by Paul Doherty
Beneath her gauze veil Elizabeth’s face hardened. The present and the future held no terrors for her. But the past? The Queen chewed on carmine painted lips, her amber-coloured eyes snapping in anger. In matters of war and statecraft, Edward of England was as magnificent as he was in bed, but in the affairs of the heart, he was indiscreet. Elizabeth had her secrets and so did the King; the Queen was now determined to discover what these secrets were whilst keeping a firm grip on those matters she wished to hide.
‘What does Tenebrae know?’ she murmured.
Elizabeth recalled the pasty white face of the great necromancer. Those blue eyes, so light they gave his gaze a milky look like that of some old, blind but dangerous cat Elizabeth had glimpsed in the Tower menagerie. She stirred restlessly, picked up the jewel-encrusted goblet of hippocras and sipped carefully.
‘Your Grace!’
Elizabeth lifted her gauze veil and smiled brilliantly at the young man who had appeared so silently in front of her.
‘Good morning, Theobald. I was thinking of cats. You move as silently and dangerously as they do.’
The white-faced, dark-haired young man bowed imperceptibly.
‘I am Your Grace’s most faithful servant.’
‘So you are, Theobald Foliot.’
She studied Foliot’s long, narrow face, the eyes that never seemed to blink, bloodless lips above a square jaw, his hair cropped close to his head. He was dressed in a velvet jerkin of blue murrey with matching hose. The belt slung round his narrow waist carried dagger and sword. She watched him beat one leather glove against his hand. When he went to kneel, Elizabeth smiled and patted the seat beside her.
‘Sit down, Theobald.’
‘Your Grace is most kind.’
‘Your Grace could be even kinder.’ Elizabeth glanced sideways at him. ‘You, Theobald, are my principal clerk.’ She leaned towards him. ‘Tell me, now, Theobald, when was the last time you went on pilgrimage to Canterbury?’
In his opulent chamber that overlooked Saint Ragadon’s Hospice, Peter Talbot sat on the edge of his canopied bed, listening to the sounds from the street below. Small, thickset, with balding head and florid face, Talbot had a reputation as a shrewd and ruthless wool merchant with fingers in more pies than even the parish gossips knew. He had built up a trade which spanned the Narrow Seas, investing in banking, as well as procuring loans to the new king at Westminster. He should have been riding high but, on that morning of the Feast of Saint Florian, Peter Talbot was worried. He rubbed his face in his hands and stared down at the tip of his polished leather boots specially imported from Cordova. The words of the gospel ran through his mind. ‘What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world yet lose his immortal soul?’ Am I losing my soul, Talbot wondered? Why did he have this feeling of unease, a premonition of danger, of dark terrors lurking in the shadows? He was a leading burgess of the city; a man personally known to the King. However, since that incident with the witch, Talbot’s life had changed, and over something so simple! The merchant owned cottages in the parish of Hackington across the River Stour, a useful source of ready cash. One of his tenants had defaulted and Talbot’s young wife, impetuous as ever and with a quick eye to a profit, had turned the tenant out and leased the cottage to another.
‘She shouldn’t have done that,’ Talbot muttered to himself. ‘Isabella should have consulted with me!’
The first he knew about it had been the previous Sunday when they had attended Mass in Saint Alphage’s church. Talbot had been standing in the porch when a grimy-faced old woman, her stick tapping the flagstones, had crawled like a spider into the church. She’d stopped before him, hand outstretched.
‘Cursed be you!’ she shrieked. ‘Fat lord of the soil though you fly as high as the eagle you shall be brought as low as hell!’
Talbot had just stared in stupefaction, but then his brother Robert had told him that the old woman was Mathilda Sempler, a self-confessed witch and the former tenant of one of his cottages. Robert had laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.
‘Don’t worry,’ he brayed in his trumpet-like voice. ‘You are not frightened of some silly, old bitch, an evil-smelling crone!’
Isabella, her fair face flushed, eyes hot with anger, lips curled with disdain, had stood behind Robert nodding in agreement.
‘You can’t put her back!’ Isabella had almost spat the words out. ‘She wasn’t paying her rent. The cottage has been leased to another.’ She’d tossed her head and glared furiously at her husband. ‘Surely you won’t contradict me?’
