by S. W. Perry
Also by S. W. Perry
The Jackdaw Mysteries
The Angel’s Mark
The Serpent’s Mark
The Saracen’s Mark
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © S. W. Perry, 2021
The moral right of S. W. Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 903 5
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 902 8
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For my family
When these prodigies do so conjointly meet,
let no men say ‘These are their reasons, they are natural’: For I believe they are portentous things…
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR
Prologue
The White Tower, London, 7th June 1594
They come for him shortly before dawn with a showy rattling of keys loud enough to wake the ghosts on Tower Hill. He rises stiffly from the first proper rest he has had in weeks, his joints reclaiming the pain the cold stone floor has borrowed while he was asleep. ‘Anon, anon!’ he protests as they take him by his chains. ‘All in good time. Incarceration is no friend to old bones.’
‘Old bones or young – it matters not,’ says his gaoler with the wistful familiarity of the prisoner’s confessor. ‘You’re wanted at Whitehall.’
‘Whitehall?’ he replies. ‘Has Her Grace the queen spoken for me? Does the Privy Council accept my innocence? Are they setting me free?’
But no answer comes as they hurry him down the wet, slime-covered steps towards the waiting wherry – only the sharp-tongued screeching of the gulls from the darkness of the river.
After months in captivity, Dr Roderigo Lopez has almost forgotten what it is to look out upon a horizon slowly prising itself from the grip of night. He stares about in cautious expectation. By the time they approach Westminster there is enough light for him to see, to his left, the pale mass of Lambeth Palace rising above the reeds. To his right, the grand houses along the Strand are taking shape. He knows them well. Within their private chambers he has administered to the greatest men in England. Powder of Spanish fly to help the Earl of Leicester in the bedchamber when his ardour failed to match his ambition; mercury to cure young Essex of the French gout; enemas to ease old Burghley’s fractiousness at the dinner table. The rewards had been handsome, if only to buy his silence: a good house, a certain prestige, money, even the queen herself for a patient. But they had never truly seen him as one of their kind. In his heart, Lopez had always known it.
At the Westminster stairs the boatmen hand him over to a brace of uniformed halberdiers in crested steel helmets. He almost laughs. Do they think a single white-haired old Jew might threaten the very realm itself? Do they not know that, after months of confinement, he can barely walk unaided?
In a panelled chamber with an embossed ceiling painted blue and studded with yellow plaster stars wait two members of the Queen’s Bench, Attorney General Coke and Chief Justice Popham. They are grave men in ermine-trimmed gowns. No smiles. Barely a greeting. They sit behind a table spread with expensive crimson cloth. It is bare, save for a leather-bound Bible and a roll of parchment with a tail of golden ribbon and a grand wax seal attached. Lopez notes the seal has been broken.
Let them think you’re the last man on earth to bear a grudge, he tells himself. They might find a little mercy in their cold hearts.
‘You’re up early, gentlemen,’ he says, smiling.
‘This is not a business for late sleepers,’ Coke says.
‘Have you brought Her Grace’s letter of pardon with you?’ Lopez asks, glancing at the parchment.
But their hard, formal faces tell him that whatever this document is, it does not carry his salvation. The pain in his joints, temporarily forgotten in the blossoming of hope, begins to scream at him again: Fool… fool for ever thinking they would find mercy in their hearts for a man like you.
With indecent haste, Coke and Popham put him through a perfunctory second trial, as though the first – it seems an age ago now – had somehow failed to stick, like the colour in a badly dyed shirt. A detestable traitor, they call him. Worse than Judas. There is no crime on earth more heinous than plotting to poison a monarch anointed by God. He was guilty of it in February, he is somehow even guiltier in June. And so he will hang by the neck until half-choked, suffer the severing of his privy organs and disembowelment by the knife – all while there is enough life left in him to appreciate the executioner’s skill at butchery. And if that doesn’t convince him of his perfidy, they will quarter his torso with an axe, burn the sundered parts and throw the ashes into the river. He will have no grave. Only his head will endure a strange immortality: set upon a spike on the southern gatehouse of London Bridge as a warning to future would-be regicides.
Why do I not fall to my knees in terror? he wonders. Perhaps it is because terror has become such a familiar companion during his lonely imprisonment. He knows it like an old friend. It cannot bite him any harder now.
Until they tell him it is to be today. At Tyburn.
There is an etiquette to an execution for high treason. Whether it be a solemn confession or a passionate protestation of innocence, an address to the mob is required. And the condemned man must stand naked as he prepares himself for the leaving of this world, just as he was when he came into it.
The executioner tears the dirty shirt from Dr Roderigo Lopez’s back. He turns the pale, trembling body to the crowd. Look, he seems to be saying, can you not see the stain of guilt on the puckered white flesh?
‘I love the queen as well as I love our Lord!’ Lopez cries out.
‘Papist traitor!’ someone shouts. Others pick up the chorus: ‘Vile Hebrew… Spanish assassin…’ This last insult hurts him more than the others. He is Portuguese, not Spanish. The Spanish are his enemy, as much as they are to the people now hurling their abuse and spittle at him.
