S Perry - The Serpent’s Mark

Along the quayside the little hoys bound for London are loading up with cheese and butter. Scottish salt-boats and Suffolk herring-drifters disgorge their cargoes by the barrel-load. The smell of pitch and freshly sawn timber reaches him from the small shipyard. It was from this very quay, he remembers, that he departed for Holland, the ink barely dry on his medical diploma. ‘The Dons are murdering innocent Protestants in their beds,’ he’d explained to Eleanor when he’d told her of his intention, his head brimming with idealistic rage at what the Spanish were doing to good Dutch Protestants across the sea. ‘Sir William Havington has raised a company to aid the House of Orange in their just revolt. They need a surgeon.’ Her reaction had astounded him. Instead of admiration, there had been only cold-eyed anger. He’d discovered later that she’d taken his pompous talk of duty and responsibility for a sign that he was having second thoughts about the wedding. He can sense her now, standing beside him on the day the Good Madelaine sailed, refusing to weep, accepting his farewell with the pretence of indifference, a determined set to her jaw.

There had been others taking leave of loved ones that day, he recalls. Sir William Havington himself – a gentle white-haired soul who had long since retired from the profession of arms – had come to wish good fortune to the company that bore his name. He had made a point of shaking hands with everyone, from its new commander down to the lowliest recruit. Behind his smile, something in Sir William’s face, some sadness he couldn’t quite hide, had told Nicholas that a test was coming – a test that would make a bloody mockery of all their boisterous, innocent confidence.

And he’d been proved right. Within a month a dozen of them were dead. By winter, several more had returned to England maimed, condemned to wander the open roads begging for alms, because the House of Orange had somehow neglected to pay their promised bounty. As for those who’d remained in Holland – Nicholas included – all that had kept them from becoming a fleeing mob of desperate, starving fugitives – or, worse still, prisoners of the Spanish – had been the iron will and extraordinary courage of the man who had taken Sir William’s place at their head: his son-in-law, Sir Joshua Wylde.

And there had been a third figure on the quayside that day, Nicholas now recalls: Sir Joshua’s son, Samuel. He remembers a thin, pale lad with fair hair and a worried face. The boy had wanted so much to follow his father, but his youth and sickliness had made that impossible. You couldn’t have known it, Samuel , says a voice in Nicholas’s head as he gazes out over the leaden flatness of the estuary, but you were luckier than many of those brave young lads with whom – even though you were still a child – you so fervently longed to trade places .

On a whim, Nicholas leaves the quayside and follows the track along the bank. He knows where he’s heading, though he won’t yet admit it to himself.

I’ll just take a quick glance from the riverbank, that’s all… See if the house fits my memory… It can’t hurt…

The grey expanse of the estuary cuts through the flat bleakness on its serpentine journey towards the sea. He catches the familiar fetid reek of tidal mud on the wind. It reminds him of the smell of flooded graves.

And then there it is: a modest but gracious thatched manor house set back from the creek, a well-grazed lawn sloping down to a reed-bed and a private jetty – Sir Joshua Wylde’s Suffolk home. The place he prefers over the family seat in Gloucestershire, because here in Suffolk there is no sickly Samuel to remind him that he has no healthy heir to whom he can entrust Sir William Havington’s legacy.

For a moment Nicholas thinks he has stepped back in time. The picture is almost exactly as he remembers it, even down to the thirty or so lads – a thin leavening of older men amongst them – who squat in expectation in a semicircle on the grass. And at their centre, standing as though he’s just forced a breach in a rampart, is the fiercely bearded resplendence of Sir Joshua himself; a little older perhaps, a few more lines around his eyes from the permanent black scowl, the points of his jerkin stretched somewhat tighter around the belly, but undoubtedly the same mad-gazed hammer of the heretic.

If Nicholas believed in ghosts – as all right-minded people do – he’d think that’s what these figures are – wraiths from the past. But he can hear Sir Joshua’s voice as clear and as real as the exchanges on Market Hill, and he realizes that he’s happened upon another company in preparation for the war in the Netherlands, a war that has been raging now for more than twenty years and shows no apparent sign of ending.

‘Your average Don is born with a bloody heart,’ Sir Joshua is telling the entranced company. ‘He drinks slaughter with his dam’s milk. He has no place on a civilized earth. It will be your God-given task to tear that heart out of his filthy, blaspheming body with your bare hands, if needs must!’

A rousing cry goes up in reply, though from what Nicholas can judge from the earnest faces, the nearest these lads have yet come to slaughter is catching coney for the pot.

And then Sir Joshua stiffens, as he spots Nicholas watching him from the path. A slow smile breaks through the great foliage around his face. It reminds Nicholas of an old tree trunk slowly parting after the axe blade has done its work. ‘God’s blood! As Christ is my saviour – look what the wind has brought!’ he booms, beckoning with one leather-clad arm for Nicholas to step forward. ‘This, my fine bully-boys, is Dr Nick Shelby. Came with us to Gelderland in ’87. Callow as a country maiden when he joined. Best damned surgeon in the whole Orange army when he left. Almost as good as that scoundrel Paré, and he was a Frenchie, so he don’t count.’

As Sir Joshua’s fist closes around his own proffered hand, pumping his arm alarmingly, Nicholas offers an embarrassed grin to the upturned faces. He has never found Joshua Wylde an easy man to like. But he knows full well that, like every other fellow in Sir William Havington’s company who returned, he owes Sir Joshua his life. He wonders how many of these eager fellows he’ll bring safely home.

With another barrage of blood-curdling oaths fired at the Spanish, Wylde instructs his recruits to attend to their preparations, and insists that Nicholas share a jug with him inside the house.

Stepping into the shadows of the hall, Nicholas finds the way almost blocked by a mountain of chests and sacks containing the necessities of comfortable campaigning: crates of malmsey, mattresses and pewter, polished plate armour, stands of matchlock muskets. A servant is dispatched and hurries back with sweet Rhenish in silver cups.

‘Surely you’re not in practice here in Suffolk,’ Sir Joshua says as they drink. ‘They still look to magic and wise-women in these parts.’

What can I tell him, Nicholas wonders as he feels his stomach churn; how can I explain what I’ve been through, to someone who thinks grief can be dispensed with by a quick prayer and a toast raised to the dead?

‘After I came back,’ he begins tentatively, ‘I did set up in practice in London, but–’

Sir Joshua – who conducts conservations the way he assaults heavily defended bastions: relentlessly – doesn’t wait for Nicholas to finish his reply. ‘Married yet?’ he asks bluntly. ‘Sons? Healthy sons?’

‘Sadly, no.’

‘Don’t tarry too long, lad. Greatest reverse of my life, not having a healthy son,’ Sir Joshua tells him, and for a lingering moment Nicholas wishes he’d stayed beside the session house with his father.