Tombland

We reached Temple Bar; Nicholas then returned to his lodgings, while I went to visit Guy. I walked down Cheapside. At the busy market stalls with their striped awnings, the usual frantic haggling was going on between the stallholders and the goodwives in their white coifs. These days, though, frequently it was not the good-natured haggling of earlier times but desperate, angry arguments as buyers tried to persuade stallholders to part with their goods for at least a good part of the face value of the new shillings. Amidst the old cabbage leaves, rotten apples and other discarded rubbish, I noticed a pamphlet, and picked it up. It was one of the many anti-enclosure pamphlets, exhorting the King:

... truly to minister justice, to restrain extortion and oppression, to set up tillage and good husbandry whereby the people may increase and be maintained. Your godly heart would not have wild beasts increase and men decay, ground so enclosed up that your people should lack food and sustenance, one man by shutting in the fields and pastures to be made and a hundred thereby to be destroyed.

I put the pamphlet in my purse.

Guy lived in the apothecaries’ district, in the maze of alleys between Cheapside and the river, the apothecaries’ shops displaying stuffed lizards from the Indies and curled horns they claimed were from unicorns. Guy was a licensed physician and could have afforded somewhere much grander than his little shop with rooms above, but he had lived there for years and, like many old men, disliked change. I saw his shop windows were shuttered; for the last couple of months, since he had been ill, Guy had taken on no new patients. It was a worrying sign, for his profession had always been the centre of his life.

I knocked at the door, which was answered immediately by Guy’s assistant, Francis Sybrant. Like Guy, Francis was in his mid-sixties, and like him was a former monk. Always inclined to plumpness, he had grown very fat this last year or two. He carried a satchel over his shoulder.

‘Master Shardlake,’ he said. ‘God give you good morrow. We were not expecting you.’ He looked a little flustered to see me.

‘Good morrow. How fares your master?’

‘The same, sir,’ he said sadly. He looked tired. ‘No change. If you will excuse me, I have to deliver remedies to some of his patients.’

‘I thought he was taking on no more.’

‘The existing ones still pester us for remedies and cures, and I make them up at Master Guy’s instruction. If you forgive me, I am late – there is so much to do – please, go up and see him. He is awake.’ He bowed me inside, then waddled off up the street.

I stood a moment in Guy’s consulting room, looking at the neatly labelled jars and flasks of herbs on the shelves, then climbed the stairs to his bedroom. My old friend lay in bed reading in a nightshirt, his big old Spanish cross with the carved figure of Christ above his head. Such crosses had been taken from the churches now and burned; even displaying one in a private house might earn official suspicion, but Guy remained resolutely Catholic.

He looked up and smiled, with teeth that were still white. Otherwise he looked bad. He had always been slim but now the bones of his temples and his large, thin nose stood out. Even his brown Moorish skin seemed to have a sickly, yellowish cast. He had always been prone to fevers, which he blamed on the bad air of the marshland on which his former monastery had stood, but recently he had had one after the other, with only brief periods of respite, and I could see they were wearing him out. I could only hope they would pass.

‘God give you good morrow, Guy,’ I said.

‘Matthew. I was not expecting you today.’ He hesitated, as though about to say something else, and glanced briefly at the door, but then smiled again.

‘I have just got back from Hatfield, and thought I would call. How are you?’

He raised a thin hand, then let it fall to the quilt. ‘Weak, and tired. And physician though I am, I have no idea what to do about it.’ He smiled wearily. ‘I have been reading.’ He held out the book. ‘Thomas More. A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation . I know you never liked him, but he had great learning.’