by S. W. Perry
The Jackdaw has seldom looked so resplendent. Fresh paint gleams on the lintel. The ivy around the little latticed windows is neatly trimmed. The irregular timbers appear to be merely resting, rather than sagging under the three hundred years of travail they’ve endured, holding up the ancient brickwork. As Nicholas follows Bianca through the doorway, he catches the mingled tang of hops, wood-smoke and fresh rushes. From her place by the hearth, the Jackdaw’s dog, Buffle, looks up at their arrival, wags her tail once and promptly goes back to sleep.
It has not been easy for Bianca to stay away, now that she’s left the daily management of the tavern to Rose, her former maid, and to Ned Monkton. She suspects that if her apothecary shop was not doing such brisk business, she’d be poking her head over the threshold every other hour.
Almost immediately she spots Ned. He’s standing in the centre of the taproom, casting an appraising eye at the scattering of breakfasters like a fiery-bearded Celtic chieftain after a good battle. Seeing her, he smooths his apron over his great frame and attempts a gallant bending of the knee.
‘Mistress Bianca! ’Pon my troth, ’tis wondrous good to see you,’ he says. ‘Rose has the accounts ready, if you’ve come to see them. Just squiggles to me, but she assures me they’re in order.’
‘I’m sure they are, Ned,’ Bianca says, with more confidence than she feels. Trusting Rose to keep anything in order – especially from a distance – has not come easily to her.
At the sound of Bianca’s voice, Rose comes hurrying from the kitchen like a plump partridge flushed by a spaniel. Running a hand quickly through her black curls, she bobs in obeisance. ‘Mistress, I wasn’t expecting—’
Bianca smiles. ‘Rose, dear, you don’t have to courtesy. I’ve cancelled your indenture, remember? You’re no longer my servant. You’re not beholden to me in any way.’ The faintest lift of a fine Paduan eyebrow. ‘Unless, of course, your accounting is deficient.’
An abbess accused of running a jumping-shop couldn’t look half as horrified at the suggestion as Rose does. ‘Mercy, Mistress! I’ve been diligent,’ she protests, her cheeks blushing. ‘Like you instructed: Walter Pemmel to have no credit beyond ninepence; Parson Moody to settle his slate promptly every Sunday, an’ a penny on his ale each time he starts singing those songs of his – the one with the nuns in them…’
Nicholas listens with a sad smile of remembrance on his face, and wonders if it might be practical to rent just the downstairs room at Mistress Muzzle’s.
‘I’m sure you’re doing everything to the letter, Rose,’ Bianca says, giving her a belated kiss of greeting. ‘To be honest, I’m more concerned about trade.’
‘It has been quiet, Mistress,’ admits Ned. ‘But then all Bankside is quiet, given what’s happening across the river. Strangers aren’t exactly welcome these days. You don’t know what they might be bringing with them.’
‘Well, here is the man who can tells us first-hand,’ Bianca says, fixing Nicholas with a challenging stare. ‘You were chewing the cud with a member of the Privy Council this morning, Nicholas. What does your friend the Lord Treasurer’s son say?’
‘Apparently the pestilence is confined around the Fleet ditch and Holborn. But if the queen decides to postpone her new parliament and retire to Greenwich or Windsor, many in the city will take it as a signal to leave.’
‘Those who have the luxury,’ Bianca says fiercely.
‘Yes. That’s what I told Robert Cecil.’
She jams her fists into her waist and defiantly thrusts out her elbows. ‘Well, we’ll keep the place scrubbed clean, and burn rosemary and angelica in all the candle sconces. Fresh rushes every day, and if we have lodgers, then boil the bed sheets on Mondays and Thursdays. Use the pottage cauldron if you must, Rose, but for heaven’s sake make sure it’s clean before you do. I don’t want the bed linen dyed brown and smelling of turnips.’ She looks at Nicholas. ‘Any other suggestions, Dr Shelby?’
‘None that would be any more effective, Mistress Merton.’
‘We could all run away to Marrakech, of course,’ she says teasingly.
‘Marry who?’ Rose demands with a scowl.
‘Marrakech. It’s place, dear. A long way away. Nicholas knows where it is, don’t you, Nicholas?’
