by S. W. Perry
‘To be honest with you, I was thinking more of flayed, salted and hung up for eating, after all the quality beef has gone.’
With a ban imposed on public entertainments, the lanes of Bankside are unusually quiet. The street tricksters have retired to the taverns, where they attempt to gull each other in the warm, partly to keep their sleight of hand sharp, partly to relieve the boredom. In the bear-baiting rings the bearward watches old Sackerson staring out through the bars of his cage and wonders if he’s enjoying the respite, though in the spirit of Christian compassion, Sackerson – being in the twilight of his life – is only baited now on special occasions. And a wedding isn’t one of them.
It is to be an Easter wedding. After a night of rain that has the earth yielding to the boot like damp mortar, Monday brings a bridal gift of clear skies.
Ned Monkton – and Nicholas, his appointed groomsman – arrive at the Jackdaw to the accompaniment of the musicians from the closed-up Rose theatre. With rowdy but joyous display, they search the tavern for the bride, to carry her away from her former estate. She and her maids – of whom Bianca is matron – resist just long enough to satisfy convention, filling the Jackdaw with joyous shrieks as they flee from one room to another.
The procession leaves promptly at ten, to the sound of the St Saviour’s bell tolling merrily. Bride and groom lead the way. Ned, being the largest fellow present by some measure, looks like Hamelin’s Pied Piper leading a flock of happy children. Nicholas has bought him a handsome woollen jerkin. It is the first new garment Ned has ever worn, and he carries himself as proudly as if it were pure cloth-of-gold. Passing the Clink prison, he waves regally to old friends temporarily confined there for disorder, who shout their encouragement from the tiny windows. Nicholas smiles vicariously. After all, it was not so very long ago that Ned spent his days as a mortuary attendant at St Thomas’s hospital for the poor, all but entombed amongst the recently deceased. He could claim to be only occupant of the crypt ever to have risen from the dead. At this moment he certainly looks like a man who’s been offered a second chance at life.
Bianca has contrived an almost-new kirtle for Rose, put together from leftover pieces by a clothier in Bermondsey who has donated the farthingale in settlement of his slate at the Jackdaw. The bride is the very picture of a bucolic angel, her black ringlets garlanded with posies, a bloom of contentment on her broad cheeks.
The bride’s father having long since passed to a gentler place, Bianca has provided the groom with a dowry: a full cask of the Jackdaw’s best hell-cat. In return, the groom’s father has provided plump capons for the feast, fresh from his poulterer’s shop on Scrope Alley.
At St Saviour’s, bride and groom make their vows. Ned stumbles over the words and turns an alarming crimson. In his embarrassment he fidgets with his jerkin, as if troubled by lice. But Nicholas has checked him over in preparation for his later exertions and can guarantee him louse-free.
The ring that Ned places on Rose’s finger is made from the handle of a broken tin spoon that someone left at the Jackdaw, re-forged in the smithy by St Mary’s dock and cleverly engraved with the words by no river parted on the outside and by this river joined on the inside – in reference to the Thames, upon which so much of their livelihood depends.
And the wedding feast! There has scarcely been a board like it in living memory. At least none that any common-or-garden Banksider is likely to be invited to. In addition to old man Monkton’s capons, there is a side of winter hog smoking and spitting in the Jackdaw’s hearth, paid for by a collection taken amongst the customers. Farzad has made a fiery sauce with capsicum, nutmeg and ginger. The sisters at St Thomas’s hospital have donated a basket overflowing with winter vegetables from their garden. Timothy – now almost a man and drawing the eye of any number of Southwark’s daughters – plays bright jigs on his lute, accompanied by the playhouse musicians. There may be plague across the river, and trade a little poor, but the general consensus is that when Philip of Spain came to England all those years ago to wed Mary Tudor, they should have done it on Bankside, not at Winchester. Yes, he’s an enemy now, but look at what he missed.
Just because there’s a wedding feast in the taproom, that doesn’t mean the Jackdaw has turned its back on the rest of the world. The door is open to all with good intent in their hearts. And to everyone’s relief, Solomon Mandel’s acquaintances from the three Barbary Company ships moored at Lyon Quay have behaved just as their captain, Cathal Connell, promised. Indeed, like mariners everywhere, they’ve won admiration for their dancing.
