The Angel's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  But when Nicholas hails him, Ned turns towards him with eyes harrowed by worry. ‘God’s wounds! Thank Christ you’ve come,’ he growls. ‘She’s been gone since yesterday – and the woe is all my doing!’

  She has been led almost to the bottom of a deep, dark well.

  She is buried so far in the earth that in the spring her limbs will turn into pale shoots, forcing their way upwards until she spills out into the sunlight in a profusion of sweet-smelling flowers. A girl with an interest in herbs will pass by, pluck her leaves, set them in a bowl and make a heady infusion to place beside her pillow to help her dream.

  But first must come the small matter of her death.

  49

  When she didn’t return, I went looking for her,’ Ned says as they leave the Jackdaw behind, heading at a brisk pace for the physic garden. He’s brought a blazing torch to augment Brabant’s lantern. By its light Nicholas can see how much he blames himself. ‘At the Magdalene they said she’d already left, with a man and a woman. I couldn’t get any sense out of them. They’re all much like my Jacob in there.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Ned; you weren’t to know it was a trap,’ Nicholas says for at least the third time. ‘When her mind’s made up, that’s it.’

  ‘I found the overseer – but he was that drunk he wouldn’t have noticed if the Pope had dropped by, asking for a bed for the night.’

  They press on through the darkened lanes. Nicholas carries the key to the physic garden door, given to him by Rose. Both she and Timothy had wanted to come, but Brabant had refused: ‘A maid and a callow boy with my crew? That’s unlucky.’ So Nicholas has left Rose to comfort Timothy in his own self-recriminating misery.

  What he hadn’t expected was the look that Rose bestowed on Ned as they parted company: a mix of admiration and anxiety. Clearly, life at the Jackdaw has been getting along just fine without him.

  On Black Bull Alley he can count the lighted windows on the fingers of one hand. To the south, towards Winchester House, barely a dozen more points of light resist the darkness. The Lazar House seems to have leached its black heart into the night.

  In the physic garden Burghley’s men begin inspecting the wall, looking for a suitable place to climb. Nicholas is acutely aware that the moving circle of light must be clearly visible to anyone chancing to look out of those eye-slit windows below the eaves of the ancient hospice.

  Brabant chooses his spot. His men go over with ease – a stationary wall, even if it is ten feet high, holds no challenge for men used to swarming aloft from a heaving deck in a high sea. But for Nicholas, the prospect does not sit so lightly.

  Ned comes to his rescue. He’s the largest of any of them, and his huge cupped paws give enough impetus to minimize the scraped hands and knees as Nicholas sails over into the dark wilderness beyond.

  And then, almost before he knows it, he’s standing in the waist-high weeds, while before him the great black bulk of the Lazar House looms up into the night like some dreadful pagan temple.

  Brabant uses an iron crow he’s brought along to take the lock off the door. He makes almost no sound. Nicholas guesses it’s a privateer’s skill – honed by years of climbing mooring ropes, prizing open cabin windows and storming aboard to commit violence with pistol and sword, all in the name of England’s queen. Or perhaps the lock was just older than he thought. If that’s the case – and Quigley’s not inside the Lazar House – then Bianca is either dead, or soon will be. And there’s not a thing he can do about it.

  The same awful feeling of helplessness he’d known when he’d realized Eleanor’s fate was completely out of his hands floods over him now. A trickle of sweat runs down his forehead. Through pursed lips, he empties his lungs of air to relieve the tension. And the fear.

  It wasn’t a prison, it was a hospital. That’s what he’d told Bianca. Leprosy is a sickness, not a sin. So why is he so grateful when Brabant goes ahead of him into a narrow pitch-black passageway?

  They emerge into cloisters around a central courtyard. There’s no sound, other than their own breathing. Brabant and the others now seem reluctant to move any further – like sailors everywhere, they’re innately superstitious. Each one of them is already conjuring ghosts out of the darkness.

