by S. W. Perry
And then he hears Bianca’s voice.
She is speaking in a strange, low monotone that chills his blood even more than the expectation of the knife. It’s so far from the warm lilt of her singing that it seems to be coming from another woman entirely.
‘I curse thee, Ned Monkton,’ she is intoning, ‘I curse thee so thy limbs shall become serpents and their venom turn thy blood to fire… I curse thee that thou shall crawl upon thy belly in blindness through the slime… I curse thee to be the Devil’s sport and burn in brimstone for eternity… I curse thee, Ned Monkton, that thine eyes and thy privy member be made the feast of worms and all loathsome things that slither in the pit of hell…’
Now it is winter. Her bones are rods of ice that seem to chill her from within. The old burn on the right side of her face feels as though icy fingers are pinching and twisting the skin there. Sometimes the chattering of her teeth and the shivering of her body make Elise believe there is some frenzied creature trapped inside her, fighting to escape. When it rains, she cannot sleep for the rattling of the branches; when it’s dry, the ground is too hard to give her comfort.
The cold has sapped her caution. She knows she is becoming careless, but she must eat soon. She longs for rest, but how can she rest when those dreams she’d kept leashed in the far corner of her mind have found a way to break loose?
Sometimes she’s convinced that Ralph and the others from the Devil’s house have escaped and are with her. She speaks to them: to Ralph, to the woman with no eyes and the little bell around her neck, to the old man with the stump for a hand, and always to dear Jacob Monkton, his innocent moon-face brimming with trust.
There are entire days when she believes she suckled the body she saw crucified upside-down in the Devil’s house, suckled it until the life that had drained out of it returned.
And when these hunger-driven visions fade for a moment, Elise sometimes finds herself howling silently, head back, the raindrops streaming down her face, scratching an inverted crucifix with her fingertips in the wet earth.
13
I never took you for a superstitious man, Nicholas Shelby. Now keep your head still or I shall summon up a goblin to bite you!’ instructs Bianca, her eyes gleaming with concerned amusement.
It is a little after five in the evening. Timothy has set a good fire burning in the hearth. The air is sharp with the tang of woodsmoke. At the table in the private parlour at the Jackdaw, Bianca’s slender fingers are rubbing a paste of crushed comfrey root and valerian mixed with a little water into back of Nicholas’s skull. The wound is superficial, but the headache is not. He finds the pressure of her fingertips soothing. He can feel the warmth of her breath, gentle and feminine, on the back of his neck. The intimate contact dulls one ache, but reminds him of another. As she moves round in front of him to check her handiwork, he thinks, with a guilty start, how comely she looks. Her green brocade kirtle now appears wine-dark against her skin, her hair is loose and unruly. He thrusts this image of her from his mind. It is impossible. He even feels a short-lived anger – anger at her ability to excite senses he had only for Eleanor.
‘I’m not at all superstitious,’ he protests. ‘And I don’t believe you can conjure up goblins. But if Isaac Bredwell and Ned Monkton weren’t convinced you were a witch a couple of hours ago, they certainly are now. Have you any idea how dangerous that might be?’
‘It worked, didn’t it?’ she argues. ‘If Isaac had been sober and surer on his feet, he might have done some real damage here.’
‘Yes. I’ll admit it. It worked. You put the holy terror into them.’
‘They deserved it.’
‘You even had me convinced for a while.’ Nicholas laughs at the thought of two well-made men fleeing from this slight, almost boyish young woman. But his laughter is tinged with concern. ‘You do realize that if they report you to the local justice of the peace, you could find yourself spending a day in the stocks, at the very least.’
‘Those two rogues? Putting themselves within a hundred yards of a law officer? That will be the day, Nicholas.’
He finds her disdain in the face of danger admirable, but troubling. He wonders if she understands the risks of what she’s done. ‘You could even find yourself dragged before the Bishop of London. It might be commonplace in Padua, but here cursing a man in the street is tantamount to witchcraft.’
She laughs softly. ‘We women from the Veneto are renowned for our cursing; the Holy Office of the Faith didn’t even bother to place an edict against it on the church door. I’ll tell the Bishop of London it’s just my strange foreign ways.’
