by S. W. Perry
‘Oh, I know who he is, Dr Shelby.’ Robert Cecil turns his face to the panelled ceiling as though this knowledge is just one more trial he must bear. ‘Let me suggest an alternative to you. It is this: Mistress Merton’s papist masters send their seditious instructions to her disguised in medical books. You then convey those instructions – in your letters – to the noble lord, their true destination. To an observer: merely two medical men having a learned discourse by post. To me: treason.’
‘As a diagnosis, that’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Good enough for a jury and a hanging judge, Dr Shelby.’
‘I only wrote to him a couple of weeks ago. He barely knows me.’
‘Yet he has invited you to Nonsuch; opened the doors of his abominable trove of heresies to you. How very generous of him. Why would he do that?’
‘I wanted to seek his advice on a certain medical matter. And it’s just a library, that’s all.’
Robert Cecil studies Nicholas in silence for a while. Then he says with a reasonableness that takes Nicholas utterly off-guard, ‘And all I ask of you, Dr Shelby, is to enter it for me.’
‘Then why all this?’ Nicholas says angrily with a sweep of his arm. ‘Why not just ask me? I was going anyway.’
‘Because I want you to spy for me. I want an informer in John Lumley’s nest of heresy.’ He casts a glance towards Fulke Vaesy. ‘Sadly, my last one is not now as welcome as he once was.’
‘Why would I turn informer, just to please you?’
‘Have you so easily forgotten Mistress Merton – this woman to whom you owe such a debt?’
‘Bianca?’
Robert Cecil sweeps a hand across the books and the Petrine cross. ‘This is damning evidence, Dr Shelby. I can easily ensure Bianca Merton hangs for heresy and treason – if she’s lucky. Otherwise, she will burn.’
The sickening realization of just how easily Robert Cecil has played him leaves Nicholas speechless.
‘You can save her, if you desire. It’s really up to you.’
Nicholas stares at Robert Cecil, open-mouthed. ‘And if I agree?’
‘You have it on my word that Mistress Merton will be returned unharmed to Bankside, where she may continue to gull the impressionable, along with all the other charlatans and knaves practising there.’
‘And what exactly am I supposed to find at Nonsuch?’ Nicholas asks. ‘Being an informer wasn’t on the curriculum at Cambridge.’
Robert Cecil leans back in his chair with a smile of self-satisfied innocence. ‘You’re the physician, Dr Shelby. Surely you know what contagion looks like when you see it.’
Master Sprint is showing Betony how to pluck pigeons.
‘Take a few feathers at a time, but briskly – like this,’ he says gently. He knows she’s understood him, but like a man having a conversation with his dog, he does not actually expect a reply.
Since the day he discovered the inverted crosses scratched into the soot by the bread-ovens, Sprint has watched the girl they have named Betony closely. He’s watched for the slightest sign of malignity or devilry. He has seen none. Joanna, his assistant – beside whom Betony sleeps at night – reports that the girl appears diligent in her prayers, always kneeling with her hands clasped and her head bowed, though what she actually says to God remains a secret only they share. As to who Betony is, and where she’s come from, no one at Nonsuch is any the wiser.
Though Sprint does not know it, Elise has come close to breaking her own self-imposed silence several times in recent days. For a start, she wants everyone to know how wonderfully warm she is, warmer than she can ever remember being. The thick walls of the Nonsuch kitchens trap the heat, and the embers in the central hearth are high enough to take a martyr waist-deep. Her whole body seems aglow. If only little Ralphie were here, she would be content – almost.
As she works she watches the scullions scrubbing grease off the roasting spits. They look just like the lads she used to play with on the banks of Battle Abbey creek. She sneaks a brief upward glance at Sprint. He’s standing close to her, closer than she would have ever tolerated barely days ago. Even in his bloodstained apron, he is surely no Devil’s minion. He’s far too kind.
The men and women of the household treat her civilly now. That’s taken a deal of getting used to. And the womenfolk especially are beginning to grant her their minor secrets, secure in their belief she cannot reveal them.
