The Saracen's Mark

by S. W. Perry

  He hugs her to his breast.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ he whispers into her ear. ‘But this, my love, is Bankside. If you can’t gull the Devil here, where can you gull him?’

  He calls to Rose and Ned to take his place. Gently prizing Bianca’s fingers from his wrist, he stands up and looks back at the passage leading to the parlour. The far end, by the cellar door, is a wall of roaring fire, smoke rolling along the ceiling of the passage and spilling out into the taproom. He judges that even if he can get into the parlour, he’ll have only moments before the fire cuts off his escape. But there is no other way. The choice Gault has given him is stark: die by the sword, or burn like a heretic.

  Unless…

  The heat almost stops him before he reaches the parlour door. He feels as though he’s pushing into the teeth of a gale greater than anything he’s experienced aboard the Righteous or the Marion. Every step he takes is a trial of strength against its scorching breath. But at last he makes it, finding a measure of relief as he slips into the chamber.

  The wheel-lock pistol Yaxley gave him as a means of escape from Cathal Connell’s vengeance is lying with the dusty-blue djellaba, where he’d discarded them before bathing away the aches and dirt of the ride from Dover. Its powder horn lies nearby, beside the pouch al-Annuri had given him at Safi. Nicholas scoops them up and fights his way back through the furnace of the passageway.

  In the taproom the air is close to unbreathable. Ned is all for making a charge against the figures waiting in the lane, though he has nothing to set against steel but his bare fists and a courage the equal of his size.

  ‘I’ll not make Rose a widow,’ Nicholas tells him brusquely. ‘It’s me they want. And it’s me who has to bring an end to all this.’

  The wheel-lock is already loaded with powder and ball; he made sure of that before leaving Dover Castle, lest he encountered cut-purses on the road. Thankful now for the skills he learned in the Low Countries, it takes him no more than a moment to make a half-turn on the pistol’s wheel with the little iron winding tool, engaging the spring. He checks that the wedge of pyrite is firmly clamped in the dog-head, slides back the priming pan cover and pours in a measure of black powder. He closes the pan lid and swings the dog-mechanism down onto the wheel, praying to God that Yaxley kept the weapon clean of dirt and sea-salt. A misfire now will leave him standing impotently before Gault like the greatest fool on earth.

  ‘Open the door, Timothy,’ he commands. ‘Ned, stand behind me. Timothy, Farzad – the moment I give the word, help Rose carry Mistress Bianca outside.’

  Nicholas knows the night air will rush in and fan the flames. But there is no alternative. Death is waiting – inside or out.

  ‘Now!’ he cries.

  As Timothy swings open the door, Nicholas steps out into the alley. He raises his arm like a man denouncing a traitor, aiming the pistol at Gault’s chest. One squeeze on the trigger and the wheel will spin against the pyrite in the dog-head, igniting the powder in the priming pan. At this range he cannot miss.

  ‘Throw aside the swords! Throw them, or I swear by Jesu I will shoot you for the deceiver you are.’

  Lit by the flames inside the Jackdaw, Gault’s striking face has turned into that of a gargoyle, his eyes fixed on the unerring muzzle of the wheel-lock barely four yards from his breast.

  ‘You won’t give fire, Shelby,’ he says smoothly. ‘You’re a physician, not a killer. You haven’t got the courage.’

  ‘That’s probably what Cathal Connell thought. But a charge of hail-shot disabused him of that notion. I fired it myself. There was nothing left of him afterwards – nothing the fishes couldn’t swallow whole.’

  Gault’s eyes snap from the pistol to Nicholas’s face. ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Ask Yaxley of the Marion. He can’t be more than a day or so away. It was his rabinet I fired.’

  Still Gault hesitates. ‘I’ll let the others live. You have my word upon it.’

  ‘A blood-tax? Is that what you want? Well, Gault, I’m sorry to disappoint, but I don’t feel like paying it.’

  Nicholas raises the pistol a little, aiming at Gault’s face.

  ‘I’ve forgotten how many wounds made by a pistol ball I treated in the Low Countries,’ he says. ‘I’m a good surgeon, but not one in ten lived. It’s a vile way to die. You’d best hope it’s a clean shot through the heart. Oh, and you’re going to have to do without the Viaticum, which for a man of your faith is an even crueller injury, and a lot longer in the healing. But that’s no concern to me, of course. We heretics don’t believe in Purgatory.’

