S. PERRY - The Heretic’s Mark

‘I am not afraid to die , if that is what you mean. Like poor little Matteo, it would bring a period of peace before the Day of Judgement.’

Stunned by her utter lack of emotion, Nicholas opens his mouth to protest. Madonna Antonella lifts a hand to stop him. She says, ‘Enough! I do not know what you are saying to Sister Hella, but it does not seem to me to be kind counsel. She will be safe enough here in the Beguinage; we are well used to dealing with men who have violence in their hearts towards the Sisters who have sought refuge here. We will look after her. You may rely upon it. Now, Dr Shelby, I think it best we consider this audience at an end.’

Bianca Merton stands in the lane and looks up at the stuccoed wall of the house she was born in. Since she left, it has been painted a garish yellow. She knows her mother would be horrified.

The wooden double doors on the ground floor are as crooked as she remembers them. She wonders what lies behind them now. In her childhood it had been sacks and crates of the herbs and spices Simon Merton imported from the lands of the Ottoman Turks. Above was the accommodation: two bedrooms, a living space and a kitchen. On the top floor her father had a curtained space where he set down on paper the strange notions he had about the world and the cosmos, notions that had eventually earned him a dank cell and the attention of the Inquisition. At the rear of the house her mother had a chamber with a table and a basin, where she could mix her balms and medicaments, her syrups and her poisons. Looking up at the little windows beneath the eaves, Bianca finds it almost amusing: the notion that her father’s harmless pursuits proved fatal, whereas her mother’s dangerous ones made her reputation.

Taking Simon Merton’s silver Petrine cross from her gown, she holds it against her chest, the crucified figure of St Peter facing outwards, as though house and cross might somehow be united again, at least for a brief moment. Or is it, perhaps, an offering? A gift, to seek approval from her mother for what she intends to do? Then she turns and walks away.

She does not go far. Just two lanes away, in the direction of the Piazza delle Erbe, she stops before a narrow shop front. It is a place so ancient that she imagines the first transactions here were made in Latin. Tentatively, as though afraid its substance is no more solid than her recollection of it, she pushes at the door.

Inside, the shop is exactly as she remembers it, dark and reeking with heavy pungent scents. Moving further in, Bianca smiles with recollection, half-expecting to see the eyes of forest nymphs peeping at her from between the profusion of leaves, sprigs, bunches, roots, tubers and stems.

‘Signor Tiziano,’ she calls out. ‘It is I, Signorina Bianca.’

At the back of the shop, as if emerging from a fairy glade, a very old man in a pale, discoloured cloth gown, tied at the waist with a cord, emerges. As he moves, Bianca hears the slow clack of wooden clogs on flagstones. She closes the distance, because she knows his eyesight is not good.

‘Is it really you – little Bianca Caporetti?’ the apothecary says, reaching out to take Bianca’s hands in his. ‘Or am I dreaming?’

‘You never did call me by my father’s name,’ Bianca says with a gentle smile as she grasps what feels to her like two sprigs of dried reed wrapped in fragile parchment. ‘Why was that, Signor Tiziano?’

‘Because your mother was a Caporetti, and the Caporettis have been known in Padua since before the Venetians came here, before the Carrara even.’ The old man gives her a toothless grin. ‘Nothing against the Englishman, your father, of course. A good fellow; but he wasn’t one of us. Have you tired of his land, Daughter? I hear they are all heretics there. Is that why you have come home?’

‘Something like that, at least for a while.’

She helps him back to his chair. They talk of old times, though Bianca is pretty sure that, for Tiziano, time was only young in her great-grandmother’s day. When they have reminisced enough, and he has recounted all those from the neighbourhood whose bones have been interred in her absence, she says, ‘If I was in need of cantarella , Signor Tiziano, could you provide a vial for me?’

He peers at her, almost as though she is beginning to dissolve slowly before his watery old eyes, as if she has been nothing but an apparition from the moment she walked into his shop. ‘ Cantarella ,’ he says at length. ‘The Borgia poison.’

‘I’m only asking – for the present. But if other remedies for my… malady… don’t work, I might have to think again.’

He gives a wise, slow nod. She hears the cartilage in his thin neck grind.

‘Is it for a man or a woman? The weight will matter.’

‘It is for a maid.’

‘You wish the consequences to be speedy? Or lingering?’

‘Oh, speedy,’ she says. ‘I am not a vindictive woman.’

He smiles again. ‘They always said that crossing the Caporettis in love was never a wise idea.’ He raises Bianca’s hands to his mouth and bestows a dry kiss upon them with his ancient lips. ‘I always knew I was right to call you Caporetti. It is good to see you taking up your mother’s trade again.’

St Paul’s, London, 6th October 1594

If Ned Monkton is awed by his surroundings, he shows no sign when the guards lead him into the Long Chapel of the old Norman cathedral of St Paul’s. He looks around at the unadorned stone and the simple furnishings with little more than mild interest. Watching from her place on the shadowed side-benches, Rose wonders if it is courage he is showing or a failure to understand the consequences of error. She can cry no more tears for him; her eyes are raw from two days with little sleep, schooling him in the one thing that stands between her husband and the gallows.

Before bidding him farewell at the Marshalsea – harder even than she had expected – she handed him the clean shirt she had brought and checked him over for loose straw. Looking at him now, chained at the ankles and the wrists, she is pleased to see that his great auburn beard and his hair are as neat as they have ever been. First impressions are important, and never more so than when making a plea to escape the noose.

Lumley’s tame chaplain is a stooped, sad little fellow. He looks to Rose like a country parson who’s attended too many funerals. Dressed in a formal clerical gown, with a broad flat cap across his head, he sits behind a table covered in ecclesiastical linen, flanked by his clerks. One of them reads the temporal charge, the verdict and the sentence. The other restates the plea of Benefit of Clergy made on Ned’s behalf by Lord Lumley, who observes silently from his place next to Rose. She wonders how she could bear this for a single minute if Lumley’s calming presence were not beside her.

‘Does the accused claim to be a member of the clergy?’ the chaplain asks Ned doubtfully.

Ned looks to Lumley for guidance.

‘No, most reverend sir, Master Monkton is not of the clergy. But he is literate, and can therefore plead benefit of the same. That is the law, as amended by Her Grace the queen. I can confirm it with her, if you wish.’

The chaplain smiles graciously. ‘That will be unnecessary, my lord. You are correct in your interpretation of the law. Let us proceed. Step forward, Accused.’

Ned shuffles closer to the table. One of the clerks look up. Rose notices the sudden nervous jump of his Adam’s apple.

‘Here is the word of God,’ says the chaplain ominously, lifting a large heavy leather-bound Bible from the table. ‘Open it to Psalm fifty-one and prove your Benefit of Clergy.’ He offers the Bible slowly and with great dignity, as though offering a sacrifice at an altar.