by S. W. Perry
After paying a Bankside ragamuffin thruppence to carry the message to Raymond Gault that his preventatives are ready, Bianca stops by the Jackdaw to help Ned and Rose deal with a delivery of imported malmsey from the Vintry across the river. She receives the news of Marlowe’s death with more than passing interest. It does not come as a surprise.
She remembers how – two years ago – he had turned up at the Jackdaw unannounced. The carpenters were in at the Rose theatre making repairs, and he needed somewhere to rehearse his play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus.
She smiles at the memory of how Marlowe’s arrival brought out the first real signs in Nicholas that he harboured feelings towards her that were more than just brotherly.
Marlowe had seemed such a larger-than-life character – an achievement in itself on Bankside, where edgy flamboyance is common currency. His presence had sent Nicholas almost mad with jealousy. But in the end, Nick – good, dependable, courageous Nick; Nick who could always save himself from perfection by a joke, or an act that had everyone wondering if perhaps there wasn’t a small whiff of sulphur lurking behind the solid yeoman’s decency – had been right: Kit Marlowe had brought in his wake nothing but tribulation for both of them. She wonders now how he would take the news.
She also wonders in a candid moment, as she helps Rose clear away the trenchers, if she might ever have lain with Kit, if he hadn’t been more interested in dice, boys and tobacco. Perhaps she might have. But it could never have been more than a brief taste of exotic but dangerous fruit. Nicholas would have won on every throw of the dice.
Thinking of Nicholas now, she imagines he would be astounded to know what she has discovered about Reynard Gault. She is intensely proud of herself for having identified him as the Rouge Croix Pursuivant. But she is still no closer to understanding why Gault lied to her about knowing Solomon Mandel.
In charitable moments, she thinks it’s because he and the Jew were partners in some conspiracy or other that led to Mandel’s murder – that he died trying to protect Gault’s identity. But when she’s in a more suspicious mood – which is becoming increasingly frequent – she wonders if it might be the other way round: that Gault was involved in the torture and murder of an innocent old man, and that those two scraps of paper might in fact be bloody fingers of accusation. Whatever the truth, she is sure now that Gault invited her to his house for a reason other than the protection of his investments.
Her musings are interrupted as Parson Moody walks in from the dusk, his face troubled. Surely he hasn’t come to hear the gossip about Kit Marlowe, unless it’s to gloat about the inevitable downfall of sinners.
‘Mistress Merton,’ he says, like a man bringing news of a massacre. ‘It’s on the march again. There’s been a house closed up on Tar Ally. The parish has put wardens on either end. I am in need of a jug of knock-down before I administer another funeral. I truly think God is testing my resolve.’
Tar Alley. Bianca knows it well – a narrow cut running south from the riverbank where the horses delivering to the grain mills in Bermondsey get led to water. No more than half a dozen tenements, mostly the homes of Dutch refugees from the wars in the Low Countries.
And just two streets away from her shop on Dice Lane.
34
Nicholas opens the shutters and looks out at the full moon rising above the distant Atlas Mountains, their peaks frosted with a ghostly rime and crowned with a mantle of stars. He wonders if this is the picture Adolfo Sykes saw on the last night of his life. He thinks he might go up onto the roof terrace and spend an hour watching the city settle itself for sleep – if he didn’t have a more pressing action to perform.
‘Careful, Sayidi,’ Hadir says as Nicholas leans out over the window ledge. ‘The Bimaristan will be of no use if you fall from such a height and break your head.’
It takes only a few moments for Nicholas to find the join in the wooden frieze. By touch alone, he slips his hand into the gap from which he’d seen the swift emerge only minutes before.
The space behind is larger than the opening, a cavity where the old masonry has crumbled away with the passing years. Almost immediately he feels something man-made and cylindrical amidst the dried leaves, dirt and bird mess. His instinct is to snatch it out for the hard-won prize he knows it to be. But out of deference to the memory of Adolfo Sykes, he takes his time, treating it more like a holy relic.