  A glance to either side at his apprentices and Gault capitulates.

  ‘Lay down your blades,’ he orders.

  Needing no prompting, Ned moves forward and picks up the weapons.

  ‘Get everyone out of the Jackdaw, Timothy!’ Nicholas shouts, without taking his eyes off Gault. He can hear windows opening, voices calling out from the other buildings in the lane. Someone is yelling for the watch, another calling out for water to be fetched from the river.

  ‘You won’t dare shoot me now, Shelby,’ Gault says, with an easy smile on his face. ‘Witnesses. You’ll hang.’

  ‘You don’t know Banksiders that well, do you? They suffer terribly from poor eyes. It’s a well-known condition. I’m forever prescribing balms.’

  The edges of Gault’s mouth lift in a cold smile. ‘It’s a temporary reprieve, Shelby. Face it – the road to Windsor can be a dangerous one: cut-purses… accidents… You’ll never reach Robert Cecil. I’ll make sure of that.’

  Nicholas glances at the apprentices. ‘What has your master promised you: that you’ll be princes when you get to the Barbary shore? That you’ll have your own slaves, gold and jewels? That all you have to do is lie about who your parents were, pretend to be noble gentlemen? Well, it’s a fraud. I’ve seen what happens. They sell you into a slavery you can’t begin to imagine. It’s called the blood-tax. And Gault and Connell took a very profitable cut of it. But it’s over. There’s nothing there for you now but death.’

  The boy Owen turns his face towards Gault. ‘Does he speak true, Master?’

  ‘Of course not,’ snaps Gault.

  Nicholas moves the barrel of the wheel-lock in a small circle, as though marking out the size of the hole he intends to blast in Gault’s face. To Owen, he says, ‘Has he handed you all a nice, smart family lineage yet – proved by the Rouge Croix Pursuivant?’ Then, to Gault, ‘How much did Sumayl al-Seddik pay you for each of your boys? How much gold? How many slaves? What price can you get on the Exchange these days for a human life, Master Grocer?’

  The heat is now almost unbearable. Nicholas feels as though his back is on fire. Clouds of sparks drift in the darkness like fireflies. The apprentices exchange glances. A change has come over them, dispelling their earlier bravado, fatally damaging their trust in Gault.

  ‘The watch… the watch is here…’

  The voice is harsh – a woman’s voice calling from nearby.

  And then one of the Jackdaw’s windows explodes, showering glass and lead-beading out into the lane. As Nicholas turns his head, distracted, Gault bolts. He flees down the alley in the direction of the Mutton Lane stairs.

  Deprived of his authority, his apprentices seem unable to act. They stand there like sheep without a drover, four young men robbed of a future they now realize was nothing but a fantasy.

  Nicholas swings the pistol, sighting down the barrel in the direction of Gault’s fleeing back. His finger tightens on the trigger. Gault is still easily within range. One more squeeze and his bargain with al-Annuri is done. You will bring pestilence and death upon them, even unto the seventh generation. You will erase their names so that Allāh will forget he ever made them…

  For a while he just stands there, breathing in the night air, air that is hotter now than any night in Marrakech, though it has no right to be – given that the moon is yellowed not by a desert mist, but by the drifting smoke from the death of the Jackdaw
. He remembers how Eleanor made gentle jokes about his determination to heal, how she’d been horrified when he told her he was going to the Low Countries to treat those who’d been hurt in the fight against the forces of Catholic Spain. And he remembers what Bianca said to him in her physic garden, before he left for the Barbary shore: let us face the truth… we are both murderers now.

  What am I, he asks himself silently: the physician… or the disease?

  And very slowly – though whether in victory or defeat, he does not yet know – Nicholas lowers the pistol.

  It takes some time for Ned’s voice to penetrate. At first the words are not words at all, merely noises. They are indecipherable, like Adolfo Sykes’s last dispatch, waiting for the moment the magic makes them whole again.

  Bianca…

  The fire…

  Hurry…

  Dying.

  Ned and Rose have laid her down at a safe distance from the funeral pyre of all her hopes and aspirations, as much to shield her eyes from the Jackdaw’s destruction as her body from the flames. Timothy and Farzad stand a little aside. Both are weeping, Farzad’s tears dampening the top of Buffle’s head as he clutches the dog protectively to his breast.

