‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘Just my imagination.’
And then their luck runs out.
Turning down Black Bull Alley beneath the overhang of a chandler’s house, they run slap into the night-watch.
12
In Southwark the bellmen go about in pairs, for security – one to hold the lantern, the other in charge of the mastiff. Unusually for this time of night, they’re both sober, and no more than ten yards away. And the mastiff is the size of a well-fed ram.
Nicholas can observe all this because the moon has just emerged from behind the tattered clouds to illuminate the alley in a cold, accusing light.
It is Bianca who seizes the moment. Before Nicholas can react, she throws her arms around his shoulders and presses into him, pushing him against the wall, her head buried in his neck. He can smell lavender in her hair. He’s not been this proximate to a woman since Eleanor fell with their child. It feels at once both achingly familiar and impossibly alien. Desired, yet feared. Right, yet wrong, in equally disturbing measure.
‘What are you doing?’ he whispers into her hair.
‘Why else would two people be out in the streets at this time of night?’ she says through gritted teeth. Then, after a contemplative pause, ‘You’re really not at all like an Italian, are you, Nicholas?’
‘What do you mean?’ He can hear the footfalls of the watch very close, and the heavy panting of the mastiff.
‘You’re as taut as a Puritan in a jumping-house! Relax.’
‘I’m trying to relax,’ he hisses.
‘Am I really that much of an antidote to desire, Nicholas?’ she asks wearily, her voice liquid, her body melded against his.
‘There’s something in this wall. I think it’s an eye-bolt. You’re impaling me on it.’
She eases her grasp a little. They cling together in the darkness like the lost souls they can’t admit they are.
The mastiff is so close now it’s sniffing Nicholas’s boots. It glowers at him as if it can’t quite decide which course of the meal he should be.
And then a friendly voice breaks the night. ‘God’s red wounds! It’s Dr Shelby!’
Nicholas stares, horrified, over Bianca’s shoulder at the dog’s master. ‘Do I know you, sir?’
‘It’s me, Doctor, Jed Boley!’
‘Of course, Master Boley…’
Hearing the confusion in Nicholas’s voice, the man says, ‘You cured my little Mary when I brought her to St Thomas’s last year. She had the tenesmus.’
‘Yes, I remember now.’
‘She wants to be a physician, bless her. Of course I told her God hasn’t given females the capacity.’
‘Evening, Mistress Merton,’ says the other man, tipping his cap.
‘Good evening, Ralph Dingle,’ Bianca replies in a monotone, recognizing the man as a regular at the Jackdaw and wishing the ground would open up beneath her feet.
‘A fine night for the season, is it not?’ says Dingle with a lascivious wink.
‘Very fine,’ says Bianca through her teeth.
‘All’s well?’ enquires Dingle.
‘Very well, thank you.’
A long, painful silence. Then, suppressing a smirk, Boley says, ‘Well, rogues and vagabonds won’t be a-catching of themselves! God’s good night to you both.’
As the watch departs in the direction of the Rose playhouse, Nicholas and Bianca clearly hear Dingle say cheerily to his companion, ‘The Jackdaw’s clearly doing well, Master Boley – not a bed to be had, by the look of it.’
Waiting until the bellmen are out of hearing, Bianca says in a long, slow release of breath, ‘Well, that’s decided then.’
‘What’s decided?’
‘My future on Bankside. It is now officially impossible. When Bruno is up and about, I’m going back to Padua.’
But the watch is almost out of sight before they release each other.
At Havington Manor, alone over a breakfast of sweet eggs, Mercy Havington reviews the accounts that Ralph Wilson, the head husbandman, has prepared for her. She does so diligently. William would expect no less, were he still alive:
…thatching for the long barn – ten shillings… a team of horses to haul felled lumber from Furze Wood – three shillings and sixpence…
From where she sits, she can hear her brother-in-law in the great hall, lecturing his hawking friends on the wisdom of keeping sheep out of the barley stubble until the hogs have had their fill of the waste. She tries to tame a growing sense of despair.
There was a time, Mercy Havington remembers, when the conversations she might expect to overhear would be somewhat more elevated: discourses on who was the better poet – Ovid or Horace? The better painter – Holbein or Hornebolte? If she was of a mind to thieve snatches of other people’s conversations, it would have been from scholars and archbishops, ambassadors and emissaries.
She hears her brother-in-law’s ponderous oration move on to his pet topic: blain-worm in cattle. Is it possible, she wonders, to be more distant from the palaces of Whitehall or Greenwich than this Gloucestershire farm?
Until William’s death, life in the countryside hadn’t been the sentence of banishment she’d feared. She had loved William enough to follow him to deepest Muscovy or the furthest Indies, and she’d found the life of a country squire’s wife fulfilling enough. Besides, her niece Elizabeth was married to Robert Cecil, Lord Burghley’s son – so there was always the opportunity to travel to London and enjoy a little of her former life.
But all that had changed last Christmas, when William died.
Now she feels besieged, the virtual prisoner of a Puritan bore who can speak about little else but loose bowels in cattle. And she fears for Samuel and how lonely he must be, himself almost a prisoner of Arcampora and Isabel Wylde.
Laying aside the account rolls, she goes out into the yard, a shawl around her shoulders to ward off the morning chill. She fetches a pail of feed from the barn and walks to the wattle pen, where the other Isabel – the one she likes – is lying stoically on her side in the mud, surrounded by her squirming pink litter.
Mercy Havington has almost reached her when she sees a rider on a mud-streaked grey courser appear through the open gate. He’s wrapped in a dark leather riding cloak, his face almost hidden beneath a scarf and a woollen bonnet – as though he’d rather no one got a clear view of him.
‘Sir Gilbert is indoors, with his friends,’ Mercy says pleasantly, assuming it’s her brother-in-law he’s come to see. ‘I hope you’re interested in sheep.’
The man shakes his head. ‘I bear a letter,’ he says. ‘Privy, for Mistress Mercy Brooke.’
Mercy almost drops the pail on the spot. She stares at the letter the man is holding out to her. Why has he come? Is he playing some cruel sport with her? Some jape whose purpose she cannot fathom? Because no one has addressed her by her maiden name – Brooke – in over thirty years.
‘I could seek out Boley and Dingle – make a plea for their discretion,’ says Nicholas around noontime as he and Bianca walk down Borough High Street. They’ve employed a trip to the cutler’s shop by the sign of the Horse’s Head to allow themselves the chance to talk. ‘After all, I did treat Boley’s daughter. And you could give Ralph Dingle a little ease on his account. That might buy his silence.’
Bianca is wearing her emerald-green kirtle and her carnelian bodice. She’s turned heads all the way from the Jackdaw. And not just because her Mediterranean complexion marks her out as exotic. Ever since Ned Monkton hoisted the sign of the unicorn beside that of the jackdaw, every tavern between the Falcon Inn and the Horse’s Head has been trying to sign up its own wise-woman. The Southwark aldermen’s office has stopped accepting requests for an apothecary’s licence.