The Angel's Mark Read online

  ‘Battle Abbey? That’s this side of the river—’

  ‘Aye. He was found by a couple of lads from the stews out searching for trinkets on the shore.’

  The body has a broken, purposeless frailty about it. It’s slicked with mud and river-filth, a creature of the water dragged out of its element. Only the lower legs look made of flesh, where Ned has washed away the slime in search of the telltale incisions – and found them.

  ‘Bring that lantern closer, Ned,’ says Nicholas as he sees the raw edges of the wounds gaping like mouths stopped at the moment of blasphemy.

  ‘Don’t look much, does he? Thin as a sick greyhound.’

  ‘Have you got whatever it was you used to clean the legs?’

  Ned picks up one corner of the winding sheet that’s been folded, surprisingly carefully, at the feet of the corpse. ‘It was all I could lay my hands on in a hurry.’

  Knowing Ned’s reputedly fearsome temper, Nicholas wonders how he’s staying so unnervingly calm as he looks upon another victim of his brother’s killer. With a good deal of scrubbing, they remove most of the watery grime from the body. Only then does Nicholas see the full picture.

  His first cursory glance at the face has already shown him the telltale slippage of the flesh and muscle around the left side. For confirmation, he inspects the shoulders and the arms. ‘Apoplexy,’ he says, as much to himself as Ned.

  ‘What’s that?’ asks Ned. ‘Some sort of pox?’

  ‘It’s from the Greek – to strike suddenly. It’s when the body is felled without any warning. Sometimes it’s fatal, sometimes not. If you survive, you can be left without speech, or motion in the limbs.’

  ‘My uncle Harry was taken like that,’ Ned says, almost in awe of Nicholas’s diagnosis. ‘Lingered a couple of days afterwards, couldn’t speak nor move. Aunt Hilda said it was God what struck him down for his blaspheming tongue.’

  ‘And there’s a deep laceration – just here – beside the windpipe.’

  ‘Looks like someone started to cut his throat, then thought better of it.’

  ‘It might have been done after the incisions on the leg, to finish the bleeding process.’

  ‘There was the same wound on Jacob’s neck.’

  ‘And on the child at Vaesy’s lecture – Ralph Cullen.’ Nicholas purses his lips. ‘Help me turn him over.’

  The body makes a noise like a fish on a slab as they roll it. Nicholas sees at once the deep tear in the small of the back. It takes him no more than a few moments to establish that the liver has been removed, not at all precisely.

  ‘Is that what killed him?’ Ned asks.

  ‘No. I suspect it was done post mortem, like the cut to the neck. Like what he did to Jacob.’ Nicholas lifts up the cadaver’s left leg. ‘This is what killed him. A little bit closer with the lantern, please, Ned.’

  For the first time since Fulke Vaesy’s anatomy lecture, Nicholas can sense the killer’s breath on his cheek.

  There is nothing random about the two incisions. They were not made in anger, but deliberately, the tip of the blade cutting deeper into the flesh as the hand grew steadily more confident. Nicholas can see how the direction and depth change, how a slight twist or turn of the wrist has left a small promontory of flesh hanging here and there. He is so close that the smell of decay and river mud is overpowering, but he hardly notices it.

  ‘He’s searching for something, with the tip of his knife,’ Nicholas says, to no one but himself. ‘But he’s holding too tight. He knows what he’s looking for, but he has little skill.’ He beckons to Ned to bring the lantern even closer. ‘Ah! And then he finds it—’

  ‘He does?’ asks Ned at his shoulder, wondering how someone can read another man’s thoughts in a tear in the flesh.

  ‘Then the other cut – transversely, just to make sure.’

  ‘To make sure of what?’

  ‘That he’s fully severed the tibial artery.’

  ‘And what’s that, to a simple man?’

  ‘It’s a vessel in the body that carries the blood. Like a pipe.’

  ‘I just mind the bodies, I don’t ask what’s in them,’ says Ned defensively.

  ‘You remember the last time I came here, and I told you how lethal a simple knife-wound could be? Well, this is a perfect example. He’s severed one of the major vessels that brings the blood down to the extremities. Cut through this, and eventually you’ll lose enough blood to kill you.’

  ‘But when I used to get a bit fractious and ended up with bloody knuckles – or when you got that lucky shot at me – my blood would dry up and stop the wound.’

