The Angel's Mark Page 19

  When he’d married the young Katherine Warren, twenty years ago, Vaesy had savoured the difference in their ages. He had looked forward to playing the master to the maid, forming his young bride into the perfect, dutiful mistress of his household. A biddable wife. An example of dutiful, healthy Christian womanhood – just the type of bride a future President of the College of Physicians and a queen’s doctor should possess.

  On their wedding night he had told her what he tells his young men of physic today: that a healthy womb is like the fertile soil in Eden’s garden, the wholesome furrow in which the seed of Adam might take root. Jesu, how wrong he’d been with Katherine. If only he’d known the corruption hiding inside her, he’d have left the marriage unconsummated. At least that way he’d have had an escape route – annulment. Not even Baronsdale, President of the College, the man who likes his fellows to have unimpeachable marriages, would hold him to the contract then.

  Looking back, the signs had been there from the start: wilfulness, a lack of modesty, an unhealthy desire to enquire into things that a girl of fifteen had no business knowing. He’d blamed John Lumley’s first wife for that. If Jane FitzAlan hadn’t infected Katherine with those abominable ideas when they were together in the early days at Nonsuch, perhaps she would have remained the innocent he had once believed her to be.

  He’d done his best to warn Katherine, God would be his judge on that. Finding her alone one afternoon in the Nonsuch library, he had told her angrily, ‘It is not pleasing to Him for a woman to seek to know such things as are found here!’

  She had merely glanced at him and carried on reading.

  Had she not understood that she was being blasphemous as well as disobedient? Did she not comprehend that when God creates us, he places each of us to his appointed sphere? For a woman to inhabit the realm of learning and reason – a man’s realm – is an abomination, one that sadly Jane FitzAlan had seemed all too willing to embrace.

  In the years since then, he’s often wondered if God hadn’t taken the three Lumley children from Jane as a warning. Perhaps that was why he’d been unable to save them, despite his command of physic. A punishment not just for Jane, but also for him – for failing to make her see the risks she was taking with her wilfulness. And knowing full well the extent of God’s wrath when He’d been defied, Vaesy thinks now that the punishment continued with Katherine.

  He feels the sweat break out on his forehead as he remembers that awful day when he’d discovered the true extent of his own wife’s internal corruption. The sin of disobedience to God’s ordained order had grown inside her until it had become a living entity.

  Blasphemy and disobedience – that’s what had swallowed the wholesomeness growing inside Katherine’s body, swallowing it as surely as the serpent swallows a helpless chick fallen from the nest.

  He recalls now with horror the wailing of the midwife as the monster sought to force its way out into the world like a slithering contagion, twisted and vile. His own son, made into a serpent by Katherine’s rebellion against God’s order!

  He had thought that if he acted swiftly, if he excised this thing inside her, all might still be saved. Katherine would see how dangerous her wilfulness could be. She would repent. God would be merciful and allow her womb to heal. In time, if she prayed enough, she might still bear him healthy offspring.

  He’d known immediately what he had to do.

  It would be a fight between the light and the darkness. But he would not enter the battle unarmed.

  The weapon was his secret; no other physician knew of it. He’d made sure of that. It had cost him a king’s ransom to buy the silence of the exiled Huguenot physician who’d shown him the apparatus. His greatest fear had been that it might become public knowledge. If that were to happen, its use would quickly become commonplace – a blacksmith could fashion one in minutes. Before you knew it, farriers would be delivering babies. There’d be no profit for a physician at all.

  Hurrying to his medical chest, Vaesy had retrieved the scissor-like device and, without taking it from its silk bag lest anyone see it, had carried it to his wife’s birthing bed. There he’d shouted at the midwife to remove her miserable carcass at once. Then he’d set to work.

