Bruno sheathes his dagger. ‘How can I be of service, Signor Munt?’
Uninvited, Munt eases his stocky frame into the chair opposite Bianca. He smells of dusty sacks and stale vegetables.
‘Can this fair cousin of yours be trusted, Master Barrani?’
The question is directed to Bruno, but it’s Bianca’s eyes he’s holding, with that covetous look she’s seen on men’s faces before – and still doesn’t care for.
‘To the grave, Signor Munt,’ replies Bruno.
‘I should be going,’ Bianca says. ‘Whatever business you have to discuss, I’m sure you’d prefer to do it without a woman present.’
‘Peace, Cousin, stay,’ says Bruno. ‘I wish Signor Munt to know how well you are trusted.’
‘Bruno, if this is about what we’ve been discussing, I really do not wish–’
Her cousin raises one small black-gloved hand to silence her. To her irritation, her innate curiosity gets the better of her. She complies.
‘This won’t take long. Isn’t that so, Signor?’
Munt fishes in his purse and takes out what looks to Bianca like a well-worn coin, an angel or perhaps a ducat. He places it on the table and holds Bruno’s gaze with such intensity that Bianca can’t help herself staring at the design embossed on the surface of the dull metal. In the centre is a woman standing over a coiled serpent, heavenly rays emanating from her head. Bianca recognizes the figure at once: St Margaret of Antioch, the martyr swallowed by Satan in the form of a serpent; a woman so pious she emerged from the ordeal unscathed, bathed in God’s holy light. In the church Bianca had attended in Padua there was a chapel dedicated to the very same saint.
Bruno’s expression is impassive as he looks at the medallion, then at Munt. ‘Have you perchance brought anything else with you, Signor Munt?’ he enquires.
Munt returns the medallion to his purse and wrings his beefy hands. ‘There I have to disappoint,’ he says. ‘I shall need a little more time.’
‘There is a problem?’
‘Only that you had favourable winds, Master Barrani. We weren’t expecting you so soon.’
We, hears Bianca. Not I. Backers? Stockholders? Or conspirators? For who else but a conspirator needs to identify himself to another with the aid of a medallion?
‘How long?’
‘Ten days from today – the sixteenth day of March. But not here.’
‘Then where, Signor Munt?’
‘At my warehouse on Petty Wales – the sign of the three tuns. Shall we say noon?’
‘If that is how it must be, well, we have come a long way, Signore. At least I shall have more time to spend with my beautiful cousin.’
Munt looks at him enviously. ‘You’re a lucky man, Master Barrani. Until then.’
‘Until then, Signor Munt – la pace di Dio su di te.’
‘And a patchy day-oh to you, too.’
And with that, Munt offers Bianca an ill-disguised leer and leaves.
Bianca leans closer to her cousin. ‘What, in the name of the saints, was that implausible piece of theatre about?’
‘I do not understand what you mean, Cousin,’ says Bruno with an airy smile.
‘I’m not a fool, Bruno. You made me sit through that exchange so that I would be complicit, didn’t you?’ The anger blazes in her eyes.
‘Complicit in what, Cousin?’ asks Bruno in a hurt voice, as though innocence flows in his veins in place of blood. ‘I am the part owner of a ship. This is a port. Signor Munt is a merchant.’
‘So why does he carry a medallion with a Catholic saint on it and show it to someone he’s never met before?’
Bruno throws his arms in the air. ‘Cousin, enough! All these questions – they’re giving me a headache. Trust is important in commerce. I prefer to deal with men whose faith is not corrupt.’
‘So I’m right? Munt is a Catholic.’
‘This is a problem, Cousin? You wish me to trade only with heretics?’
‘Bruno, you’d trade with a churchful of Lutheran bishops if you thought there was a ducat to be made, despite your love for Cardinal Fiorzi. But I thought I had made myself plain. I’ll have nothing to do with treason. It ends in but one way: on the scaffold, in lingering torment. Take my advice: complete your trade, sell your rice, sup in my tavern in well-ordered peace and then sail back home to Venice. Please. Anything else, and all the cardinals in Rome will be unable to save you here.’
By dawn a vile wind is prowling up the river from Woolwich, raising spiteful teeth on the grey surface of the river. It slips into the Southwark lanes like the chill of death spreading from the extremities. The twin signs hanging above the entrance to the Jackdaw snap at each other like fighting dogs. Rose has rekindled the fire in the taproom. The chimney whines like a cheap whistle. When Nicholas comes in from the Tabard, where he’s been trying to reduce the price of a horse to take him to Cleevely, he finds Bianca in the company of two men. One is a heavyset, jovial fellow in his fifties with a face veined by malmsey. The other is about Nicholas’s age. He has a smooth, boyish face framed by a mane that puts even Bruno’s to shame. But unlike Bruno’s, it’s honey-coloured and – as far as Nicholas can tell – a stranger to the barber’s skill with dyes. He sports a threadbare line of beard along the rounded jaw, and his limpid eyes – crowned by finely arched eyebrows – contain a hint of venal menace: an angel who’d not think twice about selling his soul. I disliked you when we first met, Nicholas thinks, remembering the bane of the Cambridge divinity professors, the iconoclast, the mercurial sprite with the unpredictable temper who’d matriculated in the same Michaelmas term; and I have no reason to alter my opinion now.
‘Come and meet Master Christopher Marlowe,’ Bianca says, beckoning Nicholas over. ‘He and Master Burridge are going to be visiting us a while.’
The older man extends his hand with a flourish. In a voice that stops Nicholas in his tracks, he announces, ‘Walter Burridge, sir! Player-manager of the finest company of actors in all London – Lord Tyrrell’s Men.’
Like all of his trade, Burridge has the loudest voice in the building. Clearly handsome enough for a heroic lead in his youth, he now looks more like the owner of a down-at-heel French perfumery. He’s squeezed into a green coat of Kendal wool that’s seen too many winters, with a bright but tattered knot of ribbons tied to the collar.
‘Good morrow, Master Burridge,’ says Nicholas, noting that Lord Tyrrell’s patronage of the finest company of actors in all London doesn’t extend to a new coat.
‘And this is Kit,’ says Bianca, with an approving smile. ‘Kit, this is Dr Nicholas Shelby.’
‘A doctor of divinity, Master Shelby? And in a Southwark tavern? How intriguing.’
Nicholas thinks he can detect a trace of the Kentish shoemaker’s son in Marlowe’s drawl, a fragment of the original man freeing itself of the playwright’s insouciance. ‘Of medicine, Master Marlowe,’ he replies, irrationally irritated by the fact that Marlowe clearly doesn’t remember him – and that somehow he’s managed to make the journey in Bianca’s estimation from ‘Master Christopher’ to ‘Kit’ in so short a time.
‘Kit’s a playwright,’ Bianca says, smiling. ‘He’s famous.’
‘I know,’ says Nicholas. ‘Tamburlaine.’ He recalls passing the Rose theatre last autumn when it was playing there. It was the day he’d thrown his doctoral gown into the Thames. Where one man falls, another rises, he tells himself dejectedly.