by S. W. Perry
‘Are you sure you are a physician, sirrah? You do not have an academic look to you.’
‘I studied at Cambridge, Highness, under Professor Lorkin,’ says Nicholas, rising from where he has knelt in the neatly cropped grass of Nonsuch’s fine Italian garden.
The knot of gentlemen surrounding the queen are regarding him with a mix of curiosity and whimsy. But they all share that head-back, looking-down-the-nose expression of superiority he can recall from his days as a pensionarius minor at Cambridge.
All, that is, except Robert Cecil.
‘Master Shelby has done the realm a goodly service, Your Grace,’ Lord Burghley’s son is saying. ‘He is newly returned from the Barbary shore, where he had an audience with His Majesty the King of the Moors.’
‘How interesting,’ Elizabeth observes with a slight twist of her narrow, determined jaw. ‘Tell me, Dr Shelby, was he very savage?’
‘Not in the slightest, Highness. I found him to be a very imposing gentleman. He desired me to assure you of the strength of the amity between our two realms.’
‘The lasting and secure amity,’ Cecil says, adding the part of the rehearsed reply that Nicholas has forgotten to include.
‘I shall send for you, sirrah, so that you may tell me more fully how the Moors practise their physic,’ the queen says, extending one gloved hand for him to kiss.
Nicholas puts his lips reverently to the pearl-encrusted doeskin, then steps aside as Elizabeth and her hive of gentlemen sweep majestically off between the topiary and the Roman columns, towards the banqueting hall set on a gentle hill to the west of the palace.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ says Robert Cecil, who has stayed behind. ‘She makes invitations like that to every young man whose appearance pleases her. She may never call for you.’
Is that a hint of resentment Nicholas thinks he hears in the crook-backed Cecil’s voice? ‘Have you found Gault yet?’ he asks.
‘He’s in Leinster. I’ve had words with my people in Bristol for letting him slip aboard a vessel undetected. But he’s of no concern now. The conspiracy ended the moment Minister al-Annuri took al-Seddik into irons.’ Cecil purses his lips in surprise. ‘My father, Lord Burghley, has been in an ill temper ever since I gave him your news. He is not accustomed to making a misjudgement. Still, I suppose these Moors do not hold constancy in the same regard as Englishmen.’
‘Speaking of which, Sir Robert, there are still Englishmen enslaved in Barbary. We should be attempting to arrange ransom.’
‘I shall ask the bishops to seek donations from their parishioners.’
‘Can the Exchequer not provide?’
Robert Cecil laughs. ‘Heavens, no! That would only encourage every Moor corsair to prey upon English ships. England is made out of God’s good earth, Nicholas – not out of silver.’
The little private chapel smells of the beeswax the Nonsuch servants use to polish the panelling and the pews. The sunlight streams through the mullioned windows, cutting bright swathes through the shadows and glinting on the dust motes. Unusually for a chapel compliant with the strictures of the new religion, there is also a hint of incense on the warm air. It was here, Nicholas remembers, that he stumbled upon John Lumley and his wife at their Romish prayers, giving him the evidence Cecil would need to destroy his old adversary. Nicholas had chosen not to reveal that evidence. It is a decision he has never once regretted in the intervening two years, least of all now – because Lumley has offered the chapel for tomorrow’s ceremony. It will be a Protestant service. Lumley’s generosity does not extend to endangering the life of his private Catholic priest – if he has one, which of course he vehemently denies.
Tomorrow, inshā Allāh, I will wed Bianca Merton, Nicholas reminds himself as he feels the sunlight on his cheek. Ned, Timothy and Farzad will be my groomsmen. Rose and Elise Cullen – sister of the once-nameless Ralph – will be Bianca’s bridesmaids. I did the right thing at last. I became the healer, not the disease.
He hears the door open softly at his back.
‘Are you sure you want to go through with this?’ he hears Bianca say, her voice now tinged with a permanent huskiness. ‘There is no dowry I can bring. It’s all burned to the ground. All gone. Everything.’
He turns to face her. She is wearing one of Lady Lumley’s cream brocade gowns, a starched linen ruff obscuring her throat. Her beauty steals the breath from his lungs.
‘Let me see,’ he says, pointing to the ruff.
‘I don’t like to. It’s a blemish. I have enough of those already.’
‘I’m your physician. I need to see.’
Coyly, she reaches behind her neck and undoes the band-strings holding the ruff in place.
‘Perfect,’ he says, observing the red wheal about the length of a small fingernail at the dead-centre of her throat, exactly where Surgeon Wadoud would wish it to be. He blushes. ‘When I say “perfect”, I mean the incision, not… well, the throat is perfect too – that’s a given…’
‘I’m serious, Nicholas. I’ll understand if a physician on the brink of a royal appointment chooses not to wed the penniless former owner of a Bankside tavern. I really will.’
‘Robert Cecil has petitioned the queen for recompense. A tavern can be rebuilt. An empty apothecary’s shop can be restocked.’
Her face falls. ‘Come now – you know what they’re like. They make such easy promises. It could be years before I see a single shilling. I can’t pay my lease on Dice Lane. I can’t restock. I have nothing.’
‘And still you look like a countess.’
‘In a borrowed gown.’
