‘Indeed she does, Dr Shelby,’ says Sprint. ‘A burn mark–’ He touches his beard. ‘Right here, on her jaw.’
Once again Southwark has decanted all its flavours into the Jackdaw. But this evening there is a change in the air; there has been for some days now. The customers sup their ale in a somewhat less boisterous manner. The fire seems a little less warm. When anyone asks Rose and Timothy what’s the matter with Mistress Merton, they receive only evasion in reply.
The truth is, the drunken overseer’s casual remarks have turned the Jackdaw’s mistress into a stalking gorgon.
As Bianca works the tables she recalls her father’s stern warning. ‘Never become any man’s chattel,’ he’d told her when the local Paduan boys began to really notice the daughter of the commerciante Inglese. ‘I’m a merchant, young lady, I know how prices can fall when the goods are too plentiful.’
Soon there had been a steady procession of young gentlemen discovering an urgent need to visit the house of the English merchant, Simon Merton. But his daughter had never liked the way Italian men made such a great play of venerating the Virgin while counting real women barely more important than their hawks or their hounds. She’d known instinctively how her life would be, if she married one of them – sewing and gossiping, gossiping and sewing, day after day, while her husband took boat rides on the Bacchiglione river with his courtesan. She’d decided then she would become a physician. She would do good in the world.
Bianca can remember walking hand-in-hand with her father in the Palazzo Bo. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. The air had been full of the noise of carpenters sawing and hammering, putting up temporary wooden stands for a public dissection in honour of the great Vesalius. The senior professor of anatomy at the university was to give the lecture. The subject was the body of a hanged criminal. With the ghoulish innocence of the young, Bianca had asked to watch. Her father had refused.
‘But Julio and Esperanza’s parents took them to watch a heretic being burned in the Piazza del Santo,’ she’d protested angrily. Instead of answering, he’d introduced her to a terrifyingly august Italian in a black gown who’d turned out to be the university chancellor. ‘It appears my daughter wants to be a physician,’ Simon Merton had said. ‘Can you help her?’
The chancellor had given Bianca a patronizing smile. ‘Signorina, it will be one hundred years at the very least before a woman is allowed to graduate with a doctorate from Padua.’ He’d made it sound like some sort of achievement.
‘But Dorotea Bucca was professor of physic at Bologna almost two hundred years ago,’ she’d protested. ‘I read it in a book.’
Her father had beamed with pride.
Not so the Paduan. ‘The Bolognese would elect a toad as a professor if they thought it would bring a few more ducats through the door,’ he’d told her scornfully.
When she’d come to England – after her father’s death – she’d rapidly discovered that it would be more like five hundred years before anyone would allow a woman to study medicine, let alone practise. Not only that, but the Grocers’ Guild wouldn’t even let her set up as an apothecary.
What would her father make of it: his daughter, the would-be physician, now mistress of a Bankside tavern? Worse still, what would her mother say? Bianca thinks she knows. She can hear her mother’s wildfire Italian voice saying, ‘I don’t care two figs that you’re a tavern-mistress in the city of the ungodly – only that you’re an unmarried tavern-mistress!’
Why have the overseer’s drunken ramblings upset me so? she wonders. Nicholas Shelby is already wed. He is a partner – whether willing or otherwise – in an indissoluble marriage, one that cannot be fractured even by death. He is not mine to love, even if I were to allow myself the luxury of that emotion.
But then just who is this Lady Katherine Vaesy – the one that rogue from the Magdalene says is all over Nicholas like a plague rash?
Nicholas’s feet beat out a tattoo that echoes beneath the arch of Henry’s great clock tower as he runs. The sun is setting, the towers and minarets of Nonsuch silhouetted against the sky like some fabled palace in far-off Araby.
Ahead of him he can see the entrance to the royal apartments, flanked by statues of ancient gods and heroes – myth made solid by the mason’s hand.
Myth made solid.
Ever since the moment Alice Welford told him about the existence of Elise Cullen, Nicholas has sought to put flesh on her insubstantial bones. But she’s always remained tantalizingly indistinct, a whisper calling to him from within a great silence. Now she is real.
He’s only minutes away from John Lumley’s privy study. He has a truth to tell. He has a key with which to turn a lock. A name to break open a cipher.
He bounds up the steps, throws open the heavy oak door and takes the great staircase three steps at a time.
He hurries along the upper gallery, the fresh rushes on the floor deadening his footfall. The startled faces of the few servants he passes make no impression on him. He has no interest in the magnificent straight-backed chairs set along the corridor where the awed of Surrey can wait while Lord Lumley considers their petitions and their suits, even though each chair cushioned with cloth-of-gold costs more than Nicholas has ever earned in a year. He does not turn his head to admire the paintings – three Holbeins, a brace of Dürers, an Antonio Moro and a Frans Floris. They leave him unmoved. The artists might as well have left the pigment unmixed in the mortar. The Passion of Christ, carved from black marble, and which Francis Deniker’s inventory values at £117 6s. 10d., if it’s worth a farthing, leaves him cold. He has thoughts only for what he intends to say to John Lumley.
He already knows it will be part revelation, part confession. For the revelation: everything he knows about Elise Cullen and her murdered brother. His confession will be that he’s come to Nonsuch on a pretence, that his real intention was to enlist Lumley’s help in finding the man who killed Ralph, Jacob Monkton and the others. He will say nothing about Robert Cecil. And therein lies the guilt. Confession always comes with a price attached. And Robert Cecil will expect him to pay it. Find a killer. Abandon Bianca.
Gabriel Quigley opens the privy-chamber door to Nicholas’s erratic knocking. The way Lumley’s secretary stands in the frame, his arms folded across the breast of his gown of legal black, makes Nicholas remember all the aldermen’s clerks, the churchwardens, the petty officials who have barred his way so far. He struggles to remain polite.
‘Master Secretary, forgive the intrusion, but I really must speak to Lord Lumley.’
‘Lord Lumley is not here,’ says Quigley, a little too quickly. The slight tightening of his pockmarked cheek makes him look as though he’s just winced. It’s an evasion, revealed before the muscles of the face can smother it. Nicholas knows he’s lying.
‘It’s important I see him, Master Quigley,’ he says, trying to look past the secretary without appearing distrustful.
‘I shall tell you again: he’s not here.’
‘Then where is he? I’ll go and find him.’
‘Lord Lumley is not to be sought out like some common ostler or journeyman, Master Physician. If you have something of import to convey, I will pass it on when I next see him.’
And he shuts the door in Nicholas’s face.
Nicholas is momentarily at a loss. He stands staring at the door while his breathing settles. What to do? His secret – Betony’s secret – cannot be contained a moment longer.