S PERRY - The Angel’s Mark

London, August 1590

He lies on a single sheet of fine white Flanders linen. Eyelids closed, plump arms folded across his swollen infant belly, he could be a sleeping cherub painted upon the ceiling of a Romish chapel – all he lacks is a harp and a pastel cloud to float upon. The sisters at St Bartholomew’s have prepared him as best they can. They’ve washed away the river mud, plucked the nesting elvers from his mouth, scrubbed him cleaner than he ever was in life. Now he stinks no worse than anything else the watermen might haul out of the Thames on a hot Lammas Day such as this.

Male child, malformed in the lower limbs, some four years of age. Taken up drowned at the Wildgoose stairs on Bankside. Name unknown, save unto God. So says the brief report from the office of the Queen’s Coroner, into whose busy orbit – twelve miles around the royal presence – this child has so impertinently strayed.

The chamber is dark, unbearably stuffy. A miasma of horsedung, salted fish and human filth spills through the closed shutters from the street outside. Somewhere beyond Finsbury Fields a summer thunderstorm is boiling up noisily. Plague weather, says present opinion. If we escape it this year, we’ll be luckier than we deserve.

The chamber door opens with a soft moan of its ancient hinges. A cheery-looking little fellow in a leather apron enters, his bald head gleaming with sweat. He carries a canvas satchel trapped defensively against his body by his right arm, as though it were stuffed full of contraband. Approaching the child on the table, he begins to whistle a jaunty song, popular in the taverns this season: ‘On high the merry pipit trills’. Then, with the exaggerated care of a servant preparing his master’s table for a feast, he places the satchel beside the corpse, throws open the flap and proceeds to lay out his collection of saws, cleavers, dilators, tongs and scalpels. As he does so, he polishes each one on a corner of the linen, peering into the metal as though searching for hidden flaws. He is a precise man. Everything must be just so. He has standards to maintain. After all, he’s a member of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons, and while he’s here in the Guildhall of the College of Physicians – a surprisingly modest timber-framed building wedged between the fishmongers’ stalls and bakers’ shops to the south of St Paul’s churchyard – he’s on enemy ground. This rivalry between the meat-cutters and the balm-dispensers has existed, or so they say, since the great Hippocrates began tending patients on his dusty Aegean island.

After two verses, the man stops whistling and engages the child in a pleasant, one-way conversation. He talks about the weather; about what’s playing at the Rose; whether the Spanish will try their hand against England again this summer. It’s a ritual of his. Like a compassionate executioner, he likes to imagine he’s strengthening his subject’s resolve for what lies ahead. When he’s done, he leans over the child as though to bestow a parting kiss. He places his left cheek close to the tiny nostrils. It’s the final part of his ritual: making sure his subject is really dead. After all, it won’t reflect well if he wakes up at the first slice of the scalpel.

‘Who are you planning to cut up for public sport today, Nick?’ shouts Eleanor Shelby to the lathe-and-plaster wall that separates her from her husband. ‘Some poor starving fellow hanged for stealing a mackerel, I shouldn’t wonder.’

For several days now Eleanor and Nicholas have communicated only through this wall, or via scribbled note passed secretively by their maid Harriet. Whenever Nicholas approaches the door of the lying-in chamber, Eleanor’s mother Ann – who’s come down from Suffolk to oversee the birth and ensure the midwife doesn’t steal the pewter – snarls him away. She’s convinced that if he gets so much as a glimpse of his wife he’ll let in the foulness of the London streets, not to mention extreme bad luck. Besides, she tells him crossly whenever she gets the chance, who’s ever heard of a husband setting eyes on his wife during her confinement? Imagine the scandal!

To add to Nicholas’s present misery, every church bell from St Bride’s to St Botolph’s begins to chime the noonday hour, the latecomers making up by effort what they’ve lost in time-keeping. Now he must shout even louder if his wife is to hear him.

‘It’s learning , Sweet. Cutting up is what East Cheap butchers do in their shambles. This is a lecture, for the advancement of science.’

‘Where any passing rogue may peer in over the casement for free. It’s worse than a Southwark bear-baiting.’

‘At least our subjects are dead already, not like those poor tormented creatures. Anyway, it’s a private dissertation. No public allowed.’

‘Insides are insides, Nick. And, in my opinion, that’s where they should stay.’

Nicholas slips his stockinged feet into his new leather boots, tugs out the creases in his Venetian hose and wonders how to say farewell before the bells make conversation through the wall impossible. Normally there’d be the usual passionate endearments, followed by a lot of letting go and grabbing back, kisses interrupted and then jealously resumed, breathless promises to hurry home, a final reluctant parting. After all, they’ve been married scarcely two years. But not today. Today there is the wall.

‘I can’t tarry, Love. You know what Sir Fulke Vaesy thinks of tardiness. There’s bound to be a line somewhere in the Bible about punctuality.’

‘Don’t let him bully you, Nick. I know his sort,’ comes Eleanor’s voice, as if from a great distance.

‘What sort is that?’

‘When you’re the queen’s physician, he’ll grovel to you like a lapdog.’

‘I’ll be seventy by then! Vaesy will be a hundred. What kind of physician makes a centenarian grovel?’

‘The kind whose patients don’t pay their bills!’

Smiling at the muffled peal of Eleanor’s laughter, Nicholas shouts a final farewell. Nevertheless, his leave-taking feels hurried and incomplete, practically ill-starred.

At first sight, you would not take the young fellow stepping out of his lodgings at the sign of the Stag and into the dusty heat for a man of physic. Beneath a plain white canvas doublet, whose points today are left unlaced for ventilation, his body is that of a hardy young countryman. A coil of black hair spills ungovernably beneath the broad rim of his leather hat. And even if this were midwinter and not blazing August, his doctoral gown – won after a lengthy struggle against a whole battery of disapproving Cambridge eyebrows – would still be tucked away, as it is now, in the leather bag slung over one shoulder.

Why this unusual modesty, given that in London a man’s status is known by what he wears? He would probably tell you it’s to protect the expensive gown from the ravages of the street. A truer answer would be that even after two years of practising medicine in the city, Nicholas Shelby can’t quite help thinking that a Suffolk yeoman’s son has no right to wear such exotic apparel.