‘Marriage is a fine estate, is it not?’ asks Connell, as by pure fortune he and Nicholas find themselves in close proximity. ‘Without it, we’re little better than the beasts.’ He is clearly drunk. His voice has a wistful edge to it, as though – by some malign conjunction of the stars and the sea – matrimony is for ever barred to him.
‘It can have its price,’ says Nicholas, remembering how the loss of Eleanor had almost broken him, led him even to attempt the sin of self-destruction in the dark and turbulent Thames.
Connell misunderstands entirely. ‘Aye, well, more fool a fellow for marrying a scold.’ He takes another swig of ale, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Though to be honest with you, I’d take all the scolding that Mistress Merton could give me. What a landfall a woman like that could be to a lusty man. A nice deep harbour and no mistake.’
Inside, Nicholas flinches at Connell’s coarseness, but for Ned and Rose’s sake he keeps his fists under tight constraint.
‘Forgive me for being blunt, but you don’t look to me much like a doctor,’ Connell continues, a disappointed smile on his face, as though he wishes Nicholas had risen to the bait.
‘That’s what the College of Physicians like to tell me.’
‘You see, Doctor Shelby, ‘I’ve known men swear they sailed all the way to China and back, when the truth is they did nothing but hang around the stews on the Bristol quays, tupping the doxies and pissing in the Avon.’
Nicholas looks around the taproom to see if Ned or Rose is near enough to allow him to disengage with a degree of politeness. They aren’t.
‘Sailors aren’t the only tellers of tall tales, Captain Connell,’ he says, resigning himself to the conversation. ‘You should see some of the cures I’ve witnessed prescribed by upstanding members of my profession.’
Connell grunts. ‘Now, a trading contract is something a simple fellow like me can understand. I ship the cargo. I get paid. Easy. But if I fall ill, and I pay a physician to heal me, only God knows whether I’m to be cured or killed. Not much of an incentive to do business, now, is it?’
The words are weighted with inebriated good fellowship. But there’s a barb in Connell’s silky brogue. Nicholas decides he doesn’t much care for the man Solomon Mandel has brought to the Jackdaw. They seem poles apart: the quiet, contemplative Jew and the salt-flayed, murderous-eyed captain of the Righteous.
‘Think of it as a mariner might,’ Nicholas says, struggling to hide his irritation. ‘We’re using inaccurate charts. We don’t know where the rocks lie. At least, that’s my opinion, for what it’s worth. The College of Physicians, on the other hand, likes to tell me they’ve sounded every ocean.’
A thought occurs to him. With the three Barbary Company ships presently at Lyon Quay, is this the man Robert Cecil had intended Nicholas should sail with, on his mission to Marrakech?
‘Tell me, Captain Connell, have you by chance been asked to take anything other than cargo on your next voyage to the Barbary Coast?’ he asks.
In drink, Connell cannot hide a betraying flicker of suspicion. ‘What are you suggesting, Dr Shelby – that I’m in the habit of putting in at Brest to let off a couple of Jesuit priests fleeing the queen’s justice?’
‘I’m not suggesting that at all, Captain Connell. I simply wondered if anyone asked you to carry a passenger.’
The reek of mad-dog is pungent on Connell’s breath. ‘I carry certain young gentleme
n for a schooling in seamanship, if that’s what you’re hinting at.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of apprentices. I was thinking of me.’
‘You? Why would Dr Shelby want to go to the Barbary shore? Especially if he has that waiting by his bedroom door?’ He nods towards Bianca, the ale causing his head to dip more heavily than he intended. ‘I’d be permanently moored with that one, I can tell you. I’d be wearing her ankles for a scarf all the livelong day.’
Nicholas has the sudden desire to smash Connell in the face, to add another raw wheal to all the others that seem to glare at him like contemptuous eyes. But even in drink, Connell is very probably an expert with a blade. And if there was ever a wise time and place to find out, a wedding feast is not it.
‘So the answer to my question, Captain Connell, is no, is it?’
Connell’s inebriated gaze sharpens. ‘Now you come to mention it, I was asked if I could find a berth for someone.’
‘Who asked you?’
