‘Oh, Bruno,’ she whispers to her sleeping cousin. ‘What in the name of our all-merciful Lord have you done?’
But his answering silence only seems more deafening than ever.
Dr Arcampora has brought Samuel to the beech wood beyond the little bridge. It is almost dark, a pale scythe-blade of moon rising in a turbulent sky. Samuel can hear the wind rustling the leaves, as if the trees are beginning to wake. By the dancing light from the tallow torches that Florin and Dunstan carry, he can see the physician is sweating, wrapped in the heavy black doctor’s gown that makes him look like a magus from antiquity.
Despite Dr Arcampora’s extraordinary revelations about Samuel’s mother, Alice, and about Grandma Mercy, the boy has come to trust in the physician of late. He knows that men of physic are prone to incomprehensible pronouncements and Cabalistic practices. Indeed, a doctor who did not behave in such a manner would betray his lack of profound wisdom. If physic were simple, anyone could learn its secrets. But the beech wood is eerie and unsettling. He wishes Tanner were with him.
‘Why must Tanner remain in the house, sir?’ he asks. ‘I would wish him present.’
‘Because tonight we embark upon the most difficult phase of your cure. Tanner Bell is not of your sort. He would not understand.’
‘Is that why you made him hide away when Grandma Mercy brought my father’s friend, Master Shelby, to the house?’
‘We cannot risk unguarded talk. This physic is very secret. It must not be witnessed by ignorant people who do not understand. Perhaps they call the authorities. Then no more treatment!’ He looks intently at Samuel. ‘Do you wish no more treatment, Samael?’
Samuel tries not to laugh at the way Dr Arcampora has pronounced his name: Sam-ael. ‘No! I mean yes – I do wish for treatment. But my name is Samuel, not Samael.’
‘It is no matter. You must do everything I tell. You must believe!’
They walk deep into the wood until the old abbey lodge looms out of the gathering darkness. Up close, Samuel can see it’s been long abandoned, probably since the track to Oxford was improved back in Mary’s reign. Dunstan produces a heavy key. The lock is turned. The physician guides Samuel inside.
By the flickering tallow-light they enter the main hall. It is empty, save for an old bench in the far corner and a chair placed squarely in the centre. The air has a fusty smell of dereliction about it, close and strangely warm, though outside it’s cold enough to make the hunting foxes shiver. And another scent tugs at Samuel’s throat: a hard, ferrous smell. Looking down, he sees several dark stains standing out on the flagstones.
‘Is that blood?’ he asks timorously.
‘It may be,’ says Arcampora with a dismissive pout. ‘Vagabonds. They poach. Kill a deer or two. They have to eat, don’t they? – even vagabonds.’
He doesn’t trouble himself to explain how vagabonds managed to get through the locked door. But what really catches Samuel’s attention are the chalk marks on the floor – a series of circles, which he takes to be the orbits of the celestial spheres, the chair standing forlornly at their centre like an anchoring earth at the heart of its own cosmos. He sees the signs of the zodiac drawn around the outer ring; then – moving inwards – other strange images: a hanged man; a creature that looks like a bear, though it’s been decapitated; a mouth without a face to go with it; a serpent coiled about the crudely drawn image of a woman; rays flowing from a fiery sun. He sees a flock of sheep with horns and forked tails. Two crudely drawn men stand beside the sheep. One of them has a halo drawn about his head. Samuel guesses the image is meant to depict the miracle of the Gadarene swine – when Jesus cast out the demons from a man possessed. In the remaining spheres are symbols that make no sense to him at all.
‘What are all these marks, Dr Arcampora?’
‘To guide us, Samael.’
‘And the words – I don’t recognize the language they’re written in.’
‘Is very ancient language: Hebrew and Aramaic. Also Greek.’
‘But what do the words say?’
‘These are incantations: for your cure.’
‘Incantations? Aren’t they spells?’
‘They are like the Holy Mass – they must be made correctly. Absolutely correctly. If the words of the Mass are spoken with error, then they are of no use. God does not hear them. That is why so often our prayers do not work. They are not told properly.’
‘You mean “said”–’
‘Exactly. Only when all is said properly, then God hears.’
‘But it is forbidden to hear the Mass in England. My father says the Mass is the sound of the Devil singing.’
‘Your father is a heretic,’ Arcampora says dismissively. ‘But your grandmother, she died for the Mass. And before she died, she burned all the heretics out of this land! That is why it is most important to make the invocations correctly.’
This must be the grandmother he has yet to learn about, the one whose daughter was stolen away at birth by the deceivers, Samuel thinks. Because to his certain knowledge Grandam Mercy is not dead. She was at Cleevely only a few days ago – when Dr Arcampora and Lady Wylde had Tanner Bell locked away in the cellar for some infringement they would not reveal. And as for burning heretics, why, Grandam Mercy doesn’t even trust the servants to put out all the candles at night!
7
Ten days from today – the sixteenth day of March… At my warehouse on Petty Wales – the sign of the three tuns. Shall we say noon?
Munt’s voice wakes her like a cock’s crow.
Not that Bianca has slept much. The faintest groan of the Jackdaw’s old timbers, the slightest noise from the alley and, within an instant, she has heard in her mind a frenzied hammering on the front door, swiftly followed by plate-clad men-at-arms rampaging through the tavern to arrest everyone within and transport them to the cells, where the Privy Council’s interrogators await with white-hot irons and thumb-screws.
She takes no breakfast; there’s no room in her stomach, due to all the moths seemingly fluttering there. When Rose comes to her with a disapproving scowl on her face that would make a Puritan envious, it is all Bianca can do to rein in her temper.
‘It’s Farzad,’ Rose complains. ‘He won’t do what he’s told. He says it’s not dignified for him to obey the commands of a woman!’
Bianca seeks out the lad and steers him into an alcove where she may speak to him privately.
‘I presume you have sorcery in Persia, Farzad,’ she says sternly.
‘Of course, Mistress. Very powerful sirh. But Allah – may He be exalted – forbids us to employ it.’
‘But you believe in it?’
‘Most assuredly.’
‘Good. Well, we have sirh in Southwark, too. And if you don’t do what Rose tells you, I – not being forbidden to employ it – will turn you into a very small worm. There are big fishes in the river out there, Farzad’ – a hand stretched in the general direction of the Thames – ‘and Banksiders like to catch them. They use worms to bait their hooks. Especially little worms. Do we understand each other?’
Farzad, who by now has heard enough from the Jackdaw’s customers to know the rumours about his new employer, nods his head in silence, his eyes the size of ducats.
‘And I know most of our Venetian guests have little English, if at all – but they do venerate the Holy Father. So no more references to the Pope and dogs’ backsides within their hearing, yes?’