The cold has sapped her caution. She knows she is becoming careless, but she must eat soon. She longs for rest, but how can she rest when those dreams she’d kept leashed in the far corner of her mind have found a way to break loose?
Sometimes she’s convinced that Ralph and the others from the Devil’s house have escaped and are with her. She speaks to them: to Ralph, to the woman with no eyes and the little bell around her neck, to the old man with the stump for a hand, and always to dear Jacob Monkton, his innocent moon-face brimming with trust.
There are entire days when she believes she suckled the body she saw crucified upside-down in the Devil’s house, suckled it until the life that had drained out of it returned.
And when these hunger-driven visions fade for a moment, Elise sometimes finds herself howling silently, head back, the raindrops streaming down her face, scratching an inverted crucifix with her fingertips in the wet earth.
13
‘I never took you for a superstitious man, Nicholas Shelby. Now keep your head still or I shall summon up a goblin to bite you!’ instructs Bianca, her eyes gleaming with concerned amusement.
It is a little after five in the evening. Timothy has set a good fire burning in the hearth. The air is sharp with the tang of woodsmoke. At the table in the private parlour at the Jackdaw, Bianca’s slender fingers are rubbing a paste of crushed comfrey root and valerian mixed with a little water into back of Nicholas’s skull. The wound is superficial, but the headache is not. He finds the pressure of her fingertips soothing. He can feel the warmth of her breath, gentle and feminine, on the back of his neck. The intimate contact dulls one ache, but reminds him of another. As she moves round in front of him to check her handiwork, he thinks, with a guilty start, how comely she looks. Her green brocade kirtle now appears wine-dark against her skin, her hair is loose and unruly. He thrusts this image of her from his mind. It is impossible. He even feels a short-lived anger – anger at her ability to excite senses he had only for Eleanor.
‘I’m not at all superstitious,’ he protests. ‘And I don’t believe you can conjure up goblins. But if Isaac Bredwell and Ned Monkton weren’t convinced you were a witch a couple of hours ago, they certainly are now. Have you any idea how dangerous that might be?’
‘It worked, didn’t it?’ she argues. ‘If Isaac had been sober and surer on his feet, he might have done some real damage here.’
‘Yes. I’ll admit it. It worked. You put the holy terror into them.’
‘They deserved it.’
‘You even had me convinced for a while.’ Nicholas laughs at the thought of two well-made men fleeing from this slight, almost boyish young woman. But his laughter is tinged with concern. ‘You do realize that if they report you to the local justice of the peace, you could find yourself spending a day in the stocks, at the very least.’
‘Those two rogues? Putting themselves within a hundred yards of a law officer? That will be the day, Nicholas.’
He finds her disdain in the face of danger admirable, but troubling. He wonders if she understands the risks of what she’s done. ‘You could even find yourself dragged before the Bishop of London. It might be commonplace in Padua, but here cursing a man in the street is tantamount to witchcraft.’
She laughs softly. ‘We women from the Veneto are renowned for our cursing; the Holy Office of the Faith didn’t even bother to place an edict against it on the church door. I’ll tell the Bishop of London it’s just my strange foreign ways.’
Inside, Bianca is less sure of herself than she sounds. From the moment of her arrival in England she’d been forced to ask herself: whose side are you on? Which nation has your heart?
In Padua, with its famous university drawing scholars from all over Europe – Catholic and Protestant – the thought had seldom occurred to her. She had an English surname, an Italian given name, spoke English almost all the time, except when conversing with her mother or her Italian friends. True, they’d owed their allegiance to the Doge in Venice, but in her own mind her father’s house felt wholly English, even if she’d never actually travelled to the country and had to have England pointed out to her on a map.
But in London she hadn’t felt English at all; at least not at first. Everything was so strange, so foreign. And, Jesu, how they mistrusted foreigners, even though the city itself – just like Padua – teemed with them. Within hours of her moving into lodgings in a merchant’s house in Petty Wales by the Tower, two men had arrived demanding to know if any foreigners were staying there. They claimed to be servants of a man called Burghley. Bianca had escaped their interest because of her English surname, though the landlord had immediately doubled her rent. ‘You have no man with you,’ he’d said. ‘I don’t need the Bishop of London accusing me of running a bawdy-house.’
Then there was the time she’d witnessed a group of apprentice boys, woollen caps pulled down over their brows, chasing a poor fellow down the street. When she’d asked someone if he was a cut-purse, they had said no, he was a Dutchman. This had confused her mightily, as she’d thought the Dutch were allies of the English. Apparently that was only the Protestant ones.
Even here in Southwark she’d found suspicion rife. She’d soon learned that the queen’s ministers and advisors sent informers into the taverns to listen for foreign sedition and religious dissent. She’d found it easy to spot them – there being few things more obvious than a man trying hard to pretend he’s not eavesdropping.
She wasn’t overly troubled by such snoopers. The spies of the Holy Office of the Faith in Italy were a hundred times more dangerous. Besides, if she’d sent them packing, the Privy Council would simply have sent new ones. A few weeks later they left of their own accord, apparently satisfied she was running an orderly house. When she’d asked Timothy why foreigners were distrusted so, he’d laughed at her ignorance and said, ‘That’s easy to answer, Mistress. The Pope in Rome says our Elizabeth is a heretic. It’s every foreigner’s wish to send her to hell.’
While Bianca rubs the balm into his skull, her reflective silence makes Nicholas think he might have offended her.
‘I just think you should take care,’ he says kindly, interrupting her thoughts.
She snaps her long fingers contemptuously, then follows with that habit he’s noticed: running her hands from the sides of her brow and back through her hair – part self-consciousness, part belligerence.
‘What care I for Ned Monkton and Isaac Bredwell?’ she says bravely. ‘Or the Bishop of London, for that matter? If Englishmen are so afeared of a woman’s voice when it’s raised against them, the queen must have a pretty easy time of it. I’m surprised she needs a Privy Council at all.’
‘I’m just advising caution,’ says Nicholas, raising his palms in conciliation and trying not to grin. ‘But however badly Ned Monkton is grieving for his brother, he had no cause to speak to you so… so… discourteously.’
‘Oh, Nicholas, really! I’ve been called a witch oftentimes before now and lived. Worse, too. Try whore… a vain sister of Satan… the mare that Lucifer rides by night… I’ve even been called a papist trull, because I look a little less than English-born. Mostly it’s by men who covet me above their wives, or who don’t want to pay their ale account. Is it any surprise that curses come fluently to me?’
Is that hurt he can detect behind the defiance in her voice? Is Bianca Merton not quite as redoubtable as she likes to think? An image pops into his head: Ned Monkton trampling her herbs under his great heavy boots. He thinks, perhaps I will not go to Holland in the spring after all. I might be of use here.