The Cardinal's Angels (12 page)

“I sent Roger out to see who’s around and to deliver a message.”

Now he was really curious. Messages could be good or bad. Subconsciously he noted his two escape routes, the narrow stairway and the secret passage. “How is he going to do that? Surely they’re watching the building?”

That perfectly reasonable question was answered by a pensive tightening of her lips and, if such a thing were possible, an even more suspicious frown. Ned waved it off with a
pretense
of knowledgeable nonchalance. “I would think that it’s not normal practice for an apothecary to have a hidden passage.”

That hit home. Mistress Black’s pert nose sniffed warningly and her glare increased to the imminent strike level. It was obvious he had trespassed onto forbidden ground.
Excellent, now to show that he had cards to play as well, and forestall potential treachery.

“Mistress Black, considering that you ministered to my injuries, I am not ungrateful enough to expose your secrets to the Cardinal, especially since you’ve already had a chance to hand me over. It’s in our common interest to start trusting one another. I’ll swear on any saint’s relic or even on my mother’s soul, that I’ll not bring harm to you or your family, if that’ll help.” Ned tried to put as much sincerity into his plea. So far he was just stating the truth. The Cardinal’s men would be undiscriminating in their ‘questioning’. As for the other interested parties, court rivalry was bloody and merciless. If he read the present situation correctly, Mistress Black, apprentice apothecary had her own secrets to keep away from the view of Wolsey’s men, so for now their needs ran together, shackled by a shared peril.

“Why should I believe your words Master Bedwell? You could be a cross biter at the gaming table, lining us up as an easy mark. We know nothing about you or who you serve.”

Ned studiously tried for his most innocent expression, as if he had been most sorely insulted by the accusation. However his better angel pointed out that Mistress Black’s suspicion was valid—so far reason for trust was scant. Reluctantly Ned realised that in order to gain her trust then he must firstly show some of his own. “Alright, I live and work on Chancery Lane.”

Unfortunately this didn’t help. This confession gained him the biggest wallop yet and sent his shoulder thudding into the wall. The instant’s warning before the blow had him shield his head, saving the onset of further addling of his wits. For a girl shorter than him by almost a foot, she really did pack quite a wallop. What had he done wrong? Now those blue grey eyes sparked with fury and Mistress Black scanned the room for a handy weapon. Lucky for him the stool was out of reach. “Damn! I knew we couldn’t trust you!
Damned Royal Courts.
Why are you pursuing us?”

Ned held out one hand as a shield while with the other he attempted to ease some of the newly
reblossomed
pain out of his shoulder. “No, no! I’m at Gray’s Inn, training for law! I don’t serve the King’s Courts. I am there through the influence of my uncle, Richard Rich, Commissioner of the Peace for Essex County.”

He did however edit the details of his uncle’s connections and aspirations. Those would earn a lot more than a clip across the ear. Mistress Black slowly subsided, though it was a close thing as to whether she’d hit him once more for this declaration. His daemon pointed out her flushed appearance, red lips and heaving bodice. For once he ignored its suggestion, opting instead for survival. It appeared he’d chosen the wrong time to be honest. That’d teach him to be more circumspect with his answers.
If her reaction was any guide, then in this establishment lawyers and pursuivants of the Court rated only slightly higher in their estimation than ‘Judas’.

Commonsense suggested that it was time to move onto safer grounds of conversation. Ned sat down on the pallet and offered her the stool he had so lately wielded as a peace offering.
“My apologies if my position offends you, but I can do little about it, since my uncle bonded me as apprentice.”

The glower lessened a smidgen as he mentioned a shared status.

Ned thought he saw a chink and pushed on. “What about you?
A girl as an apprentice?”
Oh no, thought Ned. A quick rephrasing was in order. That wasn’t the right question to someone with her obviously fiery temperament and sensibilities. “I mean to ask, why an apothecary?”

His companion visibly subsided. That first clumsy attempt had almost earned him another clout, but she actually considered his question, and answered in the mildest voice he had yet heard. “My family have always been apothecaries, going back to my great–grandfather. I learnt from my mother and she said I had the skill.” Mistress Black gave him an appraising once over. “After all I sorted out your injuries.”

Ned did have the good manners to look abashed. Oh, so she had tended to his injuries. He’d missed that. Originally he thought it was a barber surgeon who’d performed the bleeding and bandaging. By the saints that meant…well, it meant a large number of things. Firstly his headache had subsided and breathing was no longer such a trial. All things considered, it was an excellent treatment, almost better than the salves used by Goodwife Johnson when he had come off a horse a few years back. More thoughts regarding the removal of his shirt tickled his slowly knitting mind, but his angel primly reminded him that now was not the time to explore them.

“Why not apprentice to a doctor?” Ahh, he must learn to curb his tongue. That comment received such a venomous look and, in all truth, it was a stupid question. No doctor would consider such a radical and foolish action as to apprentice a woman, though one of the books Ned had read recently mentioned that it happened in the Italian lands. But then they were foreigners, so any bizarre custom could be true.

If he thought that she had been angry before, it was nothing to her reaction now. The anger in her words was visible as they trembled with white–hot emotion. “Doctors are the greatest affliction to God’s creatures! Worse than bishops! They’re dissembling, fly bitten, clay brained,
motley
–minded hedge wizards, without the skill or
nouce
to treat a broken fingernail. The greedy scum are more concerned with the condition of a patient’s purse than with treating the affliction.”

This critique of the exponents of modern medicine didn’t really surprise Ned. He had observed that, unlike lawyers, doctors could always bury their failures, claiming a lack of God’s mercy as a convenient excuse. Still at the end, success or no, they made sure they were paid. “So from that, I gather you have a set against our esteemed doctors of physick.”

