by S. W. Perry
How did I get here? she asks. There must be some passageway or door, between the Magdalene and the Lazar House grounds, though she can’t remember passing through one. ‘Look, Nicholas,’ she says out loud, her voice slurred, ‘that’s how they bring them here. In through the almshouse, out through the culvert and into the river. See? It’s obvious now.’ She’s elated at having shown him a truth he’d been unable to find for himself. ‘Didn’t think of that, did you? – Master Nicholas Shelby, the oh-so-clever physician who lives in a palace and doesn’t write. Hurry back, because soon it will be your turn to fish me out of the river. Only this time, you’ll need more than theriac to cure me.’
And just before the next approaching wave of hallucinations breaks over her, the spinning of the world slows. The blurred earth comes again into sharp focus, its patterns once more familiar.
There – just a few yards ahead, slightly to the left! Is that what I think it is? Yes! Mother, let me lick my fingers, just this once – so I’ll know for sure.
Bianca takes her chance. She breaks free from the man with the damaged face who is guiding her, but is not Nicholas. She runs as fast as she can – though she knows full well there’s nowhere to escape to. He’s not expecting her break for freedom and she manages to put a little distance between them. But there’s no strength in her legs. She falls, sprawling headlong in the undergrowth.
But it’s enough. She’s made it. All she has to do now is hope they haven’t understood. For a moment she just lies there, with slow, quiet sobs of relief racking her body, while her hands claw frantically at the decaying scrub around her as if she’s trying to fashion herself a nest. When the man reaches her, she lashes out with her feet – not so much as to hurt him as to buy herself more time.
‘Take care,’ says Kat Vaesy gently into her left ear, arriving to help Quigley pin her to the ground. ‘You don’t want to harm yourself. Come, Mistress Merton – we have work to do.’
47
Having set a match to the powder trail, Nicholas discovers the resulting explosion doesn’t go quite where he’d anticipated.
When he attempts to raise the matter of the Lazar House, not one head turns in his direction. It’s as if men of this rarefied elevation have too much of their own sun in their eyes to see his sort. Hunsdon wants to send word to the ports and harbours to shut up the exits. Knollys wants to arrest every recusant in the land, just to be on the safe side. Essex wants to go to the queen and get put in charge of everything.
So Nicholas gets Lumley to intercede.
‘My lords, Dr Shelby here has a view on where Quigley may seek refuge.’
The grand heads finally turn.
‘I believe he sometimes uses the empty Lazar House on Bankside,’ Nicholas says, his mouth suddenly tinder-dry. He adds for effect, ‘It would be the ideal place for him to hold secret Masses.’
‘In addition,’ adds Lumley, setting his jaw against what he must say next, ‘I would recommend someone rides to Cold Oak manor at Vauxhall. Lady Katherine Vaesy may well be harbouring him. She’s an associate.’
‘They can arrest that charlatan of her husband while they’re about it,’ grunts Knollys. ‘Never did trust the fellow. Wouldn’t let him physic a lame horse.’
Burghley nods his assent.
After that, Nicholas knows the powder blast will go where he intends. If Quigley is taken, he can protest that he’s not a Jesuit until he’s blue in the face. Denounced by Lumley, and with the contents of Francis Deniker’s pine box for evidence, these men will not hesitate to deliver him to the mercies of one Master Richard Topcliffe.
The very thought of the man makes the hairs on the back of Nicholas’s neck lift. When he was young, his mother would invoke the threat of Topcliffe whenever she wanted to frighten him into good behaviour. The boys in his class at petty school called their most feared teacher Topcliffe.
Richard Topcliffe – the man who will happily apply more than enough bone-breaking pressure to Gabriel Quigley’s limbs for him to confess to whatever it is Knollys and the rest of them desire. Richard Topcliffe – the Privy Council’s tame tormenter of the ungodly and the treasonous; the queen’s gentleman torturer-in-chief. Once delivered into his clutches, Quigley can howl that he’s only a harmless murderer until his screams beat against the walls of his cell like the clapper of the bell of doom. But the pain won’t stop until Topcliffe hears the words ‘I willingly confess to treason’.