‘Reynard Gault. He’s a leading merchant of the Barbary Company. A good fellow to invest with. Has the Midas touch. Knows all the right people.’
‘The Cecils, by any chance?’
Connell shrugs. ‘Why would you want to travel to the Barbary shore anyhow, Dr Shelby?’
Certainly not for Robert Cecil, answers Nicholas silently. Certainly not for saltpetre to make better gunpowder. Certainly not to find out why one Adolfo Sykes hasn’t been writing to the queen’s privy councillor of late.
‘Purely out of academic interest, Captain Connell. The Moors translated all the writings of the ancients into their language. If it were not for them, our knowledge of medicine, mathematics, natural philosophy – all these – would be the poorer. There may be much we can learn from observing how they practise physic.’
‘Is that a fact, Dr Shelby? And there’s me thinking they were savages.’
‘Oh, undoubtedly. Some of the translations back into Latin and Greek are only now being printed in Europe.’
Connell gives a derisive snort. Drops of foamy spittle land on Nicholas’s boots. ‘Then you’d think the heathens would have more reverence for the God who gave them the knowledge to do it, wouldn’t you?’
‘As a matter of interest, Captain Connell, when did this Master Gault of the Barbary Company make his enquiry?’
Connell takes a gulp of ale to help him think. ‘That would have been three days ago.’
‘Three days – are you certain?’
‘Reynard Gault isn’t often seen around the quays, he’s too grand for that. It was three days ago, for sure.’
Three days.
Hot anger surges through Nicholas’s blood, followed swiftly by a sense of foreboding. He had refused Robert Cecil’s request on Thursday, four days ago. Which means that either Cecil has found a replacement… or, more likely, the serpent isn’t yet ready to ease its jaws and let its prey escape.
The flitch of hog has been eaten. The fat is cooling in pots for later use. What Farzad doesn’t need for cooking, Bianca will use as a base to hold the herbs in her balms and mastics. Nothing goes to waste. Even Buffle, the Jackdaw’s dog, is gnawing the last scraps of gristle off a bone. In the taproom the dancing, the games and the songs have become increasingly bawdy as the bride and groom are prepared for the bedding. But when the door of Bianca’s old chamber is finally closed, leaving Ned and Rose to themselves, only a few revellers remain on the landing, serenading the newly-weds with saucy songs of encouragement. Soon even they return to the taproom and its fuggy air of glutted contentment.
In one of the booths, Bianca and Nicholas sit together, replete. He eases loose the points of his white canvas doublet. He puts one arm around her shoulder. It is the first deliberate, unforced touch, and he has made it without design or even prior contemplation.
She leans carelessly into him. He has a natural scent that reminds her of her time in Padua, of the hemp sacks full of herbs and spices in her father’s warehouse, warming in the summer sun. She wonders what it would be like to lie with him. The thought has come to her more than once in recent days, hardly surprising given the impending wedding. He’s built pleasantly enough, she thinks. Neither London nor the College of Physicians has yet managed to knock the Suffolk yeoman’s son out of him. An efficiently rustic lover, she decides – pleasantly free of the elaborate and fake courtesies of a Venetian gallant, but sensitive enough not to take her as though she was no more than a heifer and he the village bull. And so far, thank Jesu, Nicholas hasn’t shown any tendency towards milky sonnets and dire poetry, which – she learned quickly upon arrival – is apparently de rigueur amongst all Englishmen who can read and write.
She likes how he escapes her attempts to catalogue him. A more predictable man would have married quickly after his wife’s death, seeking to make up for lost time in the practical business of raising sons. A less questioning one would never have blamed himself for losing her, in the first place. He looks like what he is, a tousle-haired, strong-limbed farmer’s boy. Yet given the chance, she suspects, he could give a Paduan doctor of philosophy a run for his money. No wonder the aristocratic students at Cambridge called him a country clod-pate, and the College of Physicians thinks him a heretic. A contradiction like that couldn’t possibly be boring between the sheets, could it?
