The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  Ned leaves the talking to his wife. She has a better way with words.

  ‘Tell us the truth, you vile arseworm,’ Rose snarls, her face turning crimson. ‘Was it you who made the false denunciation against Dr Nicholas Shelby? Admit it, as God is your judge!’

  Vaesy stares at her as though he cannot quite believe what he is hearing. He has never been spoken to in such a manner, certainly not by a female of the lower orders. ‘Christ’s holy nails – you’re a woman!’ he says in bewilderment.

  Rose glances at her husband. ‘See, Ned? He ’asn’t forgotten his ’natomy. That’s proper university learnin’ for you, that is.’

  Ned can almost hear Mistress Bianca in her voice. Knowing it would ruin their advantage, he struggles not to laugh.

  Vaesy says contemptuously, ‘What is this insult? I am Sir Fulke Vaesy. I have no cause to make an account of myself to some bawd’s moll.’

  Rose has to put out a hand to stay her husband. She says, ‘You’ll answer plainly, if you know what’s good for you. Otherwise I shall be ’ard-pressed to stop my Ned here from giving you a private lecture in dissection.’ She nods towards Vaesy’s groin. ‘Startin’ with your pizzle!’

  Vaesy waves his quill at the hapless Ditworth. ‘Go – fetch the constable!’

  The servant looks up at Ned in despair. ‘May I go, sir, as my master commands?’

  Ned says, ‘By all means, Master Ditworth. I ’ave no quarrel with you. Go, fetch the constable.’ Then, to Vaesy: ‘But by the time he gets here, you won’t be in any state to tell him why your blood’s splashed all over the wainscoting. Now sit down, an’ if you’re truly the gentleman you seem to think you are, answer my wife properly when she asks you a civil question.’

  Less than an hour later Ned and Rose sit in the stern of a wherry as the boatman pushes with one oar against the Blackfriars stairs to point them in the direction of Bankside. The wind has risen. The wherry jolts to the slap of spiteful little waves. Ned leans over to shield Rose from the spray. Their mood is as grey as the river. ‘You should ’ave let me throttle him,’ he says. ‘What use is a confession, if he won’t put right what he’s done?’

  ‘Because I don’t want our child to grow up knowing his father was a felon ’anged for murder, that’s why.’

  Rose lays her head against the breast of Ned’s jerkin. She is prouder of him than he will ever know. But the greater emotion she feels is relief.

  Vaesy has admitted to them that he was the author of Master Nicholas’s misfortune. He even appeared proud of it. But with pride had come a return of his former patrician self. He had called their bluff. He had refused to commit to paper any statement that his claims were baseless.

  For a terrible instant Rose had feared Ned was going to smash him to a pulp. She could see the inner battle he was fighting, as clear as day: a terrible stillness had come over him, save for his breathing, which was deep, slow and rasping, like a man close to expiring from flux in the lungs. To her joy, the better Ned had won.

  ‘I could ’ave made him write a letter of retraction. I know I could,’ Ned says angrily as the wherry rolls alarmingly with the waves. ‘You could ’ave read it to me, so that I could know it was proper.’

  ‘Vaesy is a serpent, Ned,’ she says. ‘Even if he’d written a letter, he’d ’ave told the magistrates we forced him to it.’

  Ned knows his wife is speaking the truth. The way Vaesy had so contemptuously refused to put right the wrong he had done has set a bitter fire raging inside him. Vaesy had called him a churl, a vagabond, a low-born of no consequence – told him there was not a law officer in the land who would believe a person such as him, over a knight of the realm. Ned had kept his fists by his side throughout, knowing in his heart that Vaesy was right. If he went to the Privy Council, they wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t even get a hearing.

  ‘What do we do, Wife? There must be something.’

  But Rose has no answer for him, which only adds to his despair. As the wherry fights its way towards Bankside, the knowledge of his own impotency stings Ned Monkton far more than any of Sir Fulke Vaesy’s insults.

