‘I am also informed that in England the old religion is tolerated, as long as it is practised privily.’
‘Tell me, Mistress Merton, are you a witch?’
‘No, I am not a witch.’
‘Then are you a liar?’
Always the same even tone to the questions. Always the same slow, laborious writing of her answers. And when the session is over, they take her back to the cell she shares with a woman who is alleged to have consorted with demons in the Paris Garden by night, and with a mad girl who tells her conspiratorially that she is really the Christian martyr St Perpetua and expects the Romans to come for her at any moment.
And in this manner the days pass; six of them – until the night the cell door opens, and a short while later Bianca finds herself not in the little chamber facing the man in the woollen tunic, but standing on a jetty in the rain and the cold, Nicholas Shelby beside her – equally nonplussed – while out of the darkness the Thames roars at her like a proper interrogator should.
They are rowing against the tide, heading upriver – though how the helmsman can steer a course in such relentless darkness, and with the barge pitching so violently, is anyone’s guess. In the prow crouches a man-at-arms, holding a lantern. Its light turns the spray into a myriad tiny golden sparks that flare for an instant and are then swept away on the wind. Only the occasional beacon passing by to their right gives the slightest hint of where the bank is. To the left is nothing but darkness. Nicholas judges they must have reached the Lambeth marshes.
He sits uncomfortably on a wet wooden seat, trying to master the heaving of his stomach. The cold snatches the breath from his lungs. He’s chilled to the bone. Bianca sits beside him. Her face is a mask he cannot read.
The oarsmen and the prisoners’ escort – six men-at-arms – have shown no interest in either of them. It seems that conveying the doomed to unknown fates is apparently meat and drink to them.
There has been only one small moment of hope in their journey so far. It had come almost as soon as they slipped away from the bank. The helmsman had turned the barge west, upriver. At least their destination is not the Tower.
The noise of the wind and the waves makes conversation all but impossible. Bianca hasn’t said a word since they were reunited, other than to ask if they’d harmed him. Nicholas replied that no, they had not – though he’d spent the days since their arrest in an uncomfortable cell in the Marshalsea. Then the sergeant of the men-at-arms had told them to mind their pox-blistered, profaning heretic tongues.
So now he holds his peace, and wonders why a tavern owner and a fallen physician are being taken for a ride on the river in the dead of night. And whether it is really intended that they should arrive anywhere.
Without warning the barge lurches and swings across the current, rolling sickeningly. Out of the night drifts a substantial jetty, a glorious, gilded pleasure-barge moored on the far side. The starboard rowers raise their oars like well-drilled pike-men. With the merest of caresses, they are alongside the water-stairs. Nicholas closes his eyes and allows a little of the tension to drain out of his body. Whatever their destination, apparently it is intended they should reach it alive.
‘Where are we?’ whispers Bianca, risking the sergeant’s wrath.
‘Somewhere between Whitehall and St Martin’s. It’s hard to tell.’
Suddenly the lantern in the prow appears to leap into the night sky like a demented firefly, as the man holding it clambers onto the jetty. Nicholas and Bianca are invited to follow, by a barrage of oaths and vicious blows to the back.
Once on dry land, they follow the lantern as it dances through the darkness, hemmed in by their escort, encouraged to maintain a fast pace by the occasional savage kick to the heels. Nicholas judges they are heading away from the river. It’s difficult to be certain. The buildings they pass are merely denser patches of night, pierced only by the occasional lighted window. From somewhere nearby a dog cries, a long, drawn-out sorrowful wail of loneliness.
And then out of the darkness looms a high brick wall. It stretches away into nothingness on either hand. They hear the thump of a gloved fist against timber. The low call of a challenge. The confident reply, ‘Robert Cecil’s men!’ A pale wash of light spills out of the wall and a moment later they are inside Cecil House.
29
They are standing in a corridor with walls of flint and plaster. A tallow torch burns in an iron bracket, filling the air with an oily, animal smell. Nicholas feels a sense of impending dread. He’s heard the rumours: that the great men of England who serve the queen – men like the Cecils – have their own private places for interrogating those they believe a threat to her realm. Simon Cowper once told him that Sir Francis Walsingham kept a fully functioning rack in the cellar of his house on Seething Lane, though how he’d known this, the unimpeachable Simon had never explained.
His fears are not eased when he and Bianca are pushed unceremoniously down a narrow, winding set of stone steps into a dank cellar space below ground level. It has the same, forlorn smell of despair and desolation he’d encountered at the Lazar House. It’s the smell of a freshly opened grave. Behind them an iron grille slams noisily into its frame. The lock turns. At last, they are alone.
For a while neither speaks.
Nicholas can barely see Bianca in the little light that spills down the stairs and through the grille door, but he senses her standing with her back to him, looking back the way they have come as if searching for someone lost in a crowd. He sits down wearily on a pile of hemp sacks filled with something hard and unyielding. He leans forward, head in hand, resting his elbows on his knees. He’s in too much discomfort, too cold, too weary to say very much. Whatever lies ahead, Nicholas knows his ability to resist it is already beginning to drain away.
‘Why has Robert Cecil issued a warrant for our arrest?’ he asks at last, trying hard not to sound petulant, though it’s a question he’s been asking himself for six long days. ‘I presume it’s not because you refused to mix a balm for his crooked back.’
‘What does it matter now?’ Bianca replies, only the merest falter in her voice telling him she is struggling to hold back the tears.
‘What does it matter? I’ve spent six days in the Marshalsea! And, by the look of you, you haven’t been sleeping on silk and eating stuffed capon, either.’ He tries to read her face in the semidarkness – and fails.
‘I’m so sorry, Nicholas. I never meant for any of this to happen, I swear it.’
He’d try anger, but he knows he wouldn’t be able to sustain it beyond a moment or two. ‘Did they harm you? Where did they take you?’
‘The Queen’s Bench. Asked me a lot of silly questions. But no, they didn’t harm me. Timothy brought me food and extra clothing.’ She runs her hands over her forearms, indicating the brown linsey cloak she’s wearing over the green brocade kirtle.
‘Timothy? How did he find you?’
‘Bless him, he followed us – when we were taken up. When they separated us, he had to decide who to stay close to. He chose me. I suppose that’s because I pay his wages. Don’t be angry with him.’
The clang of the iron grille as it opens reverberates around the cellar. A cold knot of fear forms in Nicholas’s stomach as a harsh male voice calls out, ‘The woman is to stay. The physician is to come with me. Now!’ He recognizes it as the voice of the sergeant-at-arms from the barge that brought them here.