The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  Being what the rest of London refers to disparagingly as denizens of ‘the Turkish Shore’ and thus used to the unusual, these same Banksiders have long since taken to Bianca Merton. Southwark admires a certain dash, a measure of what it likes to call ‘assurance’. Man or woman, poor or poorer (there are few enough in the city’s southernmost ward who are rich), they don’t much care if it’s not shown by their clothes. A jaunty cap worn at a rakish angle, a flash of bright ribbon, a string of polished oyster shells sewn to the collar in place of pearls will do, if it’s all one can afford. What is important is that you walk down Bermondsey Street or along the riverbank with your chin up, as though the Bishop of London, the queen’s Privy Council, the Lord Mayor and his Corporation – along with all their petty laws – can go straight to the Devil in a night-soil waggon, for all you care. And in this, Bianca Merton suits them down to the ground.

  For those who have learned of it, and Bianca has done her utmost to ensure there are few, the only thing that might raise a doubting eyebrow is her faith. In a realm whose present queen is still under a pope’s sentence of excommunication, and whose former sovereign, the bloody Mary, burned three hundred Protestant martyrs before her own departure into a richly deserved hell, Bianca Merton’s Catholicism could well be viewed with suspicion. Not so much now, of course. Not since she purchased the Jackdaw tavern with the money her father had left her. There are few heresies a Banksider won’t forgive, if the price of his ale is competitive. And besides, you’d be hard pressed to find one who doesn’t have something in their larder they’d rather not share with the world across London Bridge.

  The one thing they are all agreed upon is that they cannot quite bring themselves to address this comely young woman with the interesting past by her new, married name. She came to them as Mistress Merton, and Mistress Merton is how they see her still, regardless of their happiness at the match. Goodwife Shelby just doesn’t seem to fit.

  When the oil infusion is complete, Bianca adds it to the rest of the medicines she has prepared for tomorrow’s early customers. She locks her shop and goes out into the warm summer air. She walks the short distance to the pleasant lodging she and Nicholas rent close to the river by the Paris Garden. On the way she passes the place where her Jackdaw tavern had stood for centuries – until that summer night last year, when the trail of mayhem caused by her new husband’s association with Sir Robert Cecil brought about its incineration and her own close brush with death. Recovering in the splendour of Nonsuch Palace, the home of Nicholas’s friend, John Lumley, she had often wondered how she would feel when she looked again on the ruins of the place she’d bought with her father’s inheritance when she arrived in London from her former life in Padua. She had suspected it would break her heart, despite the fact that Nicholas, after his return from the Barbary shore, had the means to rebuild it. To her surprise, she had dismissed the blackened skeleton with a shrug. New starts, she had realized, were nothing new to her now. They were to be embraced, not feared.

  She stops to inspect the work. She observes the freshly hewn oak posts set into the scorched foundations, the frame upon which the new Jackdaw will rise, and checks that the masons have run the first few courses of bricks straight. Not too straight, mind; the Jackdaw was never about symmetry – that had been part of its charm. Announcing her satisfaction to the foreman in charge of the reconstruction, she walks on towards the Paris Garden.

  Arriving at the lodging, she finds two notes left for her. The first is from Nicholas himself – their love is still fresh enough to leave each other billets-doux. She reads it, learns that he expects to return from St Tom’s by five and tucks it into the neckline of her gown, where she imagines the feel of it against her skin is instead of the warmth of his touch.

  The second note is from Rose Monkton.

  Mistress Moonbeam, as Bianca is wont to call her friend and former maid, has returned to Bankside to help her while the Jackdaw is being rebuilt. The note informs her that Rose has gone across the bridge, on an errand to visit an importer of spices on Petty Wales whom Bianca knows to be that rarity amongst Thameside merchants: an honest man. Too many of them these days are not above bulking out their wares with powdered acorns and other counterfeit dusts. This one does regular business with his counterparts in Venice, the middlemen in the trade from the Levant and Asia. It is a useful conduit for Bianca’s letters to her cousin in Padua, Bruno Barrani. All it costs is her continued custom, and free medicine for the merchant’s hermicrania. She checks to see if Rose has taken her latest letter with her, because Rose is liable to forget her own name if the wind changes direction suddenly. She has.

