Dunstan and Florin peer at the spot indicated by Arcampora’s gloved hand, as if they expect to see these miraculous blood vessels through the white skin.
‘Is not there!’ says Arcampora, confounding them.
Florin looks at his master like a man who’s been gulled by a street trickster’s sleight of hand. ‘Where is it, then?’
‘The ancients were wrong!’ Arcampora exclaims. ‘The rete mirabile is not found in man, only in beasts. This was their mistake. But I, Arcampora, I discover the error – through experiment!’ His chest swells with self-congratulation. ‘I, Arcampora, believe the well of pneuma is to be found deep under here.’ He moves his hand from Tanner’s neck to his head. He prods the slippery tissue exposed by the hole he has bored in Tanner’s skull. A rivulet of blood flows around his fingertip. Tanner squirms weakly, like a dying worm. ‘This I call the cisterna mirabile: the well of wonders. From this well, the spirit of what we are – our very being – flows into the dark tissue of the brain. From there, it spreads to the corpus callosum. Finally it reaches the cerebral cortex as memory and thought.’
His audience of two receives the little lecture in silence. It is quite beyond their understanding. But that, they tell themselves, is only to be expected when men find themselves in the presence of genius. So they simply nod and thank providence that, in the fight against the heretics, God has sent them a champion like Professor Arcampora.
Arcampora regards Tanner Bell’s slumped form with a measure of contentment. The boy has survived the trepanation. How long he lives now will be partly a matter of guarding against putrefaction, and partly of staving off a breakdown in the lad’s will to survive. It is a pity, he thinks, that Florin was forced to break Finney’s neck after they had recaptured him. If Finney had not tried to fight his way free after he’d awoken from the procedure, there would be another subject against which to compare Tanner’s progress. Subjects are scarce. Isabel Wylde has had no word from Lord Tyrrell on the matter of when a replacement might arrive.
Florin and Dunstan are watching him intently, like hounds waiting for the signal to feed on a carcass. They are anticipating his signal to fill the chalices, put the lantern’s flame to the tinder and set the herbs smouldering. Waiting for him to begin the incantation. Waiting for him to call up the spirits. Arcampora can see the strain on their faces, the struggle to hold in the fear. He admires them. They may be simple men, but they are godly. And extraordinarily brave. It cannot be easy for them, he thinks, to embrace the things they have witnessed in this place. Weaker men, men less committed to their faith, would have run screaming into the beech wood in fear for their souls. But not these two. They are sustained by the example of Our Lady of Antioch, just as it sustains him. It is proof, he tells himself, that as long as a man is pious enough, faithful enough to God, he can withstand anything in the battle for righteousness – even close proximity to the spirits of the dead.
17
Less than an hour after disembarking from the Long Ferry at Billingsgate, Bianca Merton summons Rose, Farzad, Timothy and Ned to join her in the empty taproom. ‘Master Nicholas is leaving the Jackdaw,’ she tells them.
They stare at her in appalled silence.
It is not the last they will see of him, she hastens to assure them. He is a dear friend and is welcome to drop by whenever he cares to. To Rose’s wail of protest, she explains that neither of them wishes to be the focus of mirth and speculation. Any intimacy that some think may have been observed between them has been wildly misinterpreted. They are not lovers. They never have been, and they never will be. But as her mistress speaks these words, Rose notices she isn’t looking her straight in the eye.
‘And, Rose dear, take that silly marriage garland off Buffle. He looks ridiculous.’
‘They’ve argued over his late wife,’ Rose tells Ned confidently, when Bianca is out of earshot. ‘But I don’t think she really means it – the bit about never.’
‘Not true,’ says Ned. ‘His heart has mended. Now he wants to play the goat for a while. He can’t do that if he’s sleeping in the attic and Mistress Bianca is one floor down, can he?’
This brief exchange, of itself, causes a cooling-off between Ned and Rose that lasts almost a week.
Timothy finds solace in his store of lover’s laments, until Bianca threatens to burn his lute on the taproom fire if he doesn’t play something people can drum their feet to.
Only Farzad does not express an opinion. Because Farzad has been entrusted with the smallest sliver of the truth, and can be relied upon to keep his mouth shut – especially as Bianca has explained to him the consequences of him telling anyone that he is to be their secret conduit. He takes this warning so much to heart that it is some time before he stops having bad dreams, in which his mistress turns him into a particularly plump and warty toad.
At its narrowest point, Poynes Alley is barely wide enough for two people to pass without rubbing shoulders. It cuts through to the river between St Olave’s church and Bridge House, on the eastern side of London Bridge. At the far end, on the left side, lies the property Nicholas has come to see. It is timber-framed, and the spaces between the beams are filled with mud and daub that look as though it would crumble away if you dared to hammer on it with your fist. It is two storeys high, barely ten feet across and already well on the way to dereliction. The landlord, a fellow with the long, wiry body of a bent poker, seems to think it a rival to Hampton Court.
He shows Nicholas the single chamber downstairs that serves as hall, parlour and kitchen combined, and follows him up the flight of narrow stairs that gives access to the sleeping chamber above. The sparse furnishings – a tester bed that must have been built in situ, for its dimensions defy the stairway by a considerable margin, and a parlour table – look ancient. Their age and paucity do not trouble Nicholas. He will buy what is needed at the St Saviour’s market.
On the way back down from the upper floor, Nicholas says nothing. The landlord takes it as indifference and drops the rent by a penny.
There is a window and a door at the far end of the ground floor. Beyond it, Nicholas can see a narrow balcony and a flight of precarious steps leading down to the mud of the riverbank. A half-feral cat has taken up residence there, but at least it will keep the rats down.
He goes outside and looks back at the river frontage before making his decision. On the upper part of the wall he can just make out the image of a swan, the paint peeling off the plaster. The house, he realizes, must once have been a Bankside stew, the sign calling to mariners from the ships moored across the water at the customs quay.
Some two hundred yards to the left, the great stone starlings of the bridge’s foundations march out towards the other bank. In the arches closest to the bank, huge water wheels turn slowly in the current. Nicholas studies with passing interest the buildings perched along the span of the bridge. They are tall enough to shut out half the sky. Little human figures cross in the gaps between them. As he looks, a window glints in the sunlight as someone opens it to pour the contents of a slop bucket or a pisspot – he cannot tell which at this distance – into the water below. He turns and walks back to the house, the mud sucking covetously at his boots and the stink of decay rising out of the ooze.
All in all, he thinks, the place is ideal.