‘Oh, Nicholas doesn’t sup,’ says Bianca.
He knows she’s only trying to protect him. Before Timothy found him in the Thames mud last year – one-third drowned, one-third frozen, one-third barely clinging to life – he’d spent months trying to find oblivion in knock-down and stitch-back. But at Barnthorpe, with his family, he’d discovered that he could drink weak small-beer again and not succumb to the old temptation. A milestone, he’d thought at the time, on a road whose end was as yet unknown to him.
‘A cup of small-beer will be fine,’ he says, accepting Bruno’s offer.
‘Are you sure?’ Bianca whispers in his ear.
‘Surer now than when I left,’ he replies. In truth, he’s surer about quite a lot.
The lad named Finney has never troubled himself much about the judgement of his Maker. The wild licentiousness of the player’s life, the delights of Bankside with its taverns, its bear-pits and its dice dens, the companionable weeks on the road when pestilence or the Privy Council shut the London theatres, all these have made him canny; older than his sixteen years might suggest.
But Finney is troubled now.
So troubled, in fact, that he’s desperate to put as many miles between himself and Dr Arcampora as he possibly can, before his absence is discovered. For Cleevely House has become a very different place since Dr Arcampora rode out of the dark beech wood.
Take, for example, the once innocently appointed chamber off the great hall – the chamber that the physician has now made his own, and where no one may enter other than by express invitation. Now it almost bursts at the seams with vials of strange liquids, astrolabes and almanacs, pestles and mortars, flasks, syringes, pots of yellow alum and Attic ochre, and all the other marvels that Arcampora has apparently brought with him from fabled Basle.
And what is the casual observer to make of a freshly killed fox, with its dull poisoned eyes and bloody mouth? Or the wooden board with the number 4400 written on it in a dozen different ways, from Greek to Hebrew via Aramaic, and which apparently is the Cabalistic number associated with the archangel Samael?
None of this is what Finney had expected when he arrived.
When offered this new part by the player-manager – this admittedly unorthodox part – for twice the usual wage, he hadn’t needed much persuading. It’s easy: all you have to do is play the part of a companion. Smile. Be a friend. You don’t even have to learn any lines.
But the player-manager had said nothing about him becoming Lucifer’s apprentice boy. Nothing about sleepy Cleevely being the mouth of the worm, the gateway to the most abominable of sins.
So at dusk, under a rising moon, Finney slips out through a window in the buttery, left unlatched for just that purpose. He considers himself well prepared for the journey. No, not the journey. He will call it as he truly sees it: the escape. He’s wearing thick woollen hose against the cold evening air, and Tanner Bell’s brown worsted half-coat, stolen admittedly, but more use to him now than to Tanner. Besides, it’s not strictly Tanner’s coat, is it? It’s his brother Dorney’s, and Dorney is dead. It even fits Finney – with his tall, thin frame, which has always confined him to female roles, every one of them, from a virgin maid to the Queen of Sicily – better than it does Tanner. It troubles him not a jot that Dorney Bell died in this coat. It’s warm, and that’s all Finney cares about.
Stuffed inside the coat is a small hoard of bread and cheese. Once he’s put enough miles under his feet, he’ll find a tavern and put on a performance – something from The Friars or Hieronimo – in exchange for a meal and somewhere to sleep. With his long stride, he reckons he can make Oxford in two days. He’ll be back on the boards at the Rose or the Curtain inside a week: a proper ‘roaring boy’ once more. He’ll be done with the smell of damp sheep, the company of country goose-caps, boys with the falling sickness and – most important of all – blaspheming, crazy-eyed Swiss necromancers.
He slips through Cleevely village like an angular wraith, a shadow puppet propelled on invisible strings. The houses are shuttered and dark, the lanterns extinguished; not the meanest glimmer of light to be seen anywhere. Not even the growl of a waking dog marks his passing. Above him, streamers of grey cloud flit across the moon like a ripped shroud drawn across a dead man’s face.
He’s into his stride now. He reckons he can keep up this pace for hours. Till sunrise, if necessary. An owl calls to him from the beech wood. He welcomes it as an encouragement; certainly not a warning.
Because Finney – in his stolen, dead man’s coat – is already beginning to think himself free.
4
Next morning, Nicholas is surprised to see that a small queue has formed in the lane outside the Jackdaw, waiting for the tavern to open. He knows at once they haven’t come for the knock-down and the mad-dog, because he’s seen the same quietly stoic faces before – when he was the part-time physician at St Thomas’s hospital for the poor on Thieves’ Lane. He watches with growing admiration as Bianca treats the inflamed eyes of the parish constable’s wife with turbith and agaricke juice, and brings ease to a waterman afflicted with a particularly phlegmy cough by mixing a syrup of sanicle and hoarhound. The rest seem content with a wise-woman’s advice on maladies various – from inconstant lovers to chilblains. This is physic that Nicholas has sworn to eschew as superstition. But he can’t deny the constable’s wife when she says her eyes have never felt so refreshed, or the noisy but victorious elimination taking place in the alley – and all achieved without a single horoscope being cast or a word of Latin spoken, as would happen if it had been a member of the College of Physicians at work and not a half-Italian, half-English tavern-mistress. Which makes what he has to say after a breakfast of sweet eggs, bread and butter all the more an admission of defeat.
‘I’ve been summoned to attend a hearing at the College of Physicians, before the Censors’ panel,’ he tells Bianca despondently.
She regards him quizzically. ‘A hearing? Into what?’
‘Into my professional conduct – after Eleanor died.’
What she knows about his fall is only what he’s already confessed: the drunken rampages, the public rants against an uncaring god, the flight of patients who no longer cared to be treated by a raving madman, the final desperate attempt at self-destruction in the river…
‘But you redeemed yourself, Nicholas. Think of what you prevented.’
‘I swore an oath to heal, and instead I killed a man.’
‘You didn’t kill him, Nicholas – the Privy Council killed him. And with just cause. He was a monster.’
A darkness comes into his eyes. ‘But they can’t know the truth, can they? They must never know.’
‘Did you know that, while you were in Suffolk, Ned and Rose went to the execution? They wouldn’t believe that man was truly dead unless they saw it with their own eyes.’
‘You didn’t attend?’
‘Oh, I thought about it, believe me. But in the end…’ Her voice tails off into silence.
For a moment Nicholas says nothing. Seeing the fear in her eyes, he lays a hand on her wrist. ‘It’s in the past. Let it remain there. He can’t harm either of us any more.’
‘They told me he never uttered a sound, not even when they cut out his entrails and burned them before his eyes. Utter silence, as if he wasn’t really there.’
‘He can’t return, Bianca. You’re safe.’