S. PERRY - The Heretic’s Mark

At St Thomas-a-Watering they pass the black, rotting remnants of the traitors and thieves hanged on the gibbet there and left as a warning for wiser folk. It reminds them of what they’re fleeing – the price of failure.

At Blackheath they let the horses quench their thirst from a stream, lingering until a drover and his flock have passed out of sight and the way is empty. Then, unobserved, they turn off the Kent road and strike north-east across the heath, towards Woolwich, where the new galleons of the queen’s navy are rising from their wooden cribs. Before they reach the dockyard, it is Nicholas’s intention that they should join the eastern road to Canterbury. He thinks they can be in Gravesend by dusk.

‘I hear tell this place is notorious for felons and cut-purses,’ Bianca observes anxiously as they pass along a rutted track between banks of wickedly barbed gorse.

Lifting the flap of a saddle pouch to reveal the polished wooden stock of the wheel-lock pistol, Nicholas smiles. ‘It’s the pistol Captain Yaxley of the Marion gave me when I returned from Morocco. I’ve already loaded it with powder and ball,’ he says confidently. ‘If we see cut-purses ahead, all I have to do is take the turning wrench, crank the wheel, prime the pan, set the dog-tooth… and give fire.’

‘Well then, Husband, that fills me with the greatest confidence,’ Bianca says with a smile of encouragement. ‘Just as long as they don’t come at us at the gallop.’

Nicholas’s judgement proves sound. In the tranquil dusk of Midsummer Day they enter Gravesend. The little town is still a scene of revelry. On the Hythe, the gravel strand that thrusts out into the river, a crowd of citizens is singing its way through a repertoire of bawdy songs, most of which involve anatomically impossible acts of copulation between the Pope, the King of Spain and a variety of animate and inanimate objects. Inside the Mitre tavern an uneasy Midsummer Day truce is in play. The sailors from the foreign ships anchored off the Hythe keep to themselves, heads down, enjoying their ale in silence, lest their foreign tongues attract attention. The rest of the trade is in boisterous mood. The drinkers are making the most of the day; the field or the river, the furnace or the lathe, will reclaim their labour soon enough. Nicholas and Bianca push their way carefully through the taproom throng. An overturned shovelboard or an inadvertent elbow interrupting a game of hazard will not go down well here: there’s enough sharpened steel being carried to armour a porcupine.

Nicholas scans the faces. Porter Bell is not a large man. He could be hard to spot. When they had first seen him here, Bianca thought she was looking at a ghost. Porter’s treatment in Holland at the hands of his Spanish captors, and the loss of a son to their muskets, had turned him into a husk of a man, a husk half-drowned in drink. He had lost a second son to a murderer. What must he look like now?

But Nicholas has a feeling that revenge might just have saved Porter Bell, a revenge he himself had contrived, though he has never told Bianca of it. And so he is looking for a face with the first colour of rebirth in it. And indeed, when he turns in response to a tug at his sleeve, he sees that his hopes were well founded.

‘Good morrow, Dr Shelby. An’ Mistress Merton, too. I’d not thought to see you two again.’

The smile Porter Bell gives them is heartfelt, but uncertain – the smile of a man trying to remember how to do it. But the eyes are not as shrunken as once they were. The skin is no longer spectrally translucent, as though the suffering of the body had thinned the life-force within the flesh.

‘You look well, Master Porter,’ Bianca says.

‘And you may thank the man beside you for that, Mistress.’

For an awful moment Nicholas thinks Porter Bell is going to reveal the cause of his recovery, right here in a crowded tavern. So he says, as nonchalantly as he can contrive, ‘That parcel I sent you some time ago – it must have been almost three years…’

‘The foreign one,’ Bell says, understanding at once.

‘Yes. I trust it arrived safely.’

Porter Bell gives him a contented nod. He glances towards the river. ‘All that needs saying is that it was successfully delivered to an appropriate destination.’

‘Was anyone around to witness its delivery?’

‘It was pitch-dark,’ Bell says, shaking his head. ‘But I’d warrant there’s more than a few of us who fought in the Low Countries who would willingly raise a jug in praise of what you did, Dr Shelby.’

Nicholas gives an awkward smile. ‘And others who would wish me dead for it, so let us speak of other matters. Are you still a waterman?’

‘I am. An’ I prosper at it now.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

Bell gives him a sly glance. ‘I don’t suppose you had anything to do with Lord Lumley sending me that generous sum?’

Nicholas just smiles.

‘Well, it was the mending of me, Dr Shelby, that’s all I can say. Now I have two boats: the old skiff, an’ a new pinnace for carrying goods. An’ trade on the river is always brisk.’

‘You’ll be putting the ferry to Tilbury out of business, Master Porter,’ Nicholas says with a grin.

‘There’s room on the river for us all,’ Bell says. ‘Besides, there’s some folk who care not to be seen on the official ferry, if you understand me – on account of it being, well, official .’

‘Then it seems that fortune has favoured us both,’ Nicholas says. ‘Because that is exactly what we’ve come here to talk to you about.’ He hails a passing potboy and orders a bottle of sack to celebrate Porter Bell’s resurrection.

In the opaque dawn light the shingle promontory of the Hythe disappears in front of them, a path leading to the lip of an unseen chasm. The fog has stolen the river away, along with all the ships moored upon it. To the east, a thin spread of misty gold lies like the first stroke of a painter’s brush on a new canvas.

Nicholas and Bianca walk their horses down to the water’s edge. At the extent of their reins, the horses have already begun to fade from view, as though the unseen river is washing away their substance, dissolving them.

‘How will we see him?’ Bianca asks.

‘We won’t have to. He’ll see us. He told me once he can tell where he is on the river even in the dead of night – even if there’s not a single lantern lit in any of the ships. One hundred paces to the east, he said.’

‘But how shall we know east from west in this fog?’

‘We keep the Hythe to our backs. If our feet get wet, we turn a little to the right.’

They pace carefully a short distance, until shingle begins to give way to tufts of sedge and rising ground. Looking back, Bianca sees the Hythe has disappeared, with only a scattering of rooftops and masts visible above the fog bank.

A low whistle comes out of the whiteness somewhere close by, as Porter Bell hears the sound of their horses at the water’s edge. A dark shape looms ahead.

The pinnace is about twenty feet long, flat and ugly in the water, a tub for transporting bales of wool and other light cargo across the river. Bell has chosen a place on the bank where the earth has slipped into the water. He has grounded the pinnace on the riverbed, so that the blunt prow is just about level with the land. Even so, it takes a deal of coaxing to get the horses to step down onto the wooden planks of the hull. At first Nicholas fears the clatter of hooves and the shrill whinnying will wake all of Gravesend, but the fog and the river seem to steal away the sound.