The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  They reach the town of Montreux the day after the Feast of the Transfiguration. He knows this because Bianca tells him so. In England feasting the saints has long since been ruled a dangerous superstition, an offence against the queen’s religion. Now Bianca takes great delight in acknowledging these holy days, something she has previously had to do in secret.

  Montreux itself is staunchly Protestant, governed by the Swiss and full of Huguenot exiles from Italy. Yet still Nicholas does not feel safe. He cannot shake the sense of being watched. In the street, every eye that turns his way – no matter how casually – heightens his conviction that they are being followed. When he tracks down a merchant who trades with England, in order to top up his purse on Robert Cecil’s letter of credit, he comes away with the nagging feeling that he’s fixed his presence here for everyone to see.

  But there is an even greater concern now occupying his mind: crossing the mountains. From their rented room in a hostelry on the lakeside, they have a breathtaking view of the snow-clad peaks across the water, jagged rents in the sky capped by a tumult of white cloud.

  ‘How in the name of Jesu are we going to cross those?’ he asks the owner of the hostelry, an Italian Protestant refugee from Lombardy. After Bianca’s tuition over so many weeks, he finds he can converse adequately in the man’s tongue, even if his accent raises a smile.

  ‘Bravely, or not at all,’ the man replies. ‘There are more bones up there than rocks.’

  But it turns out that he’s only having a joke at the Englishman’s expense. The great pass of St Bernard is open. And there is a hospice in the monastery at the highest point, where pilgrims can rest after the ascent.

  ‘We ought to buy warm coats,’ Bianca suggests. ‘Even at its best, it will be no warmer than a winter’s day in Milan.’

  ‘How distant from here?’ Nicholas asks.

  ‘Four days to the pass. One to cross. We could be in Italy by the twelfth, Pavia six days later.’

  ‘Is there a saint’s day for that?’ Nicholas asks mischievously.

  ‘There’s bound to be,’ Bianca replies. ‘There’s a saint’s day for everything.’

  And if there isn’t, there ought to be, she thinks. It should be called St Bianca’s Day. Because, at Pavia, Hella Maas will continue on to Rome. And if I don’t merit sainthood by then, I never will.

  In fact Montreux holds them for three days. There is no dissent. Foot leather needs repairing or replacing, tired joints need resting, and even Hella Maas accepts that you cannot march resolutely towards Judgement Day and expect to get there promptly on blistered feet.

  When Bianca wakes on the third morning she leaves Nicholas asleep and goes down to the lake. She walks along the shore, marvelling at the view. The mountains wear two faces: one stark against the sky, the other reflected in the shimmering water. Their cold, magnificent mystery makes her think back to the night when Hella stood over her on the bank of the raging torrent, her face frozen in the lightning flash. It had the same unfathomable indifference in it, the same age-old disregard for the petty trials of mere mortals.

  Did she intend to let me fall? Bianca wonders. Or was I so frightened that my mind saw danger everywhere? Hella could have done it, had she wished; no one would have been any the wiser. So if she has ever really intended me harm, she could have taken her chance at that moment. There would have been none better.

  The thought only partly reassures. There is still the matter of the maid’s claimed precognition. Bianca remembers the images of the bloated sinners in the painting at Den Bosch and the torments they were suffering, each dependent upon the sin committed. Then she thinks of the naked drowned corpse of the man called Donadieu, and the malevolent-looking toad squatting on his dead white flesh. She shivers. What if their strange companion is right?

  She walks on, gauging how much longer she must suffer Hella’s presence. She has often considered abandoning her. But Nicholas is right: a maid alone on the road would have enough real life-threatening dangers to face without considering supernatural ones. They made a promise to her in Den Bosch, and neither of them is the sort to break promises. Once we have passed through the mountains… Bianca repeats to herself as she walks.

