The Angel's Mark Read online

  ‘Well, I’ve been patient – in my own tavern,’ Bianca says, with a challenging frown on her face.

  ‘Will Slater said that if you throw a barrel into the river any further upstream than Lambeth marshes, the current could take it to either bank before it reached the bridge. But if you throw it in closer, the chances are it’ll come ashore on Bankside.’

  ‘Fascinating, Nicholas. But what does it mean?’

  ‘It means this: he’s putting them into the water somewhere between here and Lambeth. If we went up to the attic now and looked out of the window, there’s an outside chance he might actually be looking back at us.’

  On a blustery January morning Nicholas watches, head bowed, as Mary Cullen’s body is carried from the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s to the chapel graveyard. The hospital’s assistant chaplain reads the lesson with almost indecent haste: for-she-thatsuffereth-in-the-flesh-shall-cease-from-sin…

  Nicholas doesn’t hear the rest. The hurried words are carried away on the wind almost before they leave the chaplain’s mouth. He wonders if such brevity is the lot of all who leave St Tom’s this way.

  The only other witnesses to Mary Cullen’s speedy exit from this world – save for Nicholas, the assistant chaplain and the gravedigger – are Ned Monkton and Alice Welford. Ned has come because he’s custodian of the single coffin and must return it to the mortuary crypt, once Mary has no further need of it. But he’s also here because Nicholas has told him Mary Cullen’s story, as recounted by Alice, and he wants to pay his respects to the mother of the child who may – perhaps – have shared Jacob’s last days with him.

  As Nicholas walks away to his next duty, Alice asks to speak to him.

  ‘Call me an addle-pate if you will, Master Nicholas,’ she says, pulling her patched gown tighter around her shoulders and sniffing through a nose made rosy by the chill, ‘but it’s only just come back to me. You know how it is when someone dies; suddenly you start remembering old exchanges, conversations—’

  Of course I know, Nicholas wants to say, I’ve done little else since August. But the retort would be needlessly harsh, so he just nods.

  ‘When we spoke last, you asked me where little Elise Cullen might have gone—’

  For Nicholas, the blustery chill is instantly forgotten. ‘You’ve remembered?’

  ‘After a fashion.’

  ‘Tell me,’ he demands with almost indecent urgency.

  ‘It was knowing poor Mary’s gone to a better place that set me thinking. There was a tale she used to tell Elise and little Ralph, almost from before they was out of swaddling…’

  A tale. Almost as soon as it’s born, the hope begins to wither. On Bankside, tales and lies are coins of the same currency. Nicholas is about to tell Alice Welford he has a pressing appointment. But then something makes him hold back. It is an all-but-obliterated memory from his fall; the faint recollection of an encounter with a woman on the riverbank at the foot of Garlic Hill by Queenhithe, an encounter he’d dismissed either because he was too drunk or too angry to take it for what it might have been – genuine.

  ‘If I recall aright, it was like this,’ begins Alice. ‘Mary’s mother – old souse-head that she was – used to claim the Cullens had a cousin who farmed at Cuddington. Apparently he was a yeoman of some measure. Whenever times got really hard, Mary used to tell everyone that one day she’d take herself and the two sprats away to live with him. Now I recall it, it was definitely Cuddington.’

  ‘Are you telling me that’s where Elise might have been heading when she and Ralph left the Cardinal’s Hat?’

  Alice shrugs. ‘Who can say? Maybe there really was a piece of proper meat in the pottage. Elise certainly thought so. I remember her jumping up and down and trilling like a pipit with excitement every time Mary spoke of how they’d all sleep on a big feather bed, eat roast meat every day of the week and travel to the Guildford fair in a grand carriage.’

  ‘Do you know where this place Cuddington is, Alice?’

  ‘Of course I do. Surrey, by Cheam Common. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘I’m from Suffolk, Alice,’ Nicholas says, gauging whether he can afford to hire a horse from one of the Bankside livery stables. ‘I’ve never been any further into Surrey than Long Southwark.’

  ‘Suffolk or not, you’d be wasting your time trying to,’ Alice tells him. ‘And so will Elise.’

  A shadow of disappointment clouds Nicholas’s voice as he asks why.

