He has entered the beech wood now, the track winding like a narrow ravine through the trees. He can hear the rooks calling in alarm at his approach.
He finds the old broken tree-trunk almost exactly where he’d expected it to be, torn out of the ground as though by some giant hand, the rotting bark tuberous with scalycap and black-tooth. He dismounts and ties the mare’s reins around a young birch that’s grown in the space cleared by the fallen tree. Taking the hemp sack from his saddle pack, he strikes out confidently to where he and Ned temporarily re-interred Tanner Bell’s bones under a covering of rocks. He swiftly finds the spot, beneath a tangle of roots projecting from an overhang. To his relief, the temporary grave hasn’t been disturbed by foxes. Tugging his gloves tighter over his hands, Nicholas begins to move the rocks aside. The lingering stench of putrefaction turns his stomach.
As he uncovers the pitiful remains of what he assumes is Tanner Bell, Nicholas thinks of Angelo Arcampora with mounting rage. Only a man possessed of a colossal self-regard could dare do what he has done: enter an enemy’s kingdom with an enemy’s blood already on his hands, utterly confident that no one will find out who he is or what he’s done – and then engage in a conspiracy to overthrow its established religion, using an innocent sixteen-year-old boy stricken by the falling sickness. What manner of devil is he?
As he places the bones in the hemp sack, Nicholas imagines the unknown faces of John Lowell and Peter Kirkbie. They are puppet masters, dressed in the finery of self-professed piety, playing with other people’s lives from the safety of their seminaries and their foreign courts, unshakeable in their conviction that there is no suffering too great to inflict on others in the pursuit of their own certainties. Without them, he thinks, Angelo Arcampora would be just another wandering mountebank.
With a surge of angry resolve in his heart, Nicholas remembers today is the day Bianca will deliver the first letter to Lord Tyrrell’s man, Munt. If his plan works as he hopes, the letter will set in motion a chain of events that will free Samuel Wylde from the Brothers of Antioch. Now that he’s certain the boy cannot be Mary Tudor’s grandson, the battle to come seems to him even more just.
He wonders what role Bruno Barrani is playing in this conspiracy. In the short time before the riot at the Jackdaw, he had come to like Bianca’s cousin. He tries to put aside the thought that Bruno could well be a part of the Brothers’ plan. Even if he’s simply a courier for Santo Fiorzi, that still makes him an enemy to England. It would be better for everyone, now that he is safely aboard, that the Sirena sails on the first favourable tide.
The wind has quickened, roiling the darkening clouds. The leaves make a sound like grain flowing through a colander. Or sand through an hourglass. Nicholas is so intent on his task and his thoughts that he barely registers the skittish sound of the palfrey pulling on her tether.
And then, from somewhere close by, comes the sudden sharp report of a dead branch cracking underfoot.
In her physic garden by the river, Bianca Merton trails a hand across the leaves to catch their scents: wild marjoram for relieving maladies of the ears; lovage for the ague; heart’s-ease for treating the falling sickness in children… She thinks, if only there was something here to settle a heart that threatens to beat itself off its peg.
Curiosità – that’s what her mother had always warned would be her undoing. If only she had put Bruno’s black doeskin gloves straight back into the sack that day in his chamber with Rose. Then she would be party to none of this. Oblivious. Innocent.
But still it wouldn’t matter. Because Nicholas went to Cleevely and unravelled the conspiracy from the other end. He went because he owed his life to Joshua Wylde, and his purse to Robert Cecil. And, innocent or not, she is irrevocably tied to him.
Yesterday, after the crowds had dispersed from the sermon, she went across the bridge to see Munt at Petty Wales – a day earlier than Nicholas had instructed. It had felt like walking into the bear-pit. But she wasn’t going to risk discovering that he’d chosen today to visit his sick mother or an aunt in the country. Be ready, she’d warned him in a serious voice that did not come naturally to her. I will have news for you on the morrow.
‘Master Barrani is recovered?’ Munt had asked hopefully, as though he’d rather deal with Bruno than a woman.
‘He is still unable to leave his bed,’ she had told him with what she hoped was convincing sadness. ‘I fear Lord Tyrrell will have to deal with me a while longer.’
She’s hidden the two letters Nicholas wrote, along with Tyrrell’s, here in her physic garden. Though she’s had no glimpse of her cloaked follower over the past few days, she is taking no chances.
She locates the distinctive holly branch. She drops down, tugging her gown away from her shins, and rolls away the heavy lump of plaster. With her face just inches from the old wall, she reaches inside the cavity in the brickwork.
Her fingers stub against nothing but masonry.
She moves her hand around. Searching.
Still nothing.
Bianca begins to scratch at the walls of the cavity with increasing desperation, like someone who’s been buried alive. But the package containing the deciphered papers has gone.
For a moment she tells herself she’s made a stupid mistake. She’s picked the wrong place. There’s another stone, another cavity in the wall, just a foot or so from this one.
But she knows there is not.
Bianca jumps to her feet. She stares wildly around the physic garden, her mind filled with a dread a thousand fathoms deep.
And then she sees him.
From the doorway to the lane a tall, well-built figure is watching her. A figure in a brownish-black cloak.
2
In the beech wood there is no echo to the snapping of the branch, just the flat crack of a neck breaking at a hanging. But it’s enough to set the rooks cawing in the treetops. Enough of a surprise for Nicholas to let go of the half-filled sack and turn his head, searching for the source of the noise.
Further down the slope, perhaps fifty yards away, he catches a fragmented glimpse of something moving amongst the trees.
Let it be nothing but a hind or a stag, he prays. He crouches to make himself less visible. Steadying his breathing, he scans the tangle of ferns and bracken.
There – between those two gnarled old trunks and the sapling, fighting them for a share of the light: a thickset figure in a stained leather tabard, trunk-hose and boots. Nicholas worms his way deeper into the undergrowth, frightened that the slightest noise will attract the man’s attention. Is he a poacher? A villager out collecting kindling? Or something more dangerous: a cut-purse perhaps? Whoever he is, he’s coming this way.
The man stops barely twenty feet off. He looks around, unpoints his hose and relieves himself against a tree. With mounting dread, Nicholas recognizes the momentarily beatific face. It’s one of Arcampora’s two companions. Has he seen the tethered palfrey? Nicholas wonders. Does he know I’m here?
Silently Nicholas lies flat amongst the undergrowth. The earthy tang of the woodland floor is sharp in his nostrils. A small beetle crawls from under one of Tanner Bell’s half-scoured ribs, which are lying close by, and makes an unhurried excursion over Nicholas’s wrist between his glove and the sleeve of his doublet. He forces himself to resist the urge to brush it away.