by S. W. Perry
Ned gives him a doubtful look. ‘The likes of me don’t get admitted to places like Nonsuch.’
‘John Lumley has given me his word that he’ll take you all in. It will be a haven for you, until the pestilence ends.’ He repeats John Lumley’s warning not to tarry. ‘I’m relying on you, Ned.’
‘Then you should give this to Mistress Bianca, Master Nick. Perhaps it might mend what’s amiss between you.’
‘I’ve told you: she won’t see me,’ Nicholas says with a defeated shake of his head. ‘Besides, you how she can be stubborn sometimes. More than sometimes. She’ll probably tear it up, just to make a point. So I’m relying on you to get her to take the sensible course.’
Ned takes the offered paper as though it’s made of gold leaf. ‘You ’ave my word, Master Nick. What’s the second promise?’
‘This voyage I’m taking – it’s not a whim, Ned, whatever Mistress Bianca thinks. If I don’t go, Sir Robert Cecil will take her apothecary shop from her. He’ll have the Grocers’ Company rescind her licence. She doesn’t know that. Promise me you won’t tell her.’
‘I knew there was more to it than meets the eye,’ Ned says with a scowl. ‘You wouldn’t have left her otherwise. What’s that crook-backed bastard making you do?’
‘I can’t tell you, Ned. But this is between you and me. No one else. Swear it?’
‘On my life. She’ll not hear it from Ned Monkton.’ He gives Nicholas a quizzical look. ‘So the Barbary shore, then – that’s a lot further than the journey you and I made to fix that Arcampora fellow, right?’
Nicholas bites his tongue to stop himself laughing. Ned Monkton doesn’t deserve to be mocked. ‘Oh yes,’ he says, peering into his ale. ‘It’s a lot further than Gloucestershire.’
To his untrained eye, the letter is impressive. It is written in elegant court-hand on expensive vellum, in English, Latin and Spanish:
To our right beloved and trusty friend, the princely al-Abbas al-Mansur, King of Barbary, greetings…
‘Did she dictate this?’ Nicholas asks. It is the closest he has come in his life to the presence of the monarch. He cannot deny feeling a little awestruck.
‘The queen? Of course not,’ says Robert Cecil, sealing the letter with his privy councillor’s ring. ‘If we relied upon Her Majesty to set us to action, Philip of Spain would be sitting in Whitehall with his feet up on the table, the Pope would be giving the sermon at St Paul’s, and Mary Stuart would still have her treacherous head. So we anticipate. It’s what privy councillors are for.’
‘And the other part?’ Nicholas enquires.
‘If any good comes from it, then it is our task to point out it was all her idea from the start.’
‘It sounds like a marriage.’
‘Except that the annulment can have fatal consequences,’ Cecil replies, with a snort of laughter that makes his little body lurch like a crow with indigestion.
‘How am I supposed to pay my way while I’m there? Letters of credit?’
‘The Portuguese are paying. Their currency is still accepted by the Moors.’ Cecil points to a small chest that sits on his study table. ‘There were enough ducats aboard the Madre de Deus to send you around the globe a hundred times in some considerable luxury. What’s in there should be plenty for your needs.’ His eyes narrow. ‘I shall expect an accounting, so don’t develop any expensive tastes.’
Next come the secret ciphers. Lord Burghley and his crook-backed son have spies in almost every major city from Paris to Constantinople. For their correspondence to remain secure, it must be encrypted. Robert Cecil shows Nicholas the letter-transposition code in which Adolfo Sykes sent his. ‘Commit this to memory, then burn the paper,’ Cecil tells him. ‘If you happen to recover any messages that Sykes was unable to send, use this to read them and make your assessment on whether they should be dispatched with haste or brought back when you return.’
‘And if they are urgent?’
‘Put them aboard any fast English ship you can find. Tell the master they are urgently expected by the Privy Council, and that he shall have his reward from me.’
‘Should I use the same cipher for my own messages, Sir Robert? If anything ill has befallen Sykes, it could already be compromised.’
Cecil laughs drily. ‘You’re already thinking like an intelligencer. Good.’ He asks Nicholas for a section of prose or poetry. ‘Something you can remember without having to tax your memory.’