  ‘Marry now, Master Nicholas, there can’t be Cullens still farming at Cuddington, can there? It’s not possible.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, they tore down every stone, didn’t they? Pulled up the very foundations.’

  For a moment Nicholas thinks Alice Welford is talking about one of the plague villages, razed and ploughed over after the pestilence scoured it so unmercifully that the few survivors took themselves off to start their lives again from scratch somewhere new.

  But then Alice says, ‘It was old King Cod-piece what did it. The eighth Henry. Had Cuddington scrubbed out, every last piece of it. Put up that great palace of his in its place – the one they call Nonsuch.’

  20

  The funeral over, Nicholas receives a summons from the hospital warden.

  ‘I have a task for you – it’s civic,’ he announces in a tone that suggests to Nicholas he can’t find anyone less important to carry it out. He gives Nicholas an address barely ten minutes’ walk from the Jackdaw. ‘Be there by ten. You’ll be met by one of the bishop’s clerks from Winchester House. And remember, you’re the hospital’s emissary.’ He looks Nicholas up and down and sighs with disappointment. ‘Don’t you at least have a gown?’

  Nicholas reaches his assigned destination in good time. But he almost walks straight past the low, straggling line of ancient herringbone brickwork and half-rotted beams, so busy is his mind with what Alice Welford has told him. He has to stop, turn back and take a second look, just to convince himself this is the right place.

  Raised in the reign of the second Edward, the old St Magdalene almshouse now resembles those it was built to shelter: decrepit, destined for inevitable disintegration and death, and a drain on parish resources.

  How can this place possibly be the location of the strange little ceremony Nicholas has been sent here to perform, a ceremony that – the warden of St Tom’s was careful to point out before he left – dates back several hundred years and is an honoured tradition? According to the warden, the Magdalene almshouse does not actually belong to the hospital, yet by some ancient concord, drawn up so long ago that the original document is in French, a physician must be delegated on one particular day each summer and winter to administer free medical care to the inhabitants. Apparently, says the warden, it’s something to do with the bishopric of Winchester, which used to own the land the almshouse is built on. The hospital’s reward is a basket of perch.

  London is full of such odd little contracts, not all of them observed, especially when real coin is required as settlement. Today’s duty has fallen to Nicholas, as St Tom’s only physician. He wonders idly how he’s meant to carry a basket full of fish all the way back to Thieves’ Lane. It is only when he’s joined by two men and a woman that he can be sure the warden hasn’t played a practical joke on him.

  One of the men is a dun-robed clerk from Winchester House, presumably here to ensure the ceremony is carried out according to custom. With him is a woman in a winter gown of russell worsted, worn over an unassuming farthingale. Nicholas has the impression he’s seen her before, but he can’t place where or when. But he certainly recognizes her companion. It’s Gabriel Quigley, Lord Lumley’s secretary. Nicholas hasn’t seen him since the lunch at the Guildhall the previous summer.

  Quigley is a stick of a man in a severe legal gown and ox-leather boots buttoned and pointed at the sides, his skin pitted by the small-pox – grey in body and mind, by the look of him. He stands beside the Winchester House clerk with a sour expression on his face, like a thi
rd-tier lawyer hired to fight a suit he doesn’t believe in.

  At first Quigley doesn’t recognize Nicholas. And why should he? Nicholas has changed dramatically since they last met. Only when Nicholas gives his name and calls himself doctor, for the first time he can remember since his fall, does Quigley nod in vague and dismissive recollection. Nicholas knows what he’s thinking: what transgression have you committed, what dreadful professional failure, to end up working at a place like St Thomas’s on Bankside?

  ‘And what brings you to the liberty of Southwark, Master Quigley?’ Nicholas enquires pleasantly.

  ‘I am here upon Lord Lumley’s business,’ Quigley says, implying that if he were not, he wouldn’t come within a mile of the place. ‘His Grace’s late wife – the Lady Jane FitzAlan – made a charitable annuity to this place. Lord Lumley has seen fit to maintain it, in her memory – and as a favour to Lady Vaesy, who first brought the needs of these poor souls to Lady FitzAlan’s attention. I am here to escort Lady Vaesy as his proxy.’

