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PART 1
The Physician from Basle
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1
Nine months earlier. 23rd February 1591
It is a day made for second chances, a day ripe for confession, for penitence, for admitting your sins and seizing that unexpected God-given chance to start afresh. A dying storm has left thin wracks of ripped black cloud hanging in the saturated air, above a pale empty world awaiting the first brushstroke. It is simply a matter of applying the paint to the canvas. Let today slip by unused, and Nicholas Shelby – lapsed physician and reluctant sometime spy – knows he must return to London, no nearer to accepting the new life he’s been so cruelly dealt than when he left.
His father has sensed it, too.
‘Your Eleanor died in August last,’ Yeoman Shelby observes with devastating calmness, as the two men shelter from the last of the downpour in the farm’s apple press. ‘It’s now almost March. Seven months. Where were you, boy? Where did you go?’
How much of an answer does a father need? Nicholas wonders, close to shivering inside his white canvas doublet. Would it help to know that for a while I was busy drinking myself stupid in any tavern I could find that hadn’t already banned me? Or that I was losing every patient I had, because word had soon spread that Dr Shelby was raging in his grief like a deranged shabberoon? Or that I was busy rejecting everything I learned at Cambridge – attended at a cost you could scarcely bear – because when the time came and Eleanor and the child she was carrying had need of it, my medical knowledge turned out to be little more than superstition? Or that, on top of everything else, there had been a murderer I had to stop from killing again?
There are some questions, Nicholas thinks, that should remain for ever unanswered, if only for the sake of those who ask them.
‘How could you do that to us, boy – vanishing off the face of God’s good earth like that?’ his father is saying, his words delivered to the dying rain’s slow drumbeat. ‘Your brother wore himself thin, searching that godless place called London for a sign of you. Your mother wept like we’d never heard her weep before. Do you not know we loved Eleanor, too?’
Nicholas has been dreading this moment ever since he returned to Suffolk and the Shelby farm. Now he sits on the cold stone rim of the press, straight-backed, head up, a damp curl of wiry black hair slick against his brow, unable to give in to the desire to slump, because a Suffolk yeoman’s son is not grown to wilt, even if the weight of all that’s happened since Lammas Day last is almost too much for his broad countryman’s shoulders to bear. Sickened by the excuses he hasn’t even tried to make yet, at first all he can bring himself to say is ‘I know. I’m sorry.’
Yeoman Shelby has rarely struck either of his sons, and not at all since they’ve grown to manhood. But as he comes closer, Nicholas wonders if he’s about to land a blow in payment for the extra pain his youngest has caused the family by his vanishing. He catches the heavy, musty smell of his father’s woollen coat, the one he’s worn in winter for as long as Nicholas can remember. Dyed a now-faded grey, it smells as though it’s been buried in a seed basket for all of Nicholas’s twenty-nine years. But the scent is oddly comforting. Nicholas has the overwhelming urge to reach out and cling to the hem, as if he were an infant again.
‘The only way I can explain it is this,’ he says, staring at his hands and thinking how his fingers, nicked and coarsened by boyhood summers helping with the harvest, seem so unsuited to healing work. ‘Imagine if you woke up one morning and discovered that all the wisdom accumulated over fifteen hundred years of husbanding the land didn’t work any longer – that you couldn’t grow anything any more; that you couldn’t feed your family.’
‘It’s called an evil harvest, boy. It’s happened before.’
‘Exactly! And there was absolutely nothing you could do about it, was there?’
Nicholas looks up at his father with moistening eyes. He snorts back the tears, frightened that he’s about to weep in the presence of a man who has always seemed immune to sentiment. ‘That’s how it was when I tried to save Eleanor and our child,’ he says thinly.
His father lays a hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘I know you well enough, Nick. You would have moved heaven and earth, if you but could. But sometimes, boy, it’s just the way God wants things to happen.’
Nicholas gives a cruel laugh. ‘Oh, I’ve heard that said before. Did you know the great Martin Luther – fount of this new religion we’re all supposed to embrace so unquestioningly – tells me in his writings that God designed women to die in childbirth! He says it’s what they’re for! Well, for the record, I’ll have none of such knowledge.’
‘Parson Olicott would say that what you learned at Cambridge is God’s wisdom revealed through man,’ his father replies, caution in his runnelled face. ‘He’d say our Lord would offer us no false remedies. He’d call you a blasphemer for suggesting otherwise.’
