by S. W. Perry
Nicholas looks up to check the hatchway is clear, then around at the sleeping, off-watch crew. Why he does this, he is not certain. Perhaps it is the thought that some of the men presently snoring in their hammocks within a few feet of him might be the very same men who hauled Hortop up the ladder to his death. Satisfied that he is not observed, Nicholas opens up the single sheet of expensive vellum.
The proximity of the deck beams requires him to stoop a little, his body shading the document. He moves closer to the shifting square of sunlight.
He is looking at a series of interconnected boxes containing elegantly written court-hand. And around the edge of the vellum, a border of what appears to be heraldic coats of arms. He reads the contents of the first box:
Nicholas frowns, wondering what a shepherd’s son from the Weald of Kent might be doing in possession of such a document. And then his eyes fall to a line at the foot of the page.
It is written in a different hand from the text in the boxes. A single sentence. Spelled out in capital letters:
PROVEN BY DUE AUTHORITY OF THE ROUGE CROIX PURSUIVANT, COLLEGE OF HERALDS
Instantly Nicholas is back in Solomon Mandel’s wrecked lodgings, staring at the two fragments of bloodstained parchment that he lifted from the torture bed. On one is written ROUGE CROIX. On the other, the indecipherable SUIVAN.
Could be suivant – following… he can hear himself saying to Bianca. A follower of the red cross… And her reply: I’m not sure that translates… But if it does, a follower of the red cross would be an English crusader…
Now Nicholas knows they were both in error. He has lived in London long enough to witness her taste for pageantry. He has watched from the crowd as earls and dukes ride past in grand display, their horses caparisoned in silk and cloth-ofgold. He has seen the queen herself, though admittedly from the riverbank, as she was rowed down to Greenwich in a barge that would make Robert Cecil’s look like the cockboat of the Righteous.
But in his mind now he is observing a procession by one of the city’s many grand livery companies. Whether it’s the goldsmiths, the brewers, the haberdashers or even the grocers matters not. His eye is fixed upon the fellow leading the vanguard, imperiously commanding the ordinary folk to clear the way. A fellow resplendent in a gilded tabard. A ceremonial appointee, an officer of the College of Arms. One down from a herald in the order of magnificence.
He is a Pursuivant.
Suddenly Nicholas hears footsteps on deck approaching the hatchway, and the gruff banter of sailors. He steps away from the sunlight and, with all the calmness he can muster, slips the document back into the folds of Hortop’s gabardine.
And even as he does so, he tells Bianca: we were wrong. Solomon Mandel wasn’t murdered because a Christian zealot found his religion abominable. He was killed for another reason entirely. A reason that has something to do with Cathal Connell, Reynard Gault and the Righteous. And a young lad named Edmund Hortop, whose resting place is now the boundless ocean.
19
There is something unusual about the morning.
Bianca had gone to bed expecting one of two things to happen. Either she would wake to the racket of next-door’s cockerel heralding the dawn or she would die in the night.
Clearly I am not dead, she thinks as she wakes. But nor can I hear the cockerel, and already daylight is blooming around the shutters. She wonders if her neighbours have abandoned their lodgings, taken the bird and fled. Or perhaps they’re all dead. Perhaps she’s the only one left alive on a street of plague houses.
She sits up against the bolster and looks around the chamber, trying to determine what it is that’s out of place.
For a start, the Good Samaritan painted on the wall is behaving himself this morning. Today he did not tumble in the moment before she woke. There he is – fixed in paint for as long as the wall lasts, his pious smile unaltered, his robes draped decorously across the feet of the poor beaten traveller lying on the road.
As Bianca leans forward, it hits her: her joints don’t ache. She feels fine. Well rested. And the one thing she can be certain of about the pestilence is that – if it’s going to take you – it doesn’t permit you a morning off in the process.
She wriggles her shoulders. She throws out her arms and flexes her wrists. She kicks off the coverlet and thrashes her legs about, the way Buffle does when you tickle her belly. Nothing aches. She feels fine. She checks under her armpits and around her crotch for buboes. Not so much as a pimple.
Within a minute, Bianca is weeping copiously with relief.
