The Saracen's Mark Read online

  Also by S. W. Perry

  The Jackdaw Mysteries

  The Angel’s Mark

  The Serpent’s Mark

  Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2020 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © S. W. Perry, 2020

  The moral right of S. W. Perry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 897 7

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 898 4

  Printed in Great Britain

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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  For Jane, as always

  O, let the heavens give him defence against the elements, for I have lost him on a dangerous sea…

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, OTHELLO

  In 1589 the Sultan of Morocco sent an envoy to London. He received a rapturous welcome, even though at the time comprehension of the mysterious Islamic world was, at best, confused. Whatever the country of his birth, to the English a Muslim was a Moor, a Turk, or a Saracen…

  PART 1

  The Kissing Knot

  1

  Marrakech, Morocco. March 1593

  In the moment before they caught him, Adolfo Sykes was dreaming of oranges.

  It was an hour after sunset, the third night of the time that some amongst the Moors called `Ushar, when the moon was almost full. In the gardens of the Koutoubia mosque the sellers of holy texts had packed away their books. The professional storytellers had departed, their audiences dispersed. From their high minarets the muezzins had called the city to the al-maghrib prayers, leaving the medina to the shadows and the scavenging dogs.

  He loved the city at this time of night. He felt enfolded within its protective red walls. The cooling breeze from the Atlas Mountains filled the streets not with the scents of spices and human sweat, but with cleansing citrus.

  Until he’d come to the land of the Moor, Adolfo Sykes had barely seen an orange, let alone tasted the succulent flesh. But now, after three prosperous years in Morocco, this agent of the Barbary Company of London – its founding stockholders the noble Earls of Warwick and Leicester – was ready to believe that paradise itself might smell like one vast orchard of orange trees.

  He had almost reached his destination, the city hospital, the Bimaristan al-Mansur. Its high mud-brick walls were barely twenty paces ahead of him. And then this agreeable reverie was shattered in a single heartbeat.

  Out of the night stepped two figures, their heads bound in voluminous kufiyas – a pair of monstrously fat-headed demons conjured up by some devilish jinn. In that instant Adolfo Sykes realized he had been a dead man from the moment he’d left his lodgings on the Street of the Weavers.

  He had thought himself unobserved, no easy accomplishment for a small, somewhat bow-legged half-English, half-Portuguese merchant with a threadbare curtain of prematurely white hair that clung to the sides of his otherwise-unsown pate. An involuntary grunt of surprise escaped his lips. He stopped. Then he did what most are inclined to do when they have stumbled into what they suspect to be mortal danger: he came up with hasty reasons to believe he hadn’t.

  They are fellow Christian traders, he told himself confidently. Or Jewish moneymen from the el-Mellah quarter, those clever fellows without whom trade between Moor and European would seize up like an axle without grease. Whoever they were, they were not, under any circumstances, real or imagined, assassins.

  The night suddenly seemed colder, despite the djellaba he was wearing, woven from the best English wool, and evidence – if any were needed – of the superiority of his merchandise. Fighting against a rising tide of panic, Sykes glanced quickly over his shoulder. A second pair of shrouded figures was standing barely two paces behind him, cutting off his retreat.

  What happened next began with a moment of awkward comedy. First there was an odd little dance, as though five latecomers to a feast had all converged at the one remaining empty chair. Sykes, being a diminutive fellow and as wiry as a Barbary macaque, dodged sideways. He had a brief glimpse of himself as a free man, speeding through the darkened streets to safety – then to a ship that would carry him back to England where, as far as he knew, no one intended him violent bodily harm. Then a grasping hand caught a fold of his djellaba and a sideways kick swept his little bowed legs from under him. He went face-down onto the dirt, a plaintive grunt bursting from his lungs. He felt warm blood pool in his jaw, and the weight of a man’s knee in the small of his back, almost breaking him. The darkness took on an even thicker patina as the man leaned over him, enveloping him in the folds of his robe like a falcon mantling over a stunned hare.

  Even then, Adolfo Sykes was not yet fully ready to acknowledge the truth: that they had known he was coming, known where to lie in wait. That he’d been driven like game, the way the Berber tribesmen drove the desert gazelle towards their bows. In his tolerable Arabic he gasped, ‘Purse… left side… my belt – take it. If God wills it, it’s yours.’

  The answer ripped away the last shreds of self-delusion.

  ‘Do not insult us, Master Sykes; we are not common thieves,’ said a voice very close to his left ear. ‘It is not your purse we desire; it is the secret that you keep hidden from us in your infidel heart.’

  English. Spoken with an Irish accent, by someone barely grown to manhood. The very last language he’d been expecting to hear.

  Turning his head painfully towards the speaker, Sykes saw a cheek as pale as porcelain in the moonlight, a cheek flecked with a boyish attempt at a beard.

  The voice then spoke some words in Arabic, presumably for his companions’ benefit. It was not the unrefined language of the streets, Sykes noticed abstractly, but formal, classical Arabic, as if it had recently been learned by rote at the feet of a teacher. Sykes picked out the phrases ‘It is him… it’s the infidel who steals from the faithful.’