‘The remedies Parson Olicott gets called upon to administer, Father,’ says Nicholas, running his fingers through a tangle of hair that the rain has flattened to his scalp like black ribbons discarded in a ditch, ‘are for ills of the soul, not the body.’
‘But if the soul is in good health, does not the body follow?’
Though a humble farmer, a man who only learned to write when he was forty, his father has just summed up the current thinking of the College of Physicians in a nutshell.
‘That’s what we’ve thought for centuries,’ Nicholas says. ‘That’s what the books tell us: bring the body into a balance pleasing to God. They instruct us to bleed the patient from a particular part of his body if the sanguine and choleric humours are out of kilter; purge him if the melancholic humour suppresses the phlegmatic; read the colour of his water – and always make sure the stars and the planets are in favourable alignment, before you do any of it. Then present the bill. And if it all goes wrong, say it was God’s will – or the stars were inauspicious.’
His father kneels and stares into his son’s eyes with the stoic acceptance of the cycle of life and death, of hope and disappointment, that a man who relies on the fickleness of the earth for his survival must learn. His face looks carved out of holm oak. You’re barely fifty, thinks Nicholas, yet you look like an old man. Is it the toil? Or have my own actions aged you? He settles for what his mother and his sister-in-law, Faith, have always claimed: grubbing away at the earth makes Shelby men look older than their years.
‘Listen to me, boy,’ his father says with a surprisingly gentle smile that looks out of place on such a hard-used face. ‘Thrice in my lifetime I’ve heard Parson Olicott tell me I’m to forget my religion and believe in a different one. Every Sunday – until I was about fourteen – he’d tell me the Pope was a fine Christian man, an’ that for my spiritual education I was to study the pictures of the saints in St Mary’s…’
Nicholas wonders what that weathered stone Saxon barnacle, where the Shelby family now have their own pew almost within touching distance of the altar, has to do with his present agony; but he’s learned long ago that when his father embarks on one of his homilies it’s best not to interrupt.
His father continues. ‘Then one Sunday shortly after King Henry died, I hear Parson Olicott announce, “King Edward says the Pope is the Antichrist!” Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. After the sermon, Parson Olicott hands us lads a bucket of whitewash.’ He makes a painting gesture with one hand, the fist clenched. ‘“Cover up those paintings of the saints,” orders old Olicott, “’cause now they be heretical!”’
Nicholas has stared at the plain walls of St Mary’s every Sunday for as long as he can recall, usually with intense boredom. It has never occurred to him that his father was one of those who’d done the whitewashing.
‘Took us lads ages, I can tell you,’ Yeoman Shelby says. ‘But the next thing I know – around the time I was paying court to your mother – there’s Parson Olicott proclaiming that Edward is dead, Mary is queen, and the Pope is once more our father in Christ. Imagine it!’
Nicholas indulges his father and imagines.
‘“Change the prayer book!” says Olicott. “Bring out the choir screens again” – we’d hidden them in Jed Arrowsmith’s barn. “Scrub off the whitewash! The bishops what made us paint over those saints are all now heretics and must burn for it!”’ Yeoman Shelby sighs, as though all this variable theology is beyond the understanding of a simple man. ‘To tell the truth, Nick, when we got the whitewash off, I was surprised those paintings had survived. But survive they had. Stubborn buggers, those Catholic saints. Didn’t last, of course. Barely five years on, Bloody Mary is dead, we’re all singing hosannas for Queen Elizabeth, and the Pope is the Devil’s arse-licker again. And what’s old Olicott preaching?’
‘Fetch the whitewash?’
His father nods. ‘Exactly. What I’m saying to you is this: there ain’t ever such a thing as certainty, boy. Maybe in the next world, but not in this. So don’t you worry your young head about whether or not your old father can handle it when his clever physician son has a crisis of belief. Because what really grieves us, Nick – what really makes us weep – is that when your world was turned on its head, when you had need of us most, you didn’t come home.’
For a moment there is only the slow dripping of water on the pressing stone. Then Nicholas is in his father’s arms, his chest heaving like a man drowning, sobbing with a child’s bewilderment at unjustified injury.
Outside, the rain is starting to ease. The old thatched houses of Barnthorpe are beginning to take on their newborn, sharper forms. When the two men walk back to the Shelby farmhouse, Nicholas feels somehow lighter. Certainly more resolute. Confession has done him good – even if it’s only a partial confession.
Because there’s something else Nicholas hasn’t admitted to his father. He hasn’t told Yeoman Shelby that a part of his son – a small part to be sure, but even the smallest canker can still pr...
