At first she had been ready to refuse Nicholas’s suggestion, knowing how much of a feast Bankside will make of them spending so many hours in each other’s company. And what would Cousin Bruno say, if he were able? Even now, after three years in London, the Paduan part of her finds it scandalous that English women are allowed to mix so freely with the opposite sex: dancing on feast days and at Christmas, parading in couples around the Paris Garden utterly unchaperoned, playing hood-man-blind amongst the trees on Moorfields. Her mother would spin in her grave at the thought of Bianca spending a night in a tavern with a man who wasn’t her husband.
‘And where, pray, do we sleep?’ she’d asked him.
‘At an inn, of course. Gravesend has plenty of them – it’s where the bigger argosies anchor. I’ve hardly touched the money Robert Cecil gave me. He can treat us to a couple of handsome rooms with feather-down beds.’
‘But why do you need me to come with you?’
‘It will go better if there are the two of us. Porter Bell might need the gentling a woman can provide.’
‘You mean someone sympathetic to tell him his son is dead?’
The words were no sooner out of her mouth than she’d wished a mighty wave would come and wash her away. Could she possibly have uttered anything more likely to puncture Nicholas’s heart?
His response had surprised her. He hadn’t flinched. Grief had not misted his eyes. She had wondered then if perhaps he might have turned some small corner on his long road out of despair.
It was Buffle who had changed her mind about going. Rose – to Bianca’s horror – had garlanded the poor creature in some dreadful approximation of a bride, with daisies she’d plucked from the gardens of Winchester House, and a scrap of lace tied around the dog’s neck. She’d then paraded Buffle around the taproom on a leash made of ribbon, singing ‘The Heaven-made Match’ at the full extent of her lungs, to the rapturous applause of the customers. Compared to that humiliation, several gruelling hours spent on the Long Ferry to Gravesend in the company of goats and passengers in the throes of mal-de-mer had seemed positively enticing.
Now she wonders why she hadn’t trusted her instincts more. And it has nothing to do with her modesty. The barge is almost completely open to the elements. There is only a simple canvas awning for shelter. Its corners are already beginning to snap tetchily in the strengthening wind.
The last chime of the bell, the last ‘Eastward ho!’ and the oarsmen are edging them out between the Muscovy traders, the Hansa argosies, the flyboats and the estuary hoys. The single sail fills, the ebbing tide lifts them and Bianca steels herself for the ordeal ahead. She takes one last glance at the security of dry land, at the crowd on the Billingsgate stairs.
And she sees – if only fleetingly – a figure watching her. A figure in a dark-brown cloak.
With the wind and the noise of the ferry’s passage through the water masking his voice, Nicholas risks speaking freely. He looks around, just to be sure. The other passengers have their backs to him, playing dice or warming themselves from flasks of arak and bingo. The goats have given up fighting the unnatural motion of the barge and have sunk into a resigned huddle. Nevertheless, Nicholas leans close to Bianca to be certain they are not overheard.
‘John Lumley thinks it might just be possible Mary Tudor bore a child. He said we should burn the letters. He says public knowledge of their content could lead to a war in England between the faiths.’
‘Did you tell him about Samuel?’
‘Not in detail. Nor about much else that was in Tyrrell’s papers. But I now know who the Brothers of Antioch are: a group of Mary’s counsellors, living somewhere across the Narrow Sea. As for Arcampora, he was once the creature of this realm’s most implacable enemy – the Duke of Alba.’
‘All the more reason to go to your friend Robert Cecil and tell him. Offer him this information, in return for his promise to protect Samuel and my cousin.’
‘Firstly, he’s not my friend. Secondly, Cecil has enemies. It’s common knowledge the Earl of Essex would happily see him discredited. If word gets out about this conspiracy, the Privy Council will likely hand everyone involved – including you, me, Samuel and Bruno – to Robert Topcliffe, the queen’s inquisitor. And we both already know how efficient he is at extracting confessions, be they true or false. The sooner we get Bruno back onto the Sirena and out of England, and Samuel Wylde away from Arcampora and the Brothers of Antioch, the smaller the chance of us ending our days on the scaffold.’
Bianca digests his warning in silence, staring out across the heaving surface of the brown river towards the Limehouse shore, where faint smudges of smoke rise over the kilns into the desolate sky. Moving closer to him, like a lover about to declare her heart, she says in a voice he can barely hear above the wind, ‘I think I’m being followed.’
The landscape on either bank flattens out into empty marshland. At Woolwich, they catch a glimpse of the gibbets at the Hole and of the sea-rovers rotting in their cages. Some looked newly hanged, others nothing but a dangling collection of bone, scraps of cloth, water-weed and kelp. The sight does not lighten their mood.
Sometimes they doze; sometimes they talk. Sometimes the river and the rest of the world seem to run to two different clocks.
The light is fading. Dusk is coming on. Flights of teal and widgeon skim low over the water like spirits fleeing from opened graves. The barge is close inshore now, the bank rising into low, grey bastions built to house the batteries of cannon that King Henry set up to guard the seaward approaches to London. The wind has dropped, but the air has turned bitterly cold. A cry goes up, and the great chalk spur that pushes out from the southern shore and gives Gravesend its safe anchorage looms out of the river ahead. The barge stands off a while to allow the last ferry of the day to clear the Hythe on its journey across the river to Tilbury. And then the oarsmen port their oars and nimble watermen make fast the lines.
They have reached their destination.
15
The narrow lanes of Gravesend are almost deserted. A damp mist sulks around the huddled houses. The masts of the fishing boats and trading barques puncture the night sky like the spines of the mythical porpentine. It reminds Nicholas of the estuary at Barnthorpe.
The first inn they enter is the Black Bear. Bianca gives it her professional eye and decides it’s little better than a mariners’ sixpenny stew, a haunt of watermen and whores. Nicholas asks the owner if he knows of Porter Bell. The man says, ‘Try the Mitre. He’s too rough for our palate.’
When they reach the Mitre, they find a cock-fight is about to begin. The two birds glower murderously at each other from inside their cages, the spurs buckled to their legs so keenly sharpened that just one strike will cut flesh to the bone. Two men in leather jerkins and sailors’ slops move amongst the customers, each shaking a pewter pot into which flows a cascade of rattling coins.
‘On reflection, I think I preferred the Black Bear,’ Bianca says.
The landlord is a well-salted fellow in his fifties, with the sea in his eyes and shoulders rounded like a tautly strung bow. He has a mane of lank grey hair, tied back to show the gnarled remains of a left ear burned by the sheriff’s brand. Whatever his offence, Nicholas assumes it probably involved violence. But the man greets them civilly enough. In answer to Nicholas’s enquiry, he raises a fist – each finger like a well-stuffed bolster – and points to a dark corner of the tavern beyond the improvised cockpit. ‘Have you come on the Long Ferry?’ he asks.