But in Hella eyes there is no regret, only an intolerable pity.
‘It is right to speak the truth,’ she says. ‘I gain no pleasure from it. But once knowledge is let loose into the world, it must be accepted. Not denied.’
With great effort, Bianca keeps her voice low – in case Nicholas, even at this distance, catches a hint of the tension between the two women.
‘Well, I think this knowledge of yours is nothing but a hateful trick, played only so that you can see the pain it causes people. You may have suffered in the past, Hella, but that is no reason to hurt people who wish only to help you. We didn’t have to let you come with us, you know. And to speak plainly, I rather wish we hadn’t.’
But the maid seems not to have heard her. Or if she has, Bianca’s statement is lost on her. ‘How much of a disappointment will you be to him – barren after a stillbirth?’ she asks in a monotone voice. ‘How will he survive the loss of a wife and two children?’
Suddenly the words Hella spoke in the chamber at Reims seem to fall out of the sky around Bianca like the cast-out angels in the Den Bosch painting: heralds of torment to come. We see a dead child… a dead parent – or perhaps it is a dead womb… And then an even greater sense of dread seizes her. Then, Hella had spoken only of one child.
‘You said “a wife and two children”. Even if I was pregnant, how do you know about his Eleanor and the child she was carrying?’
Hella smiles. ‘He told me.’
For Bianca, this is even worse than Hella being able to see inside her husband’s mind, or her own for that matter.
‘He told you? When?’
‘At Besançon. When you went down to the river. We understand each other. You should let him go. Let me have him. He does not deserve more pain.’
There is only so much a woman with blisters on her feet, who’s sure she stinks of mule, and has a mountain range ahead of her to cross, can suffer with equanimity. Bianca drops the reins of the mule she is leading. The beast immediately begins grazing at the roadside.
‘Listen to me, girl,’ Bianca hisses in a voice that would have silenced the entire taproom of the Jackdaw in an instant. ‘I don’t know what manner of sport you think you’re playing, but I am having none of it. I’ve spent too long on Bankside not to know a gulling when it’s in the offing. And I don’t fall for any of them. Whatever you think you’re achieving by this manner of talk, I can tell you it won’t work. You’re wasting your time. Nicholas and I have been through too much together to be sundered by a trickster, however sad her story. I’m not with child, do you hear? And when I am, it will be born to us healthy.’
In that instant Bianca knows she has made herself a terrible hostage to fortune. In her mind she whispers the phrase Nicholas brought back from his journey last summer to the Barbary shore: inshā Allāh – if God wills it.
But the cold pity in the other woman’s eyes is merciless.
‘I am sorry, Mistress Bianca, if you find what I have to say upsetting,’ Hella says. ‘All I know is that when the knowledge of something is out, it cannot then be erased. And to deny its existence would be a sin. Measure the hours how you will, the darkness will always come eventually.’
‘You’ve hardly spoken a word to Hella all day,’ Nicholas says. ‘Has some dispute passed between you?’
They are in their lodgings at Mouthier-Haut-Pierre, in a house owned by Perrault the muleteer, business partner of Monsieur Boiseaux in Reims. Freed from their temporary Protestant identities, the former Cecil, Essex, Coke and Popham are now grazing contentedly on good Catholic grass in a nearby field.
A dispute? Bianca says inside her head. A dispute between Hella Maas and me? Do you think that while you were spying out the way ahead from the crest of that hill, we had a mild disagreement over my ability to bear a child with you? She clenches her jaw to stop her thoughts tumbling out and becoming words.
‘Hella speaks as if she likes to wound,’ she says. ‘I’ve borne it about as long as I can.’
Nicholas is gathering a pile of laundry. Amongst the other services Perrault provides for weary pilgrims is the chance to wash their dusty, sweat-stained clothes in a nearby stream, or – for a single denier – have a washerwoman do it for them. Nicholas’s motive in discovering this has not been entirely domestic; his exploration of the town has enabled him to scan the approaches for a man in a grey coat, or any number of imaginary Privy Council watchers, all pointing their fingers in his direction and scribbling down messages to send to Attorney General Coke and Chief Justice Popham, messages that begin with the phase We have found him…
Hella is out buying food from the town market, leaving the two of them alone for the first time in days. Bianca would prefer it if she never returned.
‘I don’t think she realizes,’ Nicholas says casually. ‘It’s as if other people’s sensitivities don’t exist for her. Don’t let it trouble you. We’re getting closer to leaving her every day.’
Don’t let it trouble you. Bianca longs to have Nicholas take her hand – the way he does when he knows instinctively that she is in need of comfort. She wants his physician’s cure for her present malady: kissing her fingers one by one, then the tautness of the skin below the knuckles, then her palm, then her wrist, until the tension has gone out of her. But at this precise moment she fears that if he does, it will serve only to tear open the fragile net that holds in her rage.
‘Did she say something particular that’s brought on this distemper?’ he adds.
‘It doesn’t matter, Husband.’
‘It matters to me. What was it?’
‘Women’s talk, that’s all.’
‘Nothing about how we sinners are all going to burn in hell before the month is out?’
His clumsy attempt at parody is designed to make her smile. It almost succeeds.
‘I think she’s grown weary of that song, now that it no longer makes us shiver,’ Bianca says.
‘Then what is it?’
Bianca takes a deep breath. ‘You told her about Eleanor and your child.’ It is said without recrimination. Just a bald statement of fact. And even before the words are out of her mouth, Bianca wishes she’d never spoken them. But it’s too late to take them back now. ‘You allowed her to see into one of the most important places in your heart. Why would you do that?’
For a moment he’s flustered, unable to answer. He simply stands there, holding her dirty linen under-smock as though he’s been caught with a weapon at the scene of a killing.
‘It was at Besançon… when you went to wash your feet in the river. Hella was speaking of how searching after knowledge can lead to evil things happening.’
Bianca frowns. ‘Well, we both know how true that is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Our life on Bankside has not been exactly what one might call tranquil, has it?’