by S. W. Perry
A table has been set out with a bench on either side. Nicholas takes his place with the others. No one seems inclined to remove his cloak or gabardine. A wicked draught nips at their ankles, let in through the places where Mary Tudor’s men were frugal with the mortar when they bricked up the sacristy windows.
‘Now that we are all present, I suggest we begin,’ says Constable Willders. He closes his eyes, puts his hands together in prayer and misquotes a few words from the Gospel according to St James: ‘If any of us here need wisdom, let us open our hearts to Almighty God, and He will provide it.’
Following the Amens, Nicholas hears a muttered, ‘I hope this won’t take long. There’s a lovely fire a-roarin’ at the Griffon.’
Willders invites Nicholas to read out his report of what he saw at Solomon Mandel’s house. He describes briefly how he was able to follow the trail of blood; how he found the door unlatched, and the devastation beyond. Then he recounts the manner in which the Jew died: strapped to a bed, naked, a wound below the left knee – the blood from which accounted for the marks on the Jackdaw’s wall and the subsequent trail – and signs on the victim’s breast of considerable avulsion.
‘Avulsion, Dr Shelby? Can you explain what you mean?’ asks one of the jurors, a chandler from Winchester dock by the name of Frontwell. ‘We are not medical men, here.’
‘Forgive me, Master Frontwell. I didn’t mean to be obscure. Strips of flesh were cut from his chest. “Sliced” would be a better word, or “carved”. Several of them.’
‘You mean he was flayed?’ askes another juror, his face suddenly taking on an even colder hue than that of the others around this already-chilly table.
‘If you prefer it that way, yes. Over an area about the size of my hand.’
‘Flayed like the martyred St Bartholomew,’ enquires another juror. ‘Whilst alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘That is monstrous,’ whispers Frontwell, looking around the ceiling vault as though he hopes to find a morsel of God’s mercy hidden somewhere amongst the cracks.
‘It is my judgement that Mandel died either by the torment of it or from the blood thereby spilt,’ Nicholas says. ‘Probably the former. Solomon Mandel was not a young man, remember.’
‘But who would do such a thing to him?’ Frontwell asks. ‘And to what end?’
‘I heard that young Moor from the Jackdaw has gone missing,’ says a juror whom Nicholas does not recognize. ‘An innocent fellow has no cause to flee, does he?’
Nicholas immediately launches a stout defence of Farzad. He tells of the two fragments of parchment suggesting that Christian zealots might have been responsible for Mandel’s death, under the banner of a red cross. But he is only partially successful. While the jury stops short of accusing Farzad of the crime, it instructs the clerk to refer the matter to a justice of the queen’s peace, so that a proper search can be made and Farzad invited to explain his sudden disappearance – under hard questioning, if necessary. Nicholas alone votes against it.
But doing so does not mean that he thinks Solomon Mandel’s murder and Farzad’s disappearance are unconnected. Far from it. His greatest fear – one that he does not share with the rest of the jury – is that they are inextricably linked. And that somewhere, perhaps not so very far away, a young Persian lad is waiting in terror for the first cut of the same blade that flayed Solomon Mandel.
Waiting beneath a red cross.
On the walk back to his lodgings, Nicholas stops at St Saviour’s church. It is empty, except for an elderly churchwarden in pursuit of a pigeon that has flown in and is now busy shitting on the pews. The man mirrors the bird’s agitated flapping as he chases it around the nave. It is a Catholic pigeon, Nicholas decides on a whimsy, sent by the King of Spain to foul a Protestant church. What else can account for the crimson-faced warden’s distinctly unchristian curses?
‘I’d like to see the subsidy rolls, please – if that’s not too much trouble,’ Nicholas calls out, giving voice to an idea that has come to him during the inquest. ‘You do keep the parish records here?’
The churchwarden breaks off his exertions and comes over. ‘God give you good morrow, Dr Shelby.’
‘And to you, Warden Dymock. The subsidy rolls—’
Warden Dymock frowns, turning his head towards the fluttering shadow high up in the vault, as though he fears a sudden counter-attack. ‘I’m not sure that is possible, without the say-so of an alderman.’
