The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  This causes Rathlin to look at Winter with a severe furrowing of the brow. ‘What’s this, Master Winter? Have you brought us the wrong fellow?’

  Athy put his hand over his mouth and gives a lawyer’s sonorous cough.

  ‘Richard Tarlton was a comedic actor, Master Rathlin – at the playhouses. He’s dead.’

  Rathlin looks surprised. ‘Oh, a jest.’ Then, disapprovingly, to Athy, ‘The playhouses, you say?’

  ‘I do, Master Rathlin.’

  Rathlin studies Nicholas through narrowed eyes. ‘Sinful places, playhouses. Given over to those who rejoice in lust, and impertinence towards their betters.’

  Nicholas sighs inwardly. That’s all I need: a lawyer and a Puritan.

  ‘It is alleged, Master Shelby,’ Rathlin continues, ‘that you were an accomplice in the recent vile conspiracy made by the Jew Lopez, a native of Portugal given shelter in this realm, to administer to our sovereign lady, Elizabeth, a concoction fatal to Her Highness. This plan was thwarted only by the diligence of her Privy Council and the intercession of the Almighty. What say you – guilty?’

  ‘I say the Trinity term must be a barren one for you lawyers, if you have time to waste on such a wild fabrication.’

  ‘The allegation came from a reliable source,’ says Rathlin.

  ‘Did it really? Would you care to name it?’

  ‘You think perhaps we have fabricated this charge on a whim?’

  The evasion gives Nicholas a glimmer of comfort. An anonymous denunciation, he thinks. ‘I’d put my money on it coming from someone I refused to purge for a bellyache brought on by overindulgence,’ he says. ‘Prove me wrong.’

  Athy looks down his nose at the accused. ‘This is not a trivial matter, Mr Shelby. We are speaking here of treason.’

  Nicholas shrugs, a gesture that carries more indifference than he feels. ‘I get more than a few of such charges, now that I am in the service of’ – a pause to make sure they are paying attention, then a slowing of the voice as he plays the only card he holds – ‘Sir Robert Cecil, Her Grace’s secretary.’

  But Temple lawyers are not so easily distracted. Rathlin says, ‘But you have oftentimes been in close proximity to Her Highness’s person, have you not?’

  ‘Oftentimes? No; I’m not her personal physician. Not yet.’

  Nicholas remembers Robert Cecil’s warning last year when he returned from Morocco. The queen had expressed an interest in having him speak to her of the Barbary shore and how the Moors practised their physic. ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Cecil had warned him. ‘She makes invitations like that to every young man whose appearance pleases her.’ But Cecil had been wrong. Elizabeth had summoned him: once to Windsor, once to Whitehall and twice more to Nonsuch. The memory of their first conversation springs into his mind now. ‘Are you sure you are a physician, sirrah? You do not have an academic look to you.’

  He’d taken it as a compliment.

  ‘Master Baronsdale tells me he considers you a heretic,’ he hears the queen saying, her white cerused face – almost as unmoving as a mask in a morality tale – creasing slightly with amusement at the expression on the faces of the assembled courtiers who are wondering what manner of fellow she’d commanded to appear before her. ‘In matters of physic, I mean.’

  ‘It is the privilege of the president of the College of Physicians to judge us humbler doctors as he chooses, Majesty,’ he had replied, head down out of deference. But to his horror that had enabled him to see that he was wearing an old patched pair of woollen hose. In the pre-dawn darkness when he’d dressed, Bianca had been half-asleep. Kissing him goodbye had taken preference over ensuring he’d been properly attired to meet his monarch.

  Rathlin’s voice pulls him back to the present.

  ‘Nevertheless, you have been granted privy access to Her Grace’s chamber. We presume she did not call upon you to have you read poetry to her. What did you do there?’

  ‘We spoke of how the Moors of Barbary organize their hospitals. She was interested.’

  ‘The Moors have hospitals?’ asks Athy, as though the possibility has only just occurred to him.

  ‘For longer than we have had them. The one I visited was better than St Tom’s. Certainly cleaner.’

  ‘How remarkable.’

  ‘Not really. Many of our procedures come from Moorish physicians of old, or from the books of antiquity they saved from destruction by the barbarians.’