By the light of grandmother Tiziri’s oil lamp, he lays the object on the plain wooden table to the left of the window. It is a narrow parcel wrapped in what he presumes was once fine English wool, before it was secreted away in a swift’s nest. It is tied with spun yarn. Nicholas picks at the knot until it loosens. Then he unrolls the cloth to unmask the contents. He takes his time, because when one man dies to protect a secret it is unworthy of another to reveal it with the flourish of a cheap Bankside street-trick.
Lying on the table in a splash of moonlight is a roll of parchment, three or four sheets thick. The pages curl defensively inwards at the edges, as if protecting to the last what is written on them. For a moment Nicholas is afraid to touch them.
Drawing breath, he tentatively spreads the sheets out on the table, nodding to Hadir to bring the lamp even closer.
The first thing Nicholas notices is that one sheet is different from the others. It is covered in hand-drawn characters set inside boxes, each one linked by a vertical or horizontal line. It is similar to the family lineage he’d seen laid out on the document he’d taken from apprentice Hortop’s gabardine coat aboard the Righteous.
Peering closer, he sees that’s exactly what it is – a family tree.
Studying the document, Nicholas becomes acquainted with Sir Walter Vachel, born in the Year of Our Redeemer 1576, lord of the manor of Melton in Suffolk. It is a simple task for him then to trace Sir Walter’s lineage back several generations, following the lines and boxes from the bottom of the page to the top, until he meets one Guillaume de Vachel, Earl of Barentin in Normandy. On the way, he discovers that Sir Walter’s ancestors share one outstanding attribute: they have all fought – indeed, frequently died – in every historical battle of renown from the Holy Land to the Low Countries.
A Thomas Vachel was knighted in the field at Agincourt by the fifth Henry. Sir Norris Vachel expired in glory at Falkirk, battling the Scots alongside the first Edward. Yet another Vachel fought with Lord Stanley’s men at Bosworth Field and gained himself an estate valued at six hundred pounds from Henry Tudor.
And at the foot of the page, next to the box containing the scion of this redoubtable lineage, Sir Walter himself, is a line identical to the one Nicholas had seen written on Hortop’s document:
PROVEN BY DUE AUTHORITY OF THE ROUGE CROIX PURSUIVANT, COLLEGE OF HERALDS
All in all, it is a pedigree of which any Englishman could be rightly proud, thinks Nicholas, were it not for the fact that it is very likely a complete fabrication.
Nicholas knows this because the manor of Melton, of which the young Sir Walter is apparently lord, is barely an hour’s walk from his own home, his father’s farm at Barnthorpe. And Yeoman Shelby, being a mildly prosperous farmer, is on nodding terms with all the local nobility. Their family names, from the Howards down, can be seen on effigies and tombs in churches for miles around. Nicholas has grown up with them, heard those names invoked in all manner of situations, good and bad, for as long as he can remember. But never in his life has he heard of a Sir Walter Vachel, or any of his supposedly distinguished ancestors.
The other three sheets are enciphered, a meaningless procession of five-letter groups.
‘What does my friend say, Sayidi?’ Hadir asks.
‘I don’t know – yet. First I must decipher what he has written.’
Hadir looks at him, uncomprehending.
‘The words have been changed to make them unreadable,’ Nicholas explains. ‘I have to change them back again.’
‘This is infidel magic,’ breathes Hadir, an expression of f
earful astonishment on his face.
Nicholas tries not to laugh. He reminds himself that not everyone is acquainted with the artful contrivances of a Cecil. ‘No, it’s not magic,’ he says. ‘It is just a clever trick to hide what you write, so that your enemies cannot read it. I’d show you how, if the matter wasn’t so pressing.’
In the centre of the table is a wooden writing box inlaid with a sinuous mother-of-pearl arabesque that gleams in the lamplight. Nicholas is almost reluctant to touch it, knowing that it once belonged to Adolfo Sykes.
Lifting the lid, he sees a collection of quills, a nib-knife, an inkwell and a pounce-powder pot. As he lifts them out, he cannot help but wonder if the last time they were used was to write these very pages.
‘I will need paper, Hadir.’
‘I know Sayidi Sy-kess keep parchment with his tally books. I fetch.’
While Nicholas waits for Hadir to return, he gathers the pages to him and tries to recall Sykes’s transposition code, the one that Robert Cecil had made him commit to memory before he left.