For a moment Rose looks about to cry. ‘But the marriage is to be here, on Bankside! It’s all arranged. We’ve even hung up the kissing knots.’ She points to the little woven balls of greenery hanging from the ceiling beams. ‘There’s a special one by the window, for you and Master Nicholas. Go on, we’ve all been waiting.’
‘Rose!’
But Rose gives an impertinent toss of her head that has her black curls rippling across her brow. ‘You can’t be cross, Mistress – you said I wasn’t indentured any more.’
Ned Monkton grins. ‘You’ll have to try it out, Mistress – see if it works. We all spent hours putting them up. Rose insisted.’ He turns to the nearest booth, where an elderly man with a long threadbare white beard and a tight-fitting black cap on his head is taking his breakfast. ‘Isn’t that so, Master Mandel?’
Solomon Mandel, a Jew who lives in the lane beyond the public well, licks his fingers clean. ‘Rose had me perched on a stool to put that thing up there,’ he says crossly. ‘Imagine it – me, at my age!’
‘If I recall rightly, Master Solomon, you insisted on helping,’ says Rose. ‘And I vaguely recall you dancing a little measure while you were doing it.’
The image of the usually reserved Solomon Mandel dancing on a chair while he ties a kissing knot to the rafters is a startling one for Nicholas. Mandel is a reserved fellow who lives alone and goes about his trade – importing foreign spices – without fanfare. He has been a regular at the Jackdaw since shortly after Farzad’s arrival became common knowledge on Bankside. He’d enquired, in a strange tongue, if the young Persian could cook a certain bread that neither Rose nor Bianca had ever heard of. When Farzad said yes, Mandel almost wept with joy. From that day on, he’s arrived promptly at daybreak for his breakfast of kubaneh.
‘You are a tyrant, Mistress Rose, a veritable tyrant, do you hear?’ Mandel says, wagging a cautionary finger in her direction. ‘Making an old man stand on a chair just so you can crow to all Southwark that you’ve witnessed Master Nicholas and Mistress Bianca exchanging a kusch.’ He looks in their direction, his moist old eyes set far back in their caves. ‘If it’s going to happen, could you two please get on with it, so I can finish Farzad’s excellent kubaneh?’
Seeing the trap that’s been laid for them, Bianca begins to protest. ‘Oh no, no, no…’
‘We have to go,’ says Nicholas, coming to her aid. ‘I’m bound to have patients to see—’
But the ambush has been too well set. The quarry is surrounded.
Farzad arrives from the kitchen, grinning all over his round face, while Timothy the taproom lad appears as if from nowhere and begins hopping from table to table, leading the customers in a rising tattoo of table-thumping. Ned and Rose all but march the couple to where the kissing knot hangs like a waiting noose.
There is no way out. Within minutes the event will be the talk of Bankside. It’s happened at last… Solomon Mandel saw it with his own eyes… Walter Askew, the waterman, was there having breakfast, and you know he’s too stupid to lie… Mercy! – how long has that taken them?… I thought we were going to have to wait for the Second Coming before they saw sense…
As kisses go, it’s really rather unremarkable – hardly unbridled. It’s not reticence that makes it so. Indeed, each has known this moment would come eventually. It’s just that neither of them ever expected it to happen in the middle of the Jackdaw’s taproom, to the enthusiastic approval of a dozen or more witnesses. Nevertheless, it’s a kiss that falls a long way short of Puritan.
It is only when Rose’s voice intrudes that Bianca and Nicholas notice everyone has stopped pounding the tables.
‘Fie, Mistress,’ she is saying, ‘anyone would think it was you and Master Nicholas ge
tting wed, and not me and Ned!’
Bianca puts her hands to her cheeks. They feel as hot as the sides of a bread oven. She runs her fingers through the dense waves of her hair, noticing the beads of sweat on her brow. A part of her wishes the ground would open up and swallow her. The other part wishes she hadn’t invited Rose to use her chamber upstairs as her own.
And Nicholas? What is he thinking as he feels the extraordinary heat of her body through his fingertips?
In part, absence. Absence of guilt. Of grief. Of ghosts. Absence, at last, of Eleanor. And in its place, a growing understanding that it may indeed be possible for him to love two women and be faithless to neither. But most of all, he feels a desire that he thought was lost to him for ever.
