And with that, Ned produces Nicholas’s letter to John Lumley from his jerkin – where he’s stowed it in expectation of this very moment – and tears it into quarters. ‘There, Mistress,’ he says. ‘Have we settled the matter?’
Bianca’s face remains constrained until she has left the Jackdaw. When she knows no one can see her from the tavern windows, she allows the tears that have been welling in her eyes to trickle down her cheeks. No one she passes takes any notice. Tears are commonplace on Bankside now.
As she walks back to Dice Lane, she wonders how long the pestilence can be kept at bay. Yes, the open drains are free from human soil and smelling more tolerable than they have been since she arrived; middens and cess-pits no longer foul the air; and only the vaguest scent of butchered meat hangs over the Mutton Lane shambles. But how long can the defences hold? She wonders why the city across the river has not been as diligent. Then she remembers what Nicholas had told her about physicians: how you could put ten of them around a patient’s bed and come up with twelve different diagnoses, and the patient would probably be dead by the time they stopped arguing. Thinking of him now turns her mind to the letter she wrote to him when she believed she was infected and dying. Never in her life before had she committed such intimate thoughts to paper, made them real, given them a weight that her fingertips still remember.
She tries to imagine where he is now, but whenever she pictures him, it is always in the shadow of the cruellest man in the world. All she has to comfort her is Gault’s promise that he’d warned Connell to take good care of his passenger. But now she knows Gault has lied to her about Solomon Mandel, she doesn’t trust him much more than she trusts that Aži Dahāka in human form.
And there are plenty of other fears to torment her – fears that have sprouted like weeds from the fertile soil of her childhood imagination, from the moment Nicholas told her he was leaving.
In Padua she had often seen merchants and sailors from Araby, dark-skinned, saturnine men who wore clothes unlike any Italian and seemed to have been forged out of the very sand and rocks of their distant, arid deserts. When she was young they had frightened her. She had ducked behind her mother’s skirts whenever they’d looked at her. This was because she’d heard the tales of how the Turk corsairs raided coastal villages in Sicily and around the Ionian Sea, carrying off men, women – even children like her – to a life of slavery in their galleys or their harems. It had taken all her father’s efforts to assure her they wouldn’t bother to march all the way inland to Padua. Even then, she’d refused to go to bed unless she could take a small kitchen knife to place beside her pillow, next to her favourite cloth doll, Caterina. If a Turk should unexpectedly burst in, she had decided to sell both the doll and herself dearly. No amount of persuasion by her mother could encourage her to leave the blade in the kitchen. It was only on her ninth birthday that she relented, when news arrived of the smashing of the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto by galleys of the Italian and Spanish Holy League. Then, with the solemnity of a general bringing home a sacred trophy that had cost much brave blood, she’d returned it to the kitchen, cutting a finger in the process and earning a weary rebuke from her mother: ‘Now do you see where the greater danger lay?’
The greater danger.
That must have been how Nicholas had seen the choice Robert Cecil offered him, she thinks: face God-only-knows what dangers in the land of the Moor or see the Grocers’ Guild revoke a certain person’s apothecary licence. So, to protect her, he had chosen to put himself in the care of the cruellest man on earth and set off for a land where – or so she imagines – sleeping with a knife beside your pillow is probably the very least of the precautions you ought to be taking.
Her mood swings violently between loving Nicholas for the way he wanted to save her from hurt, and hot anger that he’d allowed himself to become a pawn in Robert Cecil’s machinations. And on each swing, the pendulum bumps against her guilt at sending him on his way with a cold face and an unforgiving heart.
When she arrives in Dice Lane, she sees a small crowd waiting outside her shop. Even Jenny Solver is there, beaming all over each of her two faces, pretending that only days ago she hadn’t fled in such haste that anyone would think she’d discovered the Devil serving behind the counter. Bianca wonders how she’ll get all the balms, tinctures and distillations finished before nightfall, because they’ll all want to gossip.
She reminds herself she’s almost out of brimstone. She’ll have to go across the river to Petty Wales soon, to an Italian Lutheran merchant she knows there, who imports it from Sicily via her cousin Bruno in Padua. In return for Bianca paying a good price, the merchant sends her letters to Bruno along with his orders. Thus she receives news of old friends, like Cardinal Fiorzi – currently enjoying a serene retirement with Mercy Havington. She knows, for instance, that Samuel – Mercy’s grandson – has made a name for himself as a gardener in the cardinal’s estate, that his falling sickness has abated and that he is to marry a sweet maid named Alessandra.
As Bianca reaches her door, a young lad pushes forward, drawing angry looks from the waiting customers. Simply dressed in woollen hose, jerkin and apprentice’s cap, he seems to think himself more important than he has a right to. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jenny Solver asks petulantly. ‘Wait your turn, like the rest of us.’
Ignoring her, he presses a folded paper into Bianca’s hand and disappears in the direction of the bridge.
It is only when she has closed the shop again – an hour after nightfall, when the last customer has been served – that Bianca has the opportunity to study the message.
She’d assumed it was a prescription, perhaps from one of the barber-surgeons at St Thomas’s hospital for the poor. But it isn’t. It’s a letter from Reynard Gault, written in a sweeping hand as ostentatious as the man himself – so much so that the lines have to curve downwards at the end to prevent themselves tumbling off the page:
To Mistress Merton, my greetings and most respectful compliments. Mindful of your undoubted skill at physic, coupled with the mercy Almighty God has shown unto you of late, I desire you to repair to my house on Giltspur Street at Smithfield, at your earliest convenience. I find myself in need of your competence, to protect myself and my interests from this present dreadful winnowing. In addition, I have a confidence to impart that may be advantageous to you.
Your True Friend whilst I breathe,
Rynd Gault
She reads it three times, gaining much pleasure from the fact that the popinjay who’d had the gall to imply to her face that she was a charlatan now has need of her. But when she lays the letter aside, she’s still none the wiser. What confidence could he possibly have to share with her that would be to her advantage?
Unless, of course, he knows more about why Robert Cecil sent Nicholas to Morocco than he’s admitting.
Or he’s suddenly and uncharacteristically found the need to unburden himself of the sin of lying – about knowing Solomon Mandel.
25
The Bab Doukkala. Hadir gives Nicholas the name so quickly he can barely catch it.
It is unlike any city gate he has ever seen: a concentric nest of archways decorated in arabesque carvings and tiled in vivid colours: blues as brilliant as the sky and yellows as fiery as the sun, interlaced with weaving threads of silver. On either side, two forbidding towers of red mortar command the approach. From the battlements, bored sentries look down upon a throng of tradesmen, farmers, potters, weavers, spice merchants, all touting for business as vocally as any at St Saviour’s market on Bankside.