‘I’m asking in an official capacity, on behalf of the Queen’s Coroner,’ Nicholas says, not entirely truthfully.
A smile of understanding from Dymock reveals three missing lower teeth and a little pointed tongue that oozes through the gap, like a snail emerging from its shell. ‘Oh, of course – the inquest. I heard about it from Constable Willders. A dreadful business. Quite dreadful.’
‘There is something I need to check – for the record, that’s all.’
‘Well, in that case…’
The churchwarden leads him into the vestry and takes a key from a collection on his belt. He unlocks a sturdy wooden chest and lifts the lid. Inside, Nicholas can see piles of wide leather-bound books and stacks of vellum rolls, neatly tied with ribbon. They have the dry smell of old ink: the musty accumulation of a century or more of parish diligence. Given Southwark’s general contempt for officialdom, they appear to Nicholas to be surprisingly well maintained.
‘Please put them back in the order you find them, Dr Shelby, otherwise I shall never hear the last of it from the aldermen,’ Dymock says, turning back towards the nave and his battle with the sacrilegious pigeon. ‘Call for me when you’ve done.’
It takes Nicholas only a few moments to locate the latest subsidy roll, drawn up by the petty collectors to calculate how much tax Bankside might contribute to the Exchequer, should the queen demand a fresh imprest in the war with Spain. He has chosen it because it specifically lists foreigners dwelling in the ward. He runs his finger down the column of residents. Listed against each name is the value of their moveable goods, rents or holdings. Skipping rapidly over the English names, he notes a French grocer named Baudry; a Dutch wax-chandler called Hugelyn; and another refugee from the Low Countries, a joiner who goes by the imposing appellation of Johan Hieronymous van Vestergarten.
And then he sees it. The entry he’s been hoping for:
Solomon Mandel, Hebrew; worth assessed at 100 crowns…
So Mandel was comfortably off, despite his humble appearance. Did his killers torture him to find out where his coin was hidden? Nicholas wonders. If they did, they were not local men. Bankside is nothing if not a family, however lawless some of its tribe. The perpetrators of such a brutal crime, committed upon one of its own, could not keep their secret long.
But it is the addendum to the entry, written on the right-hand margin in the petty collector’s precise hand, that brings Nicholas up short. After Solomon Mandel’s occupation – spice merchant – he has added: The Turk’s man.
8
‘The Turk’s man,’ says Bianca with a frown. ‘Solomon Mandel never struck me as anyone’s servant. Least of all, that of a Turk.’
It is a bright spring morning, and she and Nicholas are making another footsore trawl through Bankside for a sighting of Farzad. Yesterday was prisons day: first the Marshalsea, then the Compter, followed by the Clink and finally the White Lion. After peering into more stinking cells than is good for the health, they came to conclusion that if Farzad is incarcerated anywhere, it is not by order of the parish authorities.
Today it’s the lanes around Bermondsey Street. As always, they choose wisely who to question: day-labourers, travelling tinsmiths, ribbon-sellers, the sort of people who spend their time on the move in search of custom. They even stop known coney-catchers and purse-divers, who with less trade to prey upon, now that the contagion has put an end to public gatherings, seem pleased to pass a few moments in conversation. They’ve even visited the Flower de Luce, because the landlord there has twice tried to lu
re Farzad away from the Jackdaw with the promise of an extra thruppence a week on his wages.
‘Turk, Moor, Saracen… whoever Mandel’s master was, we can assume he’s a Mohammedan who’s converted to Christianity. He wouldn’t be living here otherwise.’
‘The queen has a few Blackamoor and Ethiopian servants in her household. I’ve seen them in processions. Perhaps royal servants have servants.’
‘Who are free to eat kubaneh bread in a Bankside tavern every morning?’ Nicholas says. His face darkens. ‘Or were.’
‘When was the subsidy roll drawn up?’
‘It’s dated January 1590.’
‘A year after the envoy of the Moroccan sultan arrived in the city.’
‘You think Farzad was a servant to someone in the entourage?’
‘Well, he turned up on Bankside around about that time.’
‘Then why did he not return with his master to Barbary?’
Bianca rolls her eyes and says crossly, ‘I don’t know. Stop trying to catch me out. You’re not a lawyer, and I’m not on trial.’