  There has been a lot to tell Bruno since last she wrote – most of it impossible to put in a letter. So Bianca had confined herself to a report of daily life on Bankside, and for his greater interest – because Bruno likes to hear of strange phenomena – she had mentioned the mercifully brief fresh outbreak of plague in the spring; the great storm at the end of March that had torn up so many trees and ripped off so many roofs; and the fearful rains and gales of early April. Her final words, before closing with the usual expression of familial devotion and commending Bruno to God’s merciful protection, had touched on the matter closest of all to her heart: as yet, no sign of our hoped-for bounty…

  That had been harder to write than she had expected. But the fact remains that, despite lying with Nicholas that night of the fire, and on many joyous occasions since, her belly is still as flat as it has ever been.

  As Bianca sits in the window seat of the parlour, looking out across the unusually quiet lane to the close-packed timbered houses and the spire of St Saviour’s beyond, she hears the church bell ring four times. The slow, deliberate chimes remind her how time seems to be passing ever more swiftly. She has already seen the back of thirty. Only God knows how many years she has been allotted. As each one ends, so the possibility of bearing a child – their child – diminishes. To give Nicholas a healthy child would be the final laying of his first wife’s ghost.

  To fill the time while she waits for him to return from St Tom’s, Bianca picks up a printed sheet purchased a few days ago from a bookshop near St Paul’s. It is the new poem by Master Shakespeare. She had been lucky to find a copy. They are flying out of the stationers’ faster than the presses can run them off. She lets her eyes skim over the words to get a feel for the piece, before reading it more attentively.

  She does not get beyond the second verse before a dark and uncomfortable sense of foreboding comes over her, no doubt brought about by remembering what she has left out of her letter to her cousin:

  O comfort-killing Night… Black stage for tragedies and murders fell…

  Whispering conspirator with close-tongu’d treason…

  Make war against proportion’d course of time.

  Returning from delivering Mistress Bianca’s letter into the hands of the merchant on Petty Wales, Rose Monkton hurries south across London Bridge. She prefers not to linger in the narrow parts where it runs beneath the buildings that perch upon it as if they are teetering on the edge of a precipice. The crowd squeezes in so tight that you have to fight your way through the shoppers, the hawkers and the cut-purses. She prefers the few open spaces where there is a chance to look at the river sweeping beneath the great stone piers on which the whole implausible edifice is built. Then she can breathe properly. Then she can gaze east towards the Tower, or west towards the grand houses lining the northern bank around Westminster.

  Rose has grown accustomed to grand houses recently. She’s developed a taste for them. Born in the narrow maze of lanes between the Paris Garden and Long Southwark in the shadow of the playhouse whose name she shares, she has always found the crush of the timber-framed tenements oddly reassuring, as comforting as the wooden walls of a cradle to a swaddled infant. But then, in the aftermath of the fire, and with plague still rampant in London, Master Nicholas had accepted Lord Lumley’s offer of sanctuary at Nonsuch Palace. True, she and her husband Ned
dwelt in the servants’ quarters, but even they were grander than their former rooms at the Jackdaw.

  The thought of Nonsuch makes her hanker for the comforting vastness of Ned’s huge frame. She will have to wait a little longer, she thinks with a resigned smile; Mistress Bianca still has need of her. A body can’t run an apothecary shop that tends to the needs of half of Bankside and watch over the rebuilding of a tavern by herself – not with the way that London day-labourers are wont to behave. And Bianca Merton is, after all, more an older sister to her than a mistress.

  As she emerges from beneath the bridge gatehouse into Long Southwark, Rose takes care not to glance up at the traitors’ heads crowning the parapet like a macabre grinning diadem. She presumes the one unburnt relic of poor Dr Lopez is up there now, blackening in the summer sunshine.

