The Angel's Mark
Page 38
His father kneels and stares into his son’s eyes with the stoic acceptance of the cycle of life and death, of hope and disappointment, that a man who relies on the fickleness of the earth for his survival must learn. His face looks carved out of holm oak. You’re barely fifty, thinks Nicholas, yet you look like an old man. Is it the toil? Or have my own actions aged you? He settles for what his mother and his sister-in-law, Faith, have always claimed: grubbing away at the earth makes Shelby men look older than their years.
‘Listen to me, boy,’ his father says with a surprisingly gentle smile that looks out of place on such a hard-used face. ‘Thrice in my lifetime I’ve heard Parson Olicott tell me I’m to forget my religion and believe in a different one. Every Sunday – until I was about fourteen – he’d tell me the Pope was a fine Christian man, an’ that for my spiritual education I was to study the pictures of the saints in St Mary’s…’
Nicholas wonders what that weathered stone Saxon barnacle, where the Shelby family now have their own pew almost within touching distance of the altar, has to do with his present agony; but he’s learned long ago that when his father embarks on one of his homilies it’s best not to interrupt.
His father continues. ‘Then one Sunday shortly after King Henry died, I hear Parson Olicott announce, “King Edward says the Pope is the Antichrist!” Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. After the sermon, Parson Olicott hands us lads a bucket of whitewash.’ He makes a painting gesture with one hand, the fist clenched. ‘“Cover up those paintings of the saints,” orders old Olicott, “’cause now they be heretical!”’
Nicholas has stared at the plain walls of St Mary’s every Sunday for as long as he can recall, usually with intense boredom. It has never occurred to him that his father was one of those who’d done the whitewashing.
‘Took us lads ages, I can tell you,’ Yeoman Shelby says. ‘But the next thing I know – around the time I was paying court to your mother – there’s Parson Olicott proclaiming that Edward is dead, Mary is queen, and the Pope is once more our father in Christ. Imagine it!’
Nicholas indulges his father and imagines.
‘“Change the prayer book!” says Olicott. “Bring out the choir screens again” – we’d hidden them in Jed Arrowsmith’s barn. “Scrub off the whitewash! The bishops what made us paint over those saints are all now heretics and must burn for it!”’ Yeoman Shelby sighs, as though all this variable theology is beyond the understanding of a simple man. ‘To tell the truth, Nick, when we got the whitewash off, I was surprised those paintings had survived. But survive they had. Stubborn buggers, those Catholic saints. Didn’t last, of course. Barely five years on, Bloody Mary is dead, we’re all singing hosannas for Queen Elizabeth, and the Pope is the Devil’s arse-licker again. And what’s old Olicott preaching?’
‘Fetch the whitewash?’
His father nods. ‘Exactly. What I’m saying to you is this: there ain’t ever such a thing as certainty, boy. Maybe in the next world, but not in this. So don’t you worry your young head about whether or not your old father can handle it when his clever physician son has a crisis of belief. Because what really grieves us, Nick – what really makes us weep – is that when your world was turned on its head, when you had need of us most, you didn’t come home.’
For a moment there is only the slow dripping of water on the pressing stone. Then Nicholas is in his father’s arms, his chest heaving like a man drowning, sobbing with a child’s bewilderment at unjustified injury.
Outside, the rain is starting to ease. The old thatched houses of Barnthorpe are beginning to take on their newborn, sharper forms. When the two men walk back to the Shelby farmhouse, Nicholas feels somehow lighter. Certainly more resolute. Confession has done him good – even if it’s only a partial confession.
Because there’s something else Nicholas hasn’t admitted to his father. He hasn’t told Yeoman Shelby that a part of his son – a small part to be sure, but even the smallest canker can still presage a greater infection – now belongs to one Robert Cecil.
‘Careful now, Ned. Master Nicholas is not here to set your bones if you fall!’