They walk on in silence for a while, following the riverbank. The tide is out, the air heavy with the stink of rotting waterweed.
At the mouth of Battle Creek, they stop to watch a brace of boys in threadbare hose grubbing through the shingle like sanderlings hunting for worms. The place holds an uncomfortable place in Nicholas’s memory. This is where – almost three years ago now – the third victim of the Bankside butcher was found, a discovery that allowed Nicholas his first insight into the mind of the killer. He closes his eyes. In his thoughts he sees the body rolling over the side of the little skiff into the dark water. He hears the splash, but when he opens his eyes again he sees only the two urchins, competing to see how far they can hurl flotsam into the current.
‘Perhaps I’ve got it wrong,’ he says. ‘Perhaps I’m seeking a connection where there is none.’
‘You mean between Solomon Mandel’s death and Farzad’s disappearance?’
‘Perhaps he just sickened for his home.’
‘Farzad doesn’t have a home, Nicholas – other than the Jackdaw. Besides, he’d need more than a second shirt and a knife for a journey to Persia. And he wouldn’t have left without speaking to me first.’
‘Then maybe he’s taken himself off in a fit of jealousy – over Rose marrying Ned. A heart of that age can be a fragile thing.’
‘Are you speaking from experience?’
He squirms at her directness. ‘It’s a passionate age, especially if the passion is unrequited.’
‘I’ll accept he adores Rose. We all do – when she’s not being Mistress Moonbeam with a head full of air. But I never once saw Farzad making mooncalf eyes at her.’
Nicholas senses a deep coldness flowing up through his veins. He wonders if it’s this place and the memories it holds. Or perhaps it’s just a sudden chill in the air, heralding a shower.
‘Who else knows that you let Farzad practise the orisons of his faith,’ he asks, ‘apart from me, Ned, Rose and Timothy?’
‘No one. I’m not a clod-pate, Nicholas. I do know how to keep a secret, if that’s what you’re suggesting. I’ve been doing so since the day I landed here.’
‘Perhaps Danby was right, and this is about religion. If someone discovered Solomon Mandel’s conversion was a deceit – that he was secretly practising his old faith – then maybe that same person found out that you were allowing Farzad to do the same.’
‘Then where is his body?’ Bianca says, more hotly than she’d intended.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, giving a shrug of defeat. ‘It is a long walk back. We’d best be on our way. It looks as though it’s coming on to rain.’
Mistress Muzzle gives a crabby little toss of her head as Nicholas pauses at the door to his consulting chamber. ‘You’re wet, Dr Shelby.’
‘We got caught in a shower.’
From crabbiness to joy in a heartbeat. ‘You and Mistress Merton – you’ve been walking together. Alone.’
‘The Puritans don’t have the city, Mistress Muzzle. Not yet.’
‘Have they found the lad who murdered the Jew – that young Moor who cooks at the Jackdaw?’
‘What have you heard?’
‘Jenny Solver told me he had committed a foul murder, out of his pagan spite. Jenny Solver says that, in God’s eyes, the Moors and the Jews are worse even than the papists. We shouldn’t tolerate them in our realm.’
‘And when did Mistress Solver tell you this?’
‘Yesterday, at church. We were attending Evensong.’
‘Then Mistress Solver is speaking through her arse. And you may take that as a physician’s professional opinion.’ He gives her a cold smile. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t charge her for it.’
Nicholas resists the desire to slam the door behind him. He only partially succeeds. Leaning against the wall, he throws his dripping hat on the floor and begins to unlace his boots. He thinks he might rest his feet awhile and then stop by the Jackdaw for some coney pie.
‘And by the way, Dr Shelby, a letter arrived for you,’ he hears Mistress Muzzle say from the hallway. ‘I’ve put it on your table.’
Mumbling his thanks, his eyes fall to the folded and sealed square of paper lying beside his potion box.
His heart sinks. A seal that large can only mean the letter is official: another complaint from the College of Physicians about his errant behaviour, or Robert Cecil announcing that his stipend is cancelled because he’s refused to go to Marrakech. And indeed, on inspection, he sees the wax is impressed with the Cecil device. Snapping it open, he curses the Cecils and all their works, in a mumbled stream of invective. Shards of wax scatter across the desk.