  But the sin was embedded so deep in Katherine that it had proved unwilling to leave. The struggle had been like an exorcism. She had screamed in torment as he’d fought to grip that monstrously deformed head between the prongs of the device. He’d closed his eyes and called up a passage from the Book of Mark to strengthen his resolve: blasphemies, pride, folly… all these evils come from within…

  Looking at his hands now, as they grip the reins of the horse so tightly that its head tosses against the pull of the bit, Fulke Vaesy recalls how they shook that day – until at last they’d felt the resistance end and the sin leave Katherine’s body in a slithering, bloody tumble.

  Wasn’t that proof enough? Vaesy asks himself as his horse steps reluctantly over a little bridge across a racing stream. What other physician could have won such an infernal battle, save one favoured by God?

  The court has spent Christmas at Greenwich Palace. The Cecils, father and son, wait on the broad water-front terrace for the barge that will carry them upriver to their house at Covent Garden. The drizzle has turned the land, the sky and the river into a world of unpolished pewter.

  ‘I’m not sorry to have seen the back of that year, Robert,’ Burghley tells his son as he pulls his cloak closer to keep out the damp. His age and failing health have made dealing with Elizabeth’s ever-growing cantankerousness a trial he can do without. ‘I suppose we may thank our Saviour for keeping the Spanish too busy with their meddling in the Low Countries to send a fleet against us again. And Ireland is relatively quiet for once. I will pray long and hard for God’s help to endure whatever this new year has planned for us.’

  ‘My prayers are simple, Father, and brief,’ says Robert. ‘No plague. No plots.’

  ‘Ah, the simplicity of youthful hopes,’ Burghley says with a wry smile. ‘Perhaps I should consider casting off some of the burden the queen expects me to carry. I might even seek her leave to retire to Theobalds – hand it all to those who still have the vigour.’

  Vigour. Never is Robert Cecil more conscious of his crooked back and his twisted legs than when his father tries not to mention them. Through gritted teeth he says, ‘You’d miss it, Father – the thrill of the battle. It’s in your blood. And there’s still work to be done.’

  ‘There’s always work in England for a queen’s servant, Robert.’

  ‘Do I not work, Father? She knows how hard, yet there is not even a knighthood in sight. I am Burghley’s son, yet I am unrecognized.’

  ‘It will come, Robert. Be patient. Perhaps this year.’

  ‘Does she not understand the extent of the labour? How long does she think it will take us to smoke the last of the Bishop of Rome’s vermin out of their priest-holes?’

  Burghley favours his son with a wise but quizzical frown. ‘Does any one of these vermin have a name, perchance?’

  ‘Aye, John Lumley.’ Robert chews the name like a sour fruit. ‘Perhaps if I make a present of Nonsuch to the queen, she’ll be a little more appreciative of my efforts on her behalf.’

  ‘Well, we both know how much she likes presents. But remember, greed is a mortal sin,’ warns old Burghley with just the hint of a chuckle. His own piety has not prevented him making a fortune out of serving Elizabeth.

  ‘Her father built Nonsuch. It was her favourite house when she was a child. Imagine how grateful she’ll be when a Cecil gives it back to her.’

  ‘And you expect John Lumley simply to hand you the keys?’

  ‘I live in the hope; but I also plan.’

  ‘And what of Lumley himself ? What do you intend for him?’

  ‘Cast down for the papist traitor we both know him to be.’

  The Burghley barge, a gilded Venetian wonder festooned with silk cushions and curtains, glides up to a flight of stone st
eps. The barge-master reaches out to help the Lord Treasurer aboard. Robert jumps onto the deck behind him, as agile as a monkey. He likes to show the liveried crew that a crook-back can be as nimble as any waterman.

  As the two men settle onto the cushions, a liveried servant brings Robert Cecil a leather satchel. ‘The latest news from our intelligencers, sir,’ he says, handing over the report harvested from the Cecils’ small army of watchers, searchers and informers. Robert Cecil scans the sheets of paper quickly.

  ‘No plague, no papist plots?’ askes Burghley, whose eyesight is not what it once was.

