by S. J. Parris
Gasping, I wipe my mouth with my sleeve and lean against the wall. Toby watches me without moving, though there is fear in his eyes.
‘What do they put in it?’ I demand.
His voice almost disappears. ‘Nutmeg.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s what she does sometimes. It means she doesn’t trust you. That’s why she brought you here.’
I rub my forehead. I am still dizzy and off-balance; I can feel the heat of it working into my system, though I think I caught it in time to prevent worse damage. I wonder if they have done the same to Sidney, and if they mean to rob us. Padre Pettifer warned me; I should have listened. Then, through my muddied thoughts, there emerges a pinpoint of clarity: Mistress Grace addressed me as ‘Doctor Bruno’. Yet I did not give her my title at the door, therefore: she knows who I am. She was waiting for me. Was it her that wrote the letter, then? But how could she know me, and why bring me here?
‘Did Robert Dunne’ – I speak slowly and deliberately, hearing my voice as if it comes from elsewhere – ‘did he come to you as a client? Were you his favourite?’
He shakes his head. His outline is still blurry to me, but I see him dart another nervous glance at the door.
‘Then why did she bring me to you? Is it a trap? What do they mean to do?’
When he does not reply, I take a step forward, my hand outstretched; he gives a little yelp, as if he expects to be struck. I grab the pitcher and pour its contents over my upturned face, then shake my head like a dog, scattering droplets.
‘I don’t know, sir,’ he whimpers. ‘I just do as I am asked.’
‘Who sent the letter?’ I wipe the water from my eyes and take another step forward, looming over him as he backs away with a whimper.
‘I don’t know about any letter, sir. I never even spoke to Robert Dunne. He didn’t come here for me.’ He presses up against the wall, trying to make himself smaller. ‘You need to talk to Eve. She was his special one. I don’t know anything.’
‘And where is Eve?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘Where? Where can I find her?’ I kneel on the bed and grip his arm. ‘Tell me – or shall I mention your book to Mistress Grace?’
‘No!’ He bites his lip. ‘She sends them away when they get with child. They’re no use to her here after that.’
‘But where?’
‘I don’t know!’ His voice is squeaky with panic; his eyes skitter to the door again, just as it is flung open and the figure of a man in black fills the space.
For the space of a heartbeat I freeze; Toby takes advantage of my confusion to slip from my grasp and dart for the open door, past the man, who gives him a cuff around the head as he ducks by. The door slams behind him. My vision is still slightly unfocused; all I can see is that he is tall, with a beard, and that he is holding something behind him.
I stand back, facing him, squinting to bring him into alignment. I can feel my head clearing, though my heart is galloping behind my ribs.
‘So you are the famous Giordano Bruno?’ he says, glancing around the room. He has a refined voice, much like Sidney’s, but with an odd lisp. ‘You know buying boys is against the law in this country? As well as against God’s law, I hardly need add.’
‘Who are you?’ For one terrifying heartbeat I fear he is come from the authorities, that I have been set up to be caught with the boy. But that would make no sense; the madam and her entire business would be condemned with me.
His face splits into a knowing smile and I focus enough to see that he is missing most of his teeth.
‘You don’t know me, though I dare say you are familiar with my name. But I have a friend who is keen to acquaint himself with you. Or re-acquaint, I should say.’
My throat tightens. ‘Did you send the letter?’
‘That would have been my friend. I don’t write so well any more. Not after what they did to me.’ He holds up his right hand. It dangles at an unnatural angle from his wrist, twisted under. The tendons have clearly been damaged beyond repair. I have seen this before: in a man who was hung by the wrists for several hours during an unofficial interrogation. It is one of the Privy Council’s preferred techniques in the Tower. A cold understanding begins to dawn.
‘You are John Doughty.’ My voice emerges as a croak.
He tilts his head and smiles, as if to imply that this is an interesting guess. At the same time he brings out his left hand from behind his back to show that he is holding a knife. I force myself to keep still. He believes I am unarmed; I will have only one chance to catch him while he thinks he has the advantage and I must time it exactly.
