The Saracen's Mark Read online

  For the first time that Nicholas has witnessed, since he moved out of the Jackdaw and into Mistress Muzzle’s lodgings, his landlady favours him with a smile. It is the warm, indulgent smile that some women are inclined to, whenever they think of impending nuptials. ‘And if Mistress Merton herself should call here while you are away? What am I to say to her?’

  ‘That’s easy to answer, Mistress Muzzle. One way or another, I will be back in time for the wedding.’

  In the bedchamber of a modest property on Dice Lane, a short distance upriver from Mistress Muzzle’s house, Bianca Merton wakes from a fragile, troubled sleep. She sits up against the bolster, the neckline of her shift damp against her skin. In the darkness she remembers two bodies falling through the night towards the cold, black surface of the Thames. She hears the slow, heavy slap as they enter deep water, the sound of ripples fading, like the tinkling of broken glass on a stone floor. She waits for them to disappear beneath the surface. But they don’t. Their faces stay just below, watching her through the water with the cold, accusing stare of the dead. She squeezes her eyelids tightly shut. If I made a pact with God, she tells herself, when I look again, they will be gone. But if I made a pact with the Devil…

  She counts to three and opens her eyes.

  To her immense relief, there are no bodies tumbling, just shadows cast by the rushlight burning on the bedside table. A pact made with God, then. A righteous pact, not an evil one. Even so, she wonders if all murderers are troubled by such memories.

  Her eyes linger on the crudely painted figures on the far wall, figures that must have triggered the illusion: two men, one prone, the other standing over him. The image is from the New Testament, the parable of the Good Samaritan. This house, she has learned, was previously owned by a Puritan who had wanted furnishings with a biblical theme, but couldn’t afford expensive Flemish tapestries. So instead he hired a man who painted tavern signs to decorate the walls.

  They keep her company: Jonah and his whale, in the closet; Lazarus in the pantry; Daniel and the lion in the parlour where she takes breakfast. Daniel looks like a fat Bankside alderman. The lion, conjured from the painter’s imagination, is an animal quite unknown anywhere else on earth. Bianca has learned to tolerate them all, including the Good Samaritan in the bedroom, except on those few occasions when he dances in the rushlight and reminds her of the night, almost two years ago now, when two men did indeed tumble through the darkness below the bridge.

  When she had confessed her sin to Cardinal Fiorzi, before he sailed away back to Venice, he had told her that God would forgive her. The men she had led to their deaths were evil men. They had committed vile deeds in the service of Satan, and there was no sin in ridding the world of them. But to Bianca, in spite of all that, they were still men. And now they were dead. Absolution could not alter the hand she had played in their deaths.

  She scolds herself. I am not a murderer. I am a Good Samaritan. How many more innocents would have suffered if I had not done what I did? How many penniless Banksiders might have sickened – or, worse, died – if I’d stood by and allowed Nicholas Shelby to die?

  At the thought of him, she demurely adjusts her shift where it has slipped over one shoulder, and combs her hair with her fingers to bring at least a little obedience to those heavy, dark tresses that are always at their most ungovernable when she wakes. If he could see her at this moment – Jesu, what would her mother have said at the very idea? – he would think her skin still glowed with the warmth of the Italian sun. But that’s because of the rushlight. She fears that five years of English rain have washed the real colour right out of her, along with almost every other trace of her Paduan upbringing. She touches her neck where it meets the shoulder – a neck that on Monday is swanlike, and on Tuesday as scrawny as the reeds that grow around the Mutton Lane river stairs. Yes, in candlelight a veritable Venus; but in the grey light of a morning in early April?

  She consoles herself with the thought that Englishmen appear to like their women looking as pale as a cadaver. Caking your face with ceruse is all the fashion in smart circles. Even the queen paints her features with it, to make her skin as white as the best Flanders linen. Not that you’ll see it on Bankside, save on the faces of the richer whores who favour it to cover up the ravages of the French Gout. She curses herself angrily, and recalls something her mother had often told her: Bianca, my child, never trouble yourself with what a man may think of you. Thinking is not their natural disposition.

  Yet even as she stares down the bed to the wainscoting on the far wall, wainscoting that is painted a rich orange, she thinks it would be nice to have a little colour in her face for the wedding.