And what of their master, Lord Lumley – the man she had once assumed was foremost amongst these servants of Satan? He is never less than kind to her. True, he seems to think of her as an object to be studied, her dimensions and character measured and catalogued. Yet he shows no displeasure at her refusal to speak. Never even raises his voice – unlike his friend, the great physician who had come from the queen to make her talk and is now apparently unwelcome at Nonsuch. She hasn’t seen him for days.
Yet despite the warmth and the kindness, Elise still can’t quite lay aside her fears. Like the hind supping from the stream, a part of her is still alert for the rustle in the trees that warns of the hunter’s approach.
A misty morning, the tide low and the stink of mud and carrion drifting up from the river. In mid-stream the barges drift towards the city under slack sails. Beyond them Nicholas can just discern the outline of Lambeth Palace. It appears to be settling into the marsh.
He makes his way towards the private river stairs where they landed the previous night. Bianca, flanked by two bored servants in Cecil livery, watches him approach. She’s wearing the same serge overgown and the brocade kirtle in which she was taken from the Jackdaw. Her hair looks as wild as Medusa’s. She puts her hands to the sides of her brow and runs the fingers back to untangle it. The familiar habit is like an accusation to him.
‘Marry, someone has turned the night to his profit!’ she observes with a raised eyebrow, taking in the smart doublet of London russet trimmed with black lace that Robert Cecil has given him to wear, because he doesn’t want one of his people walking around Cecil House looking like a vagabond.
‘You should have told me, Bianca. It would have meant nothing to me. I would have kept your secret.’
‘Told you what?’ she asks, looking him up and down. ‘Where to find a good tailor?’
‘That you practised the old faith.’
‘That’s my concern, not yours.’
‘Robert Cecil threatened to use your father’s books and his Petrine cross to hang you for sedition,’ he tells her, his anger burned out almost before the words have left his mouth. ‘I struck a deal. He’s changed his mind.’
‘A deal? What are we to Robert Cecil that he makes deals with us?’
‘It’s me, Bianca. I’m the one he wanted. You’re being sent back to Southwark, a free woman. You’re to say nothing other than that the charges were a false denunciation.’
She looks so small, standing between the two Cecil men. Yet she stands squarely on the jetty as though she means to stop an army passing. ‘Really? And how much of himself did Mister Nicholas Shelby have to sell to arrange that?’
There is no other way Nicholas can think of couching it, so he tells her, ‘There is a man he wants me to betray.’
She almost laughs. ‘You’re not the betraying kind, Nicholas. You’re too honest. Who is this man anyway?’
‘It’s John Lumley. The man I wrote to. The one I thought could help us.’
‘Am I permitted to know why?’
Nicholas hopes she cannot see the lie in his eyes. ‘It’s complicated.’
From the gilded Cecil barge moored to the jetty comes the command for Bianca to board. Four rowers lift their oars into the rowlocks. The two liveried servants make to assist her onto the deck.
‘Shall I see you again, Nicholas Shelby?’ she calls out as she steps aboard. ‘I don’t even know where you’re going.’
‘I am to stay at Cecil House until I leave for Nonsuch.’
‘Mercy, Nicholas Shelby is going to live in a palac
e!’ The bright amber eyes are teasing him again. ‘You have come up in the world.’
‘I’m just going to visit for a while. I don’t know how long.’
‘Will I see you again? Do I need to look for another handy fellow to help me out at the Jackdaw?’
‘I don’t know. But yes, you will see me again, Mistress Merton. You may count on it.’
‘Will you write?’
‘When I can.’
‘You were safer on Bankside than you knew, Nicholas. Please take care.’
He doesn’t see it coming: the sudden overwhelming need to jump onto the barge, follow her back to the Jackdaw and take her to his lonely bed in the attic.
But even as the urge hits him, the barge vanishes into the mist, the only evidence it was ever there the fading sound of oars breaking the water – and the guilt of betrayal in his heart.
