‘Of course I’m sure. He’s here. Or if he isn’t, there’s another way out of this church that I haven’t seen.’
More heads turn towards them. More tutting.
‘Then the best thing we can do is to wait out there,’ Bianca says, tugging at his sleeve and nodding in the direction of the street, ‘before you bring down the wrath of Holy Mother Church upon our heads.’
Reluctantly, Nicholas accepts the wisdom of her advice. Opening the heavy bronze door as quietly as he can, he follows her outside.
Immediately the setting sun low over the rooftops opposite almost dazzles him. Human shapes are momentarily turned into hazy grotesques. He hears squealing and the thwack of cane on hide as someone drives a pig across his path, an indistinct blur of pink teardrops floating just above the cobbles.
And then someone pushes him violently.
As his eyes focus, he sees the young gallant he cannoned into on his way into the church. He has a look about him as sharp as the rapier he wears at his belt. One hand is held below his nose, flicking at his nostrils with a thumb in a gesture of contempt, the other already lifting steel from its scabbard. He lets loose a tirade in Italian too fast for Nicholas to fully catch, though the meaning is clear. Behind him, his companions are lending moral support by jeering and catcalling.
On Bankside – Nicholas knows – fatal street fights can easily begin with an imagined insult, an inadvertent jolt, a misunderstood glance. He has no reason to think Padua is any different. He raises his hands and lowers his head apologetically, trying to defuse the situation.
It doesn’t work. He finds himself staring at the rapier’s tip hovering barely a foot from his throat, brilliant beads of light reflected in the needle-sharp steel. And when his eyes are drawn along the blade to the youth who holds it, he can see in his eyes not sunlight, but murder. With his attention fixed on the sword point menacing his throat, Nicholas catches only the indistinct impression of movement to his left. One of the youth’s companions seems to be offering him something. Then the lad holding the rapier steps back.
Now Nicholas can see that the second fellow is presenting him with the hilt of his own weapon, the curved knuckle-guard and the cross-quillons rising and falling like the head of a flower stirred by a gentle breeze as the supple steel of the blade flexes. Jesu, he thinks, they want me to fight a duel.
‘Forgive me, it was an accident. I intended no insult,’ he says lamely in Italian, knowing that if Padua is anything like London, a foreign accent will only make things worse. He makes a crossing motion of his hands to show he wants nothing to do with the rapier he’s being offered. ‘Spada… non posso…’ he manages, in a mangled effort to explain that he has little skill at swordplay.
And then little Bruno Barrani is amongst them, roaring like a lion and letting fly a violent reprimand, though it’s delivered too speedily for Nicholas to catch more than a few words. He seems quite untroubled that he’s outnumbered, unarmed and a head shorter than any of the gallants. But the rapier comes down. The youth looks sullenly at Nicholas, calls him a foreign dog and then leads his companions resentfully to the other side of the street, where he glares at his lost opportunity like an alley cat deprived of its kill.
Nicholas breathes again. ‘What did you say?’ he asks as Bianca hurries to his side.
‘I told them I’m a member of the Podestà’s council, and that duelling is forbidden in public. I told them if they persisted, they’d find themselves enjoying a spot of rowing – in the galleys.’
‘I think I owe you my life, Bruno,’ Nicholas says, realizing his hands are shaking.
‘Then my debt is cleared,’ Bruno says happily. ‘But I think we should go now.’
‘I can’t. He’s still inside that church.’
‘Who?’
‘The fellow I was chasing. Didn’t you see him?’
Bruno looks perplexed. ‘All I know is that you set off as though you’d caught sight of a tax collector. Who, in the name of the Holy Mother, were you chasing?’
‘Someone who’s been following us from Brabant. I think he may be in the pay of the English Privy Council. I have to wait for him to leave, so that I can confront him.’
Bruno’s face darkens. ‘You’ve done enough confronting for one day. I don’t think you appreciate the situation. If you don’t leave now, that fellow with the rapier and his friends will track you down and throw you in the Bacchiglione in a sack weighted with rocks. And I’m not sure he was speaking in jest. If they get their blood hot again, I cannot guarantee I will be able to cool it a second time.’
‘He’s right,’ Bianca says, tugging at Nicholas’s sleeve. ‘I didn’t come all this way only to lose you in a silly street quarrel. Please.’
Reluctantly, he turns away. As he follows Bruno back out of the lane he can feel malevolent stares burning into the nape of his neck. Angry gallants, drunk on pride, he can ignore. What troubles Nicholas more is the knowledge that with the appearance of Grey-coat in the city, the destination Bianca has brought him to is no longer the sanctuary either of them had imagined.
‘Now we know the truth. It wasn’t Hella Maas our friend was following, it was us. Me.’
Nicholas cups the back of his head in his hands, splays his elbows and leans back on the bolster. It is midnight. Their chamber in the house in the Borgo dei Argentieri is in darkness, save for a single oil lamp burning on a clothes chest by the window. Outside in the street, revellers are making their way home to the accompaniment of someone playing a mandolin badly. It almost masks the sounds of Bruno’s contented snoring from the adjoining room.
‘He could have been following us all the way from Den Bosch,’ Bianca says, lying against him while she traces the contours of his shoulder with an index finger. ‘Perhaps it’s just a matter of chance that we didn’t see him until Reims.’
Nicholas considers this awhile in silence. The list of possibilities is a short one. He says, ‘Either he’s a friend, sent by Robert Cecil to report on our whereabouts. Or he is an enemy, sent by the Privy Council for much the same reason.’
‘If he’s the former – a friend – why did he not stop when you called him? Why did he run?’
‘I cannot tell,’ Nicholas says with a shrug, ‘He certainly didn’t want to be caught.’
‘So he must be an enemy?’
Nicholas lets out a long, slow exhalation. ‘Very probably.’
‘What if he’s not alone?’ Bianca asks.
It is a question Nicholas has asked himself more than once, from the moment he spotted the man loitering so unconvincingly at the lantern stall. He imagines a dark night in the near future, Alonso or Luca – perhaps both – bribed to leave the street door unbolted. The soft scrape of covert boot-leather on the stairs. A sudden rush taking the sleeping victim before he knows what’s happening. Hands tied. Woollen cape thrown over the head to keep the cries of surprise to a minimum. A hurried bundling through the darkened streets to the Brenta canal and a waiting boat. Then the journey to the Venetian lagoon – barely twenty miles away – trussed up and gagged beneath some innocent-looking cargo. An English merchant barque moored there, primed to expect a last-minute addition to its load, an addition that must be carried home with all dispatch. It wouldn’t be the first time a perceived enemy of England has been snatched from what he imagined was a safe exile.
As he lies in the darkness, waiting for sleep to come, Nicholas discovers that every sound that issues from the house in the Borgo dei Argentieri – no matter how familiar or previously innocent it had sounded – has suddenly taken on the furtive, threatening nature of a warning.