  And Nicholas has no trouble understanding why. By the light from Brabant’s lantern and Ned’s flickering torch, he sees, scattered around the cloisters, poignant reminders that the Lazar House was once a community of outcasts shut away from the world. There’s a handcart collapsed against a wall like a Bankside drunk; a reed basket all but unravelled, its contents of washing mallets forming a forlorn and jumbled altar in the centre; even a child’s wooden study-book lying in its frame, the painted letters of the alphabet so badly faded they are little more than shadows on its face. It’s as if the occupants of a house have fled impending catastrophe, not daring to stop to take their possessions with them.

  In the central courtyard grows a miniature forest of fern, hart’s tongue and buckler. Nicholas remembers the night at Barnthorpe when he and Jack first climbed out of the window to go coney-hunting in the barley by lantern-light. He’d been barely tall enough to see over the gently swaying crop, imagining that he was alone and adrift on a vast black sluggish ocean. Then an owl had swept low over his head in the darkness and frightened him clean out of his boots. He’d had nightmares for a month.

  He wonders if he’s having one now – because at the extreme edge of the flickering lantern light he can just make out a black hole cut in the cloister wall. It’s the entrance to a stone stairway. It looks to Nicholas more like a tomb with the door ajar.

  Under his breath, Nikko the gunner’s mate starts muttering something about graves and ghosts. Brabant curses him and tells him to shut his mouth. But even he seems reluctant to take the next step.

  ‘The dead won’t bite you,’ rumbles Ned Monkton, coming to the rescue once again. He heads purposefully towards the archway. ‘Not unless you let them.’

  At the top of a stone stairway festooned with cobwebs is a gallery that extends into the darkness. The walls are streaked with bat droppings, the floor no longer solid stone but baulks of timber covered by a thick layer of dust. It drifts up in little clouds as they pass. Nicholas hears Elise Cullen’s voice in his head: High walls… dark, and dusty… even the Cardinal’s Hat was cleaner.

  Brabant has commanded silence, and though Nicholas wants only to call out Bianca’s name at the top of his voice, he knows that if she’s here – and still alive – it could be a death sentence. Stepping carefully – far too slowly for Nicholas’s liking – they cover three sides of the building without observing the slightest sign of recent habitation.

  What am I looking for? Nicholas asks himself. What do I expect to find?

  A dead man in a chamber lit by a thousand candles – that’s what Elise had said.

  Or a dead woman.

  ‘There’s nothing here, sir,’ says Brabant. ‘We’re wasting our time. His Grace will have more profitable work for us than this.’

  ‘Thank Christ’s holy wounds for that,’ says Nikko. ‘I’ll take a Don’s broadside over this place, any day of the week.’

  ‘Amen,’ says Davey from the Ark Royal.

  ‘We’re done, then,’ says Brabant.

  For a moment no one speaks. The lantern light makes sharp-edged masks of their faces. Then Ned Monkton’s voice rolls like a heavy millstone out of the darkness:

  ‘There’s still the fourth side.’

  Again, silence.

  Then Brabant, spitting into the dust. ‘Fourth side of my arse! This place is giving my men the black dreads. It’s not doing much for me, neither. If there’s a Jesuit in here, he’s welcome to it. He and his friend the Pope can kiss my pimpled arse – we’re on our way out.’

  Ned whispers hurriedly into Nicholas’s ear, ‘Do you really think this is where my Jacob died?’

  Nicholas doesn’t know whether to nod or apologize. But something in his eyes makes Ned Monkton turn to Br
abant and say, ‘Leave if you want, but you’ll have to walk over me to find the way out.’

  Brabant lets out a weary sigh. He glances rapidly at Davey and Nikko and says, ‘You might be a big bastard, Monkton, but you’re shit at arithmetic.’ And draws a good length of steel from his scabbard – just to make his point.

  ‘Let them go, Ned,’ says Nicholas dispiritedly.

  As Burghley’s men disappear into the darkness beneath the fading glow of Brabant’s lantern, Ned mutters, ‘Poxy sods’, and calls after them in a voice loud enough to be heard but not to carry: ‘We came in somewhere over there. Or maybe it was that way. Oh, and remember when I told you the dead don’t bite—?’

