The Heretic's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  ‘Your Honour, Sir Fulke Vaesy wrote a letter to the Privy Council denouncing my friend, Dr Nicholas Shelby, who is physician to the young son of Sir Robert Cecil. I went to his house on St Andrews’s Hill to make him retract the calumny.’

  ‘And that’s when you murdered him,’ the Crown’s sergeant interjects helpfully.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Did Sir Fulke agree to your request?’

  ‘He did so agree, yes.’

  ‘By your gentle persuasion, no doubt?’ More laughter from the public. ‘And then you killed him.’

  ‘I had words with him, yes. But I laid not a hand upon him, sir – not until I went to leave. Then he drew upon me. It was a poniard.’ Ned places his two palms a foot apart. ‘About this long. He sought to strike me with it. I pushed him. He fell against his desk. His brains was dashed out.’

  Rose smiles proudly from the public cordon. She had counselled him to speak simply and plainly, not to try to impress with airs that might only make him risible in the eyes of the court. He has not let her down.

  The magistrate shuffles through the written depositions before him. He finds what he is looking for. ‘It is written here that the accused cites the manservant of Sir Fulke Vaesy as a witness. Is he here?’

  ‘No, Your Honour,’ says the sergeant. ‘He is not to be found.’

  ‘The constables have made a proper search for this… Ditworth person?’

  ‘No effort has been spared, Your Honour. All we can ascertain is that he has taken the opportunity of his master’s demise to leave the city. It seems that, as Sir Fulke’s servant, he was ill used.’

  ‘So we have only your word that you did not assault the victim,’ the magistrate says, addressing Ned with a doubting eye.

  ‘That is how it passed, Your Honour. I ’ave sworn to it, on the Bible.’

  Another ruffle through the documents, a downward jab of the magistrate’s thumb as though squashing a woodlouse. ‘Ah, here it is: an account that tells me you are well known on Bankside as a drunk and a brawler. A Constable Willders reports that on numerous occasions you fought with the watch when leaving taverns in an inebriated state. You were so quarrelsome, in fact, that they paid you money to go quietly to your bed, rather than risk injury to themselves. The warden at St Thomas’s Hospital writes that you were frequently to be found intoxicated in the mortuary crypt. How say you?’

  Ned finds an unexpected dignity. To Rose, he seems to grow even taller, causing her to make tearful honking noises that draw a frown of irritation from the magistrate.

  ‘That was my place of work, Your Honour,’ he says calmly. ‘All day an’ into the night, amongst the dead. That it made me quarrelsome, I do not deny. But that was before Master Nicholas and Mistress Bianca found me. I was a different man then. I was angry. So might you be, with only the forgotten dead for company.’

  ‘And I would suggest the accused is angry still,’ the sergeant says. ‘So angry, in fact, that he forced a supposed confession from Sir Fulke Vaesy and then beat him to death.’

  ‘Where is this letter you forced Sir Fulke to make, before you killed him?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him, Your Worship,’ Ned objects. ‘The desk did.’

  More guffaws from the public, silenced by a mournful glare from the magistrate.

  ‘Where is the letter?’

  ‘It is sent to Lord John Lumley, at Nonsuch Palace. I gave it into the hands of his secretary at his London house on Woodroffe Lane. I have placed my trust in Lord Lumley to lay it before the Privy Council.’

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘So that Dr Shelby can be zonerated.’

  ‘Exonerated of what?’ the magistrate asks.

  ‘Seeking to poison our sovereign lady Elizabeth, the queen.’

  A single gasp from someone in the crowd. Then almost complete silence, freighted with appalled expectation.

  The only sound comes from Rose: a tearful porcine snort. For a moment she is too taken by compassion for her great, dumb, cod’s-headed magnificent bear of a husband to comprehend the implication of what he’s just said. But not for long. The look on the magistrate’s face sees to that. Then she can only watch and listen with mounting horror as everything unravels.

  The magistrate says ponderously, ‘Are you informing the bench that Sir Fulke Vaesy had denounced this Shelby person for attempting regicide?’

  Ned looks at him blankly. ‘I know not what that means, Your Worship.’

  ‘Killing his queen, man! Killing the anointed sovereign set over him by God.’

  ‘But he didn’t, Your Worship.’

