Nicholas fumbles for words that won’t make things worse.
‘Those events – the ones that happened to you and me in the past – nothing we did was ever with evil intent. You know that. God knows it.’
‘We are damned if He doesn’t,’ she says softly. ‘Just as Hella says.’
He pretends he hasn’t heard; the same thought has occurred to him more than once. But the past they share cannot be undone.
‘When Hella and I spoke,’ he says, ‘I chose Eleanor as an example of how it was my lack of knowledge that brought ill upon us, not my searching after it.’
‘Nevertheless, I wish you had not spoken of Eleanor and your unborn child to that woman – even if it is not my place to say it. The more she knows about us, the less comfortable I feel. I don’t trust her.’
Nicholas tries to set her mind at rest. ‘She’s merely a young maid who has suffered great hurt in her life: all her family dead – for which she blames herself. Her home is denied to her… she is an outcast… We must excuse her if she says things that provoke. It’s probably because she’s testing providence. When people spurn her, she takes it as proof that she’s right. It’s self-fulfilling.’
‘Excuse her? Why must I excuse her when she says hurtful things to me? Worse than hurtful! More to the point, why do you excuse her?’
Bianca’s cheeks are flushed now. The anger has returned. It is threatening to boil over. She can hear Hella’s voice echoing around a dusty mountain track: How much of a disappointment will you be to him – barren after a stillbirth?
She stands to her full height, throws her shoulders back, arches her neck. She thrusts her chin purposefully towards her infuriatingly compassionate husband. Sometimes she wishes he wasn’t so damnably considerate – of other people’s faults.
She unties the string of her kirtle and lets it fall. As he stares at her nakedness she can think only of her poor blistered feet, and whether the sight of them will douse the fire the rest of her body lights in him. But the kirtle has somehow absorbed a little of her fury and coiled itself around her ankles to hide the blisters from his sight.
‘Knowledge, Husband?’ she says huskily. ‘Have all the knowledge of me you want – and then tell me to my face if it leads to evil.’
Beyond the riverside town of Pontarlier the path rises into forested hills on the northern edge of Lake Geneva. The country is wild here. Boars grub noisily amid the trees. It is late afternoon and the three travellers are alone on the track. The air is close and threatening. Overhead, towers of grey, roiling thunderclouds billow upwards like smoke from the Devil’s fires. Shortly before the heavens open and wash them from the face of the earth, Hella – in the lead as usual – calls out that there is shelter ahead.
The hamlet of mean houses and a single barn is scattered around an ancient bridge, a single arch thrown across a fast-flowing, deep-cut stream. Where the water surges over the rocks it is as white as bleached bone; in the depths, as black as sin. There is no one about, and the barn has holes in the roof. But there is a tavern, a sprawling, broken-backed place of slate and stone draped over a rise just above the bridge. Above the door is a painted sign of a bunch of grapes. But the real clue to the building’s existence lies in a little niche set into the wall, home to a carved effigy of St James, patron saint of pilgrims. In his weather-worn hand he holds his staff, while his blunted feet stand on scallop shells. Nicholas realizes the place is a former religious house turned over to earthier indulgences.
They have had mixed fortune with their choice of places in which to lay their heads. When Bianca ducks below the crooked stone lintel, the tavern-mistress in her sounds a warning note about this one.
She studies the dark interior with a professional eye while Nicholas pays for a room. It seems on the surface like any humble country establishment: low, smoke-blackened beams; rustic benches; foresters in leather jerkins and plain broadcloth, playing dice. None look to her like pilgrims, but then they haven’t seen any on the road for days. A hound lies close to the hearth, gnawing on a bone that still has a scrap of flesh left on it and eyeing them with suspicion. The customers glance at the three strangers with sullen curiosity. There seems to Bianca to be a sense of unspoken anticipation in the air. It is only when a plump, white-haired, flush-faced man wearing a threadbare black cassock comes down the stairs, pauses on the last step to tug his gown straight and lace one shoe, that she realizes the truth.
‘It’s a bawdy-house,’ she whispers to Nicholas when he re-joins her, just as the first crack of thunder sounds and rain begins to stream down the windows. A moment later a stocky peasant woman of indeterminate years with a carnivorous eye and fists like a farrier’s clumps down into the taproom. She gesturers impatiently to a little bald fellow who nervously cradles his felt cap in his lap. As he rises to his feet, she turns imperiously and ascends once more to the upper floor. He follows, like a man going to be bled by the barber-surgeon.
‘Do you see? I was right.’
Nicholas says, ‘We’ve passed nowhere else on the road since Pontarlier. It has a fire, and we’ve paid for a chamber. If we go outside, we’ll likely drown.’
‘Come, Husband – you cannot think me too precious to abide a jumping-house. I’ve lived on Bankside longer than you have, remember?’ Bianca tells him, as the sound of hail striking the shutters intensifies. She glances at Hella, who is questioning the landlord in serviceable French about the state of the road through the hills and onwards to the lake. ‘But what about her?’ These don’t seem like the sort of clients who’ll take kindly to being chastised loudly for loose morals.’
‘I’ll suggest to her that we rest until supper,’ Nicholas says, rolling his eyes. ‘If she’s asleep, perhaps she won’t notice.’
In the event, their chamber is not conducive to rest. It smells of unwashed bodies and the mattresses feel as though they haven’t been aired in a year. Within the hour there is little to see from the window but intermittent torrents of grey rain, which thrash the branches of the trees and send dirty rivulets coursing down the steep street of the little hamlet. They fill the time as best they can, accepting their confinement, welcoming the opportunity to rest. Hella spends much of it mouthing silent prayers. Nicholas wonders if she can smell the sin.
Supper is a tolerable stew of boar meat, better than the surroundings might suggest, though the table they eat at is as sticky as a honey jar. As the evening draws on, the inn begins to drop the thin veneer of propriety it had shown in daylight. Whenever the rain eases, men scuttle in to dry themselves by the fire: local foresters, poachers, hunters, even a few gentlemen, judging by the quality of their clothes. Where they come from is anyone’s guess; there aren’t enough houses in the hamlet to home them. The swelling crowd plays dice and cards, chalking the scores on a slate as they down flasks of sweet wine and a spirit that smells of fermented pears. At some invisible sign, a procession of young women comes down the stairs and passes amongst them, alighting first on the better-dressed customers. Their smiles are flat and sickly, their eyes dead. These are not local drabs, Bianca guesses. They have dark, almost Moorish faces, and weals on the back of their wrists where they’ve been branded with a hot iron. From her place beside the landlord, the bawd with the farrier’s fists keeps a beady eye on her stock, while a youth with one empty eye socket plays angry little galliard tunes, though no one is dancing.
‘It’s worse than the Tabard on a feast day,’ Bianca says under her breath. ‘I wouldn’t have this crowd in the Jackdaw if they offered me all the gold in the queen’s mint.’