From the gilded Cecil barge moored to the jetty comes the command for Bianca to board. Four rowers lift their oars into the rowlocks. The two liveried servants make to assist her onto the deck.
‘Shall I see you again, Nicholas Shelby?’ she calls out as she steps aboard. ‘I don’t even know where you’re going.’
‘I am to stay at Cecil House until I leave for Nonsuch.’
‘Mercy, Nicholas Shelby is going to live in a palace!’ The bright amber eyes are teasing him again. ‘You have come up in the world.’
‘I’m just going to visit for a while. I don’t know how long.’
‘Will I see you again? Do I need to look for another handy fellow to help me out at the Jackdaw?’
‘I don’t know. But yes, you will see me again, Mistress Merton. You may count on it.’
‘Will you write?’
‘When I can.’
‘You were safer on Bankside than you knew, Nicholas. Please take care.’
He doesn’t see it coming: the sudden overwhelming need to jump onto the barge, follow her back to the Jackdaw and take her to his lonely bed in the attic.
But even as the urge hits him, the barge vanishes into the mist, the only evidence it was ever there the fading sound of oars breaking the water – and the guilt of betrayal in his heart.
32
Candlemas, 2nd February 1591
In the meadow beside Cheam church a band of militia is at drill practice. They wield the heavy pikes like the farmboys and seed merchant’s clerks they are. Their sergeant is a small fellow in a battered, hand-me-down breastplate. In a shrill voice he’s warning them their ineptitude will cost England dear, should the Spanish ever come to Surrey. Nicholas Shelby watches them go through their postures as he rides past on one of Robert Cecil’s palfreys, loaned for the journey. He knows the sergeant’s threat is not an idle one. In the Low Countries he’d seen the well-drilled armies of Spain cutting through lads much like these with the ease of a buttery maid scooping curd. It makes him think again of the infant he’d seen pitchforked onto a midden, and that leads his thoughts inevitably to Ralph Cullen. He looks away to the fields, the hedgerows and the occasional thatched house. Where, on the journey from the Cardinal’s Hat to Cuddington, did the killer find you? he wonders. Was it hereabouts? And what of you, Elise? Did you make it? Or are you merely waiting your turn to wash ashore?
It’s a week since Nicholas bade farewell to Bianca Merton. For most of that time he’s been a virtual prisoner at Cecil House, though his incarceration has not been arduous. On the day Bianca returned to Southwark, Robert Cecil had stood over him while he wrote another letter to Nonsuch, taking up John Lumley’s offer. Then had followed the random summons to Robert Cecil’s study, delivered whenever the courtier was able to tear himself away from the onerous burden of saving England from heresy. During these sessions Nicholas had received instruction on the nature of the beast he was to confront. Now his head is full of details: Lumley’s youthful allegiance to Bloody Mary; how he and his first wife, Jane FitzAlan, daughter to old Arundel, had ridden in the entourage at Mary’s marriage to the Catholic Philip of Spain; how Lumley and his father-in-law had plotted to wed Mary Stuart, the Scots queen, to the Duke of Norfolk to strengthen a papist claim to the throne. Now he can recite the dates of Lumley’s sojourns in the Tower with accuracy. He can name the exact amount Lumley still owes to the Crown for getting into bed with Florentine bankers. He knows the rents due to the privy purse for which Lumley keeps seeking respite. Now he feels like one of those spies who used to flit in and out of the camps in Holland: furtive, secretive fellows, their lives little else but a paid-for procession of lies and betrayal.
How did I make the journey from healer to informer so seamlessly?
What would Eleanor think of me now?
As he rides leisurely up the gentle, grassy slope towards the gleaming white-walled outer court of Nonsuch Palace, another troubling image insinuates itself into Nicholas’s mind. It’s the image of some helpless soul – as yet unknown to him – chained, frightened, waiting alone in the dark interior of the Lazar House for the moment the door opens and a new nightmare begins. And he wonders how he can ask for Lumley’s help in stopping it, while at the same moment scheming to betray him.
‘We need new sheets,’ says Rose apologetically. She is unaccustomed to speaking obliquely, but what exactly does one say to a mistress who disappeared a heretic and a traitor and returned in a gilded barge, like Queen Dido of Carthage? What she really wants to ask Bianca – has wanted to asks for days – is did they harm you?
Now that the mistress of the Jackdaw is safely home, the tavern has returned almost to its former state. But there is still work to do. Much of the linen recovered from the floor and the street is badly torn, and lodgers must now sleep on their cloaks and not mind the gaping wounds in the straw pallets where Robert Cecil’s men went rummaging for hidden papist tracts.
‘At least we still have our customers,’ Rose observes. ‘When they raided the Knight’s Shield on Bermondsey Road, it took a whole month for trade to recover. Looking for Jesuits, they were.’
‘Did they find any?’ Bianca asks.
‘No. Only a fugitive from Bedlam.’
‘How did they recognize him? All the Shield’s customers look as though they’ve escaped from Bedlam.’
‘There’s only a few haven’t come back here,’ says Rose, laughing. ‘That Walter Pemmel – the one who only pays every other tab – he hasn’t shown his miserable face again. And old Leicester and Walsingham haven’t been seen or heard of since.’
‘I’m not surprised. They’re probably the reason the Privy Council turned us over in the first place,’ Bianca retorts harshly. ‘And as for Walter Pemmel, he was a Puritan hypocrite anyway. Wore out his knees in the pews at St Saviour’s each Sunday; back in the taproom on Monday, trying to drown all that guilt he got from lying with whores. We’re better off without him.’
‘He hasn’t written yet, then? You’d have told me if he had, Mistress.’
‘Why on earth would Walter Pemmel write to me?’
‘I wasn’t speaking of Walter Pemmel, was I?’
Bianca gives Rose’s left knee a gentle slap. ‘Nicholas probably doesn’t have the time. He’s an eminent physician now, didn’t you know? Get on with your sewing, girl.’
Rose does as she’s told – for all of two minutes. Then she announces defiantly, ‘I don’t care what the Bishop of London says! I don’t think papists are the Devil’s own spawn. My grandmother was of the old faith, and a goodlier person you never met.’ It’s her way of saying whatever Bianca has been accused of, it doesn’t matter.
‘I’m sure she was, Rose.’
‘I’d light a candle for her soul, too, if it were allowed. She always liked candles.’ Rose considers this small heresy for a moment, then asks, ‘Do you think they’d come back and arrest me, if I did?’
‘I shouldn’t imagine so,’ says Bianca. ‘If they do, I suggest you take Timothy with you. After what’s happened to Nicholas, Tim might come back as master of the Brewers’ Company and you as a lady-in-waiting to the queen.’
‘Was it dreadful – in the Tower?’
‘We weren’t in the Tower, Rose dear. We were at Cecil House, near the Strand. A very different place.’
‘Did they put burning irons to your flesh?’
‘No, they didn’t.’
‘Nor rack you?’
‘Never saw a rack all the time I was there.’
‘I shouldn’t like to be racked. The extra inches might be nice, though.’