‘Do you promise? No more madmen offering Satan their souls in exchange for knowledge?’
‘I promise.’
She holds his gaze for a while, as though taking the measure of what he’s just said. Then she laughs. ‘What’s the worst they can do to you at this hearing – stop you attending their interminable feasts?’
He knows what she’s trying to do. And he’s genuinely grateful. But it doesn’t make him feel better. ‘They could have me imprisoned – condemned to the Bridewell for charlatanism.’
A wave of anger floods across her face. ‘Have physicians now become justices of the peace? Are we to be sent to the Tower for falling ill?’
‘I’m sure the idea would appeal to more than a few of them.’
‘But you’re not a charlatan – are you?’
‘I don’t believe so.’
‘Tell them to ask people around here. They’d soon learn the truth.’
‘The College Censors tend to avoid Bankside, unless it’s for a discreet visit to the stews.’
‘Well, whatever they decide, if you want to use your skills, why not here? An apothecary and a physician – that would make Bankside as civilized as any ward in the city.’
‘There’s another reason I’ve returned.’
‘Is that so?’ Bianca says, the interest blooming brightly in her eyes as she wonders if his heart is beginning to heal.
‘I’ve made a promise to someone I served with in Holland to visit his son in Gloucestershire.’
Interest turns to disappointment in an instant. ‘Oh, I thought you were going to say something else.’ She affects indifference. ‘When will you leave? Only I have some casks that need moving out of the brew-house.’
‘In a few days. I can be there and back in just over a week. If it turns out the roads are bad and I get delayed, well, what’s one more blot to the College of Physicians? They’ve probably already made up their minds. Besides, you’ll likely be glad of my absence. I won’t be much company, with the hearing on my mind.’
Before she can reply, Rose enters the parlour carrying a stack of mugs and pottles, which she sets down on the table with a clatter. ‘I see your Venetians are all still abed, Mistress!’ she says in wonderment. ‘Do they not rise of a morn, like God-fearing English folk? When am I supposed to air the bedding?’
‘They’re not my Venetians, Rose,’ Bianca says. ‘Let them have their sleep; they’ve been good for business.’
‘They’re all very handsome, I must say,’ announces Rose with a grin. ‘Even the ugly ones.’
Bianca gives her a warning stare. ‘Maybe they are, but if they want to spend their money on more than just ale, you leave them to the stews, my girl!’
Rose looks horrified. ‘Fie, mistress! I have my own gallant now. I have my Ned.’
It pleases Bianca that Rose and Ned are close. For all his rough exterior, Ned has a gentle heart. Like Nicholas, he too has lost someone dear to him – his younger brother, taken by the killer who stalked these lanes around the Jackdaw less than a year past, the man whose execution she and Nicholas have just been discussing.
‘Master Nicholas, you’re looking sore troubled this morning,’ Rose observes. She turns back to Bianca. ‘Yesterday he seemed so pleased to see you. Now he looks positively dejected. Have you spurned him, Mistress?’
‘Rose!’
‘I was only asking!’
The desk is hewn from Flemish walnut. It is a very large desk for such a small man: a riot of arabesque panels and chiselled within an inch of its life. It sits in an airy room – equally splendid – in a mansion the queen herself might covet, somewhere between the Strand and the fields of Covent Garden to the west of the city walls.
The man who sits at this desk is Robert Cecil, the crook-backed young son of Lord Burghley, the queen’s Lord Treasurer. He has spent the morning dealing with state business. He has signed documents on behalf of his father; read intelligence reports from the small army of agents the Cecils employ to watch for sedition; studied digests from ambassadors and emissaries across the known world. There are princes – kings, even – who know fewer secrets than Robert Cecil.
Yet to look at him – he’s not yet thirty – you might think him better suited to studying choral polyphony, or penning a learned treatise on interpretations of church liturgy. He’s short. Very short. And his back is an abomination to God’s design for the human skeleton. Yet his face is placid, tapering noticeably to a tender mouth and a thin umbrage of beard trimmed to a sharp point. The weight of the face is in the brow – broad and flexed, like a book cracked open at the spine.
At present he is studying a list of foreigners recently arrived in the country. (His men visit the hostelries and boarding houses regularly to record their names.) He notes nothing out of the ordinary. There’s a Zealander who’s rented rooms at the sign of the Mermaid on Water Gate Lane; a Fleming in lodgings at the Crossed Swords by Porter’s Quay… He puts the document aside and picks up another. It’s a copy of the returns of the Court of Admiralty and the London Customs House. He’s pleased to see that since his father reformed the inefficient and corrupt collection of duties last year, the records are more scrupulously kept.
He already knows of the Sirena di Venezia. She was picked up long before she rounded the North Foreland, by a pinnace running into Falmouth from Alderney. Now he reads that she has properly declared her cargo of Lombardy rice, and that the searchers have found her to be a wholly innocent trader. The name of her owner is recorded: one Signor Baron, which he takes to be the English corruption of Baronelli or perhaps Barrani. (Robert Cecil has studied at the Sorbonne, and is thus more familiar with the renderings of foreign names than is a harried London customs clerk.)
Surprisingly, it’s Englishmen he’s seeking amongst the Sirena’s crew. A seemingly innocent Venetian cargo ship making her way up the Narrow Sea could easily put into a French creek and there take aboard a native-born traitor schooled in the Catholic seminaries of Europe; someone who’s come to spread the Pope’s commandment that all English men and women who wish to save their souls should rise up against their excommunicated queen.
There have been plots aplenty against her these past years. There will undoubtedly be more to come. Not even the vast network of intelligencers and informers that he and his father have established can prevent it. All it will take is a moment’s carelessness on his part, a moment’s laxity by those he employs. And even the most diligent watchdogs must sleep occasionally.
But the Sirena di Venezia appears unimpeachable. Nevertheless, Cecil has already taken precautions. As soon as she had come to his notice, he’d written the letters AF next to the vessel’s name – a faenore – Latin for ‘of interest’. He has dispatched a man to keep an eye on her master and his crew. Consequently he now knows where they sup – at the Jackdaw tavern on Bankside. He gives a thin smile of recognition.
Bianca Merton.
While we may not be at war with Venice, we are at war with her religion; and if watchdogs must sleep, so Robert Cecil likes to think, they should do so lightly.
A discreet double tap on the door tells him it’s time for the first audience of the afternoon.
‘God give you good day, Robert,’ says a slender, handsome woman in her middle fifties, as the livered servant who ushers her in slips away silently, as if he had never existed.
The woman is smartly turned out in a gown of ochre brocade trimmed with green lace. She has a wide elfin mouth and mischievous eyes the colour of summer wheat. Her greying hair is tucked modestly beneath a white linen coif, and though she holds herself with a stern dignity, there’s no trace of severity in her smile. Indeed, it is Cecil – leaving his place behind the desk to bend a gracious knee to her – who bears a slight trace of disapproval in his clever green eyes.