The Angel's Mark: A gripping historical thriller for fans of C. J. Sansom

by S. W. Perry

  ‘Mr Shelby! It is a pleasure to wish you God’s good day. Welcome! Come in, please do come in,’ he says without rising. His voice has a distinct Northumbrian burr to it.

  Nicholas makes an extravagant bend of the knee. He might be invited, but his host is still a lord.

  ‘Master Baronsdale is most fulsome in your praise,’ Lumley says, lifting a parchment from a small table beside the chair. ‘He sent this letter of recommendation.’

  Nicholas is forced to admire Robert Cecil’s preparation. He guesses the President of the College of Physicians has no idea he’s written any such letter – men like the Cecils employ clever servants skilled in forgery. ‘I’m sure it’s quite unwarranted, my lord,’ he says uncomfortably.

  ‘Nevertheless, it is always good to have the opportunity to converse with the younger fellows in the profession,’ says Lumley, one lugubrious eye coming close to a wink. ‘If the only people I listened to were the likes of Baronsdale and Vaesy, my understanding of science would like as not go backwards rather than forwards.’ He rises from his chair and shakes Nicholas by the hand. ‘Forgive me if your welcome is not as warm as might be thought proper, only Lady Elizabeth is in London. She keeps on at me to light a fire in almost every room. I don’t think she has the slightest idea of how many rooms we actually have, or how many men we need to gather the firewood.’ He laughs affectionately. ‘She’s a D’Arcy – from the county of Essex. You’d think she’d be used to a draught or two.’

  ‘Your invitation alone is worth a thousand warm welcomes, my lord. It is far more than I expected.’

  Lumley turns to Gabriel Quigley. ‘Dr Shelby has had a long ride, Gabriel. We should fetch him some hippocras.’

  ‘I don’t take spirits, my lord,’ says Nicholas, trying to keep the consternation out of his voice, and fearing he just sounds rude as a consequence.

  ‘A young physician who doesn’t sup? Whatever next? Don’t tell me you’re a Puritan, Dr Shelby.’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that—’

  ‘Fear not, the inebriation is quite boiled out of it,’ Lumley says. ‘It won’t bring you harm.’

  He knows, thinks Nicholas. Vaesy, or someone else, has told him about what happened to me after Eleanor. The understanding does not bode well. What kind of informer will he be, if the man he’s been sent to spy on can see through him so easily?

  Supper that evening is taken in Lumley’s privy apartments. It proves something of a mixed pottage. Quigley remains taciturn, barely engaging in the scientific discourse, even when Lumley asks for his opinion. In the candlelight his pockmarked skin looks like the surface of one of Rose’s puddings. Why is Quigley so sullen? Nicholas wonders. Has he already guessed why I’m really here? Or is Lumley’s secretary guarding his master’s library a little too jealously? An abominable trove of heresies, that’s what Robert Cecil thinks it is. Could he be right?

  Lumley’s clerk, Francis Deniker, proves to be little better company. A gentle-looking man in his fifties with little wings of grey hair curling behind his ears, his gaze seems directed permanently downwards. He looks like a priest or a schoolmaster. And he seems evasive, unwilling to talk much about himself. Nicholas gets the distinct impression that Deniker’s reserved conversation is a coverlet designed to obscure what lies beneath. He’s like a physician who doesn’t want to give you bad news.

  Only John Lumley seems completely at ease. He speaks with great knowledge on subjects that, on occasion, enter the realm of the positively dangerous: like who should reign when the queen is no longer alive, and whether science – rather than religion – might one day prove if there really is a place called Purgatory or not. At this, Deniker suffers an explosive fit of coughing.

  Is John Lumley testing him? Nicholas wonders. Is he watching to see how his guest reacts to controversy? Whatever his motives, by the time the dessert arrives – a miraculous apple-and-cinnamon tart – it seems Nicholas has passed the examination.

  ‘Stay as long as you like, Dr Shelby,’ Lumley says. ‘It pleases me to imagine what wondrous discoveries in physic are yet to be made, and it is good to have a receptive ear. You don’t cluck like old Lopez, or try to tell me there’s no new knowledge to be found, like Fulke Vaesy does.’

  ‘No new knowledge, my lord? How can that be?’

