‘No charms, Rose. I wasn’t infected.’
‘But you were! Jenny Solver said so. So did Parson Moody… and Warden Cullicot… and Billy Evans, the stonemason’s son… They even sent Jack Coslin to mark your place with a painted cross.’
‘I know. I made him spill red paint all over his apron.’
‘Did you make one of your elixirs, Mistress? Tell us how, please.’
‘Rose, dear, I wasn’t sick. It was an ague.’
But as Rose demands to know whether the cure contained angelica or tragacanth, wood-sorrel or wormwood, whether it was boiled or distilled and how much of it a body has to take for it to be efficacious, Bianca resigns herself to the inevitable: that her miraculous cure from the pestilence will find its way into the canon of her already extensive notoriety, where it will keep good company with the queen’s gilded barge and all the other fancies she cannot correct, no matter how often she tries.
Ned comes over, the fingers of his huge hands working as though he were a small boy with a guilty secret. He tilts his auburn beard at her timorously. ‘Mistress, might we speak privily a while?’
‘Why, of course, Ned,’ she replies, planting a gentle kiss on his left cheek, which has him blushing so that skin and beard are all of one colour.
With surprising agility for such a large frame, he darts upstairs. When he returns, he is carrying what looks to Bianca like a letter. He ushers her to an unoccupied table in a quiet corner.
‘Before he left, Mistress, Master Nick gave me this,’ he tells her, with all the anxious pride of a man who’s been entrusted with a state secret from the hand of the queen herself. ‘Perhaps now is the time to take advantage of it.’
In silence, Bianca reads the letter Nicholas wrote commending her, the Monktons, Timothy and Farzad to John Lumley’s care at Nonsuch Palace. When she looks up, Ned says, ‘He was most insistent. Should the pestilence come to Bankside, I was to ensure we all repaired to Lord Lumley for shelter and board. Master Nick said it was all arranged. All you have to do is present this letter.’
Her response catches him off-balance.
‘Is that what he wanted – that we should all run away? Like he did?’
‘Mistress, it was done in thought of us, his friends,’ Ned says uncomfortably.
‘I’m not blaming you, Ned. You have discharged your promise to him. That was proper of you.’
‘But the plague has come, Mistress. And you have dodged it once already. Should we not do as Master Nick wanted?’ A guilty downwards glance. ‘I have my Rose to think upon now, Mistress.’
Bianca gives him a sad, apologetic smile. ‘Forgive me, Ned. Of course you have your wife to think about. You should both go. And Timothy and Farzad. I’ll close the Jackdaw. But I can be of use here. Nicholas may say the pestilence is incurable. And he may even be right. But if I cannot cure, then I can at least help.’
‘I shall speak to Rose and do as she wishes,’ Ned says quietly.
Something about the way he keeps his head down, studying his fingers over the great swell of his chest, tells Bianca he has not given up all his secrets.
‘What is it, Ned? What are you keeping from me?’
There is no hiding the struggle going on behind his eyes. ‘He didn’t do what you said, Mistress – run away.’
‘Ned, what is it you’re not telling me?’
Ned’s huge fingers have begun to drum against the table board. In the past – before he was tamed – that, Bianca knows, was always a sign the Monkton temper was about to explode. But there is no anger in his face now. Only conflict.
‘I swore to him I would not speak of the matter to you.’
‘But now you believe I should hear of it?’
He nods. ‘Because you do him an injustice.’
She lays a hand gently on his arm. ‘Then speak, Ned, if that is what your heart is telling you to do.’
He looks at her while he battles with himself a little longer. Then he sighs and says in a rush, ‘Master Nicholas only agreed to go to the Barbary shore because Sir Robert Cecil told him he’d have your licence to practise ’pothecary rescinded if he didn’t.’ He makes a noise like a smithy’s bellows. ‘There – I’ve said it. God forgive me for breaking an oath.’
For a while they sit facing each other in silence, Bianca’s right hand splayed against her temple. Then she leans back, letting her arms fall to her sides. ‘Oh, Ned. I should have realized.’ She turns and tilts her head towards the ceiling. If she’s looking for something, Ned thinks, she’s doing it through closed eyelids.
‘And now he’s in the hands of that monster, Cathal Connell,’ she says, barely loud enough for Ned to hear. ‘I know not whether to admire him or chastise him for a fool.’
‘What shall we do, Mistress?’
‘You, Ned, must do what you think right for you and Rose. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to beard Robert Cecil in that den of his on the Strand.’
Barely two hours later, having commandeered Rose to help her into her green brocade kirtle, lace her carnelian bodice for her and pin up her hair in as fashionable an imitation of a woman of the better orders as she can manage, and a penny poorer for taking a wherry across the river to save her feet, Bianca stands before the liveried gatekeeper at Cecil House.
‘I desire an audience with Sir Robert Cecil,’ she says loftily. ‘It is a matter of grave import.’
‘Are you on the list?’
‘I shouldn’t imagine so. But it really is a matter of–’
‘Grave import. It always is.’ The gatekeeper yawns, displaying a jaundiced tongue. Bianca catches a scent that reminds her of the brimstone she burned in the hearth on Dice Lane.
‘It concerns Sir Robert’s emissary to the Barbary Moors.’
His mouth closes like a trap. ‘And who might you be, Mistress, to know aught of Sir Robert’s emissaries? Are you a privy councillor, perhaps?’ He makes a little piggy snort at his clever joke.
‘I am a friend to the said emissary. And I have news of him – news for Sir Robert.’
‘Have you really? Who are you?’
Bianca clenches her fists and says, as evenly as she can, ‘I am Mistress Bianca Merton. From Southwark.’
She knows at once by his face that she’s made a mistake.
‘Oh, from Southwark,’ he says knowingly. ‘Bawdy-houses, bear-gardens, taverns and the playhouse’ – another porcine snort – ‘oh yes, Mistress, I know all about the matters of grave import there.’
Just my luck, Bianca tells herself: to find my way blocked by a lecherous Puritan.
‘I am an honest tavern-mistress,’ she says, forcing the words out between a clenched jaw. ‘And an apothecary, licensed by the Grocers’ Company.’
The gatekeeper swaps porcine for asinine. He gives two sharp brays, like a mule being whipped. ‘Aghgh! Aghgh! A pot-wench who sells love-philtres. I know your sort.’
Oh, that I had just one-tenth of the witchcraft Bankside believes I have, Bianca thinks to herself. There would be nothing left of you now, but a smoking dust of expensive kersey and the lingering scent of burnt hubris.
‘I really do believe Sir Robert will wish to see me,’ she says as calmly as she can manage.
‘And why is that, my saucy little Hippolyta?’
Her knuckles land squarely in the languorous curve of his nose, smashing it through to the other side so that he resembles Janus of the two faces. But when she looks at her fist, the knuckles are unblemished and his supercilious face is intact. She takes a deep breath and draws the last shot out of her locker.