32
Candlemas, 2nd February 1591
In the meadow beside Cheam church a band of militia is at drill practice. They wield the heavy pikes like the farmboys and seed merchant’s clerks they are. Their sergeant is a small fellow in a battered, hand-me-down breastplate. In a shrill voice he’s warning them their ineptitude will cost England dear, should the Spanish ever come to Surrey. Nicholas Shelby watches them go through their postures as he rides past on one of Robert Cecil’s palfreys, loaned for the journey. He knows the sergeant’s threat is not an idle one. In the Low Countries he’d seen the well-drilled armies of Spain cutting through lads much like these with the ease of a buttery maid scooping curd. It makes him think again of the infant he’d seen pitchforked onto a midden, and that leads his thoughts inevitably to Ralph Cullen. He looks away to the fields, the hedgerows and the occasional thatched house. Where, on the journey from the Cardinal’s Hat to Cuddington, did the killer find you? he wonders. Was it hereabouts? And what of you, Elise? Did you make it? Or are you merely waiting your turn to wash ashore?
It’s a week since Nicholas bade farewell to Bianca Merton. For most of that time he’s been a virtual prisoner at Cecil House, though his incarceration has not been arduous. On the day Bianca returned to Southwark, Robert Cecil had stood over him while he wrote another letter to Nonsuch, taking up John Lumley’s offer. Then had followed the random summons to Robert Cecil’s study, delivered whenever the courtier was able to tear himself away from the onerous burden of saving England from heresy. During these sessions Nicholas had received instruction on the nature of the beast he was to confront. Now his head is full of details: Lumley’s youthful allegiance to Bloody Mary; how he and his first wife, Jane FitzAlan, daughter to old Arundel, had ridden in the entourage at Mary’s marriage to the Catholic Philip of Spain; how Lumley and his father-in-law had plotted to wed Mary Stuart, the Scots queen, to the Duke of Norfolk to strengthen a papist claim to the throne. Now he can recite the dates of Lumley’s sojourns in the Tower with accuracy. He can name the exact amount Lumley still owes to the Crown for getting into bed with Florentine bankers. He knows the rents due to the privy purse for which Lumley keeps seeking respite. Now he feels like one of those spies who used to flit in and out of the camps in Holland: furtive, secretive fellows, their lives little else but a paid-for procession of lies and betrayal.
How did I make the journey from healer to informer so seamlessly?
What would Eleanor think of me now?
As he rides leisurely up the gentle, grassy slope towards the gleaming white-walled outer court of Nonsuch Palace, another troubling image insinuates itself into Nicholas’s mind. It’s the image of some helpless soul – as yet unknown to him – chained, frightened, waiting alone in the dark interior of the Lazar House for the moment the door opens and a new nightmare begins. And he wonders how he can ask for Lumley’s help in stopping it, while at the same moment scheming to betray him.
‘We need new sheets,’ says Rose apologetically. She is unaccustomed to speaking obliquely, but what exactly does one say to a mistress who disappeared a heretic and a traitor and returned in a gilded barge, like Queen Dido of Carthage? What she really wants to ask Bianca – has wanted to asks for days – is did they harm you?
Now that the mistress of the Jackdaw is safely home, the tavern has returned almost to its former state. But there is still work to do. Much of the linen recovered from the floor and the street is badly torn, and lodgers must now sleep on their cloaks and not mind the gaping wounds in the straw pallets where Robert Cecil’s men went rummaging for hidden papist tracts.
‘At least we still have our customers,’ Rose observes. ‘When they raided the Knight’s Shield on Bermondsey Road, it took a whole month for trade to recover. Looking for Jesuits, they were.’
‘Did they find any?’ Bianca asks.
‘No. Only a fugitive from Bedlam.’
‘How did they recognize him? All the Shield’s customers look as though they’ve escaped from Bedlam.’
‘There’s only a few haven’t come back here,’ says Rose, laughing. ‘That Walter Pemmel – the one who only pays every other tab – he hasn’t shown his miserable face again. And old Leicester and Walsingham haven’t been seen or heard of since.’
‘I’m not surprised. They’re probably the reason the Privy Council turned us over in the first place,’ Bianca retorts harshly. ‘And as for Walter Pemmel, he was a Puritan hypocrite anyway. Wore out his knees in the pews at St Saviour’s each Sunday; back in the taproom on Monday, trying to drown all that guilt he got from lying with whores. We’re better off without him.’
‘He hasn’t written yet, then? You’d have told me if he had, Mistress.’
