by S. W. Perry
‘I studied the parish subsidy roll, Dr Lopez,’ Nicholas says quietly. ‘Solomon Mandel was described there as “the Turk’s man”. Was he once a servant of some sort – to a Moor?’
‘Solomon?’ Lopez says with a dry rasp of laughter. ‘Solomon was no man’s servant. He was an honest merchant, a factor for the Moor traders selling spices to English importers.’
‘You mean he was their agent in London?’
‘Yes. He kept an eye on their interests: sent them news of how much the Venetians were charging for handling Indies spices, that sort of thing. When the envoy of the Sultan of Morocco came to London in 1589, Solomon was his interpreter – he spoke the Moor’s language.’
‘So the Turk mentioned in the subsidy roll could be the Moroccan envoy?’
‘Or one of his companions. He came with several gentlemen of the sultan’s court.’
The curtain is pulled aside and Nicholas sees the river stairs, slick with rain, stretching out into the water. At the far end the awning of a tilt-boat rises and falls, adding to the strange discomfort in his stomach.
‘Thank you, Dr Lopez. You’ve been a great help. I apologize again if you thought me uncivil at the feast. Sometimes I can be a little disputatious. Usually I manage to keep my arguments confined to the College of Physicians.’
Lopez’s pale eyes widen in belated recognition. ‘Of course, I have it now – you’re the young fellow whose wife and child died. The one who threw his practice aside. Now I remember the name.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘That explains your desire to overturn the apple cart. I hope it brings you comfort, Dr Shelby. But I fear it will only leave you with more unanswered questions. Take the advice of an old man: stay with what is known.’
Nicholas steps down from the carriage. The curtain closes behind him. A last flurry of rain stings his face. Head down, he hurries towards the waiting tilt-boat, while behind him the carriage rolls away with a funereal rumble of its heavy wooden wheels.
10
Farzad has run away because of something Bianca has said to him, something she cannot remember – and wouldn’t have meant anyway. As a consequence, he has drowned. With some wholly imagined insult ringing in his ears, he has stumbled on the riverbank and fallen in. And it’s all the fault of her too-hasty tongue, she tells herself in frequent moments of self-recrimination, as if the more guilt she can shoulder, the more likelihood there is of Farzad walking into her shop to tell her it’s all been nothing but a silly misunderstanding.
As she unlocks the door to her shop on Dice Lane the morning after Nicholas’s visit to Cecil House – making a mental note to have Timothy grease the ancient hinges – she tells herself: He’ll come today. I shall not cry. Nor will I box his ears. I shall confine myself to a simple ‘We’ve been worried about you. Welcome home’ – at least until she’s had the chance to embrace Farzad. After that, he’ll have to take his medicine like a man.
But to her continuing dismay, when the first visitor of the day enters, admitting a gust of wind that flutters the sprigs of herbs hanging from the rafters, it is not Farzad, but Cathal Connell. For a dreadful moment she fears he’s come to tell her the lad’s body has been found bobbing on the tide at Lyon Quay.
‘So this is where you brew your love-philtres an’ your spells, is it?’ he says, his scoured face cracking into a grin.
As he moves further into the little chamber, ducking under the larger bunches of borage and wild campion, elder and elecampane, Bianca sees he isn’t alone. A second man follows close on his heels. And when this one turns from closing the door behind him, she sees that he is as different from the master of the Righteous as he could possibly be.
Where Connell has the wild-eyed look of famine about him, his companion is well fleshed, commanding even. In contrast to Connell’s sailor’s slops, he wears an expensive cloak, the fine Muscovy fur trim slicked against the leather. To shame Connell’s simple cap, he sports a jaunty banded hat with what might have been an osprey’s feather in it – before the rain got to it. Removing the hat, he flicks at the feather with his fingers to coax it back into shape.
Good-looking, Bianca can’t help but think. A man so well turned out would have every purse-diver and trickster on Bankside trotting in his wake, were it not for the fact that today they’d half-drown before they could get within striking distance.
‘God must be grief-stricken, what with all these heavenly tears pourin’ out of the sky,’ Connell says, shaking the rain off the cuffs of his sailcloth coat. ‘Is He weeping ’cause Mistress Merton ain’t wed yet?’