When Hadir brings the paper, Nicholas takes it from him, ordering him to set down the lamp by the writing box to augment the wash of moonlight. He writes the alphabet in a column on the first blank sheet. Using each letter as a peg, he begins to hang the cipher alongside. To his relief, he soon has all but a handful of matching letters, certainly enough to begin deciphering with confidence. All the while, Hadir watches him in silent bewilderment.
Writing down the first group of letters and their transposed equivalents, Nicholas begins to frown. ‘Something’s wrong,’ he mutters.
The letters spell out nothing but gibberish. He tries again, thinking he’s made a mistake. He gets the same infuriating result. The code remains impenetrable. The leaden weight of defeat makes Nicholas slump forward over the table.
‘What is the matter, Sayidi?’ Hadir asks. ‘Does the magic fail?’
‘Yes, it fails, Hadir. The key I was given by Robert Cecil does not unlock the words written by Master Sykes. And I cannot understand why.’
But Hadir can offer him no comfort, other than a sad expression that’s half-pity and half-mystification.
The word in Bianca Merton’s imagination needs no deciphering. It is as clear as day, written in letters a yard high: Coward.
No matter how rational the course of action she has decided upon, she cannot rid herself of a sense of shame. No one but a coward would flee because the pestilence has arrived just two lanes distant. But remembering the close shave that followed her visit to Constable Willders’s house, she thinks that only a fool would stay.
As she makes her way back to her shop on Dice Lane, Ned Monkton walking protectively at her side in the moonlight, Bianca unburdens herself. It feels strange, she thinks. It should be Nicholas in whom she’s confiding.
‘What will my customers think of me, Ned? Will they lose heart? Will they say I’ve abandoned them?’
‘There’s none would think it, Mistress,’ Ned says, in a tender voice that ill-befits his intimidating size. ‘All they have to do is walk a little further; the Jackdaw’s not ten minutes from Dice Lane.’ He smiles. ‘Besides, Rose and I would be glad to have you home.’
She places one hand against his arm in gratitude.
In silence they pass Solomon Mandel’s old house. Someone else is living there now. On Bankside, a murder is little cause to pass over any half-decent place to lay your head. The landlord moved in a family of French Huguenots the moment the last bloodstains had been scrubbed away.
‘I still see him, Ned,’ Bianca says, ‘telling poor Farzad he hasn’t put enough black cumin in that kubaneh bread he likes.’ It’s an image she prefers to the one she’d encountered when she and Nicholas inspected the ruin of Mandel’s chamber.
‘Hanging’s too good for the rogues who did that,’ Ned growls as they leave the little house to the shadows. ‘Or for those who said he deserved it, because he wasn’t a true Christian.’
‘Some people have a tendency to dip their tongues in a pot of foolishness before they speak, Ned. Most don’t mean it.’
‘Aye, Mistress. But that’s no excuse for talking ill of a goodly old man.’
When Ned has delivered her safely to the door of her shop she leans up to kiss the wild auburn bank of his bearded cheek, bids him farewell and goes inside. Alone, and in the semidarkness, she makes a slow lap of the interior, deep in thought. She rubs her fingertips on the sprigs of herbs and bunches of dried leaves, inhales the competing scents of sweet briar, quince and rosemary. She walks amongst the clusters of wound-wort and lovage that hang from the ceiling, as though she is taking a contemplative stroll through a moonlit arbour.
And after a while she comes to a conclusion. Tomorrow she will pack all this away and take it back to the relative safety of the Jackdaw. If she stays here and the plague overtakes her, she reasons, she won’t be able to help anyone. Standing in the path of a huge, merciless wild beast that has tasted blood and craves more is not courage. It is blind stupidity.
There is a measure of desperation in the way Nicholas handles the documents Adolfo Sykes has tried so hard to keep hidden. The paper magnifies the trembling of his fingertips, as though a playful breeze is blowing through the open window. The groups of letters blur tantalizingly in the lamplight.
‘I can’t read them,’ he mutters to himself. ‘I can’t.’
His only hope is that one of Robert Cecil’s clever secretaries, skilled in the arts of the cipher, will be able to do so. But that will have to wait until he brings these impenetrable pages back to England.
