But like someone unburdening herself of an unwanted secret, Hella Maas seems unable to stop.
‘We see a dead child… a dead parent – or perhaps it is a dead womb…’
Are these statements? Or questions? Is the maid in some form of trance? Bianca wonders. Is she, perhaps, even possessed?
It is Nicholas’s sharp intake of breath that makes her turn.
He is standing in the doorway, a look of terrible vulnerability on his face. Bianca knows at once what he’s thinking, and the pain goes through her so sharply that for a moment she thinks it is a knife that Hella Maas has thrust towards her, rather than a silver cross.
He’s thinking of his first wife, Eleanor, and the child his physic couldn’t save.
16
‘It was a guess, nothing more. It just happened to strike the mark,’ Bianca says, taking Nicholas’s hands in hers. ‘It’s the same sort of trick the old vagabond women play on Bankside. They say something imprecise, but portentous. That’s how they convince the gullible they can foresee the future. There was nothing mystical about it. She’s a charlatan. I’m surprised she didn’t ask for money.’
The object of her anger is at this moment topping up the well of her piety in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, making a last-minute personal appeal to God to delay Judgement Day long enough for them to reach Clairvaux Abbey, their next hope of proper rest on the Via Francigena.
‘Of all the guesses she could have made, why that one?’ Nicholas asks. ‘And how did she know there was a cross among your belongings?’
‘She didn’t. It was chance.’
It is the first time they have been alone and able to speak openly since Hella threw her handful of black powder onto an open fire the previous day. The resulting explosion is still ringing in their ears.
Nicholas says, ‘Yet the words she spoke: it was as if she knew about Eleanor.’
‘That is how it was meant to be – to convince,’ Bianca tells him. ‘Though for what purpose, other than to shock or to cause mischief between us–’ She spreads her hands in mystification.
Nicholas knows he should believe her. He is the least superstitious physician in London, a man of the new learning. Why, he even refuses to cast a patient’s horoscope before he makes a diagnosis, a practice that most in his profession believe essential. And yet the maid had sounded so certain, as if she really was seeing the things she spoke of: a dead child… and a parent. At the time, he had felt as though she was looking deep inside his heart, unearthing memories he had thought stilled for ever.
Bianca kisses him lightly on the cheek. ‘Do not feel ashamed, Nicholas. Eleanor and your child will always be in your heart,’ she says, as though she too can read his thoughts. ‘I make no complaint. That is as it should be.’ She smiles. ‘Perhaps Hella really does believe what she says: that she can see into the future, see something dreadful coming. She wouldn’t be the first. We’ve had maids like that in Italy for centuries. They start off seeing visions, and the next thing you know they’re made into saints.’
‘We’ve weeks of this ahead,’ he says. ‘Couldn’t we just slip away before she gets back?’
‘Nicholas!’
‘I know.’
He takes his wife in his arms, wondering how long they might have before Hella returns from her prayers.
Bianca – eyes closed – feels the warmth of him against her cheek. Feels again the sense of safety she always experiences in his embrace. And then the hairs on the nape of her neck begin to rise. What if the child Hella had spoken of was not the one her husband had conceived with his late wife? What if it was a child as yet unborn?
For some reason Bianca dares not explore, a line from her last letter to her cousin Bruno jumps into her head: as yet, no sign of our hoped-for bounty…
On the advice of Father Peacham, further preparations are made. Boots are re-soled. Wide-brimmed straw hats are purchased, to protect against sun and rain. Coins are sewn into linings and hems to make it harder for spur-of-the-moment thieves.
If Nicholas were a true pilgrim and not simply a fugitive, he thinks he might be more inclined to walk the Via Francigena. But the two weeks it has taken them to reach Reims has convinced him that authenticity of cover has its limits. With the help of Hella Maas, he finds a muleteer who caters for the wealthier travellers on the road to Rome. The man has a business partner at a town called Mouthier-Haute-Pierre, where the Via Francigena rises into the crests and gorges of the Haut Jura guarding the way into Switzerland. Monsieur Boiseaux makes his profit sending the mules down, and Monsieur Perrault makes his profit sending them back. And just in case the Englishman is thinking of making off with them somewhere in between, he points out that there is not a pilgrim hostelry between either place that does not recognize one of the Boiseaux–Perrault mules almost as well as an old and well-respected friend, even if the colour of its coat has been artfully changed with soot or flour.
Nicholas rents four of the sturdy little beasts – the fourth to allow periods of unburdened rest. On a mischievous whim, he names them Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham.
They choose to leave on the feast day of Mary Magdalene, the twenty-second day of July. The day dawns clear and cloudless, the early-morning shadows streaked across the cathedral square like inky lines drawn on parchment. Father Peacham has told them it is the perfect day on which to begin a pilgrimage, particularly if you’d rather trust in the safety of numbers over divine providence. And indeed, looking down from the window of their lodgings, Nicholas can see a crowd gathering. The pilgrims are easily identifiable by their plain brown tunics, broad sunhats and faces flushed with the anticipation of spiritual ecstasy. When they’ve been on the road a week or more, Nicholas recalls Father Peacham saying sadly, they’ll be looking like any other weary, footsore traveller and wondering if it is really worth the effort.
Across the square, the great doors to the cathedral are open. A battle for supremacy is taking place between the eager pilgrims, the city’s roosters and the priests chanting Lauds. Nicholas leans out of the window and fills his lungs with clean morning air. It feels cool and refreshing, though if Cecil and the others are right, it should by rights have a whiff of sulphur hanging in it. How, he wonders, can his soul be damned, simply by listening to Roman prayers in Reims? The people beginning to go about their business below – the bakers with their baskets of still-warm loaves, the farmers coming in from the outlying villages with their produce, the washerwomen carrying their bundles down to the Vesle – look much like the people of Southwark, more or less. Is this, he wonders, the enemy that his own queen fears so much she would have her Privy Council make bloody carrion of decent men like Father Peacham and Dr Roderigo Lopez?
He spots Hella crossing the square towards the lodgings, returning from a last-minute dose of spiritual fortification for the long journey ahead. He makes a promise to himself to be charitable. She cannot possibly know about Eleanor and the child she was carrying. That was four years ago, in another land, in another time. Bianca is right: it was just a guess, a cheap street trick, though what Hella thought she might win by it is anyone’s guess.
She is walking with her head down, he notices. She moves at the same driven pace that hasn’t flagged since Den Bosch. He is sure now that it’s a moving away from something, rather than a striding towards it. Perhaps on the road to Clairvaux Abbey she might be persuaded to tell them what it is she is really fleeing from. Perhaps it has to do with what she has already partially revealed: a dead family and a sister who apparently speaks to her from heaven.