by S. W. Perry
‘The vintners speak highly of me,’ says Nicholas in a flat voice devoid of frivolity.
‘Perhaps I’ve been mistaken in my opinion of you, Dr Shelby,’ says Elizabeth Cecil with a wry smile. ‘I ought to know by now that a pearl is not to be judged by its shell.’
The clear reference to her husband catches Nicholas off-guard. He has always assumed Lord Cobham’s daughter married the crook-backed Robert Cecil solely for the name. Until now, it had never dawned on him that love played any part in Cecil’s life.
As they walk back to Sir Robert’s study, Nicholas says, ‘When your men hammered on the door of my lodgings, I feared it was the parish, come to tell me that plague had crossed the river.’
Robert Cecil glances up at him pensively. ‘At present it seems confined mostly to the lanes around the Fleet bridge. One of Elizabeth’s ladies has family there. So naturally I assumed the worst. Let us hope to God it can be kept in check.’
‘The Lord Mayor has done the right thing, Sir Robert. As long as everyone keeps their dwelling clean and the street outside free of refuse—’
‘And what would be your heretical view of the cause of this contagion, Dr Shelby?’
A weary smile. ‘I know no better than any other physician, Sir Robert.’
‘Men who don’t think with the herd are often wiser than they know, Dr Shelby. Speculate.’
‘I know that casting horoscopes and wrapping yourself in ribbons inscribed with prayers has no discernible – and, more importantly, repeatable – effect, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But its transmission: have you no views of your own?’
‘It is held to move easily in tainted air, but how, and from where, I cannot say. Nor can I tell you why some who catch it die, while others live. That may have to do with age and constitution, but it is by no means certain. The disease is a mystery – an exceptionally malign mystery.’
‘Well, the Privy Council has done what it can. The infected houses are to be shut up and a watch set over them. We’ve forbidden all fairs and gatherings within the city. The rest is up to God.’
‘Then let us hope it dies of starvation, Sir Robert.’
‘Amen to that. At present there’s no talk of adjourning the Trinity term for Parliament. But if Her Majesty starts thinking of removing herself to Windsor or Greenwich, there will be a great leaving of this city, mark my words.’
Back in Cecil’s study, Nicholas reaches for the gabardine he’d left hanging on a chair. Through the window, a faint grey line marks the boundary between the fields of Covent Garden and the still-black sky.
‘Leave your coat a while longer,’ Robert Cecil says, fixing him with an uncompromising look. ‘I have something else to ask of you.’
Here it comes, Nicholas tells himself, his heart sinking. With Cecil, a summons is like the bark on a rotten tree: what is on the surface is not always what lies beneath. Peel away the layers and you’re likely to find black beetles crawling about underneath.
‘I want you to go on a journey for me.’
‘A journey, Sir Robert? What manner of journey?’
‘Quite a long one, as it happens. Are you familiar, by any chance, with the city of Marrakech?’
The courtier’s little bejewelled index finger traces a line on the globe’s lacquered surface, down the Narrow Sea towards Brittany, then across the Bay of Biscay, past Portugal, all the way to the African continent, almost to the point where knowledge ends. Here and there the fingertip ploughs through little flurries of waves, drawn simplistically as a child might draw the wings of a bird in flight. ‘Saltpetre, Dr Shelby,’ Cecil says as his finger runs southwards. ‘It is all about saltpetre.’
Nicholas looks at him blankly.
‘Let me explain. The Barbary Company was set up by Their Graces, Leicester and Warwick, to trade with the western nations of the Moor. We send Morocco fine English wool. In return, Sultan al-Mansur sends us spices and sugar.’ As his fingertip reaches the Barbary shore, Cecil’s eyes narrow. ‘But that is not the sole extent of our commerce, and I must have your word that you will not speak of what I am about to tell you beyond this room – on pain of severe penalty.’
Nicholas wonders if this is the point where he should stick his fingers in his ears – but he knows full well that not actually hearing one of Robert Cecil’s confidences is no protection at all. Reluctantly he nods his acceptance.