And in a way she has already lain with him, in everything but the carnal pleasure of it. She knows his body better than he knows it himself. She remembers that October dawn when they had found him lying in the river mud – one-third frozen, one-third drowned, one-third hanging on to life because it couldn’t think of anything better to do. With the help of passing strangers, she and Timothy had carried him to the Jackdaw. There she had stripped him of his sodden clothes, laid him before the fire, washed the water slime from his body, carried him to the attic when he’d thawed a little, and then spent three weeks tending him in his delirium while she wondered who on earth he was, and what had prompted him to throw himself into the river – an act that her Catholic faith tells her is so sinful that God Himself can barely find the compassion to forgive it.
Yes, Nicholas Shelby is less unknown to her than he himself might imagine.
Before she realizes it, Bianca is tilting her head and offering him her mouth to kiss. She feels his body shift in anticipation, waits for his lips to meet hers.
And then she senses a movement at the edge of her vision. She hears a low voice calling, ‘Mistress, Mistress—’
Timothy is standing at the edge of the booth, fidgeting, his face on fire with embarrassment. Young Timothy, now almost a man. Timothy, who plucks such sweet tunes from his lute. And who – at this precise moment – is a harbinger of ill news, if ever she saw one.
‘Forgive me, Mistress,’ he says, staring at Bianca and Nicholas and wringing his hands together, consumed by misery for shattering the moment. ‘It’s Farzad. I’ve looked for him everywhere. He’s vanished!’
5
Nicholas stands in the lane, the cold night air stinging his face. ‘Farzad’s probably gone down to the river for some peace. He’s worked hard today. He’ll soon be back.’
‘And did he take his possessions – his second shirt and his knife – for a little tranquillity beside the river, too?’ Bianca asks. Her concern for Farzad is making her short-tempered.
They have searched the Jackdaw from the cellar to the attic, every nook and cranny. The only chamber they haven’t entered is Bianca’s old room. When one of Connell’s men – with a leer on his face – suggested it, Bianca silenced him with a single look. On this night, if on no other, Ned and Rose are to be allowed their privacy.
Cathal Connell steps unsteadily out of the Jackdaw’s entrance. ‘He’s soused, that’s what he is,’ he says, grinning like a traitor’s head on a pole. ‘Only a young lad – can’t hold his ale. He’ll be puking into a ditch somewhere.’
‘His religion doesn’t permit him to take drink,’ snaps Bianca, looking Connell up and down. ‘Unlike some I could name.’
‘What’s a Mohammedan doing in a Bankside tavern anyway?’ Connell asks, turning his face to the cold night air as though it might sooth his scoured cheeks.
‘He was saved from Barbary slavers by an English ship. Off the Ethiope shore,’ Bianca explains, looking up and down the lane as though she expects to see Farzad trotting home with his bright smile lightening the dark night. ‘They came into the Jackdaw with him one day. He had a cold – English weather doesn’t agree with him.’
‘He’s from Persia,’ Nicholas adds, as though a cold was something unknown outside England.
‘Which is why I don’t believe he’s gone down to the river,’ Bianca adds. ‘Not on a night like this. He wouldn’t.’
Connell shrugs. ‘Well, it’s time me and my fellows were in our hammocks. If we see him on the shore, we’ll send him back home with a flea in his ear.’
With the sailors gone and most of the revellers now departed, there are barely a dozen people left to carry out a search of the surrounding lanes, and most of those have difficulty walking a straight line. Southwark lanes at night are dangerous places for the solitary traveller, and there is always the danger of stumbling onto the riverbank in the dark. So Nicholas marshals them into groups of three, each group led by the least inebriated. With Bianca and Timothy in tow, he tracks down the night-watch at their brazier by the bridge and enlists their help.
They search for a good two hours: west into the Pike Garden and the open patches of ground around the bear-pit, east to the Compter prison. They circle the closed-up Rose theatre, which looms in the misty darkness like a monstrous bastion, silent and defended only by ghosts. They wander around the ruins of Rochester House, calling Farzad’s name and hoping all the while to hear one of his famously indelicate replies: The Pope is the spawn of a she-goat and a monkey… the King of Spain wears a woman’s farthingale under his gown… for it is well known throughout Southwark that Farzad learned his first English from the good Protestant sailors who rescued him. Tonight even Bianca would be happy to hear one of his slanders, even though she cleaves to her secret faith and has to hold her tongue when others laugh uproariously.