  Their mistress’s amber eyes have closed. Her chest heaves in desperate spasms as she fights for breath.

  Kneeling beside her, Nicholas sees in the light from the fire the black soot around her nostrils and her lips. He gently inserts a finger between her lips and slides it around her mouth. When he withdraws it, the wetness on his skin is slicked with more soot.

  He’s seen the phenomenon before, in Holland: men who had escaped a burning town, apparently unharmed, dying a short time later as the damage caused by inhaling the fire’s breath spread, constricting the windpipe. He knows that if he doesn’t act immediately, it will be too late to save her.

  And then, from the darker parts of his memory, the old fear comes back to haunt him. His physic had failed to save Eleanor and the child she was carrying. His inability to protect them had been the priming powder that set off the detonation that almost destroyed him. He knows he cannot go back there again – not just because of what it did to him, but because this time there will be no Bianca Merton to bring him back from the Purgatory he told Gault he doesn’t believe in, but which he’s tasted and knows to be only too real.

  He lays his fingers on Bianca’s throat. For an instant he thinks she has placed her own fingers upon his, because he senses another’s hand about his own. But her arms are lying motionless by her sides. He smiles as he recalls Surgeon Wadoud’s impassive brown eyes. You have the hands of a good man. And a good surgeon, too… tell them what you saw here in the Bimaristan al-Mansur. Tell them we are not all heathens…

  Nicholas searches for the pulse in Bianca’s neck.

  A risk of severing the carotid arteries, leading to death…

  When he feels the beat of her life against his fingertips, Nicholas’s fingers linger, fixing the line of the arteries in his mind.

  ‘Ned, I need a knife. A sharp one,’ he calls out.

  ‘One of them lads had a poniard as well as a sword,’ Ned replies. ‘Hang on while I fetch it.’

  There is also the danger that the wound becomes foul…

  Nicholas calls after him, ‘There’s a piece of window frame there – to your right – still burning. Put the tip of the poniard into the flames. Count to twenty, then bring it to me.’

  The trick is in keeping it clean…

  ‘Timothy, there’s good water in the well at the crossroads. Fetch me a little.’

  ‘Water’s no use now, Master Nick,’ Timothy protests, staring at the flames.

  ‘It’s not for the fire! Now, hurry!’

  As Timothy sprints towards the well, Nicholas takes Rose gently by the sleeve.

  ‘I want you to run to Mother Fissel at the chandler’s on Black Bull Alley. She keeps bees. Tell her we need honey. And clean linen. Tell her it’s for Mistress Bianca. If she plays her usual game, don’t quibble. I’ll pay whatever she demands.’

  Rose hurries away at a velocity unseen till now.

  ‘Farzad, give Buffle to Ned,’ Nicholas commands.

  For a moment he seems reluctant to obey.

  ‘It’s important, Farzad. Give Ned the bloody dog!’

  ‘I’m to look after the dog?’ queries Ned. ‘Is that the only task I’m to be trusted with?’

  ‘I want you to hold the dog tightly, Ned, because when I do what is required, your instinct will be to stop me. So I need you to have your hands full. I’ll be no use to her if you try to stop me.’

  He turns back to Farzad. ‘Go to the Pike Garden. Fetch me half a dozen of the strongest reeds, each about the length of a finger.’

  ‘Yes, Master Nicholas,’ says Farzad, grinning with the pleasure of responsibility.

  ‘And Farzad…’

  ‘Yes, Master?’

  ‘This time, don’t take it into your head to go missing.’

  47

  The ashlar walls of Nonsuch Palace gleam like bleached bone in the August sunshine. Built by the late King Henry for Jane Seymour, it has for many years been home to John and Elizabeth Lumley. Though Lord Lumley has returned it to the queen in lieu of his many debts to the Crown, Her Grace has granted him enduring tenancy until both he and his long-suffering wife have moved on to more heavenly accommodation.

