by S. W. Perry
On the voyage she’d been astonished by the English sailors: strange, weather-beaten little men who could climb rigging like monkeys, who carried charms of aquamarine to calm the waves and the storms, but whose speech she couldn’t understand – apart from the profanities and blasphemies that seemed to make up most of their vocabulary.
They can’t all be like this, she’d told herself. And indeed, when they docked at Tilbury, she’d discovered they weren’t. But they weren’t much better.
She had rapidly come to the conclusion that there appeared to be only two types of native male: silk-gloved gallants who thought God had made woman solely to provide a subject for their sonnets or to breed their sons; and the rest – pasty, ill-mannered rogues with a fondness for bear-baiting, cock-fighting, thieving and falling over drunk. And to think she’d begun to hope that Nicholas Shelby might be different—
The vintner is looking at her with a satisfied gleam in his eyes. God’s wounds! She’s just agreed a price a full ha’penny a barrel above what she’d intended. She curses Nicholas and all his works.
‘I wonder if the Mutton Lane stairs are open again,’ the vintner says as he gets up to leave. ‘We had to land by the Falcon tavern. There was a body in the water – off Mutton Lane.’
Bianca starts as if she’s just been slapped: hard.
‘A body? What sort of body?’ she asks, a cold stone of dread forming in her stomach.
‘I don’t know. I was too far off to see.’
She keeps her composure barely long enough for the vintner to reach the door. As he disappears down the lane, Rose has to steady her. It’s a while before she can persuade her mistress to take her hand from in front of her mouth.
‘Jesu, Rose,’ Bianca whispers, ‘you don’t think he’s gone and—’
‘Don’t be foolish, Mistress,’ Rose says, giving her a gentle shake that at any other time would be unforgivably familiar. ‘He’ll be back, by and by.’ She pours her mistress a shot of the malmsey sample the vintner has left behind.
And then, as if on cue, Nicholas walks in.
Bianca’s expression travels from relief to rage and back to somewhere in between. He’s too far away to hear her muttered welcome: stupido farabutto!
‘They shut the Mutton Lane stairs,’ he says apologetically. ‘Somebody drowned.’
He says no more than that, knowing the details will be common knowledge by sunset. He’s not yet ready to trust her with his conviction there’s a killer on the loose on Bankside. He thinks to himself, there’s too much I don’t know about you, not least where you go when you slip away so furtively from the Jackdaw when you think no one is looking.
When he wakes the next morning the attic is flooded with a bright winter light. Opening the little window, he breathes the crisp, cold air surging in like a wave foaming into a rock-pool. Across the river the church spires stand out sharply against the early sunshine. From somewhere close by comes the sound of Bianca singing as she and Rose air the lodging-room sheets. She has a fine voice, he notices. The faint accent of the Veneto gives it a richness he hasn’t heard before.
At breakfast she tells him she has no urgent tasks; the morning is his own. He thinks he will visit the parish authorities, tell them what he knows: that the little lad taken from the Wildgoose stairs and Jacob Monkton were killed by the same person. Perhaps they might listen to him now. But then Bianca suggests a walk to the Paris Garden.
The notion appeals. The fresh air might help him think. He can’t remember the last occasion he made time for simple pleasures. Surely a few idle hours passed in pleasant company can’t hurt.
As they walk their breath hangs in the air like ghostly smoke. If you didn’t know better, you might take them for a couple at the tentative beginnings of a courtship. They have an easy way about them: he in the buffin coat, walking with a slow swing of his Suffolk yeoman son’s shoulders; she in the green brocade kirtle, occasionally dipping her head as she laughs at something he’s said. But that is where it ends. Each of them has secrecy in their blood. Perhaps today is the day to wash a little of it out.
And indeed – to his surprise and joy – Nicholas finds himself beginning to smile at little things again; like the drayman they pass at the riverbank who’s trying to force an unwilling mare to drink, or the creaking of the sails of a windmill that sounds to Bianca like a parrot calling ee-nough… ee-nough…, which is what Timothy shouts at closing time. If it wasn’t for the ever-present dark current drifting sluggishly in the well of his soul, Nicholas might even feel carefree.