‘It’s just raining, Captain Connell, that’s all,’ Bianca answers wearily. ‘I fear the courtliness is wasted.’
She still remembers how Kit Marlowe had come sniffing around the Jackdaw – two years ago now, she realizes with a start – pouring the same sickly-sweet treacle into her ears. And look what that got me, she thinks: a conscience troubled by murder.
‘On such a jewel, never.’
Ignoring him, she asks, ‘And who might this gentleman be? He doesn’t look in need of an apothecary.’
‘Reynard Gault, Mistress,’ says the well-dressed one, bending a formal knee to her, ‘of the Worshipful Company of Grocers.’
So that’s it, she thinks, biting her tongue. Ever since Nicholas’s friend, Lord Lumley, had convinced the Grocers’ Company to issue her apothecary’s licence, Bianca has known they would eventually get round to paying her a visit. She’s surprised it’s taken them so long. Perhaps they expected her to fail. Perhaps they’d simply forgotten they had licensed a woman. Either way, the visit is unwelcome – doubly so at this time.
‘Then you are doubly welcome. I am honoured, sir,’ she says, trying to wring a drop of politeness from her jaw. She turns to Connell. ‘I had no notion you moved amongst such quality, Captain Connell.’
Gault answers for him. ‘I also happen to be a leading member of the Barbary Company, Mistress Merton. We are a monopoly founded by the Earls of Leicester and Warwick, and licensed by the queen. It is our mission to expand this realm’s trade into the lands of the Moor, to the general benefit of the Treasury.’
With yourself running a close second, judging by your fine apparel, she thinks.
‘Captain Connell is the admiral-general of our fleet,’ Gault explains. ‘When he told me of the existence of a Helen of Bankside, I determined at once to see her for myself.’
‘See me for yourself ? I’m not London Bridge, or the Tower, Master Gault. I am not a landmark.’ She glowers at Connell. ‘And as for being admiral-general of – what was it Master Solomon told me: three ships? – well, I can’t imagine how Sir Francis Drake lives with the jealousy.’
Connell grins to show he can take a little teasing. ‘Drake set off around the world with only five. If I come back from our next voyage to the Barbary shore one-tenth as rich as he, I’ll be happy enough.’
Gault begins a slow circuit of the shop, which Bianca finds uncomfortably intrusive. He peers into shelves full of caskets of dried herbs; pulls out bunches of the sea holly she prescribes for low libido; holds up to the light the decoctions of hoarhound she uses to ease discomfort of the menses; sniffs the elecampane roots she grinds into ale for failing eyesight. Wishing him and his cadaverous admiral out of her shop before the customers arrive, Bianca wipes her hands on her apron to signify that she has work to do and says to Gault, ‘How may I be of service to you, sir? Only I have some medicines to mix for Dr Shelby.’
‘A physician, on Bankside?’ he says, halting his inspection. ‘How in the name of Christ’s wounds does he make a profit?’
‘I don’t think he does.’
‘Then why is he here?’
Bianca ducks down to peer at the grey sky through the little front window. ‘Probably for the sunshine.’
‘Well, it can’t be for the reward.’
‘That rather depends on what you mean by reward.’
Connell lets out a desiccated laugh. ‘How is Dr Nicholas
Shelby, by the way? Preparing for his voyage to the land of the Moor, I take it.’
That brings Bianca up with a start. ‘How do you know about that?’ she asks, almost dropping the pestle she’s taken up, to pound some mullein leaves in a mortar.
‘He mentioned it to me himself.’
‘When?’
‘At the marriage feast. Where, I might add, you outshone the bride like a thousand stars outshine a solitary candle.’
This must be how it feels to be wooed by a corpse, she thinks. ‘Well, he’s not going. He told me so himself.’ She turns her gaze on Gault. ‘If there’s nothing else I can do for you, there’s a little girl on Kent Street with the belly-ache. Her mother will not thank me for wasting time in idle discourse.’
‘There is nothing idle about my visit here, Mistress,’ Gault says. ‘I am visiting the apothecaries to ensure they are prepared for an increase in the number of plague cases, should the weather turn milder.’ His voice takes on a harder edge. ‘And also to root out charlatans.’
