by S. W. Perry
Hella has come to the great cathedral of St John the Evangelist because she has heard what lies within. Were it not for Father Vermeiren, she would have come sooner, but the priest is large in frame and voice, and his scowl frightens her. She would not put it past him to give her up to the Spanish garrison as a troublemaker, and she knows only too well the extent of their cruel depravities.
Her self-inflicted banishment has cost her dear. She has missed being present at Mass, and she knows God will have witnessed her absence. But today she has summoned all her courage. Because today is the one day of the week when Father Vermeiren stands before the congregation and opens God’s window to let everyone see a glimpse of His great plan.
Hella waits silently while the inhabitants of Den Bosch hurry past her into the darkness beyond the great door. She sees the stolid cloth merchants, their faces lined with furrows of resignation from the endless battle to compete with English imports; the tough little beef farmers who can find grazing pasture even on soil made spongy by too much rain and too high a water table; the well-dressed men of commerce who now look for their profits to Antwerp rather than Cologne; the Spanish soldiers of the garrison, even more pious than the local clerics and just as dangerous. Some meet her gaze with a flicker of recognition, though fewer now than when she first arrived in the city.
There had been a time, barely a month ago, when they would have gathered in the Markt square in their hundreds to hear her preach. Then they had pressed in upon her, straining to hear her words, marvelling that God would choose such an insubstantial vessel through which to let His voice flow. Now, if they recognize her at all, they turn their heads away. They place themselves between her and their children, as if she carries a contagion. They no longer want to hear her warnings. Yet warnings are what Hella knows she was put on this earth to deliver.
For as long as she can remember she has understood the power of portents. Even as a child, she could link something bad happening to a recent storm, or a flood, or a fire brought about by a lightning strike. Had not her very birth occurred in the year that a new star had blazed into being in the night sky?
She does not think this second sight of hers is a gift. For Hella, to be permitted glimpses of the future but be unable to alter it, to gain knowledge only to watch helplessly as the consequences bring death in their wake, to see things she would rather not see, is a curse. Sometimes she thinks she would be better off blind.
Every day, for the past thirteen years, she has castigated herself for failing to use this ability to warn the people of Breda, her home town, of the catastrophe that engulfed them on the very day she turned eight. Eight : a number that the Bible associates with resurrection. Her sister Hannie had taught her that, and Hannie – five years older and twice as clever – had shared her delight in the magic of numbers. But Hannie is dead, along with almost six hundred other citizens of Breda, amongst them nearly every other member of the Maas family. Six hundred : the number of chariots that Pharaoh sent to hunt down the Israelites.
In the years that have passed since that day, Hella has turned the guilt, the self-reproach, to good use. Whenever the ghosts of her family drifted across her vision, which was every single day, she would imagine they were encouraging her from heaven to warn the living that God does not want us to lift the curtain. He doesn’t want us to go searching for what might lie behind it – like so many of those pursuing the new learning, the new sciences. Tell them, sister Hannie would whisper to her, that I was wrong, that there are some things it is best not to know.
In Den Bosch, the crowds who came to listen to her had soon begun to thin. The first to go had been the ones who shouted back that she was frightening their children. More followed. Every day there would be fewer gathering around her in the Markt square. She had wondered if Father Vermeiren from the cathedral was behind it. Had he warned his parishioners that it was not proper for a woman to preach? She knew for a fact that he had led a delegation of city burghers to the Beguinage, the community of pious women who had given her shelter and board, suggesting they expel her, because that was exactly what they had done. She had been forced to sleep under a bridge, to hold out her hand for food like a beggar. Soon she had found herself addressing hardly anyone but the town drunks and the worst sort of men, who insulted her with obscenities and derision.
And then she had learned the true reason why most of Den Bosch had abandoned her sermons: they had only been listening to her because she was a novelty. They had their own window into God’s plan for mankind. And it lay inside their own cathedral. And now she has summoned up the courage to defy Father Vermeiren and see it for herself.
Waiting for a gap in the flow of people passing through the great arched entrance, Hella picks her moment and slips inside.