  And the mountains give her pause enough. Overawed by their majesty, she wonders how it will be possible to cross such a barrier and emerge safely into the lush valley of the Po river. She knows she has the determination. But has she the courage? Has she the strength? From where she stands, the peaks look impassable. But then she thinks of the warm cobbles and the shady arcades of the Palazzo delle Erbe, of the handsome young Paduan gallants in their bright satin doublets, hose and half-capes strutting about like fighting cocks, and the maidens as chaste as nuns on the outside but still contriving to smoulder even under the chaperone’s watchful scowl. She will find a way.

  Turning reluctantly away from the breathtaking view across the lake, she sets off on the short walk back to their lodgings.

  When Bianca opens the door of the chamber she is expecting Nicholas to be up and about. He is not. And once again – just as in Reims – she is unable to fully comprehend what she sees before her.

  The shutters are drawn. Shafts of sunlight slice into the shadowy interior, falling across the bed like molten steel running in the mould.

  She left Nicholas dozing. And he is still there in the bed, his head turned sideways on the pillow, his wiry black hair tousled, his close-cut beard making a dark archipelago of his chin. But he is not alone.

  Lying against him, one arm thrown casually like a lover’s across his chest, is Hella Maas.

  21

  Standing in the doorway of their chamber, Bianca can only stare in disbelief at the bed, and at her husband sleeping the slumber of the innocent, while a young maid – whose own innocence she is rapidly beginning to question – lies next to him in a pose of stomach-churning familiarity.

  Hella lifts her head a little from the coverlet. ‘Quiet, Mistress Bianca. You’ll disturb him,’ she whispers without the slightest edge of guilt in her voice, and so close to the nape of Nicholas’s neck that in her own mind Bianca can smell his hair, imagine her own breath ruffling the thin black curls of down that disappear between his shoulders.

  Bianca counts slowly to three, partly to stop herself flying at the audacious little drab, partly to savour the sudden image of her mother in the kitchen at Padua mixing her poisons: This one for giving a rival in love the breath of a diseased dog… this one for making her wind intolerable in polite company… and this one for when all else fails, and you want to do away with her entirely.

  On three, Bianca slams the door behind her loudly enough to wake the sacred dead in every churchyard in Montreux.

  Nicholas sits up so quickly his left shoulder sends Hella’s body rolling across the bed. Blinking, he stares at Bianca, then at Hella, who is trying to make herself prim by folding her legs under herself and clasping her hands in her lap, like a novice awaiting a lecture from her abbess.

  ‘Jesu! Bianca, what are you…? What’s…?’

  ‘If you are about to ask me what’s happening, Husband,’ Bianca says coldly, ‘I suggest you ask Mistress Doomsday here. I’d rather care to know myself.’ She fixes the woman she is now convinced is her rival with a gaze bordering on murderous.

  ‘You were not here to comfort him,’ Hella says, as though she’s been poorly rewarded for performing a necessary service. ‘He was dreaming – a bad dream. I meant only to comfort him.’

  ‘Were you dreaming, Husband?’

  Nicholas shakes the sleep from his eyes. ‘In truth, I was. A demon – like one of those on the altarpiece at Den Bosch. It was half-human, half-mule, and it was pushing us up a mountain, jabbing at us with a fiery trident. When we reached the top there was nowhere to go, other than to plunge down into a great machine in the valley below that was grinding people into dust.’ He gives a tentative, self-deprecating laugh. ‘It must have been something I ate last night.’

  ‘You see,’ says Hella tri
umphantly, ‘even in sleep we cannot escape the warnings of what lies ahead.’

  ‘Oh, spare me the false necromancy,’ Bianca snarls. ‘Come with me!’

  She seizes the younger woman by the sleeve and drags her out of the lodgings and into the early-morning air. On the shore, fishermen are preparing their nets. They give the two women not a single glance.

  ‘Let go of my arm, Mistress Bianca,’ Hella pleads. ‘You’re hurting me. Why are you so angered?’

  ‘Why am I… angered? Why does the sun rise every morning?’ Bianca looks around at the mountains as though seeking inspiration from them. ‘Shall we begin with the intimacy I’ve just this moment witnessed in our chamber?’

  ‘I told you: I was only comforting Nicholas.’