  For once, no one tells Nicholas to sit patiently amidst the panelled elegance of Cecil House – one of the grandest beyond the city walls, set between the river and Covent Garden – until someone remembers his presence. No one instructs him to bide his time while the clerks and the men of law, the intriguers and the intelligencers hurry to and fro. No one mistakes him for a new gardener who has unforgivably stumbled through the wrong door. This time a weary-looking secretary in a black half-cape and gartered stockings shows him directly to Robert Cecil’s study.

  The Lord Treasurer’s son has clearly been at work for some time, though dawn has yet to break. Hunched over his desk, his crookedness is smoothed by the night beyond the glass. His little beard cuts a dark wedge out of the neat white ruff that he wears over a doublet of moss-green velvet. To Nicholas, he could be an innocent-faced but malevolent little sprite reading spells from a parchment. Though he is about Nicholas’s age, his eyes are those of a man who has seen all there is to see, good and bad. When he speaks, his voice is like the whisper of a blade drawn from its sheath.

  ‘Dr Shelby, thank you for agreeing to come.’

  It seems a strange thing to say, thinks Nicholas, when you’ve sent three men to drag someone from his bed – especially when you already pay him handsomely to be on call.

  ‘I am always at your service, Sir Robert,’ he says quietly, wishing it didn’t sound so much like an admission of guilt.

  Robert Cecil rises and steps forward from his desk. There is a tension in his little body that almost dares you to recognize its imperfection, to ask him to his face how it is that a small man with a crooked spine can make even the most powerful dance to his tune. Nicholas has heard the tavern-talk: that the queen calls him Elf, or Pigmy. Given that the Cecils know almost everything that occurs in this realm, he wonders how Sir Robert bears the insult. Perhaps his hard carapace is more a defence against life’s slights than against the realm’s enemies.

  ‘Leave your gabardine there,’ Cecil says, indicating a high-backed chair in the corner. ‘I don’t wish my wife to think I’ve summoned a Thames waterman instead of a physician.’

  ‘Is Lady Cecil ill?’ Nicholas asks as he unlaces his coat. ‘Why didn’t your man say?’

  But Cecil merely regards him with a critical eye. ‘Tell me, Dr Shelby, what exactly is it you spend my retainer on? That is the same white canvas doublet you were wearing when I sent you to spy upon Lord Lumley. When was that – two years past? Are you hoarding my stipend in case the Spanish come again? It won’t save you, you know. They’ll rob you of it and give it to the Pope to expiate their sins. So you might as well spend some of it on a good tailor.’

  Nicholas tries not to sound sanctimonious. ‘I spend a little on lodgings and food, the rest I use to subsidize my medical practice, so that Banksiders can afford something better than the usual charlatans who peddle false remedies. In return, I come when you call. It is what we agreed when I accepted your patronage.’

  Cecil shoots him a look of mock despair. Then he opens the door and ushers Nicholas through into the panelled corridor. Candles burning in silver sconces throw their two shadows back against the oak wainscoting. In Nicholas’s mind, one shadow is a man climbing the steps to a scaffold, the other a gargoyle watching from the crowd. Why is it, he asks himself, that whenever I’m in this
man’s presence, my thoughts turn inevitably towards a violent fate?

  At the end of the corridor they stop before a set of doors, their panels carved with the Cecil crest. Sir Robert raps his energetic little fist on the timber and calls out, ‘Madam, are you composed? Dr Shelby has arrived.’

  The door opens onto a pleasant chamber hung with shimmering drapes and cushioned as Nicholas would imagine an Eastern harem to be. He remembers the craze for all things Moorish that swept London when the envoy of the Sultan of Morocco visited: Tamburlaine at the Rose theatre, shoemakers turning out oriental slippers, everyone gawping at the sight of dark-skinned men in exotic robes. Even Eleanor had insisted they turn their own chamber Turkish. But that was before…

  He pushes the memory from his mind and follows Cecil into the room.