  ‘It does, Ned, but a tear in an artery or vein is too great a breach. And it could be that the killer is administering something to thin the blood, so it won’t coagulate.’

  ‘So what makes the blood flow out, then?’

  ‘According to the ancients, there’s a tidal flow between the liver and the organs. If you can get to the tear quick enough, you can hold it back.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Most physicians will cauterize the vessel’s severed ends with hot oil or tar to seal them. I prefer silk.’

  ‘Silk?’ echoes Ned, who can’t even begin to imagine how an expensive fabric he’s only ever seen adorning the gowns and doublets of the rich could possibly have a place in the treatment of a knife-wound.

  ‘In Holland I used silk a lot: two ribbons, but they have to be really fine. Looped around the cut vessel, they’ll tie off the ends nicely. Causes far less pain, too. But to be truthful, usually there’s so much of an outflow of blood that it’s impossible to find the tear in the artery before the patient bleeds to death. These incisions were made deliberately, to do just that. The wound on the neck was made to drain the body completely. But the man who did it would make a better slaughterman than a surgeon.’

  ‘What kind of devil are we dealing with here?’ Ned asks.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think he’s a devil, Ned. He’s just a man, fallible, like any other. He’s already made one mistake: he thinks the tide is carrying the bodies downriver and out to sea. And he’s arrogant enough to believe that if one should wash up on the riverbank, no one will care enough to take much notice.’

  ‘But he leaves the Devil’s mark behind him: the Cross, stood on its head.’

  ‘That’s what I thought – at first. But it’s not a crucifix, Ned. At least, I don’t think it is.’

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘It’s just the way he uses the knife; a surgical technique. Like the way a man signs his name.’

  ‘Funny kind of name-mark,’ says Ned.

  ‘But it’s the same every time. This is a creature of habit, Ned – a very tidy man. But where did he get his knowledge from? Does he go to Tyburn and take note of the way the executioner cuts the body? Is he a barber-surgeon? Is he one of those people who attends the public demonstrations at the College of Physicians?’

  At once Nicholas is back in Knightrider Street at the Guildhall, shoulder-to-shoulder with Simon Cowper, Ned Wooley and the rest, listening to Fulke Vaesy’s biblical thundering.

  ‘Or is he a physician?’ he whispers as the dark, appalling notion strikes him. ‘An incompetent physician – or one who’s disguising his hand? Whoever he is, I have absolutely no idea how to stop him.’

  When two nurses come down to prepare the body for the winding sheet, the corpse from Battle Abbey creek is given back his name. ‘Mercy! It’s that Pinchbeak fellow,’ one says, recognizing the face. ‘I heard him ranting like a zealot outside St Antholin’s towards the end of Advent. Put the very dread of Judgement Day in me for a week or more. Spoilt my whole Christmas!’

  22

  Mercy, what’s the matter with you?’ asks Bianca, when Nicholas returns to the Jackdaw that evening.

  ‘There’s been another killing. Only this time I got a proper chance to inspect the body.’

  Ashen-faced, she draws him to a quiet bench. She’s been dreading this moment as much as he has.

&nbs
p; Nicholas tells her about his visit to the Magdalene – how he’d seen Ned Monkton forcing his way through the crowd and had known that this time it was going to be different. This time he would be no helpless bystander.

  ‘This one fits the pattern exactly,’ he tells her. ‘Always he chooses someone afflicted with a malady. Always someone weak, someone unable to protect themselves.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ she says.

  ‘This has a bright side, does it?’

  ‘At least now they’ll have to listen to you,’ she tells him, laying one hand on Nicholas’s arm to tell him he’s not fighting this battle alone.

  With a written testimony in which he describes the wounds made upon the preacher’s body, Nicholas returns to the alderman’s clerk at Bridge House. He stands over the man while he pens a report for the Surrey coroner, who – with surprising speed – sends a deputy the very next day to convene a jury. Nicholas is even invited to sit upon it.

  ‘He is not the first,’ Nicholas assures the jury foreman, a stout baker named Royston with rosy-veined cheeks and a duck’s tail of ginger hair at the nape of his neck. ‘There have been others.’