As the executioner places the rough hemp noose around Lopez’s frail neck to begin the slow gruesome journey, the words of the man who lit the fire that sustains the queen’s religion – Martin Luther – echo in the physician’s lonely, tormented soul: Every man must do two things alone… his own believing, and his own dying.
In a different life, the man watching from the crowd had been someone of substance. But that was before his fall.
Grand in stature with a voice to match, he too is a physician – once the most renowned anatomist in England. There had been a time, Sir Fulke Vaesy recalls, when he had been a proconsul of the medical profession. A time when he could afford to attend an execution in silk-lined hose and imported Bruges shirts. He has shrunk a little since then. His reputation has gone, and with it the income. The manor house at Vauxhall has gone too, sold to some upstart warden of the Fishmongers’ Guild. The expensive brocade doublet he
had worn on his imperious strolls down Knightrider Street to the College of Physicians is now patched and faded, like the covering of an old chair. He no longer has the spare cash to replace it. Now he is reduced to giving purges and drawing blood, like a country barber-surgeon.
Sir Fulke Vaesy knows exactly who is to blame for this ruination. Being a man who values careful accounting – at least when he had property and possessions to account for – he has drawn up a proper reckoning. It does not exist on paper. It cannot be presented as a bill. Nevertheless, the columns are neatly ordered in his head: every humiliation, every slight, every averted eye and unanswered greeting, every cancelled invitation… all assigned a price and entered in the ledger.
And where, now, is the fellow to whom this bill should be presented? In the pay of Sir Robert Cecil, that is where. Physician to Lord Burghley’s ill-formed younger son. Favoured by the queen herself, if what Vaesy has heard is true – though how Her Grace can bear to listen to the man’s wild, heretical ideas he cannot imagine. These undeserved endowments are, in Vaesy’s mind, the interest on the debt the wretch owes.
With detached professional interest, Vaesy observes the executioner take up his knife and geld the struggling old man on the scaffold. He nods at the practised ease with which the wrinkled white belly is opened up, spilling the hot pearlescent billows onto the planks. He watches the blood spill over the edge of the platform. For a moment he sees himself climbing the steps and instructing the crowd on the inner workings of the human body.
The axe begins to swing, quartering the Jew’s still-breathing body with a sound like someone dropping four heavy sacks of flour in quick succession. Then one final blow finishes the grisly masque for good. The executioner holds up the head by its now-crimson beard.
And in that moment the man watching from the crowd forgets the crush of sweating bodies that press upon him with such rude familiarity. The stink of unwashed common broadcloth and half-eaten coney pies, of cheap ale and rotten gums, fades entirely from his nostrils. In its place, as if carried sweetly on a sympathetic summer breeze, Sir Fulke Vaesy thinks he can smell the faint but distinct scent of revenge.
PART 1
Falling from Heaven
1
St Thomas’s Hospital, Southwark. Thirteen days later, 20th June 1594
‘Tell us, Dr Shelby: when did you first conspire with the executed traitor Lopez to poison Her Grace the queen?’
The questioner wears the livery of Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex. He is a large man. He has to stoop slightly in this dank low-ceilinged former monk’s cell. His face reminds Nicholas Shelby of an oval of badly cast glass on a grey day, cold and impenetrable. Judging by the foot-long poniard he wears at his belt, the noble earl has not hired him to wait at his table or tend his privet hedges. His companion is also armed. He stands close to his master, as though he hopes a little of the other man’s menace might rub off on him.
Even in summer the hospital warden’s office has the dank stink of the river about it, the walls cold and slippery to the touch, a place more suited to burial than the administration of healing. Now, in the shocked silence that follows the man’s accusation, it has for Nicholas the stillness of a freshly opened crypt. Before he can reply, the warden gives a frightened little harrumph. His eyes, set unnaturally close to the bridge of his thin nose, hurriedly fall to the ledgers on his desk. He seems to think that the harder he studies the inky scrawls, the further he can remove himself from the implications of what he’s just heard. ‘I have no knowledge of Mr Shelby,’ he mutters to the pages, ‘other than of his duties at this hospital. Beyond that, I am not of his acquaintance.’
Nicholas thinks: that’s exactly the kind of betrayal I might have expected from a man I have always imagined more as a pensioned-off Bankside rat-catcher than a hospital warden, a man who sneeringly refuses to understand why a physician who now serves Sir Robert Cecil, the queen’s privy councillor and secretary, should still care enough about healing to visit St Thomas’s Hospital for the sick poor of Bankside on a Tuesday and Thursday, without even asking for the shilling a session you grudgingly paid me when I was down on my luck.
He keeps his reply calm and measured. Bravado will be as incriminating as hesitancy. ‘Who are you to speak with such impertinence to a loyal and obedient subject of Her Majesty?’
The man gives a smile that is very nearly a sneer. ‘Judging by what Master Warden has just said, it would appear you must account for yourself without an advocate, Master Shelby. Please answer the question I put to you.’
‘It is not a question,’ says Nicholas. ‘It has no merit. It is an insult. And as a member of the College of Physicians, to you I am Mister Shelby.’
