by S. W. Perry
Sprint, the head cook, is waiting for them, alerted by a servant sent in advance. He is a ruddy-faced fellow with a barrel chest and a good belly, as sound a testimonial to what flows from the Nonsuch kitchens as you could wish for. Unusually for one of England’s great houses, he’s not French.
‘Has she spoken yet, Master Sprint?’ asks Lumley.
‘Not a word, my lord. At first it was like having a trapped starling in the place – flapping her arms like a proper Tom-o’-Bedlam. She’s calmed now. I don’t think she fears us any longer. But I keep young Will busy by the door, just in case she tries to flee.’ He nods towards a tousle-haired lad in a woollen jerkin, who sits by the door salting stockfish.
‘Does she respond to instruction, Master Sprint?’
‘Most diligently, my lord.’
‘Have you looked to see if she has a tongue?’ Vaesy asks. ‘Sometimes a deformity can occur—’
Sprint laughs. ‘It appears she has a fine, strong tongue, sir. She’s all but emptied the scullions’ pottage bowl.’
‘If she does indeed have a tongue, I could lay some irritant upon it – sting the organ back into function,’ Vaesy suggests. ‘I don’t suppose there are nettles in your privy garden at this time of the year, my lord.’
‘We’ll have no need of nettles, thank you, Fulke,’ says Lumley, appalled. ‘We shall examine her with all gentleness. I suspect the child has known great suffering in her life. Let us not add to it.’
A breathless Francis Deniker arrives, a cloak thrown over his nightshirt. ‘I understand you wish me to make a record, my lord,’ he says, half-disbelieving the reason for the summons. ‘It seems an odd time to study the child, if I may say so. Could it not wait until morning?’
‘Sir Fulke and I have had a goodly supper. Fine food and Rhenish tend to put men of physic in an inquisitive frame of mind. Now is as good a time as any.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ the clerk replies, wishing that Gabriel Quigley was here to do the job instead.
‘Well, Master Sprint,’ says Lumley cheerfully, ‘lead us to her.’
Washed in a tub of water scented with camomile and marjoram, dressed in a clean linen kirtle, the girl who scrubs the bread-ovens looks an altogether different creature from the wildcat they dragged out of a hedge only yesterday. Her skin still carries the marks made by thorn and bramble, red wheals against skin that still bears the tan of a summer spent on the road. Her hair is not yet fit to be seen outside the Nonsuch kitchen yard, but the terror in her eyes has subsided to a tired wariness, like that of an exhausted bird caught in a net. She scrubs with a distant look on her face, pausing every now and then to look around her, as though she can’t quite believe where she is.
‘I’ve set Joanna to keep charge of her, my lord,’ says Sprint, glancing at the plump woman in a freeze-smock who guides Betony at her labour. ‘Shall I have her brought to you?’
‘This gentleman is one of the finest physicians in all England,’ Lumley says when the girl stands in front of him. ‘I have asked him to examine you, so that together we might better understand the nature of your silence. Do you consent?’
The girl they have named Betony neither consents nor refuses. Instead she looks at Lumley the way a dog may look at a master it has not yet learned to trust.
‘You’re quite safe, lass,’ says Sprint gently. ‘This gentleman is the lord of Nonsuch Palace, which, as I’ve already told you, is where you find yourself. It is a goodly palace, and we in it are goodly people – at least we like to think so. Is that not so, my lord?’
‘Indeed it is, Master Sprint,’ says Lumley in what he hopes is his most reassuring tone.
‘And just as our master, Lord Lumley, is obedient to God, so must we be obedient to him,’ says Sprint. This causes John Lumley to smile. Sprint and his assistant, Joanna, are the least biddable servants in Nonsuch.
‘Two stools, placed by the fire, please – just there,’ orders Vaesy, indicating the great hearth with its spit-iron and the logs burning merrily behind. ‘One for me, one for the child.’
It is uncomfortably hot in front of the fire. No sooner has Vaesy taken his place than he begins to sweat. He unlaces the topmost points of his shirt. He leans across the space between the stools and takes the girl by the arm, catching her off-guard. He does his best to make his face gentle, but he is a big man and his beard is impressive.