‘Until some fifteen years ago,’ Cecil continues, ‘Philip of Spain – and his Portuguese puppet Sebastian – were masters of Morocco. Then the Moors rose up and expelled them. Now we send Sultan al-Mansur new matchlock muskets, to defend his realm against their return.’
‘And in payment he sends us saltpetre,’ Nicholas guesses.
‘Which you, Dr Shelby, will know – from your service in the Low Countries – is a crucial component in the manufacture of gunpowder. Do you happen to know how many Spanish ships were sunk as a direct result of our gunfire, when Philip sent his Armada against us?’
‘Not off the top of my head, no.’
‘None,’ Cecil says archly. ‘Drake had to close with them at Gravelines before our cannon could do them proper harm. Moroccan saltpetre is amongst the finest there is. We need every ounce we can get, in order to ensure that if the Spanish snake comes against us again, we can out-charge his cannon.’
‘But that still doesn’t explain why you want me to go to the Barbary shore,’ Nicholas says.
‘I’m sure you will not be surprised to know that I maintain an agent in Marrakech, expressly to keep watch on our interests.’
It could scarcely surprise Nicholas less. The most isolated village in England knows the Cecils are the eyes and ears that ceaselessly protect England from her enemies. They have their people everywhere. Mothers warn their children that if they misbehave, the Cecils will see their faults almost as surely as God Himself.
‘The man I employ as my spy in Marrakech is a half-English, half-Portuguese trader named Adolfo Sykes,’ Cecil tells him. ‘He is the Barbary Company’s factor there. But in the past weeks three Barbary Company ships have returned to England without a single one of his customary dispatches. I fear some mischief has befallen him.’
‘But why send me? Yes, I know a little about wool – my father is a yeoman farmer – but I couldn’t tell saltpetre from pepper, if you put it on my mutton.’
Cecil gives him a condescending smile. ‘Because to send just another merchant would be as pointless as sending my pastry cook. I need an educated man, Dr Shelby – someone who can assume an envoy’s duties. If the Spanish have swayed the sultan against us, I want someone with the faculties to sway him back again.’
‘But I’m a physician, not a diplomat.’
‘Exactly. One of the sultan’s close advisors – a Moor named Sumayl al-Seddik – is benefactor to a hospital in the city. My father had dealings with him when he came here with the entourage of the sultan’s envoy some four years past. I’m sure you will recall the public tumult that accompanied the visit.’
‘Eleanor and I were in the crowd,’ Nicholas says, remembering. ‘That was before…’
A moment’s uncomfortable silence, until Cecil says, ‘Yes, well… you can tell Minister al-Seddik that you’ve come as an envoy to foster ties of learning between our two realms. That should pass well enough as a believable reason.’
‘An envoy who looks like a Thames waterman,’ Nicholas says, throwing Cecil’s earlier words back at him.
Sir Robert gives a diplomatic cough. ‘If that’s your only other objection, Dr Shelby, let me reassure you: I have more tailors than I do horses.’
Nicholas takes a steadying breath, so that his answer sounds appropriately resolute. Since the moment two years ago when he’d agreed to act as Cecil’s physician, in return for a stipend that would allow him to set up a charitable practice on Bankside, he has known this time would come. Hasn’t Bianca warned him enough times? Nicholas, sweet, Robert Cecil offers nothing without a reason. There is always a price t
o be paid in return.
He thinks of the last journey he undertook for the Lord Treasurer’s crook-backed son. It had ended with two slack-eyed killers dragging him towards the centre of London Bridge and the river waiting below, the pain of the beatings coursing through his limbs and howling in his ears. If it hadn’t been for Bianca’s courage that night, he wouldn’t be standing here now.
Yes, he thinks, a journey undertaken for Robert Cecil does not always end at the destination you are expecting.
3
In the shadow of the riverside church, St Saviour’s market is in full cry. Competition for a sale is fierce. Drapers loudly proclaim the quality of their ribbons; farmers in from the Surrey countryside boast you’ll find no better winter vegetables outside the queen’s own gardens; cutlers swear on their mother’s graves that their knives are newly forged and not pawned by destitute sailors laid off from the royal fleet. And weaving through the crowd, like pike in a shady pool, the cut-purses and coney-catchers hunt their prey.