  ‘And the bishop is most honoured by her presence,’ says the clerk from Winchester House, whose own master is also far too busy to attend in person.

  Now Nicholas realizes why the woman looks familiar to him. He makes an extravagant knee to her. He might be in Southwark, he might no longer be welcome at the grand ceremonies of the College of Physicians, but he hasn’t forgotten his manners.

  Katherine Vaesy nods in appreciation. She is a comely woman, he can’t help but notice, though her features carry a brittle sharpness about them, like someone familiar with pain, a survivor perhaps of a cruel illness that has left its traces in her eyes and the lines around them.

  ‘Gentles, please – time is pressing,’ says the Winchester House clerk impatiently. ‘May we begin?’

  Nicholas does what he can for the inmates, their faces blank and uncomprehending as he treats rashes, scalds and lesions with some of Bianca’s potions he’s brought with him in his bag. Lady Vaesy and Gabriel Quigley hand out a single farthing to each one he treats.

  ‘This is a strange place in which to find the man my husband once told me might make a fine physician,’ Katherine says, as a patient offers Nicholas an elbow to inspect – a raw chafe that looks as though it’s been allowed to fester for weeks.

  ‘It suits me, madam – for the present. Besides, I’m sure Sir Fulke was being unnecessarily generous.’

  ‘They say you came to Southwark out of grief, Dr Shelby. Is that so?’

  Her directness causes him to press too hard on the limb he’s inspecting. The patient yelps. Nicholas mutters an apology. ‘Would you rather have had me come for the gaming and the bear-pit, madam?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not if your grief is so shallow it can be eased by such distractions. There is nobility in suffering. There is God’s grace in it. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Not particularly, madam. Do these poor souls look noble to you? The rest of the world seems to have forgotten all about them.’

  Katherine’s brow lifts a little. ‘To bear great tribulations with a martyr’s grace, Dr Shelby? To be frank, I find that an inspiration.’

  ‘And to be equally frank, as far as tribulations are concerned, I’d happily have done without mine, however noble they might make me.’ Nicholas lets go of the elbow. Katherine rewards the woman with a farthing from her alms bag.

  ‘I heard you’d given up physic altogether,’ she says. ‘Not that you can call this physic, of course.’

  ‘Why not? It’s doing more good than treating some comfortable fellow who’s feeling a little down because his mistress won’t reply to his letters. And yes, I have had patients like that.’

  Katherine Vaesy’s laughter sounds as out of place in the Magdalene as rough soldiers’ song in a chapel. ‘Forgive me, Dr Shelby,’ she says, ‘in the presence of physicians, I’m in the habit of speaking plainly. I’ve found it the only way of being listened to.’

  ‘Cruel, madam – but probably justified.’

  ‘You may not know it, Dr Shelby, but you were the topic of plain speaking amongst my husband’s friends and their wives last summer – just for a day or two.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. The men thought you dangerously over-sentimental. The women all wanted to cradle your head upon their bosoms.’

  ‘It’s nice to be appreciated.’

  She smiles. ‘I think we have something in common, Dr Shelby: you in your exile in Southwark, me in mine at Cold Oak manor. Perhaps we should get together and celebrate the benefits of solitude.’

  Is the great anatomist’s wife suggesting an association? Nicholas wonders. He remembers it was common knowledge amongst the young physicians that Vaesy and Lady Katherine were on barely better terms than Spain and England. He decides the best course of action is to pretend he hasn’t heard her.

  Once the physic is dispensed and the alms distributed, Nicholas assumes that the ritual is complete. He can’t wait to escape. The dark interior of the Magdalene stinks, and the overseer seems more interested in the ale jug on his table than the inmates he’s supposed to care for. Nicholas is also worried Katherine Vaesy might ask another of her uncomfortably direct questions. But there remains one final piece of the ritual that must be observed.

  ‘It’s time for the fish,’ says the Winchester House clerk sonorously. ‘And the signing.’

  ‘I have to sign – for fish?’