After that, there will be no more eviscerated bodies troubling the wherry passengers of Bankside.
They have brought her to a room high up in the eaves – a dark, dusty place with a small grimy window she can’t see out of. They have chained her by one ankle. She can’t move more than a short distance in any direction. Through some warped sense of compassion, they’ve let her lie on one of half a dozen filthy mattresses scattered around the chamber.
‘When will it be? We can’t have much time left,’ she hears the woman ask.
‘Soon,’ comes a harshly masculine reply. ‘This is too important to hurry; I have to cast an astrological matrix for guidance. I’m not just going to cut her up like a village butcher. Mathew would not want it so.’ Then they close the door on her and slide home the bolt.
Lying curled up on the mattress, Bianca fights against the waves of nausea and confusion that sweep over her as the poison she’s drunk works on her body. She wonders if Ralph Cullen or Jacob Monkton slept on this very pallet, suffered these same wild visions, had their will and control of their limbs stolen away from them in the same manner. Then she decides it doesn’t matter if they did – she does not intend to die like them.
But she knows that soon the hallucinations will return. She wonders how long she has: minutes? Hours? She slithers as close to the door as the chain will allow. Listening for footsteps beyond, she has to battle the noisy thudding of her heart. When she’s satisfied there’s no one nearby, she moves back to the mattress.
Reaching into her gown, Bianca pulls out a few of the leaves she’d gathered so frantically when she’d thrown herself headlong into the wilderness outside the Lazar House. She prays to all the saints that what she’d seen there was not a part of the hallucination; that the knowledge her mother has bequeathed her has not played her false. She holds the leaves to her nose, rubs them between her fingertips. At once the sharp scent of ginger rises like smoke from a chafing dish. She whispers just one word of blessed relief, like an incantation: Asarabacca!
In England, Bianca knows, they call the plant hazelwort. She hopes the English variety is as good a purgative as the one her mother used to give her when she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have – like the time she tried to lick her poisoned fingers.
There’s no possibility of making an infusion; she’ll just have to eat the leaves raw. Look on the bright side, she tells herself: they’ll work faster that way. The only question is: did I manage to gather enough?
She puts the leaves into her mouth and begins to chew. The taste of them makes her face pucker. Her whole body cries out to her: Spit the vile stuff out – now!
But there’s no going back. This is her only hope. Bianca swallows the pulp and waits for the pain to start.
Burghley has given Nicholas a private wherry for the journey to Bankside. He’s detailed four of his men as crew – tough, weatherbeaten little fellows. Nicholas suspects they’re former sailors from Effingham’s fleet.
The captain of this small band is a leathery-skinned man named Brabant. He sports a pigtail and a brass earring. At his belt is slung a sword and buckler. There’s a violent energy about him that seems barely constrained. He’s one of those fearsome English privateers who keep the protests flowing from the Spanish ambassador, whenever a Don ship gets taken up and its cargo appropriated by the Treasury. The only thing that seems to give him pause is the thought of contracting leprosy.
‘This lazar hospital – I’ve seen how quickly contagion can spread through a mess-deck,’ he says as he settles himself deftly into the boat,
leaving Nicholas to follow, in his own ungainly landlubber’s way.
‘It’s been empty for years. There’s hasn’t been a leper living there since the queen was a young maid.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Certain. You can’t fall sick merely by entering it.’
‘And the tide is against us,’ says Brabant with the pessimism of a mariner who’s spent too long at sea. ‘We’ve a handy enough crew, mind. Davey over there was in Ark Royal when the Dons’ Armada came sailing up the Channel in eighty-eight.’
Davey tips his cap to Nicholas.
‘And Nikko Shugborough – that’s him there, second oar on the leeward side – Nikko was in Henry Seymour’s squadron, weren’t you, Nikko?’