Inside, Bianca is less sure of herself than she sounds. From the moment of her arrival in England she’d been forced to ask herself: whose side are you on? Which nation has your heart?
In Padua, with its famous university drawing scholars from all over Europe – Catholic and Protestant – the thought had seldom occurred to her. She had an English surname, an Italian given name, spoke English almost all the time, except when conversing with her mother or her Italian friends. True, they’d owed their allegiance to the Doge in Venice, but in her own mind her father’s house felt wholly English, even if she’d never actually travelled to the country and had to have England pointed out to her on a map.
But in London she hadn’t felt English at all; at least not at first. Everything was so strange, so foreign. And, Jesu, how they mistrusted foreigners, even though the city itself – just like Padua – teemed with them. Within hours of her moving into lodgings in a merchant’s house in Petty Wales by the Tower, two men had arrived demanding to know if any foreigners were staying there. They claimed to be servants of a man called Burghley. Bianca had escaped their interest because of her English surname, though the landlord had immediately doubled her rent. ‘You have no man with you,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t need the Bishop of London accusing me of running a bawdy-house.’
Then there was the time she’d witnessed a group of apprentice boys, woollen caps pulled down over their brows, chasing a poor fellow down the street. When she’d asked someone if he was a cut-purse, they had said no, he was a Dutchman. This had confused her mightily, as she’d thought the Dutch were allies of the English. Apparently that was only the Protestant ones.
Even here in Southwark she’d found suspicion rife. She’d soon learned that the queen’s ministers and advisors sent informers into the taverns to listen for foreign sedition and religious dissent. She’d found it easy to spot them – there being few things more obvious than a man trying hard to pretend he’s not eavesdropping.
She wasn’t overly troubled by such snoopers. The spies of the Holy Office of the Faith in Italy were a hundred times more dangerous. Besides, if she’d sent them packing, the Privy Council would simply have sent new ones. A few weeks later they left of their own accord, apparently satisfied she was running an orderly house. When she’d asked Timothy why foreigners were distrusted so, he’d laughed at her ignorance and said, ‘That’s easy to answer, Mistress. The Pope in Rome says our Elizabeth is a heretic. It’s every foreigner’s wish to send her to hell.’
While Bianca rubs the balm into his skull, her reflective silence makes Nicholas think he might have offended her.
‘I just think you should take care,’ he says kindly, interrupting her thoughts.
She snaps her long fingers contemptuously, then follows with that habit he’s noticed: running her hands from the sides of her brow and back through her hair – part self-consciousness, part belligerence.
‘What care I for Ned Monkton and Isaac Bredwell?’ she says bravely. ‘Or the Bishop of London, for that matter? If Englishmen are so afeared of a woman’s voice when it’s raised against them, the queen must have a pretty easy time of it. I’m surprised she needs a Privy Council at all.’
‘I’m just advising caution,’ says Nicholas, raising his palms in conciliation and trying not to grin. ‘But however badly Ned Monkton is grieving for his brother, he had no cause to speak to you so… so�
� discourteously.’
‘Oh, Nicholas, really! I’ve been called a witch oftentimes before now and lived. Worse, too. Try whore… a vain sister of Satan… the mare that Lucifer rides by night… I’ve even been called a papist trull, because I look a little less than English-born. Mostly it’s by men who covet me above their wives, or who don’t want to pay their ale account. Is it any surprise that curses come fluently to me?’
Is that hurt he can detect behind the defiance in her voice? Is Bianca Merton not quite as redoubtable as she likes to think? An image pops into his head: Ned Monkton trampling her herbs under his great heavy boots. He thinks, perhaps I will not go to Holland in the spring after all. I might be of use here.
‘Anyway,’ Bianca says, dabbing off the excess comfrey and valerian paste and wiping her fingers on a linen rag, ‘it was just a little spat. They were drunk. I don’t think Ned Monkton intended to use that blade. He’s not a killer. He’s grieving. That was his little brother they fished out of the river at the Mutton Lane stairs on Accession Day, after all.’
