They reach the town of Montreux the day after the Feast of the Transfiguration. He knows this because Bianca tells him so. In England feasting the saints has long since been ruled a dangerous superstition, an offence against the queen’s religion. Now Bianca takes great delight in acknowledging these holy days, something she has previously had to do in secret.
Montreux itself is staunchly Protestant, governed by the Swiss and full of Huguenot exiles from Italy. Yet still Nicholas does not feel safe. He cannot shake the sense of being watched. In the street, every eye that turns his way – no matter how casually – heightens his conviction that they are being followed. When he tracks down a merchant who trades with England, in order to top up his purse on Robert Cecil’s letter of credit, he comes away with the nagging feeling that he’s fixed his presence here for everyone to see.
But there is an even greater concern now occupying his mind: crossing the mountains. From their rented room in a hostelry on the lakeside, they have a breathtaking view of the snow-clad peaks across the water, jagged rents in the sky capped by a tumult of white cloud.
‘How in the name of Jesu are we going to cross those?’ he asks the owner of the hostelry, an Italian Protestant refugee from Lombardy. After Bianca’s tuition over so many weeks, he finds he can converse adequately in the man’s tongue, even if his accent raises a smile.
‘Bravely, or not at all,’ the man replies. ‘There are more bones up there than rocks.’
But it turns out that he’s only having a joke at the Englishman’s expense. The great pass of St Bernard is open. And there is a hospice in the monastery at the highest point, where pilgrims can rest after the ascent.
‘We ought to buy warm coats,’ Bianca suggests. ‘Even at its best, it will be no warmer than a winter’s day in Milan.’
‘How distant from here?’ Nicholas asks.
‘Four days to the pass. One to cross. We could be in Italy by the twelfth, Pavia six days later.’
‘Is there a saint’s day for that?’ Nicholas asks mischievously.
‘There’s bound to be,’ Bianca replies. ‘There’s a saint’s day for everything.’
And if there isn’t, there ought to be, she thinks. It should be called St Bianca’s Day. Because, at Pavia, Hella Maas will continue on to Rome. And if I don’t merit sainthood by then, I never will.
In fact Montreux holds them for three days. There is no dissent. Foot leather needs repairing or replacing, tired joints need resting, and even Hella Maas accepts that you cannot march resolutely towards Judgement Day and expect to get there promptly on blistered feet.
When Bianca wakes on the third morning she leaves Nicholas asleep and goes down to the lake. She walks along the shore, marvelling at the view. The mountains wear two faces: one stark against the sky, the other reflected in the shimmering water. Their cold, magnificent mystery makes her think back to the night when Hella stood over her on the bank of the raging torrent, her face frozen in the lightning flash. It had the same unfathomable indifference in it, the same age-old disregard for the petty trials of mere mortals.
Did she intend to let me fall? Bianca wonders. Or was I so frightened that my mind saw danger everywhere? Hella could have done it, had she wished; no one would have been any the wiser. So if she has ever really intended me harm, she could have taken her chance at that moment. There would have been none better.
The thought only partly reassures. There is still the matter of the maid’s claimed precognition. Bianca remembers the images of the bloated sinners in the painting at Den Bosch and the torments they were suffering, each dependent upon the sin committed. Then she thinks of the naked drowned corpse of the man called Donadieu, and the malevolent-looking toad squatting on his dead white flesh. She shivers. What if their strange companion is right?
She walks on, gauging how much longer she must suffer Hella’s presence. She has often considered abandoning her. But Nicholas is right: a maid alone on the road would have enough real life-threatening dangers to face without considering supernatural ones. They made a promise to her in Den Bosch, and neither of them is the sort to break promises. Once we have passed through the mountains… Bianca repeats to herself as she walks.
And the mountains give her pause enough. Overawed by their majesty, she wonders how it will be possible to cross such a barrier and emerge safely into the lush valley of the Po river. She knows she has the determination. But has she the courage? Has she the strength? From where she stands, the peaks look impassable. But then she thinks of the warm cobbles and the shady arcades of the Palazzo delle Erbe, of the handsome young Paduan gallants in their bright satin doublets, hose and half-capes strutting about like fighting cocks, and the maidens as chaste as nuns on the outside but still contriving to smoulder even under the chaperone’s watchful scowl. She will find a way.
Turning reluctantly away from the breathtaking view across the lake, she sets off on the short walk back to their lodgings.
When Bianca opens the door of the chamber she is expecting Nicholas to be up and about. He is not. And once again – just as in Reims – she is unable to fully comprehend what she sees before her.
The shutters are drawn. Shafts of sunlight slice into the shadowy interior, falling across the bed like molten steel running in the mould.
She left Nicholas dozing. And he is still there in the bed, his head turned sideways on the pillow, his wiry black hair tousled, his close-cut beard making a dark archipelago of his chin. But he is not alone.
Lying against him, one arm thrown casually like a lover’s across his chest, is Hella Maas.
21
Standing in the doorway of their chamber, Bianca can only stare in disbelief at the bed, and at her husband sleeping the slumber of the innocent, while a young maid – whose own innocence she is rapidly beginning to question – lies next to him in a pose of stomach-churning familiarity.
Hella lifts her head a little from the coverlet. ‘Quiet, Mistress Bianca. You’ll disturb him,’ she whispers without the slightest edge of guilt in her voice, and so close to the nape of Nicholas’s neck that in her own mind Bianca can smell his hair, imagine her own breath ruffling the thin black curls of down that disappear between his shoulders.
Bianca counts slowly to three, partly to stop herself flying at the audacious little drab, partly to savour the sudden image of her mother in the kitchen at Padua mixing her poisons: This one for giving a rival in love the breath of a diseased dog… this one for making her wind intolerable in polite company… and this one for when all else fails, and you want to do away with her entirely.
On three, Bianca slams the door behind her loudly enough to wake the sacred dead in every churchyard in Montreux.
Nicholas sits up so quickly his left shoulder sends Hella’s body rolling across the bed. Blinking, he stares at Bianca, then at Hella, who is trying to make herself prim by folding her legs under herself and clasping her hands in her lap, like a novice awaiting a lecture from her abbess.
‘Jesu! Bianca, what are you…? What’s…?’
‘If you are about to ask me what’s happening, Husband,’ Bianca says coldly, ‘I suggest you ask Mistress Doomsday here. I’d rather care to know myself.’ She fixes the woman she is now convinced is her rival with a gaze bordering on murderous.