The pinnace slams against the Sirena’s hull, buffeted by the swell. The crew make fast to a trailing line and help Bianca to the bottom rung of a swaying rope ladder. She begins to climb the slick wet side of the ship. When she risks a glance down at the heaving water below, her stomach lurches. She feels the bile rise in her throat. If her hands slip on the rope, if she falls between the pinnace and the ship, there is but one certain end: crushed into paste, like a handful of seeds in her apothecary’s mortar.
Looking up doesn’t offer a much better prospect. Somehow – in her heavy woollen kirtle – she will have to get over the painted bulwark and onto the deck without looking like a turkey felled by a hunter’s lucky shot. Crushing she can bear, but humiliation before Bruno’s crew is another matter entirely. Summoning up her resolve, she manages it with no more indignity than having to reach out a hand to Luzzi, the sailing master, for assistance.
Inside the small cabin on the Sirena’s high, sloping stern, Bruno lies in his cot, propped up against a bolster. Bianca smiles as she sees he’s waxed his mustachios into something approaching their former glory. He reaches out to clasp her hand, his voice still a dry husk compared to its former chirpiness.
‘Graziano tells me I look like a wild savage with the flux.’
‘You look a lot better than you did, Bruno, believe me,’ she says, laying a hand on his cheek. ‘And you may dispense with the deception, Cousin. I know who Graziano is.’
A flicker of alarm plays across Bruno’s pale face.
‘I had no choice,’ the cardinal says, spreading his hands in admission. ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on her while you were out of your wits. Your cousin is an enterprising young woman; though I have to say she seems possessed of a dangerous curiosity. It appears to run in the Merton family.’
The allusion to her father removes the last constraint on Bianca’s temper.
‘Not content with following me around like a common cut-purse, you’ve also tried to break into a chest of mine at the Jackdaw and stolen personal items from my physic garden!’
She stops, scarcely able to believe she’s addressing a cardinal of Holy Mother Church in such an insolent fashion. If Father Rossi could hear her now, he’d throw up his hands in horror and scuttle about on his ancient bowed legs like a crab poked with a stick.
Fiorzi, however, seems unperturbed; even amused. ‘I think you’ll find, Mistress Bianca, the items I took from your hiding place were not in fact yours.’ He reaches inside his cloak and pulls out the sailcloth parcel. Untying the binding, he spills its contents out onto the little cabin table: Tyrrell’s papers, the deciphered copies, and the two letters Nicholas wrote in his Poynes Alley tenement – the first of which she should, at this very moment, be delivering to Munt’s warehouse on Petty Wales, but which now lie before her like damning evidence in a trial.
6
Nicholas lies on the cold stone floor of the lodge in the beech wood. He flinches as his tongue finds the rip Florin’s fist has put in his upper lip. Through one eye he can make out a wash of pale light spilling through the windows. The other eye is too swollen to see out of. His medical opinion is that it could have been worse. His body will need some persuading.
Missing two teeth to the pommel of Nicholas’s saddle, Florin’s initial intent had been to batter Nicholas into insensibility and throw him in the stream with the carcass of the mare. Dunstan had allowed him his fun for a while, then – just as Nicholas had begun to think he was going to die – he’d casually suggested to Florin their master might not thank them for killing their prisoner before he’d been properly invited to explain his return to Cleevely.
But Florin said he hadn’t enjoyed himself enough yet. So Dunstan had let him hit Nicholas twice more: two really vicious jabs that took the wind out of his lungs so violently he thought it had flown away, never to return. Then they’d thrown him over the saddle of Dunstan’s horse and brought him back to the abandoned lodge, locked him in and ridden away – though, to be honest, that part is remembered only in fragments.
For a while now the only sounds have been the burbling of his own breath through the blood in his mouth, the ringing in his ears and the intermittent pattering of rain showers on the old slate roof. But now the ringing has faded, replaced by a dry, scratching noise he can’t quite place.
Nicholas rolls onto his side and curls up. The posture gives him the opportunity to explore his arms and legs, to confirm that Florin’s exuberant sallies with his boots haven’t caused lasting damage. All seems to be intact. Mere bruises are easily dealt with, he thinks. Bianca would make up a balm of pimpernel, adder’s tongue and mother-wort. Picturing her at work at her apothecary’s bench in the little chamber beneath the Jackdaw’s taproom, her amber eyes gleaming with satisfaction at her skill, the distance between them strikes home, filling Nicholas with a sense of almost unbearable loneliness.
‘Perhaps you could enlighten us as to how these came to be hidden away in your garden, Mistress Bianca,’ says Santo Fiorzi, sweeping a hand above the papers strewn across the little table.
When she was young and her father had caught her red-handed at some mischief or other, her response had always been to maintain an innocent silence, betrayed only by the biting of her lower lip. By old habit, she does this now.
The cardinal’s expression hardens. She wonders if he plans to strike her, beat a confession out of her. Being a member of the Holy Office of the Faith, he would be skilled in that line of work.
‘I think you already know what they are, Your Eminence,’ she replies at length, thinking how absurd it is to address a man in a sailor’s jerkin and slops so formally, yet unable to prevent herself.
‘I know one thing, Mistress Bianca: they were not intended for you to see.’ A sudden flicker of admiration crosses his grizzled face. ‘Let alone read.’
From his cot, Bruno stares at her open mouthed. ‘She’s read them? How?’
‘She found the key to our cipher, Bruno – in your glove.’
‘You should have had the stitching done better, if you didn’t want anyone to notice,’ she protests.
‘Not content with that, she thought she would keep your appointment with Signor Munt,’ says Fiorzi, as if he can’t quite believe it himself.
‘I was afraid Bruno was involved in something dangerous. I was right, wasn’t I?’
‘I followed her to Munt’s warehouse, where – I presume – she presented herself as your emissary,’ says Fiorzi. ‘Because she came away with these.’ He gathers up the papers and regards them like a hand of cards.
‘Does His Eminence speak the truth, Cousin?’
‘You could hardly have gone yourself. You were at death’s door.’
‘Oh, that’s not all, Bruno,’ Fiorzi says. ‘Only the Almighty knows how, but by the look of it, she’s even managed to decipher them and translate them into English! All save these two. They’re still enciphered.’
‘How in the name of all the saints did you break the code?’ Bruno asks.
‘Father Rossi taught us all the dates on which the Holy Fathers met their rewards in heaven. It was just a matter of trial and error to come up with the right page.’
‘It’s good to see our priests know how to school their flock,’ says Fiorzi without the slightest trace of humour in his voice. He lays the papers back on the table. ‘The question is: Do you understand what these are, Mistress Bianca? Do you comprehend their import?’