  The sergeant chips in helpfully, ‘That is what the papist rogue Lopez claimed when he faced the same charge.’

  ‘Where is this Dr Shelby now?’ the magistrate demands to know. ‘Is he in the court?’

  The clerks look around expectantly. When no answer comes, the magistrate returns his bespectacled gaze to Ned. ‘Accused, where is this Shelby now?’

  ‘He has gone abroad, Your Worship.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He did not care to tell us, Your Worship.’

  Rose is silently screaming at her husband not to say another word. But Ned is still suffering from the deluded belief that telling the truth will save him.

  The magistrate leans slowly forward from his chair, the deep trailing cuffs of his gown pooling around his hands as he spreads his fingers on the counter to balance himself. ‘So that the jury may be spared any confusion, answer truthfully to the following.’

  ‘Yes, Your Honour.’

  ‘Sir Fulke Vaesy wrote a letter to members of the Privy Council denouncing the physician Shelby for being involved in a plot to poison the queen. True or false?’

  ‘True, Your Honour.’

  ‘The physician Shelby then flees abroad, omitting to tell you, his servant, where he has gone. True or false?’

  ‘I’m not his servant, Your Honour. I’m his friend.’

  ‘The friend of a man who seeks to murder his queen,’ the prosecuting sergeant slips in.

  ‘But he didn’t—’ Ned tries to protest.

  ‘TRUE or FALSE?’ shouts the magistrate.

  ‘Well, Your Honour, it is true he went out of the realm without saying where he was bound, but—’

  The magistrate cuts him off. ‘And following this secretive departure, you go in a hot temper to Sir Fulke Vaesy’s house on St Andrew’s Hill and there beat from him a retraction, before killing him in an unprovoked fury. Do you see why I might distrust your plea of not guilty?’

  When put to him like that, the colour drains from Ned’s ruddy face. He raises his hands slightly, as if to add weight to the denial he is about to make. The chains on his wrist-irons jangle loudly around the still chamber.

  ‘It weren’t like that, Your Honour. That’s not ’ow it was.’

  A flick of one hand from the magistrates, and the two guards, who until now have been standing a little way either side of Ned, move even closer.

  ‘I have heard all I need to hear in this particular matter,’ the magistrate says. Then to the jury, ‘You may begin your deliberations. You will bear in mind that the servant, Ditworth, is not present to lend any credence to the accused’s claims that he acted in self-defence. More importantly, the denunciation of a suspected regicide – in these present times of danger – is a duty that lies upon every Englishman. If that duty can be hindered by the threat of violence, Her Grace the queen must live every day in peril. The fact that the subject of the denunciation in question has fled abroad speaks for itself. The accused is clearly guilty of the felony with which he is charged.’

  It takes all of two minutes for the jury to act upon the justice’s direction, two minutes during which Rose has to be restrained by the court clerks. Ned stands there silently, manacled like old Sackerson the bear waiting for the mastiffs to be released for another baiting. Ned Monkton, taverner, resident in the parish of St Saviour’s, Bridge Ward Without: guilty of manslaughter as charged.

&nb
sp; ‘I have a number of sentences at my disposal,’ the magistrate says in a tone that leaves no doubt he intends to discard all but the severest. ‘You should prepare your soul and your conscience for a higher judgement than I can make upon you, Ned Monkton, but execution is inevitable—’

  Rose’s screaming drowns out much of what follows. Ned doesn’t hear it, either, because he’s too occupied trying to drag himself towards his wife while the guards and several of the clerks hang onto his chains to prevent him. Thus the magistrate finds himself speaking to a court that isn’t listening to him.

  ‘I will, however, postpone formal sentencing,’ he continues, ‘until the Privy Council has been afforded the opportunity to question the guilty man under hard press. It is true he may have acted out of misguided loyalty to his friend the physician by forcing Sir Fulke to retract his accusations. But he may also have killed him for something more troubling: sympathy for the intended crime for which this Dr Shelby was denounced. In which case they may choose to further arraign the felon for treason. Remove the condemned man to the Marshalsea!’

