The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  ‘Oh, the son of a Sea Beggar will be taking no coin from another enemy of Spain. Have no fear on that score.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you, Master van der Molen.’

  ‘But I’d steer clear of Antwerp, if I were you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve come from there. The Archduke of Austria rode into the city a short while back, at the head of a body of Spanish troops. He’s making Antwerp and Brussels the twin centres of his authority in the Spanish Netherlands. His spies are everywhere, making sure the rebels don’t slip inside the city and take a potshot at him.’

  Bianca has picked up the word Antwerp and seen the cautionary look on van der Molen’s face.

  ‘What’s wrong, Nicholas?’

  ‘He’s saying Antwerp is too dangerous for us. We’ll have to think of somewhere else to go ashore.’

  ‘Tell him to think of somewhere they have shops and dancing,’ she says. ‘I’ll follow you anywhere, Nicholas, as long as it’s not tedious. I draw the line at tedious.’

  ‘Can you land us somewhere else, Meneer?’ Nicholas says in Dutch. ‘Somewhere my wife won’t go mad with boredom.’

  The master laughs. ‘I’ll take you to my home town. It’s just below the River Maas, around twenty leagues from Antwerp. It’s still occupied by the Spanish, but the garrison is small. Not so many spies.’

  ‘That sounds perfect,’ Nicholas says, thanking him. ‘I know the Low Countries a little. What is the name of this town?’

  ‘’s-Hertogenbosch,’ van der Molen says proudly. ‘But we call it Den Bosch.’

  8

  Southwark, London, 29th June 1594

  Ned Monkton watches the labourers at work on the reconstruction of the Jackdaw and thinks himself the least gainfully employed man on Bankside. He is overjoyed to be back with Rose, but Mistress Bianca’s wish to have him here to help oversee the work seems something of an extravagance. There is not a soul who would dare short-change Bianca Merton. Most of the men at work here are former customers. More than a few have had need to visit Bianca’s apothecary shop or call upon Nicholas’s healing skills, if not for themselves, then for their families. They want to see the Jackdaw open again as much as anyone. Indeed, the brickwork is already climbing like a red creeper between the stout oak posts. The thatchers come by almost every other day to ask when they will be needed. Ned wishes only that he could let Nicholas and Bianca know how the project has become a source of pride throughout the lanes south of London Bridge.

  Ned is not the wisest man on Bankside, though he is far from being the dullest. He does, however, possess a mind made brutally efficient through hardship. And he is determined to track down and expose the man who denounced Nicholas as an accomplice of the unfortunate Dr Roderigo Lopez. He has asked everyone he can think of if they have heard even the slightest rumour, from the wherrymen who ply their trade on the river to the cut-purses who send their customers back to the other shore with nothing but neat little tears in their cloaks as a memento of their visit. But they can tell him nothing. He has even pestered Jenny Solver, Bankside’s foremost peddler of gossip, until she has begun to avoid him in the street. But so far he’s been unable to pick up even the faintest of scents.

  And he thinks he knows why.

  Anyone who can write a letter to the Privy Council denouncing a physician is not the sort of person who moves in his sphere. It must therefore be someone of a higher station. And that, in all likelihood, means a world closed to a former mortuary porter, even one who has spent several months in the domestic household of Lord Lumley at Nonsuch Palace. If it is a gentleman – the word makes his tongue sour – then the Ned Monktons of this world are unlikely to get so much as a toe across his threshold. Rose was right: he’d probably end up in the Clink or the Marshalsea, accused of assault.

  Ned tries hard not to let the realization sink his mood as he turns to walk away from the building site. He tells himself to dwell on the day when the Jackdaw opens its doors again. Absorbed in his thoughts, he notices the man watching the construction work from the side of the lane only in the instant before he sends him flying. The man stares at him in terror, which folk are often wont to do when about to collide with Ned Monkton.

  ‘Forgive me my carelessness, Master,’ Ned says, extending a great fist to clutch the man’s sleeve in an effort to stop him toppling. ‘I did not see you. I’m sorry.’

  For a moment there is confusion in the man’s eyes, something else Ned is used to whenever he apologizes for being clumsy.

  ‘Too many thoughts, not enough head,’ he adds apologetically. Then he steps back and gets his first proper look at the fellow.