‘Now then, my daughter, you have nothing whatsoever to fear from me,’ he says with a forced smile, wiping his brow with the back of his free hand.
For a moment the anatomist and the vagrant girl simply stare at each other. Then, as Vaesy tells Betony that nothing she might say will get her into harm, he gently slides his hand down to her wrist, forcing her hand against the stool and effectively pinning her there.
‘Tell us, child, what is your real name?’
Betony does not answer.
This surprises no one except Sir Fulke Vaesy, who is accustomed to being answered promptly and with reverence. He raises his voice. ‘Child – your name?’
Silence.
Francis Deniker makes his first entry on the paper he has brought with him.
‘Come now, Mistress Betony, did you not hear Master Sprint say we must all be obedient to those set over us?’ Vaesy asks. ‘We know you are not deaf. I am told you have taken instructions from that good lady yonder,’ he says, glancing in the direction of Joanna. ‘So I know you understand me when I say “obedient”. Are you obedient, Betony – obedient to God and His ordained natural order?’
The girl nods. But she says nothing.
Sweating profusely now, Vaesy blusters on. He asks her where she came from, how she got to Cheam church. He tells her that she should feel honoured to be here. The queen comes to Nonsuch often, he explains. The queen eats food prepared in these very kitchens. Does Betony know the name of our sovereign majesty, the queen?
If Betony does, she’s not of a mind to share the fact. The only sounds in the kitchen are Vaesy’s increasingly frustrated voice, Francis Deniker’s scribbling and the crackling of the fire.
‘I think we should call a halt to this experiment,’ says Lumley. ‘We’re getting nowhere.’ He raises his left palm to indicate that Deniker may stop wasting paper.
Thus he fails to notice Vaesy’s free hand seize the girl’s other wrist, trapping it so firmly that it becomes a mere extension of his intent.
For a moment, only Vaesy and the girl share the bond of understanding. Her body locks into a spasm of fear as he draws her hand towards the smoking spit-iron. She twists away from the fire, away from the man whose grip she cannot escape. Her feet flail against his shins. He seems not to notice.
‘Fulke, in the name of God’s blood – no!’ shouts Lumley.
Vaesy shoots him a silencing glance, as though Lumley were one of his junior physicians.
Sprint thinks: I know how to stop him. I’ll hit him with the nearest heavy kitchen implement I can reach. But for all his independence, Sprint has never before considered assaulting a knight of the realm. So he, in company with Lumley and Deniker, remains frozen to the spot.
As if the will to resist has suddenly drained out of her body, Betony crumples. She looks into Vaesy’s stern face, the tears streaming down her scrubbed cheeks. Her hand is so close to the burning spit-iron that were she to unclench her fist now, her fingertips would touch it. She bows her head, accepting the inevitable torment like a martyr going willingly to the flames. She closes her eyes.
But she does not speak.
The heat against her flesh is the warm sunlight spilling through the summer leaves. The stream burbles over the rocks. The air thrums with the beating of dragonfly wings.
Elise watches the hind supping from the water of the ford, its dappled skin the colour of pearls drenched in honey. Drink swiftly, little one! The hunter is always nearer than you think.
28
The kitchens are silent now, just the occasional crack from the logs glowing in the hearth and the soft snoring of th
e male scullions asleep on their mattresses.
Betony is with the female servants in their quarters in the outer court. John Lumley is confident she will be secure there. Even if she manages to slip away, the outer gatehouse is shut after dark. Unless she can fly over two storeys of brick and ashlar, she is effectively imprisoned.
Given the ordeal she’d been through, thinks Sprint as he makes his nightly rounds of the kitchens, she appeared oddly calm afterwards. Her mind seemed to have taken her to some distant place where none of them could follow.
Sprint’s father had told him once about a burning he’d attended, back in the time before Elizabeth, when the realm was temporarily Catholic again and her half-sister Bloody Mary had sent three hundred Protestant martyrs to the flames. It’s like they welcomed it, eyes lifted to heaven, hymns on their lips right up till the moment they folded up and collapsed, like all the bones had suddenly been plucked out of their bodies. Sprint has often wondered how anyone could face such a fearful death with equanimity. Now he thinks he knows.
