new physician,’ he says.

  The warden looks as sickly and as impoverished as his patients. But he’s canny enough to know the young fellow asking for a position could quite easily be a self-taught charlatan seeking an easy salary and a bed. He wouldn’t be the first. ‘Name for me the four dictums of surgery,’ he says, his attention returning to his accounts.

  ‘Firstly—’

  ‘In the Latin – if you wouldn’t mind.’

  This man is no Fulke Vaesy. He looks more like a pensioned-off Bankside rat-catcher. But Nicholas does his best to oblige, though his grasp of the classical languages is somewhat rusty.

  ‘Firstly, to unite the parts disjointed. Secondly, to sunder such parts joined unnaturally. Thirdly, to cut out those parts superfluous…’ His Latin falters as he looks at the warden and sees that the man appears not to have heard a word. He’s still scratching away with his nib on a parchment. But then he looks up, a faint trace of admiration on his face.

  ‘And lastly?’

  ‘Lastly, to supply those parts wanting.’

  Nicholas thinks of adding, ‘And fifthly, to charge an arm and a leg for the doing of it’, but he suspects the warden’s sense of humour is as susceptible to shock as his inmates.

  Only when he has listed the symptoms of quinsy, swine-pox, tissick and dropsy, along with their cures, does the warden finally decide he’s heard enough. He engages Nicholas for two days a week, salary one shilling and fourpence per session – minus the fourpence, when Nicholas politely turns down the offer of bed and board in one of St Tom’s damp corners.

  And so – in a manner somewhat less grand than before – Nicholas Shelby once again takes up the profession of physician. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he forsakes the Jackdaw and is to be found sitting in the cloisters at St Thomas’s, warmed by a brazier, while a seemingly never-ending file of Southwark’s shivering, sneezing, limping and spluttering pass before him. He treats tavern spit-turners for burns, weaver women for aching wrists, draymen for crushed fingers. For cases requiring minor surgery he uses the hospital’s collection of ancient and battered saws, lancets, drills, sewing-quills and rasps. To the astonishment of the barber-surgeon, he cleans them with brandy appropriated from the warden’s private store. It’s a trick he’d picked up in the Low Countries. Not once does he cast a patient’s horoscope before he makes a diagnosis, even if they ask him to.

  He knows he’s sailing close to the wind – practising surgery with his bare hands. Even to touch a patient’s body is regarded by some of the older fellows of the College of Physicians as a breach of professional standards. But it seems the writ of neither the College nor the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons runs in Southwark, as happens north of the river. Besides, the warden appears only too happy to have someone qualified – and more importantly sober – to carry out the work, and the barber-surgeon seems only too glad of the help.

  So Nicholas keeps his head down. He minds his own business. He tends to his patients as diligently as if they were paying him. Those in need of an apothecary he directs to Bianca Merton, trusting neither the competency of the sisters at St Tom’s nor the efficacy of their balms and potions.

  And he chooses carefully the sister, the patient and, indeed, the moment to ask, ‘Do you recall if there was ever a woman who brought a young boy here, four or five years of age – a little boy with deformed legs?’

  As Christmas approaches, Bianca musters her forces to ensure the Jackdaw outdoes its rivals in the lane, the Turk’s Head and the Good Husband. The taproom is garlanded with mistletoe and holly, some of it bought from hawkers, the rest cut illicitly from the hedges and banks around the Pike Garden and the orchards by the Barge House stairs. Hot spice
d wine is prepared. Using a recipe she brought with her from Padua, Bianca has Rose prepare dainties of pastry and marchpane, which fly off the tray. When the landlord of the Turk’s Head suggests they’re papist wafers and threatens to report her, she lets him try one. Then another. He forgets the Church and offers her a shilling for the secret.

  Christmas in London, she thinks, is a world away from Padua. Here there are no tableaux of the nativity paraded through the streets and squares, no swelling voices spilling out of the churches as Mass is celebrated. Here, despite the strictures of the new religion, the festivities seem more steeped in a pagan past. It has a dangerous edge to it, as though it wouldn’t take much to tear away the thin façade of propriety and expose a whole ensemble of fawns and sprites, antlers on their heads, cavorting in a woodland glade. No wonder the Pope thinks the English heretical.

