She finds herself glaring at a shabby-looking man in his fifties, frozen in the act of rising from behind a desk cluttered with astrological charts, leather-bound medical books, pots and vials, and a scattering of knives and lancets that makes her think of a meal table after the plates have been cleaned away. Clad in the dark gown of a doctor of medicine, with a tangled grey beard framing an aggressive jaw, Vaesy waves a quill at the intruders as though he intends to defend himself with it. ‘What is this rank discourtesy?’ he demands to know, almost knocking over a flask of straw-coloured liquid that looks to Rose suspiciously like urine. ‘Who makes such ungovernable sport with my privacy?’
Ned leaves the talking to his wife. She has a better way with words.
‘Tell us the truth, you vile arseworm,’ Rose snarls, her face turning crimson. ‘Was it you who made the false denunciation against Dr Nicholas Shelby? Admit it, as God is your judge!’
Vaesy stares at her as though he cannot quite believe what he is hearing. He has never been spoken to in such a manner, certainly not by a female of the lower orders. ‘Christ’s holy nails – you’re a woman!’ he says in bewilderment.
Rose glances at her husband. ‘See, Ned? He ’asn’t forgotten his ’natomy. That’s proper university learnin’ for you, that is.’
Ned can almost hear Mistress Bianca in her voice. Knowing it would ruin their advantage, he struggles not to laugh.
Vaesy says contemptuously, ‘What is this insult? I am Sir Fulke Vaesy. I have no cause to make an account of myself to some bawd’s moll.’
Rose has to put out a hand to stay her husband. She says, ‘You’ll answer plainly, if you know what’s good for you. Otherwise I shall be ’ard-pressed to stop my Ned here from giving you a private lecture in dissection.’ She nods towards Vaesy’s groin. ‘Startin’ with your pizzle!’
Vaesy waves his quill at the hapless Ditworth. ‘Go – fetch the constable!’
The servant looks up at Ned in despair. ‘May I go, sir, as my master commands?’
Ned says, ‘By all means, Master Ditworth. I ’ave no quarrel with you. Go, fetch the constable.’ Then, to Vaesy: ‘But by the time he gets here, you won’t be in any state to tell him why your blood’s splashed all over the wainscoting. Now sit down, an’ if you’re truly the gentleman you seem to think you are, answer my wife properly when she asks you a civil question.’
Less than an hour later Ned and Rose sit in the stern of a wherry as the boatman pushes with one oar against the Blackfriars stairs to point them in the direction of Bankside. The wind has risen. The wherry jolts to the slap of spiteful little waves. Ned leans over to shield Rose from the spray. Their mood is as grey as the river. ‘You should ’ave let me throttle him,’ he says. ‘What use is a confession, if he won’t put right what he’s done?’
‘Because I don’t want our child to grow up knowing his father was a felon ’anged for murder, that’s why.’
Rose lays her head against the breast of Ned’s jerkin. She is prouder of him than he will ever know. But the greater emotion she feels is relief.
Vaesy has admitted to them that he was the author of Master Nicholas’s misfortune. He even appeared proud of it. But with pride had come a return of his former patrician self. He had called their bluff. He had refused to commit to paper any statement that his claims were baseless.
For a terrible instant Rose had feared Ned was going to smash him to a pulp. She could see the inner battle he was fighting, as clear as day: a terrible stillness had come over him, save for his breathing, which was deep, slow and rasping, like a man close to expiring from flux in the lungs. To her joy, the better Ned had won.
‘I could ’ave made him write a letter of retraction. I know I could,’ Ned says angrily as the wherry rolls alarmingly with the waves. ‘You could ’ave read it to me, so that I could know it was proper.’
‘Vaesy is a serpent, Ned,’ she says. ‘Even if he’d written a letter, he’d ’ave told the magistrates we forced him to it.’
Ned knows his wife is speaking the truth. The way Vaesy had so contemptuously refused to put right the wrong he had done has set a bitter fire raging inside him. Vaesy had called him a churl, a vagabond, a low-born of no consequence – told him there was not a law officer in the land who would believe a person such as him, over a knight of the realm. Ned had kept his fists by his side throughout, knowing in his heart that Vaesy was right. If he went to the Privy Council, they wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t even get a hearing.
‘What do we do, Wife? There must be something.’
But Rose has no answer for him, which only adds to his despair. As the wherry fights its way towards Bankside, the knowledge of his own impotency stings Ned Monkton far more than any of Sir Fulke Vaesy’s insults.
19
The road is rising. The hills grow ever steeper. To ease the burden on the mules, the pace has slowed and only Bianca and Hella ride. Even though Nicholas feels as fit as he ever did on his father’s farm at Barnthorpe, his calves ache at the end of each day when they rest in a pilgrims’ hostelry, or in a barn, or even beneath a hedge – something he has only vague memories of doing after Eleanor’s death, when grief and drink had made a deranged vagrant out of him.
They cross little stone bridges over torrents of mountain melt-water tumbling through narrow defiles. Knuckles of granite thrust out of wooded inclines like the tips of a reef breaking the surface of a dark-green ocean. They have almost reached the village of Mouthier-Haut-Pierre, where they will surrender the mules. Nicholas has walked ahead a little, to check the way from the next crest. Bianca can see him in the distance, silhouetted against the sky where the path leads between dense stands of fir trees.
‘Nicholas tells me that you have a brother still living,’ she says to Hella, suddenly weary of the silence.
‘Did I tell him that?’ she replies distractedly.
‘When we were resting in that forest near Troyes, you told him what had happened to your family, at Breda.’
‘If you say so, I must have done.’
‘I don’t mean to pry–’
Hella looks down at her dust-covered leather overshoes. ‘I haven’t seen him for some time. He is a priest – was a priest. I think he lost his faith in God, after what happened.’
‘So too did Nicholas, when he suffered a great loss. When we are in pain it is easy to rail against His plan for us. But the pain passes – eventually.’
Hella lifts her gaze to meet Bianca’s. There is a frightening coldness in it, which makes Bianca think she has intruded too deeply, struck some deep vein of suffering that runs through the maid’s memory and that she would prefer were not mined.
‘It will break his heart when he finds out,’ Hella says.
‘Your brother’s heart?’
‘No – your husband’s.’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
For what seems like an age, Hella studies Bianca’s face, as though trying to recognize someone she remembers only from her childhood. Then she says, ‘It will break his heart when the child you are carrying is stillborn.’
The heat goes out of the air with a rush. On either side of the track the forest turns from summer to winter in the passing of a single breath. Bianca almost reels at the cold cruelty in the maid’s voice. For a moment she is speechless. Then, through a jaw that seems to have fused itself to the rest of her skull, she says, slowly and with great resolve so that her voice does not falter, ‘I am not with child, Hella. I am sure I would know. And even if I was, why would you say such a vile and hurtful thing? Do you get pleasure from it?’