‘Better?’
‘Much.’
In the candlelight he observes her profile, the arch of her neck as she leans back against the bolster. Her skin has a sheen of liquid amber to it.
She turns her face to him. Her breath slides off his cheek like silk drawn lazily over marble.
‘I lied,’ Bianca says.
Does she mean the words she spoke in the Jackdaw, when she’d learned what everyone was saying about them? Why am I so hot, he wonders, when there’s frost outside? ‘You did? When?’
‘Out in the lane. When I said I’d never wanted to murder anyone. I lied.’
He stares into her eyes. She doesn’t look murderous. But with Bianca Merton, he thinks, you never can tell.
‘I wanted to murder Antonia Addonato.’
‘Did you?’
‘I was twelve. She was fifteen. All the boys in the streets around my father’s house in Padua fought over her. She had breasts, you see.’
‘And did you murder her?’
‘Only a little. I asked my mother to make a potion.’
‘And did she?’
‘Yes. But it was made of marchpane, and Antonia loved every bite.’
‘I accept your confession. That is forgivable.’
‘Is it?’
‘Completely.’
‘And who did you fight over, Nicholas, when you were that age?’
‘At Barnthorpe we fought over who got to drive the plough.’
Her laughter has a throaty echo to it that carries the warmth of the Veneto sun.
‘When I first came to England,’ she tells him, ‘I thought I would find gallants who would recite poetry to me. Men whose souls were moved by art and music. Men who would know the courtly ways. I ended up in Southwark.’
‘You didn’t look hard enough,’ he tells her. ‘If you’d wanted to see an Englishman with his soul swept by passion, I could have told you exactly where to look.’
A whisper, so close he imagines he can feel the impact of it on his cheek.
‘You can? Where?’
‘Every Shrovetide. When the apprentice boys are playing football.’
She strikes his upper arm with her hand so hard it hurts.
They lie in silence for a while, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the inn: the creak of a floorboard, the gurgling grunts of drunken sleep coming from another room. The sound of their own breathing.
‘I think we have to talk,’ he says at last.
‘Yes, we do.’ She turns to him again, her eyes locked with his. ‘You first…’
For a long while he stares at the filigree of light reflected in the pupils of her eyes. He seems unable to speak. The urge to kiss her, to bury his face in the warmth of her neck, has come out of nowhere. It’s almost overpowering. But the bridge ahead of him is just a little too steep to climb – yet. ‘Lord Tyrrell’s letters,’ he says croakily.
Bianca lets out a long, slow breath. ‘Oh, those.’
Catching the disappointment in her voice, he curses himself for his temerity. But it’s too late; the moment has passed. The mention of Tyrrell’s name has killed it.
‘John Lumley confirmed everything I feared about their importance,’ he says. ‘If Samuel Wylde really is Mary’s grandson, the danger is beyond imagination. This realm could be riven by the most brutal of civil wars. If Robert Cecil or the Privy Council learns of their content, they’ll pass the sentence of death on everyone involved, to prevent that happening.’
‘But Mary never had a child,’ Bianca counters. ‘I remember my parents telling me Father Rossi would have everyone pray and light a candle that Mary Tudor and her Spanish prince might beget a child. He said if they did, England would remain under the protection of the one true faith. If not, every English man and woman would spend eternity in Purgatory.’
His face seems gaunt in the meagre light. She finds it a little frightening.
‘Well, some people believe there was a child,’ he says vehemently. ‘And some people believed in Perkin Warbeck. Look where it got him: the scaffold.’
As though her cousin were not thirty miles away, senseless and unable to speak, Bianca whispers into the night, ‘Oh, Bruno, whatever madness have you become entangled in?’
‘If he could answer you, I think he’d tell us he came here to see the proof for himself – the proof that Samuel Wylde is the true heir to the English crown. That was the intent of the privy commission for Cardinal Fiorzi that Bruno spoke of.’
‘But we have no part in this, Nicholas,’ she protests. ‘Our consciences are clear. Go to Robert Cecil. Tell him the truth.’
‘The truth will be whatever Cecil and the Privy Council believe it to be. It will be whatever the men with the white-hot irons and the ropes have been told it is. And all they have to do is wait until the pain becomes so unbearable that – finally – you agree with them.’
Watching him intently, Bianca sees there is a look almost of self-loathing on his face.
‘That is how it works,’ he says. ‘We both know that. But Samuel Wylde? A young lad with the falling sickness, cast aside by his father, used by others for their own end – does he deserve to face such an end?’
‘Do you truly believe Samuel is Mary Tudor’s grandson?’
‘I don’t know. It’s possible. The only thing that matters is that enough people believe it to be true.’ Nicholas stares into the darkness. Now he sees nothing but hopelessness staring back at him. ‘For myself, I care not a jot if the wafer and the wine are the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. But I can tell you this: if the Brothers of Antioch use Samuel Wylde to start a holy war in England, this realm will see a thousand Naardens.’
Did Nicholas ever really consider abandoning Samuel Wylde and Bruno Barrani to their fates? Did he consider returning from Gravesend and telling Robert Cecil everything he had discovered, in exchange for immunity for Bianca, Bruno and Samuel, as she had twice suggested? In the darker places of the mind where raw self-preservation lies, he most certainly did – though he never admitted it to Bianca, either on the Long Ferry back to London or, indeed, later.
It would have been by far the easiest course of action. He might conceivably have secured their safety, in exchange for Tyrrell, Arcampora and the others. But he knew he could not rely on the mercy of Robert Cecil alone. It was public knowledge that factions on the Privy Council would happily see Burghley’s son humbled. He could almost hear the cruel voice of Richard Topcliffe, the queen’s torturer-in-chief, as he set about his interrogation of Thomas Tyrrelclass="underline" Tell me, traitor, who carried the messages between you and the foreign agent Barrani? And Tyrrell, in a voice half-choked by pain, would tell him: It was Mistress Merton!
Nicholas already knew that Bianca’s welfare was far too precious to him to jeopardize. For it is a truth that love is not confined to its object alone, but to all that is precious to that object – even a love as yet unacknowledged.
He had, however, managed to answer one question that had been troubling him. By the time the barge slipped away from the Hythe that morning on its journey upstream to London, he was certain that there is space in the heart for two loves – one a memory, the other very much alive.
For almost six long hours he sat in the prow of the barge, staring out into the opaque emptiness while Bianca slept fitfully beside him on the plank seat, her head resting on her folded arms. To the other passengers, he was merely searching for something – anything – to break the monotony of the river. In truth, he was struggling to make sense of a dilemma that would have astounded them, a puzzle that he and Bianca had tried to answer from the testimony of Porter Bell, from Tyrrell’s deciphered letters, from his conversation with John Lumley; a puzzle they had sought to resolve as they lay close together, close as nearly-lovers, in the little chamber at the Swan Inn.