Her words remind Nicholas of what he’d been about to tell her on Black Bull Alley. ‘I know – I heard someone on the jetty say so.’
‘Poor little sprat. The way he was found – isn’t that’s enough to drive any brother to madness?’
‘The constable decided he fell into one of the waterwheels beneath the bridge. That’s what the coroner’s verdict will say. That’s the version that will go down in the parish mortuary roll.’
Nicholas hears her place the balm pot on the table a little more forcefully than perhaps she’d intended. ‘What do you mean by “version”, Nicholas? Do you imply that’s not how he died?’
‘Jacob’s death had nothing to do with any waterwheel.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I was a physician, once. I know what I saw.’
‘You are a physician still, Nicholas Shelby. You do not unbecome something simply by crossing a river – or casting yourself into one, for that matter. You cannot unstitch yourself like an old shirt in order to make a new one. Now, tell me what you mean by “version”.’
‘You clearly know the Monktons,’ he says, the ache in his skull slowly fading. ‘If you tell me everything you know about young Jacob, then I’ll tell you how he really died. Do we have a compact?’
It appears they do. True to her word, Bianca tells him how Jacob was the darling of his older brother’s eye, how Ned protected and cared for him because Jacob’s brains didn’t work the way other people’s brains work – protected him with his considerable fists, if anyone so much as looked at Jacob the wrong way. Little Jacob, who gazed in wonderment at each new day as though nothing in it was even remotely familiar to him. Jacob, whom the unkind said should have a cell of his own in Bedlam. Jacob, who went missing from the hovel on Scrope Alley that the Monktons call home a whole month before his eviscerated body washed up at the Mutton Lane stairs.
When she has no more to tell him, Bianca puts away the balm and throws the linen rag into a basket for Rose to clean. There is a look of sadness on her face as she gazes out through the parlour window to the dark yard beyond. No matter what she thinks of Ned, she admires the loyalty in him, feels deep sadness for young Jacob. Sometimes, she thinks, you have to forgive a hurt if the one who causes it is suffering too.
‘Now it’s your turn,’ she says. ‘Tell me how young Jacob Monkton really died.’
Joshua Pinchbeak has had an encounter with God. He can prove it. He bears the physical scars of it and he bears them proudly. He will tell anyone who’ll listen how God spoke to him out of a whirlwind of fire and light. A physician once told him he was only suffering from a stroke of the palsy, but Joshua Pinchbeak knows better.
The encounter had blazed with such excoriating intensity that it was a whole day and a night before his senses returned. An entire month passed before his limbs regained some of their former strength. The ordeal has left him with one arm that does not work, and a tongue that can barely speak the warning God wants him to shout to all who will listen. His left leg drags as he walks and one side of his face has slipped, like a bank of earth after a heavy rain. But he has survived the whirlwind, and he understands why. Joshua, a simple weaver’s son, has been chosen to bring God’s warning to every man, woman and child he can reach. A terrible warning: the end of days is coming soon. Prepare!
Joshua has read the scriptures. He’s devoured every word. He knows that God makes His chosen face a trial of faith. After all, didn’t He make Job crawl on his belly like a worm, took every possession, every joy, every last hope away from him? But Job was up to the trial. Not once did Job deny his Lord, and in the end Job was rewarded. Every age must have its Job, and Joshua Pinchbeak, itinerant preacher and messenger of the end of days, believes he is this one’s.
In market squares and on cathedral steps from York to Exeter, in sunlight that burned him and rain and wind that scoured him, he has tried to make them listen, to fear what is coming. His earthly reward has been nothing but more pain.
Because he is not ordained, because he doesn’t have a doctorate of theology from Oxford or Cambridge, from Basle or Strasbourg, from Padua or Heidelberg, the clergy chase him from the church door. They have brought him before the assizes. They have tried to make him confess that he is a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anabaptist, a Lollard, that he’s possessed by Devils, that he’s a blasphemer, that he’s just making it all up. He has languished in the filth of a dozen prison cells. But he will not stop shouting his warning. Prepare!
