by S. W. Perry
A look of official regret comes over the clerk’s face. ‘I really would like to assist, Master Shelby. But if Alderman Hawse is to raise a muster of men to seek out a felon, he will need more than the suspicions of a potion-maker and someone who attends public dissections for pleasure. Might I suggest you try the warder at the Marshalsea. After all, if it’s a felony…’
But Nicholas is already halfway to the exit.
It is late afternoon when he reaches the open fields of St George’s parish. Rooks call to him from the bare branches, the ground is hard underfoot. His feet are cold and they ache. He’s walked almost from one end of Southwark to the other.
Ahead of him are the White Lyon, the Marshalsea and the Queen’s Bench gaols. From a distance, they look like a row of ordinary houses, though not remotely welcoming. This is where Southwark keeps its debtors, its miscreants, its heretics and its traitors.
The Marshalsea has a grim lassitude about it. For the luckier inmates, a fine will secure their freedom. Others will languish here until age or sickness releases them to their maker. Some await the next assizes, to hear if they are to be burned with a brand about the face, or lose an ear, an eye or a hand, in payment for some misdemeanour. For a few – the heretics and the traitors, the Jesuit priests denounced or caught up in the random sweeps – incarceration is only a pause on the road. Their final destination will be Tyburn, where they will hang until half-strangled, then watch while their entrails are cut out and burned before their fading sight. Their eviscerated bodies will then be quartered, the pieces nailed up where they can best serve to remind the citizenry of the benefits of remaining obedient to Elizabeth’s law. There is a melancholy lying on the land here, a melancholy that will long outlast the winter.
‘Listen to me, friend,’ says the warder, his voice not remotely amiable, ‘I’ve got five warrants outstanding for suspected papist agents. I’ve another three for unlicensed preachers. On top of all that, I’ve a villainous Jesuit in the condemned cell, who keeps me awake all night chanting his vile Masses. And you want me to launch a hue and cry for the killer of four vagabonds? If you ask me, the fellow’s doing us a public service. What’s his name? He should get a pension.’
Nicholas braces himself for the long walk back to the Jackdaw. There’s a biting wind blowing up. It carries the hard scent of dashed hopes.
On the other side of the river – beneath the same cold December sky – the Bishop of London, John Aylmer, has brought his open-air sermon at St Paul’s Cross to a thunderous close. Resplendent in his cope and mitre, he has preached from the enclosed wooden pulpit between the north transept and the churchyard for over an hour and a half, fulminating against papist infiltrators, witches, equivocators, heretical philosophies, licentious behaviour, playhouses and general unspecified sin. His audience has loved every word, even the ones that put the fear of damnation into them.
On Paternoster Row, having made his courtesies to the bishop, Robert Cecil sits alone in his expensive imported Italian carriage. He’s waiting for Sir Fulke Vaesy to be brought to him.
Burghley’s son doesn’t care for physicians any more than does Ned Monkton. Nothing any of them have ever suggested has worked on his crooked back. Not their potions, not the wooden poles they’d strapped to his back to straighten it, not a single moment of the pain they’d inflicted on him. But Robert Cecil is not a man to let self-pity stand in his way. He does not see his crookedness as a weakness; rather as scar-tissue, hard and protective, like armour. That’s what you need for this job, he thinks: scar-tissue, outside and in.
‘Master Robert, I give you good day,’ says Vaesy with an elaborate bow, appearing at the carriage door.
Robert beckons him inside. ‘A goodly sermon, I thought, Sir Fulke,’ he says, his voice deadened by the plush velvet and the curtains. ‘Was that Lady Lumley I saw you with?’
‘Indeed it was. She’s in London for a few days.’
‘But the noble lord himself was absent, I noticed.’
‘Still at Nonsuch, Master Robert,’ Vaesy says. ‘He told me that if the queen sends word she intends to Christmas there this year, he wants as much warning as he may contrive. He’ll need to talk to his bankers.’
‘He can rest easy. She intends to Christmas at Greenwich,’ says Robert Cecil with a sardonic laugh. The Cecils know full well the cost of playing host to Elizabeth and the court. It can run into thousands. ‘And was that Secretary Quigley I saw with you?’