When she regains her composure, she dresses in her work kirtle, goes downstairs, intending to step out into the almost-fresh Southwark air – air that, admittedly, is always a little ripe with animal dung and emptied piss-pots, but fresh enough when you’d doubted you’d ever take a breath of it again in your life.
Jubilantly throwing open the door, she almost knocks a sallow-looking fellow in a leather apron and a labourer’s cap clean across the lane. Somehow he manages to keep upright, hugging to himself a pot of red paint, which splashes over his apron as though he’s taken a sword-thrust through the chest. He waves the brush in her direction, as though to keep her at arm’s length.
‘God’s nails, Mistress Merton, take not one step forward!’ he cries, as though he’s come face-to-face with a wild beast.
‘Whyever not, Master Coslin?’ she asks amiably, recognizing him as a regular at the Jackdaw.
‘Why? You ask me why?’
‘That’s what I thought I said.’
He gives her an anguished look. ‘Because the parish have sent me to mark these premises as plagued. The lodgings on either hand have been cleared, and I am to paint a cross upon this door.’ The anguish turns to guilty regret. ‘And you are to remain confined within. Forgive me, Mistress. I’m sorry. You was always charitable to me. I shall pray for you. You ’ave my word on it.’
Bianca treats him to a sweet smile. ‘That won’t be necessary, Master Coslin – the paint or the prayers.’
‘Not necessary?’
‘No. There’s nothing ill with me. It was just an ague. I’m fine. I really am. Never felt better.’
When she’s sure he believes her, Bianca goes back inside, takes up the letter she wrote to Nicholas when she thought she was about to die, kneels before the hearth and feeds it to the still-sulphurous embers.
Rose puts a hand to her mouth, forgetting the stack of dirty breakfast trenchers she’s carrying. They land with a clatter on the taproom floor. She stares in astonishment at the figure in the doorway, while Buffle – woken from her slumber by the hearth – gulps down the unexpected bounty of scraps.
Ned spills the tankard of ale he is serving to Walter Pemmel – who jumps back from his seat to avoid getting soaked. Timothy stops in mid-verse of ‘Thy Heart’s Sweet Allure’ with a discordant twang from the strings of his lute. Farzad says something incomprehensible in Persian.
‘Are you not pleased to see me?’ Bianca asks, unable to suppress a grin.
And then Rose hurls herself bodily into Bianca’s arms. ‘Mistress, it’s a miracle! God has answered our prayers. You’re cured!’
At least that’s what Bianca thinks she’s says, because Rose’s face is buried in her neck. ‘It’s not a miracle, Rose, dear,’ she says, her chin forced upwards by the embrace so that she has a clear view of ceiling beams browned by wood-smoke. ‘It was just an ague, that’s all.’
Rose draws back, her black ringlets all awry. Her eyes are glistening like a novice who’s just seen Christ’s face in a cloud bank. ‘What charm did you use, Mistress?’
‘No charms, Rose. I wasn’t infected.’
‘But you were! Jenny Solver said so. So did Parson Moody… and Warden Cullicot… and Billy Evans, the stonemason’s son… They even sent Jack Coslin to mark your place with a painted cross.’
‘I know. I made him spill red paint all over his apron.’
‘Did you make one of your elixirs, Mistress? Tell us how, ple
ase.’
‘Rose, dear, I wasn’t sick. It was an ague.’
But as Rose demands to know whether the cure contained angelica or tragacanth, wood-sorrel or wormwood, whether it was boiled or distilled and how much of it a body has to take for it to be efficacious, Bianca resigns herself to the inevitable: that her miraculous cure from the pestilence will find its way into the canon of her already extensive notoriety, where it will keep good company with the queen’s gilded barge and all the other fancies she cannot correct, no matter how often she tries.
Ned comes over, the fingers of his huge hands working as though he were a small boy with a guilty secret. He tilts his auburn beard at her timorously. ‘Mistress, might we speak privily a while?’
‘Why, of course, Ned,’ she replies, planting a gentle kiss on his left cheek, which has him blushing so that skin and beard are all of one colour.
With surprising agility for such a large frame, he darts upstairs. When he returns, he is carrying what looks to Bianca like a letter. He ushers her to an unoccupied table in a quiet corner.