  Rathlin asks, ‘And during these visits to Her Majesty, did you administer any foreign substance to her body?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘I think I might have remembered. So might she.’

  ‘Did the traitor Lopez suggest such a thing to you?’ This from Athy.

  ‘Of course he didn’t.’

  ‘But he was present.’

  ‘Only at the first summons. After that, he was elsewhere – latterly in the Tower. I see you are not taking notes.’

  ‘This is a preliminary interview, Dr Shelby,’ Rathlin says. ‘There will be time enough for testimony later – when you appear before the Queen’s Bench.’

  ‘Were you ever alone with Her Grace?’ Athy asks.

  ‘Is that an offence? I hear tell the Earl of Essex is often in her privy company.’

  ‘Answer the question,’ says Athy sourly.

  ‘Then, never. I was always in the company of either Baronsdale or Beston.’

  Rathlin raises a lawyer’s eyebrow, as though he’s found the fatal flaw in the defence. ‘So there were others in this conspiracy?’

  Nicholas manages not to laugh. ‘Master Baronsdale is president of the College of Physicians. Beston is one of the Censors, responsible for testing our professional knowledge. Are you suggesting the entire membership of the College conspired to poison the queen, Master Rathlin? All of us?’

  ‘You could still have secreted your poison in some innocent-looking vessel, Dr Shelby.’

  Now the laugh cannot be restrained. ‘Master Athy, Censor Beston might not be the sharpest of scalpels I’ve come across, but even he would manage to make a connection between a junior physician administering an unapproved draught to Her Grace and her subsequent demise.’

  Rathlin leans forward across the trestle, the elbows of his lawyer’s gown leaving a snail’s trail of dust as they move. He steeples his fingers under his chin as he looks up at Nicholas with his cold judicial eyes. ‘Perhaps, being a medical man and not of our profession, Dr Shelby, you do not know that even speaking of the queen’s death is tantamount to sedition. It is forbidden.’

  ‘If you’re going to accuse me of seeking to poison her, and I am to defend myself, it’s a little difficult not to.’

  ‘Are you saying you deny the charge?’

  For a moment Nicholas does not answer. Wearily he raises his gaze towards the low ceiling. Inches above his head a row of rusty iron hooks hang from a rafter like the sagging eyes of a dropsy patient.

  ‘Is that what you did to poor Dr Lopez – decide he was guilty from the start?’

  Rathlin seems caught by surprise. ‘I cannot tell you, Dr Shelby,’ he says. ‘Neither I nor Master Athy was party to the examination of Lopez. That was conducted by the earl himself, and Sir Robert Cecil.’

  The news gives Nicholas a glimmer of hope. Perhaps a formal charge has not yet been laid against him. Perhaps this really is a consequence of nothing but malice – a fiction uttered carelessly by someone who bears him a grudge. But even if it is, Nicholas knows this can still end in a lethal outcome. After all, the queen herself had not agreed to Lopez’s execution until the worm of doubt had been woken in her. What if the Earl of Essex is at this very moment in her company, reassuring her that another conspirator has been caught before he can strike? Poor Lopez had been her personal physician for more than thirteen years before she abandoned him. What hope could there be that she would lift even a single bejewelled finger to protect a young man who had been in her presence just four times, a man whom she h
ad already called – perhaps only half-jokingly – a heretic?

  Equally concerning to him is how far Robert Cecil will go to protect him. Lord Burghley’s son does little that is not in defence of his queen. For all the service Nicholas has given him over the past four years – service that has put his life in jeopardy more than once – he knows that in that crooked little body is an iron-willed ruthlessness. After all, Lopez himself was once Robert Cecil’s man. And look where that got him.

  ‘Master Winter,’ he hears Rathlin say in a voice he might well use when closing a prosecution, ‘I think it time to convey the accused to a place where he may be confined while he considers the wisdom of his defiance.’

  And as he senses Winter and Lank-hair move to grip his arms, Nicholas Shelby understands that his ordeal has only just begun.