‘Yes, he’s accompanying Lady Lumley.’
‘I didn’t recognize the other fellow. His name?’
The question could be mistaken for polite small-talk, but Vaesy knows that when Robert Cecil asks for a man’s name there is usually an ulterior motive. For the Lord Treasurer’s son, names are currency: some worth little, some worth a lot, but always worth storing away in case they might be found to have a greater value at some later date. ‘Francis Deniker – Lord Lumley’s clerk at Durham,’ Vaesy tells him, with the uncomfortable feeling that he’s committing a minor act of betrayal. ‘He’s been called down to make an inventory.’
‘An inventory? Of what?’
‘The contents of Nonsuch, Master Robert.’
‘Ah yes, all those books. All those fine hangings, all those paintings, all that silverware. A man could buy a lot of friends with what he could sell those for. Foreign friends, for instance. Romish friends.’
‘I think it’s just an inventory, Master Robert.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Robert Cecil, taking up a document from beside him on the seat. It is a digest that his intelligencers have prepared for him. ‘You have been with Lord Lumley several times since we last spoke, Sir Fulke. Yet this is all you have for me: “sermon at Cheam church with the Reverend Watson” … “visit to a bookseller at St Paul’s” … “Lady Elizabeth to Southwark, to distribute alms to the needy” … Not exactly earth-shaking, is it?’
Fulke Vaesy looks around the plush interior of the coach – anywhere other than at Robert Cecil. What does he want me to say? Am I to invent an accusation? Am I supposed to denounce my patron, my friend, without the slightest evidence? Is that what it’s going to take to win favour from the Cecils?
‘You tell me this man Deniker is only making lists; you tell me you have seen nothing out of the ordinary,’ Robert Cecil continues, ‘but you should know that adherents to the old faith are practised in their cunning, Sir Fulke. Very practised. They are adept at maintaining a façade of compliance with the proper religion, whilst in secret they go about their disgusting superstitious rituals.’
‘I really haven’t seen anything like that.’
‘Innocent-looking inventories can hide papist Masses between the pages, Sir Fulke. We’ve even unearthed their filthy pamphlets from the bottom of barrels full of Dutch herring!’
‘Master Robert, I can assure you, I have seen no—’
Robert Cecil raises a hand to silence him. Vaesy stares at the hand and thinks, I could live for years off the gemstones on those gloves.
‘The papists do not make loud with their heretical Masses, Sir Fulke, they hide them. They have been known to contrive miniature altar stones and other tokens, which they carry disguised as trinkets beneath the clothes in travelling chests. Their priests scuttle through this land in the guise of ordinary men, unseen. You may have witnessed no obvious signs of heresy, Sir Fulke, but that does not mean John Lumley has given up his old ways. Look yonder’ – he points at the ancient Caen stones of the minster on the other side of the street – ‘they say that in the reign of the second Edward, the monks dug up a whole cemetery of animal bones from beneath the Lady Chapel: skulls, jaws, ribs, scores of wormy bones.’
‘Is that so?’ says Vaesy, wondering why Burghley’s son is telling him the sort of trivia the vergers usually reserve for tourists.
‘It is believed St Paul’s is built upon a pagan temple, Sir Fulke – a place where sacrifices were performed. And shall I tell you what happens on the saint’s day, even now, in ou
r modern times?’
Vaesy knows Robert Cecil is going to, whether or not he’s interested.
‘The head of a buck – antlers and all – is paraded at the front of the procession! Paraded like some heathen trophy! Do you see now, Sir Fulke, how long it takes to eradicate heretical belief ?’ Robert Cecil’s stare is so fanatical that Vaesy wonders if he’s in the grip of some spiritual paroxysm. ‘The roots we must tear out – if our new religion is to survive – they go deep indeed. Very deep. So, Sir Fulke, if you wish to be numbered amongst those who kept our queen’s faith alive, against all the legions the Antichrist in Rome could send against her, I suggest you redouble your efforts.’
If an alderman’s clerk and the warder of the Queen’s Bench won’t listen, perhaps a church officer might. The following day Nicholas seeks the help of the vestrymen at St Saviour’s, the Bankside parish church. It’s their responsibility to administer to the poor and vagrant of Southwark. Perhaps they will take an interest in what he has to say.