Bianca Merton grasps the ladder with both hands, letting her weight bear down on her left foot, which is set firmly on the bottom rung. Above her, Ned Monkton sways precariously as he leans out over the lane. He looks like a bear that’s climbed to the top of a maypole and got stuck there. Cursing, he tries to attach the newly made board beside the sign of the Jackdaw. It takes him a few minutes and an excess of profanities, but before long the new banner is in place: the unicorn and the jackdaw swaying side-by-side in the breeze. Southwark now has a tavern and an apothecary, all in one. You can forget your tribulations with a quart of knock-down, and get colewort and hartshorn for the resulting hangover, in the same place.
‘Don’t that look a fine sight?’ says Rose, Bianca’s maid, as she admires the scene – though whether it’s the apothecary’s sign or the sight of Ned’s hugely muscular legs wrapped around the ladder is somewhat unclear to Bianca.
‘I wish I could have seen the faces of the Grocers’ Guild when they signed my licence,’ Bianca says, sweeping her proud, dark hair from her brow. ‘They’ve been trying to shut me down since the day I arrived. And now I’m legal! Who would have imagined it? Bianca Merton of the Jackdaw, a licensed apothecary!’
Whatever her curative talents, Bianca makes an unlikely tavern-keeper. She’s slender, with a narrow, boyish face topped by a trace of widow’s peak, and extraordinarily amber eyes that gleam with a mischievous directness. Having been born of an Italian mother and an English father, her skin still boasts a healthy lustre infused by the Veneto sun, despite all that three years in Southwark have contrived against it.
‘Shame a someone isn’t here to see it,’ says Rose, a plump, jolly young woman with a mane like tangled knitting. ‘How did he manage it? I thought he were out of all regard with them physicians in their pretty college on Knightrider Street.’
‘He called in a favour, Rose,’ Bianca says wryly. And beyond that she will not go. The memories of the horror she and Nicholas endured together are still too raw. Before he left for Suffolk to make his peace with his family, they’d scarcely spoken of it between themselves, let alone with outsiders. The nightmares still come to her, though less frequently now. When they do, they have a terrifying fidelity about them. Once again she is back in that vile place deep in the earth, feeling her flesh tense as it awaits the draw of the scalpel. She consoles herself with the knowledge that no more bodies will wash up on Bankside. The man who put them in the river has met his just reward, thanks to Dr Nicholas Shelby, who came to her as a talisman from out of that very same river.
She wonders what Nicholas is doing now. Is he reconciled with his family? Do the ghosts of his wife and child haunt him still? Will he return to Bankside, as he promised? And how will she feel about him, if he does?
He’s so very different from the men she’d known in Padua. A yeoman’s son from the wilds of Suffolk who’d found the intellectual courage to battle the stultifying hand of tradition during his medical studies is as unlike a fashionably clad libertino as she can possibly imagine. She scolds herself for the sudden, unexpected surge of jealousy that comes with knowing how capable of love Nicholas is, despite his stolid roots. It would be so much better, she thinks, if he could devote that love to the living, and not the dead.
Her reverie is broken by the sole of Ned’s boot on her hand as he descends the ladder.
‘God’s mercy!’ she cries, snatching her hand away and shaking it vigorously. ‘Have a care where you’re putting your feet, you clumsy buffle-head!’ Catching herself using the vocal currency of the London streets, she smiles. She thinks, soon I shall have lost that accent Nicholas says he can hear in my voice whenever I get fractious. Soon I shall be as English as Rose.
Ned Monkton, just turned twenty-one, built like King Henry’s great Mary Rose – and just as liable to capsize, if too much liquid flows in thro
ugh an open port – steps back to earth. He scratches his fiery auburn hair and slaps his belly with his great fists. ‘There now, Mistress,’ he says, looking up at the two signs, ‘they can’t beat that at the Turk’s Head or the Good Husband, eh?’
‘You’ve hung it upside-down,’ says Rose.
And for just a moment Ned is taken in.
They’re an odd pair. Rose is as ungovernable as a sack of wild martens. Her idea of a day’s leisure is a trip to Tyburn to watch a good hanging. Ned used to be the mortuary warden from St Thomas’s hospital down by Thieves’ Lane. Smiling, Bianca remembers her mother’s firm conviction: there’s always someone for someone.
