S PERRY - The Angel’s Mark

It’s a few minutes before he even acknowledges that Lumley is beside him. Then, in recognition, he lifts one hand to clutch Lumley’s sleeve. Nicholas notices the fingers no longer line up. Nor do they have nails.

‘I am forsaken, my lord,’ Quigley cries in a hollowed-out voice. ‘They made me say I was a Jesuit! They made me say I desired to deliver the queen in chains to the mercy of the Pope! That I plotted her death. I am condemned out of my own mouth. For the love I know you bear me, my lord, tell them they’ve made a mistake. Tell them it’s not true .’

Nicholas stares at the creature hunched in the chair. If nothing but sudden blindness could shut out the sight of what Gabriel Quigley has become – of what he, Nicholas Shelby, has brought about – he thinks he might almost welcome it. Only the image of Ralph Cullen’s body, of Jacob Monkton’s eviscerated carcass, prevents him from calling for the warden to let him out of the cell.

I’m not the physician – I’m the disease.

With what little strength Topcliffe has left him, Quigley tugs at Lumley’s gown. ‘You are a man of great learning, my lord. Your library nurtured my skills. Part of the glory will be yours. Tell them to let me go. I have to go on.’

Lumley drags himself away from Quigley’s grasp as Nicholas says, in a bitter voice, ‘ Glory? What glory? There’s no glory in what you’ve done, Quigley.’

Quigley’s bloodshot eyes turn on Nicholas. A dull light of comprehension flickers in them – and loathing.

‘Tell me, Quigley, when were your crimes going to end?’ Nicholas asks. ‘When you’d butchered the last crippled child in London? When you’d bled the life out of the last helpless beggar? What were you going to do then? Find another malady to cure by murder?’

Quigley shakes his head violently. The pain of his injuries makes his mouth gape in protest. ‘Murder? No! You must understand: I have learned wondrous things in this work. I have come so close to understanding how God’s purpose works in the body: in mine, in yours–’ Then, pleadingly, to John Lumley, ‘in Mathew’s .’

Lumley just looks on in horror.

‘I lost someone I loved, too,’ Nicholas says without pity. ‘The grief almost killed me – I couldn’t save her. But not once did I ever think of butchering someone else’s wife to find out why!’

Quigley studies him for a moment, as though trying to read his thoughts. Then, utterly unrepentant, he says hoarsely, ‘And you’re the poorer physician for it, Shelby. No vision – that’s the trouble with your sort. You should stick to prescribing balms for scrofula.’

It would be so easy, Nicholas thinks, to smash his fist into Quigley’s already-ruined face. That his inevitable end will be unimaginably more painful is small recompense for not doing so. ‘Did you know their names, Quigley?’ he asks, crossing his arms lest the temptation prove irresistible.

‘Names? Whose names?’

‘The people you butchered. Ralph Cullen, for a start.’

Quigley shakes his head slowly, painfully. It dawns on Nicholas that his victims’ humanity is something Quigley dare not allow himself even to glimpse.

‘Ralph was the little boy with the withered legs,’ he explains. ‘Ralph’s mother was a drunken bawd from Bankside. You’d think God might have given him a little more of His much-vaunted love. His sister Elise carried him on her back, all the way from Southwark to Surrey, looking for a little hope in life. Instead she found Katherine Vaesy, and you .’

Quigley lowers his head and lets it sway gently in denial.

‘Then there’s Jacob Monkton, the lad you eviscerated. Did you learn much from him – other than how to torture an innocent lad who wouldn’t harm a fly? Did you know his father and his brother have almost nothing in the world? And most of what they did have went on paying a charlatan like you to find a cure for his malady.’

The swaying of the head increases. Nicholas wonders if a small shard of guilt has found its way beneath Quigley’s carapace.

‘And what about the preacher? What about the blind woman with the bell around her neck – and her sister? Or the old man with one hand? I’ve no idea what they were called, Quigley. Have you? Perhaps you should have asked them, before you drained the blood out of them. At least you’d have been able to thank them properly for their contribution to your studies! Do you actually have any blood in your own veins, Quigley? Or is there just the piss of your own self-importance flowing there?’

Quigley looks up and meets his angry gaze. He reaches to his own breast with his feeble, twisted hands. ‘We were almost there ,’ he says, in a voice that sounds as though it’s being scratched out on glass with a rusty nail. ‘Your woman was going to provide the final proof.’

‘Proof? Proof of what?’

Quigley draws a long, slow breath. ‘I believe the answer lies somewhere inside the heart. Galen and the others were wrong – the blood has no tide . It isn’t heated in the heart. It doesn’t flow from the liver to the organs. Somehow it’s propelled around the body. If a vessel is cut and enough blood is lost, the heart will stop. Even Galen knew that, but he didn’t know why. The heart and the blood are more connected than we ever thought. And if you had not intervened, I could have discovered how!’

Suddenly, for Nicholas, the cell is full of people. He can see his mother-in-law, Ann, wringing her hands out of fear for Eleanor… Harriet breathless from the run from the Cheapside fountain… the midwife with her holy stones… Barely a single drop of blood discharged from the privy region – just some small quantity of her water.

Nicholas sinks to his knees. He’s so close to Quigley he can feel the man’s sour breath on his face. ‘Quigley, tell me, from what you’ve discovered, what would happen if the blood vessels ruptured internally – if there was no outside agency, no knife, no wound?’

When Quigley answers, it’s not because he wants to hand the gift of knowledge to Nicholas, but because he’s learned from Richard Topcliffe that not answering can swiftly bring a man more pain than he can possibly imagine. ‘The heart would drive the blood out into the body cavity, until there was not enough left in the vessels to support its work.’

‘And then?’

‘Then it would stop.’

Nicholas closes he his eyes.

Eleanor: the thread in the weave of my soul. The sunlight on the water. The sigh in the warm wind.

And I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her child.

They died not because of what I’d forgotten, but because of what I never knew.

Lumley’s voice makes Nicholas open his eyes again.

‘The heart is the seat of reason, of courage and of love, Gabriel,’ Lumley says, his words heavy with disgust. ‘Mathew would have told you that, if you’d listened to him. It’s the chalice into which God pours His mercy – not some merely mechanical engine .’ He steps back outside the compass of Quigley’s reach, as if he fears contamination. His last words to his secretary are filled with self-recrimination. ‘If I’d known what use you wished to make of my precious library, Gabriel, I’d have fed every single page into the fire with my own hands.’

Robert Cecil’s carriage is waiting by the Bulwark Gate. The door is open. Burghley’s crab-shouldered son watches Nicholas and John Lumley approach. He looks smaller than Nicholas remembers.

‘My noble lord of Nonsuch,’ Cecil says, with a courtier’s smile that suggests there is no setback that cannot be turned to an advantage, ‘I hear our sovereign lady is much in your debt.’