S. PERRY - The Heretic’s Mark

He’d taken it as a compliment.

‘Master Baronsdale tells me he considers you a heretic,’ he hears the queen saying, her white cerused face – almost as unmoving as a mask in a morality tale – creasing slightly with amusement at the expression on the faces of the assembled courtiers who are wondering what manner of fellow she’d commanded to appear before her. ‘In matters of physic, I mean.’

‘It is the privilege of the president of the College of Physicians to judge us humbler doctors as he chooses, Majesty,’ he had replied, head down out of deference. But to his horror that had enabled him to see that he was wearing an old patched pair of woollen hose. In the pre-dawn darkness when he’d dressed, Bianca had been half-asleep. Kissing him goodbye had taken preference over ensuring he’d been properly attired to meet his monarch.

Rathlin’s voice pulls him back to the present.

‘Nevertheless, you have been granted privy access to Her Grace’s chamber. We presume she did not call upon you to have you read poetry to her. What did you do there?’

‘We spoke of how the Moors of Barbary organize their hospitals. She was interested.’

‘The Moors have hospitals ?’ asks Athy, as though the possibility has only just occurred to him.

‘For longer than we have had them. The one I visited was better than St Tom’s. Certainly cleaner.’

‘How remarkable.’

‘Not really. Many of our procedures come from Moorish physicians of old, or from the books of antiquity they saved from destruction by the barbarians.’

Rathlin asks, ‘And during these visits to Her Majesty, did you administer any foreign substance to her body?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘I think I might have remembered. So might she.’

‘Did the traitor Lopez suggest such a thing to you?’ This from Athy.

‘Of course he didn’t.’

‘But he was present.’

‘Only at the first summons. After that, he was elsewhere – latterly in the Tower. I see you are not taking notes.’

‘This is a preliminary interview, Dr Shelby,’ Rathlin says. ‘There will be time enough for testimony later – when you appear before the Queen’s Bench.’

‘Were you ever alone with Her Grace?’ Athy asks.

‘Is that an offence? I hear tell the Earl of Essex is often in her privy company.’

‘Answer the question,’ says Athy sourly.

‘Then, never. I was always in the company of either Baronsdale or Beston.’

Rathlin raises a lawyer’s eyebrow, as though he’s found the fatal flaw in the defence. ‘So there were others in this conspiracy?’

Nicholas manages not to laugh. ‘Master Baronsdale is president of the College of Physicians. Beston is one of the Censors, responsible for testing our professional knowledge. Are you suggesting the entire membership of the College conspired to poison the queen, Master Rathlin? All of us?’

‘You could still have secreted your poison in some innocent-looking vessel, Dr Shelby.’

Now the laugh cannot be restrained. ‘Master Athy, Censor Beston might not be the sharpest of scalpels I’ve come across, but even he would manage to make a connection between a junior physician administering an unapproved draught to Her Grace and her subsequent demise.’

Rathlin leans forward across the trestle, the elbows of his lawyer’s gown leaving a snail’s trail of dust as they move. He steeples his fingers under his chin as he looks up at Nicholas with his cold judicial eyes. ‘Perhaps, being a medical man and not of our profession, Dr Shelby, you do not know that even speaking of the queen’s death is tantamount to sedition. It is forbidden.’

‘If you’re going to accuse me of seeking to poison her, and I am to defend myself, it’s a little difficult not to.’

‘Are you saying you deny the charge?’

For a moment Nicholas does not answer. Wearily he raises his gaze towards the low ceiling. Inches above his head a row of rusty iron hooks hang from a rafter like the sagging eyes of a dropsy patient.

‘Is that what you did to poor Dr Lopez – decide he was guilty from the start?’

Rathlin seems caught by surprise. ‘I cannot tell you, Dr Shelby,’ he says. ‘Neither I nor Master Athy was party to the examination of Lopez. That was conducted by the earl himself, and Sir Robert Cecil.’

The news gives Nicholas a glimmer of hope. Perhaps a formal charge has not yet been laid against him. Perhaps this really is a consequence of nothing but malice – a fiction uttered carelessly by someone who bears him a grudge. But even if it is, Nicholas knows this can still end in a lethal outcome. After all, the queen herself had not agreed to Lopez’s execution until the worm of doubt had been woken in her. What if the Earl of Essex is at this very moment in her company, reassuring her that another conspirator has been caught before he can strike? Poor Lopez had been her personal physician for more than thirteen years before she abandoned him. What hope could there be that she would lift even a single bejewelled finger to protect a young man who had been in her presence just four times, a man whom she had already called – perhaps only half-jokingly – a heretic?

Equally concerning to him is how far Robert Cecil will go to protect him. Lord Burghley’s son does little that is not in defence of his queen. For all the service Nicholas has given him over the past four years – service that has put his life in jeopardy more than once – he knows that in that crooked little body is an iron-willed ruthlessness. After all, Lopez himself was once Robert Cecil’s man. And look where that got him.

‘Master Winter,’ he hears Rathlin say in a voice he might well use when closing a prosecution, ‘I think it time to convey the accused to a place where he may be confined while he considers the wisdom of his defiance.’

And as he senses Winter and Lank-hair move to grip his arms, Nicholas Shelby understands that his ordeal has only just begun.

As evening approaches, Bianca Merton waits at the Falcon stairs for a wherry to take her across the Thames. The warmth of the day is fading; a chill is settling on the city. After half an hour her feet are tapping out a tattoo on the planks while the river mocks her impatience with dancing waves turned orange by the setting sun. Then three tilt-boats arrive from the northern bank almost simultaneously. A spirited but good-natured jostle with feet and oars breaks out amongst the boatmen for the best mooring post. ‘What are you doing on the water, Tom Frear? You’d be safer pushing a plough,’ shouts the first. ‘Mercy, good sirs,’ says the second to the passengers in another boat, ‘you’re the first lot today that Jack Tomblin ain’t managed to drown.’ Tomblin, not to be outdone, roars with good-natured scorn, ‘Make way for a proper waterman, you lubbers! Neptune hisself would weep to see such clumsiness.’

By custom, Bianca Merton would watch this tussle with mild amusement. But this evening she is desperate for the wherries to empty. She knows from experience how hard it is to get a private audience with Sir Robert Cecil.

Five young gentlemen from Gray’s Inn are the first ashore: trainee lawyers looking for diversion from their studies. To Bianca they look ridiculously young to be chancing purse and body on Bankside. Their beards are meagre and they have more pimples than a freshly plucked goose. She wishes the Jackdaw was still open. At least she’d be able to keep an eye on them, tell them which dice-dens and bawdy-houses to steer clear of, which alleyways to avoid if they should end up alone. But this evening it is all she can do to stop herself shouting at them to get out of her way. When the boat she has chosen is empty, she calls down to the waterman, ‘Good morrow, Master Frear. Will you take a fare to the Savoy hospital stairs?’