  When not at Bianca’s bedside – an excusable intimacy, given that he is her physician – Nicholas is often to be found in Baron Lumley’s vast library: the equal, it is said, of those at Oxford or Cambridge. He has spent many hours there, battling the Latin translations of Avicenna and Albucasis, though in his mind they will now for ever be Ibn Sina and al-Zahrawi. He wonders if one day he might read the words of Surgeon Wadoud, though he hasn’t yet managed to construct a satisfactory Latinized version of her name. But he has sent a letter to her – via Captain Yaxley – thanking her for the gift she so unknowingly gave him.

  He has considered describing to the College of Physicians the procedure he employed to save Bianca Merton’s life, but has decided against it. They would most likely denounce him as a butcher.

  Thinking of that night – as he does often – he recalls the anguished faces of his friends as he placed the tip of the knife against Bianca’s arched throat. Yet not even Ned Monkton had sought to intervene, as he’d feared. They had trusted him to do the right thing. And in so doing, they had given him the strength to trust himself.

  Dawn had broken behind the smouldering ruin of the Jackdaw before he’d been even halfway sure that death had been – if not cheated – at least delayed. By then half of Bankside had gathered to gaze in wonder at the destruction, more than a few shedding tears for the Jackdaw and the remarkable woman who had owned it.

  Ned had carried her to the vicarage at St Saviour’s, where Parson Moody had made a bed available. And there Nicholas had stayed for two whole days, taking it upon himself to clean Bianca’s wound with water and honey as Surgeon Wadoud had instructed. To ease the pain of the burns to her throat, and to heal the damage the smoke had done, he’d made her take regular draughts of a distillation of marshmallow root, sage and cinnamon, prepared by an apothecary he trusted on Bucklersbury Lane near Cheapside. Robert Cecil, he’d decided, could wait a day or two. With Connell dead – Sumayl al-Seddik, too, for all he knew – and Gault exposed, the conspiracy was decapitated.

  Only when he was sure Bianca was out of immediate danger did Nicholas take a wherry to Cecil House. There he entrusted his dispatch to the same black-gowned secretary who had shown him to Robert Cecil’s study the night he’d been so rudely summoned from his bed at Mistress Muzzle’s lodgings.

  ‘If he has need to speak to me, you’ll find me at St Saviour’s,’ he’d said. ‘If he summons me to Windsor, I shall have need of an armed escort.’

  Returning to Bankside, he had spent the next six days at Bianca’s bedside. If Parson Moody ever thought his presence in her chamber exceeded his duties as her physician,
he never raised so much as an eyebrow in criticism, possibly because of his own propensity for visiting a certain house near the Falcon stairs.

  Ned, Rose, Timothy, Farzad – even Buffle – had been closeted with Mistress Muzzle, who, should she ever grow tired of simpering over Ned, could console herself with a goodly handful of Robert Cecil’s ducats.

  Nicholas had not returned to the Jackdaw until a week after the fire. What he beheld had broken his heart. A tavern that had stood for centuries was now nothing but a mound of blackened debris, bookended by the scorched remains of the gable-end walls. The buildings on either side had largely been spared, thanks to a human chain of Banksiders who had laboured for a whole day bringing water from the river.

  Nicholas had wondered what effect the sight would have upon Bianca’s recovery. Almost all that she owned – everything she had striven for since arriving from Padua – was gone. The only light in the darkness of her loss was the discovery of the travelling chest containing her father’s books and his Petrine cross, which she’d left in her shop on Dice Lane.

  But it was the pestilence that finally made him decide to leave London. Towards the end of July plague deaths were approaching a thousand a week. The queen had ordered her Privy Council to send a stiff note to the Lord Mayor, expressing her concern. Hearing of it from Parson Moody, who had himself heard it from an eminent Bankside alderman – though he was a little coy in saying precisely where – Nicholas had decided to take it as a sign that luck should only be pushed so far.

  And so he had hired horses for himself and Ned, and a cart for Bianca, Rose, Timothy and Farzad to ride in. The two lads had taken turns on the reins, while Buffle barked at every new and exciting sight and smell on the journey to Nonsuch.

  Three days after John Lumley took them in, Robert Cecil arrived.

  He did not come alone. With him were a score of gentlemen in gorgeous plumage – all of whom, Nicholas assumed, could authenticate their noble lineages without the least help from the Rouge Croix Pursuivant – and a woman of about sixty, whose high, cerise-white brow sat below a crown of tight ginger curls that, in Nicholas’s humble opinion, were probably not her own.