  ‘Fulke says we’re only rediscovering what man used to know already – knowledge that was lost after the first sin.’

  ‘That explains a lot.’

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you the library. I think you’ll find it instructive.’

  ‘I’m sure I will, my lord.’

  ‘And when you’re done, perhaps you and I might turn our minds to an issue that’s been much troubling me of late. I’ve not found anything in the library that might shed a medical light upon it.’

  ‘I’d be honoured, if you think I can help. What is it that concerns you?’

  ‘Speech, Dr Shelby – the ability to make ourselves understood, the property that separates us from the beasts,’ Lumley answers, wiping away a sliver of apple from the corner of his mouth. ‘Or rather the lack of it.’

  He looks Nicholas so squarely in the eye that for a moment Nicholas thinks by ‘lack’ he means wilful withholding – duplicity, evasion, secrecy or any of the other sins Nicholas is currently accusing himself of.

  ‘Lord Lumley is referring to a servant newly brought to the household,’ Francis Deniker says. ‘A goodly soul, it seems, but mute.’

  ‘Sir Fulke Vaesy believes the Devil has stopped up her mouth,’ says Lumley. ‘I don’t believe him, not for a moment. But I would like to discover why someone who has a perfectly functioning tongue should deliberately deny themselves the use of it, when they know full well it was put into their mouth by the very same God who made the rest of them.’

  33

  His chamber in the inner gatehouse is one of the rooms the courtiers use when the queen visits. If Lumley were selling Nonsuch, his agents would call it ‘well appointed’. It has Flanders hangings on the wall, and a comfortable mattress. But Nicholas cannot sleep. He lies awake while Henry’s great clock on the outside wall chimes every half-hour, its mechanism making the floorboards tremble like an ailing heart.

  ‘Henry built the house for his one true love, Jane Seymour,’ John Lumley had told him over supper, barely three hours ago. ‘What a tragedy she did not live to witness the magnificence of the gift he intended for her.’

  It occurs to Nicholas now that the king must have been grieving even as he watched the first stones being raised, barely six months after Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth. A house conceived in love, built on grief. The image is not lost on him. He wonders what its creator would make of Nonsuch now.

  Nicholas had expected to find the place alive with activity. But with only the Lumley household in residence, it’s all but empty. And there’s an air of disquiet, despite the magnificence. It’s as if Nonsuch is bracing itself for impending catastrophe, frozen in the very moment joy turns to despair. He imagines the very bricks can sense why he’s come.

  And Nicholas knows full well the ghastly procession of tragedy that will follow, if he finds what Burghley’s son hopes he will find. And not just for Lumley, but for his wife, and for Quigley and Deniker too – and who knows how many more of Lumley’s friends and acquaintances? He can imagine all too easily the arrests in the dead of night, the river journeys taken in fear, iron-bound doors slammed shut to extinguish the light – and the hope with it. Give us the dates upon which you visited the traitor Lumley… What treason did you hear uttered? Who else was present? Give us the names… When the indictment is finally read before the Privy Council, it will contain a long list of sworn statements, even if the signatures are a little unclear, due to the writers’ fingers mysteriously no longer functioning as they once did. Meanwhile Elizabeth Lumley will sit weeping in the solitude of Nonsuch, tormented by dreadful images of her husband’s suffering, and wondering if she will be allowed to see him just one more time before the hooded
executioner beckons him forward. And I, Nicholas Shelby, will have set the whole grizzly parade in motion.

  Is Bianca Merton’s life worth all that? Is there a tariff to be set for betrayal – one life worth more, another a little less? How did I, a man dedicated to serving the sick, come to bring about such pain?

  There are so many troubling questions disordering his thoughts that he quite forgets John Lumley’s comments at supper about the mute in the Nonsuch kitchens. His last conscious thoughts are of the letter he hasn’t yet written to Bianca. He tries to compose the lines in his mind, but his impressions of the day are too disordered to marshal.

  A quiet tapping on the door makes him turn his head. It’s Harriet, his maid from Grass Street, bearing breakfast. She’s struggling not to giggle at her master and mistress lying entwined in the chaos of the sheets like vines in the summer sun. He leans across the bed, the better to delight in the salty tang of Eleanor’s skin, expecting the scent of rose oil in her hair.

