‘If they do, her life is in great danger. Even if they think she was merely an unwitting surrogate, they may still want her dead.’
‘Why?’
‘To prevent her testifying on oath that the child was hers.’
Bianca turns to him. Even in the dusk he can see her eyes are brimful of fear, the way she looked the night he’d found her in the crypt beneath the Lazar House. And he hates himself for being the agent of its return.
‘There’s only one person who really knows the truth,’ he says.
‘Mercy Havington.’
‘Which is why I have to go back to Gloucestershire.’
‘Why should she tell you the truth, Nicholas?’
‘Because her life depends upon it; Samuel’s, too.’
‘But what if someone from Cleevely sees you? Aren’t you supposed to be back in the Netherlands, with Sir Joshua Wylde?’
‘I promise you I’ll stay well away from Cleevely House.’
‘And Samuel? What of him, the poor child?’
The little balcony has become Nicholas’s confessional. ‘The fact that Perkin Warbeck wasn’t really the heir of the fourth Edward didn’t save him from the scaffold. Samuel Wylde is still in immense danger, whatever the truth. Even more so than Mercy Havington. I need to prise him away from Arcampora and the Brothers of Antioch – before it’s too late.’
Bianca’s eyes widen as she realizes what he intends to do. ‘You’re going to kidnap him?’
He gives her his best physician’s smile.
‘I prefer to think of it as changing his doctor.’
Farzad arrives at Poynes Alley within an hour of Bianca’s departure. He brings with him a bowl of pottage for Nicholas to heat in the hearth.
‘Mistress Bianca had me make it specially,’ he says, as though it might be a peace offering. ‘She says she will call tomorrow morning, for the bowl. That’s what she told me I must say: Tomorrow. For the bowl.’
Nicholas gives the lad one of Robert Cecil’s silver testers as a reward and sends him on his way.
With the tallow candles lit the room is like a monastery cell, and Nicholas the monkish scribe. He sits down at the table, lays out paper, pen and inkpot, and begins scratching careful lines with the nib. The river murmurs to him through the open window. He pauses occasionally to brush an unruly curl of black hair from his temple, leaving an inky smudge between his right eyebrow and the hairline. The only witnesses to what he writes are the moths attracted by the candlelight.
He composes in Latin, for greater authenticity, though it slows him down. It’s what he thinks ‘His Eminence’ would write, or at least his emissary, Bruno Barrani.
Time, or the lack of it, is his major concern. How long Bruno will remain too weak to pursue Fiorzi’s mission – whatever that may be – he cannot say. Despite his small stature, the man has a stout heart. It might be mere days.
It takes several attempts before Nicholas has the letter exactly as he desires, the tone authoritative and conspiratorial in the proper measure. When he’s finished, he takes Bianca’s bowl of pottage from the table where Farzad left it. He unties the string that secures the cloth cover. Taking off the linen, he turns the cover over and removes the little fold of paper Bianca has pinned there. Opening it up, he sees the line of random letters written on the fabric: Bruno’s cipher. Bianca’s neat, confident hand encourages him. It speaks of her belief in what he is doing, a shared determination to be careful, yet bold. He goes to work encoding what he has written.
When he’s finished, he collects the abandoned drafts and the sheet with the cipher written on it, ready to take them to the hearth and burn them. He lays out the cloth cover to the pottage bowl, and beside it the string that held it in place. As he’d instructed, Bianca has allowed enough cloth for him to cut off a piece in which to wrap the letter, ready for her collection in the morning. He smiles appreciatively. She won’t even need to come inside the tenement. They can make the exchange in the street, confident that, should they be observed, all anyone will see is him returning an empty pottage bowl.
Nicholas takes up the tinder box by the grate, flints the tinder aglow and sets a fire burning in the hearth. He places the pottage bowl close by, to heat up. While he’s waiting he goes out onto the little narrow balcony to gather his thoughts.
The night is cool. The bridge is a black brooding presence to his left, a few lighted windows in the buildings piercing the darkness like a torchlit procession frozen against the sky. Across the river, lanterns burn on the vessels moored along Galley Quay. Off to his right, across the dark expanse of water, the great Tower squats behind its flinty ramparts like a dark and malevolent hunter come out of its lair in search of prey, a monstrous black toad waiting in the night. He recalls how – not so long ago – he stood in one of its chambers watching a man plead for his life. Who will it be this time? Tyrrell? Arcampora? Samuel Wylde himself? I’ve fed you once already, he thinks, yet still you’re hungry.
And then, as the smell of warming pottage comes to him through the open door, an idea strikes him out of the darkness, carried on the wind like Tanner Bell’s murdered soul crying out for vengeance. He thinks upon it for a while, then returns to the solitude of his cell.
Where he writes – and then enciphers – a second letter.
20
‘Do you hear that, Tanner Bell? The Professor says you’re a monstrous disappointment to physic.’
Dunstan kicks the heavy chair, sending it skewing sideways. Only Tanner’s weight stops it from toppling over.
Florin bends down to Tanner’s blood-streaked ear. ‘Here we are, risking our immortal souls in His work, and all you can do is dribble! I call you a wicked dissembler, a heretic, a resister against God.’
‘Leave him be. The boy is not at fault,’ says Arcampora wearily, placing his book of incantations on the table. His face is lined with exhaustion, his eyes streaming with the smoke from the roots and leaves smouldering in the chafing dishes: vervain and barberry to help St Margaret protect them all from the demons he has sought to conjure during the night; culverwort to strengthen the courage of the mute boy into whose body he is attempting to drive them. ‘It can be done!’ he says, wiping the stinging tears from his eyes with the sleeve of his gown. ‘I, Arcampora, know this! Did not our Lord drive a host of demons out of a poor madman and into the Gadarene swine? Every good Christian soul knows this!’ He slams his palm down onto the book in frustration.
Taking up the lantern from the table, Arcampora crosses to where Tanner is sitting, his head slumped forward, chin on chest. The physician’s boots scuff the chalk circle and the symbols drawn on the floor. No matter – they can be redrawn. He reaches out a gloved hand and tilts Tanner’s head back. The boy’s eyes look like those of a corpse. The two wounds on his neck, where Arcampora cut the laryngeal nerves, are still raw. That was a mistake, the physician thinks. Robbed of his voice, how will Tanner indicate that a spirit has taken possession of him? Perhaps Lord Tyrrell can be persuaded to send another boy to Cleevely.
Arcampora lowers Tanner’s head and regards the aperture drilled into his skull, the surface of the brain quivering like the milky breast of a paramour.
‘Deep within this tissue is the vermis,’ Arcampora begins – though whether he’s addressing Dunstan and Florin or a wider, unseen audience is unclear. ‘According to the great Galen of antiquity, it is by means of the vermis that the flow of sensations to the seat of reason may be controlled. But Galen does not suggest by what mechanism the flow may be altered.’ He moves Tanner’s head from left to right, as though admiring an ornament. He studies the white forehead glistening with sweat. Somewhere behind it, if the Moor physician Avicenna is right, is the imaginatio, the spring from which flows all that a human being might envision. ‘Perhaps there is some restriction in the vermis, preventing the inflow of the alien spirit,’ he suggests, though mostly to himself. ‘Or there may be emanations escaping from the brain’s ventricles that push against the pneuma, preventing it from entering.’ He refuses to countenance the other possibility: that he has made an error in the invocation.