  29

  Aman and his wife cannot live on air, certainly not in a city like Padua where a fine coat of silk and damask in broad red-and-black stripes is the very least you need to be taken seriously. Bruno has purchased one on the back of the doge’s commission, and Nicholas feels even more of a poor relation, clad in the same worn white canvas doublet he has owned for years. He has noticed, too, how Bianca becomes a little truculent whenever they go out in public, judging herself against the standard set by Paduan women. Bruno steadfastly refuses all offers of payment for food and lodging, but with his purse close to depletion, Nicholas is in need of coinage. Bruno accompanies him to the local house of the Baldesi, a banking family based in Venice. A bill of exchange is drawn up with Robert Cecil’s letter of credit as security, to be redeemed one year hence in either London or Padua at an agreed rate. ‘You’re lucky I’m here with you,’ Bruno tells him. ‘The Baldesi like to stiff every foreigner in the city if they think they can get away with it.’ Nicholas withdraws just enough for their needs and a decent new gown for Bianca.

  Walking back to the house on the Borgo dei Argentieri, he keeps a wary eye open. It is not only the possibility of being robbed that concerns him. Somewhere in the city an agent of the English Privy Council might well be prowling, for he can think of no other reason why Grey-coat – as he now calls him – is here.

  Bianca has returned to the church, to ask the priest if he knows the man who came in halfway through the Mass and either hid himself amongst the other worshippers or slipped out again through another door. He doesn’t. When he is giving the Eucharist he is communing with God, not looking out for people taking inappropriate refuge from a quarrel that is none of his business.

  For Nicholas, it is hard not to imagine Grey-coat lurking in the shady lanes, watching him from the shadows. Will it be kidnap? Or a knife in the ribs? To a bounty-hunter sent by the likes of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the latter would be easier work – less effort. Bruno has laughed away his friend’s fears. But he’s hired three cousins of the Corios – the brothers who are casting the sphere’s cogs and gears in their foundry on the Borgo Socco – as temporary bodyguards. Just as a precaution.

  With enough coin in his purse to provide a modest but comfortable existence for himself and Bianca, Nicholas considers a return to the life of a student of medicine. He thinks: if I am to be an exile for a while, I would be a fool not to avail myself of the opportunities afforded by one of Europe’s foremost medical faculties. Over a jug of wine, he asks Signor Galileo to honour his promise to introduce him to Professor Fabrici at the Palazzo Bo. Bruno asks if might be allowed to accompany them – as leader of the Arte dei Astronomi. ‘When I am Master of the Spheres to His Serene Highness,’ he tells them in all seriousness, ‘they’ll have my statue there. I should take the opportunity to assess the best place for it. I don’t intend to spend eternity on a plinth behind the privy.’

  The university is a handsome building in the classical style, with Roman pillars and an airy, colonnaded central courtyard open to the vivid blue sky. Arriving early, they are directed towards an open entrance through which echoes the sound of sawing and hammering. Nicholas wonders if perhaps the august professor of anatomy likes to take his ease repairing the university’s tables and pews, or building furniture for the rector. But as he passes through the doorway he is brought up with a jolt of astonishment.

  He is standing in the entrance of what appears to be an elliptical playhouse. Lit by stands of tallow candles, tiers of concentric wooden balustrades curve away on either hand, each set back a little from the one below, rising towards the high domed ceiling. Each has its own exterior staircase and a narrow door giving onto a gallery so narrow that only one man may stand between the back wall and the edge without the risk of tumbling into space. The top two tiers are nothing but naked wooden beams, workmen’s planks and scaffolding thrown across the void. Nicholas can see labourers perched precariously some thirty feet above the floor, working with mallet, awl and plane. It dawns on him that this whole edifice is indeed a theatre. But no living actor will ever declaim upon the man-sized rectangular platform that is the focal point for those standing in these galleries. There will be no stirring victory speeches given here, no tragedies played out to their tearful end. This, he realizes, is a theatre in which the leading character is already dead. The player who lies here will give a very different performance from any Nicholas has seen at the Rose theatre on Bankside. He will reveal to his audience not emotion, but the inner complexities of his own body. This is an anatomical theatre, designed for dissection.