  Ned can see now why he failed to notice him. He is a small man, and although small does not necessarily mean insignificant, in this case he is just that. His jerkin is patched and his hose made of the coarsest wool, his narrow head bald save for a few strands of grey hair that fall forward of his ears. He holds himself in tense expectation, as though chastisement is an hourly experience. A man accustomed to being shouted at, Ned thinks.

  ‘Is this the Jackdaw tavern?’ the fellow asks, mustering the fractured pieces of his courage.

  ‘Aye, it is,’ says Ned, letting go of his sleeve and stepping even further back so as not to intimidate any further. ‘But as you can see, if you’re after a quart of mad-dog, you’re a little premature.’

  The man gives him a sickly smile, to show he can take a joke. ‘And the owner… er... Shelby – Dr Shelby… is he here?’

  Something in the way the man speaks makes Ned think it is not his own question he’s asking, but another’s. He’s been coached.

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘No one of any matter,’ the man says hurriedly. ‘I simply wondered if he was still on Bankside.’

  ‘He’s gone abroad.’

  A sudden flicker of vicarious interest in the little eyes. ‘Might I ask where to?’

  Ned remembers what Rose had told him on his return from Nonsuch when he’d asked the same thing: We’re not to know that, ’Usband – in case the Earl of Essex come here asking…

  But Ned has seen more than a few Privy Council searchers in his time, and they tend not to look like small, hard-done-by domestic servants. ‘He didn’t see fit to tell me,’ he replies. ‘Are you in need of physic, by any chance?’

  ‘Physic?’ the man echoes.

  ‘If you’re one of his patients, there’s a barber-surgeon at St Tom’s who’s agreed to give service in his absence.’

  ‘Are you quite sure Dr Shelby is abroad, and not imprisoned?’ the man asks tentatively.

  Ned raises one bushy red eyebrow. ‘Why would you think he might be in prison?’

  ‘No particular reason,’ the man says, again a little too quickly for Ned’s taste. Then, after a contemplative sucking of the teeth that seems staged, or is intended to give him thinking time, he adds, ‘St Thomas’s, you say – this barber-surgeon who’s seeing Dr Shelby’s patients?’

  ‘Aye,’ says Ned. ‘If you’re in need.’

  ‘Yes, he will do, if Dr Shelby is not here.’

  Then, with mumbled thanks, the man turns away and hurries off down the lane, revealing as he goes two large damp patches on the back of his hose.

  When are folk going to stop thinking I intend to murder them? Ned asks himself sadly. The poor fellow’s pissed himself.

  He calls after the man to stop, but that simply adds impetus to his pace – something else Ned Monkton is used to. Which hurts him a little. Because all he was trying to do was tell the stranger that St Tom’s hospital lies in quite the opposite direction.

  An hour later, in a modest little house on St Andrew’s Hill, a short walk north from the Blackfriars river stairs, the once-great anatomist puts his servant – whose name is Ditworth – through an inquisition of which any Spanish cardinal would approve.

  ‘Tell me again, sirrah,’ Sir Fulke Vaesy insists, ‘did this rough fellow you spoke to have no knowledge of Shelby’s whereabouts?
None at all?’

  ‘No, Master. I swear it. He said he had none, other than abroad.’

  ‘You’re sure he’s not been arraigned to any prison on Bankside?’ Vaesy demands to know, yet again.

  ‘No, sir. I visited them all: the Clink, the Counter, the Marshalsea, the Queen’s Bench… no prisoner by the name of Shelby anywhere.’

  Vaesy returns to his seat by the window. Outside on St Andrew’s Hill where it gives onto Thames Street, Londoners are hurrying about their business. Not one wastes a single glance on the very ordinary home of the man who once held the chair of anatomy at the College of Physicians.

  Vaesy thinks: if Nicholas Shelby – he can’t bring himself to call him Doctor – hadn’t poked his nose into my wife’s affairs when he did, revealing a nest of serpents I hadn’t for a moment suspected existed, I’d still be that man. I’d still be welcome in the grand houses of London. I’d still have the favour of the queen. Nor would I be reduced to bleeding or leeching the very worst sort, people who once would have stood aside as I passed. And to think that the man whose meddling brought about this calamity was very nearly appointed the queen’s physician! At least my letters to the Privy Council put an end to that.

