‘She doesn’t need a licence,’ Nicholas says, a little more sharply than he intends. ‘This is the liberty of Southwark. The city corporation’s writ doesn’t run here. You know that as well as I. Now, if we can return to the matter of the killings–’
A look of official regret comes over the clerk’s face. ‘I really would like to assist, Master Shelby. But if Alderman Hawse is to raise a muster of men to seek out a felon, he will need more than the suspicions of a potion-maker and someone who attends public dissections for pleasure. Might I suggest you try the warder at the Marshalsea. After all, if it’s a felony…’
But Nicholas is already halfway to the exit.
It is late afternoon when he reaches the open fields of St George’s parish. Rooks call to him from the bare branches, the ground is hard underfoot. His feet are cold and they ache. He’s walked almost from one end of Southwark to the other.
Ahead of him are the White Lyon, the Marshalsea and the Queen’s Bench gaols. From a distance, they look like a row of ordinary houses, though not remotely welcoming. This is where Southwark keeps its debtors, its miscreants, its heretics and its traitors.
The Marshalsea has a grim lassitude about it. For the luckier inmates, a fine will secure their freedom. Others will languish here until age or sickness releases them to their maker. Some await the next assizes, to hear if they are to be burned with a brand about the face, or lose an ear, an eye or a hand, in payment for some misdemeanour. For a few – the heretics and the traitors, the Jesuit priests denounced or caught up in the random sweeps – incarceration is only a pause on the road. Their final destination will be Tyburn, where they will hang until half-strangled, then watch while their entrails are cut out and burned before their fading sight. Their eviscerated bodies will then be quartered, the pieces nailed up where they can best serve to remind the citizenry of the benefits of remaining obedient to Elizabeth’s law. There is a melancholy lying on the land here, a melancholy that will long outlast the winter.
‘Listen to me, friend,’ says the warder, his voice not remotely amiable, ‘I’ve got five warrants outstanding for suspected papist agents. I’ve another three for unlicensed preachers. On top of all that, I’ve a villainous Jesuit in the condemned cell, who keeps me awake all night chanting his vile Masses. And you want me to launch a hue and cry for the killer of four vagabonds? If you ask me, the fellow’s doing us a public service. What’s his name? He should get a pension.’
Nicholas braces himself for the long walk back to the Jackdaw. There’s a biting wind blowing up. It carries the hard scent of dashed hopes.
On the other side of the river – beneath the same cold December sky – the Bishop of London, John Aylmer, has brought his openair sermon at St Paul’s Cross to a thunderous close. Resplendent in his cope and mitre, he has preached from the enclosed wooden pulpit between the north transept and the churchyard for over an hour and a half, fulminating against papist infiltrators, witches, equivocators, heretical philosophies, licentious behaviour, playhouses and general unspecified sin. His audience has loved every word, even the ones that put the fear of damnation into them.
On Paternoster Row, having made his courtesies to the bishop, Robert Cecil sits alone in his expensive imported Italian carriage. He’s waiting for Sir Fulke Vaesy to be brought to him.
Burghley’s son doesn’t care for physicians any more than does Ned Monkton. Nothing any of them have ever suggested has worked on his crooked back. Not their potions, not the wooden poles they’d strapped to his back to straighten it, not a single moment of the pain they’d inflicted on him. But Robert Cecil is not a man to let self-pity stand in his way. He does not see his crookedness as a weakness; rather as scar-tissue, hard and protective, like armour. That’s what you need for this job, he thinks: scar-tissue, outside and in.
‘Master Robert, I give you good day,’ says Vaesy with an elaborate bow, appearing at the carriage door.
Robert beckons him inside. ‘A goodly sermon, I thought, Sir Fulke,’ he says, his voice deadened by the plush velvet and the curtains. ‘Was that Lady Lumley I saw you with?’
‘Indeed it was. She’s in London for a few days.’
‘But the noble lord himself was absent, I noticed.’
‘Still at Nonsuch, Master Robert,’ Vaesy says. ‘He told me that if the queen sends word she intends to Christmas there this year, he wants as much warning as he may contrive. He’ll need to talk to his bankers.’
‘He can rest easy. She intends to Christmas at Greenwich,’ says Robert Cecil with a sardonic laugh. The Cecils know full well the cost of playing host to Elizabeth and the court. It can run into thousands. ‘And was that Secretary Quigley I saw with you?’
‘Yes, he’s accompanying Lady Lumley.’
‘I didn’t recognize the other fellow. His name?’
The question could be mistaken for polite small-talk, but Vaesy knows that when Robert Cecil asks for a man’s name there is usually an ulterior motive. For the Lord Treasurer’s son, names are currency: some worth little, some worth a lot, but always worth storing away in case they might be found to have a greater value at some later date. ‘Francis Deniker – Lord Lumley’s clerk at Durham,’ Vaesy tells him, with the uncomfortable feeling that he’s committing a minor act of betrayal. ‘He’s been called down to make an inventory.’
‘An inventory? Of what?’
‘The contents of Nonsuch, Master Robert.’
‘Ah yes, all those books. All those fine hangings, all those paintings, all that silverware. A man could buy a lot of friends with what he could sell those for. Foreign friends, for instance. Romish friends.’
‘I think it’s just an inventory, Master Robert.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ says Robert Cecil, taking up a document from beside him on the seat. It is a digest that his intelligencers have prepared for him. ‘You have been with Lord Lumley several times since we last spoke, Sir Fulke. Yet this is all you have for me: “sermon at Cheam church with the Reverend Watson” … “visit to a bookseller at St Paul’s” … “Lady Elizabeth to Southwark, to distribute alms to the needy” … Not exactly earth-shaking, is it?’
Fulke Vaesy looks around the plush interior of the coach – anywhere other than at Robert Cecil. What does he want me to say? Am I to invent an accusation? Am I supposed to denounce my patron, my friend, without the slightest evidence? Is that what it’s going to take to win favour from the Cecils?
‘You tell me this man Deniker is only making lists; you tell me you have seen nothing out of the ordinary,’ Robert Cecil continues, ‘but you should know that adherents to the old faith are practised in their cunning, Sir Fulke. Very practised. They are adept at maintaining a façade of compliance with the proper religion, whilst in secret they go about their disgusting superstitious rituals.’
‘I really haven’t seen anything like that.’
‘Innocent-looking inventories can hide papist Masses between the pages, Sir Fulke. We’ve even unearthed their filthy pamphlets from the bottom of barrels full of Dutch herring!’
‘Master Robert, I can assure you, I have seen no–’
Robert Cecil raises a hand to silence him. Vaesy stares at the hand and thinks, I could live for years off the gemstones on those gloves.
‘The papists do not make loud with their heretical Masses, Sir Fulke, they hide them. They have been known to contrive miniature altar stones and other tokens, which they carry disguised as trinkets beneath the clothes in travelling chests. Their priests scuttle through this land in the guise of ordinary men, unseen. You may have witnessed no obvious signs of heresy, Sir Fulke, but that does not mean John Lumley has given up his old ways. Look yonder’ – he points at the ancient Caen stones of the minster on the other side of the street – ‘they say that in the reign of the second Edward, the monks dug up a whole cemetery of animal bones from beneath the Lady Chapeclass="underline" skulls, jaws, ribs, scores of wormy bones.’