  3

  As evening approaches, Bianca Merton waits at the Falcon stairs for a wherry to take her across the Thames. The warmth of the day is fading; a chill is settling on the city. After half an hour her feet are tapping out a tattoo on the planks while the river mocks her impatience with dancing waves turned orange by the setting sun. Then three tilt-boats arrive from the northern bank almost simultaneously. A spirited but good-natured jostle with feet and oars breaks out amongst the boatmen for the best mooring post. ‘What are you doing on the water, Tom Frear? You’d be safer pushing a plough,’ shouts the first. ‘Mercy, good sirs,’ says the second to the passengers in another boat, ‘you’re the first lot today that Jack Tomblin ain’t managed to drown.’ Tomblin, not to be outdone, roars with good-natured scorn, ‘Make way for a proper waterman, you lubbers! Neptune hisself would weep to see such clumsiness.’

  By custom, Bianca Merton would watch this tussle with mild amusement. But this evening she is desperate for the wherries to empty. She knows from experience how hard it is to get a private audience with Sir Robert Cecil.

  Five young gentlemen from Gray’s Inn are the first ashore: trainee lawyers looking for diversion from their studies. To Bianca they look ridiculously young to be chancing purse and body on Bankside. Their beards are meagre and they have more pimples than a freshly plucked goose. She wishes the Jackdaw was still open. At least she’d be able to keep an eye on them, tell them which dice-dens and bawdy-houses to steer clear of, which alleyways to avoid if they should end up alone. But this evening it is all she can do to stop herself shouting at them to get out of her way. When the boat she has chosen is empty, she calls down to the waterman, ‘Good morrow, Master Frear. Will you take a fare to the Savoy hospital stairs?’

  The boatman looks up. ‘You, Mistress Merton? The Savoy hospital? Nothing amiss, is there?’

  ‘Nothing amiss, Master Frear,’ she lies. He’s noted the agitation in me, she thinks. She tries to compose her features. ‘I have some business at Covent Garden, that’s all.’

  ‘Shall I wait for a full load to take upriver, or are you in a hurry?’

  ‘A hurry, Master Frear – if that’s not a burden to you.’

  ‘Then you’re in luck, Mistress. The tide’s still on the flow.’

  Bianca does the best she can to settle on the cross-bench. Realizing her left hand is drumming on the plank, she fumbles inside her gown for her purse.

  Leaning into his oars without breaking rhythm, wherryman Frear shakes his head. ‘There’ll be no need of that, Mistress Merton. You and Dr Shelby cured my Mags of the tertian fever. Twelfth Night last, it was. Say the word an’ I’ll row you to Oxford and back, an’ twice on Accession Day, all for gratis.’

  Bianca gives him a grateful smile. It hides a cold swell of fear in her belly that has nothing to do with the rise and fall of the wherry as it strikes out past the Paris Garden towards Whitehall. From the moment Rose Monkton came flying through the door, her mistress has been pondering the likelihood that one of the most powerful men in the kingdom will happily lay aside whatever occupies him this evening just to grant an audience to a Bankside tavern owner without a tavern.

  In the event, she doesn’t recognize the gatekeeper on duty at Cecil House. He, in turn, does not recognize her. And even if he did, Bianca knows he is but the first thorn bush in a whole thicket set around the queen’s secretary that grows denser, the more one tries to penetrate it. She adopts a tone she thinks might sound authoritative.

  ‘I am the wife of one of Sir Robert’s physicians,’ she begins. Even now it sounds strange to her. ‘I must speak to Sir Robert. It’s urgent.’

  ‘Sir Robert’s physician, you say?’

  ‘Dr Nicholas Shelby. You must have seen him pass through these gates before now.’

  The gatekeeper nods. ‘The young fellow who don’t look like a physician?’

  ‘That would be him.’

  ‘And you’re his wife?’

  ‘Yes. I am Mistress Merton.’

  ‘But you said you were Dr Shelby’s wife.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘So why are you Mistress Merton and not Goodwife Shelby?’

  ‘I am both,’ she says, having little time for the English practice of subsumption by marriage.

  ‘How can a body be two people at once?’

  ‘I have to speak to Sir Robert.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘A privy matter.’

  ‘I’ll have to know more before I can pass a message.’

  Bianca’s jaw stiffens. ‘I told you, I’m the wife of his physician. It’s about a pustule that needs lancing.’

  Even in the dusk Bianca can see the relish in the gatekeeper’s eyes. He’s savouring how the revelation will play with the other servants when he tells them the son of the Lord Treasurer has a boil somewhere on his august person.