‘Will you stay long?’ Bianca asks as they follow the riverbank towards the Paris Garden. ‘You seem much recovered.’
‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘I had thought of perhaps going into Holland in the spring.’
‘For trade?’
He laughs. ‘No, I have no head for business.’
‘Then to fight – against the Spanish?’
This amuses him even more. ‘I’m not a soldier. I was a physician.’
‘Ah,’ she says, looking down at the hem of her gown. She has kept a list of possible occupations in her head. She’s been crossing them off as she’s grown to know him better. ‘I knew it would be something learned.’
‘I wasn’t much good at it. There was someone I couldn’t cure – someone very dear to me.’
She nods wisely. ‘Is that why you went into the river?’
A bold question. To his surprise, he finds it comforting, rather than intrusive. It’s the comfort of invited confession.
‘Yes. I think I wanted to pay God back, by committing the worst of sins – the self-destruction of His own creation. They say He loves us all. Well, I suppose I wanted to remind Him what it’s like to lose someone you love deeply.’
‘If a man should esteem me that much, I should think myself blessed.’
‘But I couldn’t even do that properly. The river spat me out.’ She looks at him in silence for a moment.
‘Good,’ she says, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Good.’
In the Paris Garden they eat coney roasted on a brazier. Afterwards they watch a bear dance to a jig his master plays on a hurdy-gurdy. The beast has a sorrowful look in his yellow eyes, as though he’s dreaming of distant forests. He seems quite tame. Bianca gives him an apple, which he chews with stumpy teeth.
As they walk back along the river, Nicholas picks his moment.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
‘Then ask it. Like that poor bear, I do not bite. At least, not too sharply.’
‘When I recovered from my fever, you told me you’d treated me with theriac.’
‘It worked, didn’t it? It appears not to have poisoned you.’
‘Theriac is a medicine of the ancients. The great Galen himself distilled it in the time of the Caesars. Its substance is known only to a few. I don’t know of more than a couple of physicians in London who have it.’
‘Is that so?’ she says, with a nonchalant smile playing on her mouth.
‘So how does a tavern-mistress come by it?’
‘Come with me,’ she says.
The journey does not take long. She says nothing as they walk. Her movements are swift but still graceful. English women, he thinks, don’t move like this. He has to hurry to keep up with her.
In the grim shadow of the Lazar House, just to the west of the Mutton Lane shambles, Bianca stops. Nicholas can smell the river, a pungent mix of mud and putrefaction just out of sight.
Perhaps it had been a house once, or a shop. All that remains of it now is a jumble of blackened bricks and charred timbers, left by the fire that destroyed it. Dead weeds and scraps of plaster lie around the rubble like grey silt. Rangy cats stalk rats amongst the wreckage. Bianca hoists up the hem of her gown. Nicholas follows her across the wasteland.
At the back of the plot is a wall of sagging brickwork and crooked timber, about ten feet high. He guesses it might have been the back wall of a courtyard once. It is pierced by a
stone arch with an ancient door. Looming beyond the wall is the roof of the Lazar House itself.
Seen up close, the door looks as though it’s not been opened since Henry was on the throne. Yet to his surprise, when Bianca takes a key from the sleeve of her gown, it swings easily on new hinges.
‘Timothy’s father is a locksmith,’ she explains, seeing the look on his face. She beckons him through.
Immediately he is almost overwhelmed by the rich scents that even the November air cannot diminish: winter cherry, mugwort, asarabacca… He is standing in a small space between the adjacent buildings, open to the sky, perhaps thirty feet wide by twenty deep, bordered on the far side by the wall of the Lazar House garden.
‘It’s the poorest physic garden you ever will see,’ she says proudly, spreading her arms to tell him that, however humble, it’s still hers. ‘I have agrimony, toadflax, goatsbeard and comfrey. I can make an infusion of cudweed for aching bones, or a paste of juniper for the dropsy. I’ve pennyroyal for cleansing water, and borage to banish melancholy. In summer I sometimes come here just for the smell.’