  In his heart, he hadn’t really wished Shelby to suffer the same tribulation as the late Dr Lopez. He wasn’t a vindictive man. A few months in the Tower, while innocence was eventually established, would suffice. Just enough of a fall to bring ruin in its wake, the way Shelby’s interference had ruined him.

  Vaesy has tried hard to find out if his denunciation has had the desired effect. He’s asked around. But his old colleagues at the College of Physicians, who had once bowed their heads to him, now won’t give him the time of day. Nor will the courtiers with whom he was once on first-name terms. So he has been forced to send Ditworth across the river to Bankside to see what he can uncover.

  Remembering that the hapless Ditworth is still standing in the chamber waiting to be dismissed, Vaesy says, ‘Abroad? Just abroad?’

  ‘Yes, Sir Fulke.’

  Vaesy sighs. Well, exile is better than nothing. An eye for an eye…

  ‘Did you ensure no one could have known it was I who sent you to Bankside?’

  ‘Yes, Sir Fulke. I did.’

  ‘You weren’t stupid enough to mention my name, or give your own?’

  ‘No, Sir Fulke.’

  ‘And you did not take the same wherry out and back?’

  Ditworth assumes the expression of a man who has overcome his enemies by superior guile. ‘I was most careful not to, Sir Fulke. Besides, the big fellow I spoke to at the building site was naught but a common labourer. He wouldn’t have had the brains to be suspicious.’

  As they lie abed in the Paris Garden lodgings, Ned says to Rose: ‘The fellow who came to the Jackdaw asking questions about Master Nicholas – he wasn’t a Banksider. I’m sure of it.’

  Rose turns over and throws an arm about her husband’s chest. Her fingers barely reach his breastbone. She grasps the wiry auburn hairs that coil there, as though trying to stop herself sliding down a steep woodland bank. ‘You’ve been kicking my ear about that fellow all evening,’ she says sleepily. ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘He didn’t know where St Tom’s was, an’ he seemed to think it was Master Nicholas who owned the Jackdaw, not Mistress Bianca. Everyone on Bankside knows the Jackdaw belongs to her. An’ all that wanting to know if Master Nicholas had been taken up in irons. There’s something amiss. I know it.’

  Rose says, ‘You think he might be the fellow who wrote the denouncement?’

  ‘Wouldn’t ’ave ’ad the balls. He was naught but a little arseworm.’

  Rose’s mouth turns down in disapproval. ‘Sometimes they’re the sort to start an anonymous slander.’

  ‘Are you telling me he was checking to see if it ’ad done its mischief?’

  ‘Why else would he bother to come across the river, just to ask where Master Nicholas is?’

  ‘Maybe if I could find the wherryman who brought him, they could tell me whereabouts on the north bank they picked him up,’ Ned says.

  ‘But what if he saved himself the risk of a soaking and walked across the bridge instead?’ Rose says. ‘You’d never trace him then.’

  Ned sits bolt upright.

  ‘What is it?’ Rose asks, gazing up from his lap into a tangled auburn canopy.

  ‘He came across the river! He definitely came across the river.’

  ‘How can you be sure, ’Usband?’

  ‘Because I remember now: the back of his hose was soaked. I thought he’d wet himself. But he could either ’ave slipped getting in or out of the wherry or – more likely – the boatman ’ad some sport with him on the crossing. So they might well remember ’im.’

  Rose reaches out and lays a cautionary hand against her husband’s chest. ‘Promise me, if you find him, you won’t go back to your old ways,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to lose you to a noose, Ned Monkton.’

  Ned leans down and kisses her. ‘’Av’ no fear, Goodwife Monkton,’ he says gently. ‘This Ned’s a different man to the one he once was.’

  9

  For Nicholas and Bianca the first two days of the voyage across the Narrow Sea are like waiting for a jury to reach a verdict. Every time another sail is sighted, their hearts beat faster: is it a fast galleon dispatched to apprehend them?

