‘You think he might be a Privy Council man? One of Essex’s, maybe?’
‘We may have laughed at them when we gave their names to our mules, but they have their people in all the major cities.’ He watches a single buzzard launch itself from a high crag and go sweeping above the trees down the valley in search of prey. ‘Especially in Catholic ones like Reims.’
‘You think he might have stopped Hella to ask her where we were staying?’
‘Perhaps. If so, she doesn’t remember him – if she’s telling us the truth.’
‘But if you’re right, how did he know who we were? How did he know he was supposed to follow us?’
‘Remember when the searchers arrived at Woodbridge?’
‘Of course. I could hardly forget.’
‘I had to show Robert Cecil’s letter of safe-passage to stop them going through your bag and finding your Petrine cross. They could have reported to the Privy Council that we’d been spotted leaving on a vessel for Den Bosch.’
‘Do you think he’s been following us all the way from Brabant?’
‘Again, perhaps.’
Bianca looks unconvinced. ‘But we were in Den Bosch only a few days. He couldn’t possibly have received a command to follow us in such a short time.’
‘I know the Privy Council is a ponderous beast,’ Nicholas says. ‘It takes them weeks to agree whose signatures to place at the foot of a sentence of execution. But not Essex. Essex is a man of hot temper and swift action. With a fast rider and a speedy ship, he could have sent the order quickly enough.’
Bianca scoffs. ‘But we were in Den Bosch, not Antwerp. Even Robert Devereux cannot have spies everywhere.’ A thought occurs to her. ‘Why didn’t you simply ask this fellow to his face, when you saw him?’
‘I wanted to speak to Hella first, lest I was jumping to a false conclusion.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘I don’t know. After he’d taken breakfast, I tried to follow him, but I was stopped by two of the monks. By the time I’d worked out travellers aren’t allowed in that part of the hospice, he’d vanished.’
‘I think you’re making too much of this, Nicholas,’ Bianca says, giving him a smile of reassurance. ‘He’s probably just an innocent pilgrim. But if we see him again, I’ll stand in his way and say, “Why are you following my husband, you saucy rogue? Away with you, or I shall fetch Hella Maas back, to drive you mad with her pious warnings of the apocalypse.”’
It does Nicholas good to hear his wife laugh again. With the maid gone, a weight seems to have been lifted from her shoulders.
‘Tell me – now that she is safely gone away – what caused the coldness between you? Surely you must know that nothing happened between us that morning in Besançon.’
For the briefest instant Bianca’s smile falters. Then it strengthens again, which Nicholas puts down to their closeness to Italy.
‘It is of no matter, Nicholas. She’s gone. Let any enmity I felt go with her.’
But inside Bianca is thinking again of the words Hella had spoken on the lakeside at Montreux: I am the last person you should blame… now that you are with child. Angrily she imagines herself stamping on the words, crushing them underfoot. Words are nothing, she tells herself. A few words in French do not prove fluency in five languages. Simple tricks with numbers do not make a person a mathematician. Naming a few stars in the night sky does not prove the ability to discourse on the merits of Master Copernicus’s model of the heavens. And telling me I am pregnant does not make it so.
And yet…
And yet.
Below them the bell tower in the village of Saint-Rhémy signals the way down into the fold of the valley and the track on into Italy. As Bianca walks beside her husband she cannot escape the alternative possibility: that Hella Maas was speaking the truth.
That Hella Maas can do all these things, and more.
That Bianca is pregnant.
That there will be a death.
Echoing between the granite peaks, the sudden ringing of the Saint-Rhémy bell sends a jolt through her body. And in its wake come more of the maid’s words, as though all it was ever going to take to breach the dam was this single, sudden shock: It will break his heart when the child you are carrying is stillborn… How much of a disappointment will you be to him – barren after a stillbirth?
The mist hangs in the valley of the Po like a pale banner discarded after a saint’s day parade. It hugs the hem of Pavia’s city walls, lies as still as death on the surface of the Fossa Bastioni that guards the western gate. In the calm morning air the smoke rising from countless chimneys looks like pale strings suspending the city from a crystalline heaven. Almost a week has passed since they left the mountains, and Bianca and Nicholas are footsore and hungry. But before they seek out somewhere to breakfast, there is first a task Bianca has been anticipating with growing pleasure. She finds a scrivener’s shop near the Porta Santa Croce. The message she writes there with a borrowed quill is brief:
Most beloved cousin, we are in Pavia. God willing, we shall rest in Padua by the end of August. We come by way of Verona, and each step fills me with a greater joy at the prospect of our meeting again.
May God’s kindness and mercy carry these words to you on joyous wings.
Your cousin,
Bianca
And having paid the scrivener to seal the letter with wax, she drags Nicholas off in search of one of the many couriers, official and mercantile, whose sweating mounts speed so imperiously between the cities of La Serenissima.
On Bankside, serenity is in scant supply. The River Thames lies beneath a sullen sky like a trail of melted pewter after a fire. A penetrating drizzle falls on Southwark, more appropriate to a grey January than late August. And while Bianca entrusts her letter to a messenger, Rose Monkton is answering a sudden, imperious hammering on the door of the Paris Garden lodgings. She finds Constable Hobbes on the step, flanked by two of the Bankside watch, their leather jerkins black with rainwater and their official cudgels dripping like driftwood lifted from the riverbank after the tide’s gone out. It is a sight that at any other time would make her laugh out loud. Today, however, she knows intuitively that all her unspoken fears have been realized.
‘I pray you, Mistress Rose, counsel your Ned to come peacefully and without anger,’ Hobbes says, not entirely confidently. He is still somewhat new to his role, his predecessor having succumbed to the plague that stalked Bankside last year.
‘What am I charged with, Constable Hobbes?’ Ned asks from behind Rose’s shoulder. ‘A fellow should know what manner of felony he’s being accused of. That’s the law, ain’t it?’
Ned says this without the slightest animosity, as though he has long been preparing himself for this moment. Rose turns and stares at him in horror.
‘Manslaughter, Master Ned,’ says Constable Hobbes. ‘I am informed by the coroner that Sir Fulke Vaesy died of his injuries last night around nine of the clock, in his bed, following an assault occasioned by you some days ago. You are to be taken to the Marshalsea for examination by the justices, in preparation for arraignment.’
Rose seizes her husband’s hands, pulling them towards her as she might tug two large joints of meat across a table. She kisses the knuckles frantically.
‘Oh, ’Uusband, what ’ave you done?’ she manages through her tears. ‘My dear, dear, foolish Ned.’
He bends down and brushes his lips across the crown of her head. ‘I did not murther ’im, Wife. It were not done maliciously, I swear it. ’Twas an accident.’