Nicholas stares at the size of the man’s hands. ‘Yes.’
‘Does Porter Bell owe you money?’
‘No.’
‘Then count yourself in profit.’
‘We just want to speak with him awhile.’
The landlord puts one great arm around Nicholas’s shoulder. The pressure makes his knees bend. ‘Go gently with him, Master,’ he says, with a compassion that catches Nicholas off-guard. ‘Porter Bell has been a guest of the Dons, if you understand me. That tends to leave a mark on a man.’
Apart from Nicholas and Bianca, Porter Bell is the only customer in the inn whose eyes aren’t glued to the cock-fight. For a moment Nicholas thinks they’ve got the wrong man. Compared to the landlord, this one looks as temporary as gossamer on a hedge at sunrise. He sits alone in the deepest recess of the tavern, a half-filled jug of mad-monk before him, picking at a plate of brawn. He’s staring into his jug as though it’s a window through which he yearns to catch a glimpse of the man he once was – before he learned the futility of hope and dignity. He seems to fill almost no space at all. Perhaps it’s a trick he’s learned in captivity, Nicholas thinks: to become small. To appear insignificant. To disappear. But then Porter Bell looks up at their approach, and Nicholas knows where he’s seen that look before: it’s the stare that only comes when a man has seen the Devil in all his manifestations, up close on the field of battle.
Nicholas eases onto the opposite bench, Bianca beside him. He whispers in Dutch, ‘God geeft u vrede, soldat’ – God give you peace, soldier.
Porter Bell’s deep-sunk eyes range slowly over his face. He’s like a man trying to catch the strains of a half-forgotten song. When he answers, his voice has a rasp of suspicion in it.
‘Do I know you?’
‘You do not, friend,’ says Nicholas.
‘I don’t drink with strangers.’
‘Would you drink with someone who knew your boy Dorney?’
Porter Bell studies him suspiciously through rheumy eyes. ‘Dorney’s dead. The Dons killed him.’
‘I know. I was there.’
‘In Holland? With Dorney?’
‘I was surgeon to Sir William Havington’s company – though his son-in-law, Sir Joshua Wylde, was our captain then.’
‘You don’t look like a physician.’
‘I try not to. It makes treating patients easier.’
Porter Bell peers once more into his ale. ‘But you couldn’t treat my boy, could you? So you can’t be much of a doctor.’
‘You don’t need to be a doctor to comfort a man when he’s dying. Dorney was beyond my help, the moment that ball struck him. But I can tell you he was at peace. I know that, because he was in my arms.’
Bell’s distrust seems to ease a little. But he still can’t quite bring himself to believe Nicholas hasn’t come to gull him for some reason of his own.
‘If you’re a physician – prove it,’ he says. ‘Tell me something in physic.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘If I was burned by a powder flash, how would you treat my wounds?’
‘A balm of salt and crushed onions.’
Bell’s thin brows lift a little. In the gloom, Bianca smiles.
‘And scalding oil to save them from putrefying, I suppose?’ he grunts.
‘Not unless you’d stolen my rations. I favour Monsieur Paré’s method: a compress of turpentine and egg-yolk. It’s more effective – and far kinder. But then you would know that, because you’ve served in the Netherlands, too.’
Bell’s slow smile reveals almost no front teeth in his upper jaw. ‘I have, broer,’ he says, using the Dutch for ‘brother’. ‘And scant reward it brought me.’
Nicholas nods in sympathy. ‘There’s many a good man starving on the road because his services are required no longer. Sailors from the squadrons, too, after the Dons’ fleet was scattered in ’88. It’s a poor settling of the account.’
With surprising strength, Bell slams his tankard down on the table. ‘How can it be called justice, when the captains live richly on their bounties and the rest of us must go hang for stealing bread?’ He glares at Nicholas. ‘I’ll tell you this, broer: the rich man would think twice about kicking us aside if he’d seen how the Don plans to treat this realm, should he ever come into it.’
‘Then drink with us, Master Bell, and we’ll raise a toast to the rich man’s proper education.’
Porter Bell seems pleased with the suggestion. He glances at Bianca. ‘And is this your woman?’
‘I’m a friend,’ Bianca says as Nicholas struggles for an answer. ‘Bianca Merton, mistress of the Jackdaw on Bankside.’
‘A Bankside bawdy-house? God’s blood, the doxies must be a sight, if the bawd herself is so fair!’
‘It’s a tavern,’ she says firmly.
‘Bianca is also an apothecary,’ says Nicholas.
‘A licensed apothecary,’ Bianca adds, irritated by the lifting of Bell’s eyebrows.
‘Can you mix something for aching bones?’ Bell asks her. ‘Six months fettered in a Don cell has put the cold of the grave in my joints.’
‘I’ll send something down on the first available ferry,’ she promises. ‘My gift to you.’
Nicholas calls to a potboy for ale. While he waits for it to come, he continues his careful enticement of Porter Bell.
Though their memories are separated by almost twenty years, they are shared nonetheless: places they’d slept in, so exhausted from the march that hard earth and flagstones had felt like feather beds; how the greatest loot a captured town could give up was its store of imported English ale; how the Dutch never quite managed to pay them on time; warming themselves around the fire with mercenaries from half the princely states of Europe; and trying hard not to let anyone see in their eyes the visceral terror of falling into the hands of the Spaniard. It’s a side to Nicholas that Bianca has never seen revealed before.
‘And you tell me Dorney was at peace?’
‘More so than any of us there, Master Bell. God’s peace.’
The cock-fight begins. The noise of the spectators fills the tavern with a brutal, cloying fog of bloodlust. But Nicholas and Bianca are oblivious to it.
‘Have you ever met a man called Angelo Arcampora, Master Bell?’ Nicholas asks, praying he’s done enough to win Porter Bell’s confidence.
‘You ask me if I know the Devil’s doctor?’ Bell’s voice is a dry whisper of surprise. ‘Aye, I know him. I know him all too well. He should be in hell, but the Devil forgot to bolt the door.’
And as Nicholas and Bianca lean in across the table, Porter Bell’s words transport them to another place. Not Gloucestershire, but the Low Countries. And to another time.
The year is 1572. Porter Bell has returned to Naarden.
Imagine a fair town near the Zuider Zee. A town of fine houses, rich burghers and industrious citizenry, set around with ramparts and grassy banks upon which the tulips sway in the soft breeze. Imagine it before the Spanish came.
Now imagine it as I saw it in winter, Porter Bell invites them – a Calvinist town besieged by the Catholic forces of the Duke of Alba.
There is strangely little noise. Just the wind and the intermittent, mournful tolling of the Spanish canon. Their sulphurous yellow smoke is the only colour on the bleak canvas Porter Bell is painting. The inundated fields, flooded to deny close access to the town walls, are a dirty white and frozen over. Snowflakes the size of guilders settle on little islands that thrust up through the ice, where the carcasses of abandoned cattle have become part of the desolation. From the walls and from the tower of the great church of St Vitus, the defenders regard these mounds covetously, for there has been almost nothing to eat for weeks. Not even a rat. The truly desperate have taken to melting snow over a fire and boiling tree-bark in it. Tomorrow will be the first day of December – the day Naarden learns the true meaning of the term Spanish Fury.