by S. W. Perry
‘Are you suggesting Cornwall is a pagan place, Captain Yaxley?’ Nicholas asks, playing along.
‘Have you never been to Cornwall, Dr Shelby?’
Yaxley’s laugh of self-appreciation dies in his throat as the rattle of flapping canvas reaches the deck. The pennants streaming from the mastheads, formerly pointing the way home, begin to droop. Seeing Yaxley look up, Nicholas asks, ‘What’s amiss?’
‘The wind, it’s backing. We should be thankful to have had the best of it.’
By the time they encounter the Brixham fishing fleet beneath a cloudscape of gulls, Yaxley’s speedy little command is beating long diagonal tacks on either side of the wind in order to fill her sails. Taking a meal of stockfish and biscuit in the cramped confines of Yaxley’s cabin, Nicholas’s frustration is hard to disguise.
‘If it keeps up like this, how much longer before landfall?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On God. He’s the one who sends the weather.’ Yaxley cracks a wedge of rusk and dips it into his glass of arak to soften. ‘If the wind is out of the east from now on, then maybe another four days to London. Five, if it strengthens.’
‘And if it gets truly bad?’
‘We may have to seek shelter in the Solent or at Chesil Cove.’
‘At the present rate, how long till a landfall at Dover?’
‘A little under three.’ Yaxley smiles at Nicholas’s persistence. ‘I’m guessing this is only your second voyage, Dr Shelby.’
‘My fourth, actually. The first was to the Low Countries, then back again. Not nearly so far. I was seasick most of the time. But the Marion seems to have cured me.’
‘Then I can forgive the impatience, Dr Shelby.’
‘It is a fault in me, I know.’
‘It’s something you have to learn to put aside. Impatience in a mariner is a greater failing than seasickness.’
Chastened, Nicholas takes a bite of cold stockfish, wishing Yaxley hadn’t had to order the ship’s oven doused, when the sea began to get up. ‘You’re right, of course. But you know why I’m in such haste.’
Yaxley studies him carefully. ‘I think I do. Privy Council business; the queen’s business, even.’ A knowing look comes into his eyes. ‘But you said the plot against old al-Mansur was put down before we left Safi. So maybe there’s another reason you’re in such a pelt. Would it be a maid, perhaps?’
Feeling like a child caught out in a lie, Nicholas senses the heat flow into his cheeks. ‘Am I that plain to see through, Captain Yaxley?’ he asks.
‘Transparent, Dr Shelby – as a fairy’s wing.’
The Marion pitches violently as a wave crashes into her bow. Nicholas hears the sound of the sea rushing down her sides, feels the little vessel shake herself free. ‘I suppose you can’t face danger with your fellow man, or spend a life in such close proximity to him, without learning to see what’s in his thoughts. It was the same in the Low Countries, when I was a physician with Sir Joshua Wylde’s company, fighting against the Spanish.’
‘Who is she, Dr Shelby? Describe her to me.’
Nicholas looks like a man asked to explain the countless spheres of heaven in a single sentence. He shakes his head in defeat. ‘I do not have that rogue Marlowe’s faculty with words, Captain Yaxley. All I can tell you is that if, tonight, the moon and all the stars above were snuffed out, where she is there would still be light.’
For a moment Nicholas thinks Yaxley is going to laugh at him. But he just drops his gaze, his body moving in time to the swaying of the little ship as though her deck is the only ground he’s ever known.
‘I knew one like that,’ he says contemplatively. ‘But I hesitated. And so I was lost to the sea.’
‘Is that why this barque is named the Marion?’ Nicholas asks in a flash of inspiration.
Yaxley nods. Then he lifts his eyes again and fixes Nicholas with an uncompromising stare. ‘Does this light of yours know the fellow coming home to her has taken another man’s life without a second thought?’
‘You mean Connell?’
‘Aye. I saw the look on your face, just after you discharged the rabinet.’
‘I’m not a murderer, if that’s what you mean. At least, I don’t think so. You didn’t see what he did to my friends in Marrakech.’
