‘What will my customers think of me, Ned? Will they lose heart? Will they say I’ve abandoned them?’
‘There’s none would think it, Mistress,’ Ned says, in a tender voice that ill-befits his intimidating size. ‘All they have to do is walk a little further; the Jackdaw’s not ten minutes from Dice Lane.’ He smiles. ‘Besides, Rose and I would be glad to have you home.’
She places one hand against his arm in gratitude.
In silence they pass Solomon Mandel’s old house. Someone else is living there now. On Bankside, a murder is little cause to pass over any half-decent place to lay your head. The landlord moved in a family of French Huguenots the moment the last bloodstains had been scrubbed away.
‘I still see him, Ned,’ Bianca says, ‘telling poor Farzad he hasn’t put enough black cumin in that kubaneh bread he likes.’ It’s an image she prefers to the one she’d encountered when she and Nicholas inspected the ruin of Mandel’s chamber.
‘Hanging’s too good for the rogues who did that,’ Ned growls as they leave the little house to the shadows. ‘Or for those who said he deserved it, because he wasn’t a true Christian.’
‘Some people have a tendency to dip their tongues in a pot of foolishness before they speak, Ned. Most don’t mean it.’
‘Aye, Mistress. But that’s no excuse for talking ill of a goodly old man.’
When Ned has delivered her safely to the door of her shop she leans up to kiss the wild auburn bank of his bearded cheek, bids him farewell and goes inside. Alone, and in the semidarkness, she makes a slow lap of the interior, deep in thought. She rubs her fingertips on the sprigs of herbs and bunches of dried leaves, inhales the competing scents of sweet briar, quince and rosemary. She walks amongst the clusters of wound-wort and lovage that hang from the ceiling, as though she is taking a contemplative stroll through a moonlit arbour.
And after a while she comes to a conclusion. Tomorrow she will pack all this away and take it back to the relative safety of the Jackdaw. If she stays here and the plague overtakes her, she reasons, she won’t be able to help anyone. Standing in the path of a huge, merciless wild beast that has tasted blood and craves more is not courage. It is blind stupidity.
There is a measure of desperation in the way Nicholas handles the documents Adolfo Sykes has tried so hard to keep hidden. The paper magnifies the trembling of his fingertips, as though a playful breeze is blowing through the open window. The groups of letters blur tantalizingly in the lamplight.
‘I can’t read them,’ he mutters to himself. ‘I can’t.’
His only hope is that one of Robert Cecil’s clever secretaries, skilled in the arts of the cipher, will be able to do so. But that will have to wait until he brings these impenetrable pages back to England.
He is about to return the sheets to their woollen wrapping when he notices something he hasn’t seen before. On one of them, written so faintly in the bottom left-hand corner that it is all but invisible in the meagre light, is a single word in clear English.
Matthew.
Nicholas stares at it, willing some meaning into the name. He finds none.
‘Is there an English merchant here in Marrakech who goes by the name of Matthew?’ he asks Hadir.
If there is, Hadir does not know of him. And Hadir knows every merchant in the city.
Searching for the tiniest glimmer of light escaping the otherwise impervious curtain of Adolfo Sykes’s secrecy, Nicholas returns to the window. He stares down into the courtyard. Inevitably his eyes alight on the tiny grey smudge of the stone talisman on the far wall, and the downward-pointing finger that had brought him so tantalizingly close to the agent’s last written words. If it’s guided me this far, he thinks, can it not guide me all the way?
A talisman on a garden wall in Marrakech. Another one beside a door in Southwark. Two hands, somehow entwined.
And then it hits him: Adolfo Sykes wasn’t writing to Robert Cecil. And he wasn’t using Cecil’s code. He was writing to someone else, because he feared that his dispatches to Lord Burghley’s son could be intercepted. He was writing to a friend who shared his faith in the power of a talisman that had ultimately failed them both. He was writing to Solomon Mandel.
From there it is but a small jump in his imagination to Mandel’s ruined chamber. He sees himself retracing his steps around the murder bed while Bianca looks on in moist-eyed horror at the devastation. And he sees the one item in that room that has been left untouched: a Bible, open at a page from the Book of Matthew, the parable of Jesus feeding the multitude with just five loaves and two fishes.
Farzad, bring me some more of your fine kubaneh bread, he can hear Mandel saying as he sits taking his solitary breakfast in the Jackdaw.
Five loaves. And two fishes.
The revelation strikes home with the force of one of Ned Monkton’s playful punches. Turning away from the window, Nicholas hurls himself back into the chair, leaving Hadir to stare at him as though he fears his master has just been possessed by a particularly energetic demon.
‘Matthew,’ he announces, holding up the sheet of paper for Hadir to see where Sykes, with the lightest of hands, has written the name. ‘It’s to tell Master Sykes’s friend in London which code he’s using. And the key to that code comprises the numbers five and two.’
Nicholas begins to write. Counting five letters into the word kubaneh, he sees the next character is an e – also the fifth letter of the alphabet. It is all the proof he needs to know he’s on the right path. He rings the same letter on the alphabetical column he wrote earlier, when he’d been trying to remember the cipher that Robert Cecil’s agent had employed in his dispatches.
Now he faces a choice: two fishes. Two up or two down? He picks the latter. He counts two and then rings the next in the sequence, h. Using that as an anchor point, he begins to write a second alphabet in the empty space to the left of the first, a against h, and so on down the column. Long before he’s finished he knows the curtain has been drawn aside, simply by glancing every now and then from the new column to the first encoded page.
Should I make Hadir complicit in this? Nicholas wonders. What else am I to do? He already knows more than is safe for him. Without his help, God alone knows what dangers I’m likely to blunder into in this alien city. And so he lets Hadir watch while he recovers the last written words of Adolfo Sykes. By the time he has completed his task, there is nothing but darkness beyond the open window.
To my dear and trusty friend, Solomon Mandel, I send you a gentile’s greetings, you old rogue. How is it on Bankside? Raining, I don’t doubt. Are you still acquainted with the Moor lad, the one who makes kubaneh for your breakfast?
I have contrived another sight of the false pedigree, and can reassure you that the copy I sent you in my last dispatch is accurate in all important respects. I still do not know why these fellows have them, but perhaps the Falconer requires his hawks to be well bred. All I know is that Connell is most certainly the traitor I suspected him to be. He is a devil, stripped by Lucifer of all that was good in him – and I doubt even that was very much.
Connell is paid for his treachery in gold and slaves. He gets first choice in the market. God help the poor souls who become his property. Yesterday I witnessed him houghing a poor fellow who had attempted to escape: two quick slices of his knife and the desperate man was hamstrung. Connell spat upon him, called him dog and sent him crawling away to find his forage as best he might, or starve. What use will he be to anyone, this slave who cannot stand?