The nave is cast in shadow, the pale slender columns reaching into the canopy of the roof like a forest made of stone. She can smell incense burning in sconces, and the dusty scent left by centuries of pious feet rubbing against the flagstones. Taking her place as close to the altar as she can, Hella pulls her plain cloth gown over her head, so that Father Vermeiren, should he see her, will take her for just another of the Beguines, come to hear his homily on how to live a pious life.
The painting stands behind the altar, resting on a gilded screen. As tall as Hella herself and half her height again in length, it is a triptych, its two outer panels folded inwards to hide the centre section. Thus, as Hella stares at it, wondering how it can possibly draw the citizens of Den Bosch away from God’s word as channelled through her, it reveals to her only the forms of two saints, each one painted entirely in shades of grey on the back of its folding wings. Their lack of colour reminds her of the images that often appear in her own head, images of her sister Hannie, of her parents: ghostly, insubstantial, always in danger of slipping away when she tries to fix them in her memory. Images of the dead, slain because she, Hella, hadn’t had the wisdom to heed the portents properly, hadn’t warned them of what was coming.
Hella can sense the growing excitement in the congregation as Father Vermeiren moves towards the altar, his deep booming voice calling them to penance. Two of his priestly procession move to the triptych and begin to open the side-panels, slowly, as though what lies within might blind them if revealed too suddenly.
The ripple of gasps that flows through the worshippers sounds to Hella like a cold wind blowing over tall grass in the dead of night. What they are seeing, most have seen before, but that does not stop the congregation giving a collective shudder, as if they are all part of the same frightened organism.
After that, Hella Maas hears nothing, not even Father Vermeiren’s great voice as he begins the liturgy. She feels nothing, not even the elbow of the person beside her as he pushes forward to get a better view. If she were a martyr, she wouldn’t feel the pain of the arrow as it strikes or the sword as it falls. Nothing exists except what she sees laid out before her on the now-open triptych. She feels a great wave sweep her up, carrying her into the images burning themselves into her eyes.
But it is no wave of holy exultation. It is a wave of terror. True, the window has been opened, and Hella Maas is staring through it. But she is staring not into heaven, hoping to see an imagined glimpse of sister Hannie and her parents – she is staring directly into hell.
5
In the privacy of their bedchamber, Bianca sits in the single chair and swings her legs so that her feet are resting on the edge of the bed. Her kirtle falls back over her knees.
‘Can Lord Lumley not help us?’ she asks. ‘Surely he can tell the queen you’re innocent.’
‘John Lumley may have her favour, but he’s still a recusant. The Privy Council will try to persuade her that he’s protecting a traitor. I won’t risk making things more hazardous for him. We’ve seen, with Dr Lopez, how easily the queen’s trust can be undermined.’
‘Then where do we go, Husband?’
‘I know the Low Countries well enough, from the summer I spent as a surgeon to the a
rmy of the House of Orange in the war against the Spanish occupation.’
‘Holland? But it’s crawling with English agents, isn’t it? You’ve told me before: the Privy Council has its watchers and informers everywhere.’
‘That’s true. And if the purse was heavy enough, they wouldn’t hesitate to take us by force.’
An idea pops into Bianca’s head, like a sudden flash of sunlight from behind a raincloud. ‘Then we choose somewhere where my own faith is in the ascendancy. A Catholic country.’
Nicholas considers this for a moment. Then he says, ‘You know very well that I have no time for religious factions, sweet. But I’d be exposed as a heretic the moment I opened my mouth.’
‘I can help you pass for a good Catholic, Nicholas,’ Bianca says with a bright laugh. ‘If you’ll chance your immortal soul.’
‘According to Robert Cecil, it was damned the moment I fell in love with you.’ He grins. ‘But you know, it might just work. You’re a marvel, Mistress Merton.’
‘Do you have anywhere in mind, Nicholas? Please don’t choose some dull, provincial backwater. I would lose all joy in such a place.’