‘What about Hippocrates? “Medicine is of all the arts the most noble…” I had to memorise extracts from The Law for my medical studies.’
Cecil makes him write down the first twenty lines. Then he takes up the nib and goes over the text, ringing certain characters, making broad slashes between various letters and words. When he’s content, he says, ‘See: let us say, for example, that you wish to encipher the word send. The first s you come across in your extract can be found at the end of is. Go back a letter – to i. Then forward again, skipping the next five. You arrive at an l. So the first letter of send will be l. The second, the e – first found in the word medicine – will become an n. And so on… Twenty lines will ensure you have a large enough stock, whatever you wish to encipher. Remember: one back, skip five forward. Do you have that in your head?’
Nicholas does. But he also has the awful image of Solomon Mandel’s flayed chest there, too. Just because a word is enciphered doesn’t mean it can’t be revealed.
‘Yes, I have it.’
‘Good. You have your memory – I have this,’ Cecil says, tapping the annotated text. ‘Of course there may be some wholly innocent explanation for why Sykes’s dispatches have ceased. If you cannot find him, or if some ill has befallen him, then seek the Moor courtier I told you about – al-Seddik. He was a gentleman of the sultan’s envoy who came here, back in 1589.’
The Turk’s man. Nicholas wonders if Solomon Mandel’s master had been the Moor al-Seddik.
Robert Cecil picks up a second letter from amongst the many documents on the desktop. ‘Give him this. It is from my father, Lord Burghley. They spoke many times while al-Seddik was in London, and he has a little English. He is an ally. This letter commends you to him.’
‘Did you write this, too?’
‘Of course not, Nicholas,’ says Robert Cecil with a frown. ‘Deceiving one’s queen is one thing. But deceiving one’s father…’
Cecil takes both letters and places them in an expensive leather pouch. Pressing the pouch into Nicholas’s hand, he says, ‘Think how grateful – and generous – Her Grace will be when I am able to assure her that the concord between our two realms is unbroken.’
‘But what if I discover it is broken? What then?’
Cecil claps Nicholas on the shoulder and offers him a mirthless smile. ‘Then we are all relying upon your ingenuity to mend it.’
12
‘He’s keeping something from me, Ned. I know he is.’
Ned Monkton prays silently for a sudden act of God, a loud one with not too many ill consequences – anything that will avert the penetrating stare of those amber eyes.
‘He’s concerned for you, Mistress, what with the pestilence an’ all.’
‘Then why is he leaving us?’ Bianca asks. ‘You’re a man; he must have confided in you. Because I’m certain he’s lying through his teeth to me.’
Ned’s squirm of discomfort makes him look like a bear shaking water from his coat after a swim. ‘P’raps you should go down to Lyon Quay and ask him yourself, before it’s too late. It’s not a goodly thing to part with harsh words.’
‘So he did confess himself to you?’
‘No!’
‘Then what are the two of you hiding from me?’
There can be no harm in telling her of the letter, Ned thinks. It might even put her off the scent. If she persists with the inquisition, he fears he won’t be able to keep to himself Nicholas’s story about Robert Cecil threatening to shut her down.
‘He’s given me a letter, addressed to Lord
Lumley at Nonsuch.’
‘A letter? Should I know what it says? Or is it more of men’s secrets?’
‘If the plague comes south, Master Nick wants us all to seek refuge from it there. He says it’s arranged.’
Her reply is not what he expects, though with Bianca Merton he long ago learned that it seldom is.
‘Arranged?’ she hisses. ‘What are we to him – a bunch of posies to be neatly tied into a garland? Does he not think us capable of our own deliverance?’
‘I think he was trying to help, Mistress,’ Ned says, bemused at the unpredictability of women. Especially women from Padua.
And then, to his further bewilderment, he sees her eyes begin to moisten. But before he can find even the clumsiest words of comfort, she is already on her way out of the Jackdaw.
As Bianca hurries towards the bridge, anger fights a battle with longing for control over her feet.