Talbot had reluctantly agreed. The old crone had slithered away. He had forgotten about the incident until the curse, written in blood on the skin of an ass, had been found pinned to his front door. Talbot felt in his wallet and drew the skin out.
‘May you be consumed as coal upon the hearth.’ Talbot quietly mouthed the words.
May you shrink as dung upon the wall.
May you dry up as water in a pail.
May you become as small, much smaller than the hip bone of a flea.
May you fall
As low as me.
‘I didn’t know the old bitch could write,’ Talbot muttered.
He pushed the curse back into his wallet and sprang to his feet as his wife strode into the room. Talbot took one look at her pretty, shrewish face and groaned. This had been a May and December marriage. Isabella had appeared so coy yet so delightful in bed. Now she was shrewish, intent on amassing influence and power within this merchant’s house. She turned, hand on hip. Talbot admired her slender waist, the swell of the generous breasts under her tight-fitting, blue samite dress.
‘Husband, you should go down to the stalls.’
She went over to the window and stared down where the apprentices were busily putting out the goods ready for another day’s trading. Suddenly she started.
‘There’s someone stealing! Good Lord, two or three of them! Peter, quickly, come!’
Isabella rushed out of the room. Talbot grabbed his cloak and followed. Isabella was now at the foot of the long and steep stairs, beckoning him to come. Talbot went after her but then he tripped: for a few seconds his whole body rose in the air. He saw the steep fall below him and momentarily recalled Sempler’s twisted face and hissed curses. Then Peter Talbot fell through the air, his body spinning and turning, his head and neck striking the balustrade along the stairs until he crashed to the paving stones, head askew, neck completely broken.
Chapter 1
Kathryn Swinbrooke, physician, leech and apothecary in the King’s city of Canterbury, had started the day so well. She’d been up just after dawn. She’d scrubbed her body with a sponge soaked in soap from Castille and quickly dressed, pulling down over her petticoats a brown, workday, fustian dress. She now carefully arranged a white wimple around her head to hide the few greying hairs on the side of her temple, then carefully studied her face in the polished piece of steel which served as a mirror.
‘The eyes and face, Kathryn, tell you a lot about the body: its humours, the state of mind. Perhaps even a glimpse into the soul.’
Kathryn recalled her dead father’s kindly ways. A physician of repute, he was forever quoting all the medical axioms and aphorisms he had learnt. She stared into the mirror. Colum had called her complexion creamy.
‘More like chalk,’ Kathryn groaned to herself. But, there again, she always went pale after her monthly courses. Am I pretty, she wondered, feeling strangely guilty at this prick of vanity. Her eyes were large and dark, the eyebrows black and finely etched. Her nose was straight but turned up a little at the end; her father always used to tease her about this. He would tap her cheek.
‘Sure signs of stubbornness,’ he’d remark. ‘Generous lips and a firm chin.’
Kathryn glimpsed the few grey hairs. ‘You’ll pass scrutiny.’ She sighed. ‘Today I must do the accounts.’
‘You must also stop talking to yourself!’
Kathryn started. Thomasina her nurse, helpmate, confi
dante, counsellor and tyrant of a housekeeper stood in the door of the bed chamber. Kathryn studied her nurse’s plump, cheery face, brown button eyes and the way she wore her wimple, more like a war banner than a head-dress.
‘You look set for battle, Thomasina.’
Thomasina stared down at her hands and wrists, still covered with traces of flour.
‘Some people work and some people sit.’ Thomasina chirped, her fleshy cheeks quivering in indignation. She pointed to the window where the sun was streaming through the shutters. ‘Spring has truly come, Mistress. I have been out in the garden. The gelda roses are beginning to bud. Even the dog mercury,’ Thomasina preened herself on her knowledge of herbs, ‘is beginning to show life.’ She walked over and looked at Kathryn. ‘Which is more than I can say for some people round here!’ Breathing heavily, she sat down and took Kathryn’s hand in hers. ‘Your courses are finished?’
Kathryn smiled and rubbed her stomach. Thomasina leaned over and kissed her softly on the cheek.
‘Mine have long gone,’ she whispered. ‘I am an old tree with no sap.’
‘Nonsense!’ Kathryn squeezed Thomasina’s podgy fingers. ‘You will marry again, Thomasina. Mark my words!’