  ‘But if we know not from whence this fellow came,’ says Royston, with the weary casualness of a man who is being kept too long from his proper calling, ‘then he is of no concern of ours. He is a vagrant. What does it matter how he died?’

  ‘An honest man can scarcely travel the queen’s highway these days without encountering all manner of brigands and beggars!’ complains another of the jurymen. ‘Better they slay each other than honest folk.’

  Nicholas fights, but he is outnumbered. The brief and inconclusive life of the jury barely spans the period between the bell at St Olave’s tolling eight and then nine. Its verdict is brutally short: Unknown man of some forty years, slain by knife-wound to the liver, probably in dispute with a fellow vagrant on the road.

  Nicholas can do nothing but place it beside those other forlorn conclusions stored away in his mind: Male child… taken up drowned at the Wildgoose stairs on Bankside. Name unknown, save unto God… The wholly natural sensitivities of the expectant father…

  Having decided the killer must be keeping his victims somewhere secluded before he butchers them, Nicholas asks Royston to include in his report to the coroner a request that a search be made of all disused buildings along the south bank of the river between the bridge and the start of the Lambeth marshes.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like me to ask the Privy Council to raise a muster while I’m about it, Dr Shelby,’ is the dismissive reply. ‘I’ll ask them to call out the trained bands, shall I? – all for some unknown vagabond who’s taken umbrage against another.’

  ‘They’d do it to catch a Jesuit priest or a Spanish agent,’ Nicholas tells him bitterly, wondering if the murderer is going to have to kill his next victim in public at St Paul’s Cross during Sunday sermon before anyone shows a passing interest.

  Nicholas has one last hope. It springs from Gabriel Quigley’s unexpected presence at the St Magdalene’s almshouse, and something Katherine Vaesy had said to him.

  ‘You’ve never struck me as someone who’s on cordial terms with a lord,’ Bianca says, when he tells her what he plans to do. They are sitting by the taproom fire. Timothy and Rose hurry past with jugs of ale and trenchers of food for the customers. ‘Perhaps I should consider charging you rent, Master Shelby.’

  ‘Lord Lumley might not even reply to the letter. I’d be surprised if he remembers who I am,’ Nicholas replies with a forlorn laugh. ‘We only spoke about a dozen words to each other, in the yard at the College of Physicians last August.’

  ‘Then why do you think he will listen to you now?’

  ‘It’s just a feeling I have. He’s not like Baronsdale and the others at the College. If he was of a mind to, he could just turn up for the feasts and admire his portrait hanging in the Guildhall. After all, he doesn’t have a doctorate in medicine. But no, he sends Vaesy all the way to Padua, at his own expense, to learn about the latest advances from the experts. Isn’t that the mark of a man with an open mind?’

  ‘But what are you going to tell him?’

  ‘That someone has been doing exactly what Sir Fulke does, only on living bodies rather than dead ones.’

  ‘Is that really what you think?’ Bianca asks with a shudder.

  ‘Sometimes he removes just one organ, sometimes all of them. In Ralph Cullen’s case he didn’t take any, just the blood. But in every case I’ve seen so far he’s severed the tibial artery – while his victims are still alive.’

  ‘I’m an apothecary, Nicholas; I grow plants and mix balms and distillations. I haven’t read your precious Galen. I don’t know what a tibial artery is.’

  ‘It’s a blood vessel, in the leg. Close to the bone. And actually Realdo Colombo is the man to consult. In his De Re Anatomica he contradicts Galen on a number of points.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s very brave of him, Nicholas. Contradiction must be such a dreadful trial for a physician.’

  ‘We bear it when we must,’ he says, to let her know he can take a joke.

  ‘These vessels – what is their purpose?’

  ‘They carry the blood around the body,’ he explains. ‘The Greeks used to think they carried only air, but that’s because they were studying cadavers. Now we know they carry the tide of the blood.’

  ‘Our blood has a tide? I just assumed we were full of it, like a jug is full of ale.’

  ‘Oh, quite the opposite. It’s a river, inside us. That’s what Galen says. He states that the blood is made in the liver, and our organs pull it towards themselves when they need nourishment, the way a lodestone attracts metal. That creates a tide. On the way, the blood passes through the heart—’

  ‘And what does the heart do? Apart from being the seat of love and valour.’