  She has heard Master Nicholas tell how he doesn’t believe the old man was guilty of trying to poison the queen. And to her mind it seemed a monstrous way to treat a physician. The barber-surgeon who pulled that diseased tooth of hers when she was eleven, perhaps. But not a doctor.

  As she leaves the gatehouse and turns right towards the Pepper Lane water-stairs, eyes fixed straight ahead in an effort to resist the uncomfortable urge to look back and up over her shoulder, Rose sees a familiar figure coming towards her from the direction of Long Southwark.

  He’s the last man you’d take for a physician, she thinks. She imagines men of medicine – like magistrates, priests and schoolmasters – to possess a stern gloominess brought on by all that book-learning, probably tall and lugubrious, and definitely old. Master Nicholas is none of these. How could he be? He’d never have won the heart of Mistress Bianca if he was.

  He looks exactly what he told her he was before he became a doctor: the younger son of a yeoman farmer. Thus, being of a romantic mind, Rose imagines him made out of the same solid earth that sprouted the men who fought with the fifth Harry at Agincourt, or who now captain the ships of Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh. He looks as though he’d be more at home wielding a scythe than a scalpel, though she suspects he’d do it with the same careful diligence, allowing himself just the occasional flourish to show that he’s not all earnest sobriety, that he can laugh at himself, when required.

  He’s wearing that old white canvas doublet of his, the one he came to them in, a twenty-eight-year-old foundling abandoned by the river he’d thrown himself into to escape his grief. It had taken her ages to clean the mud off it, while Mistress Bianca tended his battered body upstairs in the attic of the Jackdaw. He looks a lot different now, of course. He has the grateful eyes of a man who knows the value of a second chance. Now, even his coarse black hair and his tightly cropped beard know better than to sprout piratically, as Rose herself would prefer. But Mistress Bianca won’t have him looking like a felon, and has told him so more than once.

  But who are these two fellows with him? She hasn’t seen them before. Not as big as her Ned, but large enough. And by the way they crowd him, they do not appear to be friends.

  Rose becomes certain something is amiss when Master Nicholas does not smile at her. In fact he stares straight through her, save for a very brief shake of his head, as though he’s trying to tell her not to acknowledge him. Keeping her eyes off his, she waits until she feels it is safe to look back. She watches in horror as they bundle him down into a waiting wherry as if he’s the most wanted criminal in all London. In indecent haste the wherry pushes off into the current.

  But not before Rose has had the opportunity to spot the embroidered design on the leather tunics of the two men. It is a mark she has seen before, when the young man whose livery it is made one of his many vainglorious processions through the city, graciously accepting with a wave of his gloved hand the hosannas of the admiring crowd.

  2

  The Strand, London. Later the same day

  Essex House stands on the north bank of the Thames, between the Middle Temple and the eastern end of Whitehall. Like many of the great houses that line the river to the west of Temple Bar, it once belonged to a bishop. But that was before the queen’s father, the eighth Henry, decided he preferred his men of God – if not their monarchs – frugal. It has a grand banqueting hall, more bedrooms than the city has wards, and fine gardens that sweep down to the water’s edge, where two private water-stairs jut out like serpents’ tongues tasting the air for treason.

  All London knows Essex House wears two faces. The first is cultured and fashionable. Poets and musicians come here, lavish masques are held amid the topiary. The dancing is exquisite. As are the boys who serve the wine.

  The other face is darker. Like its equivalent, Cecil House, home of that other great faction of England, it is a centre of intrigue and politics, of foreign entanglements and alliances that shift forever like quicksand. Hidden away in places where a guest is unlikely to stray are the expert cryptographers, forgers, intelligencers. A few of these men are also practised in the application of a skill that would turn the stomachs of the more rarefied visitors who come in via the front gate. Their domain lies below ground – so the screams won’t disturb the neighbours.

