S. PERRY - The Saracen’s Mark

For a moment Nicholas enjoys her confusion. But spacious, sanitary lodgings are not easy to find on Bankside.

‘I’m not a wanted felon, Mistress Muzzle. Or a Jesuit – if that’s what concerns you. And I have paid my rent until Trinity term.’

Unconvinced, she turns her head back towards the door and the men in the street. ‘Is Dr Shelby under arrest?’ she asks.

‘Not at the moment,’ says the one holding the burning torch. Wisps of smoke swirl upwards, disappearing into the cold, damp night and making Nicholas think of souls rising from a graveyard. ‘But if you want–’

The hammering has sounded so official that not a single occupant has dared open a window to see what is happening. No one wants to risk witnessing the apprehending of a traitor or the flushing out of a papist priest. Too many questions get asked, and there’s always the chance of being mistaken for an accomplice. Much safer to wait for the public finale on Tower Hill or at Tyburn. And even though he knows himself to be an almost -innocent man, Nicholas can’t help but acknowledge the little wormy knot of cold fear that writhes in his stomach.

‘Do I have time to make myself a little more presentable?’

‘Be quick. This is not an invitation to a revel, Dr Shelby. We have a wherry at the Mutton Lane stairs and the tide will soon begin to ebb. Bring what items a physician might normally have about him.’

‘For what malady?’

‘Sir Robert did not say.’

‘Then how, in the name of Jesu, may I know what to bring?’

The irritation is clear in the man’s terse reply. ‘Whatever else is required, Sir Robert will provide it. Now hurry .’

‘How long will you be away?’ asks Mistress Muzzle.

‘I don’t know. Ask them ,’ Nicholas says, nodding at the men in the street. ‘If anyone comes here needing medicine, tell them to seek out Mistress Merton. She’ll be either at the Jackdaw tavern, or at her new apothecary shop on Dice Lane. Bianca will know what to do.’

For the first time that Nicholas has witnessed, since he moved out of the Jackdaw and into Mistress Muzzle’s lodgings, his landlady favours him with a smile. It is the warm, indulgent smile that some women are inclined to, whenever they think of impending nuptials. ‘And if Mistress Merton herself should call here while you are away? What am I to say to her?’

‘That’s easy to answer, Mistress Muzzle. One way or another, I will be back in time for the wedding.’

In the bedchamber of a modest property on Dice Lane, a short distance upriver from Mistress Muzzle’s house, Bianca Merton wakes from a fragile, troubled sleep. She sits up against the bolster, the neckline of her shift damp against her skin. In the darkness she remembers two bodies falling through the night towards the cold, black surface of the Thames. She hears the slow, heavy slap as they enter deep water, the sound of ripples fading, like the tinkling of broken glass on a stone floor. She waits for them to disappear beneath the surface. But they don’t. Their faces stay just below, watching her through the water with the cold, accusing stare of the dead. She squeezes her eyelids tightly shut. If I made a pact with God, she tells herself, when I look again, they will be gone. But if I made a pact with the Devil…

She counts to three and opens her eyes.

To her immense relief, there are no bodies tumbling, just shadows cast by the rushlight burning on the bedside table. A pact made with God, then. A righteous pact, not an evil one. Even so, she wonders if all murderers are troubled by such memories.

Her eyes linger on the crudely painted figures on the far wall, figures that must have triggered the illusion: two men, one prone, the other standing over him. The image is from the New Testament, the parable of the Good Samaritan. This house, she has learned, was previously owned by a Puritan who had wanted furnishings with a biblical theme, but couldn’t afford expensive Flemish tapestries. So instead he hired a man who painted tavern signs to decorate the walls.

They keep her company: Jonah and his whale, in the closet; Lazarus in the pantry; Daniel and the lion in the parlour where she takes breakfast. Daniel looks like a fat Bankside alderman. The lion, conjured from the painter’s imagination, is an animal quite unknown anywhere else on earth. Bianca has learned to tolerate them all, including the Good Samaritan in the bedroom, except on those few occasions when he dances in the rushlight and reminds her of the night, almost two years ago now, when two men did indeed tumble through the darkness below the bridge.

When she had confessed her sin to Cardinal Fiorzi, before he sailed away back to Venice, he had told her that God would forgive her. The men she had led to their deaths were evil men. They had committed vile deeds in the service of Satan, and there was no sin in ridding the world of them. But to Bianca, in spite of all that, they were still men. And now they were dead. Absolution could not alter the hand she had played in their deaths.

She scolds herself. I am not a murderer. I am a Good Samaritan. How many more innocents would have suffered if I had not done what I did? How many penniless Banksiders might have sickened – or, worse, died – if I’d stood by and allowed Nicholas Shelby to die?

At the thought of him, she demurely adjusts her shift where it has slipped over one shoulder, and combs her hair with her fingers to bring at least a little obedience to those heavy, dark tresses that are always at their most ungovernable when she wakes. If he could see her at this moment – Jesu , what would her mother have said at the very idea? – he would think her skin still glowed with the warmth of the Italian sun. But that’s because of the rushlight. She fears that five years of English rain have washed the real colour right out of her, along with almost every other trace of her Paduan upbringing. She touches her neck where it meets the shoulder – a neck that on Monday is swanlike, and on Tuesday as scrawny as the reeds that grow around the Mutton Lane river stairs. Yes, in candlelight a veritable Venus; but in the grey light of a morning in early April?

She consoles herself with the thought that Englishmen appear to like their women looking as pale as a cadaver. Caking your face with ceruse is all the fashion in smart circles. Even the queen paints her features with it, to make her skin as white as the best Flanders linen. Not that you’ll see it on Bankside, save on the faces of the richer whores who favour it to cover up the ravages of the French Gout. She curses herself angrily, and recalls something her mother had often told her: Bianca, my child, never trouble yourself with what a man may think of you. Thinking is not their natural disposition .

Yet even as she stares down the bed to the wainscoting on the far wall, wainscoting that is painted a rich orange, she thinks it would be nice to have a little colour in her face for the wedding.

For once, no one tells Nicholas to sit patiently amidst the panelled elegance of Cecil House – one of the grandest beyond the city walls, set between the river and Covent Garden – until someone remembers his presence. No one instructs him to bide his time while the clerks and the men of law, the intriguers and the intelligencers hurry to and fro. No one mistakes him for a new gardener who has unforgivably stumbled through the wrong door. This time a weary-looking secretary in a black half-cape and gartered stockings shows him directly to Robert Cecil’s study.