14
The Duchy of Brabant, between Antwerp
and Brussels,
10th July 1594
In the light of a blood-red dawn, Hella Maas stops at the crest of the little wooden bridge and turns in a slow circle, looking out over the barren, empty polder. Apart from Nicholas and Bianca, there is not another living soul to be seen. All that breaks the horizon is a single skeletal tree shattered by lightning, and a windmill, its sails motionless in the early-morning stillness, pulling the eye towards it like a distant crucifixion. Nicholas cannot help but remember the right-hand panel of the Den Bosch triptych, with its hellish fires glowing in a darkened, satanic landscape. He can see by the look on the maid’s face that she is seeing it, too. Her words confirm it.
‘Do you not smell what I smell?’ she asks, a slight smile of superiority on her lips.
‘Smell what?’ asks Bianca, wondering if she means the marshy odour of the polder.
‘The smell of the flames.’
‘There’s nothing here to burn,’ Nicholas says quickly.
‘I speak of the flames of eternal judgement,’ Hella announces. ‘And it is we who have opened the door to let them enter.’
In the four days since leaving Den Bosch they have grown used to these sudden doom-laden pronouncements. They seem to come out of nowhere. Usually Hella does not even pause when delivering one, as she has now, but keeps up her relentless pace, jabbing at the path with a length of willow held in her right hand, as though every step forward must be won in battle. But they leave Bianca with a sense of foreboding. In her life till now she has had her own moments of uncanny foresight – usually not for the better. Precognition is not something she takes lightly.
‘Is this about the painting, Hella – the painting in the Den Bosch cathedral?’ she asks gently.
Nicholas closes his eyes in resignation. By now he knows not to ask such a question.
‘I tried to warn them,’ the maid answers, stabbing at the planks of the bridge with the tip of the willow cane. ‘I told Father Vermeiren that he was inviting those same horrors to come to pass, if he let it remain on public view. But he said it was just a painting, and that praying hard would ensure such things were never visited upon us. Now he’s dead, and the Spanish will treat the people of his town harshly.’ She gives the bridge a final, sharp jab with the willow, as if to put it out of its misery. ‘Why won’t people listen to me?’
Without waiting for an answer, she resumes her determined march.
Bianca can see only her back, but she knows that on the maid’s face will be that sad, ethereal look of almost-tearful foreboding she has become accustomed to. She whispers to Nicholas, ‘We’re not even in France yet, and it is a very long way to the St Bernard Pass.’
‘Give her time,’ he says quietly, his mouth close to her ear. ‘She’s witnessed two brutal murders at close hand, and you saw what the townspeople were capable of doing to her.’
‘You are right, of course. I should be more charitable,’ Bianca says, hoisting her pack into a more comfortable position to ease the blisters forming on her shoulders. She sets off again after the figure pacing so determinedly ahead, leaving Nicholas to follow.
She would prefer to put Hella Maas out of her thoughts, but in the empty polder there is little to distract her. If even half of what Hella claims is true, then she is a most unusual young woman. When Nicholas had asked again how she came to speak such good English, this time she had answered him: Leiden University.
‘You have studied at a university?’ Bianca had said in awe, recalling how the professors at the Palazzo Bo in Padua had laughed at her own demand to study medicine there. She had tried to keep the envy from her voice, telling herself that she had, after all, been only eight years old at the time.
‘I learned English, Latin and Italian,’ Hella had told her. ‘I served the learned men there, and I listened closely to them. They let me read their books. But they would not let me graduate, because God made me out of the rib of Adam. They said it was not proper for one of my sex.’
Bianca had immediately felt a measure of sympathy, bolstered by the fact that there had been not the slightest hubris in the maid’s voice. She might have been laying claim to nothing more than a minor talent with bodkin and thimble.
Apart from her command of several languages, it also seems that Hella Maas can recite from Euclid’s Elements, name the attendants of the North Star, knows the magic contained in certain numbers and can discourse with confidence on the subject of Master Copernicus and his theory of the cosmos. ‘God blessed the women of my family with great gifts,’ she had announced.
Watching her now, a driven zealot in a borrowed gown striding through the empty landscape as though in flight from an unseen enemy, it occurs to Bianca that at some point God changed his mind. He turned benevolence into punishment. Though how and for what sin, Hella Maas has yet to tell them.
On Bankside, a new Jackdaw tavern is rising from the ashes of the old. The oak frame is up, the brick walls are complete, glaziers are busy setting the lozenges of glass into the lead frames, thatchers scramble over the joists with the confidence of mariners aloft in the rigging of a ship at sea.
It is not the Jackdaw of old. How could it be? For a start, the walls are too straight. They do not sag under the weight of centuries of collected insobriety. Where the timbers were once smooth and darkened with the smoky patina of age, now they are new and honey-coloured, bearing the rough marks of sawtooth, chisel and adze. The only survivors from the original are the chimneys, the brewhouse in the yard where the mad-dog was made and the tavern’s painted sign, which once hung over the lane. True, it is a little scorched. But it survives. Rose and Ned have sworn not to hang it in place again until Bianca and Nicholas have returned from wherever it is they are now.
The steady progress has enabled Ned to pursue the lead given to him by the wherryman, Giles Hunte. He has taken several trips across the river to the Blackfriars water-stairs. For hours at a time he has hung around the jetty, wandered up St Andrew’s Hill or into Thames Street, or through the lanes around Baynard’s Castle, ostensibly just another citizen fortunate to have time on his hands. But so far, he has caught not so much as a glimpse of his quarry.
At first there were numerous occasions when his imagination toyed with him, causing his huge frame to stiffen momentarily as he noticed a bald man, a thin man, a patched jerkin, a pair of cheap woollen hose… But always the fellow he saw was too bald, or not bald enough; too thin, too fat, too young, too old. Now he has managed to chain his impetuosity a little.
He has thought about giving up. Rose is uncomfortable with these journeys across the river. He knows how much she fears he will revert to his old ways, when he knew no other way of handling the world’s objection to him than prodigious quantities of ale and the use of his fists. But why, he wonders, would she think he might risk going back there? Especially now that Rose is sure she is with child.
That in itself is miracle enough for him. There had been a time when Ned had only the dead for company, his only home the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s – where he worked for pennies as a porter. He had almost come to believe that God intended him to dwell apart from the living, that he should have no place in the world above ground. There is nothing he intends to do that will risk him being buried a second time.