‘And still I wouldn’t have listened to you,’ she says, pulling a face.
‘So instead you’ve managed to become a courier between an English traitor and a cardinal of Rome,’ he says, exasperated. ‘Christ’s wounds! God alone knows what you could have achieved if I’d been gone a couple of days longer.’
Bianca folds her arms. Her mouth tightens. A hint of menace enters her eyes. ‘You’re only behaving like this because you’re jealous of Kit Marlowe.’
‘Nonsense! I’m “behaving like this” because you’ve put yourself in grave danger. Anyway you’re only behaving like this because I haven’t brought you a dog back from Gloucestershire.’
‘Now you’re being absurd.’
‘What happens if the Jackdaw gets raided? Have you thought of that? It’s happened before. Imagine if Robert Cecil were to get his hands on those letters. You, Bruno, me – we’d all be facing an appointment with the Duke of Exeter’s daughter!’
‘What has she got to do with anything?’ Bianca asks with a scowl.
‘It’s what they call the rack!’
Her mouth tightens. Though she’s loath to admit it, the same fear has haunted her since the day she opened Bruno’s glove.
‘Well, Robert Cecil won’t find them. They’re hidden in my physic garden.’
‘I still say burn them.’
She studies his face, but he’s wearing his physician’s mask: inscrutable, any number of unwelcome diagnoses behind the eyes.
‘Well, that’s my week in a nutshell,’ she says flippantly. ‘Now tell me about yours. Feet up at Cleevely, supping ale with Ned, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Dead? With a hole drilled in his head?’ Bianca’s hands are clamped over her mouth. She’s just listened with mounting horror to Nicholas’s story. ‘And you think this Arcampora killed the poor lad?’
‘Either him or his two bully-boy assistants. Perhaps it was physic that went wrong. Or maybe he was killed to keep him from telling anyone what Arcampora is up to at Cleevely.’
‘And what is he up to, Nicholas?’
‘I wish I knew.’
Bianca shudders. ‘What did you call it – the thing you said might help Bruno? The thing they did to this poor Tanner Bell.’
‘Trepanation. It’s been practised since the time of the ancients. It can help ease the falling sickness, or the effects of wounds to the head or of madness and delirium. Believe it or not, it’s not as rare as you’d think. I’ve heard of physicians in Europe attempting it in their studies on the functioning of the human brain. But never in England.’
‘And the patients survive?’
‘Some do. Some make a complete recovery. I can’t say I’d risk it on a patient of mine, not if there was any other treatment available. I think Arcampora is practising on these companions that Samuel’s father provides him with. I think he means to use it to cure Samuel Wylde of the falling sickness.’
‘What is this Samuel Wylde to you, anyway?’ Bianca asks. ‘Why do you care about him?’
‘I explained to you before I left. His father saved my life in Holland. And now that I’ve seen how Samuel is, my heart aches for the poor boy.’ Nicholas shakes his head in sorrow. ‘You should have seen him, Bianca. He couldn’t have been lonelier if he’d been living in a cave on Mount Ararat! His father has cast him off – pays people to pretend they’re his friends. His stepmother is as warm as a winter blizzard.’
‘Do you think the father knows what’s happening?’
‘No, this is Arcampora’s and Isabel Wylde’s work.’ He begins helping Bianca to gather the balms and cloths from around Bruno’s mattress. ‘Arcampora is everything I despise in physic. He puts me in mind of the charlatan Ned Monkton’s father gave his last farthing to, the one who’d told them he could cure their little Jacob of his slow wits. I don’t much care for people who sell false hopes to the desperate.’
Bianca remembers with a chill the second victim of the Bankside butcher – Jacob Monkton, Ned’s younger brother. She turns to Nicholas, her face clouded. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Go to Robert Cecil first thing tomorrow and tell him what I’ve discovered. He can send some of his men to Cleevely and rescue the boy from Arcampora’s grasp.’
Bianca brushes her hair from her temples, as though making space for her thoughts. Instinctively Nicholas reaches out and pushes back a rebellious strand that her fingers have missed. She makes no attempt to avoid his touch, but her eyes are bright with half-formed tears.
‘Remember what you told me the day you returned from Suffolk?’ she says. ‘You told me there would be no more madmen offering Satan their souls in exchange for knowledge. That’s what you promised me. Kit Marlowe’s theatricals I can bear. But not the real thing. Not again.’
11
The bell at St Olave’s chimes midnight as Nicholas and Bianca return from the physic garden with Tyrrell’s box of letters, flitting silently through the empty lanes.
Rose is already asleep on the truckle bed in Bianca’s room, Buffle curled up beside her. Timothy and Farzad have settled down on their mattresses beside the taproom hearth, and Ned has returned to his father’s house on Scrope Alley. Tonight Bianca is glad no one is lodging at the Jackdaw. She makes a final check on Bruno, then goes down to her apothecary’s room in the cellar, with Nicholas close behind.
As he lights the candles with a taper, Bianca’s secret world takes shape out of the darkness: ceiling beams festooned with dense sprigs of peony and knapweed, gilliflower and galangal, fleabane and featherfew; sloughed snakes’ skins, as brittle and translucent as spun sugar hanging from pegs; shelves crammed with pots and jars full of spices and herbs she’s gathered from her physic garden, or from the few merchants along the wharves whom she trusts – a leafy arbour of mysteries that he thinks should, by rights, belong to a magical forest rather than a Bankside tavern. The multitude of scents swarm about him like hiving bees, some with sharp, acidic stings, others so warm and soft they feel like honey in the back of his throat. If some of the more impressionable of the Jackdaw’s customers could peek inside here, they’d have their suspicions about Mistress Merton’s darker skills confirmed in full measure.
Bianca takes the sailcloth package and unwraps it on the table. ‘You’d better hurry,’ she says. ‘These can’t stay here a moment longer than necessary.’
‘I’ll do my best, but I wasn’t exactly the finest Latin scholar,’ Nicholas tells her. ‘Have you written down the code you deciphered?’
‘I’ve done better than that,’ she says, fetching him the book containing the record of her patients and the cures she’s mixed for them. She opens it to what appears to be a random page. Nicholas sees a column of letters. They mean nothing obvious to him. They might be customers’ initials, the first letter of a herb or plant, a distillation, a syrup… anything. ‘Look at the top left corner of the page,’ she tells him.
Nicholas sees an F written there.
‘Instead of page numbers, I’ve put letters. Page six is marked F, which is also the sixth letter of the alphabet.’ She places a fingertip to guide him. ‘Now, if you look at this column of letters I’ve written, the sixth one down is a T.’
‘So when I come across a T in Tyrrell’s papers, it’s really an F?’
‘Exactly.’
‘How very devious of you, Mistress Bianca,’ he says admiringly.