‘Oh, I’m not judging you, Dr Shelby. I’ve heard tales of Cathal Connell’s time in the Arabian seas that would make such a quick end seem like a mercy. But I presume you swore an oath to heal. And they do say that a man who kills once will find it easier the next time. So I think you should ask yourself: does this light of yours deserve a life wed to a fellow who has strayed off the path of mercy?’
It is a brutal question, but Nicholas does not blame Yaxley for asking it. He considers it in silence, remembering the promise he made to Muhammed al-Annuri: You will bring pestilence and death upon them, even unto the seventh generation. You will erase their names so that Allāh will forget he ever made them…
He recalls, too, that night on London Bridge, when Dr Arcampora’s men had been preparing to hurl him to his death in the black waters of the Thames. And he hears again the voice of the woman who saved him, sees her now, sees her standing before him in her physic garden beside the river on the day he told her he was leaving for Morocco: let us face the truth, Nicholas: we are both murderers now…
Gault has given Bianca a week to devise a plan to poison Robert Cecil. To keep her mind on the task, he assigns another of his apprentices as her shadow, a sour-looking boy named Calum. Whenever he visits the Jackdaw, he sits alone in one of the booths, reading a cheap copy of Hoby’s translation of The Book of the Courtier. Whether he’s learning anything from it is questionable, because it takes all Ned’s diplomacy – a substance as rare as powdered unicorn horn – to keep Calum from starting brawls with the watermen, whom he seems to consider himself above.
‘Who is he?’ asks Rose on the fourth day. ‘Why is he here?’
‘He’s one of Master Gault’s apprentices,’ Bianca explains.
‘Well, I don’t much care for him. He behaves as if he owns the place. This morning I found him poking his nose about down in the cellar, amongst your apothecary stuff. Said it reminded him of a sorcerer’s den.’
Bianca fights back the sudden anger. It’s one thing, she thinks, to accept there’s a spy in the household, quite another when he makes such a contemptuous display of it.
‘Perhaps he wanted to see where I make the preventatives,’ she says lamely. ‘Indulge him a little longer, for my sake.’
When Rose seeks further explanation, Bianca – uncharacteristically – loses her temper. After that, Calum is not mentioned in her presence again.
Bianca has barely slept since her meeting with Gault on the river. The dread that haunts her mind has become mountainous. Whatever Gault is plotting, she understands now that Nicholas has been sent to Morocco to thwart it somehow. Which means he is in great danger. And if what Gault told her about Solomon Mandel was true, none of them are safe. She has begun to curse herself for taking such an insane risk. What was she thinking, when she embarked on unmasking a man she now knows – by his own admission – to be a heartless killer?
At night, when she does finally manage an hour or two of sleep, she dreams of Nicholas being flayed alive like Solomon Mandel. Then she wakes in a drenching sweat, her mouth dry and her fingers clawing at the sheets.
By day, the yearning to have him back with her plays havoc with her reason. Whenever the image of him enters her mind, her thoughts whirl around like leaves in a gale. The customers who come to the Jackdaw – now that her shop on Dice Lane is closed – have to repeat what they say to her, because she appears as distracted as a madwoman. Jenny Solver has even put it about that Bianca is besotted with a rich and handsome merchant from across the river.
On the seventh day, as arranged, she goes to see Gault at Smithfield. Calum tags along beside her, his copy of The Courtier tucked into his leather jerkin.
He still seems to have missed its finer points on humility, giving way for no one he encounters, glaring about ferociously as though he owns the city and everyone in it. She imagines teacher Gault must be proud.
The green expanse of Smithfield is unnaturally empty – the ban on entertainments and gatherings has seen to that. There are no lovers making sweet-talk beneath the trees, no pedlars, sharpers or jugglers to be seen anywhere. Even the birds have stopped flying. The cattle she’d followed on her earlier visit to Gault’s house on Giltspur Street graze placidly in the sunshine, a single cowherd asleep against the trunk of a beech tree.
Calum leads her towards the half-ruined priory of St Bartholomew. By a section of monastery wall she sees Gault and the other apprentices standing together beside a row of hawks perched on their blocks.
‘Well, that explains the paucity of songbirds,’ Bianca says. ‘I wonder how they know when there are predators about, even when they can’t see them.’
‘What’s that you say?’ grunts the surly Calum.