  ‘It is not your place to comfort my husband.’

  Hella gives her a sullen look. ‘And as such, he deserves obedience.’

  Bianca considers slapping her. She decides against it, if only because she thinks it would be a shame to sully the pristine landscape with an act of violence.

  ‘I know you think you owe Nicholas your life,’ she says, trying to calm herself by slowing her speech, ‘but it was I who wielded that bale-hook in Den Bosch, and don’t you forget it. This has gone far enough.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Hella protests.

  ‘Do you really think I don’t know what you’re about? I can see through you like the very cheapest Bankside drab.’ Bianca forcibly turns the maid to look out across the shining water. ‘Do you see those mountains? We have to cross those, if Nicholas and I are to reach Padua and you are to reach Rome. After all your mischief since Reims, I have tolerated your presence only because my husband is too much of a decent man to abandon you to the dangers of a solitary journey. If you want our continued protection, then you will make no further sport with him. If you do, I can promise you this: that dream Nicholas said he was having will come true – but the demon with the fiery trident will be me, and the one plunging off the summit to be ground into dust will be you. In Southwark they call me the one witch no one dares hang. So if it’s to be a contest over whose enchantments are the more powerful, I can predict this with absolute certainty: you, Mistress, will be the loser.’

  Her anger spent, Bianca lets go of Hella’s sleeve. She steadies her breathing.

  The maid rubs her arm where Bianca’s fingers have driven into the flesh. Still gazing at the mountains across the lake, the sunlight turning the snow to gold, she says, with a studied compassion that turns Bianca stomach to ice: ‘I understand why you’re distraught, Mistress. But I am the last person you should blame… now that you are with child.’

  22

  Bankside, 10th August 1594

  Ned Monkton sits in the stern of Giles Hunte’s wherry, wringing his huge hands as though trying to rub a stain out of his flesh. The good weather has broken. Across the river, ragged grey clouds drift over the stunted spire of St Paul’s church. He wonders if he should stop there first, to pray for God’s guidance in what he knows he must do.

  ‘Something amiss, Master Ned?’ Hunte asks as he leans into his oars. ‘You look ill at ease.’

  What to tell him? Ned wonders. That I feel guilty at having lied to Rose about where I’m going? Or that I fear what I may do when I get there?

  So Ned just grunts and, as Hunte knows – if only from what he’s heard, rather than from personal experience – if Ned Monkton grunts when you ask him a question, don’t press him for an answer.

  As the wherry makes its way across the river, Ned thinks of how much he owes to the man whose future he is on his way to protect. When he considers his former life, spent in the mortuary for the deserving poor at St Tom’s, with only the dead and the bottle for company, an angry demon that most decent folk feared to be around, he knows that were it not for Nicholas Shelby he would still be wrapping those corpses in their winding sheets, bundling them into the single reuseable coffin that served as their means of transport between the mortuary and the graveside, and unceremoniously tipping them out into the waiting earth. As a consequence, he is loyal beyond measure to his friend. He would kill for him. Has killed for him, though only in defence of Nicholas’s own life. And one way or the other – regardless of what he has promised Rose – he is determined to make Fulke Vaesy publicly confess his treacherous slanders.

  Bidding curt thanks to Hunte at the water-stairs and walking – briskly for such a large man – up St Andrew’s Hill, Ned is not surprised when Ditworth refuses him entry to Vaesy’s house.

  ‘Go away. I shall call the constable,’ the servant says, staring in terror at him from behind the little grille. ‘You’ve no cause to be troubling a gentleman of Sir Fulke’s station.’

  ‘But he’s not a gentleman, is he?’ rumbles Ned, peering in like an ogre in a story told to frighten children. ‘An’ you an’ I both know he treats you no better than a ship’s master may treat a blackamoor.’

  ‘I can’t open the door,’ says Ditworth wretchedly. ‘Sir Fulke will make free with his cane, and I may not leave him ’cause I’m indentured.’