  With only Ned’s guttering rush torch to light the way now, the two men make their way along the fourth wall of the Lazar House. Nicholas guesses they must be facing the edge of the Mutton Lane shambles. Most of the tiny windows are either boarded up or stopped with grime-encrusted glass. Those that are open let in the east wind. It lifts the dust into a low, swirling cloud about their feet, which reminds Nicholas uncomfortably of the night he walked off the jetty and into the river. He remembers how he’d imagined Eleanor beckoning him, how in his delirium he’d convinced himself he was to blame for her death, for the death of their child – for the death of little Ralph Cullen, too. For no reason he can think of, other than his own heightened state and the effect the Lazar House is having on him, one of Fulke Vaesy’s dire sermon-lectures jumps into his head:

  ‘In the Book of Ezra,’ Vaesy is saying, ‘the prophet states that the issue of a man and woman who lay together during her menstrual purge may be born leprous… may be born monstrous…’

  An innocent crippled child – born monstrous, or so Vaesy would have it – murdered solely for the story that his own blood has to tell. Ralph Cullen, Jacob Monkton, the preacher and the others Elise had described in her testimony, all of them destroyed, reduced to a few lines of faux-academic scribbles on a sheet of paper. Medicine become its own monstrosity, in the hands of a man and a woman driven by some twisted notion of love.

  And one last death to come – if it hasn’t come already.

  Unless I’m right.

  Unless this is the place.

  Unless I’m in time.

  Out of the darkness of the Lazar House, Nicholas sees something large and solid looming ahead of him. At first he can’t make it out. But as he approaches he sees it’s the entrance to a chapel, built out from the wall. The door is an elaborate wooden tracery, like an altar screen.

  Ned lifts his torch to get the last light out of the dying flames. Through the screen Nicholas sees a woman crucified upside-down, white as chalk.

  But it’s only the torchlight scattering the shadows across the painted figures of the saints on the far wall. He turns and starts to walk away.

  It is the little crypt where Father Rossi prays over the graves of her parents. It’s her father’s cell in Padua. It’s a prison specially made for her by the Worshipful Company of Grocers because they’re frightened of what will happen if they grant her a licence to practise apothecary. And it doesn’t matter whether its walls are in Padua or in London, she was a fool to think she could ever climb over them. Yet for all that, this low crypt deep in the earth appears almost welcoming. The candles set around the little chamber paint the stone walls with a blush of warm gold.

  At the centre stands a plinth of coarse-cut ragstone. This, she assumes in a moment of lucidity, is the place where the inmates of the Lazar House would be brought at the end of their lonely lives – lives lived beyond the sight of the rest of the world outside. Down here, no one but the priests who prayed over them would have to look upon the visible signs of God’s displeasure.

  On the plinth, the man with the pumice face has laid out all the holy relics of his obscene, perverted physic. The candlelight gleams on saw-edge and hook, on knife-blade and needle. She sees an hourglass – polished till it seems to hold not sand, but a myriad tiny stars. She sees pewter bowls, a set of scales and weights, astrological symbols and calculations drawn out in chalk on the walls.

  But the items that terrify her most are not on the plinth, but set to one side: a wooden frame supporting what looks like an inverted cross, leather straps fixed to the extremities. And set around its base: a collection of glass jars containing things Bianca can barely permit to exist – things that might once have pulsed and throbbed inside a human body. She almost pleads for the return of the hallucinations. They must come soon – she’d swallowed the last of the asarabacca pulp several lifetimes ago. At least when they do, she thinks, they will take her clear away from this monstrous place.

  ‘A tavern-mistress?’ says Quigley, shaking his head in apparent disbelief. ‘How can she possibly comprehend an endeavour such as ours?’

  He comes very close to her. She can smell the musty scent of old books on him. And something else: a desiccated smell – as if he’s anointed himself with the distillation of a lifetime’s resentment.

  ‘Very few have been permitted to enter our chapel of mysteries,’ he tells her, as though she should be grateful to him. ‘We do such great and blessed work here. And you will be part of it. You may well be the one who gives us what we’ve been searching for. But first we shall pray together.’