‘The hawks,’ she says. ‘I can see he’s training you all very thoroughly. I can see that you’re all going to be the model of fine gentlemen.’
‘Oh, this isn’t part of our education, Mistress,’ Calum tells her. ‘This is our ease. We all learned how to hawk back in Ireland. Master Gault has the finest mews in County Leinster. Everyone there knows that. They call him the Falconer.’
44
In the end it is Nicholas’s impatience to be with Bianca, rather than the inclement gale, that determines the Marion’s landfall – and the fact that the constable of Dover Castle is Lord Cobham, Robert Cecil’s father-in-law. If anyone can promise a fast horse for the ride to London, it will be him.
Just shy of three days after his conversation with Yaxley the little vessel is safely moored beneath Dover’s towering ramparts. Before Nicholas climbs down into the waiting skiff to be rowed ashore beneath voluminous white farthingales of summer cloud, Yaxley shakes his hand.
‘When you see Sir Robert Cecil, be sure to tell him I had no part in whatever that rogue Connell was about.’
‘That, Captain Yaxley, is the very least I can do to discharge my debt to you.’
Yaxley gives him a parcel wrapped in sailcloth. ‘Here, take this,’ he says.
By the heft of it, Nicholas knows it’s the wheel-lock pistol Yaxley had offered him in Safi bay.
‘I believe you know why I gave you this before, Dr Shelby. Keep it, as a memento of a fortunate deliverance. You’re a man who seems to have the Devil’s luck. But even the Devil can have his back turned every now and then, and I wouldn’t want anything to stop you reaching that light you spoke of – the one that’s waiting for you on Bankside.’
‘It’s impossible. It cannot be done.’ Bianca struggles not to sound as though she’s pleading. ‘You have set me a trial I cannot pass.’
For privacy, she and Gault have walked a little way from the priory wall. Even though Smithfield is all but empty and there is no one close enough to overhear, speaking openly of poisoning a queen’s privy councillor does not come comfortably to her. Her senses seem blade-sharp. She can hear the jangle of the bells on the hawks’ leather jesses, and a sudden murmuring of the wind in the grass.
‘I thought you were more adroit than that, Mistress Merton,’ he says, eyeing her critically. ‘Have I misjudged you?’
‘Ignoring the fact that he’s in Windsor – with the queen, and no one from London is allowed there, and certainly not my sort – how am I to gain access to Cecil’s food or his wine? I’m his informer, not his cook.’
Gault looks at her like a schoolmaster who’s spotted a glaring error in a pupil’s work. ‘But you are a comely young woman…’
‘How is that supposed to help – even if it were true?’ she asks. ‘And I can tell you, Master Gault, if you’ve ever seen me with an English cold and snot running down my chin, you’d revise your understanding of comely.’
‘He’s a stunted crook-back. An abomination to beauty. And a Lutheran. Surely it can’t be beyond your imagination. Or your wiles.’
She wonders if she punched Gault, in that otherwise oh-so-pleasing face, she could outrun his apprentices, reach the river and a wherry before they caught up with her.
‘Cecil’s devoted to his wife,’ she says, as an alternative. ‘He dragged Nicholas – Dr Shelby – out of bed in the middle of the night to have him treat their child. Robert Cecil is probably the one man in London I couldn’t drag to Bankside, even if I promised to dress up as Salome and dance for him in the middle of Whitehall.’
‘You’ll find a way,’ Gault says chillingly.
And to her horror – because she realizes that she’s almost as vulnerable here as she was on his tilt-boat on the river – he grabs her wrist. He squeezes it like a lover who’s begun to exhibit an unwelcome fondness for insistence. ‘Don’t disappoint me, Mistress Merton,’ he whispers. ‘We have made the act of confession to one another. And a confession cannot be taken back. Not without consequences.’
Lord Cobham turns out not to be in residence, but at his home some fifty miles away near Gravesend. After announcing his arrival at the porter’s lodge, Nicholas is led to the new battery of cannon at the southern end of the ramparts, where the High Sheriff, a bluff man in his late forties named Sondes, is making one of his periodic inspections. He has troubling news.