But instead of a spirit of selfless Christian charity, what he actually finds is a clique of comfortable burghers whose idea of looking after the destitute is to ensure that as few of them as possible settle in the ward and become a drain on its coffers. This, they tell him vehemently, is best achieved by a whipping and scourging of biblical proportions, a task for which they are only too ready. Twice on Sundays, if necessary.
‘But young Jacob Monkton was no vagrant,’ Nicholas protests. ‘His father’s a poulterer on Scrope Alley. His brother is the mortuary porter at St Thomas’s. He deserved the protection of the law as much as you or I.’
One of the vestrymen is a prosperous little pug of a man named Cheyney. Nicholas has seen him frequenting the Turk’s Head, the tavern across the lane from the Jackdaw. Cheyney, he knows, is a haberdasher, a man of some considerable standing in his guild. He considers himself the arbiter of parish morals, and he has a deep and very partisan understanding of the Poor Laws. Cheyney tells him bluntly, ‘The Monkton lad went missing for over a month. Is that not so, Master Shelby?’
‘So I am told.’
‘Then he was out of the parish without licence. Ergo, the boy is a vagrant, as defined under the Vagrancy Act, passed by our sovereign lady’s Privy Council in Parliament.’ His beady eyes gleam in bureaucratic triumph. ‘And just between you and me, Master Shelby, you really ought to consider whether it’s in your long-term interests to cleave quite so closely to an employer like Mistress Merton.’
Under a pale sky streaked with white mare’s tails of cloud, Lizzy Lumley returns to Nonsuch accompanied by Francis Deniker and a groom from the Lumley town house behind Tower Hill. Gabriel Quigley has remained in London on his master’s business. Lord Lumley assembles the household in the inner court to welcome her, the grooms and servants along one wall, the maids and scullions along the other. It’s what he always does when his wife comes home: makes an occasion of it.
‘An uneventful journey, I trust, Mouse?’ he enquires of his wife as the stable lads lead away the mud-splattered horses.
‘We crossed the river at Richmond, on the ferry, Husband,’ says Lizzy, accepting her husband’s kiss on the back of her hand with a gentle smile. ‘It was an unusually smooth passage for the season.’
‘Lizzy, you know how much it troubles me when you cross by ferry,’ John says, a concerned frown on his face. ‘The river is very strong at this time of year. What if the ferry had been carried away?’
‘Husband, the ferry is perfectly safe. Had I crossed by the London Bridge, you’d be waiting here in the cold till nightfall. And the Portsmouth road is a veritable swamp the other side of Morden.’
‘I would have sent a coach.’
‘You don’t have a coach, Husband.’
‘Then I shall get one, Mouse. One like Robert Cecil’s – from Italy, full of plump cushions.’
I wonder if you would have thought to send a coach for Jane? she asks him in her private thoughts. Probably not. Jane FitzAlan could have walked from Nonsuch to Constantinople and back without the need of a coach. And she’d have presented you with another child on her return. She lifts a gloved hand to his cheek and says, ‘I’m just happy to be home.’
With Lizzy Lumley returned to Nonsuch, Kat Vaesy has time on her hands. Time to do what she so often does when she’s alone at Cold Oak with none but her maid and cooks for company: dwell amongst her memories.
She sits by the window of her privy chamber, looking out at the beehives in the orchard. It’s been months now since the last insect dawdled sleepily along the window ledge. When they come again, it will be spring.
She’s been rummaging through her small collection of books: psalters, uplifting tracts on the duties of women, pamphlets on modesty, all the tedious constraints her father had sought to impose upon her so she would make Fulke Vaesy the sort of wife he expected.
One book had stood out amongst the others, like a signal from a time before her misery had begun. It lies open on her lap now: Pliny’s Naturalis Historia.
Twenty long years ago Jane FitzAlan, John Lumley’s first wife and – at that time – Kat’s closest friend, had plucked this very book from a shelf at Nonsuch and thrust it into her hands. Every time she goes there, or Lizzy comes to visit, Kat always intends to return it. Yet somehow she’s never quite got round to it.