  ‘Apparently not today, my lord father. Nothing of import anyway. A wool merchant from Holland has taken lodgings at the sign of the Fox by Aldgate. He may or may not have passed through the Romish seminary at Rouen on his way here. I’ll make sure we keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Is that all we have for our money?’

  ‘A carpenter named Fladbury was heard by the West Cheap cross proclaiming he would give the queen a son – if they let him into her privy chamber and paid him five shillings. Drunk, apparently.’ He shuffles the leaves of paper. The barge-master gives the order and six sets of oars break the surface of the river. ‘Oh, and two of our watchers in Southwark have been informed there is a tavern-mistress there who was apparently born in Italy, or possibly Spain. She may be allowing seditious intercourse in her establishment. And the Grocers’ Guild would like her arrested for unlicensed practice of apothecary. Not that that interests us, unless of course she’s planning to poison the queen with an excess of aqua vitae, should Her Grace ever stop by for a jug or two of ale.’ He stuffs the papers unceremoniously back into the satchel.

  Old Burghley looks through the cabin window as the riverbank slides past. ‘Judged against what we have faced, Robert, I think we may infer that for the moment the realm is enjoying a considerable measure of tranquillity.’

  ‘We may,’ agrees Robert through pursed lips. ‘But sometimes the greatest plots hide behind the most ordinary of masks. I think we can safely ignore the drunk carpenter. But the merchant, and the tavern-keeper? Perhaps a stick thrust into the ants’ nest might be in order – see what comes out. Just to err on the safe side.’

  Upriver from Greenwich the same damp grey mist wreathes Kat Vaesy’s silent Vauxhall orchard. She walks alone, passing the beehives standing like old headstones in the grass. The orchard is where she comes when the thoughts in her head become so loud that she fears the servants will overhear them and tell her husband: Even in her exile, you have not tamed her, Sir Fulke… she still desires the world to know what sort of man you are, and twenty years is not long enough to quench her thirst for revenge… She has already dismissed one of her cooks because she believed the woman was in Fulke’s pay, though Lizzy Lumley told her she was imagining it.

  What does Fulke want to know that he doesn’t already know? Does he think she takes lovers to her bed here at Cold Oak manor? She imagines writing to Nicholas Shelby, inviting him here, even perhaps lying with him. He would understand the grief that’s so thoroughly insinuated itself into every part of her, like holly strangles the bough over which it spreads. But Fulke Vaesy took even that possibility away from her, the day he destroyed their child – the day he almost destroyed her.

  At first, when it became clear she was going to survive Fulke’s brutal ineptitude, she’d tried to tell John Lumley how mistaken he was to put his trust in her new husband. But John had just counselled her gently not to let bitterness at losing the child colour her judgement. ‘I’m sure Fulke did everything he could,’ John had told her. She had realized then that if she even hinted that Fulke had been responsible for the deaths of the three Lumley infants – something she could not actually prove, even if her hatred of her new husband clamorously suggested it – she would lose John’s sympathy, and very probably Jane’s friendship with it. And that Kat would never have risked.

  When her father had first sent her to Jane, she’d been little more than a child. She’d been expected to serve the baron’s young wife as a lady-in-waiting, learn the arcane mysteries of running a great household. She’d learned fast, watching in awe as Jane deftly played the chatelaine. She’d joined Jane at grand occasions, danced the pavane and the volta in the great hall when John Lumley threw revels for his aristocratic friends. She’d even been in attendance when the queen and the court came to visit. Not for a moment had she been homesick. Who could think of a home such as hers – with a stern Puritan father and a mother so cowed that she barely said a word from dawn till dusk – when all around her was the unimaginable beauty of Nonsuch? Who would not want to live for ever within those gleaming white walls? Who would not be happy playing chase between the statues of gods and heroes, or strolling in the sunshine through the Italian gardens while the gently drifting mist from the fountains cooled your skin?