‘London?’ he says doubtfully, when Nicholas tells him he’s carrying an urgent dispatch for Cecil House. ‘Have you not heard that the city is rife with plague?’
Nicholas feels his legs lose their strength, and not because of his days at sea.
‘How rife?’
‘Her Grace, the queen, has removed to Windsor,’ Sondes tells him, as though Elizabeth were the city’s only occupant. ‘The Inns of Court and Parliament are shut up, and all the feasts and fairs cancelled. They say the mourning bells have hardly stopped tolling.’
For a moment Nicholas stares at him open-mouthed, consumed by the awful thought that the pestilence might have spread to Southwark. Sondes mistakes his expression for a surfeit of zeal.
‘Do not distress yourself, sirrah, you may still deliver this important dispatch of yours to Sir Robert Cecil. I am told Her Grace took many of her Privy Council with her. Sir Robert is most likely amongst them.’
Nicholas doesn’t hesitate. He has no intention of riding to Windsor. Robert Cecil can wait another couple of days for his news. After all he has gone through, and with Captain Yaxley’s words ringing in his ears – I hesitated… And so I was lost to the sea – he desires nothing more than to take Bianca in his arms and confess to being the mightiest fool in Christendom for having set even one foot aboard the Righteous. What comes afterwards is not his to determine.
‘I will have need of a horse, Master Sondes,’ he says. ‘A fast one with strong legs. Better still, find me one with wings.’
Distillations, syrups, purges, balms and potions; in her revived apothecary’s cellar at the Jackdaw, Bianca has spent the day making a dozen or more of each. It has taken all her concentration not to put tansy instead of walnut leaves in the salve that she makes for dog bites, or hyssop in the headache cure instead of houseleek. More than one customer has enquired if she is feeling a little unwell. ‘You appear a mite distracted, Mistress Merton,’ Jenny Solver observed barely an hour ago when she’d come in search of some horehound for a wasp sting. ‘Are you ailing again?’
Distracted? Ailing? Try desperate, she’d wanted to shriek at the woman. Desperate beyond measure. For the first time in her life she feels like a condemned prisoner without the slightest hope of commutation. And she can put her imminent demise down to her own impulsiveness. If only she hadn’t tried to get the better of Reynard Gault.
She knows there is no possibility she can do what he has demanded of her. Even in the unlikely event she could contrive to poison Sir Robert Cecil, every Catholic in the city would be rounded up within the day. The Privy Council torturers would have no rest.
/> On more than one occasion her thoughts have turned instead to poisoning Gault himself, doing away with the cause of her misery. But his apprentices know her. They’ve witnessed her visits to Giltspur Street; they know what remedies she brings. They’d have the justices on her inside the hour.
And to cap it all, she has started to weep without warning. It is only a matter of time before Rose or Ned catches her with her eyes brimming.
She stabs her pestle into the mortar as though she means to kill it.
Nicholas, where in the name of Christ’s holy wounds are you?
The town is named Faversham. It is a busy little place on the Swale, with an anchorage for shallow-draught vessels, oyster beds and a gunpowder mill. It has cobbles where most places of its size have nothing but ruts, and taverns, too. Nicholas stops at one to rest his horse, and to quench his thirst and take a hurried meal. The landlord regards the djellaba he is still wearing, now dust-stained, with consternation.
‘You’re not some papist priest, are you, come here to corrupt the queen’s religion?’ he asks, his eyes wide with suspicion. ‘Or has a company of players come to town?’
‘I’ve come from Morocco,’ Nicholas explains wearily. ‘I’m on important Privy Council business.’
‘Oh, aye,’ the landlord says, as though his custom comprises nothing else but passing couriers in exotic garb. ‘You’re going to London, then?’
‘That is my intention. I hear there’s plague there.’
‘So there is, an’ it’s cut our trade in half. Never seen the London road so empty.’
‘Do you know if Southwark is spared?’ Nicholas asks.
‘I have a cousin who’s a drover. He took a flock up last Thursday. He told me it’s not as bad as in the city, but not healthy enough for him to want to stay more than a night.’
‘Do you by chance know which tavern he stayed at?’
The man shakes his head.
‘Is he here, your cousin? May I speak to him?’