  His hand meets nothing but cold linen. Only the tapping on the door is real. And the guilt that, in the moment before waking, he was unsure exactly whose face would have turned towards him on the pillow.

  When Nicholas enters the library he finds Gabriel Quigley stooped over a desk, making entries in a ledger with a quill. The secretary does not acknowledge him, other than to wave him to a window seat. It seems daylight has not lightened the secretary’s mood.

  While he waits for John Lumley to arrive, Nicholas takes in the view from the windows. It’s as though he’s gone to sleep in Surrey and woken in Caesar’s Rome. In the watery sunlight he can see arches of close-cropped holly, classical columns, statues of gods and emperors. There’s even a small pavilion where – he assumes – the queen may sit when she views the chase.

  Turning away from the view, he begins to inspect the library. It takes only a few paces for him to see that the rumours were based on fact. There’s Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy; Bullein’s Dialogue against Fever Pestilence; Vicary’s Anatomy; three works by Thomas Gale… The ancients are here, too: Galen in the original Latin, Aretaeus in the Greek. More pages of medical knowledge than Nicholas has seen since he left Cambridge. And beyond the books on physic he can see treaties on cosmology, philosophy, theology – a store of wisdom so vast it humbles him.

  But there are also books here that only a man with powerful friends – or a carefree attitude to his own safety – might possess. Volumes on necromancy… on occult practices… on matters that the new religion would consider highly detrimental to one’s immortal soul. He sees the words ‘Thomas Cantuarien’ embossed in gold leaf on a spine and realizes it’s by Archbishop Cranmer, Henry’s reforming Protestant prelate, sent to the flames by Bloody Mary Tudor. It stands alongside Pope Innocent’s polemic against witches. John Lumley, it seems, is walking a very dangerous tightrope.

  A voice from behind him breaks into his thoughts. ‘I’ll wager the lost library of Alexandria can’t have had many more works in it than this.’

  Nicholas turns. Lord Lumley is watching him from the doorway, severe in his scholar’s gown, a pearl pendant hanging on a gold chain around his neck. He looks more like one of Nicholas’s tutors at Cambridge than Robert Cecil’s version of a disciple of the Antichrist.

  ‘But then Alexandria never had Gabriel to keep it in order, or I dare say it would never have become lost in the first place. I trust you slept well, Dr Shelby.’

  Better than the innocent, Nicholas assures him, hoping Lumley won’t notice the tiredness in his eyes.

  ‘In your letter you wrote of an interest in the carriage of blood through the human body.’

  ‘I believe I did, my lord.’

  Lumley selects a shelf and extracts a large leather-bound book. He places it on a lectern. The stiff velum parts reluctantly, the pages rocking slowly as though the book can’t quite make up its mind which of its secrets to reveal.

  It decides upon an exquisite woodcut showing a man standing in a landscape of trees and ancient temples. He is leaning nonchalantly on a stick. But Nicholas can see this is no simple Arcadian scene. The man’s skin has been flayed open to show the interior of the body in minute detail: muscles, veins and arteries perfectly drawn, the ink a dark and lustrous lifeblood. The head is in fact a skull, tilted upwards, the bulbous eyes fighting to pull themselves free of the surrounding muscle fibres as they seek a glimpse of heaven.

  ‘By Carolus Stephanus. Published in Paris less than one man’s lifetime ago,’ says Lumley proudly.

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ Nicholas whispers, bending forward to inspect the illustration. ‘Look at the detail, the way he depicts the veins—’

  ‘Yet it’s already out of date, I fear. And, worse, inaccurate.’

  ‘Inaccurate? It looks perfect.’

  ‘Aye, it’s a fine piece of work, I’ll grant you. But when Stephanus published it, he did not know that in just a few years he would discover these very veins have valves in them. Now he’s bickering with Fabricius and the others over who discovered them first. Sir Fulke Vaesy tells me that when he went to Padua to learn from the masters, he found it worse than trying to separate two women squabbling over ribbons at a market stall.’

  Nicholas shakes his head in wonder. ‘When I was in Holland, one of our German doctors had studied under Stephanus,’ he says, remembering a jovial Lutheran from Saxony named Gunther. ‘He said these valves were like sluices in a river, managing the tide of the blood around the body. We all thought he was in error.’