‘Before he left, Mistress, Master Nick gave me this,’ he tells her, with all the anxious pride of a man who’s been entrusted with a state secret from the hand of the queen herself. ‘Perhaps now is the time to take advantage of it.’
In silence, Bianca reads the letter Nicholas wrote commending her, the Monktons, Timothy and Farzad to John Lumley’s care at Nonsuch Palace. When she looks up, Ned says, ‘He was most insistent. Should the pestilence come to Bankside, I was to ensure we all repaired to Lord Lumley for shelter and board. Master Nick said it was all arranged. All you have to do is present this letter.’
Her response catches him off-balance.
‘Is that what he wanted – that we should all run away? Like he did?’
‘Mistress, it was done in thought of us, his friends,’ Ned says uncomfortably.
‘I’m not blaming you, Ned. You have discharged your promise to him. That was proper of you.’
‘But the plague has come, Mistress. And you have dodged it once already. Should we not do as Master Nick wanted?’ A guilty downwards glance. ‘I have my Rose to think upon now, Mistress.’
Bianca gives him a sad, apologetic smile. ‘Forgive me, Ned. Of course you have your wife to think about. You should both go. And Timothy and Farzad. I’ll close the Jackdaw. But I can be of use here. Nicholas may say the pestilence is incurable. And he may even be right. But if I cannot cure, then I can at least help.’
‘I shall speak to Rose and do as she wishes,’ Ned says quietly.
Something about the way he keeps his head down, studying his fingers over the great swell of his chest, tells Bianca he has not given up all his secrets.
‘What is it, Ned? What are you keeping from me?’
There is no hiding the struggle going on behind his eyes. ‘He didn’t do what you said, Mistress – run away.’
‘Ned, what is it you’re not telling me?’
Ned’s huge fingers have begun to drum against the table board. In the past – before he was tamed – that, Bianca knows, was always a sign the Monkton temper was about to explode. But there is no anger in his face now. Only conflict.
‘I swore to him I would not speak of the matter to you.’
‘But now you believe I should hear of it?’
He nods. ‘Because you do him an injustice.’
She lays a hand gently on his arm. ‘Then speak, Ned, if that is what your heart is telling you to do.’
He looks at her while he battles with himself a little longer. Then he sighs and says in a rush, ‘Master Nicholas only agreed to go to the Barbary shore because Sir Robert Cecil told him he’d have your licence to practise ’pothecary rescinded if he didn’t.’ He makes a noise like a smithy’s bellows. ‘There – I’ve said it. God forgive me for breaking an oath.’
For a while they sit facing each other in silence, Bianca’s right hand splayed against her temple. Then she leans back, letting her arms fall to her sides. ‘Oh, Ned. I should have realized.’ She turns and tilts her head towards the ceiling. If she’s looking for something, Ned thinks, she’s doing it through closed eyelids.
‘And now he’s in the hands of that monster, Cathal Connell,’ she says, barely loud enough for Ned to hear. ‘I know not whether to admire him or chastise him for a fool.’
‘What shall we do, Mistress?’
‘You, Ned, must do what you think right for you and Rose. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to beard Robert Cecil in that den of his on the Strand.’
Barely two hours later, having commandeered Rose to help her into her green brocade kirtle, lace her carnelian bodice for her and pin up her hair in as fashionable an imitation of a woman of the better orders as she can manage, and a penny poorer for taking a wherry across the river to save her feet, Bianca stands before the liveried gatekeeper at Cecil House.
‘I desire an audience with Sir Robert Cecil,’ she says loftily. ‘It is a matter of grave import.’
‘Are you on the list?’
‘I shouldn’t imagine so. But it really is a matter of—’
‘Grave import. It always is.’ The gatekeeper yawns, displaying a jaundiced tongue. Bianca catches a scent that reminds her of the brimstone she burned in the hearth on Dice Lane.
‘It concerns Sir Robert’s emissary to the Barbary Moors.’
His mouth closes like a trap. ‘And who might you be, Mistress, to know aught of Sir Robert’s emissaries? Are you a privy councillor, perhaps?’ He makes a little piggy snort at his clever joke.
