S. PERRY - The Heretic’s Mark

The boatman looks up. ‘ You , Mistress Merton? The Savoy hospital? Nothing amiss, is there?’

‘Nothing amiss, Master Frear,’ she lies. He’s noted the agitation in me, she thinks. She tries to compose her features. ‘I have some business at Covent Garden, that’s all.’

‘Shall I wait for a full load to take upriver, or are you in a hurry?’

‘A hurry, Master Frear – if that’s not a burden to you.’

‘Then you’re in luck, Mistress. The tide’s still on the flow.’

Bianca does the best she can to settle on the cross-bench. Realizing her left hand is drumming on the plank, she fumbles inside her gown for her purse.

Leaning into his oars without breaking rhythm, wherryman Frear shakes his head. ‘There’ll be no need of that, Mistress Merton. You and Dr Shelby cured my Mags of the tertian fever. Twelfth Night last, it was. Say the word an’ I’ll row you to Oxford and back, an’ twice on Accession Day, all for gratis.’

Bianca gives him a grateful smile. It hides a cold swell of fear in her belly that has nothing to do with the rise and fall of the wherry as it strikes out past the Paris Garden towards Whitehall. From the moment Rose Monkton came flying through the door, her mistress has been pondering the likelihood that one of the most powerful men in the kingdom will happily lay aside whatever occupies him this evening just to grant an audience to a Bankside tavern owner without a tavern.

In the event, she doesn’t recognize the gatekeeper on duty at Cecil House. He, in turn, does not recognize her. And even if he did, Bianca knows he is but the first thorn bush in a whole thicket set around the queen’s secretary that grows denser, the more one tries to penetrate it. She adopts a tone she thinks might sound authoritative.

‘I am the wife of one of Sir Robert’s physicians,’ she begins. Even now it sounds strange to her. ‘I must speak to Sir Robert. It’s urgent.’

‘Sir Robert’s physician, you say?’

‘Dr Nicholas Shelby. You must have seen him pass through these gates before now.’

The gatekeeper nods. ‘The young fellow who don’t look like a physician?’

‘That would be him.’

‘And you’re his wife?’

‘Yes. I am Mistress Merton.’

‘But you said you were Dr Shelby’s wife.’

‘I am.’

‘So why are you Mistress Merton and not Goodwife Shelby?’

‘I am both,’ she says, having little time for the English practice of subsumption by marriage.

‘How can a body be two people at once?’

‘I have to speak to Sir Robert.’

‘What about?’

‘A privy matter.’

‘I’ll have to know more before I can pass a message.’

Bianca’s jaw stiffens. ‘I told you, I’m the wife of his physician. It’s about a pustule that needs lancing.’

Even in the dusk Bianca can see the relish in the gatekeeper’s eyes. He’s savouring how the revelation will play with the other servants when he tells them the son of the Lord Treasurer has a boil somewhere on his august person.

‘A pustule – whereabouts?’

Bianca smiles sweetly at him.

‘It’s guarding his gatehouse.’

Less than ten minutes later she finds herself sitting on a window seat beside a tall column of mullioned glass stained orange by the setting sun, staring fixedly at a mantelpiece carved with the Cecil insignia, and trying to slow the frenzied beating of her heart by silently counting the monotonous ticking of a fine French clock.

Nicholas has no idea how much time has passed since Winter pushed him through the door of this new chamber. But at least his accommodation has improved. They have taken him from the old carpenter’s store to a minor wing of Essex House. He can sense, perhaps by the stagnant closeness of the air, that it has been used as a depository for things no longer necessary to the earl’s comfort: furniture that is out of fashion, boxes of clothes that now fail to dazzle, people… The floor is tiled, a white-and-red zigzag that makes him think of blood running over the planks of a scaffold. He wonders if this is where they kept Lopez while they plastered over the gaping cracks in their case against him.

He is lying on single narrow cot, not quite wide enough to take a fully-grown man. The coarse woollen sheet scratches through the linen of his shirt. It fails miserably to soften the hardness of the boards beneath. If he rests his arms by his sides, the limbs are forced inwards across his body; if he extends them, the edges of the cot are hard against his elbows. Either way, he cannot sleep. Perhaps that’s the aim. Wear him down. Exhaust him. Confessions can be wrung out of a man without recourse to hot iron or cold fists.

Sometime after Winter had left he heard a key turning to unlock the door. Thinking the interrogation was about to begin again, he lifted himself off the cot, preferring to face them on his feet than prone like a beaten dog. But it had only been a servant bringing a plate of bread and cheese and a pot of small-beer.

He wonders if Rathlin and Athy will come again. Perhaps Essex will send someone more significant. If it is Chief Justice Popham, or Attorney General Coke, or even Essex himself, then the thread of hope will unravel. His greatest fear is that they will come accompanied by the infamous Richard Topcliffe, the queen’s tame torturer.

To master the fear inside him, and to suppress his longing to be with Bianca, in his mind he runs through his knowledge of Italian vocabulary. In their time at Nonsuch over the winter, she helped him improve his limited skill in the language. For him it had been just a diversion. His real motive had been to strengthen the muscles in her throat, to aid her recovery from the laryngotomy he had been forced to perform in order to save her life, after the smoke from the fire that destroyed the Jackdaw had almost killed her. He reaches benefico before something resembling sleep takes him.

A key turning in the lock brings him suddenly awake. Two faces emerge from the blackness, each turned into a devil’s mask by a sudden flare of candlelight. One of the masks speaks.

‘You are to come with us, Dr Shelby.’

The voice is Rathlin’s. Nicholas presumes the second demon is Athy. Rising stiffly from the cot, he asks, ‘What hour is it? Where are you taking me?’

He receives no answer. Despite his aching limbs, he thinks of punching the closest devil’s face and making a break for it. But beyond the compass of the candlelight there is nothing but blackness. He has no idea where to run to . So with Rathlin leading and Athy as rearguard, he walks hesitantly into the depths of Essex House.

After a meandering journey that costs him barked shins and several harsh prods in the back, a door looms out of the night, framed by the faintest sliver of light. Nicholas almost walks into Rathlin’s back as he stops. He sees the candle flame move diagonally, extinguished and then relit as it passes across the silhouette of the lawyer’s body. He hears Rathlin’s fist rap twice on the door. The next moment he is standing, blinking furiously, in a grandly appointed room lit by more candles than he can count. Their flickering light makes a dancing cloudscape on the gleaming white plaster ceiling, casting shadows from the ornate moulding. On the far wall, an oak gallery extends from one side to the other above a row of paintings that he takes to be leading members of the Devereux family.

In the centre of the room stands a tall man, a little younger than himself. He sports a sandy-coloured beard and a doublet seeded with more pearls than a diver could harvest in a year and still have lungs to breathe with. He eyes Nicholas with detached disappointment, as though he’s bought a hunting dog on a false recommendation. Nicholas knows him at once. It is Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex.