The Saracen's Mark (eBook)

3

In the shadow of the riverside church, St Saviour’s market is in full cry. Competition for a sale is fierce. Drapers loudly proclaim the quality of their ribbons; farmers in from the Surrey countryside boast you’ll find no better winter vegetables outside the queen’s own gardens; cutlers swear on their mother’s graves that their knives are newly forged and not pawned by destitute sailors laid off from the royal fleet. And weaving through the crowd, like pike in a shady pool, the cut-purses and coney-catchers hunt their prey.

Not that any of them would think for a moment of waylaying the comely young woman with the amber eyes who walks around the stalls with such an assured air, a wicker basket tucked under her arm, her waves of dark hair pinned beneath a simple linen coif. They’ve heard it said that if you try to slip your hand between bodice and kirtle to steal away her purse, you’ll wake up next morning with a raven’s claw instead of fingers. Bianca Merton is known to them. Bianca Merton is out of bounds.

And by association, so too is the curly-headed lad with dark eyes and skin the colour of orange-blossom honey who walks beside her.

Banksiders know Farzad Gul now, almost as well as they know his mistress. They greet him as if he were one of their own. After all, he is Bianca Merton’s Moor, and thus something of a curiosity. His colourful slanders of the Pope and the King of Spain, learned from the English mariners who rescued him from shipwreck, have made him as popular as any Southwark street entertainer.

Today Farzad is making one of his regular visits in search of vegetables for the Jackdaw’s pottage pot. Usually he would come alone, but with the wedding pending, Bianca has taken the opportunity to accompany him. She has the better eye for quality braids and ribbons with which to turn his battered jerkin into something a little more befitting a groomsman.

‘An English wedding might not be the match of a Paduan one, or a Persian one for that matter,’ she tells him sternly, when his interest in haberdashery fails at the second stall she drags him to, ‘but I will not abide you looking like a vagabond, young gentleman.’

‘No, Mistress,’ he says, with downcast eyes.

‘So then, you go and find us some of Master Brocklesbury’s cabbages, and I will see to the ribbons. Meet me by Jacob Henry’s oyster stall when you’re done.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ Farzad says with a grin, knowing the choice of rendezvous means a cup of the best oysters to be found this side of the river.

As he heads deeper into the market, alone, Farzad Gul wonders where he might be now, were it not for Mistress Bianca. It is two years since he found himself cast up in this strange city. If his rescuers had not happened to stop at the Jackdaw tavern on their paying-off, perhaps he might have sold his cooking skills to a new ship, sailed away again to some other strange place far beyond the world he had once known.

Every day Farzad wonders where his mother and the other survivors of his family are. In his mind he can trace their soul-crushing progress across the scorching desert wilderness, from Suakin on the Red Sea to a slave market in Algiers or Tripoli, or Fez, or even Marrakech. But from there they fade away entirely; sold, undoubtedly – if they lived; turned from the boisterously argumentative characters of his childhood into living ghosts.

But living where? Sometimes he prays they never made landfall at all, but followed his father and his sister into heaven.

A jarring blow to his shoulder pulls Farzad back into the present. He hears a contemptuous ‘Out of my way, heathen dog!’

Turning, he sees two lads of about his own age, dressed in the jerkins and caps of city apprentices. One has his hands in his belt and his elbows spread aggressively. ‘And take your filthy Blackamoor eyes off me,’ he snarls in an accent that, to Farzad, feels somehow familiar.

‘I am no heathen, I am from Persia,’ Farzad says pleasantly, refusing to rise to what is clearly a challenge. And to take the anger out of the air, he adds brightly, ‘And the Pope has the breath of an old camel!’

To his surprise, his words fail to bring about the expected slapping of thighs and jocund howls of approval. The lad with the elbows rushes at him, hurling Farzad back into a cheese stall. Round yellow truckles tumble onto the cobbles.

Southwark street-fights can swiftly run out of hand. Knives get drawn. Sometimes even swords. Deaths are not unknown. So the stall-holders at St Saviour’s are adept at putting them down before they get started. A burly weaver whom Farzad recognizes as a regular at the Jackdaw pins one of the apprentices in a vicious armlock.