  19

  The road is rising. The hills grow ever steeper. To ease the burden on the mules, the pace has slowed and only Bianca and Hella ride. Even though Nicholas feels as fit as he ever did on his father’s farm at Barnthorpe, his calves ache at the end of each day when they rest in a pilgrims’ hostelry, or in a barn, or even beneath a hedge – something he has only vague memories of doing after Eleanor’s death, when grief and drink had made a deranged vagrant out of him.

  They cross little stone bridges over torrents of mountain melt-water tumbling through narrow defiles. Knuckles of granite thrust out of wooded inclines like the tips of a reef breaking the surface of a dark-green ocean. They have almost reached the village of Mouthier-Haut-Pierre, where they will surrender the mules. Nicholas has walked ahead a little, to check the way from the next crest. Bianca can see him in the distance, silhouetted against the sky where the path leads between dense stands of fir trees.

  ‘Nicholas tells me that you have a brother still living,’ she says to Hella, suddenly weary of the silence.

  ‘Did I tell him that?’ she replies distractedly.

  ‘When we were resting in that forest near Troyes, you told him what had happened to your family, at Breda.’

  ‘If you say so, I must have done.’

  ‘I don’t mean to pry—’

  Hella looks down at her dust-covered leather overshoes. ‘I haven’t seen him for some time. He is a priest – was a priest. I think he lost his faith in God, after what happened.’

  ‘So too did Nicholas, when he suffered a great loss. When we are in pain it is easy to rail against His plan for us. But the pain passes – eventually.’

  Hella lifts her gaze to meet Bianca’s. There is a frightening coldness in it, which makes Bianca think she has intruded too deeply, struck some deep vein of suffering that runs through the maid’s memory and that she would prefer were not mined.

  ‘It will break his heart when he finds out,’ Hella says.

  ‘Your brother’s heart?’

  ‘No – your husband’s.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  For what seems like an age, Hella studies Bianca’s face, as though trying to recognize someone she remembers only from her childhood. Then she says, ‘It will break his heart when the child you are carrying is stillborn.’

  The heat goes out of the air with a rush. On either side of the track the forest turns from summer to winter in the passing of a single breath. Bianca almost reels at the cold cruelty in the maid’s voice. For a moment she is speechless. Then, through a jaw that seems to have fused itself to the rest of her skull, she says, slowly and with great resolve so that her voice does not falter, ‘I am not with child, Hella. I am sure I would know. And even if I was, why would you say such a vile and hurtful thing? Do you get pleasure from it?’

  But in Hella eyes there is no regret, only an intolerable pity.

  ‘It is right to speak the truth,’ she says. ‘I gain no pleasure from it. But once knowledge is let loose into the world, it must be accepted. Not denied.’

  With great effort, Bianca keeps her voice low – in case Nicholas, even at this distance, catches a hint of the tension between the two women.

  ‘Well, I think this knowledge of yours is nothing but a hateful trick, played only so that you can see the pain it causes people. You may have suffered in the past, Hella, but that is no reason to hurt people who wish only to help you. We didn’t have to let you come with us, you know. And to speak plainly, I rather wish we hadn’t.’

  But the maid seems not to have heard her. Or if she has, Bianca’s statement is lost on her. ‘How much of a disappointment will you be to him – barren after a stillbirth?’ she asks in a monotone voice. ‘How will he survive the loss of a wife and two children?’

  Suddenly the words Hella spoke in the chamber at Reims seem to fall out of the
sky around Bianca like the cast-out angels in the Den Bosch painting: heralds of torment to come. We see a dead child… a dead parent – or perhaps it is a dead womb… And then an even greater sense of dread seizes her. Then, Hella had spoken only of one child.

  ‘You said “a wife and two children”. Even if I was pregnant, how do you know about his Eleanor and the child she was carrying?’

  Hella smiles. ‘He told me.’

  For Bianca, this is even worse than Hella being able to see inside her husband’s mind, or her own for that matter.

  ‘He told you? When?’

  ‘At Besançon. When you went down to the river. We understand each other. You should let him go. Let me have him. He does not deserve more pain.’

  There is only so much a woman with blisters on her feet, who’s sure she stinks of mule, and has a mountain range ahead of her to cross, can suffer with equanimity. Bianca drops the reins of the mule she is leading. The beast immediately begins grazing at the roadside.