He had enjoyed seeing Vaesy bested. When the physician had let go of the girl’s wrist at the very last moment, his face had been crimson with humiliation. It had been a joy to watch the conflict in him. Inside two minutes he’d come up with more diagnoses than an ordinary man could have afforded in a lifetime: The child is too dull-witted to speak… the child has never been taught the words… the child must be foreign and doesn’t understand the simplest of questions… The one diagnosis he’d refused to consider was that the girl was made of stronger stuff than he. By the look Sprint had seen on Lord Lumley’s face, he suspects Nonsuch won’t be seeing quite so much of the great anatomist for a while.
On the wooden counter over the bread-ovens stands a jug of small-beer. Sprint unties his apron like a crusader laying down his shield after a hard day’s battling against the heathen, pours himself a larger measure than he intended. And as he drinks, the logs in the hearth behind him give out a last dying blaze of light, bringing the front of the bread-ovens into sharp relief.
At first he thinks one of the younger scullions has scratched his mark there, or scrawled some lewd doggerel into the sooty plaster. Lowering himself into a squat – not an easy thing for such a big man – he inspects the marks, the faces of the likely suspects already forming up in his mind, in order of culpability.
He’s looking at a row of three inverted crosses, clawed into the soot in the very place where Joanna set Betony to work, before Fulke Vaesy turned up and threw everything into riot. Betony must have made them when Joanna was at some other task, he thinks.
And below the third crucifix, a teardrop of spilt blood-sauce. Or perhaps just blood. From a fingernail – as it tore into the plaster.
Perhaps Sir Fulke Vaesy was right after all, Sprint thinks, as he wonders just what sort of creature John Lumley has let into Nonsuch.
He looks so familiar to her – the man in the plain woollen tunic who sits behind the table. Familiar in the same way that Leicester and Walsingham, the two watchers who’d come to the Jackdaw, were somehow already known to her. Even though Bianca has not set eyes on him before, he is already known to her in all his tedious detail. He is yet another of those minor men of government – the ones who toil to keep their masters’ hands clean by taking to themselves the decision that a harsher degree of questioning might be in order. The ones who smile so regretfully while they show you the implements of torture you will force them to employ, because of your wholly unreasonable refusal to tell them what they want to hear. The gowned lawyers’ clerks who draft the confession you never made. The men who say they’re doing holy work, yet have something of the slaughterman in their eyes. The men who set their consciences subordinate to their service to the realm. As Bianca stands manacled before this very ordinary fellow – who will not tell her his name, but says only that he has come directly from the queen’s Privy Council to examine her – she realizes that no matter which religion they think they’re protecting from heresy, they are in essence the same.
She’d met her first one in Padua, when the Holy Office of the Faith had arrested her father. Tell me, child – have you ever witnessed him laying out a circle with his staff, and there within making incantations to summon up Lucifer? She had answered that her father was a good man and only interested in advancing physic. Is your father in frequent correspondence with agents of the heretic Queen of England? At that moment she’d understood how they worked: if they couldn’t burn you for witchcraft, they would burn you for being a spy. It didn’t matter to them which, only that you should burn.
‘Mistress Merton, please tell me: where were you born?’ says the man behind the table.
‘Italy – in Padua.’
‘So you are Italian?’
‘I am both English and Italian.’
‘Why did you come into England?’
‘My father was murdered by the Holy Office of the Faith.’
‘The Romish Inquisition?’
‘Yes. He died of despair in his cell.’
‘Then you are a true Protestant?’
Why should she tell this man what is in her heart?
‘I was informed the queen has no desire to see into her subjects’ souls.’
He writes down her answer carefully, mouthing it as he does so. Then he looks up at her, his face expressionless. ‘So then you are a papist?’
‘I am also informed that in England the old religion is tolerated, as long as it is practised privily.’
‘Tell me, Mistress Merton, are you a witch?’
‘No, I am not a witch.’
‘Then are you a liar?’