  A slight, graceful woman of about thirty sits flanked by four ladies-in-waiting, an empty cradle at her feet. In her lap is a toddler, dressed in an embroidered smock that Nicholas reckons would set back a Southwark labourer the better part of a month’s wages. He has met Lady Elizabeth Cecil, daughter of Lord Cobham and wife to the Lord Treasurer’s son, before. And he knows she does not care much for him.

  ‘Is there really no other physician in London to attend us, Husband?’ she asks Cecil, putting her arms protectively around the child, who begins to grizzle loudly.

  So it’s the son I’ve been called to treat, thinks Nicholas. And his mother doesn’t want me anywhere near him. This could prove a difficult diagnosis.

  ‘Madam, you know my opinion of doctors,’ says Cecil. ‘I have suffered the best of them, certainly the most expensive. They did nothing for me. I remain as I was born – disjointed. To my mind, I count Dr Shelby among the few honest ones I’ve met. At the very least, he will not lie to us.’

  It is the first time Nicholas has heard Robert Cecil speak openly of his condition. He takes it as a cue, looking directly into Cecil’s wife’s eyes.

  ‘Lady Cecil, let us be open with one another. I assume you have heard what a few of the older Fellows of the College of Physicians say about me.’

  His directness takes her by surprise. ‘I have. They say that in some matters of physic you are a heretic.’

  A sad smile – quickly mastered. ‘And I do not deny it, Lady Cecil. When I discovered that what I had learned wasn’t enough to save the woman I loved and the child she was carrying, there followed a period when I shunned all reason. I rejected everything I had been taught. I drank myself into insensibility, because it seemed the only medicine I could stomach. I lost my practice, my friends, my livelihood. I slept beneath hedges and I cursed God for letting me wake in the morning. When I recovered my senses – with the help of a woman I can only describe as a ministering angel – I swore I would only practise medicine that I could prove works. If I was to have faith in it, it must be physic whose outcome I could predict with some accuracy. That is an oath I do not intend to break. If it is not enough for you, I am content to return to Bankside and the bed from which your husband’s men so roughly summoned me.’

  Shocked by his honesty, Elizabeth Cecil drops her gaze to her son. She gentles him, but he keeps grizzling. ‘I am not sure that recommends you, Dr Shelby, except as a man who loved his wife more than he loved his reputation.’

  ‘As Sir Robert has just this moment said, madam, I will not lie to you.’

  ‘Is it true you abjure casting a horoscope before you make a diagnosis?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Then how do you know what manner of cure is propitious?’

  ‘I do not believe the stars influence the body nearly as much as is claimed, Lady Cecil.’

  ‘But that flies in the face of all received wisdom, Dr Shelby.’

  ‘Perhaps it does. But if you have a pain in your back in January, and after treatment it returns in August, how can the constellations guide me on what medicine I should prescribe? The stars are no longer aligned.’

  He can see the confusion in her. Her delicate fingers fuss with the child’s smock.

  ‘And they say you do not believe in the humours of the body. Is that true?’

  ‘Until someone can show me a humour, madam, yes, it is. Until I can touch it, examine it, replicate its influence in a reliable manner, I cannot in all faith insist it exists. Besides, it is taught that balancing the humours requires the drawing of blood from certain parts of the body. Would you have me bleed a child of William’s age? He’s barely two, am I right?’

  ‘Of course not! William is far too young for bleeding,’ she exclaims, more than a little horrified. She clutches the boy to her breast, as if she fears Nicholas will produce a lancet from beneath his doublet and advance upon the infant.

  ‘But if bleeding works, Lady Cecil, why not bleed a child?’

  ‘Because… well, because…’

  ‘A child has blood flowing through its veins, just as the mother has. So if drawing blood is medically sound, why not bleed the child – other than to save it from the discomfort? That is where reason would lead us, is it not?’

  He waits until he sees a flicker of self-doubt in her grey eyes.

  ‘I’m not trying to trick you, madam. The answer is simple: because it doesn’t work. I believe any effect is purely coincidental. I can tell you from my experiences in Holland, as a physician to the army of the House of Orange, that blood is best kept where it is – inside.’

  Elizabeth Cecil seems intrigued now, almost enjoying a frisson of sedition. She turns to her husband. ‘Robert, explain yourself: how is it that a man who spends his waking hours seeking out heretics invites one into his house – to administer to his son?’