  This offended Adolfo Sykes almost as much as the assault on his body. He had never stolen from anyone. Ask his customers. Ask the Christian merchants. Ask the Jews from the el-Mellah. Ask the forty God-fearing English merchants who comprised the body of the Barbary Company – licensed by the queen’s seal to hold the monopoly of trade between the princely states of Morocco and England – fine upstanding men, every last one of them. Men who counted themselves amongst the most forward-thinking in London, and who would expel him at the merest suggestion of stealing.

  But what troubled him more than the slander was the voice: an executioner’s voice, devoid of mercy.

  Rough hands hauled Sykes to his feet. Making a poor attempt at bluff, he protested, ‘I am the factor for the Barbary Company of London. As such, I am protected by the mercy of His Majesty Sultan al-Mansur. I have his written word upon it. I can show you.’

  And it was true, after a fashion. The passport was in his lodgings, penned by one of the sultan’s army of clerks, though as it was written in Arabic – which he could speak, but
not read – it might, for all Sykes knew, be a shopping list.

  The answer was brutally unapologetic. First there was a blow to the side of his head that made his knees buckle. Then they bound his hands and gagged him. He could tell at first bite that the gag was of a wholly inferior-quality cloth. Probably homespun by Berber tribesmen. It seemed to Sykes like the final, deliberate insult.

  They manhandled him roughly through the same narrow doorway cut into the mud-brick wall of the Bimaristan from which they had emerged. He didn’t struggle. They were young and much too strong for him. They had the law of the desert on their side: the weak always die first; and resisting only prolongs the agony.

  Once inside, Sykes saw by the meagre light of an oil lamp an old watchman sitting in an alcove. His furrowed skin was as dark as argan bark, his beard white, like a crescent moon on a starless night. He left his seat, turned away and dropped to his knees, taking up the posture of a Moor at prayer. Sykes understood at once: this was not religious devotion, this was done so that he could later claim never to have witnessed the furtive, nocturnal arrival of a bound and gagged European.

  For the place of execution they had chosen a room seemingly at the very heart of the Bimaristan, a chamber tiled from floor to ceiling with intricate mosaics, each tiny square of stone as polished as a mirror glass. He heard the one with the Irish accent engage in a brief but tense conversation in Arabic with his companions. He could understand only intermittent words, but he knew they were fortifying their own courage – boys on the verge of manhood, steeling themselves for a harsh rite of passage. He heard the prayer begin. ‘All hu akbar…’

  In a way, he was glad it was to be here, in this little bejewelled chamber. Because cut into the flat ceiling was an opening in the shape of a six-pointed star, a window onto the limitless night, and once more he could catch the scent of oranges on the air. Paradise. Waiting for him. And all he had to do now was steel himself for the journey.

  2

  The south bank of the Thames river, London. One month later

  In the small hours of a deathly-still April morning two miles downriver from Westminster, three men climb silently from a private wherry. Caped against the bitter cold in heavy gabardines, they strike east from the Mutton Lane river stairs. They are heading for Long Southwark, guided through the empty lanes by the twisting flames of a single torch. Bankside is deserted. The unseasonably cold night is too raw even for thieves and house-divers. The timbers of the close-set houses rear out of the mist like the ribs of a fleet of galleys wrecked in the surf.

  At the gatehouse on the southern end of London Bridge they come across the night-watch, warming their tired bones around a brazier that burns like a beacon warning of invasion. The three men pause, but only to confirm the address they have been given. There is a practised hardness in their faces that hints that they might be bearing steel beneath their cloaks. The watch lets them pass without question. They know government men when they see them. Arrests are always best made at times like this, when the subject is too sleep-befuddled to put up a fight.

  Entering a lane close to the sign of the Tabard Inn, the three men count off the houses until they reach a modest two-storey property of lathe and plaster, close to a row of trees that marks the western boundary of St Thomas’s hospital for the poor. With no show of pleasure at having reached their goal after such an uncomfortable journey their leader begins to hammer violently on the front door, as though its planks and hinges are personally responsible for the night’s discomforts.

  Nicholas Shelby wakes with a start. He feels the rhythmic blows through the floorboards, through the frame of his bed, through the straw in the mattress, even in his bones. It is the sort of hammering that constables employ when arresting traitors – or calling physicians from their warm beds to tell them that the plague has finally crossed the river into Southwark.

  He has been awaiting a call like this since the first cases of the new pestilence came to light last year. So far, the outbreak has stayed confined to the poorer lanes on the other side of London Bridge. But that hasn’t stopped the Courts of Chancery, Wards, Liveries and Requests taking themselves off to Hertford to consider their business in healthier surroundings. So far, the liberty of Southwark has escaped. In the Bankside taverns, more than one wag has made the connection between the decrease in lawyers and the absence of plague south of the river where the bawdy-houses lie.