  ‘Think of it as being rather like an oven,’ he says, trying not to sound as though he’s giving her the blessing of a diagnosis. ‘The heart heats the blood together with the divine spirit in the air we breathe: what we call pneuma. The mixture flows back from the heart to the liver. That’s what causes the heart to vibrate – it’s being moved by the tidal flow of the blood, a bit like an open door moving to the wind.’

  ‘Rivers, ovens and doors? And wind?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She gives him a look of unimpeachable innocence. ‘And that’s what makes your heart flutter, is it?’

  ‘According to the ancients.’

  ‘I think I understand now why you don’t write sonnets, Nicholas,’ she says, raising one eyebrow in gentle mockery.

  ‘Of course, Vesalius and Servetus disagree with Galen over the precise nature of how the blood flows across the heart,’ he continues blithely. ‘One of them thinks there are tiny holes which allow it to pass through, the other doesn’t.’

  Bianca throws back her head and stares at the sagging beams of the taproom ceiling. ‘Rivers, ovens, doors and wind. And a disagreement between physicians over holes. Who could ever imagine such a thing?’

  ‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’

  She looks straight at him, the core of each eye a droplet of molten amber in the light from the taproom fire. She reaches out and lays one hand against his cheek. ‘Never think it, dear Nicholas. Never ever think it.’

  Later, Nicholas calls Timothy to bring him paper, nib and ink. By the light of the tallow candle Rose has placed in the attic, he begins his letter to John Lumley. He chooses his words carefully, knowing that each day Lord Lumley will receive any number of requests for favour and patronage:

  I humbly beseech my noble lord to recall with favour our short meeting at the College of Physicians this summer past, and I hope to find Your Grace still amenable to the offer of correspondence on matters of physic…

  Then, expressing an academic interest in the workings of the human blood system as described and debated by Vesalius, Colombo and Servetus, he asks the patron of the Lumleian chair of anatomy if per
haps he might even be allowed to study at the Nonsuch library. In truth, he means to tell John Lumley his story face-to-face.

  At no point in the letter does he refer, even obliquely, to the presence on Bankside of a murderer with an interest in draining his victims of their blood. Nor does he write of Elise Cullen, even though he knows Lumley will have people about him – his servants, his tenant farmers, the tradesmen and merchants who keep Nonsuch functioning – who would know if a girl of some thirteen years, alone and helpless, had recently been taken up by the authorities, or given alms and shelter by the local churches. Despite Alice Welford’s belief that Elise might have tried to reach Cuddington, these lines of enquiry must wait until he’s learned the measure of the man he hopes will be his salvation.

  When he’s finished, he folds the paper over on itself, seals it with wax from the candle and places it beside his mattress.

  When the dawn begins to pluck the outline of the northern bank of the river from the darkness, Nicholas rises and goes downstairs. Bianca and Rose are already up, preparing the Jackdaw for the day. He asks if he can borrow Timothy, send him on an errand across the bridge to Lord Lumley’s town house on Woodroffe Lane behind Tower Hill. He will not carry the letter himself. He no longer belongs to the city to the north.

  23

  If Fulke Vaesy could have just one of the Cecils’ fine possessions, it would not be Burghley House at Covent Garden, or the vast estate at Theobalds; not even the Cecils’ apparently endless treasury. At this precise moment it would be Master Robert’s fine Italian carriage. For Vaesy is no born horseman. And the road to Nonsuch has suffered much this winter.

  He’d prefer by far to stay in London. But John Lumley is his friend and – more important – his patron. If he hopes one day to succeed the old Jew Lopez as the queen’s physician, then he must come when summoned, like a lapdog to its mistress.

  Besides, he has work to do for Robert Cecil; an informer’s work. So he grits his teeth, swears at his horse and consoles himself with the knowledge that at least Lady Katherine will not be there today. He knows this because, before accepting any invitation from John Lumley, he sends a servant to Cold Oak, to discover from his wife’s household if she’s been invited, too. For not even Nonsuch, with its multitude of chambers and corridors, is large enough to rule out the possibility of an encounter. Cock-fights, thinks Vaesy, are best kept where they belong – in the tavern yard. He laughs brutally at the image of a feathered Katherine squawking viciously and lashing out with spurred talons. The noise is loud enough for his servant, riding beside him, to look across in alarm.