He thinks hard. ‘We need somewhere that Spanish rule is not too arduous; somewhere accustomed to foreign merchants and traders coming and going at will. A town where two new faces are scarcely worth remarking upon.’
‘Can you think of such a place?’
‘Without a moment’s pause, Wife. We’ll try Antwerp for a while.’
It is the obvious place, Nicholas tells her. It even has an exchange where they can convert English coin into gulden or ecu – though since the queen’s father debased the English currency, they will have to swallow the punitive exchange rate.
‘I’ve heard Antwerp is a fine city,’ she says, remembering three Dutch brothers who drank at the Jackdaw before the fire, Protestant weavers who had fled from the Spanish occupation.
‘Then Antwerp it shall be,’ Nicholas says. ‘Where better to lose ourselves than in the Duchy of Brabant?’
Bianca frowns. ‘But first we have to escape from England. What if they put a watch on the ports?’
Nicholas runs a hand through the black wiry tangle of his hair, as though to plough a disciplined furrow through his thoughts. ‘We must put our trust in the fact they have not issued a formal arraignment against me. That gives us a few days’ head-start. But we can’t delay.’
‘And if Essex, Coke or Popham sends men after us?’
‘We must misdirect them – lay a false trail.’
‘Then are we already fugitives?’
‘It would be foolish,’ he answers, ‘to think ourselves otherwise.’
The Tabard inn lies just off Long Southwark, south of the great stone gatehouse at the foot of London Bridge. You can spot it from a hundred yards away by the garish sign of a man’s tunic quartered with heraldic insignia. It boasts good lodgings, decent ale and livery stables where you may leave your horse if you are rich enough to own one, or rent one if you’re not. It is a pilgrims’ tavern. It marks the start of the spiritual road to Canterbury and on to St Peter’s in Rome, though with the queen’s new religion now firmly established, fewer use it for that purpose. Now it caters mostly for visitors bound for the city across the bridge.
Bianca Merton has always considered it a model of what a tavern in the Liberty of Southwark should be, although she baulks at the landlord’s toleration of the more brazen type of Bankside doxy. However, on the morning of the day after Nicholas’s release from Essex House, its greatest recommendation for Bianca and Nicholas is that the husband of Jenny Solver – Southwark’s most efficient gossip – is a regular.
They enter the stable courtyard as St Saviour’s bell tolls eight. Yesterday’s showers have brought out the sweet ammoniacal smell of manure from the stalls, along with the musty tang of old leather and horsehair. The ostler, Tom Prithy, greets them warmly. He is a man wholly suited to his role, with a long equine face and wide, trusting eyes arched by eyebrows too delicate for his runnelled complexion. He even has a habit of stamping his left foot when making a point, like an impatient courser. Prithy is a good man, and Bianca is reluctant to take advantage of him. But needs must.
First, she engages him in a pleasant exchange about nothing in particular. Then she asks after his daughter: does she need any more of the posca of vinegar and herbs for that cold distemper of the stomach? Prithy thanks her warmly and says no, his daughter is restored to her former good health, thanks to the efforts of Dr Shelby and… he tries to say ‘Goodwife Shelby’ but gets no further than ‘Goo—’ before reverting thankfully to ‘Mistress Merton’.
Then Nicholas asks, ‘Do you have two sound mares we can hire? We have to make a journey – the day after tomorrow.’
‘Must be important, to miss the Midsummer Day revels.’
‘A physician is always on call, Master Prithy.’
‘These mares – short legs or long?’
‘Long enough for Dover.’
‘Dover?’ says Tom Prithy with a lift of his lugubrious eyebrows. ‘They must be paying you well, this patient. Ain’t Dover got no physicians of their own?’
Before Nicholas can answer, Bianca says with uncharacteristic vehemence, ‘Dover? I thought we’d agreed against Dover.’
‘No, Wife. I told you quite clearly it must be Dover,’ Nicholas says with laborious patience.
‘But Dover is a hateful little place! Even in the sunshine it’s beset by French gales. The streets stink worse than they do here; and the people – I can’t even bring myself to think of the people.’