Not that any of them would think for a moment of waylaying the comely young woman with the amber eyes who walks around the stalls with such an assured air, a wicker basket tucked under her arm, her waves of dark hair pinned beneath a simple linen coif. They’ve heard it said that if you try to slip your hand between bodice and kirtle to steal away her purse, you’ll wake up next morning with a raven’s claw instead of fingers. Bianca Merton is known to them. Bianca Merton is out of bounds.
And by association, so too is the curly-headed lad with dark eyes and skin the colour of orange-blossom honey who walks beside her.
Banksiders know Farzad Gul now, almost as well as they know his mistress. They greet him as if he were one of their own. After all, he is Bianca Merton’s Moor, and thus something of a curiosity. His colourful slanders of the Pope and the King of Spain, learned from the English mariners who rescued him from shipwreck, have made him as popular as any Southwark street entertainer.
Today Farzad is making one of his regular visits in search of vegetables for the Jackdaw’s pottage pot. Usually he would come alone, but with the wedding pending, Bianca has taken the opportunity to accompany him. She has the better eye for quality braids and ribbons with which to turn his battered jerkin into something a little more befitting a groomsman.
‘An English wedding might not be the match of a Paduan one, or a Persian one for that matter,’ she tells him sternly, when his interest in haberdashery fails at the second stall she drags him to, ‘but I will not abide you looking like a vagabond, young gentleman.’
‘No, Mistress,’ he says, with downcast eyes.
‘So then, you go and find us some of Master Brocklesbury’s cabbages, and I will see to the ribbons. Meet me by Jacob Henry’s oyster stall when you’re done.’
‘Yes, mistress,’ Farzad says with a grin, knowing the choice of rendezvous means a cup of the best oysters to be found this side of the river.
As he heads deeper into the market, alone, Farzad Gul wonders where he might be now, were it not for Mistress Bianca. It is two years since he found himself cast up in this strange city. If his rescuers had not happened to stop at the Jackdaw tavern on their paying-off, perhaps he might have sold his cooking skills to a new ship, sailed away again to some other strange place far beyond the world he had once known.
Every day Farzad wonders where his mother and the other survivors of his family are. In his mind he can trace their soul-crushing progress across the scorching desert wilderness, from Suakin on the Red Sea to a slave market in Algiers or Tripoli, or Fez, or even Marrakech. But from there they fade away entirely; sold, undoubtedly – if they lived; turned from the boisterously argumentative characters of his childhood into living ghosts.
But living where? Sometimes he prays they never made landfall at all, but followed his father and his sister into heaven.
A jarring blow to his shoulder pulls Farzad back into the present. He hears a contemptuous ‘Out of my way, heathen dog!’
Turning, he sees two lads of about his own age, dressed in the jerkins and caps of city apprentices. One has his hands in his belt and his elbows spread aggressively. ‘And take your filthy Blackamoor eyes off me,’ he snarls in an accent that, to Farzad, feels somehow familiar.
‘I am no heathen, I am from Persia,’ Farzad says pleasantly, refusing to rise to what is clearly a challenge. And to take the anger out of the air, he adds brightly, ‘And the Pope has the breath of an old camel!’
To his surprise, his words fail to bring about the expected slapping of thighs and jocund howls of approval. The lad with the elbows rushes at him, hurling Farzad back into a cheese stall. Round yellow truckles tumble onto the cobbles.
Southwark street-fights can swiftly run out of hand. Knives get drawn. Sometimes even swords. Deaths are not unknown. So the stall-holders at St Saviour’s are adept at putting them down before they get started. A burly weaver whom Farzad recognizes as a regular at the Jackdaw pins one of the apprentices in a vicious armlock.
‘That’s enough out of you, young master,’ he says, giving the lad’s arm a corrective wrench. ‘If you’ve a mind for a brawl, you’d be better off back home in Ireland, taking your anger out on the Spanish, if they try a landing. We’ll have none of your bog-trotting rowdiness here.’ He releases his grip, thinking the apprentice has learned his lesson.
