That brings Bianca up with a start. ‘How do you know about that?’ she asks, almost dropping the pestle she’s taken up, to pound some mullein leaves in a mortar.
‘He mentioned it to me himself.’
‘When?’
‘At the marriage feast. Where, I might add, you outshone the bride like a thousand stars outshine a solitary candle.’
This must be how it feels to be wooed by a corpse, she thinks. ‘Well, he’s not going. He told me so himself.’ She turns her gaze on Gault. ‘If there’s nothing else I can do for you, there’s a little girl on Kent Street with the belly-ache. Her mother will not thank me for wasting time in idle discourse.’
‘There is nothing idle about my visit here, Mistress,’ Gault says. ‘I am visiting the apothecaries to ensure they are prepared for an increase in the number of plague cases, should the weather turn milder.’ His voice takes on a harder edge. ‘And also to root out charlatans.’
The implication is obvious. Bianca stops pounding the mullein leaves. ‘I’ve been called any number of things, Master Gault,’ she says, wondering if there’s a law in England against breaking the fine nose of a member of the Grocers’ Company with a stone pestle, and whether the penalty might be bearable, ‘from a papist harlot to a witch. Mostly by men who felt aggrieved because I would not suffer their courting. But no one has ever accused me of being a charlatan.’
Gault settles his hat carefully on his head. It takes a couple of twists before he’s satisfied. Then he makes a pretty little bow to her. ‘I’m sure they haven’t. But there’s always a first time for everything, Mistress Merton.’
Nicholas finds Bianca where Rose told him she would be: in her physic garden, her secret place known only to a select few, a walled enclosure between Black Bull Alley and the old Lazar House, close enough to the river to hear it whispering. It is the place where she grows many of the flowers and herbs she uses in her medicines. It is also where she goes when her thoughts become heavy.
The rain has stopped by the time Nicholas crosses the patch of waste ground set between the gable ends of two houses. He pushes open the old wooden door set into the sagging brick wall.
She is kneeling at one of the beds, tending it with the reverence of a novice in holy orders. He watches her for a while in silence, until some second sense makes her look over her shoulder. She stands up, takes off her leather work-mittens and walks towards him.
They meet between the sow-fennel and the pellitory. The spent rain has left so much of itself in the air that her brow gleams with its moisture. An errant wave of her hair has fallen across one eye. He pushes it away, feeling its wet heaviness against his fingers. And then, without either of them having seemed to make any form of conscious decision to jump across the last remaining divide, they are kissing.
And this time it is as unlike their last public embrace – beneath the kissing knot at the Jackdaw – as a single whisper is to a choir in full flood. It is almost bruising. Thirty months of denial ripped to shreds in an instant.
When at last they draw apart, she says breathlessly, ‘That was so much easier than the last time, wasn’t it? Why did we wait so long?’
‘You know why.’
‘And do I now take it that Dr Shelby is healed?’
It is the hardest question he’s ever had to answer, and the easiest.
‘Yes.’
She fixes him with a gaze that demands his honesty. ‘Then tell me, how does it feel?’
‘To kiss you?’
‘To be a free man, Nicholas. A slave to no one?’
‘Terrifying – in a good way.’
Something in his expression causes a flicker of doubt to cross her amber eyes. ‘Really? Are you really free, Nicholas? Can you look at me and say: I, Nicholas Shelby, promise you, Bianca Merton, that I am no longer troubled by ghosts? That I am a free man; free to do – and to love – as I please?’
He wants so much to say yes. But lying to this woman would feel like broken glass on his tongue.
Sensing his hesitation, she pushes him away. ‘What is it, Nicholas? What’s wrong?’
‘It’s not Eleanor, I promise you that.’
‘Then kiss me again – if you dare to. Prove it to me. Show me that you’re free.’
‘But I’m not, am I? Nor are you. Look around us: Solomon Mandel is dead; Farzad is missing – perhaps also dead. Then there’s the past: little Ralph Cullen, Ned’s brother Jacob; Tanner Bell and Finney, those two boys that Dr Arcampora had murdered… And what about the deaths we caused? – Gabriel Quigley; Arcampora and his two thugs, Dunstan and Florin; Sir Fulke Vaesy’s wife Katherine… When does it end, this dainty measure we dance with death?’
It’s the first time he’s seen ugliness in Bianca’s face. A scowl of pain.
‘Do you think I don’t have the same thoughts, Nicholas? Sometimes, just before I’m fully awake, I see those two men falling from the bridge – the bridge I led them to, knowing full well what would happen. I tell myself they had to die in order for you to live. But let us face the truth, Nicholas: we are both murderers now.’
For a while they stand there, like two passing strangers who thought they might have known each other once.
‘We must both live with what we have done,’ Bianca says at length. ‘We must believe it was done for good, not for evil. Then we can be free.’ She looks around the garden; draws strength from it, as she always has. ‘Enough dark talk, Nicholas. Have we lost the moment – or do you want to kiss me again?’
‘More than anything.’
‘Then what’s stopping you?’
The look he gives her is that of a man who knows he’s taking his last glimpse of the world before he loses his sight. ‘I have to go away for a while.’
For a moment she doesn’t understand him. Is he going back to Suffolk to be with his family? Is he leaving to join his friend John Lumley at Nonsuch, fleeing the city lest the contagion spreads?
And then it dawns on her.
‘You’re going to Marrakech!’
For a moment he cannot speak. The speech he’d prepared on the way from his lodgings has deserted him. It wasn’t meant to happen like this.
‘How do you know?’ he manages lamely.
She clasps her hands over her head, as though a great truth that she’s failed to see has suddenly become visible. ‘I didn’t, until now. But apparently Cathal Connell did. He came to my shop. He asked me if you were preparing for the voyage. I told him you weren’t going. Obviously I was wrong.’
‘I was going to tell you–’
But the anger is already rising in her, hardening her face and making her fingers fidget. ‘So now I know the truth – this ghost you can’t let lie. It isn’t Eleanor. It’s Robert Cecil!’
‘It’s not like that!’
‘That man brings us nothing but ill, Nicholas,’ she barks, the hard accent of the Veneto suddenly blooming to the surface of her voice. ‘How much coin has he paid for your obedience this time?’
‘He’s not offering me money. He’s offering the possibility to do some good with my skills.’
‘But you are doing good with them. There are people here on Bankside who’d be dead, were it not for you.’
‘And I rely on Robert Cecil’s favour to allow me to continue treating them. He could snatch that favour away in an instant.’ He sweeps one hand through the air for emphasis. ‘And what then? I could barely earn a living here on Bankside, and only then by treating those who could afford to pay me. Robert Cecil is offering me the opportunity to really cause a stir amongst the College of Physicians. If I did nothing else, helping to put an end to the charlatans who feast on the poor and the desperate would be a goodly legacy, wouldn’t it?’