  Nicholas arrives by the water-stairs that serves this other face. As the wherry rocks against the piles, Winter gives him a helping shove that will leave bruises on his back for days. He almost falls at the feet of two other men waiting for him on the planks. They are middle-aged, of middle height and from the Middle Temple, judging by their dark legal gowns. Ominous, thinks Nicholas with mounting alarm. If they are Essex House lawyers, they may have been sent simply to intimidate. But if the noble earl has brought them in from the Temple, then the accusation may already be public knowledge. It could have gathered a momentum that will be hard to stop. It could be that the letters of his arraignment have already been prepared.

  They lead him up the gently sloping gardens towards the great house. He sees gardeners in linen smocks trimming the topiary; clerks and messengers moving purposefully along gravelled pathways; a gaggle of expensively dressed young gentlemen practising archery, their arrows speeding deep into a straw target set against a shady elm tree, honing their skills in the hope the earl will take them on his next expedition to the Low Countries. Or Lisbon. Or wherever else glory and riches may be had, by those with an appetite for risk.

  Looking back, he sees Winter and Lank-hair trailing him like a pair of wolves trying to anticipate which way their prey will break. In the distance, out on the river, two tilt-boats glide past incongruously, their passengers enjoying a pleasant picnic beneath the awnings.

  The lawyers seem to be the only two of their profession in all London disinclined to speak. In silence they lead him towards an area of stables and storerooms. It is shady here. Nicholas feels a chill in his blood, though whether real or imagined he’s not sure.

  They stop before a low lintel that caps a door studded with iron. One of the lawyers produces a heavy key from the folds of his gown. He inserts it into the lock-plate and tries to turn it. The lock does not yield. He tries again. And when that too is unsuccessful, a third time.

  ‘Are you sure this is the place?’ he asks his companion.

  ‘The old carpenter’s store – that is what His Grace’s secretary told me, Master Rathlin,’ the other replies.

  Rathlin tries the key a fourth time. Withdrawing it, he stares at the intricate metal maze of the bit, until Winter steps forward, takes it from him, puts it in the lock and calmly turns it in the opposite direction. Nicholas stifles a grin. They can’t believe me to be that much of a threat, he decides. They clearly didn’t think it worth sending their best legal minds.

  Inside, the chamber smells of wood-shavings and old animal pelts. It is bare, save for a furrowed carpenter’s trestle. Here and there little curls of paper-thin shavings poke through the dust like wavelets on a frozen pond. It looks as though it was last used when the Earl of Leicester owned the place, and he’s been dead almost six years.

  ‘They said there would be chairs,’ says Rathlin, as Lank-hair wipes the
dust off the trestle with his forearm. ‘Why are there no chairs?’

  Lank-hair is dispatched and returns a few moments later carrying a bench just big enough to seat two. He places it before the trestle with elaborate care, as though this were the Star Chamber and not an outhouse. The lawyer without the key gives a petulant little tut, motioning to the other side of the trestle. ‘We’re questioning the accused, not the wall,’ he mutters under his breath, a small triumph of petty revenge.

  ‘I beg pardon, Master Athy,’ mutters Winter, as though Lank-hair is not to be trusted to make his own apology.

  This inept confusion gives Nicholas no comfort. It is not Rathlin and Athy who will pass sentence upon him. That will be left to Chief Justice Popham and Attorney General Coke. Not that it matters much. No matter how sound the accused’s protestations of innocence, treason trials tend to have only one outcome.

  With Winter and his friend stationed behind him, blocking the exit, Nicholas stands before this mockery of the Queen’s Bench, trying to look as though he’s being kept from more important business. Rathlin, apparently the more senior man, looks around the mean little chamber, gives a sigh of resignation and begins.

  ‘You are Dr Nicholas Shelby, of Barnthorpe in the country of Sussex, accredited to practise physic by the Bishop of London, and a member of the College of Physicians. Is that correct?’

  ‘No,’ Nicholas says, sucking in his cheeks. ‘I’m Richard Tarlton.’