‘I have been married three times,’ Thomasina replied, blinking back her tears. She stared down at the rush-covered floor. ‘I just wish one of my children had survived, little Thomas or Richard. Sometimes,’ she glanced at Kathryn, and the tears welled over and ran down her cheeks, ‘sometimes, on a morning like this, out in the garden, with the cuckoo warbling high in the trees and the birds chattering like monks in a choir stall, I feel they are with me dancing about, but I blink and stare, it’s only the sunbeams.’ Thomasina breathed in noisily through her nose. ‘There, I have had my little moan.’ She wiped her eyes quickly with her fingers. ‘I look forward to your children.’
‘I am not married, Thomasina. Well,’ Kathryn caught her lip between her teeth. ‘Well, you do know what I mean?’
‘Aye.’ Thomasina put her arm around Kathryn’s shoulders. You are married all right, Thomasina reflected, to that cruel-hearted, bare-faced bastard, Alexander Wyville who beat and ill-treated you before swaggering off to join the rebels.
‘How long is it?’ Kathryn asked, as if she could read Thomasina’s thoughts.
‘Long enough.’
Kathryn sat up. Thomasina marked how drawn her face had become.
‘Do you think he’s dead?’
‘He’s been gone over a year, child,’ Thomasina replied. ‘He changed his name, but he’s gone to his own reward.’ She pinched Kathryn’s cheek playfully. ‘Forget him. If he has not returned within two years and a day I am sure that, if you apply to the archdeacon’s court, you will be given permission to marry again.’
‘But Thomasina,’ Kathryn declared coyly, ‘whom on earth could I choose?’
‘Well, there’s Roger Chaddedon,’ Thomasina said tartly, referring to the handsome widower and wealthy physician, who lived in Queningate. She caught Kathryn’s frown. ‘Of course,’ Thomasina cooed, ‘there’s always our Irishman.’
Kathryn grinned.
‘He dotes on you.’
‘He also dotes on his horses!’ Kathryn snapped.
‘He is handsome,’ Thomasina teased. ‘Tall, with strong legs. Men with strong legs are very good in . . .’
‘That’s enough!’ Kathryn snapped, rising to her feet. ‘As you say, spring is here. There are tasks to be done.’
Kathryn went downstairs and broke her fast on rabbit stew mixed with onions, small loaves smeared with butter and a jug of watered ale. Shortly afterwards her first patient arrived, Wartlebury, the miller’s apprentice, complaining of a wart on his face. Kathryn gave him an infusion of purple spurge. She also advised that if the love of his life would not take him, warts and all, then she didn’t really deserve his attention. Wartlebury fairly skipped from the house. Edith and Eadwig, the tanner’s twins, came next. They looked like peas out of the same pod. They always talked together and moaned loudly about pains in their stomach and the looseness of their stools.
‘In other words, you have diarrhoea,’ Kathryn remarked bluntly. She gave them a small jug of heatherlene. ‘Drink water,’ she advised. ‘Nothing but water for the next twenty-four hours. Mix some honey with two horn spoons of this: allow it to mingle in the water.’
‘How long?’ Edith and Eadwig chorused.
‘About the space of ten Aves,’ Kathryn replied. ‘Drink it four or five times a day. By tomorrow afternoon you will feel much better.’
‘But we can’t eat!’ the twins wailed.
Kathryn crouched down and put a hand on each of their shoulders.
‘No, you must let the evil humour go. Promise me. Come back tomorrow and, if you are better, Thomasina will give you some marchpane freshly baked and covered in sugar. Oh, and by the way.’ Kathryn stood up and touched both children on the nose. ‘You wouldn’t have diarrhoea if you hadn’t eaten so many fresh berries. I have told you that before.’
Both children stared crestfallen up at her.
‘Now, remember, the marchpane tomorrow.’
The two children hurried off. Kathryn went into her chancery to draw up her accounts. Colum had remarked that, perhaps in the summer, the King might levy a new tax. She nibbled at the feathery quill. Her household now was comprised of four: herself, Thomasina, Agnes the maid and Wuf, the foundling boy she had taken into her house the previous summer.
‘Waifs and strays,’ she murmured.
Both Agnes and Wuf were orphans. Of course, there was also Colum Murtagh, King’s Commissioner in Canterbury and keeper of the royal stables out at Kingsmead to the north of the city. Kathryn put her quill down and half listened to Agnes and Thomasina’s chattering in the kitchen. They were crushing herbs whilst waiting for the baked bread to cool. They’d placed this in wire baskets and hoisted these up, just under the beams, away from the scavenging mice. In the garden Wuf, already a skilled hand at carpentry, was making a bird box in the hope that some of the sparrows would nest there.