Ned’s cynical remark on her impassioned outburst had a strange effect on Mistress Black. Rather than a frown or her accustomed glower, small trails of tears slowly leaked from her eyes. Oh no he’d done it again!
An unthinking question.
His daemon immediately whispered of opportunities to offer comfort, but his angel sternly counselled respectful sympathy. For Ned, her reaction was so unexpected he was caught off guard and instinctively handed her a clean piece of bandage as he rapidly sorted through the clues. Ahh yes, doctors, that was it! “Who did you lose?” He didn’t need to cultivate artifice for that. It was a genuinely sympathetic question.

Mistress Black dabbed her eyes and gave a small snort, bending her head in the slightest of nods before answering.
“My father and mother, this last season.
It was the Sweating Sickness.”

Ned instinctively crossed himself. Lord God, save us! The dreaded Sweats—it had carried off so many. Like most Londoners, he’d seen too much of its visitation, the almost constant tolling of the bells and the slow processions of carts to the burial pits, after the graveyards had filled up. Some talked of the end of the world. Others muttered that it was spread by foreigners and Jews in service to the Great Turk poisoning the waters. The bravest, or most foolhardy, said it was a righteous visitation because of the sins of the Royal Court, and the pride and vanity of the Lord Chancellor.

God’s wrath or poisoned water aside, Mistress Black continued to recount those painful memories, her tone quietly speaking to Ned of deep loss and pain. “It was a few days past the procession of Corpus Christi. My mother had complained of a headache and sore neck. She’d just been to
Chirk
Lane to drop off a remedy for Widow
Alsford’s
malady, since she was on the parish roll.”

Ned nodded in understanding. For the old or impoverished without family, the only assistance they could get was from the generosity of their local parish. He’d seen some cases at the courts where that generosity had been sorely abused. Unfortunately, since it frequently included church officials, those pleas were now only reviewed in the Church’s courts. From what he’d heard only the few without patrons, influence or ready money were arraigned before a judge.

“Father prepared the usual treatments, and dosed her and put her to bed, but later that night she started complaining of pains in the chest and sweating with a burning fever. Pa looked very worried and he sent us out to my Uncle Williams for help, and he then sent off for the doctor.” That last comment was accompanied by a dismissive sneer.

“Finally, one old tosspot turned up, dressed in embroidered robes, and reeking of sack. His assistant had to haul the old drunkard up the
stairs,
he was so taken with drink. He looked at my mother, waffled about the four humours being out of balance, an excess of bile,
then
instructed his fellow to bleed her.” A loud sniff interrupted the tale and Ned obligingly passed across another scrap of cloth. “Father was distraught. That’s why he let the fool do it. Mother was delirious with the fever and screamed about the pain and how stiff her arm was. I think that was when the old fool sobered up and realised what she was suffering from.”

Mistress Black’s voice came out harder now. “You could see his face turn white. Suddenly the measle complained that he had to attend others, and pried several angels from Father, then almost tumbled down the stairs in his haste to be gone.”

And now her voice was as flat and hard as iron, and as unrelenting. Ned, on his daemon’s urged, edged ever so slightly away.

“It was already too late. In the potbellied scum’s rush to be out of there, the ham–handed assistant had nicked the artery in her arm.”

Ned crossed himself. Oh merciful Lord, what a way to die. He’d seen a few taken by the Sweats, screaming, convulsing, with high fever and wracking pains until the sufferer lapsed into the long sleep of death, and all within a day.

Mistress Black was lost in the immediacy of the past and it was with an almost conversational tone that she continued the story. “We tried to staunch the bleeding—bandages around the arm, fingers to shoulder, but with her thrashing around and being lost in the dangerous dreams of the fever, it was too late. By the next morning it was over.”

Now tears streamed down her face and he could hear the choked sobs return. Ned would have moved closer to comfort her, this time responding to his better angel, but was unsure as to his reception.

“And at midday it struck Father. He trembled with fever and poured with sweat. Then he forced us out and barred the door to the house. We pounded on the timber for hours. I went out into the lane and begged our neighbours for help. No one not a soul answered!”

Ned thought about the way Christian decency seemed to flee during pestilence. However he understood the action of her father. By keeping his children out of the house, he no doubt saved them from being locked in with him by the parish reeve or the Watch.

“I was shunned and they put the mark on the door, the red cross of warning. Roger Hawkins found me huddled by the doorstep and brought me to Uncle Williams.”

It was a grim tale, both parents lost, but there was, within it, a deep secret thought. It was mean spirited and bitter, and surely he would do penance for it later. But a part of him wailed that at least she had her own family till now. It may have been the shadow of that regret that helped phrase his next question, or more generously, it may have been professional concern. Either way it did come as a surprise. “So with your parents dead, who got the share of the estate?”

At his question Margaret Black sniffed loudly, dabbed her face with a sleeve and gave a shake of her head, chuckling mirthlessly. “So it is true. That’s as typical a question as I’d expect of any lawyer! No pickings here I am afraid—all settled, witnessed and sealed. So Master Bedwell you’ve heard my tale. Fair’s fair. Why are you learning to prey upon decent folk’s problems?”

Ned raised a single eyebrow. Mistress Black was certainly quick to strike out here, but to be fair, it was a good question and deserved, in return, a good answer. He chewed a lip, deep in thought for a moment. His angel pointed out that this was a perfect chance to prove a degree of honesty, so spontaneity had his tongue. “No, no. I wasn’t going to be lawyer. Originally I was meant for the church. My uncle thought that a cleric would be an asset to the family”.