Bianca Merton has always considered it a model of what a tavern in the Liberty of Southwark should be, although she baulks at the landlord’s toleration of the more brazen type of Bankside doxy. However, on the morning of the day after Nicholas’s release from Essex House, its greatest recommendation for Bianca and Nicholas is that the husband of Jenny Solver – Southwark’s most efficient gossip – is a regular.
They enter the stable courtyard as St Saviour’s bell tolls eight. Yesterday’s showers have brought out the sweet ammoniacal smell of manure from the stalls, along with the musty tang of old leather and horsehair. The ostler, Tom Prithy, greets them warmly. He is a man wholly suited to his role, with a long equine face and wide, trusting eyes arched by eyebrows too delicate for his runnelled complexion. He even has a habit of stamping his left foot when making a point, like an impatient courser. Prithy is a good man, and Bianca is reluctant to take advantage of him. But needs must.
First, she engages him in a pleasant exchange about nothing in particular. Then she asks after his daughter: does she need any more of the posca of vinegar and herbs for that cold distemper of the stomach? Prithy thanks her warmly and says no, his daughter is restored to her former good health, thanks to the efforts of Dr Shelby and… he tries to say ‘Goodwife Shelby’ but gets no further than ‘Goo–’ before reverting thankfully to ‘Mistress Merton’.
Then Nicholas asks, ‘Do you have two sound mares we can hire? We have to make a journey – the day after tomorrow.’
‘Must be important, to miss the Midsummer Day revels.’
‘A physician is always on call, Master Prithy.’
‘These mares – short legs or long?’
‘Long enough for Dover.’
‘Dover?’ says Tom Prithy with a lift of his lugubrious eyebrows. ‘They must be paying you well, this patient. Ain’t Dover got no physicians of their own?’
Before Nicholas can answer, Bianca says with uncharacteristic vehemence, ‘Dover? I thought we’d agreed against Dover.’
‘No, Wife. I told you quite clearly it must be Dover,’ Nicholas says with laborious patience.
‘But Dover is a hateful little place! Even in the sunshine it’s beset by French gales. The streets stink worse than they do here; and the people – I can’t even bring myself to think of the people.’
Nicholas says sternly, ‘I have decided we are going to Dover. Have you forgotten, so soon, that you are now a wife? A measure of the proper obedience is required from you.’
Bianca purses her lips. ‘If you command it, Husband, then I suppose it will have to be Dover. But I still loathe the place.’
‘You’re only saying that because my brother’s wife comes from Dover. You’ve never liked her. You’ve always made that clear enough.’
This is a fiction. Nicholas’s sister-in-law is from Woodbridge in the county of Suffolk. Bianca has yet to meet her.
‘Why would anyone like your sister-in-law anyway?’ she snaps petulantly. ‘She’s a harridan.’
Nicholas draws a slow breath to prepare himself. He says slowly and deliberately, in case Tom Prithy might mishear: ‘That’s rich talk, coming from the daughter of an Italian witch!’
The slap that lands against Nicholas’s face echoes around the stables, bringing forth whinnies of alarm from the stalls, and a look of utter astonishment on Tom Prithy’s face.
Later, in the crowded taproom, he will tell his master the landlord – in public – that Dr Shelby and Mistress Merton had their very first argument within his hearing.
‘Well, they always were an ill-matched couple,’ the landlord will say. ‘I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.’
‘It were all about Dover,’ Tom Prithy will say, shaking his head slowly as he marvels at what some folk will find to fall out over.
‘Dover?’ says the landlord.
‘Oh yes,’ confirms Tom Prithy, as the customers – including Jenny Solver’s husband – crowd even closer to catch the yeast of the gossip, ‘’twere definitely Dover.’
‘I didn’t realize you actually meant to strike me,’ Nicholas says as they walk back along the riverbank to the Paris Garden. ‘Was that really necessary?’
The red mark between his left cheek and the line of his tightly trimmed black beard has yet to fade.
‘I thought it would add some authenticity.’
‘Authenticity? I think it might have added a loosened tooth.’
‘But it did the job, didn’t it?’
‘There’s no question about that,’ Nicholas admits, rubbing his cheek.
Bianca leans across and plants a chaste kiss on the red weal. ‘A husband striking his wife in the heat of an argument would scarcely draw comment on Bankside, or anywhere else in London for that matter. But a wife striking her husband…’ She gives Nicholas a sly grin that he finds just a little alarming. ‘Master Prithy will be speaking of it for days to come. And unless Jenny Solver has lost her hearing, or her husband is struck dumb before he gets home–’
Nicholas nods. ‘At least, if Essex’s searchers come here asking questions, there will be plenty of people to tell them where we’ve gone. It will take them days to discover we never went within twenty miles of Dover.’
‘But if we’re not going to Dover to take a ship for Antwerp, where are we going to take it from? So far you haven’t deigned to tell me.’
‘We’re going to my father’s farm, at Barnthorpe.’
‘Are you planning to have me sit in a muddy farm waggon all the way to Antwerp? You do know the Narrow Sea is in the way?’
He takes her teasing in good spirit. ‘Woodbridge is barely five miles away. Dutch herring boats and wool traders regularly put in there. We’ll pay for a passage on one of those.’
‘I suppose it’s only right to tell your family you’re leaving the realm for a while,’ Bianca says with a compassionate nod. ‘It will be good to meet them at last.’
Nicholas remembers how he disappeared into a shadowy life of drunkenness and vagrancy after his first wife, Eleanor, died in childbirth. He still finds it hard to forgive himself for the pain he put his family through. He says, ‘They deserve to know the reason for my dropping out of plain sight for a while. Besides, they will have to learn at some point quite what a tempest I’ve married.’
Bianca wonders if he has really given his plan the critical scrutiny it requires. ‘Have you forgotten the searchers – the ones the Privy Council send to watch the ports for Jesuit infiltrators?’
‘Woodbridge is small. They’ll be concentrating on Ipswich or Lowestoft. And they’ll be looking for Jesuits trying to enter the realm, or papist tracts and pamphlets being smuggled in. A Dutch wool merchant and his wife going home in the opposite direction from a little town on the Deben won’t raise their suspicions.’
‘Dutch? How do you propose we pass ourselves off as Dutch?’
‘Easily. I can muster enough of the Hogen-mogen language – from my summer with the army of the House of Orange. You’ll have to speak Italian. I cannot imagine they’ll know the difference.’
Bianca is still not convinced. ‘But once they learn we didn’t enter Dover, the very next place they’ll search for us is your family home. And what if they decide to put someone at Aldgate, to keep watch on the road east? They’ll take us before we’ve even left the city.’
It is not often that Nicholas is ahead of his wife in matters devious. He grins. ‘We’re not taking the road from Aldgate, either.’