Nicholas says sternly, ‘I have decided we are going to Dover. Have you forgotten, so soon, that you are now a wife? A measure of the proper obedience is required from you.’
Bianca purses her lips. ‘If you command it, Husband, then I suppose it will have to be Dover. But I still loathe the place.’
‘You’re only saying that because my brother’s wife comes from Dover. You’ve never liked her. You’ve always made that clear enough.’
This is a fiction. Nicholas’s sister-in-law is from Woodbridge in the county of Suffolk. Bianca has yet to meet her.
‘Why would anyone like your sister-in-law anyway?’ she snaps petulantly. ‘She’s a harridan.’
Nicholas draws a slow breath to prepare himself. He says slowly and deliberately, in case Tom Prithy might mishear: ‘That’s rich talk, coming from the daughter of an Italian witch!’
The slap that lands against Nicholas’s face echoes around the stables, bringing forth whinnies of alarm from the stalls, and a look of utter astonishment on Tom Prithy’s face.
Later, in the crowded taproom, he will tell his master the landlord – in public – that Dr Shelby and Mistress Merton had their very first argument within his hearing.
‘Well, they always were an ill-matched couple,’ the landlord will say. ‘I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.’
‘It were all about Dover,’ Tom Prithy will say, shaking his head slowly as he marvels at what some folk will find to fall out over.
‘Dover?’ says the landlord.
‘Oh yes,’ confirms Tom Prithy, as the customers – including Jenny Solver’s husband – crowd even closer to catch the yeast of the gossip, ‘’twere definitely Dover.’
‘I didn’t realize you actually meant to strike me,’ Nicholas says as they walk back along the riverbank to the Paris Garden. ‘Was that really necessary?’
The red mark between his left cheek and the line of his tightly trimmed black beard has yet to fade.
‘I thought it would add some authenticity.’
‘Authenticity? I think it might have added a loosened tooth.’
‘But it did the job, didn’t it?’
‘There’s no question about that,’ Nicholas admits, rubbing his cheek.
Bianca leans across and plants a chaste kiss on the red weal. ‘A husband striking his wife in the heat of an argument would scarcely draw comment on Bankside, or anywhere else in London f
or that matter. But a wife striking her husband…’ She gives Nicholas a sly grin that he finds just a little alarming. ‘Master Prithy will be speaking of it for days to come. And unless Jenny Solver has lost her hearing, or her husband is struck dumb before he gets home—’
Nicholas nods. ‘At least, if Essex’s searchers come here asking questions, there will be plenty of people to tell them where we’ve gone. It will take them days to discover we never went within twenty miles of Dover.’
‘But if we’re not going to Dover to take a ship for Antwerp, where are we going to take it from? So far you haven’t deigned to tell me.’
‘We’re going to my father’s farm, at Barnthorpe.’
‘Are you planning to have me sit in a muddy farm waggon all the way to Antwerp? You do know the Narrow Sea is in the way?’
He takes her teasing in good spirit. ‘Woodbridge is barely five miles away. Dutch herring boats and wool traders regularly put in there. We’ll pay for a passage on one of those.’
‘I suppose it’s only right to tell your family you’re leaving the realm for a while,’ Bianca says with a compassionate nod. ‘It will be good to meet them at last.’
Nicholas remembers how he disappeared into a shadowy life of drunkenness and vagrancy after his first wife, Eleanor, died in childbirth. He still finds it hard to forgive himself for the pain he put his family through. He says, ‘They deserve to know the reason for my dropping out of plain sight for a while. Besides, they will have to learn at some point quite what a tempest I’ve married.’
Bianca wonders if he has really given his plan the critical scrutiny it requires. ‘Have you forgotten the searchers – the ones the Privy Council send to watch the ports for Jesuit infiltrators?’
‘Woodbridge is small. They’ll be concentrating on Ipswich or Lowestoft. And they’ll be looking for Jesuits trying to enter the realm, or papist tracts and pamphlets being smuggled in. A Dutch wool merchant and his wife going home in the opposite direction from a little town on the Deben won’t raise their suspicions.’