  ‘Listen to me, girl,’ Bianca hisses in a voice that would have silenced the entire taproom of the Jackdaw in an instant. ‘I don’t know what manner of sport you think you’re playing, but I am having none of it. I’ve spent too long on Bankside not to know a gulling when it’s in the offing. And I don’t fall for any of them. Whatever you think you’re achieving by this manner of talk, I can tell you it won’t work. You’re wasting your time. Nicholas and I have been through too much together to be sundered by a trickster, however sad her story. I’m not with child, do you hear? And when I am, it will be born to us healthy.’

  In that instant Bianca knows she has made herself a terrible hostage to fortune. In her mind she whispers the phrase Nicholas brought back from his journey last summer to the Barbary shore: inshā Allāh – if God wills it.

  But the cold pity in the other woman’s eyes is merciless.

  ‘I am sorry, Mistress Bianca, if you find what I have to say upsetting,’ Hella says. ‘All I know is that when the knowledge of something is out, it cannot then be erased. And to deny its existence would be a sin. Measure the hours how you will, the darkness will always come eventually.’

  ‘You’ve hardly spoken a word to Hella all day,’ Nicholas says. ‘Has some dispute passed between you?’

  They are in their lodgings at Mouthier-Haut-Pierre, in a house owned by Perrault the muleteer, business partner of Monsieur Boiseaux in Reims. Freed from their temporary Protestant identities, the former Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham are now grazing contentedly on good Catholic grass in a nearby field.

  A dispute? Bianca says inside her head. A dispute between Hella Maas and me? Do you think that while you were spying out the way ahead from the crest of that hill, we had a mild disagreement over my ability to bear a child with you? She clenches her jaw to stop her thoughts tumbling out and becoming words.

  ‘Hella speaks as if she likes to wound,’ she says. ‘I’ve borne it about as long as I can.’

  Nicholas is gathering a pile of laundry. Amongst the other services Perrault provides for weary pilgrims is the chance to wash their dusty, sweat-stained clothes in a nearby stream, or – for a single denier – have a washerwoman do it for them. Nicholas’s motive in discovering this has not been entirely domestic; his exploration of the town has enabled him to scan the approaches for a man in a grey coat, or any number of imaginary Privy Council watchers, all pointing their fingers in his direction and scribbling down messages to send to Attorney General Coke and Chief Justice Popham, messages that begin with the phase We have found him…

  Hella is out buying food from the town market, leaving the two of them alone for the first time in days. Bianca would prefer it if she never returned.

  ‘I don’t think she realizes,’ Nicholas says casually. ‘It’s as if other people’s sensitivities don’t exist for her. Don’t let it trouble you. We’re getting closer to leaving her every day.’

  Don’t let it trouble you. Bianca longs to have Nicholas take her hand – the way he does when he knows instinctively that she is in need of comfort. She wants his physician’s cure for her present malady: kissing her fingers one by one, then the tautness of the skin below the knuckles, then her palm, then her wrist, until the tension has gone out of her. But at this precise moment she fears that if he does, it will serve only to tear open the fragile net that holds in her rage.

  ‘Did she say something particular that’s brought on this distemper?’ he adds.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Husband.’

  ‘It matters to me. What was it?’

  ‘Women’s talk, that’s all.’

  ‘Nothing about how we sinners are all going to burn in hell before the month is out?’

  His clumsy attempt at parody is designed to make her smile. It almost succeeds.

  ‘I think she’s grown weary of that song, now that it no longer makes us shiver,’ Bianca says.

  ‘Then what is it?’

  Bianca takes a deep breath. ‘You told her about Eleanor and your child.’ It is said without recrimination. Just a bald statement of fact. And even before the words are out of her mouth, Bianca wishes she’d never spoken them. But it’s too late to take them back now. ‘You allowed her to see into one of the most important places in your heart. Why would you do that?’

  For a moment he’s flustered, unable to answer. He simply stands there, holding her dirty linen under-smock as though he’s been caught with a weapon at the scene of a killing.

  ‘It was at Besançon… when you went to wash your feet in the river. Hella was speaking of how searching after knowledge can lead to evil things happening.’

