As Nicholas watches, Lady Lumley reaches into her cloak and pulls out a small ivory comb. She clearly means it as a gift, a trinket brought from London for a favoured member of the household. The girl takes it, studying it intently as though she had never seen such a thing before. ‘Does it please you, Betony?’ Nicholas hears Lady Elizabeth ask gently.
The child makes a discreet bob of acknowledgement.
But she utters not a single word in reply.
34
In the Jackdaw’s parlour Rose is repairing Bianca’s best dorothea. When Robert Cecil’s men tore it from her clothes chest, along with her spare kirtle and nightgown, they’d compounded the outrage by trampling it underfoot. Several of the bone-stiffeners have been shattered beyond resurrection.
‘Look at it!’ cries Bianca as she holds the corset against her body. ‘It’s supposed to flatter. Now it looks more like something you’d constrain a dangerous lunatic in!’
‘Your Haarlem linen is almost dry,’ says Rose. ‘And I’ve brushed the carnelian bodice. He likes you in those. I’ve seen it in his eyes.’
‘Who, Rose? Who likes me in my carnelian bodice? Walter Pemmel, the Puritan rake? Will Slater, the wherryman who smells of waterweed? Tell me, Rose – I’m all ears.’
Rose decides it’s best to change the subject. Her mistress has developed an uncommonly raw nerve recently. ‘And all because someone does not write,’ she whispers – just loud enough for Bianca to hear.
Timothy comes in with a pensive look on his face. ‘Pardon, Mistress, but there’s a fellow becoming fractious in the taproom. Shall I have Ned Monkton throw him out?’
The fractious fellow turns out to be a grubby-bellied man with lank grey hair, claret-coloured cheeks and eyebrows that curl down over his eyelids like wood-shavings.
‘He’s the overseer at the Magdalene almshouse,’ Ned tells her softly. ‘Came in a few times while you were – away. No trouble, till now.’
Bianca can see at once the man is a practised souse-head. You could warm your hands on the veins that illuminate those cheeks, she tells herself. ‘Marry, what’s all this? – troubling my poor overworked taproom boy,’ she says pleasantly.
‘I know you,’ the fellow says, as Bianca sits down beside him. ‘You’re that maid what got herself invited to Whitehall for sack and sweetmeats.’
‘That’s me.’
‘They say you came back in the queen’s golden barge. I heard all about it.’
‘Then you won’t be surprised if I tell you the owner sends her affections and counsels you to be her mild and obedient subject,’ Bianca says with a laugh, deciding that’s a better reputation to have than flying down the street at night in the form of a bat. ‘And that includes being obedient in taverns.’
The man squawks with derision. ‘The queen? I’d rather she gave me a decent annuity for looking after them addle-pates I’ve been set in charge of at the Magdalene,’ he says, breathing fumes of knock-down over her, ‘’cause the parish pay me fuck-all for it – if you’ll pardon my grammar.’
Bianca decides Timothy and Ned are right – the Jackdaw can do without this particular patron. ‘I think it’s time you went home, don’t you? Careful of the cut-purses on the way. I wouldn’t want you to come to harm.’ She lifts one hand, intending to signal to Ned. But then the Magdalene’s overseer kicks the world out from under her feet.
‘That husband of yours is a right enough fellow, though – ain’t ’ee?’
Bianca stares at him. Last time she checked, matrimony was a state utterly unfamiliar to her.
‘My husband?’
‘Aye, the physician. Where is ’ee? Call ’im out – I ain’t too proud to sup with the bone-setter from St Tom’s.’
Ned Monkton’s huge arm is already reaching out, in anticipation of Bianca’s command. She stops him.
‘Do you mean Nicholas Shelby?’
‘Aye. The one who came down from St Tom’s – for the ceremony.’
Bianca gives him the eyes of death. ‘Firstly, I’ll have you know Nicholas Shelby works for me. Well, he did. And secondly, there’s been no marriage ceremony, unless I was asleep with a pillow over my head when it happened.’
The overseer vents more fumes into the already fuggy atmosphere of the taproom. Bianca shifts sideways an inch or two. ‘Listen, Mistress, I’m talking about the ceremony at the Magdalene a few weeks back. The one with the fish.’
‘Fish?’ Bianca is beginning to feel her command of this exchange slipping through her fingers.
‘Aye, St Tom’s sends a physician for the inmates. The Bishop of Winchester gives the hospital a sack of fish in return. Dates back to King Canute. Fuck knows what good it does any of them.’
‘I have not the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
Unconcerned, the overseer ploughs on. ‘Mostly, the physic don’t work, and the fish stinks worse than the Magdalene does. But we have to do it, else the inmates don’t get the medicine. More’s the point, I don’t get to keep the alms money. Your husband was the physician, last time. I hadn’t seen his face there before.’
‘Dr Shelby is not my husband,’ Bianca says indignantly.
The overseer decides of his own accord that it’s time to leave. He rises uncertainly to his feet, bestowing a parting belch of knock-down fumes on her. ‘Well, if he ever should be, you want to keep him on a tight leash. That Lady Katherine Vaesy was all over him like an outbreak of the buboes.’
At breakfast Lord Lumley announces that the household will attend Cheam church for a thoroughly conventional, approved Protestant Sunday sermon.
Nicholas’s relief is palpable. Robert Cecil is deluded, just as I’d hoped, he tells himself. John Lumley’s library is merely eclectic, not heretical. His conversation at supper is designed solely to provoke. His mind encourages discourse, not sedition. He is no threat to the realm.
Now I can safely broach the subject of the Bankside killer, he decides. I can enlist John Lumley’s help. Then I can go back to Southwark, having discharged Robert Cecil’s instructions to the full. I’m off the hook.
He joins the household as they assemble in the outer courtyard with a lighter conscience than he’s had since the day he arrived. It occurs to him – with a guilty start – that he still hasn’t written to Bianca.
The winter sun flecks the chalk-and-flint walls of Cheam’s Saxon church with slivers of golden light. The hamlet is a cluster of houses and barns, some as old as England itself, others new with whiteboard fronts and straight chimneys, all lying in a small valley between Cheam Common and the Banstead Downs. At the church porch a serious-looking man in a rector’s gown greets them. He bows deeply before John Lumley. ‘My lord, you are – as always – doubly welcome. And the Lady Elizabeth.’
‘Reverend Watson, I trust I find you in God’s good peace, sir,’ Lumley answers. ‘This is Dr Nicholas Shelby, a young man of physic. He’s come from London to study a while at Nonsuch.’
‘A physician?’ says Watson. ‘Oxford or Cambridge?’
‘Cambridge.’
‘Brothers then, eh? I was at Christ’s.’
Nicholas remembers his first year there – a sizar, little better than an unpaid servant for the students of better breeding, darning their hose and carrying their hawks when they went hunting. The divinity men had been the worst. He smiles thinly and shakes the priest’s hand. It feels as dry and dead as the stones of his church, though he can’t be much older than forty.