‘What do you want of me, then?’ I try to make my voice bolder, but it still sounds slurred.
‘Why are you asking questions here about Robert Dunne?’
I stare at him. ‘Why do you think?’
The smile disappears. ‘I can only assume that Drake does not believe he died by his own hand. Is he right?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Ah.’ He nods, his lips pressed together. ‘Interesting. Well, it seems we are all looking for answers. For now, I want you to come with me. My friend is keen to see you. He has some questions for you too.’
‘And if I refuse?’
He holds up the knife so that the candlelight catches the edge of the blade. ‘That would be quite foolish on your part.’
I say nothing. Though my limbs still feel heavy, my head is clearing. I wait. When he sees that I do not mean to respond, he tilts his head, as if to say ‘so be it’, and steps forward, his blade pointed towards me. In one movement, I duck, seize the knife from my boot and lunge at him, catching him in the upper arm; he cries out and drops his weapon as he tries to grasp at my doublet. I shove him hard in the chest and half-slide, half-fall down the stairs, yelling for Sidney as I trip on the first landing and pull myself to my feet. I take the corner for the next flight of stairs as footsteps follow me from above; a couple of doors open a crack and I sense faces watching from the shadows, though no one moves to intervene. Curses rain down from the stairs above as the footsteps grow quicker in pursuit, but I reach the ground floor unhindered and find myself in a passageway with doors leading off it, all of them closed. My heart is racing; I begin to run, though my legs feel as if they are moving through liquid. I cast a quick look over my shoulder as Doughty reaches the foot of the stairs; he shouts something, though the sense of it is lost on me. I throw open the first door I see and plough through a bedchamber, where a white-skinned girl sits astride a man, tangled in sheets, riding him to a steady rhythm; I see nothing of their faces, though I hear their protests and call out an apology in Italian for the intrusion. On the far side of the room is a casement, unfastened; I fling back the shutter, push it open, and roll through just as Doughty appears in the doorway.
As the cold evening air hits my face, I barely have time to register that I was not on the ground floor, as I had thought, but only on the first, and that I am falling, and that in my semi-drugged state it is not an unpleasant sensation.
ELEVEN
My ribs hit a hard edge and I am sliding and falling again, until I come to land with a jolt in something soft. I put out a hand; it sinks down with a squelch and a foul smell rises around me. Looking up I can make out the jutting roof of a ground-floor room, which I must have hit on the way down, and above it, an open casement, from which a man’s head is hurriedly withdrawn. I have landed, it seems, on the midden-heap in the House of Vesta’s back yard; revolting as it is, it may have saved me from the broken bones I should have had from such a fall. The sound of shouting echoes from within; he will be out here any minute in pursuit. I push myself up from the mass of rotten vegetables and God knows what else and stagger towards the wall that borders the yard. I feel no pain yet in my side or my legs, but I am winded and my senses have been overtaken by a wild panic, my heart still hammering. Ahead of me in the wall is a gate, but it is fastened shut. Snatching quick, ragged breaths, I weave towards the far c
orner of the yard where a gnarled tree grows, some of its branches extending over the other side as if pointing the way. My legs feel unpredictable beneath me and I will myself to every step; looking back towards the house, I see a figure in the oblong of light from the open door. I pull myself up to the lower branches of the tree and scramble higher; as I throw myself over the wall I hear a loud cry. It is only when the noise stops abruptly as I hit the ground again that I realise the voice was my own.