As Kat stares at the tight line of print, she is transported back to that hot summer’s day: she and Jane in the library, John away in London, the gleaming white walls of Nonsuch sending blazing light through the high windows.
‘You have to give me something – a book I’ll understand enough to sound clever,’ she is saying to Jane, her voice tinged with desperation.
‘Don’t be so foolish, Kat,’ Jane says, sounding as though she wants to shake the young Katherine by the collar of her stammel shift. ‘You are clever. That’s one of the reasons he loves you.’
‘Jane, I mean it. Please. Look – that one there, with the red leather binding.’
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Jane says as she picks the closest book she can reach. ‘I’ve never seen a man so reduced by passion. You’ve won him, Kat, and quite without recourse to’ – she glances down at the cover – ‘Master Pliny.’
Reluctantly, Kat Vaesy puts away the memories and slowly closes the book. She rises from her chair and takes up an ornate wooden Bible-box that she keeps by her bed. It has an intricate pattern of entwined leaves carved into the side. Jane – dead for over a decade now – gave it to her for a wedding present. Fulke has always believed she keeps her psalter in it. She takes a key from the bundle she carries on her belt and opens the box. Reaching in by instinct, just as Bianca Merton had done with her own box of mysteries, Kat touches her treasures with trembling fingertips. She feels the tightly wound swaddling sheet; the coral-handled bell whose gentle trilling would have lulled her daughter to sleep; the length of hollowed-out horn through which she would have blown soap bubbles, to delight… What would it really matter if her husband knew of this sad cache of lost hopes? He’d call it the over-sentimentality of women. He’d say she’s kept them because she’s too bitter to forget.
But how can she forget? The day he came to her as she lay in her birthing bed and committed butchery upon her and her child – butchery he passed off as merely unsuccessful physic – will stay with her until her last living moment, probably beyond.
One day, she thinks. One day I shall show him the contents of this Bible-box. And when he laughs and calls me a fool for not letting go of the past, I shall tell him the truth: that these treasures were meant for a child I planned – no, longed – to have.
By another man. By Mathew.
A primero game at a nearby table is progressing noisily towards its climax, the music of Timothy’s lute almost drowned out by the shouts of the players as they throw down their cards. Every part of Nicholas’s body yearns for the soothing oblivion of a couple of quarts of knock-down. He can feel it calling to him in the tingling in his fingers, making t
hem curl as though they were already clasping the jug. He feels as though he’s walked a pilgrim trail and back again. And it’s not just the din of the tavern and the throbbing of his feet he wants to drown out, it’s also the questions in his head.
‘If the parish authorities won’t take action, then we have to,’ Bianca says blithely, doing what she always does when she’s trying to solve a tricky problem: running those long fingers through her unruly hair as though preparing herself for whatever battle – large or small – lies ahead. The bloom of the taproom fire on her skin, the brilliant white of her Haarlem-linen collar against the carnelian of her bodice, the green brocade of her kirtle that looks as deep as an ocean in the semi-darkness, all these would make her unbearably desirable, thinks Nicholas, were it not for one inescapable fact—
He pushes the thought from his mind. ‘And what exactly are you proposing?’
‘Let’s face it, no one is going to listen to a taverner with a hint of Romish in her voice, and her labourer. One of us is going to have to raise their station a little.’
‘And who did you have in mind?’ he asks.
With a challenging tilt of the head she looks him straight in the eye and says, ‘Well, you’re the one with the Latin.’
17
The first light snowfall of winter turns into a slippery grey gruel underfoot. On Bankside the lanes are busy as Christmas approaches. Despite the chill, most of the Jackdaw’s customers are outside, watching a man in bright-yellow Venetians and a gaudy coat festooned with ribbons. He’s attempting to walk along a rope strung between two carts, while breathing fire like a dragon.
The street entertainer is almost at the end of the rope when he begins to teeter. The crowd responds with the usual cacophony of jeers and cat-calls that it saves for poor performances at the Rose playhouse. He falls, landing with a stomach-turning thud on the hard ground. The torch he employs to provide the dragon’s fire sails through the air and lands spluttering in the snow.