Always the same even tone to the questions. Always the same slow, laborious writing of her answers. And when the session is over, they take her back to the cell she shares with a woman who is alleged to have consorted with demons in the Paris Garden by night, and with a mad girl who tells her conspiratorially that she is really the Christian martyr St Perpetua and expects the Romans to come for her at any moment.
And in this manner the days pass; six of them – until the night the cell door opens, and a short while later Bianca finds herself not in the little chamber facing the man in the woollen tunic, but standing on a jetty in the rain and the cold, Nicholas Shelby beside her – equally nonplussed – while out of the darkness the Thames roars at her like a proper interrogator should.
They are rowing against the tide, heading upriver – though how the helmsman can steer a course in such relentless darkness, and with the barge pitching so violently, is anyone’s guess. In the prow crouches a man-at-arms, holding a lantern. Its light turns the spray into a myriad tiny golden sparks that flare for an instant and are then swept away on the wind. Only the occasional beacon passing by to their right gives the slightest hint of where the bank is. To the left is nothing but darkness. Nicholas judges they must have reached the Lambeth marshes.
He sits uncomfortably on a wet wooden seat, trying to master the heaving of his stomach. The cold snatches the breath from his lungs. He’s chilled to the bone. Bianca sits beside him. Her face is a mask he cannot read.
The oarsmen and the prisoners’ escort – six men-at-arms – have shown no interest in either of them. It seems that conveying the doomed to unknown fates is apparently meat and drink to them.
There has been only one small moment of hope in their journey so far. It had come almost as soon as they slipped away from the bank. The helmsman had turned the barge west, upriver. At least their destination is not the Tower.
The noise of the wind and the waves makes conversation all but impossible. Bianca hasn’t said a word since they were reunited, other than to ask if they’d harmed him. Nicholas replied that no, they had not – though he’d spent the days since their arrest in an uncomfortable cell in the Marshalsea. Then the sergeant of the men-at-arms had told them to mind their pox-blistered, profaning heretic tongues.
So now he holds his peace, and wonders why a tavern owner and a fallen physician are being taken
for a ride on the river in the dead of night. And whether it is really intended that they should arrive anywhere.
Without warning the barge lurches and swings across the current, rolling sickeningly. Out of the night drifts a substantial jetty, a glorious, gilded pleasure-barge moored on the far side. The starboard rowers raise their oars like well-drilled pike-men. With the merest of caresses, they are alongside the water-stairs. Nicholas closes his eyes and allows a little of the tension to drain out of his body. Whatever their destination, apparently it is intended they should reach it alive.
‘Where are we?’ whispers Bianca, risking the sergeant’s wrath.
‘Somewhere between Whitehall and St Martin’s. It’s hard to tell.’
Suddenly the lantern in the prow appears to leap into the night sky like a demented firefly, as the man holding it clambers onto the jetty. Nicholas and Bianca are invited to follow, by a barrage of oaths and vicious blows to the back.
Once on dry land, they follow the lantern as it dances through the darkness, hemmed in by their escort, encouraged to maintain a fast pace by the occasional savage kick to the heels. Nicholas judges they are heading away from the river. It’s difficult to be certain. The buildings they pass are merely denser patches of night, pierced only by the occasional lighted window. From somewhere nearby a dog cries, a long, drawn-out sorrowful wail of loneliness.
And then out of the darkness looms a high brick wall. It stretches away into nothingness on either hand. They hear the thump of a gloved fist against timber. The low call of a challenge. The confident reply, ‘Robert Cecil’s men!’ A pale wash of light spills out of the wall and a moment later they are inside Cecil House.
29
They are standing in a corridor with walls of flint and plaster. A tallow torch burns in an iron bracket, filling the air with an oily, animal smell. Nicholas feels a sense of impending dread. He’s heard the rumours: that the great men of England who serve the queen – men like the Cecils – have their own private places for interrogating those they believe a threat to her realm. Simon Cowper once told him that Sir Francis Walsingham kept a fully functioning rack in the cellar of his house on Seething Lane, though how he’d known this, the unimpeachable Simon had never explained.