Pushing myself up on my elbow, I glance around. I seem to have landed in a lane behind a row of houses. The light has drained almost completely from the sky overhead and the backs of the buildings either side cast the narrow street into deep gloom. I catch the sound of footsteps, running. A few yards ahead in the alley a squat man in a cloak is crouching, arms outstretched stiffly; I stifle a cry of alarm and skitter backwards away from him until I realise he is not moving a muscle. I squint at him suspiciously through the gloom, easing closer until he is revealed to be a handcart covered in sacking, of the kind a man might use to take vegetables to market. The footsteps draw near. I glance down the alley, but see only sliding, teasing shapes growing out of the dark. I climb into the cart and cover myself with the sacks. Curled up small, I can just fit. The wood reeks of manure. I hunker down and discover with a creeping dread that something is in the cart with me; I can hear it breathing, raw and ragged, close to my ear. I am on the point of leaping out when I realise the breathing is my own and the fierce war drum I hear is the sound of my blood pumping.
Running footsteps outside; they skid to a halt somewhere further down the lane. Voices carry through the dark.
‘Well, he won’t get far, not in that state.’
‘I thought you said he brought it up.’
‘The boy says he drank half a glass before he made himself sick. It must have done something.’
The second man curses. ‘Then why wasn’t he easier to deal with? You as good as had him by the collar, Devil take you! Did I not warn you about him?’
‘He had a knife. She said she’d taken their weapons.’
‘There you are, then. I told you not to underestimate him – he is a cunning dog. What else did you hear?’
‘He was asking after Robert Dunne. It was all he wanted to talk about.’
Balled up in the cart, under my sackcloth, I cannot quite catch the murmured discussion that follows. My right hand strays down to my belt, and with a wash of relief I find that I must have sheathed my knife before I threw myself from the window, though I have no recollection of doing so. At least I will have some small defence if they should discover me. From the street there comes a cough, and a stamping of feet; I grip the cart’s sides and concentrate on slowing my breathing. The side of my face feels wet.
‘It would serve us better to watch and wait,’ says the first voice. I would swear that I know it, though I do not dare look out to confirm. An attractive voice, if you did not have to look at the face it came from; educated, with a dark timbre. It is a voice I have not heard since I was in Oxford two years ago. ‘We know where to find him.’
‘But if he should discover—’
‘Peace, John! We will find a better way. I have an idea.’
The first man makes some further protest, but it is brief, and the footsteps retreat. I remain still under the sacking, unsure whether they have really gone. Shouts and fragments of drunken catches float in from the street beyond the houses, but the two voices seem to have disappeared. I wait a few minutes longer before I risk peering out of the cart.
Though the lane is sunk further in shadow, it appears to be empty. With some effort I swing a stiff leg over the cart’s side to climb out and tumble on to the ground, pulling myself to my feet to assess the damage. My right side burns with pain when I breathe; I suspect I have cracked my ribs on the way down. My legs are bruised and aching, but I must be grateful that the midden-heap saved me from breaking any limbs. My head throbs and my pulse is still racing, though my vision has returned to normal and the strange sensations brought on by the nutmeg are receding. The night air feels cool on my face. As I stand there, taking shallow breaths so as not to strain my ribcage, I recall a young novice at San Domenico who claimed to have marvellous and terrible visions of angels and demons, after which he would often fall down as if in a dead faint; the other youths were enthralled by his tales and more learned monks than me declared him to have been touched by God and devoted themselves to interpreting his visions, until the novice master, a man of limited imagination but unrivalled common sense, discovered that the boy had been stealing nutmeg from the kitchen and consuming it, ground up, in copious quantities. I exclaim aloud and strike my forehead with the heel of my hand, amazed that I did not think of this sooner – the wine that smelled of spices in Dunne’s cabin must surely have contained a heavy dose of nutmeg. That could explain the strange extremity of his drunkenness, the hallucinations, the irrational fear. Whoever gave it to him probably intended it to take effect over the course of the evening, leaving him confused and disconcerted, unable to defend himself from any attacker, just as the madam at the House of Vesta had intended for me. That was a curious coincidence too – had Dunne’s drinking companion learned the trick at the House of Vesta? If so, then we need only establish who among the ship’s company was also a regular visitor to the brothel. My thoughts flit immediately to Savile and his superior smile as he spoke of the sacred flame.