It is five days now since the exchange with Nicholas in her physic garden. He has been to the Jackdaw more than once, though she’s left Rose in no doubt about her disinclination to see him. This morning, when she awoke in her chamber above the apothecary shop, she thought she saw him standing at the foot of her bed. But it was only the Good Samaritan painted on the wall. Later, at the Jackdaw, she half-expected to see him in the taproom and wondered what she would say to him if she did.
Regardless of what Ned Monkton has just told her, Nicholas clearly does not care one jot for her, otherwise his farewell would have been somewhat more expressive than the self-serving nonsense in the note he’d sent three days ago via Rose. Her eyes hadn’t got past a duty to my patron… improving my prospects of advancement… before she’d crushed the note in her palm and thrown it in the hearth. Where was the though it breaks my heart asunder to leave you…? she demanded out loud, to her empty chamber.
Englishmen, she thinks as she passes the well at the crossroads before Long Southwark – pah!
Aboard the Righteous there is an air of calm purpose. The tide is on the turn and a westerly wind promises a fair passage downriver to the Narrow Sea. The crew seem cheered by the prospect of having a physician amongst them, and in return Nicholas has pulled his weight with the manhandling and stowing of provisions. His offer to assist with the very last of the cargo is, however, politely declined.
It is delivered in a cart escorted by men-at-arms: six wooden straight-sided coffins, the lids nailed down with iron brads. Each crate bears a wool trader’s mark: – two sickles back-to-back.
Being the son of a yeoman, Nicholas knows cloth comes not in boxes, but in wrapped bolts. He studies the deck planks, feigning ignorance, while Robert Cecil’s words ring in his ears: We send Sultan al-Mansur new matchlock muskets, to defend his realm against Spain and Portugal…
With Cathal Connell declaring himself satisfied with the preparations, Nicholas wonders why they are not already casting off from Lyon Quay. Is there some arcane maritime ritual that must first be performed? he wonders. Are they waiting for a priest to come and give the voyage God’s blessing?
His questions are answered a few minutes later when five lads of about Timothy’s age arrive on the quayside. I carry certain young gentlemen for a schooling in seamanship, he can hear Cathal Connell telling him at the wedding feast.
In their plain woollen mariner’s slops and leather jerkins, they look less like gentlemen and more like servants of the man who accompanies them: a tall, well-turned-out fellow in a velvet doublet. Nicholas puts him at about forty. With the pleasing features of a gallant, his obvious wealth and confidence gleam as brightly as the gold rings on his fingers. His beard is as well cut as his clothes, and the breeze across the deck makes his brown forelock dance as eagerly as the pennants fluttering from the ship’s halyards.
‘God give you fair winds, Captain Connell,’ he says as he follows the five apprentices onto the deck. ‘Better yet, may He give you prosperous ones.’
‘Aye, Master Gault,’ Connell replies with his death-mask grimace. ‘For all our sakes.’
Hearing the name, Nicholas looks up from his place by the mainmast shrouds. He sees Gault hand Connell a set of documents, each with a heavy wax seal on a silk ribbon, and hears his reply clearly.
‘These are the young gentlemen’s. You know what they are, Connell. Keep them safe. A goodly profit depends upon them.’
Connell tucks the documents under his arm and consigns the young lads to his sailing master, a scowling brute with a chef’s belly who eyes them up as though he can’t decide whether to instruct or boil them.
‘Your man’s aboard, too, Master Reynard,’ Connell says, nodding at Nicholas.
Gault makes a shallow bow in his direction. ‘Take good care of him,’ he says to Connell, declining to address Nicholas directly. ‘I will have to answer to Sir Robert Cecil should any ill befall him.’
Nicholas replies with a nod. Somehow the exhortation does nothing to make him feel any safer.
In the late-April sunshine Bianca stops in one of the few open spaces on London Bridge. She looks out on the river foaming between the arches. This, she recalls, is the very same place where Ned Monkton, with terrifying ease, pitched the living bodies of Dunstan and Florin – Nicholas’s would-be killers – into the night, the same falling bodies she still sometimes sees in the moment before she wakes.
