When he sees the apothecary’s sign hanging alongside the Jackdaw’s own, he allows himself a contented smile. One of his last acts before leaving for Barnthorpe had been to seek the help of his friend, Lord Lumley, the patron of the College of Physicians’ chair of anatomy, in procuring the licence from the Grocers’ Guild, which manages such things in the city. It would appear Lumley has kept his word.
The flickering candlelight beckons to him through the tiny lozenges of pitted glass that make up the Jackdaw’s lopsided windows. For a moment he hesitates. It’s an ingrained reticence. It stems from what his father calls ‘the evil harvests’. When famine threatens and the pottage bowl only goes so far, you wait your turn; father and elder brother must eat their share first, because they are more use on the land than a ten-year-old.
At Cambridge, during his medical studies, it was reinforced: the sons of yeomen are so far beneath the sons of gentlemen that they must hang back, defer, carry and wait.
But it was mostly knocked out of him in the Low Countries. No one there stood in the way of the physician when the cry for his services went up. Now it is merely an almost unnoticeable pausing, a momentary slowing of the beat. Ducking under the lintel – Nicholas is of average height, but the entrance seems to have sunk a little further into the earth than the last time he was here – he steps inside.
At once the familiar smells of wood-smoke and hops envelop him, followed by a tide of unrestrained chatter: wherrymen arguing over mooring fees, players from the Rose berating the Master of the Queen’s Revels for his lack of artistic imagination, chandlers from the waterfront complaining about tight-pursed ships’ masters. And there’s no mistaking the huge form of Ned Monkton propping up the counter, or Rose’s cry of Anon! as she calms impatient customers.
He has to strain his ears to catch the familiar sound of a lute. But there it is: the Jackdaw’s taproom boy, Timothy, is strumming a ballad to a pair of lovers in the far corner.
There have been times when Nicholas has wanted to tear that lute from Timothy’s gentle hands, smash it over his knee and hurl the wreckage into the fire. In his grief, lovers’ ballads had been like a virulent poison to him. But he can bear them now; and besides, Bianca had quietly instructed Timothy to drop ‘The Gallant’s Heart’ and ‘The Maid and Her Beau’ from his repertoire, along with the other tunes that she has somehow discovered were Nicholas and Eleanor’s favourites.
At first he can’t see Bianca amongst the throng. He casts his gaze over the crowded taproom, searching for that unruly cascade of dark tresses.
He spots her at the centre of a knot of brightly dressed men who look as English as an elephant. She’s wearing the emerald-green kirtle that flatters her slim figure, her hair pinned loosely beneath a white linen coif. That darting smile, like the flash of a sunlit kingfisher’s wing, lights up the dark interior. Those slender hands, brimming with animation, are doing half her talking for her. The men around her seem enchanted.
And then she sees him.
He feels suddenly foolish – standing there in his plain white yeoman’s doublet, the simple bag slung over his shoulder as though he were an itinerant seller of cheap trinkets. He lifts the fingers of his right hand to his head and fusses at the tangle of coarse black hair – then stops self-consciously: what if she mistakes his attempt to make himself presentable for an infestation of lice?
All the way from Barnthorpe he’s imagined what he would say to Bianca, how he would greet her. He’s rehearsed everything from high courtesy to easy heartiness, from an extravagant bend of the knee to a kiss on the cheek. But all that comes out of his mouth is ‘How now, Mistress Merton?’
‘Well, hey nonny, nonny, if it isn’t Dr Shelby,’ she replies languidly, with an almost imperceptible lifting of one finely arched eyebrow.
Ned Monkton turns from the counter. Though he’s younger than Nicholas, his huge chest and wiry red hair make him look like a mother bear surprised by the return of a wandering cub. His ruddy face breaks into a grin. On the other side of the taproom, Rose stops in mid-Anon. Timothy’s fingers hesitate above the strings of his lute. Even the admirers around Bianca fall silent.
Letting his sack fall to the taproom floor, Nicholas spreads his hands, palm upwards, as though mystified by his own arrival. ‘I’ve returned,’ he says lamely.
‘So you have,’ observes Bianca.
She studies the solid, guileless face before her. She notes the jaw is still shaved unfashionably close – hardly a beard at all, more like soot on a hearth-brick. His chin carries its customary upward tilt – to her mind, an oddly belligerent pose for a man she knows to be inherently gentle. She takes in the raised hands: the battered fingers looking as though they should belong to a shipwright rather than a physician; the strong wrists with their filigree of tiny black curls disappearing into the sleeves of his doublet. She thinks he looks shorter than she remembers.
‘I said I would.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘And here I am.’
‘And so you are.’
For a moment they fall silent, regarding each other through the taproom fug.
‘Have I offended?’ he asks, puzzled by her coolness.
‘Mercy, why should you think that?’ she asks softly as she bestows a chaste kiss upon his right cheek. ‘I was simply wondering: have you not brought your two friends with you?’
‘My two friends?’
‘Master Mayhem and Mistress Chaos. Or perhaps they’re at home, keeping their friends Disruption and Calamity company.’
As she steps back, he searches those astounding amber eyes for a sign of levity. And finds it.
‘I see Southwark’s new apothecary specializes chiefly in ginger and vinegar,’ he ripostes.
And then, without conscious agency, they’re embracing – like the lovers they might be, if life (and Eleanor) hadn’t got in the way.
‘By the way, I think the new sign does very well. Don’t you?’ says Nicholas when they part.
‘And I must thank you for it, Nicholas, however you managed it.’ She smooths her green brocade kirtle over her hips. ‘You look as though you’ve had a hard ride. I’ve kept your lodgings in the attic free, if you need a bed for the night – or longer. There’s pottage still, if you’re hungry. I’ll get Rose to bring you a bowl.’
For a moment she looks deep into his eyes. He can feel her gaze laying out his thoughts like cards on a gaming table, face up – revealed.
‘I’d like that.’
‘Then welcome back, Dr Shelby,’ she says sweetly with a nod of her head. ‘Come, there’s someone I want you to meet: my cousin Bruno. His ship is moored at Galley Quay.’
She leads him to the group of foreigners and introduces him to the man who appears to be their chief: a diminutive fellow clad all in black, with mustachios the Earl of Leicester and Francis Walsingham might envy, had they still lived.
‘This is my cousin, Bruno Barrani,’ she says. ‘And these bravi ragazzi are his crew.’
Barrani immediately appoints Nicholas his long-lost brother, embracing him as though he’s just been rescued from a shipwreck. In an instant Nicholas is enveloped in a frenzy of hand-pumping, cheek-kissing and back-slapping as the crew of the Sirena greet him expansively. Though by nature a reserved man, he does his best to respond in kind. ‘Drink with us, mio fratellino!’ Bruno insists.