‘Dr Shelby,’ says Piers Gardener with evident relief. ‘I’ve been half-drowned trying to find this tavern. I asked for you all around St Paul’s. I even went to the Stationers’ Hall. They hadn’t heard of you. I’m beginning to think you weren’t telling me the truth about your visit to Edmund Spenser.’
21
Whether it is said in jest or in deadly earnest, it leaves Nicholas speechless.
‘Aren’t you going to make me welcome?’ Gardener asks, whatever doubts he may just have expressed seemingly forgotten. He gives Nicholas the broad smile of the utterly innocent.
‘Of course, forgive me,’ Nicholas says hurriedly. ‘God give you good eventide, Master Gardener. I must confess you are the last person I expected to walk into the Jackdaw on Twelfth Night.’
To his relief, Bianca appears at his shoulder.
‘Master Piers, what a happy surprise! Whatever are you doing in London?’
‘There has been a change of Surveyor of the Victuals, now that the Earl of Essex is to take the field,’ Gardener says. ‘Sir George Beverly has been appointed in Ireland. I have come with his letters to the earl. It is the first time I have been in London; nay, in all of England. It is such a large city. I have never seen such a place. I can walk from one side of Dublin to the other in the time it takes the Christchurch bell to ring an hour’s quarter. Here I feel I might walk all day and not traverse it. How do you not all get lost in such a place?’
‘We find a tavern and ask for directions, Master Gardener,’ Nicholas explains with a smile.
Bianca readies a table and orders hot wassail to take the chill out of Gardener’s cheeks. ‘When we were with you last in Ireland I recall you were hoping your position might be made permanent,’ she says. ‘I take, from your presence here, that your wish has been granted.’
‘Seven pounds per annum,’ says Gardener proudly.
‘You mentioned you’d come from St Paul’s, asking after me amongst the Stationers’ Company,’ Nicholas reminds him.
‘Aye, they seemed not to know of you,’ says Gardener. ‘I’m sure that when we met in Dublin you said you were visiting Master Spenser on the guild’s behalf. Was I mistaken?’
Nicholas feels himself colour. He prays that, in the low light from the hearth and the candles, Gardener hasn’t noticed. ‘It was a privy matter,’ he says, trying not to hurry his words, ‘regarding Master Spenser’s rather controversial pamphlet on the present situation in Ireland. Only the president of the guild and a few of his closest officers knew about my journey.’
‘Ah, that explains it,’ says Gardener, beaming as though a heavy burden has been lifted from his conscience.
Bianca enquires where he’s lodging. A storeroom floor somewhere deep in Whitehall, he tells her – a place he can never find by the same route twice in a row. She insists he at least spends tonight at the Jackdaw; there is still one straw mattress free in the communal lodging room on the top floor beneath the attic, and enough venison pottage left to nourish a slight but hungry frame. He asks the price. Bianca assures him there isn’t one, not for the man who saved their lives in Ireland.
While Gardener warms himself before the fire, they press him for news. The hospital in Cork is still functioning, they learn, though mercifully the winter weather has kept it mostly free of men wounded in battle with the rebels. The word in Dublin is that the Earl of Tyrone is holed up in Ulster, awaiting the onslaught of Essex and his army in the spring.
‘Have you seen Spenser yet?’ Nicholas asks. ‘He’s very much the pride of the Essex faction at present.’
A fleeting shadow passes across Gardener’s face, a sudden hardening of the smooth features, a momentary dying of his former goodwill. And then, in an instant, placidity is restored. He smiles. ‘I have not yet had the pleasure. Perhaps when the festivities are over.’
Bianca turns the conversation to the trivial, letting Gardener find his ease in his new surroundings. Only when he has emptied his bowl of pottage and drunk his wassail does she asks casually, ‘Tell us, Master Piers, before you left were you still often on the road?’
‘Endlessly, Mistress,’ Gardener replies, adopting the look of a man asked to attempt the impossible. ‘But in Ireland, as you will have discovered when you were there, the term “road” is a tricky one to pin down.’
She allows him a sympathetic smile. ‘And did you still rest at night in those extraordinary places? I’m thinking of the Seanchaí.’
‘Aye, I prefer them to the settlers. They are good folk, Mistress. Their kind were in Ireland centuries before even the Conqueror’s people went there. The land would have no soul without them.’
Nicholas thinks he knows where Bianca’s questions are leading. He casts her a cautionary glance.
‘I recall that night we heard the Seanchaí tell us the tale of the Merrow, the woman who walked out of the sea to entrance menfolk,’ she continues. ‘It was a fine tale. I fear all we can offer you here is Timothy and his lute.’ A thought strikes her. ‘The Morris men will dance, tomorrow. That’s always… engaging.’
‘I shall be grateful merely to be in your company, Mistress,’ Gardener says gallantly.
‘I don’t suppose, Master Piers, that the tale of the Merrow has surfaced again, has it? – in those places you visit on your lonely travels.’
‘The Merrow?’ he replies, raising an eyebrow.
‘Any claims of a beautiful woman walking out of the sea to enchant all those silly men? You haven’t heard any rumours like that during your peripatetic wanderings?’
And for a moment, before Gardener answers that no such tales have reached his ears, Nicholas could swear he sees the fleeting return of suspicion to their guest’s innocent gaze.
The following day Piers Gardener returns to Whitehall. Nicholas bids him farewell with mixed emotions. He cannot lay aside the feeling that Gardener’s visit to the Jackdaw was not made solely out of friendship. True, in the time it had taken to ride from Dublin to Kilcolman, he and Bianca had struck up an easy companionship with their guide, but it had not been the sort of friendship that might entice a man to walk from Whitehall to Bankside in the pouring rain on a cold Twelfth Night. Just how speculative, he wonders, were Gardeners’ enquiries around St Paul’s and at the Stationers’ Company? Even as he catches a glimpse of Gardener in the lane beyond the window, striking out in the direction of the southern gatehouse of London Bridge, he can hear again the words that had caught him so off his guard:
They hadn’t heard of you… I’m beginning to think you weren’t telling me the truth…
Had Gardener really been joking?
The memory jolts Nicholas back to the previous night, and his conversation with Barnabas Vyves. He goes in search of Ned Monkton, finding him in the brew house behind the tavern yard.
‘You’re right, Ned,’ he says, ‘Vyves is lying through his teeth – but what about I can’t begin to fathom.’
He recounts how Vyves had claimed that if Sir Oliver Henshawe’s company wasn’t in Ireland, then it was held up at Bristol, and how Henshawe had told him the recruits were waiting for transport at Chester.
‘Something is going on, Ned, but I’m damned if I know what.’
‘You think Vyves was involved in poor Godwinson’s murder?’ Ned asks, effortlessly rolling a barrel across the flagstones as though it were made of pigskin and full of air.