The Sinner's Mark (eBook)

1

London, Summer 1600

His plan is to slip into the city unobserved and unremarked. He has chosen the place carefully. The gatehouse guarding the road from the east is bound to be busy at this time of day, a chokepoint for Londoners hurrying home for the shelter of the hencoop before the light fades and the foxes begin to prowl.

A group of gentlemen on horseback, returning from a day’s hawking in the fields beyond St Botolph’s, provides the perfect cover. He falls in between them and a gaggle of servant women bringing in bundles of washing that has dried on the hedgerows in the uncertain June sunshine. A procession of the damned, he thinks, looking up at the raised portcullis hanging above his head like a row of teeth in a dragon’s jaw.

In appearance he is forgettable. The only flesh he carries is in his face, as though God hadn’t allowed enough clay from which to make the rest of him. What remains of his hair is as sparse and wiry as dune grass after a North Sea gale. It is as white as a cold Waddenzee mist. All he possesses are the clothes on his back, the boots that trouble his raw feet, a set of keys, and the ghosts he carries in his pack.

Only in name is he rich.

Petrus Eusebius Schenk.

Petrus after St Peter, long dead. Eusebius in honour of the great Christian theologian from Caesarea, also dead.

And Schenk?

What is there to say about the Schenks? Little enough, other than that they are an honest if unremarkable family from Sulzbach, a one-spire little place astride a crossroads of no note, barely two leagues to the west of Frankfurt.

But this is not Frankfurt. This is London. Aldgate, to be precise, one of the four original towered gatehouses in the ancient wall that the exiled Trojan, Brutus, raised when he founded the city a thousand years ago. A city he named New Troy. Or so it goes.

After all, what are we if not the sum of the myths we tell ourselves?

The short tunnel stinks of horse-dung. From the narrow ledge where the walls reach the domed ceiling an accretion of pigeon-shit hangs like clusters of pale grapes. Slipping out of the crowd as easily as he entered, Schenk drops to his haunches, wincing. It has taken him five days to walk from the place he came ashore – Woodbridge in the county of Suffolk. As he wiggles his feet to ease the cramp in his calves, the sole of his right boot flaps like a wagging tongue. A rivulet of grit trickles down under the instep, adding to the torment. He sits down on the trampled earth and unlaces the boot to inspect the damage. The glue holding the sole in place has split and a few nails have worked loose. It’s nothing a cobbler couldn’t put right in a moment, although Schenk’s coin is all but spent. He won’t receive more until he finds the man he has come to see. Turning side-on to the wall, he hammers the boot against the indifferent stone, silently chanting words from a verse in the Old Testament with each strike: Enticers… to… idolatry… must… be… slain…

Biting against the pain of his blisters, Schenk squeezes his foot back inside the leather and reties the laces. A temporary fix, but it should last until he reaches the Steelyard.

In Schenk’s mind it is always the Stalhof, from the archaic German. His English friends have told him that ‘Steelyard’ is a corruption of an old term for a measuring balance, or a distortion of the name of the ancient fellow who once owned that stretch of land on the north bank of the Thames close to where the Walbrook empties into the river. One thing alone is indisputable: no steel is sold there now, not since the queen’s Privy Council expelled the Hansa merchants from Lübeck, Stade and Cologne.

Schenk knows the story well. For more than three centuries – since the time of England’s third Henry – generations of Hansa merchants have made the little self-contained enclave beside the Thames their home. They have built their houses and their businesses, paid their taxes and worshipped God in their own churches. But they are not wanted in England now. The English can make their own trade in pitch, sailcloth, rope and tar. England has no need of the Hansa merchants any more.

It might be empty, its houses boarded up, but the Steelyard offers Petrus Eusebius Schenk something he craves: undisturbed shelter. Now almost deserted, the warren of warehouses, storage sheds and private homes is the perfect place for a man to hide.

But the echoes of his boot striking the wall have attracted one of the gate-guards, set there to raise and lower the portcullis and to watch for vagrants, papists and other undesirables attempting to enter the city. He walks over. Schenk watches him approach, alarm spiking in his veins.