  ‘The representative of the benefactor – that is Lady Vaesy, acting for His Grace, Lord Lumley – together with the agent of St Thomas’s – that is you, Doctor – must make their avowals in the covenant record,’ says the clerk, as though it’s a treaty between nations that Nicholas is required to sign, rather than some dusty ledger he’s certain no bishop since the days of the second Edward has ever bothered to read. ‘Then you may choose five fine carp from the Winchester House carp pond.’

  Nicholas hopes there’s a meal afterwards, but somehow he doubts it.

  Once back in daylight and almost in fresh air, Nicholas accompanies the little party at a brisk pace along Black Bull Alley in the direction of Winchester House. Almost immediately his sense of place and danger – he’s been a Banksider long enough now to pick up these things – sends his brain a warning message: you’re being followed.

  The lad is barely out of childhood. He has a lean and hungry face washed clean of colour and hope. He’s not even fast on his feet. He moves with a forward-and-aft lurch, like a sick pigeon. His head – crowned with a dirty woollen cap – bobs intently with each ungainly stride. He’s just about keeping up with them, a little off to their side in the middle of the lane. It’s partly his dodging of the carts and the pedestrians, the labourers with wicker panniers slung over their shoulders, the women carrying sacks of winter fruit, that’s given him away to Nicholas in the first place. He’s a cut-purse, and he’s chosen Kat Vaesy as his target because she’s carrying the alms bag on a cord over her shoulder. Nicholas is about to suggest that she hands the bag to Gabriel Quigley when the lad makes his move.

  It should take a practised thief no more than a dozen heartbeats to complete the click, leaving the victim – the buzzard or the hick – to walk on unaware that anything is amiss until the time comes to reach for the purse. But this young lad is not practised. As he darts behind the clerk, his hand already reaching out towards Katherine Vaesy, Nicholas turns and, with a deftness that surprises even him, seizes the outstretched wrist with the hardest grip he can bring to bear.

  It’s like grasping the body of a small bird. The bones seem so delicate beneath his fingers that Nicholas instinctively eases his grip. The lad stares at him in astonishment, wild-eyed, terrified. A small knife lands almost silently in the mud.

  For a moment no one knows quite what to do. The clerk, Quigley and Katherine Vaesy all stare at Nicholas and the lad, as if the pair are putting on some form of entertainment. Then Quigley shouts, ‘Call for the bellmen! It’s a branding for you, rogue, at the very least. You deserve the gallows!’


  ‘Bring him to Westminster House,’ says the clerk sternly. ‘We’ll hold him there for the constable.’ He adds his weight to Quigley’s threats. ‘It’s the Counter for you, my fine lad, and a hot iron on the cheek, so that godly folk might read such sinfulness plainly in your face!’

  Nicholas and Katherine Vaesy say nothing. She’s watching Nicholas intently. She seems to understand what he’s thinking: this boy will be lucky if he escapes with the trimming of an ear, the judicial knife leaving him for ever marked as a felon. He looks half-starved, there are tears in his eyes. He probably wanted the purse so that he could buy food.

  But what is really in Nicholas’s thoughts is this: this pitiful member of what Quigley and the clerk would probably label ‘the undeserving poor’ might be the very next eviscerated corpse that washes up on the riverbank. When he lets go of the boy’s wrist, it’s not only with a sense of compassion, but also of fear. Released, the lad vanishes into the crowd like a fish thrown back into the stream.

  ‘He twisted loose,’ says Nicholas lamely.

  Katherine Vaesy purses her lips in a wry smile of comprehension and approval. She knows exactly what he’s done.

  And then Nicholas senses a second disturbance close by. A rough male voice is calling out his name. Looking up, he sees Ned Monkton’s impressive bulk breasting its way towards him through the crowd.

  21

  How long do we have, Ned?’ Nicholas asks. The oily flame of a tallow lantern casts furtive pools of light over the uneven arch of the mortuary crypt ceiling at St Tom’s. He thinks he and Ned must look like grave-robbers.

  ‘Long enough,’ Ned replies. ‘The sisters will want to clean him up, so that the warden can write a report to the coroner, but I can hold them off for a time. I’ll say you thought you’d seen marks of the contagion.’

  ‘Where was he found?’

  ‘The creek by the old Battle Abbey ruins. The watch brought him in about an hour ago – it took me a while to find out where you’d gone.’