  Bianca frowns. ‘Well, we both know how true that is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Our life on Bankside has not been exactly what one might call tranquil, has it?’

  Nicholas fumbles for words that won’t make things worse.

  ‘Those events – the ones that happened to you and me in the past – nothing we did was ever with evil intent. You know that. God knows it.’

  ‘We are damned if He doesn’t,’ she says softly. ‘Just as Hella says.’

  He pretends he hasn’t heard; the same thought has occurred to him more than once. But the past they share cannot be undone.

  ‘When Hella and I spoke,’ he says, ‘I chose Eleanor as an example of how it was my lack of knowledge that brought ill upon us, not my searching after it.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I wish you had not spoken of Eleanor and your unborn child to that woman – even if it is not my place to say it. The more she knows about us, the less comfortable I feel. I don’t trust her.’

  Nicholas tries to set her mind at rest. ‘She’s merely a young maid who has suffered great hurt in her life: all her family dead – for which she blames herself. Her home is denied to her… she is an outcast… We must excuse her if she says things that provoke. It’s probably because she’s testing providence. When people spurn her, she takes it as proof that she’s right. It’s self-fulfilling.’

  ‘Excuse her? Why must I excuse her when she says hurtful things to me? Worse than hurtful! More to the point, why do you excuse her?’

  Bianca’s cheeks are flushed now. The anger has returned. It is threatening to boil over. She can hear Hella’s voice echoing around a dusty mountain track: How much of a disappointment will you be to him – barren after a stillbirth?

  She stands to her full height, throws her shoulders back, arches her neck. She thrusts her chin purposefully towards her infuriatingly compassionate husband. Sometimes she wishes he wasn’t so damnably considerate – of other people’s faults.

  She unties the string of her kirtle and lets it fall. As he stares at her nakedness she can think only of her poor blistered feet, and whether the sight of them will douse the fire the rest of her body lights in him. But the kirtle has somehow absorbed a little of her fury and coiled itself around her ankles to hide the blisters from his sight.

  ‘Knowledge, Husband?’ she says huskily. ‘Have all the knowled
ge of me you want – and then tell me to my face if it leads to evil.’

  Beyond the riverside town of Pontarlier the path rises into forested hills on the northern edge of Lake Geneva. The country is wild here. Boars grub noisily amid the trees. It is late afternoon and the three travellers are alone on the track. The air is close and threatening. Overhead, towers of grey, roiling thunderclouds billow upwards like smoke from the Devil’s fires. Shortly before the heavens open and wash them from the face of the earth, Hella – in the lead as usual – calls out that there is shelter ahead.

  The hamlet of mean houses and a single barn is scattered around an ancient bridge, a single arch thrown across a fast-flowing, deep-cut stream. Where the water surges over the rocks it is as white as bleached bone; in the depths, as black as sin. There is no one about, and the barn has holes in the roof. But there is a tavern, a sprawling, broken-backed place of slate and stone draped over a rise just above the bridge. Above the door is a painted sign of a bunch of grapes. But the real clue to the building’s existence lies in a little niche set into the wall, home to a carved effigy of St James, patron saint of pilgrims. In his weather-worn hand he holds his staff, while his blunted feet stand on scallop shells. Nicholas realizes the place is a former religious house turned over to earthier indulgences.

  They have had mixed fortune with their choice of places in which to lay their heads. When Bianca ducks below the crooked stone lintel, the tavern-mistress in her sounds a warning note about this one.

  She studies the dark interior with a professional eye while Nicholas pays for a room. It seems on the surface like any humble country establishment: low, smoke-blackened beams; rustic benches; foresters in leather jerkins and plain broadcloth, playing dice. None look to her like pilgrims, but then they haven’t seen any on the road for days. A hound lies close to the hearth, gnawing on a bone that still has a scrap of flesh left on it and eyeing them with suspicion. The customers glance at the three strangers with sullen curiosity. There seems to Bianca to be a sense of unspoken anticipation in the air. It is only when a plump, white-haired, flush-faced man wearing a threadbare black cassock comes down the stairs, pauses on the last step to tug his gown straight and lace one shoe, that she realizes the truth.