‘Gunner’s mate in the galleon Rainbow,’ says a man in a dirty leather jerkin. Nicholas stares at his arms – each bicep is the girth of a boar’s ham. ‘Held the gun-deck record on the six-pounder demi-culverin, sir.’
‘It’s just one man,’ says Nicholas, grateful that he’s in serious company for the task in hand. ‘Cannon might be somewhat of an excess.’
‘Where do we land?’ asks Brabant.
‘There’s a culvert between the place where Black Bull Alley reaches the river and the Mutton Lane stairs. You should be able to take us in under the lintel.’
The sky is beginning to darken. A wind that’s had a clear run from the west batters Nicholas’s face as the wherry lurches out into the river. The weight of having set this extraordinary play upon its stage is beginning to bear down upon his shoulders, sapping his confidence. As they head upriver towards the Lambeth marshes, he ponders his chances. He’s almost sure that he never spoke of the Lazar House in Quigley’s presence. He hopes he’s right, otherwise Quigley will stay well clear of Bankside. Not even Burghley will be able to muster enough men to watch every escape route out of England.
She’d hated getting sick when she was young. She’d loathed the indignity, the humbling of the will and the body, the feeling that some pitiless, angry beast had taken control of her and was forcing her insides to dance to its tune. Now she longs for it. When the first stab of cramp comes, Bianca almost weeps for joy. The asarabacca is working. Her own pain is a blow struck against the two people responsible for her terror. She crawls into a corner and vomits up the contents of her stomach, desperately trying to limit the noise of her retching.
When the spasms stop, she drags over one of the straw pallets to cover the mess. She doesn’t care about the telltale smell. This place stinks already. But she daren’t let them see what she’s achieved: the first small victory in her struggle to live.
Nicholas is suffering his own imprisonment. The river seems to have him bound in hoops of invisible iron. The swell pushes the little wherry backwards one yard for every two that Brabant’s men manage to claw forward.
His worry that Quigley knows of his suspicions about the Lazar House has given way to another fear – did he speak Bianca Merton’s name only in John Lumley’s hearing, or did he mention it when Quigley was taking down Elise’s testament? Try as he might, he can’t be sure. His only comfort, as Brabant and his crew battle against the river and the wind, is that Ned Monkton is standing his simple, honest – and hopefully sober – guard.
48
The woman enters, bearing an earthenware bowl. She kneels beside Bianca, smiles and says kindly, ‘You’ve been taken poorly, Mistress Merton. We’ve sent for a physician, but you need to get your strength back. You really must drink. Here—’
Bianca rolls her eyes and groans, in her best imitation of someone deranged. Then she takes the bowl. Better to feign compliance than have them force her.
Again: the scent of hellebore and henbane.
She allows some of the liquid to flow over her chin. But she must drink enough to satisfy the woman or they’ll realize what she’s doing.
When the woman leaves, Bianca waits for the sound of her footsteps to fade. Then she reaches into her kirtle and brings out the rest of the asarabacca. She makes a little pile of leaves on the mattress. It’s a worryingly small pile. She halves it and stuffs one portion into her mouth.
This, she realizes, is going to come down to a battle of wills.
‘I can’t take us in, sir, not even with the likes of Davey and Nikko on the oars,’ says Brabant from the wildly pitching prow of the wherry.
‘Shit!’ hisses Nicholas in a wholly uncharacteristic display of frustration.
It’s taken him a lifetime to strike a flint and get a lantern ablaze; the wind has defeated every attempt till now. By its meagre, agitated light he can see the tide is almost up to the level of the lintel in the Lazar House river-wall. A lethal foam of dark-brown water surges around the entrance to the culvert. The whole bank is beginning to lose its outline in the gathering dusk, river and land becoming one. The hull planks of the wherry heave beneath his feet, threatening to hurl him into the racing water. He braces himself and points to a low, dark smudge on the river – the jetty where Jacob Monkton’s eviscerated body washed ashore.
