‘So the Turk mentioned in the subsidy roll could be the Moroccan envoy?’
‘Or one of his companions. He came with several gentlemen of the sultan’s court.’
The curtain is pulled aside and Nicholas sees the river stairs, slick with rain, stretching out into the water. At the far end the awning of a tilt-boat rises and falls, adding to the strange discomfort in his stomach.
‘Thank you, Dr Lopez. You’ve been a great help. I apologize again if you thought me uncivil at the feast. Sometimes I can be a little disputatious. Usually I manage to keep my arguments confined to the College of Physicians.’
Lopez’s pale eyes widen in belated recognition. ‘Of course, I have it now – you’re the young fellow whose wife and child died. The one who threw his practice aside. Now I remember the name.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘That explains your desire to overturn the apple cart. I hope it brings you comfort, Dr Shelby. But I fear it will only leave you with more unanswered questions. Take the advice of an old man: stay with what is known.’
Nicholas steps down from the carriage. The curtain closes behind him. A last flurry of rain stings his face. Head down, he hurries towards the waiting tilt-boat, while behind him the carriage rolls away with a funereal rumble of its heavy wooden wheels.
10
Farzad has run away because of something Bianca has said to him, something she cannot remember – and wouldn’t have meant anyway. As a consequence, he has drowned. With some wholly imagined insult ringing in his ears, he has stumbled on the riverbank and fallen in. And it’s all the fault of her too-hasty tongue, she tells herself in frequent moments of self-recrimination, as if the more guilt she can shoulder, the more likelihood there is of Farzad walking into her shop to tell her it’s all been nothing but a silly misunderstanding.
As she unlocks the door to her shop on Dice Lane the morning after Nicholas’s visit to Cecil House – making a mental note to have Timothy grease the ancient hinges – she tells herself: He’ll come today. I shall not cry. Nor will I box his ears. I shall confine myself to a simple ‘We’ve been worried about you. Welcome home’ – at least until she’s had the chance to embrace Farzad. After that, he’ll have to take his medicine like a man.
But to her continuing dismay, when the first visitor of the day enters, admitting a gust of wind that flutters the sprigs of herbs hanging from the rafters, it is not Farzad, but Cathal Connell. For a dreadful moment she fears he’s come to tell her the lad’s body has been found bobbing on the tide at Lyon Quay.
‘So this is where you brew your love-philtres an’ your spells, is it?’ he says, his scoured face cracking into a grin.
As he moves further into the little chamber, ducking under the larger bunches of borage and wild campion, elder and elecampane, Bianca sees he isn’t alone. A second man follows close on his heels. And when this one turns from closing the door behind him, she sees that he is as different from the master of the Righteous as he could possibly be.
Where Connell has the wild-eyed look of famine about him, his companion is well fleshed, commanding even. In contrast to Connell’s sailor’s slops, he wears an expensive cloak, the fine Muscovy fur trim slicked against the leather. To shame Connell’s simple cap, he sports a jaunty banded hat with what might have been an osprey’s feather in it – before the rain got to it. Removing the hat, he flicks at the feather with his fingers to coax it back into shape.
Good-looking, Bianca can’t help but think. A man so well turned out would have every purse-diver and trickster on Bankside trotting in his wake, were it not for the fact that today they’d half-drown before they could get within striking distance.
‘God must be grief-stricken, what with all these heavenly tears pourin’ out of the sky,’ Connell says, shaking the rain off the cuffs of his sailcloth coat. ‘Is He weeping ’cause Mistress Merton ain’t wed yet?’
‘It’s just raining, Captain Connell, that’s all,’ Bianca answers wearily. ‘I fear the courtliness is wasted.’
She still remembers how Kit Marlowe had come sniffing around the Jackdaw – two years ago now, she realizes with a start – pouring the same sickly-sweet treacle into her ears. And look what that got me, she thinks: a conscience troubled by murder.
‘On such a jewel, never.’
Ignoring him, she asks, ‘And who might this gentleman be? He doesn’t look in need of an apothecary.’
‘Reynard Gault, Mistress,’ says the well-dressed one, bending a formal knee to her, ‘of the Worshipful Company of Grocers.’
So that’s it, she thinks, biting her tongue. Ever since Nicholas’s friend, Lord Lumley, had convinced the Grocers’ Company to issue her apothecary’s licence, Bianca has known they would eventually get round to paying her a visit. She’s surprised it’s taken them so long. Perhaps they expected her to fail. Perhaps they’d simply forgotten they had licensed a woman. Either way, the visit is unwelcome – doubly so at this time.
‘Then you are doubly welcome. I am honoured, sir,’ she says, trying to wring a drop of politeness from her jaw. She turns to Connell. ‘I had no notion you moved amongst such quality, Captain Connell.’
Gault answers for him. ‘I also happen to be a leading member of the Barbary Company, Mistress Merton. We are a monopoly founded by the Earls of Leicester and Warwick, and licensed by the queen. It is our mission to expand this realm’s trade into the lands of the Moor, to the general benefit of the Treasury.’
With yourself running a close second, judging by your fine apparel, she thinks.
‘Captain Connell is the admiral-general of our fleet,’ Gault explains. ‘When he told me of the existence of a Helen of Bankside, I determined at once to see her for myself.’
‘See me for yourself? I’m not London Bridge, or the Tower, Master Gault. I am not a landmark.’ She glowers at Connell. ‘And as for being admiral-general of – what was it Master Solomon told me: three ships? – well, I can’t imagine how Sir Francis Drake lives with the jealousy.’
Connell grins to show he can take a little teasing. ‘Drake set off around the world with only five. If I come back from our next voyage to the Barbary shore one-tenth as rich as he, I’ll be happy enough.’
Gault begins a slow circuit of the shop, which Bianca finds uncomfortably intrusive. He peers into shelves full of caskets of dried herbs; pulls out bunches of the sea holly she prescribes for low libido; holds up to the light the decoctions of hoarhound she uses to ease discomfort of the menses; sniffs the elecampane roots she grinds into ale for failing eyesight. Wishing him and his cadaverous admiral out of her shop before the customers arrive, Bianca wipes her hands on her apron to signify that she has work to do and says to Gault, ‘How may I be of service to you, sir? Only I have some medicines to mix for Dr Shelby.’
‘A physician, on Bankside?’ he says, halting his inspection. ‘How in the name of Christ’s wounds does he make a profit?’
‘I don’t think he does.’
‘Then why is he here?’
Bianca ducks down to peer at the grey sky through the little front window. ‘Probably for the sunshine.’
‘Well, it can’t be for the reward.’
‘That rather depends on what you mean by reward.’
Connell lets out a desiccated laugh. ‘How is Dr Nicholas Shelby, by the way? Preparing for his voyage to the land of the Moor, I take it.’