  Bianca sways, feeling the bones and muscles in her legs beginning to liquefy. This time she’s not play-acting. The hallucinations are starting to bubble up from beneath the surface of her terror. Small at first – a bending of shape and form, a thinning-out of substance – soon they will grow. She cannot prevent it.

  A sudden brightening of everything around her forewarns of an oncoming wave. She knows that when it breaks, the man with the pumice face will set to work with his abominable collection of instruments.

  In a moment of extraordinarily banal reflection, she wonders how Rose and Timothy will fare under a new landlord; where the regulars of the Jackdaw will get their balms, salves and tinctures now; and if Nicholas will ever learn what happened to her, or even care.

  She stares at the woman she now knows is Katherine Vaesy. The woman’s mouth is moving, but it’s her own voice that Bianca can hear coming out of it:

  But you can’t claw like a Veneto maid when she’s faced with a rival… you’d have no idea which bit of them to kick first…

  ‘Come, Mistress, we must be about our task. Pray with me,’ says Quigley, moving closer to take her by the arm.

  But the voice hasn’t done with her yet:

  Bianca Merton, you didn’t come all the way from Padua to wash up like a gutted fish on the Mutton Lane stairs – did you?

  She lets Quigley lead her towards the plinth. In his tight grip she feels as though she’s made of paper. One careless squeeze will crush her entirely. She tenses her body, as if trying to force a precious liquid out of a rag. And as the wave begins to swell, she acts.

  Grabbing the nearest thing on the plinth, Bianca flails out at Quigley’s face.

  She has no idea what she’s picked up. Her arm seems as light as a feather – no real force behind it. I’m too weak now to do any hurt upon him, she thinks. He’ll brush me aside as though I’m nothing more troubling than a moth.

  In fact, she’s picked up a small saw. The teeth are cruel and sharp, like the teeth of a cornered rat. And the desperation in her is more powerful than she knows. The blade catches Quigley along the edge of his jaw, tearing away gobbets of flesh. He shrieks in pain, a piecing yowl that echoes around the crypt, up the stairway and out into the Lazar House. He staggers, falling back across the plinth and scattering the instruments onto the flagstones.

  Katherine Vaesy’s mouth gapes wide in astonishment. Bianca slices at her, too. But now she can barely keep her legs from giving way. The strike does not land. Nevertheless, Kat reels back. She leaves the way to the stairs open. As the crypt begins to transform itself into a vast hall draped with brilliant tapestries in which the beasts themselves roar and prance, Bianca makes a desperate dash for the steps.

&nbs
p; She takes the first few on pure spirit alone. Then she is flying upwards, a creature of the air, free to sail high above the world and all its maladies. She would fly for ever if she could. But like every good dream, its life is all too brief. She feels herself falling back to earth.

  Her hands scratch at the stone to get purchase. The saw drops away, clattering noisily down behind her. She feels hands seizing her ankles, pulling her back, sucking her down in a maelstrom of noise and light, to where the Devil’s cross waits ready for her crucifixion.

  And then she hears it: the sound of someone entering the chapel at the top of the steps.

  A voice calling her name. A man’s voice.

  A familiar voice.

  As the hallucinations sweep over her, Bianca imagines it’s Nicholas, come to explain why he didn’t write.

  50

  Shrovetide, February 1591

  On Tower Hill the apprentice boys are playing football in the crisp winter sunshine. It’s the Fishmongers’ Company against the Weavers’ Guild, and it’s rapidly turning into a no-quarter-given grudge-match. Since Nicholas Shelby left the Lumley town house on Woodroffe Lane, he’s patched up three split scalps and a fractured elbow. He’s also come perilously close to being thrown into a water-trough for tending a Fishmonger in a crowd of Weavers.

  Along the city wall the food vendors are doing a roaring trade. Pies and pancakes are flying off the stalls. There’s much feasting and carousing to be done before Lent stalks in with his grim face of guilty self-denial.

  ‘Your Widow Welford was right, Nicholas,’ Lumley says as they break free of the crowd. ‘Nonsuch has never heard trilling like it – we can barely keep Elise silent for one minute at a time.’

  ‘That’s good to hear. But she’s suffered so much; it will be a long time before our pipit sits happy on her branch. Will she stay with your household?’