Today she sees only the masts of the ships moored in the Pool between Southwark and Billingsgate wharf. And the wherries and tilt-boats criss-crossing the muddy brown water. And three tubby little Barbary traders making their slow way downriver on the westerly wind and the tide. She is too late. The Righteous has sailed.
With a longing to catch sight of his face one last time, she wills Nicholas to turn, though she knows full well that at this distance he could not possibly distinguish her from the other folk crossing the bridge. She wonders if he is leaving her in another way, beyond the purely physical. Has Robert Cecil wooed him, filled his head with promises, turned him from one sort of Nicholas into another? That is her deepest fear.
As she watches the three vessels making their way past the grain mills on the southern bank, she wonders if she will ever see him again. The thought of it is like a stab through the heart. But it is the anger in her, still hot, that keeps her from weeping. That I will not do, she thinks; not for any man.
Lost in her thoughts, Bianca is unaware of a young maid with a brightly eager face passing behind her, hurrying home to Southwark. Her name is Ruth. She is returning to the lodgings on Pocket Lane that she shares with her husband, after a week away in the company of a beloved but ailing aunt who lives on Fleet Lane north of the river. Passing the slender young woman in the bottle-green kirtle and carnelian bodice who stares so intently out at the river, Ruth starts to feel uncomfortably hot.
By the time she reaches home she will have a fever. She will awake the next morning to find painful swellings in her armpits. Young and strong, she is in the habit of thanking God for a good constitution. But in a few days she will be dead.
The pestilence has crossed the river.
PART 2
Barbary
13
How does the emptiness not drive a man to insanity?
Save for the Luke of Bristol and the Marion keeping company three cable-lengths astern – or so Nicholas has been informed, though it means little to a landsman like him – there is nothing to feed the eyes but an endless expanse of grey, turbid water. Nothing to hear but the booming of the sails, the groaning of cordage and the shouts of the ship’s sailing master. Nothing against the skin but the stinging salt-wind. And beneath your feet, nothing but a few baulks of oak keeping you from the soundless depths.
Yet the crew go about their toil quietly and efficiently, more at home here than they ever were at the Jackdaw. Standing on the high, boxy sterncastle of the Righteous, Nicholas wonders if perhaps they are born with an instinctive hatred of green hills, city walls and church spires. Or are they so in thrall to the wild-eyed Cathal Connell that an empty horizon, seen f
rom a crazily swaying masthead, means nothing to them?
But if Nicholas has learned only one thing since boarding the Righteous, it is that for all the uncomfortable loneliness of being out on deck, it is far, far worse below. First, there is the endless pitching and rolling, the ever-present risk of being dashed against unyielding timber. Then there is the smell: the rich stink of damp hide and animal waste, which reminds him of the cow byre at Barnthorpe.
The Righteous does not smell because she is dirty, Nicholas has learned, but because in sixty years of seafaring she has absorbed the bodily decoction of all the men who have sailed in her, along with the beasts they have brought with them for milk and meat. No amount of diligent scrubbing can remove it.
And Captain Connell is nothing if not a man of cleanliness and order. He has made that clear from the start. His rules for the voyage have been read out to the crews of all three ships, as not one man in ten can read them for himself: there is to be no cursing on the Sabbath, nor any exchange of ribaldry or dirty tales. All customary services of Her Majesty’s religion must be observed at the appropriate hour – unless any ship be in immediate peril and the hands required to save her. Prayers, in that event, are already a given. Helmsmen and navigators are to make hourly observations of tides, current, stars, moon and sun, to be recorded accurately in each ship’s log, along with any points of land seen and any phenomena of interest. Finally – and here Connell’s voice had risen to a force that carried it clearly above the wind – no sodomy, on pain of death.
This last prohibition, Nicholas has learned, is mostly to protect the young apprentices from the attentions of one or two of their older, more covetous shipmates.
The five lads are quickly shedding their lubberly ways. After only a few days at sea they can take to the rigging as deftly as performing monkeys at the St Bartholomew Fair. When not at their physical labours, they are to be found sitting on the main-deck grating, studying the documents that Gault brought aboard, and which Nicholas assumes are instructions given to tyro seafarers.