He has taken a great risk in coming to London to preach. If he is challenged, St Paul’s Cross will be far harder to escape from than a country churchyard, or the crossroads at Kingston where he preached yesterday. He is exhausted from the long journey south. He is thirsty and half-starved. To sleep in the open tonight will be a great ordeal. But if just one man or woman heeds his warning, he will bear these trials willingly. He will not complain. What possible pain can Joshua Pinchbeak suffer that he has not already endured?
14
This evening at the Jackdaw the more observant customers notice an unusual quiet in Bianca Merton. This evening she does not go amiably from table to table exchanging pleasantries, delighting the crowd with her stinging put-downs when some fellow who’s had a little too much cheer suggests she might like to accompany him to one of the Jackdaw’s lodging rooms. Even Rose and Timothy find themselves spared the usual chivvying.
‘You’ve asked her to be your mistress once too often,’ says a wherryman named Slater to his companion, Walter Pemmel. ‘Now you’ve ruined it for all of us.’
‘Never!’ protests Walter, who’s old enough to remember the reign of Bloody Mary. ‘It’s ’cause I told her I was already wed. She’s a-pining for what she can’t ’ave.’
The truth, of course, is that this evening Bianca Merton is troubled as she’s seldom been troubled before. She’s finding the story Nicholas has told her almost impossible to bear. And tonight, like him, she will find sleep elusive; and, when it comes, disturbed by dark dreams.
Lizzy Lumley has come down to Cold Oak manor. She does so every November, as close to Katherine Vaesy’s name-day as her duties at Nonsuch or the Lumley town house on Tower Hill will allow. Her husband has insisted she bring Gabriel Quigley and Francis Deniker, his clerk, with her. ‘Bad roads and bad men, Lizzy,’ he’d protested. ‘There are more cut-purses between here and Vauxhall than there are trees.’
Tomorrow morning the two women will ride east to Long Southwark, dispensing alms from the Lumley rents to the destitute sick. It’s what aristocratic women do, when sewing or reading their psalters fails to satisfy. Indeed, Lizzy’s charitable nature is famed throughout Surrey. At every Sunday sermon the Reverend Watson assures Lord Lumley it will earn her a special place in heaven. Mindful of the new faith, he stops short of praying for her beatification.
‘Remember, Lizzy, “He that hath mercy on a poor man lendeth to the Lord”,’ quotes Kat Vaesy at supper, deepening her v
oice to mimic her estranged husband’s sonorous tone. They laugh. Both know that Fulke Vaesy is probably the least generous man in Christendom.
‘And speaking of having mercy on a poor man,’ Lizzy whispers, glancing to where the pox-faced Quigley is sitting with Deniker and the senior members of Kat’s household at the servants’ table, ‘have you not noticed how Gabriel’s eye has been wandering your way all evening?’
‘Fie! You’re imagining it,’ Kat protests.
‘You could do worse, if you look past his poor face. A perfect countenance isn’t everything. John sometimes looks the saddest man in all England. But underneath—’
‘Nonsense, Lizzy. He’s John’s secretary. I’ve known him for years. He’s a dear man, but too stern for my tastes. I’m surprised you could drag him away from the Nonsuch library to accompany you.’
‘It was John’s idea. He insisted.’
‘And he was right to worry – have you noticed how many more tinkers and vagabonds there are on the roads these days?’
‘Then he made Francis join us, just to be sure.’
‘I can imagine Gabriel putting up a defence of sorts. He has an iron streak beneath that monkish exterior of his,’ says Kat. ‘But Francis? Dear Francis, who recites parables of Our Lord’s love for the poor whenever he gets the chance – and means it, unlike some I could name? What use would he be in a quarrel?’
‘His heart is bold, bless him,’ says Lizzy. ‘He has more courage than you’d give him credit for. I know that for a fact.’
‘You arrived safely, that’s all that matters.’
‘The only excitement we encountered was when we rested the horses at Kingston.’
‘Oh, Lizzy, tell me, please. Excitement here at Cold Oak is when the bees refuse to swarm.’
