The windows, long ago put out, are black and empty, blind eye-sockets in a dead face. Nicholas guesses the place must have served Cleevely Abbey, before the religious houses were cast down by the queen’s father, fifty years or more ago. Something about the place instantly makes him understand that it is here, not Cleevely, where Arcampora’s corrupt physic is practised. It is Porter Bell’s prison transferred from Holland, and from down the years. A sense of deep unease pools in his stomach.
He lets the mare draw breath. She’s no use to him exhausted. The rain rattles against his gaberdine. Only now does he have the time to realize it’s found its way inside, through the points of his canvas doublet and into his shirt, soaking him, mixing with his sweat in a cold embrace that makes him wonder if Tanner Bell’s bones haven’t reassembled themselves and are now clinging to him for the ride. This damp misery is deepened by an overwhelming sense of despair. His plan is in ruins. Warned of his presence, Arcampora will spirit Samuel Wylde away to somewhere Nicholas can’t find him. It has all been for nothing.
For an instant he considers taking shelter in the abandoned lodge. But he daren’t risk it. Florin and Dunstan are bound to be combing the wood for him. Wiser, he thinks, to get as far away from Cleevely as he can. Morose, defeated, he takes up the reins again.
He has almost reached the cover of the trees again when he hears the whinnying of a horse put to the spur. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees the two riders burst out of the wood barely fifty yards away. Florin, with his bloody face, looks like one of Kit Marlowe’s imaginary demons. With a muttered apology to the mare for what he must ask of her again, Nicholas slams in his heels and, in less than ten strides, she carries him into the trees.
Now the beech wood has truly become his enemy. Low branches rush at him, threatening to sweep him from the saddle, senseless or dead. He crouches low over the mare’s plunging neck. Rainwater flies off the leaves and into his eyes as though he’s thrust his face into a torrent. The ride has become an insane galloping volta, with no pause for breath and no end – other than escape or capture.
A branch slams into his left thigh so hard he thinks for a moment he’s been impaled. He glances back and sees the bag containing the mortal remains of Tanner Bell tumbling into the undergrowth. It’s as though his last chance to do something decent in the face of Arcampora’s monstrous scheme has been stolen from him – a betrayal of everything he had promised Porter Bell that cold night on the Hythe at Gravesend.
The ground appears to be rising now, though Nicholas wonders if it’s an illusion brought on by the blur of the undergrowth rushing past. The trees seem less densely packed here. More glimpses of the thunderous sky through the canopy.
Only in the last few yards before the edge of the beech wood does he see that his senses have not deceived him. The ground has been rising. The horse is carrying him blindly towards the edge of a cliff. Nicholas cries out a warning and hauls on the reins.
Legs flailing, the mare stops barely a stride from the drop. Her flanks heave with exertion. Plumes of vapour spill from her spume-flecked nostrils. Had he checked her a second later, they would both now be tumbling to destruction.
Looking over the mare’s neck, Nicholas can see the ground falls away precipitously to a stream some fifty feet below. The rim cascades with muddy rainwater and debris from their sudden stop. It’s not quite a waterfall, but it might as well be.
Now he can hear the noise of Florin and Dunstan approaching at speed through the wood behind him. There is nowhere for him to go but forward.
To ask the mare to attempt the drop is more than he has any right to demand. But he has no choice. Filling his heaving lungs with air, Nicholas urges her on.
She resists, her body tensing with fear. Her stamping hooves send a miniature avalanche of earth tumbling down the slope. He cannot blame her. She has carried him this far without complaint. Hating himself for what he is about to ask, he once again slams his heels into her flanks.
For one extraordinary moment Nicholas has the sensation they are flying. And then their plunging journey begins.
At one point he feels her body sinking, thinks her legs are smashed. That she’s sliding on her belly to destruction. At another, he’s staring in horror almost vertically down over her head, about to tumble forward into the path of half a ton of falling horseflesh. Together they are making a descent into hell, swept down in a hail of flying stones and earth.
It feels like an age. In reality it lasts only a few heartbeats. And then, to his astonishment, the world rights itself. Horse and rider are standing beside the stream. Dazed, bruised, breathing in violent spasms, but alive.
Looking up at the rim of the drop, Nicholas can only wonder how they have managed it without catastrophe. He allows himself a grim smile of satisfaction. Across the stream lie open fields and safety. He begins to shorten the reins in preparation.
And then a shout makes him look up again.
At the edge of the precipice stands a dismounted Dunstan. He’s holding something in his hand. Even at a distance, Nicholas recognizes it as a wheel-lock pistol.
Instinctively he gauges the chances of an accurate shot. High, but not certain. Far less if he’s not a sitting target. Still looking back and up, Nicholas sets his spurs once more to the mare’s sides. And as he does so, time itself seems to slow again.
Given the luxury of reflection, he would say that what he saw was impossible, that in reality a human eye is not fast enough to record the sequence of events. So it must be his imagination alone that sees the pistol so clearly. The primed dog-head turning on its spring, driving the flint into the pan. The brief flare of the priming charge igniting. The flash from the muzzle.
Nicholas senses the breath of the ball as it passes close by his head. The sound of the shot roars around the slope and out into the open fields beyond.
Dunstan has missed.
And then the mare begins to sink to the ground, as though she’s had enough of galloping. As though she can give him no more of her heart.
Nicholas feels the splash of her brave blood on his face. By the way she goes down, he would know she’s already dead – were it not for the fact that he’s already tumbling over her back and into the stream.
5
It cannot be him.
It cannot possibly be him.
But it has always been him. It’s just that she couldn’t see it: Santo Fiorzi, in the flesh. Even if it is flesh considerably less magnificent than the last time she’d been in his presence.
As the little craft makes for Galley Quay, Bianca finally accepts that, despite the familiarity of that deep, pious voice, there was never a chance she could have guessed the true identity of the man with the lined face and white stubble who now watches her so intently through grey, contemplative eyes.
She had stopped carrying his secret messages when her father was arrested, still not out of her teens. She can’t have seen him more than a handful of times since then. Not at all in the last six years. And until today, she’d never witnessed him in anything other than his immaculate vestments, a scarlet silk biretta on his head, an imposing beard upon his chin. She consoles herself with the knowledge that not even Father Rossi would recognize him now.
This realization does not comfort her. She remembers only too well that Santo Fiorzi was one of the members of the Holy Office of the Faith who had condemned her father to a lingering end in a cold cell, for the heretical books he had written. Just because he once called her his Passerotto doesn’t mean he’s a friend.