To my right worthy and trusted friend, Nicholas Shelby, greetings…
It seems an oddly amiable way, he thinks as he reads, to begin a letter of dismissal. And then his eyes widen in surprise, even as a raindrop rolls down his temple and across the bridge of his nose.
‘You’re not actually going to attend, are you?’ Bianca asks half an hour later as Nicholas sits before a trencher of coney pie in the Jackdaw. ‘He’s not summoning you out of friendship. There’s bound to be another motive.’
‘He’s not summoning me. He’s inviting me. No one turns down an invitation to dine with Robert Cecil. I’m not going to insult one of the most powerful men in the realm, especially as he pays me a stipend to attend his son.’
‘What’s the point? I don’t wish to be rude, but you’ll probably be sitting at the very end of the longest table in London. He won’t even glance in your direction.’
‘Thank you for reminding me of my place.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘There are members of the College of Physicians who would consider poisoning their own mothers for an invitation to Robert Cecil’s table. Besides, the queen’s physician, Dr Lopez, will be there. It’s the perfect opportunity to ask him about Solomon Mandel.’
‘Nicholas, you’re not the sort to find good fellowship in such company.’
‘Jealous?’ he asks with a lift of one eyebrow.
Bianca’s smile is laced with scorn. ‘Of dining with a serpent? Never.’ She pats him on the wrist. ‘But I hope you know where to find a reliable food-taster at short notice.’
It is the Monktons’ first spat as man and wife. Not really a spat at all, more an outbreak of tetchiness at the end of a long day at the Jackdaw. And it is over almost before it begins.
Nicholas and Bianca have departed – each to their own self-inflicted solitude – and Rose has just finished inspecting the day’s reckoning of victuals sold: eleven coney pasties; seven plates of stockfish; two tubs of oysters; twelve helpings of sprats; and twenty bowls of pottage.
Twenty.
There should be four portions remaining. Rose knows this because she made the pottage herself, at dawn, and she knows through experience the pot contains twenty-four helpings. Not twenty.
The discrepancy is importan
t. With business slack, it is hard enough for the Jackdaw to turn a profit as it is, without giving away food. And Rose has promised Bianca she will be diligent in her stewardship.
Going in search of her husband, she finds Ned in the cellar. He’s standing beneath the open trapdoor in the far corner, taking sacks of hops from Timothy, who’s out in the yard above. His shirt is open and the auburn curls on his vast chest gleam like gold thread in the sunlight. She admires him at his labour for a while, before asking, ‘Have you been over-generous with those watermen friends of yours, Husband? There’s pottage missin’.’
Ned puts down the sack as though it were full of nothing but feathers, and wipes one ham-like forearm across his brow. ‘No, I ’ave not, Goodwife Monkton,’ he replies, savouring the delight in all the happy implications encompassed by the term goodwife. ‘I’d not treat Mistress Bianca’s gift to us in such a casual fashion. You know I would not.’
‘I must have tallied it up wrong then,’ Rose says with a diffidence that would astound Bianca, were she here to witness it. She tilts her head to look Ned in the eye – a manoeuvre that deliberately exposes her invitingly silky white neck and a dash of freckles. Coyly, and with a magnificently contrived fluttering of her eyelids, she announces, ‘In which case, Husband, I shall likely later have need of serious correction.’
Rose is not referring to any correction a magistrate might envision; at least not in his professional capacity.
If at this moment Ned Monkton could find space in his thoughts for anything but his new bride, it would probably be to offer a thousand hosannas to Bianca Merton and Nicholas Shelby for giving him a life beyond that of a mortuary porter at St Thomas’s hospital for the sick and destitute of Bankside. As for Rose, she’s too busy responding happily to her husband’s kisses to consider for a single instant that she might be right about the quantity of missing pottage.
9
Sheltering beneath the sailcloth awning of the tilt-boat, Nicholas watches the private water-stairs below Cecil House loom out of the rain. A Cecil barge blocks the nearest side of the jetty. It rocks gently on the swell, empty and unrigged, the raindrops glinting like jewels on the gilded bulwarks.