I emerge from the lane into a cobbled street lined with tall houses, the upper storeys leaning inwards. It is now fully dark, though here and there a candle burns in a window, and occasionally a wan moon peeks out through a gap in the clouds, allowing me enough light to see the curve of the street as it leads downhill. If I follow it, I reason, it must eventually lead me to the harbourside and from there to the Star. I pause to look behind me, wondering what to do about Sidney. I can hardly risk returning to the House of Vesta in search of him; I am in no state to fight now, even if I could confront Doughty alone, and Mistress Grace is sure to have more armed men at her disposal.
I curse again and limp along the street, keeping close to the buildings on my left, neither seeing nor caring that I am stumbling through the gutter. I cannot think of going back to look for Sidney unarmed. Fear of what may have befallen him constricts my throat; if he has been drugged and attacked too, it is all my fault for thinking I could out-manoeuvre what was so clearly a trap. I have gained nothing by it, except a few bruises and the confirmation that John Doughty is in Plymouth and asking questions about Dunne’s death. And the near-certainty that the man he was talking to as I hid in the alley, the ‘friend’ so keen to reacquaint himself with me, could be none other than the book dealer Rowland Jenkes.
At the Star, I let myself in through the yard, keeping to the shadows. The three sides of the building rise up in darkness; from the stalls come the soft stamps and snorts of horses, sunk in sleep. Groping my way around the walls to the door of the tap-room, I find it locked. I hesitate briefly, before deciding I am willing to pay the price of inconveniencing the servants for the sake of my bed and a bath. I hammer on the door and call out. There is no immediate response; I call again and somewhere overhead a casement opens and a voice advises me to shut my fucking noise, people are trying to sleep. I bang on the door one more time and stand back, wondering if I dare break a window. When I raise my voice again, I am surprised by a sudden loud splash from behind me; I realise, as the smell hits my nostrils, that the contents of a chamber pot have been flung from the casement above. I am fortunate that whoever threw it could not see to take aim; it missed only by a few feet. Next time I might not be so lucky. I lean against the door, trying to muster the will to find a storehouse or empty stable where I can sleep until the servants wake, when I hear the fumbling of a lock on the other side and the door creaks open. The maid Hetty stands on the step in a shapeless nightdress, a candle flame throwing shadows on her pale face. She pauses, taking in my bruises and my limp with a knowing glance, and smirks openly.
‘A little too stimulating for my taste.’ I am in no mood for her provocations, but recognise that it behoves me to show some humility here, since I am in the wrong. ‘I am sorry to wake you.’
She waits until I am almost across the threshold. ‘Looks like they know how to throw a punch, them virgins.’
The timing of this remark is impeccable; I cannot help laughing. ‘What I would really like, Hetty,’ I say, turning, ‘is some hot water. As much of it as you can spare. Can that be arranged?’
‘You’ll have to wait till morning,’ she says. ‘And it’ll cost extra. If you’ve any money left.’
‘Put it on our account,’ I say. Poor Sidney. He will need a hold full of Spanish treasure to meet the bill we are mounting up here.
She squints at my eye and hands me her stub of candle. ‘Try not to wake the other guests, won’t you? I’ll bring the water first thing. Watch you don’t get blood on the sheets. Mistress Judith will have a fit.’
‘I’ll do my best. Thank you for your sympathy.’ I touch a finger gingerly to the cut above my eye. It seems to have stopped bleeding for now. Hetty sniffs; it is clear she thinks I have only myself to blame. She is probably right. ‘Do you not need the light to get back to bed, though?’
‘Don’t worry, sir – I know my way around this place at night better than the mice,’ she says, and as if to prove it, disappears into the shadows, leaving me alone at the foot of the stairs. Somehow I find the thought of her scurrying silently around dark corridors disquieting.
I take two wrong turns before I identify the corridor that leads to our chamber, every creak of the boards seeming to echo through the whole building. I let myself in quietly. The window drapes are drawn, casting the room in hushed shadows. I ease off my boots and my stinking clothes, leaving them where they fall, and collapse on to the bed, and into oblivion.