‘He was a merchant. He traded,’ says Bianca, as though he were the dullest country clod-pate imaginable, ‘with other countries.’
‘Of course,’ Nicholas replies, rolling his eyes in self-deprecation. ‘So SUIVAN could be suivant – following. A follower of the red cross?’
‘I’m not sure that translates,’ Bianca says. ‘But if it does, a follower of the red cross would be an English crusader, would he not?’
‘That might explain why they left the Bible where it was, untouched. Perhaps they’d found out that, in his heart, Solomon Mandel hadn’t really converted to the queen’s religion at all.’
‘Then why would he have a Bible by his bed?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps for show. He used this chamber for his work, as well as for his rest.’
‘So they tormented him for what they held to be heresy, and then killed him?’ Bianca postulates. She covers her eyes and shakes her head. When she drops her hands and speaks again, her voice cracks under the weight of such imagined heartlessness. ‘If they were that affronted, they could have denounced him to the parish. Let the law deal with him. They didn’t have to kill him!’
‘But I’m not convinced that is why they killed him.’
‘Then why?’
‘Perhaps they were trying to make him tell them something. And whether they were successful or not, they didn’t want him alive to identify who was asking the question.’
With gentle reverence Nicholas places the fragments back on the bed, as though he were laying flowers on a grave. Head down, he says, ‘I’ll let Constable Willders and the coroner know about these. They can tax their minds over what they might mean.’
‘And what of the menorah?’ Bianca asks.
‘I’ll keep it with me until I can think what to do with it. Perhaps I’ll leave it anonymously at the House of Converts on Chancery Lane. That’s where most of the other Jews in the city reside. They can decide what to do with it.’ He gives a forlorn shake of his head. ‘You know my view, Bianca. I care not how a man – or a woman – prays. Or even if they pray not at all.’
She smiles, her amber eyes brimming with gentle admonition. ‘Which, my dearest Nicholas, makes you a greater heretic than any of us.’
7
‘Shelby? The name is familiar to me, but I cannot rightly place it.’
William Danby is the Queen’s Coroner. The only reason he is here on Bankside is that the murder of the solitary Solomon Mandel has occurred within the verge, an arbitrary twelve-mile radius around the person of the monarch.
It is the day after Nicholas and Bianca’s visit to Mandel’s lodgings, and Danby has crossed the river to set in motion an inquest. He has brought a little of the court’s élan with him. He wears a fine maroon doublet, has garters on his hose and a bottle-green half-cape with fur trim upon his shoulders. He even sports a sword on his hip. But for all his fine apparel, Danby does not look a well man. His grey hair hangs in thin folds over his neat little ruff, and he has a grating cough that seems to have its seat somewhere very deep inside him. Nicholas wonders if he will outlive the inquest that he’s come to Bankside to conduct.
‘Shelby,’ he says again, apparently no wiser for the repetition.
‘I came to you regarding a young boy pulled from the water by the Wildgoose stairs, back in August of 1590,’ says Nicholas softly.
They are in the parlour of Constable Willders’s house on St Olave’s Street, a few doors down from the hostelry at the sign of the Walnut Tree, and far enough from the river not to be troubled by the smell of tidal mud. In the presence of the Queen’s Coroner, Willders has lost much of his official bombast. He has developed the habit of deferentially tapping his right hand on his thigh whenever Danby finishes a sentence.
‘Did you really?’ says Danby, passing his cloak to Willders as if the constable were his manservant.
‘Yes, Master Coroner. You made the corpse available to Sir Fulke Vaesy for an anatomy lecture at the College of Physicians that I happened to attend.’
‘Now I remember you,’ says Danby, coughing into his gloved hand. ‘You’re the fellow who pestered everyone to distraction about the cause of death. You insisted – somewhat argumentatively, if I recall correctly – that the boy had been murdered, even though Sir Fulke told you he had not.’
‘I was mistaken,’ Nicholas says as humbly as he can contrive.
The lie comes so easily to him that he can almost think it true – that three years ago there never was a killer preying on Bankside’s most vulnerable. That Ned Monkton’s brother Jacob, and the crippled anonymous boy who ended up on Vaesy’s dissection table, died wholly natural deaths. That Bianca had never come within minutes of being the killer’s last victim. Or that in the years since, Nicholas himself has never wondered what the penalty might be for framing someone for a crime they’d never committed, in order to bring them to justice for several crimes they most certainly had.
Yes, he thinks, it would be all too easy to rub Danby’s nose in it. To tell him that murder was exactly what it had been. But he cannot. It would open too many doors that must remain locked.
Danby turns to Constable Willders. ‘The body has already been interred, I understand.’
‘Yesterday. At St George’s churchyard, sir,’ says Willders. ‘There was no family to take it. And the parish thought a swift burial was wise, what with contagion being present across the river.’
‘I argued against it,’ says Nicholas.
A heave of Danby’s chest produces something that is half-word and half-expectoration. ‘Wh-hy?’
If you were my patient, thinks Nicholas, I’d be telling you to go back to your family and ensure your will is up to date. But he says, as civilly as he can, ‘I would have liked further time to study the body. And there is no evidence, as yet, that a corpse in Southwark can attract plague from another part of the city.’
‘The pestilence spreads in foul air, Dr Shelby, and corpses are a source of such rank miasmas, are they not?’ says Danby with a condescending smirk. ‘A wise precaution, I would have thought.’
‘There is another reason I thought the burial was hurried,’ Nicholas says, thinking of his conversation with Bianca.
‘And what is that?’
‘Solomon Mandel was a Jew.’
Willders taps his fingers against his thigh, as if to say, We’ve already had this conversation.
‘How is that relevant, Dr Shelby?’ Danby asks.
‘There is no place in London given over for the interment of those of his faith. I felt the parish should have sought advice from his fellows.’
Danby seems unconvinced. ‘Those few Jews who are tolerated in this city are required to denounce their blasphemy and embrace the one true religion. Under the law – such as it applies to a Jew – Mandel was a Christian. Your concern is wasted.’
‘But who knows what was in his heart?’
‘Let us hope it was the love of our Saviour, Dr Shelby,’ Danby says with the solemnity of an archbishop. ‘Like all infidels, the Jew may be redeemed only by his conversion. If he will not convert, then he is damned – in this world and the next. The wiser ones know it. Take for an example old Dr Lopez. He is a Jew; from Portugal, I believe. Yet he has converted. And, as a consequence, he prospers. Why, he is even permitted to attend the queen in matters of physic. No, sirrah, if this Mandel was secretly practising his heresy, being buried in consecrated ground according to Christian rites will be the least of his troubles when he stands before our Lord. You really should read Martin Luther’s book on the matter.’