  But Southwark has not escaped entirely. The Lord Mayor has ordered the closing of the playhouses and the bear-pits. As a consequence, an unwelcome lethargy has descended on the southern shore of the Thames. The purse-divers and coney-catchers have lost half of their trade at a stroke. In the stews, there are whores who have had only themselves for company since Candlemas, and the kindlier church wardens have stopped asking them their trade, when assessing the need for charity. Cynics say there are only two types of public places the authorities dare not shut, for fear of riot: churches and taverns. It all seems to Nicholas a grim prelude for what would otherwise be a time of joy and festivity – an impending wedding.

  Fully awake now, he opens his eyes to the semi-darkness of his rented room. On the clothes chest a single candle stands close to guttering, as squat and fat as a lump of yellow clay thrown on a potter’s wheel. It fills the room with the smoky smell of mutton grease. A film of moisture on the inside of the window, and the absence of anything other than watery blackness beyond, tells him dawn must still be some hours off. It is that hollowed-out time of the night when it is better not to wake, when thoughts unchain themselves, when spirits walk and old men die.

  ‘The Devil take you and your godless knocking!’

  The voice of his landlady, Mistress Muzzle, penetrates the floorboards, caustic enough to strip limewash off a wall. Nicholas hears a wheezing snort of indignation, followed by, ‘I hope this is not one of your patients, Dr Shelby! If it is, I’d be indebted if you would ask them to fall sick at a godlier hour.’

  Nicholas knows it will take his landlady a while to reach the front door. She is a woman ill-designed for velocity. Struggling into his hose and shirt, he wonders if he can beat her to it. As he steps out onto the landing, he sees the flicker of an oil lamp moving ponderously through the darkness and hears her voice again, full of injured propriety: ‘Anon! Anon! Do you expect me to open the door in naught but my shift? What manner of place do you think I keep – a bawdy-house?’

  Even on Bankside, no one would confuse the upright Mistress Muzzle’s dwelling with a bawd’s premises, thinks Nicholas as he stumbles down the stairs. It is, however, the perfect place on Bankside in which to start a medical practice: one room at street level for seeing patients, accommodation above, and the landlady – the fearsome Mistress Muzzle – safely in her own domain at the rear of the house. The only part they are forced to share is the front door.

  In the light from the lamp, her pouchy face has the discomforted look of someone suffering a mild bout of colic. With an indignant explosion of breath and a theatrical jangling of her keys, she opens the door. Over her expansive shoulders, Nicholas can just make out three heads silhouetted against the misty night; a night turned a wet, muddy ochre by the light of a single flickering torch. A disembodied voice reaches him. No apology, just a bald statement: ‘These are the lodgings of Dr Nicholas Shelby. Correct?’

  ‘I am Dr Shelby,’ Nicholas says, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  ‘You are to come with us – at once.’

  ‘By whose command?’

  ‘By Sir Robert Cecil’s command.’

  So not the pestilence, then – but a close-enough second.

  Mistress Muzzle turns back from the door. Nicholas sees her little eyes flicker over him, full of sudden mistrust. He knows what she’s thinking: a member of the queen’s Privy Council has sent for her tenant in the middle of the night. Therefore, at the very least, he must have poisoned someone. Has he been distributing papist pamphlets instead of medicine? Is he no doctor at all, but a charlatan prescriber of fak
e elixirs? And more importantly, by taking his rent, is she guilty by association?

  For a moment Nicholas enjoys her confusion. But spacious, sanitary lodgings are not easy to find on Bankside.

  ‘I’m not a wanted felon, Mistress Muzzle. Or a Jesuit – if that’s what concerns you. And I have paid my rent until Trinity term.’

  Unconvinced, she turns her head back towards the door and the men in the street. ‘Is Dr Shelby under arrest?’ she asks.

  ‘Not at the moment,’ says the one holding the burning torch. Wisps of smoke swirl upwards, disappearing into the cold, damp night and making Nicholas think of souls rising from a graveyard. ‘But if you want—’

  The hammering has sounded so official that not a single occupant has dared open a window to see what is happening. No one wants to risk witnessing the apprehending of a traitor or the flushing out of a papist priest. Too many questions get asked, and there’s always the chance of being mistaken for an accomplice. Much safer to wait for the public finale on Tower Hill or at Tyburn. And even though he knows himself to be an almost-innocent man, Nicholas can’t help but acknowledge the little wormy knot of cold fear that writhes in his stomach.

  ‘Do I have time to make myself a little more presentable?’

  ‘Be quick. This is not an invitation to a revel, Dr Shelby. We have a wherry at the Mutton Lane stairs and the tide will soon begin to ebb. Bring what items a physician might normally have about him.’

  ‘For what malady?’

  ‘Sir Robert did not say.’

  ‘Then how, in the name of Jesu, may I know what to bring?’

  The irritation is clear in the man’s terse reply. ‘Whatever else is required, Sir Robert will provide it. Now hurry.’

  ‘How long will you be away?’ asks Mistress Muzzle.

  ‘I don’t know. Ask them,’ Nicholas says, nodding at the men in the street. ‘If anyone comes here needing medicine, tell them to seek out Mistress Merton. She’ll be either at the Jackdaw tavern, or at her new apothecary shop on Dice Lane. Bianca will know what to do.’