  Nicholas is troubled.

  This will be his first Christmas without Eleanor. The approaching festivities serve only to heighten the pain he feels at her absence. He tallies in his mind the passing of the milestones: her death in the first week of August… his attempt at self-destruction in mid-October… He realizes his sanctuary with Bianca has lasted barely ten weeks. He wonders if the fragile start to his recovery will hold. And he dreads the prospect of a message from Ned Monkton, telling him another victim has arrived in the mortuary crypt at St Thomas’s. So he tries to keep his mind occupied. He willingly joins in the preparations. When he’s not at St Tom’s, he’s to be found busying himself with all manner of tasks: cutting a Yule log from a felled tree in the fields beyond the Rose playhouse, doing deals with vintners and brewers on Bianca’s behalf, visiting the markets and shops of Bankside for the ingredients with which Bianca will prepare leech and frumenty, brawn and souse for the Christmas table.

  And the Jackdaw is gaining a reputation for something other than good fare and cheap ale. Often now, when a customer orders his stitch-back, he might ask Bianca if she will make a salve for his bunions, or seek advice from Nicholas on his wife’s backache. Some of the better-off even pay.

  Three days before Christmas, Timothy announces that he thinks government watchers have returned to the Jackdaw, just as they did when Bianca first bought the tavern. From the parlour door, he points out two rough-looking fellows drinking in the taproom.

  ‘They say they’re wherrymen, but I’ve asked around and no one who works on the river seems to know who they are.’

  ‘Well, we’ve had a good run,’ says Bianca. ‘It’s over a year since I threw the last lot out.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’ Nicholas asks.

  ‘Of course not,’ she replies blithely. ‘There’s no sedition preached at the Jackdaw.’

  If they are informers, who has sent them? Has the Grocers’ Guild or the Barber-Surgeons’ Company caught word that he and Bianca are practising without licences? Or are they Privy Council watchers, on the lookout for Romish intrigue and Jesuit priests in disguise?

  ‘Do you want me to throw them out?’ Nicholas asks.

  Bianca just smiles nonchalantly. ‘Why draw attention to ourselves?’

  And to show how contemptuous she is of these supposed spies, she at once names them ‘Leicester’ and ‘Walsingham’, after the two towering pillars – both now dead – of the queen’s secret state.

  On Christmas Eve a mummers’ play comes to the lane. A crowd gathers to watch St George slay the dragon. St George is played by a handsome fellow with an earring, the dragon by a skinny boy with a paper hat in the shape of a serpent’s head. He hisses menacingly, terrifying the women and children and drawing volleys of good-natured abuse from the men. His face is painted with burnt cork, as it is a well-known fact that dragons come from either Turkey or Ethiopia, and hence are customarily dark-skinned.

  When darkness falls, candles are lit. More of them, swears Rose, than there are stars in the night sky. The Yule log blazes merrily in the taproom hearth. Measures are danced to the accompaniment of cittern and tambour, songs lustily sung, games of Hoodman Blind and Hot Cockles played.

  For the holiday, a king of Bankside is required. It’s traditional. So Timothy is duly enthroned. Anointed with a crown of laurel, he goes about the tavern like a tyrant, waving his sceptre – a pig’s bladder on a stick – and sentencing even the wholly innocent to dreadful and bloodthirsty punishments, redeemable only on immediate payment of a rosewater and sugar-paste sweetmeat.

  Nicholas joins in as best he can, though he feels as if he’s watching a play being performed in a language he doesn’t understand. When the Jackdaw has emptied and they’ve cleaned up, he offers to tamp the fire and set the locks. After all, Bianca and Rose are all but exhausted, and as Timothy is now king of Southwark, however temporary his reign, he is to be excused such menial tasks. They all wish him happy Christmas. Bianca gives him a chaste kiss on the cheek. The firelight turns her amber eyes to brilliant gold; but only Rose wonders if the way they gleam when Nicholas is around might be due to something more than just the season’s cheer.

  Later, alone, Nicholas sits by the fire, fighting the desperate desire to drink himself into stupefaction. He cannot face the climb up the stairs to the attic while sober, but fears what will happen if he weakens.