The implication is obvious. Bianca stops pounding the mullein leaves. ‘I’ve been called any number of things, Master Gault,’ she says, wondering if there’s a law in England against breaking the fine nose of a member of the Grocers’ Company with a stone pestle, and whether the penalty might be bearable, ‘from a papist harlot to a witch. Mostly by men who felt aggrieved because I would not suffer their courting. But no one has ever accused me of being a charlatan.’
Gault settles his hat carefully on his head. It takes a couple of twists before he’s satisfied. Then he makes a pretty little bow to her. ‘I’m sure they haven’t. But there’s always a first time for everything, Mistress Merton.’
Nicholas finds Bianca where Rose told him she would be: in her physic garden, her secret place known only to a select few, a walled enclosure between Black Bull Alley and the old Lazar House, close enough to the river to hear it whispering. It is the place where she grows many of the flowers and herbs she uses in her medicines. It is also where she goes when her thoughts become heavy.
The rain has stopped by the time Nicholas crosses the patch of waste ground set between the gable ends of two houses. He pushes open the old wooden door set into the sagging brick wall.
She is kneeling at one of the beds, tending it with the reverence of a novice in holy orders. He watches her for a while in silence, until some second sense makes her look over her shoulder. She stands up, takes off her leather work-mittens and walks towards him.
They meet between the sow-fennel and the pellitory. The spent rain has left so much of itself in the air that her brow gleams with its moisture. An errant wave of her hair has fallen across one eye. He pushes it away, feeling its wet heaviness against his fingers. And then, without either of them having seemed to make any form of conscious decision to jump across the last remaining divide, they are kissing.
And this time it is as unlike their last public embrace – beneath the kissing knot at the Jackdaw – as a single whisper is to a choir in full flood. It is almost bruising. Thirty months of denial ripped to shreds in an instant.
When at last they draw apart, she says breathlessly, ‘That was so much easier than the last time, wasn’t it? Why did we wait so long?’
‘You know why.’
‘And do I now take it that Dr Shelby is healed?’
It is the hardest question he’s ever had to answer, and the easiest.
‘Yes.’
She fixes him with a gaze that demands his honesty. ‘Then tell me, how does it feel?’
‘To kiss you?’
‘To be a free man, Nicholas. A slave to no one?’
‘Terrifying – in a good way.’
Something in his expression causes a flicker of doubt to cross her amber eyes. ‘Really? Are you really free, Nicholas? Can you look at me and say: I, Nicholas Shelby, promise you, Bianca Merton, that I am no longer troubled by ghosts? That I am a free man; free to do – and to love – as I please?’
He wants so much to say yes. But lying to this woman would feel like broken glass on his tongue.
Sensing his hesitation, she pushes him away. ‘What is it, Nicholas? What’s wrong?’
‘It’s not Eleanor, I promise you that.’
‘Then kiss me again – if you dare to. Prove it to me. Show me that you’re free.’
‘But I’m not, am I? Nor are you. Look around us: Solomon Mandel is dead; Farzad is missing – perhaps also dead. Then there’s the past: little Ralph Cullen, Ned’s brother Jacob; Tanner Bell and Finney, those two boys that Dr Arcampora had murdered… And what about the deaths we caused? – Gabriel Quigley; Arcampora and his two thugs, Dunstan and Florin; Sir Fulke Vaesy’s wife Katherine… When does it end, this dainty measure we dance with death?’
It’s the first time he’s seen ugliness in Bianca’s face. A scowl of pain.
‘Do you think I don’t have the same thoughts, Nicholas? Sometimes, just before I’m fully awake, I see those two men falling from the bridge – the bridge I led them to, knowing full well what would happen. I tell myself they had to die in order for you to live. But let us face the truth, Nicholas: we are both murderers now.’
For a while they stand there, like two passing strangers who thought they might have known each other once.
‘We must both live with what we have done,’ Bianca says at length. ‘We must believe it was done for good, not for evil. Then we can be free.’ She looks around the garden; draws strength from it, as she always has. ‘Enough dark talk, Nicholas. Have we lost the moment – or do you want to kiss me again?’