All these thoughts – and more – tumble through their minds in the brief moment Nicholas and Bianca remain standing face-to-face, breathless, not quite able to believe they have finally crossed over from thought to deed. From past to future. It is a pause worth taking, because whatever public face they show now to Bankside, there is no going back.
‘Fine, you’ve all had your fun,’ Bianca says at last, raising her voice as a new outbreak of table-thumping closes the performance. ‘If you want more entertainment, you’ll have to wait for the Lord Mayor to reopen the Rose.’ She points a commanding finger. ‘Farzad – back to the kitchen. And those trenchers won’t clean themselves, Timothy.’
Deciding that the only way to shut the door on what has just happened is by being strictly businesslike, she draws Nicholas, Ned and Rose aside. ‘Before that happy little jape, Ned was telling us that trade is quiet. How quiet?’
‘The regulars are still coming, Mistress,’ says Ned. ‘And we’re still getting lodgers from the country who want to rest up before crossing the bridge. It’s the trade coming in the opposite direction – down by half, at least. Anyone would think the Puritans have taken over the City Corporation.’
‘Then we must bring in more custom,’ Bianca says, adopting her practical tone. ‘We need people with coin and the inclination to spend it.’
‘Goodwife Shelby,’ teases Solomon Mandel, curling his finger as he beckons to her from his nearby alcove. ‘I might have the answer to your problem.’
Bianca crosses to his bench and kneels beside him. She feels her face glowing. She has the awful feeling it will never stop glowing. ‘I am not Goodwife Shelby. It was a kiss, Master Mandel, not a marriage contract.’
Mandel sucks the crumbs off his thumb. ‘Oh, the women in this realm! The queen won’t marry. You won’t marry. No wonder the gallants have nothing to fill their hours with but writing verse!’
Bianca leans forward and whispers sweetly, ‘Perhaps you’d like to breakfast in the Good Husband. They won’t cook your special bread, and if you choose the sprats, don’t come seeking a cure for the flux from Master Nicholas.’
‘Ships, Mistress,’ says a chastened Mandel.
‘What of them?’
‘There are three Barbary Company argosies unloading at Lyon Quay,’ Mandel says. ‘The Righteous, the Marion and the Luke of Bristol. They arrived from Morocco last week. Captain Connell is their commodore. He’s an acquaintance of mine. We’ve traded spices together. Make him an offer.’
‘Three ships – that must be sixty thirsty mariners at least,’ Bianca muses. ‘Tell your friend Captain Connell that he can drink here for free, and we’ll stand his crew every fifth jug.’ She looks at Ned and Rose. ‘Do you concur?’
‘Aye, Mistress,’ says Rose. ‘It’s still your tavern.’
‘And Master Mandel may have as much of Farzad’s bread as he wishes, free until Easter. Does that please?’
‘It pleases,’ Mandel says with the sort wistful smile permitted to old men with good intentions. ‘I’d ask for a kiss, too, but judging by the time it’s taken for you and Dr Shelby to dance love’s measure, I doubt I’ve got the years left in me to wait.’
She leans over and gives his beard a gentle tug. ‘Then I’ll have to dance a little faster, won’t I?’ And with that, she gives him a kiss on his mottled forehead.
As she walks away to re-join Nicholas, Ned and Rose, something makes her look back over her shoulder at the solitary Solomon Mandel. He is one of barely a handful of Jews still living in London, and the only one in Southwark. The few others of his kind live in the House of Converts on Chancery Lane. He is staring down at the crumbs on his trencher as though he’s looking at the fragments of a life that was long ago lost to him. As if he’s assessing the pieces, before making a final accounting of it. The sight fills her with a deep sadness.
Later, when she has cause to think of Solomon Mandel again, she will remember this moment. She will also remember something her mother once said to her: the gift of second sight is no use to anyone, if they don’t comprehend what they’re seeing.
4
There are men on Bankside who look as though they might kill you for stepping on their shadow. For the most part they take their ease in the darker taverns, the cock-fighting pits and the bear-baiting ring. Occasionally one or two might try their luck in the Jackdaw, requiring Bianca or Rose to point out the size of Ned Monkton’s fists. But Cathal Connell, Bianca thinks, would put any one of them in fear of a cutting.