  When he’s sure everyone is asleep, he takes the key that Bianca has now entrusted to him and slips out into the lane, locking the door behind him. There’s a crescent moon in the sky, glimpsed fleetingly beyond scudding clouds that threaten more snow. The wind off the river bites like a snapping terrier. From the lanes around the Jackdaw come the occasional muffled cries of revellers. The watch will have its work cut out tonight. Nicholas heads north towards the bridge, his stride purposeful, his heart resolved.

  When the priest of Trinity church in Grass Street ward wakes with the dawn on Christmas Day, he sees through the window a figure huddled in the porch, still as a statue, staring out at the churchyard. In the dark, Nicholas has been unable to find the correct grave and, in keeping his uncertain vigil, he’s damned near frozen to death.

  ‘I went for an early walk,’ he tells Bianca on his return.

  ‘Of course you did,’ she replies, as she helps him peel off the frost-hardened buffin coat. And she lets her hand linger on his arm to let him know she understands.

  One year slips into another. Epiphany approaches. On Twelfth Night the Jackdaw is witness to celebrations that outdo even Christmas. For Bankside, there is only one disappointment this year: the river has failed to freeze. The jugglers, fire-eaters, rope-walkers, acrobats and dancing bears must remain firmly on dry land.

  There have been no more bodies washed up on Southwark’s disreputable shore, save for a drowned cat and an ancient pike that the less scrupulous inhabitants of St Saviour’s parish try to pass off as a sea monster. They charge a penny a peep through an aperture cut into a dark cloth. Inside, the head with its fearsome teeth has been set before an ale cask that some enterprising fellow has painted with scales to suggest the monster’s body. They do quite well until the pike begins to rot.

  Has the killer’s appetite been satiated at last? Nicholas wonders. Where is he? What is he doing? Is he at home, watching his children play with their New Year’s presents – just an ordinary man? Is he helping his wife to take down the garlands of holly and ivy, swearing on his soul that whatever he’s done, he’ll never again let Lucifer make him embrace such terrible evil again?

  Or is he merely waiting for the weather to change?

  For Joshua Pinchbeak there has been no Christmas, no Twelfth Night, only periods of half-waking from the slumber of the ages. He has lost almost all coherent memory of his life before he came to the Cross on Cheapside. Even the time between then and now – is it days, or years? – is little more than a procession of vague fragments, dreams almost.

  Is he dreaming now? He’s not sure.

  He is bound to a Cross, pinioned by leather straps around his wrists and ankles. What remains of his senses tells him he is upside-down, for his insignificant weight is being t
aken by the muscles in his calves and thighs. He can hear the soft, familiar cadences of prayer, a man’s voice very close by. His mind tells him it will be an easy thing to untie the straps and rise to heaven. All he has to do is give himself up to the desire.

  He turns his head, and the blur of his vision eases just enough for him to see a table with strange implements on it: spirals of iron, razor-sharp blades, an old hourglass with the lower bulb full of white sand…

  Then a sudden icy fire floods through his body. He cannot move his head enough to see where the blade is piercing his flesh, but what little remains of his reason tells Joshua the pain is coming from somewhere on his left leg. He tries to pull away, but he can’t. The limb is held fast against the timber. He screams as the blade cuts deep down towards the bone.

  Almost as quickly as it comes, the pain vanishes, replaced by a warmth that seems to cover his knee in a pulsing tide. He can hear a splashing sound, like the falling of raindrops.

  Just before his eyes close for ever, Joshua Pinchbeak – itinerant preacher, carrier of God’s warning that the end of days is coming – again turns his face to the table.

  His gaze comes to rest on the hourglass.

  The bulb has been turned. The grains of sand are flowing.

  18

  Epiphany, the formal end of Christmas. Nicholas is at his place in the cloisters of St Tom’s, expecting to be kept busy with the aftermath of the Twelfth Night festivities. What he gets is the first chink in the curtain.

  As the chapel bell strikes midday he’s summoned to the foul ward. It is here that patients afflicted by the pox are cared for, a disease rife this side of the river. Bankside even has its own language for it: French gout… flap-dragon… The whores who suffer from it are fire-ships and blowers.