‘More than anything.’
‘Then what’s stopping you?’
The look he gives her is that of a man who knows he’s taking his last glimpse of the world before he loses his sight. ‘I have to go away for a while.’
For a moment she doesn’t understand him. Is he going back to Suffolk to be with his family? Is he leaving to join his friend John Lumley at Nonsuch, fleeing the city lest the contagion spreads?
And then it dawns on her.
‘You’re going to Marrakech!’
For a moment he cannot speak. The speech he’d prepared on the way from his lodgings has deserted him. It wasn’t meant to happen like this.
‘How do you know?’ he manages lamely.
She clasps her hands over her head, as though a great truth that she’s failed to see has suddenly become visible. ‘I didn’t, until now. But apparently Cathal Connell did. He came to my shop. He asked me if you were preparing for the voyage. I told him you weren’t going. Obviously I was wrong.’
‘I was going to tell you—’
But the anger is already rising in her, hardening her face and making her fingers fidget. ‘So now I know the truth – this ghost you can’t let lie. It isn’t Eleanor. It’s Robert Cecil!’
‘It’s not like that!’
‘That man brings us nothing but ill, Nicholas,’ she barks, the hard accent of the Veneto suddenly blooming to the surface of her voice. ‘How much coin has he paid for your obedience this time?’
‘He’s not offering me money. He’s offering the possibility to do some good with my skills.’
‘But you are doing good with them. There are people here on Bankside who’d be dead, were it not for you.’
‘And I rely on Robert Cecil’s favour to allow me to continue treating them. He could snatch that favour away in an instant.’ He sweeps one hand through the air for emphasis. ‘And what then? I could barely earn a living here on Bankside, and only then by treating those who could afford to pay me. Robert Cecil is offering me the opportunity to really cause a stir amongst the College of Physicians. If I did nothing else, helping to put an end to the charlatans who feast on the poor and the desperate would be a goodly legacy, wouldn’t it?’
‘Charlatans?’ She lets out an explosive huff of contempt. ‘You sound just like Connell’s friend.’
‘Who?’
‘The very expensively attired Reynard Gault,’ she says,
her amber eyes glinting with smouldering anger.
For a moment the name means nothing to him. Then he remembers his conversation with Connell at the wedding feast: Gault – the man Robert Cecil had sent to arrange his passage aboard the Righteous.
‘You’ve spoken to him?’ he asks tentatively. ‘How?’
‘Connell brought him to my shop. Apparently he has some power in the Grocers’ Company. Rooting out charlatans, because of the plague. I could have punched him.’
‘I swear I hadn’t intended you to find out this way,’ Nicholas says earnestly, desperate to ensure Bianca doesn’t realize that Cecil was behind Gault’s visit to Dice Lane. ‘I came here to tell you. But you’ve beaten me to the mark.’
‘When do you leave?’ Her voice has a skein of ice forming on it.
‘In a few days.’
‘Are you coming back?’
‘Of course! Just as soon as my commission from Cecil is concluded.’
‘And Farzad? And Solomon Mandel? Have you forgotten them so quickly?’
‘Farzad could be anywhere. If he’s alive, I don’t think he wants us to find him.’
‘What if the plague should spread to Bankside? Our need of a good physician will be all the greater.’
‘I’ve already told you: physic has no remedy. I’d be of no more use than the charlatans Gault has his eye upon.’
‘What changed your mind?’
The ice in her voice has thickened, he notices. He imagines he can hear it crackling. ‘Yesterday at Robert Cecil’s table, listening to Francis Bacon, I realized I’m not the only one who doubts the present practice of physic. You should have heard Bacon speak, Bianca. It inspired me. Cecil has shown me a future I had never imagined.’
‘He’s made you another of his promises, that’s what he’s done.’
‘It is not like that.’
‘And you’ve fallen for it.’ She looks away, her anger now alloyed with disappointment. ‘Oh, Nicholas! You’re worse than a giddy maid who believes a handsome rakehell when he promises her the world – if only she’ll hitch up her kirtle for a minute or two. Jesu, I thought you better than that!’