  ‘A pustule – whereabouts?’

  Bianca smiles sweetly at him.

  ‘It’s guarding his gatehouse.’

  Less than ten minutes later she finds herself sitting on a window seat beside a tall column of mullioned glass stained orange by the setting sun, staring fixedly at a mantelpiece carved with the Cecil insignia, and trying to slow the frenzied beating of her heart by silently counting the monotonous ticking of a fine French clock.

  Nicholas has no idea how much time has passed since Winter pushed him through the door of this new chamber. But at least his accommodation has improved. They have taken him from the old carpenter’s store to a minor wing of Essex House. He can sense, perhaps by the stagnant closeness of the air, that it has been used as a depository for things no longer necessary to the earl’s comfort: furniture that is out of fashion, boxes of clothes that now fail to dazzle, people… The floor is tiled, a white-and-red zigzag that makes him think of blood running over the planks of a scaffold. He wonders if this is where they kept Lopez while they plastered over the gaping cracks in their case against him.

  He is lying on single narrow cot, not quite wide enough to take a fully-grown man. The coarse woollen sheet scratches through the linen of his shirt. It fails miserably to soften the hardness of the boards beneath. If he rests his arms by his sides, the limbs are forced inwards across his body; if he extends them, the edges of the cot are hard against his elbows. Either way, he cannot sleep. Perhaps that’s the aim. Wear him down. Exhaust him. Confessions can be wrung out of a man without recourse to hot iron or cold fists.

  Sometime after Winter had left he heard a key turning to unlock the door. Thinking the interrogation was about to begin again, he lifted himself off the cot, preferring to face them on his feet than prone like a beaten dog. But it had only been a servant bringing a plate of bread and cheese and a pot of small-beer.

  He wonders if Rathlin and Athy will come again. Perhaps Essex will send someone more significant. If it is Chief Justice Popham, or Attorney General Coke, or even Essex himself, then the thread of hope will unravel. His greatest fear is that they will come accompanied by the infamous Richard Topcliffe, the queen’s tame torturer.

  To master the fear inside him, and to suppress his longing to be with Bianca, in his mind he runs through his knowledge of Italian voca
bulary. In their time at Nonsuch over the winter, she helped him improve his limited skill in the language. For him it had been just a diversion. His real motive had been to strengthen the muscles in her throat, to aid her recovery from the laryngotomy he had been forced to perform in order to save her life, after the smoke from the fire that destroyed the Jackdaw had almost killed her. He reaches benefico before something resembling sleep takes him.

  A key turning in the lock brings him suddenly awake. Two faces emerge from the blackness, each turned into a devil’s mask by a sudden flare of candlelight. One of the masks speaks.

  ‘You are to come with us, Dr Shelby.’

  The voice is Rathlin’s. Nicholas presumes the second demon is Athy. Rising stiffly from the cot, he asks, ‘What hour is it? Where are you taking me?’

  He receives no answer. Despite his aching limbs, he thinks of punching the closest devil’s face and making a break for it. But beyond the compass of the candlelight there is nothing but blackness. He has no idea where to run to. So with Rathlin leading and Athy as rearguard, he walks hesitantly into the depths of Essex House.

  After a meandering journey that costs him barked shins and several harsh prods in the back, a door looms out of the night, framed by the faintest sliver of light. Nicholas almost walks into Rathlin’s back as he stops. He sees the candle flame move diagonally, extinguished and then relit as it passes across the silhouette of the lawyer’s body. He hears Rathlin’s fist rap twice on the door. The next moment he is standing, blinking furiously, in a grandly appointed room lit by more candles than he can count. Their flickering light makes a dancing cloudscape on the gleaming white plaster ceiling, casting shadows from the ornate moulding. On the far wall, an oak gallery extends from one side to the other above a row of paintings that he takes to be leading members of the Devereux family.

  In the centre of the room stands a tall man, a little younger than himself. He sports a sandy-coloured beard and a doublet seeded with more pearls than a diver could harvest in a year and still have lungs to breathe with. He eyes Nicholas with detached disappointment, as though he’s bought a hunting dog on a false recommendation. Nicholas knows him at once. It is Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex.