Outside the grim fortress I drew a deep breath. The cold London fog, tainted with the smoke of many fires and the sewer scent of the river, seemed pure after the smell of human misery that filled the Marshalsea. I realised that all the while we had been inside the prison, my heart had been struggling like a pigeon trapped in a chimney. Only now did it steady and slow.
It had grown nearly dark while we were inside, but there was still cock-fighting nearby, for I could hear the shriek of a wounded bird, suddenly cut short as its neck was wrung. As we walked back towards the Bridge we passed the lighted windows of taverns. Inside, firelight gleamed on pewter tankards and flushed faces. And the Winchester geese were open for business, hanging out of their windows in their scanty clothes, calling to us to come in for a good time. I wondered how they could endure the cold, but then, I suppose, they would wonder how I endured my trade.
‘You did well,’ I said, ‘helping me. It’s not pleasant, if you are not used to it.’
We were passing a flaring torch set up outside one of the better taverns, so that I caught his smile as he turned to me.
‘I was wrong to doubt you, Kit. You know your business. I’m sorry I spoke as I did.’
By way of answer, I punched him on the shoulder in friendly fashion and said I must hurry home before the gates of the City were closed for the night. ‘Do you live near here?’
He jerked his head towards a nearby alley.
‘Down there. It is better than it looks.’
‘Better than Duck Lane?’
He laughed and raised his hand in farewell.
I never expected to see him again.
Chapter Two
On the evening of the Sabbath, a week or two after my visit to the Marshalsea, we overtook the Lopez family as they turned out of Wood Street, heading, as we were, for the Nuñez home. I fell into step with Sara, who was leading her small son Anthony by the hand.
‘A blessed Sabbath to you, Kit,’ she said.
‘Shalom.’
It was our custom to gather on the Sabbath at the house of Dr Hector Nuñez on Mark Lane, not far from the Tower. Many of our people lived in this part of London, in Aldgate and Tower Wards, and the Nuñezes’ large house had been established as a place for meetings and services long before my father and I came to England. No doubt we would have settled here too, if my father had not been given the house in Duck Lane as part of his salary from the hospital. It was a good bargain for the governors of the hospital. Duck Lane was known locally, with savage irony, as ‘Paradise’.
‘I wish that we lived in Wood Street,’ I said enviously.
Sara gave me a sympathetic look.
‘Ah, yes. I remember those houses in Duck Lane. We lived in one for a few weeks after we were married.’
I grimaced. Ours was an ancient building, one of a row of small houses which leaned drunkenly together in an alley behind the hospital. The wind whistled through holes in the walls where the daub had been pecked out by birds, or else had shrunk and fallen away. Depending on the direction of the wind, the single chimney (added after the house was first built) either smoked, dousing the fire in its own soot and ash, or else sucked the flames so high that our fuel burned away twice as fast as it should. There was bulbous, cracked glass in the downstairs windows, and nothing but ill-fitting shutters upstairs.
‘But then you moved to Wood Street,’ I said.
‘No, for several years we were in Little Britain, round the corner from your house. It was one of the hospital houses, too, but larger, with a private garden at the back.’
‘I know them. Much better than our hovel.’
The Lopez family now leased a house cheek by jowl with some of London’s richest merchants. Dr Roderigo Lopez no longer worked at the hospital, for he had a private clientele amongst the great courtiers and was physician to the Queen’s Majesty herself. I could hardly believe that a man who moved in such circles would consent to know people like us, but he maintained his ties with the community and was always courteous to my father, if somewhat condescending.
‘He’s perhaps five years older than I am,’ my father had told me some time ago, when I asked about this. ‘We knew each other as young men in Portugal. Though of course Ruy came to England long ago, and was taken under the wing of Hector Nuñez and Dunstan Añez.’
I nodded. They were the two leaders of our people in London. Dunstan Añez was Purveyor of Groceries and Spices to Her Majesty the Queen and a man of substantial fortune. Ruy Lopez’s wife, Sara, was Dunstan’s daughter and more than twenty years younger than he.
Now I walked beside her in silence for a while, our footsteps muffled by snow. Attending service at our makeshift synagogue always made me uneasy, not only because of the risks we ran if the authorities caught us. For the lie that was my life seemed to loom more monstrous there. It was like a growth in my throat, like those cancerous growths against which we physicians have no weapons, but must behold helplessly, aware of our weakness. We know we are unable to offer the patient anything but the dulling effects brought by syrups of poppy or meadowsweet, effective for a brief time during surgery, but little relief in the long enduring pain as a body consumes itself. My secret, my lie, which had seemed an innocent enough stratagem for concealment and escape when it began, had recently started, like a cancer, to eat away at me from within.
Does God exist? I had first begun to doubt Him in those last months in Portugal. On the ship off Finisterre my doubts hardened in me, the first seed of that growth in my throat. For if God did indeed exist, why did He not strike me down, liar that I was, when I joined the men and boys in our makeshift synagogue?
‘You are very quiet today, Kit,’ Sara said.
I shook my head to drive away these terrifying thoughts. Sara had always been good to me, welcoming me as a lost and motherless child when we arrived in London, taking us into her home until Dr Nuñez found a position for my father, feeding me on nourishing food, for she said that I looked like a fledging fallen from a nest. It was she who began at once to teach me English. Born in Crutched Friars in London, she spoke English more naturally than Portuguese. I had a quick ear and was eager to learn, for I never wanted to return to Portugal.
‘Sara,’ I said, for we were passing the north end of London Bridge and I was suddenly reminded of the last time I had crossed it, ‘have you ever heard of a man called Poley?’
She began to shake her head, then paused. ‘Poley? I’m not sure. I think, perhaps, Ruy might have mentioned that name once.’
But the men, talking earnestly about some shipment of pepper which had been delayed, were drawing ahead of us and she could not catch her husband’s attention.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I was called to attend one Poley at the Marshalsea a little while ago. He had eaten bad oysters and thought someone had poisoned him.’ I hesitated, not sure how to put into words my reservations about the man. ‘He was no Catholic priest, and it is priests – is it not? – who are mostly held there, before they are exiled or executed.’
‘And other traitors.’ Sara shivered, and I think it was not simply the bitter cold of the day, for all of us lived on the edge of fear, the whispered betrayal, the knock on the door in the night. She glanced down at Anthony, but he was watching his sisters arguing behind us, glancing over his shoulder and tugging at his mother’s hand.
‘Well,’ I said, remembering those eyes and the man’s sudden unexpected lunge towards me, ‘traitor he might be. I saw him not at his best, but I can imagine he might be one of those who smiles at your face while slipping a knife between your ribs from behind.’