But he hasn’t. He starts towards Farzad again, who is trying to put the cheeses back on the stall. ‘One day soon I shall be a prince over the likes of you,’ he snarls, his Irish accent thickened by his anger. He stares close into Farzad’s face. ‘We should permit none of your kind here. Our Captain Connell would know what to do with a Blackamoor like you.’
And lest there be any doubt about the sort of man this Captain Connell might be, he draws the blade of one hand across his own throat. Then he turns and walks away, beckoning his companion to follow.
Farzad watches them go, cold in his heart. Not at the insult – he’s borne much worse – but at the mention of an all-too-familiar name: Captain Connell. It is a name Farzad Gul has long prayed he would never hear again. It is the name of the cruellest man in the whole world.
‘Tell me again, Nicholas: where?’
It is later that day, in Bianca Merton’s apothecary’s shop on Dice Lane. She has assumed what Nicholas calls her tavern-mistress’s face – the one she adopts when a taproom brawl is about to kick off, someone exceeds his credit or a Puritan complains about the sinfulness of Bankside whilst asking directions to the Cardinal’s Hat, all in the same breath. Nicholas marvels at how her features can change from exquisite to terrifying in an instant.
‘Marrakech,’ he repeats with a slight trace of discomfort, handing her the list of medicines he has promised Robert and Elizabeth Cecil.
She keeps her eyes fixed on the distillations, powders and medicaments: sweet clover boiled in wine for Walter Pemmel’s sore eyes… saffron dissolved in the juice of honey-wort for Mistress Gilby’s leg ulcers…
‘It’s in Morocco,’ he says. ‘Sir Robert showed me – he has a terrestrial globe, with all the lands and capitals—’
‘I know where Marrakech is, Nicholas,’ she says, brushing aside a pennon of ebony hair that has fallen over one eye. ‘I was brought up in Padua and my father was a merchant, remember? I can name all the great cities of the known world, Christian or Moor.’ She looks up again and begins to count them off on her lithe fingers, ‘Venice, Aleppo, Lisbon, Constantinople, Jerusalem…’
‘You can stop. I take your point: you know where Marrakech is.’
‘Why does he want you to go there, of all places? If he wants spices, I know plenty of merchants on Galley Quay who import from Barbary.’
‘It’s about diplomacy,’ he says evasively.
‘Nicholas, you’re a physician, not a diplomat.’
He gives her the answer Robert Cecil proposed as a masquerade. ‘The Moors have a great tradition in medicine. Most of our medical texts were translated from Arabic versions of the Latin and Gr
eek originals. He wants me to go there to discover what, if anything, we might learn from them.’
She fixes him with those unsettling amber eyes. ‘You cannot go to Marrakech, Nicholas. The wedding – remember?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘What do you mean – it doesn’t matter?’
‘Because I’m not going. I told him No.’
The corners of Bianca’s mouth lift into an incredulous half-smile. ‘You refused Robert Cecil?’
‘I’m not his slave, Bianca. I’m his physician.’
She taps one of the pots on the table, as if she’s just checkmated him at chess. ‘He didn’t threaten to stop your stipend – force you to abandon your practice for the poor?’
‘No.’
‘Or threaten to have me hanged for a heretic?’
‘No.’
‘Because he’s tried that line before, when he’s wanted to coerce you.’
‘No.’
‘I suppose he swore on his mother’s grave there was no one else he could trust to do the job but Nicholas Shelby?’
‘Bianca, Robert Cecil has agents in more places than even you can name. I’m sure one of those will serve his needs more adequately than I. If he really must have a physician for the task, he can call on the College. Someone like Frowicke, or Beston. I’m sure they would be only too happy to spend three weeks at sea in a leaky ship full of rats and lice, so they can tell the descendants of the great Avicenna where they’re going wrong.’
‘Who?’
‘Ibn Sina. He was a Persian physician. We know him as Avicenna.’
She comes out from behind the table, the hem of her gown swirling around her ankles like a willow in a summer squall. ‘Well, I know that Robert Cecil is a snake. You have denied him – haven’t you?’
‘I told you, yes.’
She fixes him with a stern gaze and turns away before responding. ‘Good, because for a moment I was sure you’d invented the whole story simply in order to disappear for a while – to avoid the wedding.’