He’s seen them before, of course, on his travels. He knows of a barber-surgeon named Gerard who has a garden in Holborn, mostly given over to medicinal herbs. He’d owned a copy of Turner’s Great Herbal and an edition of Bankes’s Treatise – until he sold them to Isaac Bredwell for sixpence each. But he’s not visited the gardens of either man, and as far as he knows, there’s not another private physic garden planted anywhere in England, and certainly not in a patch of waste ground beside the Thames. Now he understands where Bianca Merton goes when she slips away from the Jackdaw.
‘You told me you weren’t an apothecary,’ he says, trying to suppress a grin as he rubs leaves of winter cherry in his palm, smelling the deep scents on his fingertips.
‘I told you no such thing. I told you—’
‘I know what you told me – that day at the Jackdaw, you told me to look out of the window at the tavern sign. You asked me if it was the sign of an apothecary.’
‘And was it?’
‘You know full well it wasn’t.’
‘So there was no lie, was there?’
‘Bianca Merton, you dissemble worse than a fellow of the College of Physicians.’
She smiles sweetly.
‘So why are you the mistress of a tavern on Bankside and not a licensed apothecary with a shop on Cheapside?’
‘Because the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London do not approve of women apothecaries,’ she says hotly. ‘Nor do the Grocers’ Guild and the College of Physicians. They think women should have no place in physic, that we should confine ourselves to mixing paste to sooth the feet of sick cattle.’ She brushes away a lock of hair that has fallen across her brow. Her fingers leave a small streak of dirt and crushed thyme leaf on her skin. ‘And they have set those fine men of the Grocers’ Guild to search out anyone who so much as dries a bunch of herbs in the fireplace.’
‘The Grocers’ Guild has been given its authority to license apothecaries by the queen, to stamp out—’ He stops, realizing he’s about to hurl a boulder into a millpond.
‘Go on, say it,’ she snaps. ‘Charlatans. That’s the word you were thinking of, isn’t it? If I were a charlatan, Nicholas Shelby, you’d be cold in your grave, not standing here defending those bores in the Grocers’ Guild.’
‘I’m not defending them,’ he insists, holding up the palms of his hands as a gesture of peace. He can’t help smiling at her vehemence.
‘Perhaps if I were to wear a horse-hair beard and dress like a man,’ she says, turning with her arms outstretched, so that he might imagine the unlikely spectacle, ‘would that make me more acceptable to the Grocers’ Guild?’
‘Not really. But it might confuse a few at the Tabard.’
She stops turning and gives him a hard stare. ‘The Tabard?’
‘One Isaac Bredwell, bookseller, in particular. He’s convinced you’re a wise-woman, or worse. One of his drunken friends says he saw you flying down Black Bull Alley in the shape of a bat.’
Bianca peals with delight, her anger instantly forgotten. ‘Oh, God’s blood that I was able! I would sink my fangs into Master Bredwell and then refuse to make him a balm to relieve the sting.’
‘You know him?’
‘He paid court to me when I arrived on Bankside. He seemed to think I would beg him to make me respectable. He’s sixty, if he’s a day. And he smells of ink. If he touches anything, he leaves a smudge.’
‘What happened?’
‘What do you think happened? I spurned him.’
‘Kindly?’
‘Not really.’
‘That explains a lot.’
‘Why must people like him always think that a maid who seeks her own path must have a familiar and… and… fly across the face of the moon at midnight?’
‘You own a tavern, you tell me. Perhaps you should water your ale a little.’
She gives him a friendly push. It’s the first time a woman has touched him since Eleanor. Then he thinks of the hours she must have spent mopping the sweat from his body and feeding him her healing potions. A warm wave of gratitude flows over him.
‘You still haven’t told me how you make the theriac,’ he says. ‘There’s more to it than just herbs. Galen put snake-flesh into his. Don’t tell me you have your own pit of serpents – I think I’d believe you, if you did.’
‘I brought some vials with me from Italy. They were my father’s.’
‘So you come from a line of apothecaries—’
‘A proud line.’
‘You told me your father was a merchant.’
‘Well, in a manner of speaking, he was. We lived in rooms above his warehouse full of dried plants, spices, alligator skins, horns of the narwhal – you name it, Father probably had a sack of it somewhere. You could call him a merchant of cures.’
