S. PERRY - The Heretic’s Mark

‘Someone wrote some lies about me, Rose, that’s all. He sent them to Essex and others.’

‘Does this saucy rogue ’ave a name?’

‘Anonymous, I’m afraid.’

Rose’s black ringlets swirl with a defiant will of their own. Her plump cheeks colour with anger. ‘Well, you tell me where this Master Nonny-mouse lives, an’ I’ll call my Ned back from Nonsuch to ’ave one of his friendly words.’

Nicholas smiles, glad she’s on his side. ‘I’m home now, Rose. That’s all that matters.’

‘For a little while,’ says Bianca with a cautionary tone. ‘Sir Robert Cecil says that Master Nicholas should leave the city, as a precaution. And for the very first time I find myself in agreement with him.’

Rose seems suddenly short of breath. ‘But he can’t !’

‘Why not?’ Bianca asks.

Rose looks close to tears. ‘When he went swanning off to the Barbary shore last year, you almost died , Mistress.’ She turns to Nicholas, her chest heaving beneath her gown, her eyes wide with anxiety. ‘And when you went off to Gloucestershire that time, you almost died, too.’ She thrusts her open hands out towards them, as though offering a precious gift. ‘Can’t you see – going away ain’t good for either of you!’

‘Don’t be silly, Rose,’ Bianca says. ‘No one is going to come to any harm. It’s only for a while.’

‘How much of a while?’ Rose demands to know, withdrawing her hands and balling them against her hips.

‘Just until Sir Robert has managed to find out who’s making these unfounded accusations against Nicholas.’

‘Ned and I shall come with you,’ Rose announces. ‘To keep you safe.’

Bianca is touched by her fervour, but adamant. ‘I will need you and Ned here, to watch over the work on the Jackdaw.’

‘You’re going with ’im?’ Rose squeaks as the realization strikes her.

‘Of course I’m going with him,’ Bianca says, taking hold of Nicholas’s arm. ‘He’s my husband.’

It is evening, and far away from Bankside – across the Narrow Sea in fact, in a small city to the north-east of Antwerp. A young woman dressed in a threadbare brown kirtle stands gazing up at the façade of a cathedral, steeling herself to enter. The city is called ’s-Hertogenbosch, known more simply to Brabantians as Den Bosch, and the maid’s name is Hella Maas.

In years she is closer to Rose Monkton than to Nicholas Shelby or Bianca Merton. But there the similarity ends. Where Rose is the very picture of pastoral pulchritude, this young woman has a severe, broken beauty. It is a beauty forged in grief. Her eyes are deep and dark, bulbous, as though too many bad dreams are pushing against them from the inside.

From the great tower that soars above her, the cathedral’s bell begins to ring out its sonorous invitation. The deep, bass voice makes the warm evening air quiver, as though it has a pulse, as though it is alive. Hella knows that in the narrow channels of the Binnendieze, running through the city the way veins and arteries run through her own body, the water will be rippling in concert. It will make the shadows dance beneath the little bridges that seem to spring between cliffs of mossy brickwork.

Hella has come to the great cathedral of St John the Evangelist because she has heard what lies within. Were it not for Father Vermeiren, she would have come sooner, but the priest is large in frame and voice, and his scowl frightens her. She would not put it past him to give her up to the Spanish garrison as a troublemaker, and she knows only too well the extent of their cruel depravities.

Her self-inflicted banishment has cost her dear. She has missed being present at Mass, and she knows God will have witnessed her absence. But today she has summoned all her courage. Because today is the one day of the week when Father Vermeiren stands before the congregation and opens God’s window to let everyone see a glimpse of His great plan.

Hella waits silently while the inhabitants of Den Bosch hurry past her into the darkness beyond the great door. She sees the stolid cloth merchants, their faces lined with furrows of resignation from the endless battle to compete with English imports; the tough little beef farmers who can find grazing pasture even on soil made spongy by too much rain and too high a water table; the well-dressed men of commerce who now look for their profits to Antwerp rather than Cologne; the Spanish soldiers of the garrison, even more pious than the local clerics and just as dangerous. Some meet her gaze with a flicker of recognition, though fewer now than when she first arrived in the city.

There had been a time, barely a month ago, when they would have gathered in the Markt square in their hundreds to hear her preach. Then they had pressed in upon her, straining to hear her words, marvelling that God would choose such an insubstantial vessel through which to let His voice flow. Now, if they recognize her at all, they turn their heads away. They place themselves between her and their children, as if she carries a contagion. They no longer want to hear her warnings. Yet warnings are what Hella knows she was put on this earth to deliver.

For as long as she can remember she has understood the power of portents. Even as a child, she could link something bad happening to a recent storm, or a flood, or a fire brought about by a lightning strike. Had not her very birth occurred in the year that a new star had blazed into being in the night sky?

She does not think this second sight of hers is a gift. For Hella, to be permitted glimpses of the future but be unable to alter it, to gain knowledge only to watch helplessly as the consequences bring death in their wake, to see things she would rather not see, is a curse. Sometimes she thinks she would be better off blind.

Every day, for the past thirteen years, she has castigated herself for failing to use this ability to warn the people of Breda, her home town, of the catastrophe that engulfed them on the very day she turned eight. Eight : a number that the Bible associates with resurrection. Her sister Hannie had taught her that, and Hannie – five years older and twice as clever – had shared her delight in the magic of numbers. But Hannie is dead, along with almost six hundred other citizens of Breda, amongst them nearly every other member of the Maas family. Six hundred : the number of chariots that Pharaoh sent to hunt down the Israelites.

In the years that have passed since that day, Hella has turned the guilt, the self-reproach, to good use. Whenever the ghosts of her family drifted across her vision, which was every single day, she would imagine they were encouraging her from heaven to warn the living that God does not want us to lift the curtain. He doesn’t want us to go searching for what might lie behind it – like so many of those pursuing the new learning, the new sciences. Tell them , sister Hannie would whisper to her, that I was wrong, that there are some things it is best not to know.

In Den Bosch, the crowds who came to listen to her had soon begun to thin. The first to go had been the ones who shouted back that she was frightening their children. More followed. Every day there would be fewer gathering around her in the Markt square. She had wondered if Father Vermeiren from the cathedral was behind it. Had he warned his parishioners that it was not proper for a woman to preach? She knew for a fact that he had led a delegation of city burghers to the Beguinage, the community of pious women who had given her shelter and board, suggesting they expel her, because that was exactly what they had done. She had been forced to sleep under a bridge, to hold out her hand for food like a beggar. Soon she had found herself addressing hardly anyone but the town drunks and the worst sort of men, who insulted her with obscenities and derision.