They are not the problem, Kathryn thought.
Colum Murtagh was: the tousle-haired, swarthy-faced Irishman was never absent for long from her thoughts. Handsome in a harsh way with a suntanned face and dark blue eyes, which could twinkle with mischief but become cold and hard as stone. Kathryn shivered, not from fear but uncertainty. No man, not even Alexander Wyville, her errant husband, had touched her soul as deeply as Murtagh. Yet Kathryn was wary. Alexander had been violent where Colum was not, but he had the professional soldier’s harsh ruthlessness. She had seen him take a man’s head as easily as Thomasina would snip a flower. She listened to the sound of raised voices from the kitchen.
‘And, of course, the Irishman will be back to eat,’ Thomasina trumpeted in the hope Kathryn would hear. ‘He’ll be back. Just you wait, as soon as darkness falls, clumping his muddy boots over my freshly scrubbed floor and licking his lips as hungrily as a wolf. It’s time,’ Thomasina’s voice rose almost to a bellow, ‘that he stayed out at Kingsmead!’
Kathryn grinned. When Murtagh first arrived, the royal manor at Kingsmead had been derelict so he had taken lodgings with her. The parishioners at Saint Mildred’s had gossiped, particularly her kinsman Joscelyn and his viper-tongued wife, but Kathryn didn’t care. Colum was an honourable man. She had been reluctant to allow him to stay, but now she was fearful of him leaving. Kathryn breathed in slowly, put down her quill and walked along to the passageway to the shop, which she planned to open after Eastertide. The shelves, which Colum and Wuf had put up, gleamed under their coat of polish. New cupboards stood just within the door and the huge counter had been scrubbed, smoothed down and restained. Sconces for cresset torches had been rivetted to the walls whilst the window, which looked out over the street, had been cleaned and the cracked panes replaced with oiled paper.
Kathryn took the bunch of keys that hung on a cord from her belt and undid the lock to the small store-room at the side of the s
hop. She closed her eyes and relished the sweetness of nipplewort, goats beard, tarragon, thyme and basil. She had grown some of these herself. Other herbs, like black poplar and white clover, she had bought from tradesmen either in London or Canterbury. She looked down at the strongbox where the phials and small jars of poison were safely locked away: the mushrooms, ‘devils bolatus’, ‘Destroying Angel’, or, even rarer, the ground leaves and bark of the boxwood plant. Luberon, the chubby, garrulous city clerk, had promised her that now the city council had been reconstituted, she would, within the month, receive her licence to trade. Kathryn was determined, once it was issued, to begin immediately. She looked around, pronounced herself satisfied and was about to walk back to her chancery when there was a knock on the door and a dirty face peered through.
‘Mistress, you have got to come now!’ The urchin jumped up and down.
‘Why, Catslip?’ Kathryn smiled at the little beggar boy who helped out at the Poor Priests Hospital.
‘Father Cuthbert, he says if you don’t come now, the person will die but, if you do come, he will still die.’ The boy paused, hands to his lips in puzzlement. ‘It doesn’t make sense, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Kathryn retorted. ‘But I’ll come anyway.’
She collected her basket of potions and told Thomasina where she was going. Thomasina immediately seized her own cloak, loudly declaring she’d accompany her.
‘Look after the house. Don’t let anyone in,’ Thomasina ordered Agnes, standing round-eyed at the table. ‘I don’t care if they are dying. And tell Wuf I have counted every, and I mean every, sugared almond in that dish in the pantry.’
Then she swept down the passageway after Kathryn.
‘I’d best come with you,’ she gasped, clutching on to her mistress. ‘You never know about these hospitals, do you?’
‘No, no,’ Kathryn tactfully replied. ‘You don’t.’
She kept her own counsel. Long before Kathryn was born, Thomasina had been fond of, even deeply in love with, the ascetic, gentle-eyed Father Cuthbert, the supervisor of Saint Mary’s hospital for poor priests. They turned the corner and left Ottemelle Lane, going across to Hetherman Lane whilst Catslip skipped in front of them shouting, ‘You’d better hurry! He’s going to die! He’s going to die!’
