Beyond the garden wall looms the black bulk of the Lazar House. She wonders if Nicholas is right – is this really where the man who killed young Jacob Monkton goes about his monstrous business? If so, he couldn’t have chosen a more fitting place.
But there have been no more bodies washed up on Bankside since Nicholas left – save for a customer from the Good Husband who’d decided upon a swim after an injudicious three quarts of stitch-back. Perhaps the killer has moved out of the parish. Perhaps he’s discovered a conscience. Perhaps he’s died.
And where is Nicholas now? she wonders. Is he asleep in some goose-down bed in fabled Nonsuch? Does he share it with Lady Katherine Vaesy?
She reaches down and rubs her fingertips over the winter herbs. And as she savours the rich aromas that cling to her skin, for the first time since she planted them they bring her not comfort, but a dreadful premonition.
It is some indeterminate time since the moon fell in on Nonsuch. It could be one minute; it could be one hundred years. Nicholas cannot be certain.
He is lying on the storeroom floor. Waves of pain ripple through his body. The stench of old straw and hawk-mute assaults his confused senses. He can see nothing. The darkness seeps into him, filling him from his extremities inwards, so that he doesn’t know where the darkness ends and his skin begins. Is this how death comes stealing up? he wonders.
Then he hears the rasp of a bolt sliding home. It’s followed by the agitated striking of a flint against steel. A thin glimmer of light appears, low down near the floor where he thinks the corner of the door might be.
With his sense of time fractured, he thinks the dawn must be breaking.
The light brightens – and the back of his throat catches the first sharp stab of smoke.
42
Young Tom Parker, Lord Lumley’s apprentice falconer, wakes to the impression that someone’s boot has just brushed the edge of his mattress.
He sits up, bracing himself for a cuff to the head for neglecting his duties. He should be in the mews, keeping watch over Lady Lumley’s merlin, Salome. The hawk has recently fallen victim to sour crop. It needs a small medicinal feed every three hours. Falconer Hilliard has arranged a rota, and as usual Tom has drawn the night watch. Being the apprentice, he always draws the worst jobs – like scrubbing the mutes off the floor or disposing of the half-digested mouse carcasses when the birds are off their food. But it’s cold in the mews tonight and Tom doesn’t have a coat of feathers to keep him warm. A hearthside mattress in Master Sprint’s kitchen is a far more agreeable spot in which to rest between visits.
Tom is not lazy. He did not mean to fall asleep. Indeed, until a couple of hours ago he’d hardly had the opportunity. Whenever anyone had entered the kitchens, the cry had gone up: ‘Have you heard the news? Betony has spoken! Master Sprint heard her with his own ears!’
The details of exactly what Betony has spoken are still hazy. Tom has heard the most implausible stories: that the girl has admitted to being the daughter of a Spanish noble drowned with the Armada, and that she’s wandered here from Devon where her father’s galley was wrecked; that she’s the love-child of the Bishop of London; even that she’s Lord Lumley’s bastard daughter returned to the fold. With all this excitement going on, Tom Parker is surprised he’s managed to shut his eyes at all.
He’s already muttering a sleepy apology before he realizes falconer Hilliard is not standing over him, demanding to know why he’s not at his post. Whoever’s foot it was that woke him, it must have belonged to someone else.
Looking around in the hearth-light, he sees the kitchens are still, the scullions snoring peacefully nearby. The only movement is a fleeting shadow in the far corner, someone slipping out into the corridor beside the door to the buttery. Gathering his wits, Tom hurries out into the icy yard to bring Salome her medicine – just in time to see the fiery glow spreading at the far corner of the mews.
Close. Almost too close.
Nicholas stands precariously on the cobbles of the kitchen yard on legs that appear to belong to an infant who hasn’t yet learned to walk. He takes great gulps of clean, cold pre-dawn air. Above his head the stars appear to dance in long silver ribbons. Tears stream down his cheeks from the acrid sting of the ash in his eyes.
And then everything becomes increasingly fractured and untrustworthy. He has but a blurred impression of John Lumley in his nightshirt, telling the assembled crowd that if King Henry’s architects hadn’t put a well and a hand-pump in the kitchen yard, this could all have ended very badly indeed. He catches the blur of Lizzy Lumley’s face, pale and suspicious, as she asks what he’s doing skulking around the mews at this time of the night. He sees indistinctly Gabriel Quigley staring at him, with even more loathing burned into his pocked face than before.
He captures only fragments of the walk back into the palace and what follows: Sprint’s great arms supporting him… the icy splash of water against his skin and the smell of wild clary as one of the Nonsuch women bathes his eyes with a soothing tincture… someone easing him back against the comforting bolster of a bed and pulling the covers over his chest…
After that, nothing. Not even dreams.
It will take till mid-morning to entice Lord Lumley’s peregrine, Paris, down from one of the Nonsuch minarets with the offer of a particularly bloody slice of beef. Even then he will sit reluctantly on Hilliard’s glove and glare at poor Tom Parker, as if to say, It’s all your fault.
The bird has the most powerful wings of all the Nonsuch hawks. If he hadn’t been one of the first out of the mews when Tom opened the door, the apprentice swears he might never have heard the hammering of a fist against the storeroom door.
The pale light of late afternoon spills over the casement like the dying flow of a dammed-up stream. Nicholas wakes, convinced his lungs are trying to claw their way out of his chest. When the retching subsides, the physician in him goes to work.
First he’ll need the juice of purslain seeds. That will ease the burns in the throat. Then priest’s pintle and hoarhound, to bring up whatever debris the smoke has carried into him. It’s what he would have prescribed for the men he’d tended in the army of the Prince of Orange when they’d inhaled too much of the smoke of battle. There’s bound to be a medicine chest somewhere in Nonsuch.
For the rest of it, including the drum-roll of pain when he touches the back of his head and feels the hardness of hair matted with dried blood, he wishes Bianca were here with her theriac. At least the wash of wild clary that the Nonsuch maids used to clean the soot from his eyes has done the trick: he can see well enough.
Not that Nicholas needs the faculty of sight to know that Nonsuch has suddenly become a very dangerous place for him. Whoever has tried to kill him is still at large. They might try again. He leans back against the bolster. His brow is clammy with sweat.
How can I have been so stupid? he asks himself. Why did I blunder into the mews, certain that Francis Deniker was no threat? He flails himself with recrimination. But then he thinks: I can’t prove Deniker wrote the note. It could have been someone else entirely. An awful thought assails him: there’s another at Nonsuch with a motive to silence me. What if the master of Nonsuch himself was behind the attempt on my life?
John Lumley might seem like a cultured man of learning, but Nicholas knows – from all Robert Cecil has told him – that in the past the courtier has gambled for very high stakes indeed. Perhaps the hand that wrote the words I know who killed the maid’s brother and the others wasn’t Francis Deniker’s at all, but John Lumley’s.