As the light begins to fade, Bianca suggests they return to the Jackdaw. By the time they reach Black Bull Alley, Nicholas has rehearsed the words sufficiently to tell her about the child on Vaesy’s dissection table and the real nature of Jacob Monkton’s death. Just telling someone will be a huge relief. But he knows that once those rehearsed words are out of his mouth, the bond he has begun to forge with Bianca will change for ever. It will not be a gift he is giving her, it will be a terrible burden. He’s about to speak – reluctantly – when a voice suddenly breaks into his thoughts.
‘Mercy, what have we here?’
‘Well, talk of the Devil,’ whispers Bianca.
At the end of the lane stands the bookseller, Isaac Bredwell. Beside him is a huge fellow of about twenty with fiery auburn hair, his face red-veined and sweaty with drink. Around his great stomach is tied a grubby leather apron. He wears a cloth cap on his head and his great fists rest on his hips, elbows thrust aggressively wide.
‘Ned Monkton,’ Bianca whispers in Nicholas’s ear, ‘the brother of the boy they found at the Mutton Lane stairs yesterday. He looks drunk.’ She gives the two men a direct and confident smile. ‘Go back to your father, Ned,’ she says calmly. ‘He needs you. There’s no profit for you here, troubling innocent folk out for a walk.’
Nicholas can’t help staring at Ned Monkton. He looks the sort of fellow to steer clear of, especially when he’s in his cups. Has he been on the ale because of Jacob? he wonders. He must know about his brother’s death by now. Even if the constable didn’t send him word personally, news travels fast on Bankside. He can hear the voice of the bystander on the jetty: If Ned sees him like this, he’ll start knocking holes in the brickwork. You know what he’s like…
Ned Monkton bares his teeth in a grin that’s halfway towards a snarl. He swaggers closer, leering at Bianca, seemingly oblivious to Nicholas’s presence. The ale has made him bold.
‘If the witch here don’t want you, Isaac,’ he says, ‘maybe she’s ripe for a younger buck. What say you – witch?’
It has not escaped Nicholas’s notice that, apart from the four
of them, the lane is empty. Nor does he need to study Ned Monkton’s flushed face or his belligerent posture to know he is not a man likely to be agreeable to reason. ‘Be peaceable, friend,’ he says softly. ‘We mean you no ill. Let us pass.’
‘Away, friend,’ spits Ned Monkton, pushing Nicholas aside without even glancing at him.
‘Ned, your father wouldn’t like to see you like this,’ Bianca says, standing her ground. ‘Hasn’t he suffered enough?’
But Ned isn’t listening to her. ‘Witch-whore,’ he growls viciously. ‘Papist witch-whore!’
Whatever sympathy Nicholas might have felt for this man vanishes instantly. It’s been a while since he was in a proper fight. He’d been too drunk to remember much of the scrap that left him bloodied in the Greyfriars cemetery, and throwing the occasional rowdy out of the Jackdaw doesn’t really count as serious face-to-face bloodletting. But he knows, from treating knife and sword wounds, that London street brawls can quickly turn fatal, and if he’s learned anything in medicine it’s that a speedy cure is usually the best cure. So without warning, he hits Ned Monkton just below the corner of the left eye with all the force he can throw into his fist.
It’s a lucky shot. Monkton’s legs give way like a poleaxed heifer. He sags in an untidy heap in the mud. Nick is about to give him a kick in the groin to make sure he’s not going to get up in a hurry, when Isaac Bredwell strikes him on the back of his head with something very solid.
As Nicholas goes down, he’s taunted by a fleeting image: a wooden cudgel lying against a volume of Italian poetry. He hears Bredwell’s voice toll like a deep bell. ‘You should have listened to me when you had the chance, Shelby. I tried to be charitable.’
Nicholas sprawls in the dirt, the stench of horse-dung rank in his nostrils. The back of his skull seems to be ablaze. Clusters of fireflies swarm across his vision. The whole lane seems to have filled with a red fog. Ned Monkton is back on his feet, bending over him. And that indistinct gleam where Monkton’s hand should be must be the blade of a knife. He can almost feel the razor edge of it tearing through his stomach.