S Perry - The Serpent’s Mark

So Nicholas accepts the commission – if not exactly gladly. After all, it seems a small price to pay in exchange for the two precious years Wylde’s bravery in Holland allowed him to share with Eleanor.

Gloucestershire. The next morning

‘Slow down, y’daft nigit! What’s the hurry? We’ll be lucky to catch a single trout this early in the season.’

Against the rush of the wind, Samuel Wylde barely registers the breathless cry from somewhere behind him. Reaching the crest of the hill, high above the little village of Cleevely, he allows himself a moment to imagine that he’s the only human soul alive on earth: a new Adam, unmarked by sin. With a single thought, he unpeoples the England laid out before him. His two companions – one a tall lad with delicate, questioning eyes; the other a mischievous overstuffed package of youthful rebellion – are instantly swept away. So too are the village boys who throw stones at him and call him ‘Lucifer’s familiar’. And he doesn’t stop there. A snap of his fingers and there is no Queen Elizabeth, no Pope, no Philip of Spain. No lords and ladies. Not even his father, who anyway prefers far-away Holland to the company of his unsatisfactory son. With a single stroke of his imagination, they are all swept away. There is only him – Samuel Wylde – and the songs God sings to him when the light in his head becomes too bright to bear.

From his high vantage point it is easy for him to imagine this unpeopled world. He can see all the way to the far horizon and the Malvern Hills guarding the way into wild Wales. In the fields below him, oxen draw the first plough-blades of the season through the hard earth, for the sowing of the Lenten crop. In their wake come wheeling flocks of birds in search of juicy worms. The sheepfolds look like tiny white clouds fallen to earth from a sky of cold, crystalline blue. Sinking to the cold grass to ease the ache in his legs, he sets down the parcel of manchet bread and cheese wrapped in cloth, to be eaten while the trio fish. His fingers, ungloved and now more than a little blue, are long and delicate. Samuel works tirelessly to keep them still. If they begin to tingle, it is a sure sign another of his paroxysms is on the way – a sign that God is about to shame him once again for the sins he doesn’t remember committing.

But the world that Samuel has conjured is not quite empty. There is a dark shadow somewhere at the edge of it. He is not too sure what to make of the shadow yet. Does it threaten calamity? Or is it a sign that one day soon he will be the same as his two companions, Finney and Tanner: made afresh, unblemished, like the Adam of his imagination. A son whom a father might love.

The shadow is Professor Arcampora. Arcampora, with his strange accent and hawkish profile, his receding hairline, his savagely knife-like nose, and his jutting chin tipped with a spear-point of close-cut beard as dark as jet and shot through with sparks of silver. Arcampora, always clad in his black physician’s gown, which makes him look like a magus straight out of the pages of the Old Testament. Somewhere deep inside Samuel, a last ember of hope begins to glow: perhaps this time it will be different. Perhaps this time, after the procession of stern men of physic that his father has sent to treat him – and to ease his own conscience into the bargain – this one, terrifying though he may appear, might really bring with him a cure.

The extraordinary Dr Arcampora is not working alone, Samuel has discovered. In overheard snatches of conversation between the physician and his stepmother, he has learned that there are others who are concerned for his health. Who these others are was not revealed. All Samuel knows is that they are brothers, and they live beyond the Narrow Sea. Apparently it is safer for them in the Netherlands than in England, though if that’s the case, Samuel wonders why his father is so occupied fighting there. But these brothers obviously know of Samuel. And very soon someone will be arriving in England on their behalf, to gauge the efficacy of Dr Arcampora’s work.

‘Look at him, Tanner – staring out into space like he’s expecting to spy the Almighty winking back at him from behind a cloud.’

Finney, the taller lad with wide-set eyes that seem frozen in a permanent stare of puzzlement, sets down the three fishing rods he’s carried up the hill, brushes aside the shanks of brown hair that the wind has blown across his brow and turns to his friend. He’s the same age as Tanner Bell – sixteen – but he lacks the patience that stops Tanner’s rebelliousness from sometimes sinking into youthful minor cruelties. ‘I tell you truthfully, Tanner, if he has one of his falling spells up here, he can slither back to Cleevely on his belly like the little arseworm he is.’ Finney doesn’t find it easy, looking after Samuel Wylde.

‘Leave him to his thoughts,’ Tanner replies. ‘He’s not harming anyone.’

‘ Jesu ,’ says Finney despondently, ‘let me see Southwark and the playhouse again just once more before I die of boredom in this wilderness!’

‘I can usually tell when one of his fallings is on the way,’ says Tanner Bell. ‘He goes all hawk-eyed. At the moment he’s just enjoying the view. Trust me.’

Finney and Tanner Bell are looking at a young willow of a lad, about their own age. He’s tall, slightly stooped, with milky skin and wide eyes, and a mop of thin hair the colour of early corn. His neck looks all the thinner for the scarf wrapped around it. He wears a dun-coloured broadcloth coat, defence against the chill wind, and calf-high boots laced tight, to support his ankles on the walk.

‘But what if he has one of his fits up here – a bad one?’ asks Finney. ‘What if the Devil comes into him? Are you comfortable with that notion, Tanner: us, him and the Devil, all on our own out here on a hilltop?’

‘It’s happened before,’ says Tanner Bell with a shrug that tightens the mutton-leg sleeves of his ill-fitting brown worsted coat across his plump shoulders. ‘It’s scary at first, but you get used to it.’

Given that Finney has been paid in coin to be here, Tanner Bell considers himself the only true friend Samuel has. Probably has ever had. While Sir Joshua Wylde has spent much of the last sixteen years in Holland, fighting hand-to-hand with the Pope, Tanner had been his son’s companion at Havington Manor, where Samuel had been deposited into the care of his grandparents, Sir William and Lady Mercy Havington.

‘I don’t know how you bear it,’ Finney says dismissively. ‘I wouldn’t have come if I’d known the truth. Compared to this, the playhouse is like living in Elysium.’

‘We Bells have served the Havingtons for three generations,’ says Tanner indignantly. ‘They’ve been good to us – better than a fellow could expect from the quality.’

‘Marry! The quality will throw you out at the first fart! How d’you think I ended up in the playhouse?’

‘Not Sir William and Lady Mercy,’ protests Tanner. ‘When my father lost what was left of his wits, after Dorney died, Sir William did his best to look after him – right until the end.’

‘Who’s Dorney? Not another addle-pate the Havingtons took in?’

‘My older brother. This is his worsted coat I’m wearing.’

‘I wondered why it doesn’t fit you.’

Tanner’s impish face becomes suddenly serious. ‘Dorney was tall, and very thin – more like your build. But he was seven years older than me.’ He turns his back on Finney and sticks out his backside. ‘See that patch?’ he says over his shoulder.

‘Yes,’ says Finney, looking at the coat where it spreads in broad pleats over Tanner’s buttocks. A coarsely stitched square – of a quite different pedigree from the rest of the coat – betrays the hasty repair.