He smiles. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
She rolls her eyes at the chapel’s panelled ceiling. ‘Oh, mercy, don’t give me the line about love being all. I don’t want to force you to rely upon Robert Cecil’s stipend, and I can’t live on charity.’
‘No, it really doesn’t matter,’ he says.
Reaching into his doublet, he pulls out a cloth pouch. It is the powder purse Captain Yaxley gave him, along with the wheel-lock pistol. Nicholas opens the drawstring and extracts an object about the size of a large walnut, covered in a thin layer of black powder. Holding it up to the sunlight, he blows on it, releasing a fine grey cloud. Immediately sparks of reflected sunlight fill the little chapel.
Bianca can find no words. She draws in a slow whisper of breath in astonishment.
‘It’s… it’s… beautiful. It’s…’
‘It’s worth a dozen new Jackdaws, at the very least – that’s what it is.’
And he holds out the ring Sultan al-Mansur had given him, just before having the footsteps of the unclean infidel erased from his royal sight.
Historical Note
The plague of 1593 reached its climax in late summer. By autumn it was in retreat, though it returned briefly the following spring. On Boxing Day of that year the Rose theatre on Bankside reopened for business.
At the time Nicholas Shelby entered the Bimaristan al-Mansur, the glory days of Islamic medieval medicine were fading. Yet without the writings of Muslim physicians and the translation into Arabic of Galenic and Hippocratic texts, the progress of medicine in the West would have been incalculably harmed.
The tracheotomy procedure performed by Nicholas and by Surgeon Wadoud was understood by physicians in ancient Egypt. The first successful attempt known to have been performed in Europe was carried out in Italy around the 1540s, by Antonio Brassavola. It was repeated fewer than thirty times in the next three centuries. The operation might well have saved George Washington, who died in 1799 – of bacterial epiglottis – surrounded by three surgeons, one of whom knew of the procedure but did not have the courage to attempt it.
The Catholic friar Pierre Dan, who made ransom missions to Barbary, claimed that around one million Christian slaves were taken by the Moors in the century after 1530. Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, was a slave in Algiers for five years. The English – who continued to rely on diplomacy and church collections to
free those taken – were as troubled by Moor corsairs as any other European nation with a coastline. In August 1625 sixty men, women and children were taken in a raid on Mount’s Bay in Cornwall. Twenty years later, 240 people were kidnapped in another attack on the Cornish coast. But by that time the enslavement of what would eventually become tens of millions of Africans by Europeans had far outstripped the Moorish trade.
Arnoult de Lisle gave up his position as physician to Sultan al-Mansur in 1598, to become Professor of Arabic at the Collège de France. He returned to Morocco in 1606, as ambassador from the court of Henri IV.
Dr Lopez, physician to Elizabeth I, did not long outlive this story. In October 1593 he was arrested, accused of spying for Spain and – worse still – planning to poison his royal patient. Almost seventy by now, and innocent of both charges, he was hanged, drawn and quartered the following summer.
The Barbary Company’s charter lapsed in 1597, by which time it had been absorbed into London’s other livery companies. The Aduana district in Marrakech – close to present-day el-Fna Square – was closed fifteen years later.
In 1600 the first formally appointed Moroccan ambassador to the court of Elizabeth I arrived in London. His full name was Abd el-Ouahed ben Massaoud ben Mohammed Anoun. For ease, throughout The Saracen’s Mark I have taken the liberty of using the more familiar, and shorter, version: Muhammed al-Annuri. His extraordinary and enigmatic portrait hangs today at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. It has been suggested that he was the inspiration for Othello.
Author’s Note
When the good people at Corvus asked me to continue Nicholas and Bianca’s adventure, it seemed the ideal time to write a little about the debt Western medicine and science owe to the world of historical Islam. And then I discovered the extraordinary alliance between England and Morocco that began in the latter part of the sixteenth century. I have to admit that my very next thought was: Oh, good – research in Marrakech! What a chore.
I would like to thank Paul Foulsham for the opportunity to unwind at the Kasbah Angour in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. If tranquillity can be bottled, you will find a crate of it there.
Adolfo Sykes’s house is an amalgam of a number of historical houses and riads that I visited, including the beautiful Dar Cherifa.
Acknowledgement is due to many, but in particular to Dominic Green for his book The Double Life of Doctor Lopez, which is a warning never to let yourself become an outsider, and which I mined for the character of Solomon Mandel just as much as for Lopez himself; Comer Plummer for his Roads to Ruin; and Jerry Brotton for This Orient Isle, a fascinating look at Elizabethan England’s contact with the Islamic world. Also of immense assistance were Ahmed Ragab’s fascinating The Medieval Islamic Hospital; Hakim Chishti’s The Traditional Healer’s Handbook; and of course Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors. For further reading on the subject of the particular form of slavery contained in this book, I unhesitatingly recommend Robert C. Davis’s Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters and Giles Milton’s White Gold.
As always, gratitude is due to my agent, Jane Judd, for her guidance and patience; to Poppy Mostyn-Owen and the crew at Corvus for their belief in what I do; and to Mandy Greenfield for plastering over my many mistakes and grammatical errors.
And finally, my heartfelt thanks to my wife Jane, who redefines stoicism and patience when her husband is locked away in the sixteenth century.