He is about to return the sheets to their woollen wrapping when he notices something he hasn’t seen before. On one of them, written so faintly in the bottom left-hand corner that it is all but invisible in the meagre light, is a single word in clear English.
Matthew.
Nicholas stares at it, willing some meaning into the name. He finds none.
‘Is there an English merchant here in Marrakech who goes by the name of Matthew?’ he asks Hadir.
If there is, Hadir does not know of him. And Hadir knows every merchant in the city.
Searching for the tiniest glimmer of light escaping the otherwise impervious curtain of Adolfo Sykes’s secrecy, Nicholas returns to the window. He stares down into the courtyard. Inevitably his eyes alight on the tiny grey smudge of the stone talisman on the far wall, and the downward-pointing finger that had brought him so tantalizingly close to the agent’s last written words. If it’s guided me this far, he thinks, can it not guide me all the way?
A talisman on a garden wall in Marrakech. Another one beside a door in Southwark. Two hands, somehow entwined.
And then it hits him: Adolfo Sykes wasn’t writing to Robert Cecil. And he wasn’t using Cecil’s code. He was writing to someone else, because he feared that his dispatches to Lord Burghley’s son could be intercepted. He was writing to a friend who shared his faith in the power of a talisman that had ultimately failed them both. He was writing to Solomon Mandel.
From there it is but a small jump in his imagination to Mandel’s ruined chamber. He sees himself retracing his steps around the murder bed while Bianca looks on in moist-eyed horror at the devastation. And he sees the one item in that room that has been left untouched: a Bible, open at a page from the Book of Matthew, the parable of Jesus feeding the multitude with just five loaves and two fishes.
Farzad, bring me some more of your fine kubaneh bread, he can hear Mandel saying as he sits taking his solitary breakfast in the Jackdaw.
Five loaves. And two fishes.
The revelation strikes home with the force of one of Ned Monkton’s playful punches. Turning away from the window, Nicholas hurls himself back into the chair, leaving Hadir to stare at him as though he fears his master has just been possessed by a particularly energetic demon.
‘Matthew,’ he announces, holding up the sheet of paper for Hadir to see where Sykes, with the lightest of hands, has written the name. ‘It’s
to tell Master Sykes’s friend in London which code he’s using. And the key to that code comprises the numbers five and two.’
Nicholas begins to write. Counting five letters into the word kubaneh, he sees the next character is an e – also the fifth letter of the alphabet. It is all the proof he needs to know he’s on the right path. He rings the same letter on the alphabetical column he wrote earlier, when he’d been trying to remember the cipher that Robert Cecil’s agent had employed in his dispatches.
Now he faces a choice: two fishes. Two up or two down? He picks the latter. He counts two and then rings the next in the sequence, h. Using that as an anchor point, he begins to write a second alphabet in the empty space to the left of the first, a against h, and so on down the column. Long before he’s finished he knows the curtain has been drawn aside, simply by glancing every now and then from the new column to the first encoded page.
Should I make Hadir complicit in this? Nicholas wonders. What else am I to do? He already knows more than is safe for him. Without his help, God alone knows what dangers I’m likely to blunder into in this alien city. And so he lets Hadir watch while he recovers the last written words of Adolfo Sykes. By the time he has completed his task, there is nothing but darkness beyond the open window.
To my dear and trusty friend, Solomon Mandel, I send you a gentile’s greetings, you old rogue. How is it on Bankside? Raining, I don’t doubt. Are you still acquainted with the Moor lad, the one who makes kubaneh for your breakfast?
I have contrived another sight of the false pedigree, and can reassure you that the copy I sent you in my last dispatch is accurate in all important respects. I still do not know why these fellows have them, but perhaps the Falconer requires his hawks to be well bred. All I know is that Connell is most certainly the traitor I suspected him to be. He is a devil, stripped by Lucifer of all that was good in him – and I doubt even that was very much.
Connell is paid for his treachery in gold and slaves. He gets first choice in the market. God help the poor souls who become his property. Yesterday I witnessed him houghing a poor fellow who had attempted to escape: two quick slices of his knife and the desperate man was hamstrung. Connell spat upon him, called him dog and sent him crawling away to find his forage as best he might, or starve. What use will he be to anyone, this slave who cannot stand?