  By Nicholas’s reckoning, the voyage should take less than three days. It ends up taking almost five. It is not the weather that delays them, as the sea is unusually benign. But a fisherman must make a living. Van der Molen meanders the tubby little vessel through waters he knows to be rich in fish. Nicholas and Bianca give as much assistance as they can without getting in the way, hauling on nets, shovelling the slippery silver bounty into casks of salt, washing the blood off the deck with buckets of brine.

  Even when they make landfall it is not really land at all, more like scraps of marshy carpet floating on the sea, with only the occasional stunted tree to break the bleak skyline. Eventually these islands off the Brabant coast close in, forming a recognizable river. Even so, Van der Molen announces they have another twelve leagues to run – perhaps a day’s travel, if the wind holds – before they enter the waters of the River Dieze.

  Bianca is worried about the letters of safe-passage and credit that Nicholas carries. She fears the reverse of the shock they had at Woodbridge.

  ‘If you are a recusant, and you’re fleeing abroad because your Catholic faith means you can’t practise in England any more, why are you carrying letters of safe-passage and credit from a queen’s minister?’

  Nicholas has thought this through. ‘Because I was his physician. Because I have cared for his child. Despite our different faiths, he feels bound to help me, knowing the accusations laid against me are false. He’s offering me a new start.’

  ‘Conscience? That doesn’t sound like the Robert Cecil I know.’

  ‘It’s close to the truth – and that is the best cover I can have.’

  That evening, as they eat salted fish and hard bread beneath the darkening sky, the herring buss rolling with a motion that has Bianca feeling permanently queasy, Nicholas asks Jan van der Molen how it is that a Protestant still calls a Catholic town his home. Just as they have since leaving Woodbridge, they communicate with a rugged but efficient mishmash of Dutch and English.

  ‘I could have left with all the other Lutherans and Calvinists – gone north into Holland,’ Jan says. ‘But I was born in Den Bosch. I’m damned if I’ll leave simply because the King of Spain, the Bishop of Rome or the Holy Roman Emperor says I must believe in their heresies.’

  ‘Do they not persecute you?’ Nicholas asks.

  ‘We keep our voices low and our faith to ourselves: those of us who remain. On the surface, we pretend to be good Catholics. But inside – well, you don’t eat a fine plump herring for the skin, do you?’

  When Nicholas translates this for Bianca, she laughs. After six years in Protestant England she
knows exactly what he means.

  Like all fishermen, van der Molen is at heart an optimist. It is only in the afternoon of the second day following their sighting of land that a town slowly begins to emerge from that hazy membrane between earth and sky. It appears to be moving slowly across the flat land, propelled by little wheels that turn out – as they draw closer – to be the turning sails of a multitude of windmills.

  The little vessel moors in the shadow of the Pickepoort, a magnificent multi-spired gatehouse set into the Den Bosch ramparts. Beyond the sloping walls and the modern brick bastions, the slate roofs of fine houses and the slender spires of churches pierce the wide summer sky. Nicholas tries again to offer Jan van der Molen money. He refuses. ‘It might be wiser if you avoid the obvious lodging places,’ he says. ‘The owners like to keep in with the Spanish by reporting on the movements of newcomers.’

  ‘Where would you suggest?’

  ‘Why, my house, of course. If you don’t want the citizens of Den Bosch to think all Englishmen and their wives stink of gutted herring, you’ll need the services of my Gretie and her washing tub.’

  With a grateful smile, Nicholas hoists the bags over his shoulder and nods to Bianca to follow. As he crosses the wooden bridge into the town and the shadow of the Pickepoort swallows him, he has the sense that his exile has truly begun.

  Across town, Hella Maas sits in the doorway of a merchant’s house in the Markt square, huddled in her Beguine’s gown. She holds her arms tight around her body, like a vagrant trying to stay warm in winter. The stone step is brutally hard against her flesh. She is hungry. She hasn’t eaten much above a stolen bun for days, and she aches as though she’s been beaten. She takes in the scene before her in stiff jerks of her head, as though she fears calamity might pounce the moment she relaxes her guard. She studies the fine façade of the cathedral of St John the Evangelist, and the surrounding merchants’ houses with their zigzag eaves like dragons’ teeth or a flight of stairs, seen end-on. She envies the pigeons that fly up to settle upon them, because – if she could follow – she would climb those stairs into the pale-pink wash of the Brabant evening and sit with the angels amongst the clouds.