‘The Mutton Lane stairs then!’ he shouts against the wind. ‘And for mercy’s sake, hurry!’
On land, it’s less than a hundred paces away. But the river has taken against them. The tide is running. It might as well be on the far side of the Narrow Sea.
She remembers the day news reached the Veneto of the execution of Mary Stuart, the Scots queen. Father Rossi had given the Mass in the little church on the hill. He’d told the congregation the Pope would soon intercede with God to make the new martyr a saint. Then he assured them the Holy Father prayed daily for divine retribution upon the heretical English queen who had killed her.
Sitting beside her father, Bianca could have wept with pity for poor Mary. She imagined her alone in her cell, awaiting the dawn and the executioner; no one but her enemies to give her the Viaticum. But the tortured way in which Father Rossi had pronounced the English name of the castle where this dreadful crime against God had taken place – Fotheringhay – had caused her almost to giggle in the most solemn parts of the service. It had come out of his mouth sounding more like hot-herring-guay.
Now she knows that God had noticed that little sin of hers, just as He notices all sin. And now He’s punishing her by turning the tables: it is Bianca herself awaiting the executioner.
She hears the bolt rasp again. The door opens and she lifts herself a little from the stinking mattress.
Is it time?
Have you come to lead me to the block at hot-herring-guay?
No laughing matter now.
The woman kneels beside her – takes her hand. ‘Come, Mistress Merton—’
Bianca senses pumice-face close by. She feels him place one arm around her shoulders, feels the strength in him as he lifts her to her feet as though she were made of little more than air. There is no play-acting in the way she drags her heels and stumbles as they lead her through the door and out into darkness. True, the frightening visions have ceased for a while. She feels as though at least a small measure of her will has returned. But the pain in her belly, the raw burning in her throat, the ache of her ribs from the spasms, her exhaustion – all these are real.
When did I last take the asarabacca?
When was my last purge?
When will the hallucinations come again?
Bianca knows the wrong answer to any of these questions could kill her.
A tiny gleam of light dances in the shadows. They are leading her towards it, though to her mind it is she who is stationary and it is the light that’s approaching her.
A candle burning behind a wooden grille. Another door opening. A room smaller than the one she has come from. A chapel, of sorts, set deep inside the Lazar House.
As her eyes grow accustomed to the glow of the candle’s flame, Bianca sees faded images of the saints staring at her from the walls and wonders: Have they killed me already? Have the angels come to take pity on another martyr?
A low archway, barely more than a deeper patch of
blackness. A yawing mouth with only the bottom teeth left in it – like Father Rossi’s. But the teeth are a curving flight of ancient stone steps leading down into Purgatory.
She must break free now, before it is too late.
But where will she go? She has no knowledge of her surroundings. She’d just blunder about helplessly until they caught her again. Then they’d tie her hands and feet.
No, I must choose the moment carefully. I will get just one chance.
The Mutton Lane shambles is silent now, but Nicholas can smell the place from the wherry. The iron perfume of butchery still lingers in the air. It even rises from the river, where the unwanted offal of the day’s slaughtering has been dumped. Nicholas takes it as a dreadful warning.
‘You want to stop at a tavern?’ says Brabant incredulously when they’re standing on the jetty. ‘How shall I tell His Grace we lost a Jesuit, all because you fancy a jug of knock-down?’
‘I don’t fancy a jug of anything,’ says Nicholas hotly. ‘Mistress Merton is a witness, and I fear Quigley may intend her harm. Besides, to reach the Lazar House from here you have to pass the Jackdaw. I just want to make sure.’
When he enters the taproom it feels like a homecoming. The tang of wood-smoke and hops, the dry scent of the rushes on the floor, the herbs Bianca sets in the nooks and crannies are more pleasing to him than the aroma of a prince’s bejewelled pomander. Even Ned Monkton is there. Nicholas spots him at once, deep in conversation with Rose. Nicholas decides to bring him along. If anyone deserves to be in at the kill, it’s Ned.
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.