‘That’s enough out of you, young master,’ he says, giving the lad’s arm a corrective wrench. ‘If you’ve a mind for a brawl, you’d be better off back home in Ireland, taking your anger out on the Spanish, if they try a landing. We’ll have none of your bog-trotting rowdiness here.’ He releases his grip, thinking the apprentice has learned his lesson.

But he hasn’t. He starts towards Farzad again, who is trying to put the cheeses back on the stall. ‘One day soon I shall be a prince over the likes of you,’ he snarls, his Irish accent thickened by his anger. He stares close into Farzad’s face. ‘We should permit none of your kind here. Our Captain Connell would know what to do with a Blackamoor like you.’

And lest there be any doubt about the sort of man this Captain Connell might be, he draws the blade of one hand across his own throat. Then he turns and walks away, beckoning his companion to follow.

Farzad watches them go, cold in his heart. Not at the insult – he’s borne much worse – but at the mention of an all-too-familiar name: Captain Connell. It is a name Farzad Gul has long prayed he would never hear again. It is the name of the cruellest man in the whole world.

‘Tell me again, Nicholas: where?’

It is later that day, in Bianca Merton’s apothecary’s shop on Dice Lane. She has assumed what Nicholas calls her tavern-mistress’s face – the one she adopts when a taproom brawl is about to kick off, someone exceeds his credit or a Puritan complains about the sinfulness of Bankside whilst asking directions to the Cardinal’s Hat, all in the same breath. Nicholas marvels at how her features can change from exquisite to terrifying in an instant.

‘Marrakech,’ he repeats with a slight trace of discomfort, handing her the list of medicines he has promised Robert and Elizabeth Cecil.

She keeps her eyes fixed on the distillations, powders and medicaments: sweet clover boiled in wine for Walter Pemmel’s sore eyes… saffron dissolved in the juice of honey-wort for Mistress Gilby’s leg ulcers…

‘It’s in Morocco,’ he says. ‘Sir Robert showed me – he has a terrestrial globe, with all the lands and capitals—’

‘I know where Marrakech is, Nicholas,’ she says, brushing aside a pennon of ebony hair that has fallen over one eye. ‘I was brought up in Padua and my father was a merchant, remember? I can name all the great cities of the known world, Christian or Moor.’ She looks up again and begins to count them off on her lithe fingers, ‘Venice, Aleppo, Lisbon, Constantinople, Jerusalem…’

‘You can stop. I take your point: you know where Marrakech is.’

‘Why does he want you to go there, of all places? If he wants spices, I know plenty of merchants on Galley Quay who import from Barbary.’

‘It’s about diplomacy,’ he says evasively.

‘Nicholas, you’re a physician, not a diplomat.’

He gives her the answer Robert Cecil proposed as a masquerade. ‘The Moors have a great tradition in medicine. Most of our medical texts were translated from Arabic versions of the Latin and Greek originals. He wants me to go there to discover what, if anything, we might learn from them.’

She fixes him with those unsettling amber eyes. ‘You cannot go to Marrakech, Nicholas. The wedding – remember?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘What do you mean – it doesn’t matter?’

‘Because I’m not going. I told him No.’

The corners of Bianca’s mouth lift into an incredulous half-smile. ‘You refused Robert Cecil?’

‘I’m not his slave, Bianca. I’m his physician.’

She taps one of the pots on the table, as if she’s just checkmated him at chess. ‘He didn’t threaten to stop your stipend – force you to abandon your practice for the poor?’

‘No.’

‘Or threaten to have me hanged for a heretic?’

‘No.’

‘Because he’s tried that line before, when he’s wanted to coerce you.’

‘No.’

‘I suppose he swore on his mother’s grave there was no one else he could trust to do the job but Nicholas Shelby?’

‘Bianca, Robert Cecil has agents in more places than even you can name. I’m sure one of those will serve his needs more adequately than I. If he really must have a physician for the task, he can call on the College. Someone...