  At once he is taken back to a hot Lammas Day in London. In a stuffy, airless guildhall – quite unlike this magnificent construction – he is attending a lecture given by the holder of the chair of anatomy at the College of Physicians, Sir Fulke Vaesy. He is looking down on the dissecting table as a small, cheery, bald-headed barber-surgeon, working to Vaesy’s instructions, pares back the muscles and sinews, the blood vessels, connective tissue and fat around the inner organs of an infant boy, whose name he will not learn until much later. So much of what has happened to Nicholas in the intervening years can be traced back to that one moment. He recalls now what Hella Maas said to him at Besançon: You know the danger that lurks in seeking knowledge, I know you do. I can sense it in you. And he remembers his reply, clearly: It was a lack of knowledge that brought me misery, not a surfeit of it.

  Seeing in his mind the scalpel slice into the dead child’s waxy white flesh, he thinks now that even if he had known what was to come, it would have changed nothing. All the knowledge in the world isn’t enough to prevent one single hour running inexorably into the next.

  An unrestrained rustic cough from Galileo brings Nicholas out of his reverie. In the centre of the theatre Professor Fabrici is in conversation with an architect in a sober gown. They are poring over plans and diagrams. The anatomist is a compact little man of around sixty, with a high round forehead, arched eyebrows and a neatly trimmed iron-grey beard.

  ‘Magister Galileo,’ he says, looking up as the mathematician approaches, ‘have you come to argue with Signor Sarpi here about his calculations? You’re a little late. We can’t ask the carpenters to tear it all down and start again.’

  ‘Heaven forefend, Magister Fabrici,’ Galileo says. ‘I’d hate to delay the opening of the most expensive butcher’s shop in Padua. I look forward to buying my sausages and my hams here, just as soon as the Podestà declares it open.’ He lays a hand on Nicholas’s shoulder. ‘May I present to you Signor Nicholas Shelby, from England. He is physician of some reputation there, I understand. He has recently arrived in the city.’

  The curiosity gleams in Fabrici’s old eyes. ‘We have a few of your nation here at the university, Dr Shelby,’ he says pleasantly. ‘Fewer, of course, since England abjured the true faith and turned to heresy. Some want to learn, but for the most part they tend to prefer the
sightseeing – rich fellows with too much time on their hands. Which are you, if I may be so bold as to ask?’

  ‘Definitely the former, Magister,’ Nicholas assures him. Then, looking around at the galleries, he says, ‘This is remarkable. We have nothing like it in England. Our College of Physicians thinks that getting one’s hands bloody is the preserve of a tradesman. They leave it to the barber-surgeons.’

  ‘It was the same here until not so very long ago, young man. As you can see, I have shaken things up a little. Have you any practical experience in surgery?’

  ‘After Cambridge, I served as a physician in the Low Countries—’ He stops mid-sentence, conscious that he’s about to put his head into a noose. If he admits his ministrations were to the Protestant forces of the House of Orange, he is going to fatally undermine his claim to be a recusant fugitive. ‘I was idealistic – I thought I might bring healing to the people of a land ravaged by war. But I learned a lot.’ He glances up at the workmen on the scaffolding above. ‘For a start, I learned how to saw quickly; how to pull out bits of iron that had been driven into places they weren’t meant to be.’

  Fabrici looks at him with new respect. ‘Nothing to be reticent about, young man. The great Ambroise Paré made his reputation doing that, and we now count him amongst the finest of surgeons. You will be welcome to attend my lectures while you are here, Dr Shelby. With God’s will, we might teach each other a thing or two.’ He gives Nicholas a friendly tap on the shoulder. ‘If you are not pressed for time, I will be conducting a private tutorial on optics. Perhaps you would care to observe?’ He glances at Bruno. ‘Your friend, too. If he has the stomach for it.’

  ‘I am a son of Padua,’ Bruno assures him loftily. ‘I have the stomach of a lion.’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ says Fabrici, giving him a knowing smile.

  In a small chamber with a ceiling plastered and painted like a chapel, a dozen or so young men are gathered. They are a mix of nationalities, though Nicholas is the only Englishman. He and Bruno make polite small-talk until the professor arrives and calls them to gather around a table draped with a square of embroidered Bergamo linen. Prayers are said in Latin. Then Fabrici claps his hands and two servants enter. Each carries a small walnut chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The smaller box is laid in the centre of the table. The larger is set to one side and opened with a discreet little click of its brass lock. Inside is a collection of scalpels, lancets, trocars and probes, all lying on red silk.