  And to cap it all, as if being set down in the most fabulous place in all England was not enough, Jane had contrived to bring her together with the man she would later fall in love with. A man who was most definitely not Fulke Vaesy. In truth, Mathew was as unlike Fulke as it was possible to be. It was his stoic endurance of suffering that had so overwhelmed her. He was her very own Christ, she his Mary Magdalene bringing spices to anoint his poor body. The way he braved his malady was the most courageous thing she had ever witnessed. She and Jane Lumley had spent long hours in the Nonsuch library searching the volumes for an answer to the questions that tormented her: why had God punished such a good man? Was there anywhere in the world a secret knowledge that would save him? And could she find it?

  Before she could get anywhere close to discovering the answers, her father – in an act of astounding indifference to his daughter’s happiness – had ordered her to marry Fulke.

  ‘Where is the wisdom in loving a man who could die tomorrow from a simple scratch?’ he had asked her, as if Katherine were considering buying a sickly horse. ‘You will marry Lord Lumley’s physician. He will bring the family within the orbit of a man who has the ear of our sovereign lady, which may profit us greatly.’ By us he had, of course, meant me.

  Katherine Vaesy imagines herself a girl of fifteen again, standing not in her lonely Vauxhall orchard, but amongst the neat box hedges and Italian-style flowerbeds of the Nonsuch privy garden. She is embracing Jane, weeping uncontrollably like the sole survivor of a massacre. She is so inconsolable that even Jane is unable to comfort her.

  ‘He’s so much older than I am. And the size of him—’

  She sobs into Jane’s gown, her nose streaming with such a flood of misery that she’s left a small section of her friend’s bodice looking as though the jowls of an old and sickly lapdog have rested there.

  ‘I’ve never seen Fulke Vaesy laugh, not once!’ she sniffs. ‘And he’s so loud when he speaks, as though he’s delivering a sermon!’

  So loud in fact that she barely hears the shattering of the dreams inside her own head.

  And then had come the wedding night. No one had warned her what to expect, not even her mother. ‘You will do your duty to your husband, and to God,’ was all her mother had told her, as though Kat were being sent on a difficult but necessary pilgrimage.

  Of course she’d heard all sorts of fanciful stories, seen the animals in the fields in springtime, but nothing could have prepared her for Fulke’s sweaty grappling, for the panting like a rutting hog, for the gasped obscenities while he tried to chew her ear off. Imagine – obscenities from a man who boasted of his piety!

  And the pain! And the weight of him!

  Perhaps Kat could have found the fortitude to suffer even that lewd indignity once every couple of years or so, if it had meant children to nurture and love. But he had taken even that from her, with his damnable physic.

  She would weep now, but the tears stopped flowing long ago. That well is dry. There is only the silt of hatred in it now. How can it be, she wonders, that a poisoning that has continued for so long does not kill?

  As if to escape to a better place
, Kat’s thoughts carry her to the time before the pain began. She is fifteen years old again. The season is summer, not winter. She is racing through the deer park on one of John Lumley’s horses, Jane barely an arm’s length away. Their galloping mounts are neck-and-neck, spume flying from the bridles. Grazing deer scatter wildly before them. As she rides, Kat is shouting out the name of the man she loves, shouting it against the roar of the wind as her horse flies across the park, yelling it like a hosanna, in the certainty that no one but Jane can hear it. Jane Lumley is laughing too, infected by her friend’s joy.

  Two young women delighting in a conspiracy of love.

  For the moment, the name Kat shouts is a secret only they share. But in two days’ time, when John Lumley returns from business in London, Lady Jane is going to reveal it to her husband on Katherine’s behalf, in the sure and certain knowledge it will bring them all the greatest happiness.

  Two days.

  Such a small morsel of time. Not much of a prelude before the chill wind ushers in two long decades of darkness.

  On a chilly afternoon that same week, Nicholas and Bianca take a bracing stroll along the riverbank towards the Paris Garden. Bianca thinks a brisk walk in the cold might put at least a temporary stop to his infernal edginess.