  ‘Madam, are you going to let Dr Shelby examine William or not?’

  With a sudden obedience that surprises him, Lady Cecil sits the child on the nearest cushion, holding him gently by the arm. But there is nothing obedient in the look she gives Nicholas. ‘Have a care with my son, Dr Shelby. He is not the child of some Southwark goodwife – he is a Cecil’s heir. His grandfather is the queen’s best-loved servant. Harm him’ – a glance in her husband’s direction – ‘and not even her newest privy councillor will save you from me.’

  ‘Look under his arms,’ says Robert Cecil in reply, softly, as though he hopes no one else in the room will hear. ‘Give me an honest report of what you see.’

  Now Nicholas understands. Cecil fears his son might have contracted the pestilence.

  Kneeling before the boy, Nicholas gives him what he hopes will be taken as a carefree smile. ‘Tell me now, Master William, does your mother play Tickle with you?’ He flutters his fingers. The boy grins. Nicholas looks up at Lady Cecil. ‘Madam, will you assist me?’

  Understanding him at once, she makes a fuss of the boy, pretending to pinch him on the side. He squirms away from his mother’s fingers, laughing loudly and throwing up both arms in delight. Cecil looks on intently. If he objects to the frivolity, he keeps it to himself.

  Nicholas gently holds the boy’s arms aloft and studies the red patches that are clearly visible in the armpits. He knows at once what he’s looking at.

  He remembers that when he had his practice on Bread Street – before Eleanor’s death; before the fall – his richer clients had taken a too-speedy diagnosis as a sign of sloppiness. They had wanted their money’s worth. But he can sense Robert and Elizabeth Cecil’s anxiety. There is no point in prolonging it. He stands up, finding himself stifling an unexpected yawn as the hour catches up with him.

  ‘An irritation of the skin, Sir Robert, Lady Cecil. Nothing more. These are not buboes.’

  ‘Thank our merciful Lord!’ Robert Cecil’s explosive release of breath is the first display of emotion Nicholas has witnessed since his arrival.

  ‘But there is more,’ says Elizabeth Cecil, restoring the child to her lap, where he starts toying with the edge of the cushion. ‘His sleep has also been much disturbed of late. He spits out his milk-sop. He mewls a great deal. And my ladies tell me he has a fever.’

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bsp; To Nicholas’s ear, she sounds as if she’s testing him. He lays a hand on the boy’s forehead. It feels hot to the touch. He calls for a candle to be brought nearer, the better to see inside the child’s mouth. ‘You said he spits out his milk-sop. Does he swallow water with ease?’

  Elizabeth Cecil looks at one of the ladies, who shakes her head.

  ‘Inflammation of the columellae,’ Nicholas says. ‘If you look, madam, you’ll see: there at the back of the throat.’

  ‘What do you prescribe?’ she asks.

  ‘If you wish a strictly non-heretical regime,’ he says, giving in to sarcasm and instantly regretting it, ‘I’d suggest a purge to empty his bowels, and wet-cupping to draw blood from the skin. Possibly a small incision made under the tongue to take out the over-hot blood. That’s what the textbooks would have me do.’

  She smiles. ‘Perhaps I was a little too hasty earlier, Dr Shelby. But a mother is entitled to be protective, is she not?’

  ‘Of course, madam.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘For the soreness under his arms, a balm of milk-thistle and camomile. For the throat: a decoction of cypress leaves, rose petals, garlic and pomegranate buds, all in honey.’

  Robert Cecil coughs, as if to remind them of his presence. ‘I’ll send a man to the apothecary on Spur Alley.’

  ‘Husband, it is not even dawn—’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘May I make a suggestion, Sir Robert?’

  ‘Yes, of course, Dr Shelby.’

  ‘Let me have Mistress Merton make up the physic for you. I’d trust her ingredients over anything a member of the Grocers’ Guild puts in a pot. Half of it’s likely to be dried grass and crushed hazelnuts.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve run afoul of the grocers as well, Dr Shelby,’ Robert Cecil says. ‘After the College of Physicians, the Barber-Surgeons, and the Worshipful Company of Tailors, is there any guild in London you haven’t upset?’