A contemplative nod, while the man considers if this has any bearing on the matter at hand. Then he looks at Nicholas with eyes as sharp as the poniard he carries at his belt. ‘Then as a physician, Mister Shelby, you must know what hot iron can do to a man’s fingers. How will you practise your physic with burnt stumps?’
‘This is risible. I will hear no more of it.’
Nicholas moves towards the door, intending to leave. A thick, leather-sleeved arm blocks his way. Not suddenly, but smoothly – as if the body it is attached to has seen all this before and knows precisely how this measure is danced.
‘Did you not see the recent revels at Tyburn, Mr Shelby?’ asks the younger of Essex’s men, a hollow-cheeked fellow with lank pale hair that hangs down each side of his face like torn linen snagged on a thicket. He mimics the lolling head of a hanged man, while one fist makes an upwards-slicing motion over his own ample belly. He dances a few steps in feigned discomfort, as though he’s stepping over his own entrails.
As ever when Nicholas is raised to a temper, which is not often, the Suffolk burr in his voice becomes more evident. ‘No, I did not! Let me pass. I have borne quite enough of this nonsense.’
‘That is a pity, Dr Shelby,’ says the owner of the arm. ‘It might have proved an instructive lesson – for your likely future.’
Nicholas bites back the reply that has already formed in his mind: What you call a revel was nothing but the murder of an innocent old man. In these present times, to express sympathy for a condemned traitor is almost as dangerous as committing the alleged treachery yourself.
‘You would be advised to give a proper account of yourself to Master Winter here,’ says the mimic with the lank hair, nodding towards his friend. ‘When did the executed traitor Lopez seek to enrol you in his vile conspiracy?’
‘Do you really expect me to answer that?’
The warden seems to deflate into an even smaller huddle over his ledgers. He shakes his head as if trying to cast off a bad memory, or perhaps to show Essex’s men that he never wanted Nicholas Shelby anywhere near St Tom’s in the first place, however far he may have risen since.
The one named Winter says, ‘Oh, be assured, sir, you will answer the denouncement – before me, or before the Queen’s Bench: the choice is yours.’
Denouncement. So that’s it, Nicholas thinks. Someone has made a false accusation against me. He tries to think who it might be. He has few enemies, and none made willingly. Perhaps some minor member of the aristocracy has taken offence that the new physician to Sir Robert Cecil refuses to purge him for an overindulgence of goose and sirloin.
‘Who has laid this false charge against me?’ he demands to know.
Winter’s reply is non-committal. ‘I am a servant of His Grace the earl, not a market-stall gossip.’
‘And I am in the service of Sir Robert Cecil,’ Nicholas reminds him. ‘I am physician to his son. Now let me go about my lawful business.’
Winter puts one thick hand on the hilt of his poniard and lifts just enough blade from the sheath to show he means business.
‘I am sure Sir Robert can find another doctor to attend his son, should the present one lose his life resisting arrest for treason. You are to come with us to Essex House.’
Nicholas has a sense of fall
ing – the warning the stomach gives the brain of coming terror. He remembers that old Dr Lopez made a similar journey not so many months ago, and from there to the Tower. As he follows Winter and his boy out of the dank little cell and into the June sunshine the warden’s head does not lift from his ledger, as though Nicholas Shelby has been already condemned and forgotten.
In her apothecary’s shop on Bankside’s Dice Lane, Bianca Merton is preparing an emulsion for Widow Hoby’s inflamed ear. She takes up a bottle of oil of Benjamin and pours a generous measure into a stone mortar, which she sets on a tripod over the stub of a fat tallow candle. Then she breaks up some mint, marjoram and oregano, pares a few leaves of wormwood from a stem and drops the mixture into the gently warming liquid. As she begins to grind the pestle, the scents spill out in profusion. She inhales. She smiles. There might be an open sewer outside, but in her modest premises the air is always exotically fragrant.
Some who live in the teeming warren of lanes that cluster around the Rose playhouse on the south bank of the Thames would think it a shame to pour such a fine oil into the ear of an old woman with barely the clothes on her back to her name, but Bianca knows Widow Hoby has a good soul. Her husband was one of the more than ten thousand Londoners who were carried off by the pestilence that ravaged the city last year. She deserves a little luxury.
On Bankside, indeed throughout Southwark, there is a certain air of mystery – not to say notoriety – about Bianca Merton. For a start, she looks different. Her skin has a healthy caramel sheen to it, a hint (or so her mother always told her) of a family line that ran from the Italian Veneto across the Adriatic to Ragusa, and from there into Egypt, or Ethiopia, or even far Cathay. (Her mother had never been entirely specific on the subject.) But it is more than just her complexion – which admittedly has paled a little under the unpredictable English sun – or her startling amber eyes and the thick, dark convolutions that spill from a high, determined brow that mark her out as exotic. Whether her customers come for oil of bitter almonds to ease a ringing in the ears, a decoction of plantain, sorrel and lettuce for a nosebleed or simply for a chat, they cannot help but wonder if the rumours are really true: that the daughter of an English spice merchant and an Italian mother can mix a poison as deftly as she can a cure.
