S. PERRY - The Saracen’s Mark

‘Don’t go, stay a while. Tell me who you are,’ Nicholas pleads in desperation, when they prepare to return him to the oven of his captivity. ‘I’m not trying to trick you. Just tell me who you are – we’re all berraniyin here, aren’t we?’

The lad with the Irish accent laughs. ‘Outsiders? Not any more. When our master is sultan, I shall be a duke in his court.’ He adopts a stance of affected nobility, hands on hips, head thrown arrogantly back. ‘Why, I’m already the son of an English knight, Sir Thomas Winterbourne. A great man, by all accounts. I have the paper to prove it.’ He makes a little dancing mime of dispensing alms to grovelling peasants.

‘Proved by the Rouge Croix Pursuivant, no doubt,’ says Nicholas, hoping to pique his curiosity.

The lad stops his play-acting. He comes closer, peering at Nicholas as though he were an exhibit in a cabinet of curiosities. ‘Captain Connell was right, you do know more than you’re lettin’ on. Did my old master tell you that?’

‘That depends on which master you’re speaking of: Connell, or Reynard Gault. I’m guessing that you came here on a Barbary company ship, and that Gault gave you a false lineage.’

A sudden flicker of uncertainty in the lad’s eyes. ‘What do you know of Master Gault?’

‘More to the question, what do you know of Sir Thomas Winterbourne? Save for the fact that he probably doesn’t exist. Or any of his supposed ancestors.’

‘It doesn’t fuckin’ matter if he exists or not,’ the lad snaps. ‘I’m his son. I have the writing to prove it. That makes me of noble blood. And that means I shall be a duke when we throw down the sultan and–’

The kufiya gives the lad a savage push that almost topples him. ‘Stop blathering, you stupid llafazan . Can’t you see what he’s doing?’

The Irish boy drops Nicholas’s chain and rounds on his companion, using his chest as a ram. ‘What did you call me, y’heathen?’

The kufiya stands his ground. ‘I called you llafazan . In my language it means a rattle-trap, a blathermouth. And I’m not a heathen, I’m from Albania.’

The Irish boy fires a gobbet of spit at the other lad’s feet. ‘Where the fuck is that ?’ he demands to know, giving his companion another shove. ‘You can be fuckin’ Duke of Albania, for all I care, but only if you’ve got a pedigree from the College of Heralds to prove it. If not, you’ll have to play the churl to those of us who have. What’s the word for servant in Albania?’

The two janissaries stare each other down, their tempers raw through having spent so many tedious hours guarding the door into the Bimaristan.

Nicholas takes his chance. Moving as fast as his enervated limbs will allow, he seizes the lead-chain in both hands. He swings the loop towards the Albanian’s head, with the wild idea of getting it around his throat and choking him until the Irish boy gives up his keys.

Like most acts of desperation, it’s been given almost no thought. And it has about the same chances of success. The chain lands ineffectually across the back of the kufiya ’s neck. Before Nicholas can try again, both lads are upon him, flailing fists pounding at his body. Tripped by his ankle-chains, he goes down hard, the grit rasping the side of his face as he lands.

The first boot takes him just above his right hip. The pain makes his mouth gape, swallowing dirt from the floor of the compound. The next blow lands slantwise below his shoulderblade. The third is a jab to his right buttock, bringing bile into the back of his throat and rolling him onto his side, so that he’s staring at a pair of horizontal boots, and in the hazy background a wall and a door lying on their sides. After that, counting gives way to trying not to vomit.

The Irish lad’s voice reaches Nicholas the way the muffled roaring of a wave reaches the man it drowns.

‘Don’t kill him, Brother. The master will want to hear what he has to say. He’s a contrary little bugger, but the knife will make him talkative. It always does.’

Lying curled up in the dirt, Nicholas stares at the tilted world through blooms of sweat that pool in the corners of his eyes and run across his scoured nose and cheek.

And as he does so, he sees the door in the compound wall open. Three figures emerge, floating towards him like spectres in a dream. The boots of his two assailants move away and he hears the Albanian mutter something that sounds very much like a prayer for mercy. From the Irish lad comes a muffled ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’

Forcing his eyes to focus, Nicholas recognizes the lean, balding figure of Arnoult de Lisle, and beside him Surgeon Wadoud.

But it is the third figure that sears into his vision even more than the stinging grit and sweat. Standing over him, garbed in white, his eyes observing Nicholas with the detached appraisal of a falcon, is Muhammed al-Annuri.

Bianca has spent the day returning the Jackdaw’s cellar into her apothecary’s chamber. Ned and Timothy have done the heavy lifting, passing the bags and boxes down through the open hatchway that gives access from the yard, while Rose has assisted with the bundles of plants and herbs.

Her mind has not been wholly on the job. What was I thinking of? she’s asked herself a hundred times if she’s asked it once. What temporary insanity made me do it? I went into the lion’s den, and for some reason that only my mother could explain – if she were alive, and it’s a good thing she’s not, because she’d be having apoplexy – thrust my head into the lion’s mouth. Who else but a woman bereft of all reason would make a confession like that to a man of Gault’s character and believe it could end well?

She is convinced now that there is a connection between Solomon Mandel’s murder and Gault’s conviction that Nicholas revealed to her a second reason why Cecil sent him to the Barbary shore. But if there is a second reason – and it led to the Jew’s death – that simply compounds her anxiety, because it cannot possibly be a good one. If she needs proof of that, Bianca thinks, she has only to recall what Gault said to her that time they walked together along the river: The Catholic cause in England could make good use of your talents. That was an invitation to sedition if ever she’d heard one.

Why hadn’t Nicholas been open with her? Was it to protect her? If so, it has served only to make things worse. She stamps her foot, raising a little cloud of spilt yellow brimstone. ‘Why couldn’t you have just told me?’

‘What’s that, Mistress?’ says Rose.

Appalled that her thoughts have taken on a life outside her head, Bianca says, ‘Nothing, Rose. I was just thinking.’

The faint sound of St Saviour’s bell ringing for Evensong reaches her through the open trapdoor. She sets down her burden of yellow gilliflower that she uses to treat ulcers, laying it beside the bags of brimstone Ned has assembled.

‘That’s the last of the brimstone,’ says Ned, peering down through the opening at the two women below. ‘There’s still a small chest in your chamber left to bring.’

Bianca remembers the box in which she keeps her father’s books, the ones she brought from Padua, and his silver Petrine cross. Bringing them back to the Jackdaw would seem now like an admission of failure. Better, she thinks, to leave them on Dice Lane, as a call to her to return when the pestilence has been defeated.

‘Leave it there, Ned,’ she calls up. ‘You’ve worked hard enough today.’

Ned sits on the edge of the trapdoor, eases himself down on his arms and – with surprising agility for such a big man – drops easily to the cellar floor. He scoops up his new bride by her waist and sits her down on top of the row of sacks, the better to admire her.