‘I am a friend to the said emissary. And I have news of him – news for Sir Robert.’
‘Have you really? Who are you?’
Bianca clenches her fists and says, as evenly as she can, ‘I am Mistress Bianca Merton. From Southwark.’
She knows at once by his face that she’s made a mistake.
‘Oh, from Southwark,’ he says knowingly. ‘Bawdy-houses, bear-gardens, taverns and the playhouse’ – another porcine snort – ‘oh yes, Mistress, I know all about the matters of grave import there.’
Just my luck, Bianca tells herself: to find my way blocked by a lecherous Puritan.
‘I am an honest tavern-mistress,’ she says, forcing the words out between a clenched jaw. ‘And an apothecary, licensed by the Grocers’ Company.’
The gatekeeper swaps porcine for asinine. He gives two sharp brays, like a mule being whipped. ‘Aghgh! Aghgh! A pot-wench who sells love-philtres. I know your sort.’
Oh, that I had just one-tenth of the witchcraft Bankside believes I have, Bianca thinks to herself. There would be nothing left of you now, but a smoking dust of expensive kersey and the lingering scent of burnt hubris.
‘I really do believe Sir Robert will wish to see me,’ she says as calmly as she can manage.
‘And why is that, my saucy little Hippolyta?’
Her knuckles land squarely in the languorous curve of his nose, smashing it through to the other side so that he resembles Janus of the two faces. But when she looks at her fist, the knuckles are unblemished and his supercilious face is intact. She takes a deep breath and draws the last shot out of her locker.
‘Because Dr Shelby is physician to Sir Robert’s son, William. And if Sir Robert learns how you have insulted the doctor’s intended bride’ – how easily that came to me, she thinks, as though observing herself from a distance – ‘then Bankside’s matters of grave import will be for ever denied to you, Master Gatekeeper. Because you won’t have the coin to pay for them. You’ll be dismissed. And penniless. It’s your choice.’
After that, her progress into the depths of Cecil House feels like being swept up by a tempest. A series of gentlemen, each more well hosed and cloaked than the last, pass her along so many panelled corridors that Bianca fears she has become lost in a forest of wainscoting, until at last she stands before a small man in a black half-cape and gartered stockings. He wears the resigned look of someone who is expecting to be asked to perform exa
ctly the same task he’s attempted a hundred times already, with no pleasing result.
‘I am truly sorry, Mistress,’ he says with weary honesty. ‘I recall Dr Shelby well. It was I who conducted him to Lady Cecil, when Sir Robert feared their son was sick. Had you but been here yesterday, I would have ensured an audience.’
‘Yesterday?’ she repeats with a welling sense of disappointment. ‘Is he not here?’
‘Sir Robert has left the city to be with Her Majesty. A precaution, you understand, against the current pestilence. Perhaps you would care to put your petition in writing.’
20
‘In the language of the Moor it is called Rass Lafaa: the Head of the Snake.’
Cathal Connell points across the wide bay to a rocky outcrop rising above a tumultuous surf. Nicholas’s gaze follows as his outstretched hand then sweeps along the shore, a myriad tiny suns blazing in the wave crests, until it indicates a high stone wall set with round towers. ‘And there is the Kasar el Bahr, the Castle of the Sea. The Portingals built it when they had this place, before the Moors threw them out.’ The hand lifts again, drawing Nicholas’s eyes upwards over gently-rising scrub and olive groves to a line of imposing sandstone ramparts on the skyline. ‘And that is the Kechla, the citadel. Does it not appear grand to you, Dr Shelby?’
And Nicholas must admit that it does. From the towers of the citadel, intricately patterned Moorish banners ripple in the onshore wind. The afternoon sun paints the ramparts a pale cinnamon.
Suddenly his attention is pulled back to the waterfront and the Kasar el Bahr. A ragged line of white puffs blooms along its battlements. A moment later the deep, reverberating thunder of cannon fire echoes across the bay. For an instant Nicholas fears the Righteous is under bombardment. But no waterspouts erupt from the sea around her, no shot tears through the rigging. The smoke drifts away on the wind with the dying thunder.