It’s good to see Ned above ground now, she thinks, instead of deep in the hospital crypt, surrounded by the dead. He’s even getting some colour back in his face. Since Nicholas set off for Suffolk, Ned has taken his place as the Jackdaw’s handyman and thrower-outer-in-chief. There’s been not a jug spilt in anger since. And with Rose beside him, he’s beginning to recover a little from what befell young Jacob, his younger brother, whose death gave Nicholas his first lead in tracking down the man they all now describe – in lowered voices that still have an echo of dread in them – as the ‘Bankside butcher’.
Bianca looks up at the two signs again, satisfaction welling in her breast. A measure of cautious contentment stirs within her. She waves happily at a fee of young lawyers – the invented collective noun slips into her head, unbidden. They’ve come across the bridge for the stews and the cock-fights. They’ll be lucky to get back to Lincoln’s Inn with the hose they put on this morning. She receives their clumsy, ribald replies as down-payment and ushers them towards the Jackdaw’s entrance.
And then her taproom boy, Timothy, comes running down the lane. In the excitement of raising the apothecary’s sign, she’d almost forgotten she’d sent him down to Cutler’s Yard to pay the sign-maker.
‘Mercy, young Timothy, what’s the alarm?’
‘The watermen say a new barque will drop anchor in the Pool tomorrow,’ he tells her breathlessly. ‘She’s coming up from the Hope Reach on the morning tide. Four masts!’ He raises the appropriate fingers to indicate the wonder of it. ‘Imagine it: four!’
For the denizens of Southwark, a newly arrived ship is like a freshly killed carcass to a wolf. There are victuals to be replenished at twice the going rate; goose-feather mattresses for men who’ve spent months sleeping on salty boards; a predictable uncertainty of the legs, which makes lifting a purse that much easier; an outlet for desires that until now have been only solitarily satisfied. It’s been this way since the Romans were here, and Bianca Merton isn’t about to pass on the opportunity.
‘From which state is she? Do they say?’ she asks, factoring translation into the equation – French and Spanish mariners take less time to serve than those from Muscovy, and Moors don’t take drink at all.
‘Venice,’ says Timothy eagerly, with not the slightest comprehension of just how much powder he’s about to ignite. ‘She’s the Sirena di Venezia.’
Praise for The Angel's Mark
‘A gorgeous book – rich, intelligent and dark in equal measure. It immerses you in the late 16th century and leaves you wrung out with terror. This is historical fiction at its most sumptuous.’
Rory Clements
‘Wonderful! Beautiful writing, and Perry’s Elizabethan London is so skilfully evoked, so real that one can almost smell it.’
Giles Kristian
‘A strong and convincing debut.’ Antonia Senior, The Times
‘I knew before I got to the bottom of the first page that The Angel’s Mark was the real thing. In an increasingly crowded field, this one is going to stand out.’ S. G. MacLean
‘An impressively dramatic and gripping debut novel. Elegantly written, thoroughly researched, The Angel’s Mark draws us into the murky world of Elizabethan London where life is a game of chance, and savage death a close neighbour, quick to pounce on the unsuspecting. I predict that we will be seeing much more of Nicholas Shelby, physician and reluctant spy.’ Anne O’Brien
‘An engaging Elizabethan thriller.’ Sunday Times
‘The Angel’s Mark has the pace of a thriller... S.W. Perry is a welcome addition to the ranks of historical crime novelists.’ Simon Brett
‘A tense whodunit and a fine debut.’ Weekend Sport
‘A remarkably assured and classy debut. Perry grabs your attention from the first paragraph and holds it throughout a fascinating journey into high and low life of Tudor London. This could, hopefully, be the start of an addictive series.’ L C Tyler
‘[A] sad, compassionate story, beautifully told.’ Daily Express
Contents
Title
Copyright
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Historical note
Author’s note
The Serpent’s Mark
Tilbury, England. Winter 1591
Part 1: The Physician from Basle 1
Praise for The Angel’s Mark