The captain of the Barbary trader Righteous is a parchment-skinned cadaver in a patched and padded russet doublet. He has the eyes of an old executioner who’s forgotten what mercy is, though something tells her he’s barely reached forty years. She can picture him staring at an empty horizon, wondering how long the rancid contents of the water casks will last, unsure of what he fears most: shipwreck or a safe landfall. Yet when he speaks, it is with the soft, dry voice of a poet.
‘Well now, I see ’tis true,’ he says, making an extravagant knee to her. ‘The Jew did not lie. There is an Aphrodite hiding herself away in Southwark, amongst the thieves and the tricksters. A diamond lost in the midden – who’d have thought it?’
‘Not an Aphrodite, Master Connell, more a Circe,’ Bianca replies, trying not to stare at the salt-flayed skin of his face.
‘Forgive the lack of education,’ he says with a smile that would be self-deprecating if it didn’t look more like an attack of the palsy, ‘I’m a simple Irishman from Leinster.’
‘Circe was a goddess who could turn men into crawling beasts by a single look. You’ll probably have heard someone round here say that about me.’
A tight smile pulls the skin across the sides of his skull. ‘I did hear something along those lines, when I made my enquiries.’
‘You’ve made enquiries?’
‘I don’t care much for sailing into uncharted harbours, Mistress Merton. That’s how lives are lost.’
‘And what, pray, did you hear?’
‘That you can heal. That you have the second sight. That you’re the one witch nobody dares hang.’
She smiles as if he’s paid her a great compliment. ‘It’s a pity they haven’t found anything new to say about me.’
‘I was told you once were taken up by Robert Cecil for being a Catholic. And instead of the scaffold, somehow you came back in the queen’s own barge.’
‘They’re inventive, the people of Southwark.’
‘So it’s a lie?’
‘Part of it.’
‘Which part?’
‘The barge. It belonged to the Cecils, not the queen.’
She watches the uncertainty playing in his eyes and tries not to laugh. But there’s no doubt in her mind that he has the capacity for great violence. She supposes that if a man spends his life facing the worst that storm and ocean can hurl at him, then perhaps the violence one man may do to another is a small thing by comparison.
‘I have to admit I was surprised by the offer,’ he says. ‘Me and my crew don’t often get invited into taverns; we usually get invited to leave them.’
‘If your coin is good, and your men’s behaviour moderate, you’re welcome, Captain Connell. And if not, Master Ned over there eats rowdy boys the way a whale
eats little fishes: in vast numbers.’
Connell glances to where Ned is clearing away a trencher from a recently vacated booth. ‘God’s nails, he’s a big bugger, ain’t he? Is he yours?’
‘Mine?’
‘Your man. That’s something else I heard about you: that you are betrothed.’ He runs a hand over the tight stubble on his scalp. The rasping sound makes Bianca think of someone scrubbing a bloodstain out of a winding sheet.
‘The only people betrothed here are Ned and Rose,’ she says. ‘That’s her over there, with the dark ringlets, serving your men their ale.’
‘When’s the wedding? My fellows like to see a wedding – gives them a proper sense of home to hang on to.’
‘The day after tomorrow. We’re holding the feast here, so if you want to take advantage of my offer, I’d ask you not to act like mariners ashore are sometimes inclined to act. I don’t want Rose to have to spend her wedding night bathing Ned’s knuckles.’
Connell makes another exaggerated bow. ‘I shall have my boys be on their best behaviour, Mistress Merton. The queen herself would not be discomforted by their manners.’
‘Then you’re welcome, Captain Connell.’
‘And this man of yours – will he be there?’
‘I told you, there isn’t “a man”.’
‘That is not quite what you said. Enquiries, remember? He must be some manner of fellow, to have snared such a one as you.’
‘I haven’t been snared, Captain Connell; I’m not a hare.’
‘Then a vixen, perhaps?’ He gives her a look of hungry appraisal. She tries not to shudder.
‘Best behaviour, please, Captain Connell. Or else Circe will have to consider employing her magic again. What shall it be? I think turning you into a boar might suit.’
Her jibe seems to please him. ‘Aye, I could see myself as a boar, Mistress Bianca – tenacious and unpredictable.’ He makes twin tusks out of his index fingers, thrusting them out from his chin.