  ‘And why, if I may ask?’

  ‘Well, if these valves are truly like sluices, when a man is wounded why do they not simply shut? Such a mechanism would prevent him bleeding to death?’

  One of Lumley’s wintery eyebrows lifts a little. ‘A young physician barely out of Cambridge disputing with the great Stephanus?’

  ‘No dispute, my lord. Merely a question.’

  Lumley returns the book to its place on the shelf. ‘There’s nothing shameful about questions, Dr Shelby,’ he says, ‘particularly in an age that demands certainty. Certainty of faith, certainty of allegiance. Equivocation is to be stamped out wherever it is found. Is that not so?’

  ‘So the bishops would tell us, my lord.’

  ‘Yet in these volumes are contained a thousand different opinions, all vehemently disagreeing with one another. This library could not exist if it were not for questions. The times have made natural philosophers of us all, have they not?’

  ‘I’m not a philosopher, my lord,’ Nicholas says, looking at his feet and feeling again that John Lumley is somehow testing him. ‘I’m just a humble physician.’

  Lumley looks at him like a man inspecting a gem for a hidden flaw. ‘So humble, in fact, that Dr Baronsdale has never spoken of you before, though now he sends me a fulsome recommendation. How is that?’

  ‘I c-cannot say, my lord,’ Nicholas replies, his voice faltering. Has Lumley seen through him so easily? Is he so singularly unsuited to the role of spy and informer that his inner thoughts are as easy to read as a playbill? He’s even more certain now that Baronsdale’s letter is one of Robert Cecil’s clever forgeries.

  ‘A coincidence then?’

  ‘A very generous coincidence, my lord.’

  Lumley studies him a while. Then he shrugs, his suspicions apparently forgotten. ‘Well, a fortunate one, to be sure – for both of us, I hope. Had Baronsdale been even slightly unsure of your qualities, I cannot imagine he would have recommended you. So I will trust to his judgement. And you seem like an honest man. Are you honest, Dr Shelby?’

  ‘In my heart I believe so, my lord,’ says Nicholas, sickened by the prospect of being the agent of this man’s destruction. He has the sudden, overwhelming urge to confess to Lumley why he’s been sent, to beg his forgiveness, to leave Nonsuch as quickly as he can, before he brings yet more grief to this beautiful but ill-starred place.

  Next day, under a pale sky streaked with fine white mare’s tails, Lady Elizabeth returns to Nonsuch. S
he has come from the Lumley town house in London, sending a rider galloping ahead with news of her progress. He’s spotted miles off by a servant John Lumley has posted high in one of the two great minaret-like towers that flank the southern face of Nonsuch. The news sends a wave of anticipation surging through the palace. Even Francis Deniker’s priestly face seems to lighten a little.

  The household gathers in the inner court. The grooms and servants line up on one side of the gatehouse, the maids and scullions are assembled on the other. Nicholas joins Quigley and Deniker by the fountain while they wait for the little party to ride in. John Lumley has put on a fine bottle-green velvet doublet trimmed with gems for the occasion. He looks every inch the senior courtier. His wintry face glows with anticipation. All eyes are on the archway at the foot of the clock tower and its six golden horoscopes.

  ‘His lordship always makes a goodly greeting when Lady Elizabeth has been away,’ says Francis Deniker in Nicholas’s ear as the party rides in. ‘He scarcely welcomes the queen with greater show. Look at her, she is a returning angel, a veritable angel.’

  If she is, thinks Nicholas, it is only her eyes that show it. They are grey, but warm and generous, fine lines spreading out from the corners where the wind has tightened her skin. The rest of her is swaddled in a warm riding cloak with a genet-trimmed hood. As she pulls it free of her face, Nicholas sees a comely woman in her middle thirties, her fair hair gathered up beneath a linen coif, her jaw resolute, yet by no means given to seriousness. With a ready smile and easy manner, she seems the perfect counterbalance to John Lumley’s stern Northumbrian gloom. Nicholas takes to her immediately.

  ‘I trust my husband has put you somewhere warm, sir,’ she says with a mischievous gleam in her eye. ‘He is notorious for being parsimonious with firewood.’ She turns to John Lumley and kisses his cheek. ‘A little more warmth around the place might soothe away some of those furrows on your brow, Husband.’