Bruno’s chamber is deep in shadow. The air is heavy, pungent with the sourness of old sweat and the reek of the butcher’s block. It is the scent of a weakening body struggling against its own failing. Bianca throws open the window. From the alley below, she catches fragments of a slurred but good-natured argument.
She washes her cousin’s body, using a cloth and water from the urn in the corner of the chamber. Bruno’s skin, though tanned, feels like marble after a rain shower. She takes off the old dressing from his wound, bathes it carefully, then gently applies the cataplasm. Throughout he makes no sound, gives no indication that he is aware of what is happening. If it were not for his slow, measured breathing and the warmth in his flesh, she would think him dead. She offers up a prayer for him and kisses his forehead.
Gazing at him, she recalls how her mother used to recite incantations when mixing her healing potions – meaningless phrases handed down over generations, carried along the old Gypsy routes from ancient Araby. They’ve stuck in her mind like children’s nonsense rhymes. She wonders if they might be efficacious now.
Requiring something of Bruno’s, some item of clothing or possession, to act as a focus, Bianca notices the small iron-bound chest she had asked Rose to bring to the chamber. She searches through the keys on her chatelaine belt. It takes a while, but eventually she finds the one that fits the lock.
And then she sees it: one edge of the iron faceplate is slightly bowed out from the side of the chest, as if an attempt has been made to lever it off. For an instant she wonders if Graziano had another motive for his visit to Bruno’s room this evening. Has he tried to force the lock?
She dismisses the idea. If the crew’s portafortuna had wanted something from his master’s possessions, all he would have to do is ask. The attempt must have been made by someone else, before Rose brought the chest here. Bianca shakes her head. Paduans can thieve like few others, she thinks; but given half a chance, the English would steal Christ’s nails off the holy cross.
Opening the chest, she takes out the canvas sack that Luzzi brought from the Sirena and returns to her cousin’s side.
She discounts the astrolabe and the compass – too irregular, too hard, too resistant. She discounts the Sannazaro poetry. Too many words. For all she knows, even though they’re in indecipherable Latin, they might somehow compete with the rhymes and weaken their power, the way echoes in a church blur the crispness of the Holy Mass.
Then her fingers touch the softness of Bruno’s black doeskin gloves.
She takes them out, admires them in the candlelight, then pulls them over her own fingers. She at once feels a greater contact with him, as if it’s his own skin against hers, rather than smooth leather. Softly she begins to chant her incomprehensible lullaby, all the while running the fingers of her left hand gently up and down the edge of her right, from the top of her little finger to the wrist, in a soothing motion.
After a few moments she stops.
A coarse unevenness in the stitching of the right glove has wormed its way into her consciousness. There’s no denying it. The finish of the seam on the right glove is markedly inferior to the one on the left. And yet these exquisite black gloves have clearly been made by a craftsman who cares greatly for his work.
And then she recalls her brief comment to Rose, a few days ago: They’re different sizes. The right glove is bigger… It’s thicker on the back.
Crossing to the candle, Bianca holds her right hand close to the flame. Now visible to her, the seam of the glove is clearly not as skilful as the rest of the needlework. She pushes down on the back of her hand, feeling the pleasure of the doeskin against her fingertips.
And as she does so, she feels the faintest trace of regular edges beneath the leather. This isn’t careless overstuffing by some inattentive glover, she tells herself – there’s something inside.
Muttering an apology to the unconscious Bruno, she takes up the candle and slips from the chamber. She is still wearing the gloves.
Why do I imagine danger, with these gloves in my possession and Kit Marlowe downstairs in the taproom? she asks herself as she enters her own chamber.
She hears Nicholas’s answer in her head.
They say he went abroad for the Privy Council… Spying on Catholics… Closing the door as quietly as she can, Bianca searches out her sewing box. She slips off the gloves, opens the box and takes out a bodkin and a small pair of spring-scissors – her mother’s, she recalls with a smile. Sitting on her bed, she begins to worry away at the stitching of the right-hand glove, twisting the bodkin through the thread.
It takes her some time to unpick enough to get the blades of the spring-scissors in place. But eventually she’s prised loose enough thread to cut. A little more work with the bodkin and she’s made a long enough breach in the leather to insert the tips of a thumb and finger. She worms around between the two layers of material, searching.
With the breath frozen in her throat, slowly – very slowly – she draws out a tightly folded wad of fine silk.
Opening it out, she sees it’s about seven inches by four. The candlelight shines through it as if it were of the finest gossamer. It seems to glow with a translucent beauty, like the extended wing of an angel.
There is nothing written upon it. Yet cut into the silk and, miraculously edged in some manner she can’t yet ascertain, are a series of small random apertures – a score or more of them, like little windows made for her to see through into another world.
As to what it is, Bianca has not the faintest idea. She knows only that it was never meant to be found.
4
‘A free man and his dog on the open road, with no Pope to tell him how to pray – that’s the sort of freedom we’re fighting the Spanish for,’ says Ned Monkton contentedly as he and Nicholas coax their horses across a sloping meadow dotted with grazing sheep.
‘I’m sure you’re right, Ned.’
‘All that talk of the Duke of Alba yesterday made my blood run cold. I remember my father frightening me and Jacob with tales of the Don when we were little. He was right. Look how close they came in ’88 when they sent their Armada against us.’
‘Don’t worry, Ned. Alba’s been dead for years.’
‘Yes, but the Don bull has sired plenty more like him, hasn’t it? Give ’em half a chance and we’ll be paying our taxes to Madrid and crowning our next king in the Escorial, you mark my words, Master Nick.’
The wind is making streamers in the long grass. Fixed against the sky, a kestrel hovers above the hillside as though painted there.
‘You’re not expecting that dog to walk all the way back to Southwark, are you?’ Nicholas asks, glancing down from the saddle to where Buffle is following her nose down the slope.
‘Course not. When she gets weary she can sit up here with me.’ He whistles to the dog to come closer. Buffle takes no notice. ‘So come on then, tell me about this Arcampora fellow.’
Nicholas shrugs. ‘You heard everything I told Lady Havington.’
‘I know you, Master Nicholas. You can be a secretive bugger when you want to. I think you’re suspicious of him.’
‘Whatever Arcampora is doing, Ned, I don’t think it’s intended to cure the boy – even if that were possible. There’s something else going on. But what that is, I really have no idea.’
‘And what about those two big rogues who mind his back?’