‘Why on earth would Walter Pemmel write to me?’
‘I wasn’t speaking of Walter Pemmel, was I?’
Bianca gives Rose’s left knee a gentle slap. ‘Nicholas probably doesn’t have the time. He’s an eminent physician now, didn’t you know? Get on with your sewing, girl.’
Rose does as she’s told – for all of two minutes. Then she announces defiantly, ‘I don’t care what the Bishop of London says! I don’t think papists are the Devil’s own spawn. My grandmother was of the old faith, and a goodlier person you never met.’ It’s her way of saying whatever Bianca has been accused of, it doesn’t matter.
‘I’m sure she was, Rose.’
‘I’d light a candle for her soul, too, if it were allowed. She always liked candles.’ Rose considers this small heresy for a moment, then asks, ‘Do you think they’d come back and arrest me, if I did?’
‘I shouldn’t imagine so,’ says Bianca. ‘If they do, I suggest you take Timothy with you. After what’s happened to Nicholas, Tim might come back as master of the Brewers’ Company and you as a lady-in-waiting to the queen.’
‘Was it dreadful – in the Tower?’
‘We weren’t in the Tower, Rose dear. We were at Cecil House, near the Strand. A very different place.’
‘Did they put burning irons to your flesh?’
‘No, they didn’t.’
‘Nor rack you?’
‘Never saw a rack all the time I was there.’
‘I shouldn’t like to be racked. The extra inches might be nice, though.’
Bianca lets out a gasp of exasperation. ‘I’ll rack you myself, if you don’t hurry up with your needlework. Jesu, girl – you’re a monstrous trial to me!’
Rose sets to work viciously with her bodkin, making little hissing noises as she jams the end against the linen, as if it were an instrument of hot torture and the fabric human skin.
Yes, life at the Jackdaw is almost back to normal.
Nicholas has barely crossed the spacious lawn – complete with neatly trimmed box hedges and its own bowling green – before he’s entranced. He lets his eyes wander in disbelief over the gleaming white towers, the soaring minarets, the high walls topped by stone gods and heroes of antiquity. Christ’s wounds, he thinks, whatever they say about King Henry, the old monster knew what he was doing when he built mystical, soul-lifting Nonsuch.
He rides beneath the arch of the ga
tehouse and enters a wide courtyard. The sides are two storeys high. They’re set with herringbone brick under a blue slate roof, the windows framed with exquisite carvings of fantastical beasts. Glancing back, he sees a great bronze sundial emblazoned with the signs of the zodiac set above the arch. It’s supported by three brightly painted stucco lions, quartered with fleurs-de-lys and flanked by a greyhound and a dragon – the coat of arms of Henry Tudor. A servant approaches and takes the bridle of his horse while he dismounts. A lanky man with a shaven head and pockmarked face bustles towards him, dressed in a formal gown. Nicholas recognizes him at once.
‘I give you good day, Master Shelby,’ says Gabriel Quigley, without extending a hand in greeting. ‘Follow me, please. We expected you some time ago.’ Silently Quigley leads Nicholas through a second gatehouse opposite the first.
They emerge into the heart of Nonsuch.
For a moment Nicholas thinks he’s standing in some magnificent Italian palazzo. The inner face of the second gatehouse is a high clock tower set with six golden horoscopes, while ahead of him is a great fountain capped by a rearing marble horse. Beyond it gleam the painted plaster walls of the royal chambers. Two stucco Roman emperors gaze imperiously past him into eternity, one a mature man with a beard, the other much younger. Nicholas assumes they are meant to depict Henry and his shortlived son, Edward.
‘Hurry, Master Physician,’ Quigley says, turning at the top of the entrance steps to see Nicholas staring around like a country green-head newly arrived in the city. ‘Lord Lumley is waiting.’
John Lumley is sitting in a high-backed chair that is very nearly a throne. His private study is a fine panelled chamber off the empty royal apartments, draped with expensive Flemish tapestries. It seems to be the only room with a lit fire. Lumley’s hose-clad feet are stretched out towards the hearth. He sports a long spade-cut beard and a pearl-studded cap on his head. The dark folds of a scholar’s gown flow out below a neatly starched ruff.
