It’s the only private accommodation on the vessel, no larger than a prison cell, with planked walls that slope inwards towards a small skylight set into the ceiling. It smells of paint, freshly scrubbed timber, tar and hemp, and of the uneasy intimacy it has forged with the sea. A simple cot protrudes from one wall. The only furniture is a tiny table and two chairs. As Bianca stoops to avoid cracking her head on the beams, she feels the movement of the river through the soles of her feet, as if it’s breathing. As if it’s alive.
‘A chamber fit for a duke!’ laughs Bruno proudly as he enters to find her sitting in one of the chairs. ‘Though a little stuffy, I will admit.’ Leaving the door open behind him, he sits on the edge of the cot.
In this cabin – a fragment of his own world brought with him across the water to a strange shore – he speaks to her in the language they share. The warm vigour of it, so unlike the English she learned at her father’s knee in Padua, spills over her like sunlight over the incarcerated.
‘We men of the Veneto are great mariners,’ he asserts bravely. ‘A little discomfort is nothing to us!’
‘I don’t know how you can bear it, being cooped up in here for weeks on end, while the floor rolls about under your feet.’
‘I could ask the same question of you, Cousin, could I not?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How can you live in this place?’ he says, pointing with his doeskin-gloved hand in the general direction of the quayside. ‘Do you not yearn for the nourishment of the Mass? Your soul must be as parched as an unwatered desert!’
‘Oh, we get plenty of water here, Bruno, believe me,’ she replies, glancing up at the water trickling over the skylight.
‘That’s right, laugh at me,’ he says, holding up his hands to show he can take a teasing with the best of them. ‘But don’t they watch you? Don’t they know you’re a true Catholic?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘Yet you are still free?’
‘Free enough. Free to keep my religion to myself. As long as we don’t proselytize, they tolerate us.’
A look of outrage spoils his handsome face. ‘Do you call what they do to the brave priests we send amongst them toleration? I call it vile butchery. Perhaps you think I hadn’t noticed the heads stuck on spikes on that thing?’ He points through the open doorway to the bridge, barely visible beyond a misty tangle of masts, spars and cordage.
‘Are you suggesting that if England were to send her priests into Rome to call upon all Catholics to overthrow the Holy Father, they’d be welcomed with dishes of cappelletti and the best Barolo?’
Bruno shakes his head. ‘What has become of you, Cousin?’ he asks with a sigh, as though she’s not the Bianca he once knew. ‘Don’t you remember when Cardinal Fiorzi came to our little church? He said that, of all the children, it was you who took the wafer and the wine most piously. What was it he told Father Rossi to call you?’
‘Passerotto,’ Bianca answers with a smile. ‘Little sparrow.’
‘You have a duty, Cousin,’ he tells her gravely, ‘especially now that you live amongst them.’
‘A duty?’
‘You must play your part – as must we all, in this battle against the heretic.’
‘Are these your words, Bruno? To my ears, they sound as if they come from Cardinal Fiorzi’s tongue.’
‘You were glad to aid him once, Cousin.’
‘The little sparrow grew up, Bruno. She grew wiser.’ She stares down at the scrubbed deck planks. ‘When I was an innocent child, I thought Cardinal Fiorzi so magnificent I wanted to marry him. When I was a girl, you and I carried secret messages for him. We watched his enemies and reported who they consorted with. I did those things because I believed God spoke to him directly, that he could do no wrong. Then the Holy Office of the Faith charged my father with heresy and left him in a cell to waste away. Fiorzi could have saved him. He chose not to. So I left the city of my birth to come here, to my father’s land. Like England, I have no further use for cardinals.’
Bruno gives her a pained look. ‘His Eminence is but one cardinal amongst many. His voice is not always in the ascendant.’
‘Ascendant or not, I no longer have any wish to hear what he has to say.’
‘He has need of you again, Cousin. A private need.’
Bianca stares at her cousin in horror. ‘Need? What possible need can Cardinal Fiorzi have in England that he should–’ She breaks off, raising a hand to her mouth and staring around the little cabin as though she’s found herself trapped in a snare. ‘Oh, Bruno. You cannot ask this of me. I have already come to the attention of the Privy Council watchers once before. Do you wish to see my bleached skull hoisted on that bridge?’
Bruno laughs. ‘Have no fear, sweet cousin. His Eminence has not sent me to ask you to spy on your new countrymen, or to subvert their vile religion. I told you, it is a privy matter. He needs someone he can trust in this den of disbelievers.’
She’s about to challenge him to explain what he means when Graziano pokes his grizzled face around the door.
‘Forgive the disturbance, Master. You have a visitor,’ he says, tugging the brow of his cap. ‘An Englishman.’
Bruno raises a hand in consent, and a stocky figure in a leather jerkin ducks into the cabin.
‘I’m told this is where I may find Master Barrani,’ he says in a throaty voice.
He has a lazy face, Bianca notices, with slack eyes and an almost lipless mouth that slashes across his jaw like a wound. His sleeves are rolled up over his meaty arms, his hair plastered to his head by the mist. He’s a two-pot, she decides instinctively: two pots of ale and then he’ll start putting the world to rights in an increasingly belligerent manner, until I have to have him thrown out. London is full of two-pots.
‘I am he. I am Barrani.’
‘I’d rather we spoke in private,’ the man says, eyeing Bruno’s mustachios with an English distaste for extravagance, and apparently deciding that because he’s small and appears to have an inordinate care for his appearance, he poses no threat. He glances at Bianca as though she were something in a shop that he wouldn’t dream of buying and adds, ‘I don’t talk business in the company of riverside whores.’
Bruno puffs himself up like a raven ruffling his feathers dry after a rain shower. He springs from the cot, drawing his dagger, his little face crimson with insulted honour. ‘Cane sporco!’ he cries.
‘Don’t you sporco me, you rogue!’ the man growls, leaning forward over the table – as much to avoid braining himself on the deck-head as to threaten. ‘You’re in England now. Speak English!’
‘He called you a dirty dog,’ Bianca says sweetly, her face barely a foot from his. ‘And if he doesn’t prick you with that poniard he’s just drawn, I’ll be only too happy to do it myself.’
‘Yes, I call you a dirty dog,’ Bruno says with a murderous look in his eyes. ‘You insult my cousin!’
‘Your cousin?’ echoes two-pot. ‘Why didn’t you say so at the start?’ He gives Bianca a grudging shrug of contrition. ‘A comely woman on a ship – well, it’s easy to draw the obvious conclusion, ain’t it?’
‘Is it really?’ says Bianca icily.
‘Munt, Tobias Munt – merchant of Petty Wales,’ two-pot says, running a fist through his lank wet hair. ‘Pleased to meet you, Master Barrani. Sorry if I offended, I’m sure. I take it you were expecting me?’
‘Indeed, Signor Munt. And there is no offence taken,’ says Bruno grandly.
‘Isn’t there?’ asks Bianca, horrified by how easily he’s capitulated – worse than that black-haired, Christ-faced boy in Padua.