‘You were not here to comfort him,’ Hella says, as though she’s been poorly rewarded for performing a necessary service. ‘He was dreaming – a bad dream. I meant only to comfort him.’
‘Were you dreaming, Husband?’
Nicholas shakes the sleep from his eyes. ‘In truth, I was. A demon – like one of those on the altarpiece at Den Bosch. It was half-human, half-mule, and it was pushing us up a mountain, jabbing at us with a fiery trident. When we reached the top there was nowhere to go, other than to plunge down into a great machine in the valley below that was grinding people into dust.’ He gives a tentative, self-deprecating laugh. ‘It must have been something I ate last night.’
‘You see,’ says Hella triumphantly, ‘even in sleep we cannot escape the warnings of what lies ahead.’
‘Oh, spare me the false necromancy,’ Bianca snarls. ‘Come with me!’
She seizes the younger woman by the sleeve and drags her out of the lodgings and into the early-morning air. On the shore, fishermen are preparing their nets. They give the two women not a single glance.
‘Let go of my arm, Mistress Bianca,’ Hella pleads. ‘You’re hurting me. Why are you so angered?’
‘Why am I… angered? Why does the sun rise every morning?’ Bianca looks around at the mountains as though seeking inspiration from them. ‘Shall we begin with the intimacy I’ve just this moment witnessed in our chamber?’
‘I told you: I was only comforting Nicholas.’
‘It is not your place to comfort my husband.’
Hella gives her a sullen look. ‘And as such, he deserves obedience.’
Bianca considers slapping her. She decides against it, if only because she thinks it would be a shame to sully the pristine landscape with an act of violence.
‘I know you think you owe Nicholas your life,’ she says, trying to calm herself by slowing her speech, ‘but it was I who wielded that bale-hook in Den Bosch, and don’t you forget it. This has gone far enough.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Hella protests.
‘Do you really think I don’t know what you’re about? I can see through you like the very cheapest Bankside drab.’ Bianca forcibly turns the maid to look out across the shining water. ‘Do you see those mountains? We have to cross those, if Nicholas and I are to reach Padua and you are to reach Rome. After all your mischief since Reims, I have tolerated your presence only because my husband is too much of a decent man to abandon you to the dangers of a solitary journey. If you want our continued protection, then you will make no further sport with him. If you do, I can promise you this: that dream Nicholas said he was having will come true – but the demon with the fiery trident will be me, and the one plunging off the summit to be ground into dust will be you. In Southwark they call me the one witch no one dares hang. So if it’s to be a contest over whose enchantments are the more powerful, I can predict this with absolute certainty: you, Mistress, will be the loser.’
Her anger spent, Bianca lets go of Hella’s sleeve. She steadies her breathing.
The maid rubs her arm where Bianca’s fingers have driven into the flesh. Still gazing at the mountains across the lake, the sunlight turning the snow to gold, she says, with a studied compassion that turns Bianca stomach to ice: ‘I understand why you’re distraught, Mistress. But I am the last person you should blame… now that you are with child.’
22
Bankside, 10th August 1594
Ned Monkton sits in the stern of Giles Hunte’s wherry, wringing his huge hands as though trying to rub a stain out of his flesh. The good weather has broken. Across the river, ragged grey clouds drift over the stunted spire of St Paul’s church. He wonders if he should stop there first, to pray for God’s guidance in what he knows he must do.
‘Something amiss, Master Ned?’ Hunte asks as he leans into his oars. ‘You look ill at ease.’
What to tell him? Ned wonders. That I feel guilty at having lied to Rose about where I’m going? Or that I fear what I may do when I get there?
So Ned just grunts and, as Hunte knows – if only from what he’s heard, rather than from personal experience – if Ned Monkton grunts when you ask him a question, don’t press him for an answer.
As the wherry makes its way across the river, Ned thinks of how much he owes to the man whose future he is on his way to protect. When he considers his former life, spent in the mortuary for the deserving poor at St Tom’s, with only the dead and the bottle for company, an angry demon that most decent folk feared to be around, he knows that were it not for Nicholas Shelby he would still be wrapping those corpses in their winding sheets, bundling them into the single reuseable coffin that served as their means of transport between the mortuary and the graveside, and unceremoniously tipping them out into the waiting earth. As a consequence, he is loyal beyond measure to his friend. He would kill for him. Has killed for him, though only in defence of Nicholas’s own life. And one way or the other – regardless of what he has promised Rose – he is determined to make Fulke Vaesy publicly confess his treacherous slanders.
Bidding curt thanks to Hunte at the water-stairs and walking – briskly for such a large man – up St Andrew’s Hill, Ned is not surprised when Ditworth refuses him entry to Vaesy’s house.
‘Go away. I shall call the constable,’ the servant says, staring in terror at him from behind the little grille. ‘You’ve no cause to be troubling a gentleman of Sir Fulke’s station.’
‘But he’s not a gentleman, is he?’ rumbles Ned, peering in like an ogre in a story told to frighten children. ‘An’ you an’ I both know he treats you no better than a ship’s master may treat a blackamoor.’
‘I can’t open the door,’ says Ditworth wretchedly. ‘Sir Fulke will make free with his cane, and I may not leave him ’cause I’m indentured.’
‘Then I’ll sit outside his door for as long as it takes to scare away those last few clod-pates who’ve yet to see ’im for the charlatan he is. How will he feed his indentured servant then, Master Ditworth? Do you want to starve with him? Go, tell him that.’
A short while later, Ned is standing in Vaesy’s study. The once-great anatomist eyes him warily.
‘I thought I’d seen the last of you,’ he says, his patrician face showing no sign of fear.
‘You would ’ave – if you’d done what I asked the last time I was here: recant your charge ’gainst Dr Shelby.’
‘And do you really believe I’m going to do that now, just because you’ve barged into my home like the worst sort of Bankside house-diver?’
Ned can feel the old rage rising in him. He tries to calm it by imagining his Rose a few months in the future, their newborn infant at her generous breast. ‘I told your fellow, Ditworth, that I would sit outside your door for as long as it took to scare away every patient you still ’ave,’ he says. ‘Look at me, Vaesy. Do you really believe they’ll chance it with someone of my size? You’ll be trying to trap the local cats inside a week. When they’ve gone, you’ll either ’ave to eat poor Ditworth or throw yourself on church charity – you, a knight of the realm.’
‘Linger on my doorstep and I’ll have you taken up for a vagrant.’
‘I’ll come back.’
‘Then I’ll raise a suit against you.’
‘You ’aven’t the money.’
Vaesy stares at him uncomprehendingly. ‘Why is this so important to a common rogue like you?’
‘Because Dr Shelby turned me from a common rogue into a man who knows ’is right from wrong. Unlike some gentlemen I could name.’ Ned tries to make himself smaller, less threatening. ‘Look,’ he says, gentling his great voice, ‘there is a course that could serve us both.’