‘God give you a good evening, friend,’ the man says, smiling without merriment. ‘Do we have a name, perchance?’

A name? Why yes, we have a name fit for a Bohemian prince, thinks Petrus Eusebius Schenk. But these days we must be careful about proclaiming it, in case we linger in the memory of a man such as this. Schenk’s English is good enough to pass muster, though a little too guttural for general taste. As he answers, he prays his accent won’t prick the guard’s suspicion.

‘Shelby,’ he says. ‘My name is Nicholas Shelby, of Bankside.’

William Baronsdale, the queen’s senior physician, breaks his stride halfway down the long, panelled gallery. His gown – a sinister corvine black – flaps around a frame as angular as a sculptor’s armature. The sudden halt releases a faint scent of rosewater from the rushes underfoot, anointed by the grooms to keep the coarser smells from the royal nostrils. In his long professional life, Baronsdale has held every major office the College of Physicians has in its gift to bestow: censor, treasurer, consiliarius, even president. Clad in his formal robe and in the grip of a fearsome indignation, he reminds Nicholas Shelby of nothing so much as a man caught by the sudden urge to burst the swelling head of a particularly uncomfortable boil. Baronsdale’s usually placid Gloucestershire tones tighten in concert with his features.

‘I can remain silent no longer, sirrah. She will die one day. And when she is with God in His Heaven, enjoying the holy balm of His reward, who will abide your heresies then?’

There was a time – and not so long ago, Nicholas recalls – when to give voice to the very thought of Elizabeth’s demise was treason. In the taverns, the dice-dens, the playhouses and the bear-gardens, suggesting that the queen might be anything other than immortal would draw the unwelcome attention of the secret listeners placed there by the Privy Council. But today we need stay silent no longer. Now even the unspeakable may be imagined, made corporeal. Faced. Accepted. Not even those anointed by God can live for ever. At least, not on this earth. Mercy, thinks Nicholas, how times have changed.

Through the open windows the spring sunshine dances an energetic volta on the brown face of the Thames, racing the breeze upriver towards Windsor. The priceless Flemish hangings fidget gently against the wainscoting, caught by the waft from the open windows. And at the end of the corridor: two yeomen ushers in full harness, barring the way. Nicholas can make out the Tudor rose woven in red and white thread into the breasts of each tunic, and in the polished blades of their axes the reflections of himself and Baronsdale, two tiny curvaceous gargoyles with enormous heads. He waits for Baronsdale to resume his march. But Baronsdale seems reluctant to move, glancing at the yeoman ushers to gauge how long he can delay. I understand, thinks Nicholas – there is still a little pus left to squeeze from the boil.

‘I confess it willingly, before my maker,’ Baronsdale announces as if it were a last testament. ‘I have never liked you, Mister Shelby. Never. Your arrogant rejection of the discipline you took an oath to uphold… your contempt for tradition, precedence and custom… Who are you, sirrah, to scoff at the writings of the learned ancients?’

The thin lips fold in on themselves as though sucking water through a reed. The jowls wobble. They have grown pendulous over the years, the only weight Baronsdale carries. They’re where he keeps his store of vitriol, Nicholas decides.

If Baronsdale is expecting an answer, Nicholas is not of a mind to provide one.

‘To my mind, sirrah, you are no better than a mountebank,’ the senior physician continues petulantly. ‘If men of your ilk represent the future of medicine, I see little hope for the continuing survival of Adam’s progeny. I prophesy that within a generation it will be an easier thing in England to find the fabled basilisk than an honest doctor. You could at least have worn your physician’s gown. You look like a… like a…’

Baronsdale has a lexicon that would stretch around Richmond Palace twice over, most of it medical, much of it Latin. But he seems at a loss to find the right words for the hardy-framed man of middling height with the wiry black hair who stands beside him, a look of weary sufferance on his face.

‘An actor from the playhouse?’ Nicholas suggests. ‘A cashiered pistoleer?’

‘Are you mocking me, Shelby?’

‘Not at all. I’m merely repeating what Her Majesty has said to me on more than one occasion. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry. She’s in rude health. She hunts, she...