Timothy has already explained what happened. A gang of Bankside hotheads, convinced by Kit Marlowe’s play-making that the Jackdaw is staging a real invocation and that the Venetian visitors with their heretic religion are responsible, has come to restore God’s one true religion in their preferred manner: by brute force.
‘They came in shouting the odds about blasphemers,’ Ned Monkton says. ‘That spindly little fellow from St Mary’s church – sideman Perrot – had them all whipped up.’
‘I’ll take most low-lifes in this tavern,’ Bianca says under her breath, ‘but I draw the line at Puritans!’
‘He’s not dead,’ says Nicholas, looking up. ‘He’s sorely hurt, but he’s still alive.’
Tenderly, Rose and Bianca help Nicholas roll Bruno onto his side. With each shallow breath, an alarming pink foam bubbles around his mouth.
Nicholas thinks, if I were back in the Low Countries, I’d be asking if there was a priest amongst the Catholic prisoners to give the Viaticum. But this is Protestant England. Apart from Bianca and Bruno’s friends, there’s no one to care a damn about the welfare of the Venetian’s soul.
Marlowe emerges from the ruins, grinning like an ape, his knuckles bloodied, his angelic face bright with excitement. ‘Oh, but I do so enjoy a good quarrel,’ he says cheerfully.
‘Have you any idea what’s happened here?’ asks Nicholas furiously. ‘This isn’t some Cambridge student jape.’
‘Nicholas, please! You have to help Bruno,’ begs Bianca, clutching the sleeve of Nicholas’s doublet. ‘Please, please don’t let him die in a foreign land, so far from home. Not like this.’
Ned drags the board away from where Bruno is lying and sets it upright. The Venetians lift their master and set him gently down on his back. His eyes are half-shut. His face, where it’s visible between the streaks of blood, has taken on a biliously pale hue. The breast of his black doublet hardly appears to rise and fall. As Bianca unlaces the points to help him breathe, the only sign he’s alive is that awful bubbling froth around his mouth.
Nicholas leans forward and peers at Bruno Barrani’s ruined head. For a moment that dread sense of inadequacy that he felt when he tried to save Eleanor floods into his thoughts, that mistrust of all he’s been taught, that fear that so much of his medical knowledge is built on quicksand. He fights it off. This is physic that he knows and trusts: meat work – the kind of medicine he practised with the army of the House of Orange. This calls for the practical treatment of visible injuries, the setting of bones crushed or broken, the cleansing and stitching of deep lacerations, the extraction of broken blade-tip or cudgel’s splinter. This is healing that has no use for casting horoscopes or lengthy expositions in Latin. This is what he can do. This is what he knows.
First, he sends Rose hot-foot to fetch clean linen to staunch the bleeding. Then, to Bianca, ‘Mistress apothecary, do you have any spirit of turpentine?’
‘Yes.’
‘Eggs?’
‘Laid this morning.’
‘Rose water?’
She nods.
‘Good. Mix a collation. It’s better for cleansing a wound than hot oil, and a lot kinder to the patient.’
Graziano kneels beside his friend and asks in deep, pious Italian, ‘Quanto è male ferito? È fatale?’
Nicholas doesn’t need Bianca to translate for him – the meaning of Graziano’s question is clear by the tone of his voice. ‘You may tell Signor Graziano that it is too early to tell,’ he says. ‘But I will do what I can. He has my promise.’
He tells Bianca the correct proportions for the collation. She runs – something no one can ever remember seeing her do in the Jackdaw – to her apothecary’s store in the cellar. On the way she almost collides with Rose, returning with the clean linen. Yet the tongue-lashing Rose expects does not come; just a mumbled, almost tearful apology.
While Rose tears the cloth into ragged strips, Nicholas sets to work. Soon there’s a growing pile of roseate linen on the floor beside the table. Bruno gives no response to Nicholas’s touch. His skin feels like cold, wet dough. He’s breathing fast, but almost imperceptibly. As Nicholas struggles to stem the blood-flow, he knows both of them could be fighting a battle already lost. He works quickly, but with immense care. If the pterion is damaged, any pressure applied could prove fatal.
When Bianca returns with the collation, Nicholas dips the remaining linen into the mixture and has her hold the wet cloth against her cousin’s head. ‘Did anyone see him struck?’ he asks. ‘Was it a blade or something heavier?’
Bianca translates, but the Venetians have no answer for Nicholas. It seems Bruno is simply another unlucky victim of a Bankside tavern riot.
Marlowe says languidly, ‘Mercy, but they are an excitable lot in Southwark. To lose their wits over mere play-actin’.’
‘This is partly your doing, Marlowe,’ Nicholas snaps. ‘Provoking people’s passions like that! This man could die because of your stupid play.’ He looks at Bianca. ‘I tried to warn you.’
She avoids his gaze. Marlowe stays where he is, idly chewing a thumbnail as though none of this concerns him.
Once Nicholas has staunched the blood-flow, he has a better opportunity to examine Bruno’s injury.
‘They’ve done him a great hurt,’ he says, lifting away a sodden red cloth to reveal a patch of bare skull about the size of a thumb. It’s marbled white and pink. A trickle of blood rolls across it, like wine spilt on alabaster.
‘Oh, Jesu!’ whispers Bianca, lifting a hand to her mouth.
‘The blow took away a length of scalp, right down to the surface of the parietal bone.’ Nicholas makes a slicing motion with his hand, to show how it was struck.
‘Will he recover?’
‘Too early to tell. I have a number of concerns: for a start, the shock of a blow that fierce can transmit to the pterion, just above the ear. It’s the weakest part of the skull. It doesn’t appear to be splintered, but I can’t guarantee it. The good news is that the blow hasn’t cut either of the two main vessels that run up the side of the skull.’
‘But will he live?’ asks Bianca.
Nicholas bites his lip. ‘I honestly can’t say. If the wound was anywhere else, I’d wash it thoroughly right now – wine would do the trick. Then I’d suture it and wait for the suppuration to expel any internal poison. But on the skull… well, it’s not recommended. I don’t want to risk paroxysm or palsy.’
Graziano runs a bloodstained hand through the thick white stubble on his head and says something in Italian to Bianca.
‘They want to take him back to the Sirena, she explains.
Nicholas’s answer is unequivocal. ‘Impossible. Getting him upstairs to a bed will be danger enough for him.’
‘Is there nothing else you can do?’
‘I’ll put a wad in, for a day and a night – linen strengthened with flour boiled in vinegar. That will keep the wound open.’
‘Why do want to keep the wound open?’ she asks, a sour look on her face.
‘That way I’ll be able to inspect the exposed parietal bone for fractures. I can’t see any at the moment, but they might be small. If I trouble it further, the bleeding will start up again.’ He wipes his hands on the last pristine piece of linen. ‘I’ll remove the wadding in a day or so and bathe the wound with wine and soot.’
‘Soot?’ she echoes, horrified.
‘When I wash it away, the blackness of the soot will reveal any fractures.’
‘Are you sure it will work?’