  ‘Then I’ll sit outside his door for as long as it takes to scare away those last few clod-pates who’ve yet to see ’im for the charlatan he is. How will he feed his indentured servant then, Master Ditworth? Do you want to starve with him? Go, tell him that.’

  A short while later, Ned is standing in Vaesy’s study. The once-great anatomist eyes him warily.

  ‘I thought I’d seen the last of you,’ he says, his patrician face showing no sign of fear.

  ‘You would ’ave – if you’d done what I asked the last time I was here: recant your charge ’gainst Dr Shelby.’

  ‘And do you really believe I’m going to do that now, just because you’ve barged into my home like the worst sort of Bankside house-diver?’

  Ned can feel the old rage rising in him. He tries to calm it by imagining his Rose a few months in the future, their newborn infant at her generous breast. ‘I told your fellow, Ditworth, that I would sit outside your door for as long as it took to scare away every patient you still ’ave,’ he says. ‘Look at me, Vaesy. Do you really believe they’ll chance it with someone of my size? You’ll be trying to trap the local cats inside a week. When they’ve gone, you’ll either ’ave to eat poor Ditworth or throw yourself on church charity – you, a knight of the realm.’

  ‘Linger on my doorstep and I’ll have you taken up for a vagrant.’

  ‘I’ll come back.’

  ‘Then I’ll raise a suit against you.’

  ‘You ’aven’t the money.’

  Vaesy stares at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Why is this so important to a common rogue like you?’

  ‘Because Dr Shelby turned me from a common rogue into a man who knows ’is right from wrong. Unlike some gentlemen I could name.’ Ned tries to make himself smaller, less threatening. ‘Look,’ he says, gentling his great voice, ‘there is a course that could serve us both.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘Write the letter an’ sign it. But put in something about you hearing the accusation from some other fellow, who mistook Dr Shelby for a different man entirely. A simple mistake. You was only doing what you thought at the time was your duty. The Privy Council can’t blame you for that, can they? That way Master Nicholas is cleared, an’ you get to look like an honourable man with a conscience.’

  Vaesy comes round his desk. He moves stiffly, as though even the air he walks through is an adversary. Looking down on him, Ned can see just how threadbare he looks, his once-smart doublet patched and poorly washed. One of the ribbons around the knees of his hose has a tear in it. His severe face is deeply lined, the eyes tired. But there is still defiance in them, and the bitter anger of a once-powerful man reduced to an insignificant shadow.

  ‘Why should I consider, for so long as a single breath, doing what you demand?’ he asks.

  ‘Because it’s better than losing even the little that remains. There can’t be many fools left in London s
till willing to shell out for your quackery, Vaesy. But there’ll be none at all once the word gets around that you’ve an enemy like me haunting your doorstep. An’ on the chance there is still a clod-pate or two sick enough – foolish enough – to call on you for physic in their time of need, well, you won’t be able to visit their sickbed, will you? Especially when it’s dark.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You claim to be a learned man. Work it out for yourself.’

  ‘Are you threatening me with harm, Monkton? Me, a knight of the realm – a gentleman?’

  ‘Let’s just say the night-watch can’t be everywhere at once.’

  Vaesy sneers. ‘If any harm comes to me, if my body is found slain, where do you think the magistrates will look for the culprit? Ditworth will lead them straight to the door of whatever hovel you hail from. Have you thought of that, you oversized cock-pimp?’

  To his astonishment, Ned lets the insult wash over him. He imagines a terrible silence must be falling upon Southwark at this moment; if anyone there had dared to call him the husband of a whore, blood would be about to flow. Perhaps Rose is right, he thinks. Perhaps I really am a new Ned. He leans over Vaesy and whispers, in a very civil voice, ‘There won’t be a body, Sir Fulke. I’m a Banksider – I know where to put one into the river so as it never comes out again.’

  For a moment Vaesy does nothing. He does not look up at Ned; and Rose, if she were here, would put his stillness down to the once-great anatomist finally accepting that he’s been bested by the better man. Ned himself simply waits, not too sure what he will do if Vaesy calls his bluff.