Nicholas steps back a couple of paces. He bends his knees, braces his palms on his thighs and tries to summon up the courage to do it again. Then he stands up, drops his right shoulder a little and makes a second rush.
A second howl of pain. Louder and more visceral than before. But still the door does not budge.
On the other side the trapped bird seems to have renewed its desperate attempts at escape. Nicholas can hear the thrashing of its panicked wings.
On the third charge he loses his nerve entirely, stopping the very moment before collision.
On the fourth he almost faints with the pain.
For the fifth attempt, he decides he needs help. He asks Eleanor to give him the courage to continue. Or is it Bianca he asks? Somehow the fire in his shoulder seems to have fused the two images together.
Nicholas hits the door with the last of his strength, biting again at the gash Florin has put in his lip, spilling fresh warm blood over his chin.
As the bolt-keep tears out of the frame, Nicholas’s own momentum carries him into the chamber beyond. It’s all he can do to stop himself plunging on. He barely notices the door swinging loosely on one unbroken hinge behind him, as if all he’d really had to do was knock. He comes to a halt, half-crouched, hands on knees, gasping. But grinning, too. Grinning like a Jack o’ Bedlam.
And as his functioning eye peers into the semi-darkness, he sees there is no window to escape through. No bird fluttering against the glass. Just a boy shackled by the ankle to a length of chain. A boy with a bloody rag tied around his head, every pore of his death-white skin weeping silent terror, while his right foot tries desperately to scuff out the necromantic symbols chalked into the flagstones.
8
‘And what of these’ Santo Fiorzi asks, lifting Nicholas’s two letters from the other papers on the table. He holds them between thumb and finger, as though the weight of the words might give him a clue to their value. ‘They are still enciphered. Were you interrupted?’
‘They’re separate,’ Bianca says, as though that explains everything.
‘In what manner, separate?’
‘They didn’t come from the Brothers of Antioch.’
‘Then where did they come from?’
The snowy wastes of Muscovy, she says in her mind. The ninth celestial sphere of the cosmos. The bowl in which her mother mixed her poisons. It doesn’t matter where. They’re not yours. Let me have them. Otherwise I can’t keep the promise I made to Nicholas.
‘They bear the same hand as the translations. So I assume they were written by Dr Shelby,’ says Fiorzi in answer to her silence. ‘What do they contain?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he not tell you?’
‘No. He wrote them just before he left for Gloucestershire.’
The cabin has become unbearably stuffy. The swell has picked up and the Sirena is bumping against her rope fenders in a way that’s making Bianca feel nauseous. She asks to be allowed out on deck for fresh air. Fiorzi refuses curtly. It’s decided, then. She’s not a guest, she’s a prisoner.
‘What did you do with the silk key, Mistress Bianca?’ Fiorzi asks, in a voice that tells her that prevarication or evasion will be a greater sin than any he has yet heard admitted in the confessional – and likely to require more than a few Hail Marys to absolve.
‘I put it back where I found it – in Bruno’s glove.’
‘And my gloves are where, Cousin?’ Bruno asks.
‘In the canvas sack I saw Luzzi carrying when you left the Jackdaw.’
The cardinal tidies the documents into a small pile and wraps them in the sailcloth. Then he leaves the cabin. She hears him speaking on the other side of the door, a low, insistent string of commands.
‘This would all have been so much easier, Cousin, had you agreed to help us from the beginning,’ says Bruno from his cot.
‘Had you been more honest, I might have done so.’ She rolls her eyes skywards. ‘Rice, indeed. I should have known. You always hated rice.’
‘His Eminence has risked everything by coming here. How can you not admire him for it? He has loved that woman for thirty-three years. Loved her as much as he loves God – perhaps even more.’
‘How did he discover Arcampora’s claim was false: that the child was never Mary Tudor’s?’
‘His Eminence had no notion Mercy Brooke had ever given birth to a child, let alone that Samuel was his grandson. But when he investigated Arcampora’s fantastical claim a little more deeply, he came to realize Alice Havington must have been his daughter.’
‘But why? She could just as easily have been Sir William’s.’
‘Because Cardinal Fiorzi’s own mother suffered from the falling sickness. It runs in his family.’
‘But how did he learn all this, when Mercy Havington was an ocean distant from him?’
Bruno gives a knowing smile. ‘A cardinal of the Holy Office can call upon any number of eyes and ears, even in far-off countries full of heretics like this one. There are still those living here who are loyal to the true faith.’
If it’s meant as a slight, Bianca doesn’t rise to it. ‘Then why did he think he needed me?’
‘Because you were once his little sparrow. He trusted you. And you were here.’
Bianca looks up at the beams barely inches above her head. She smiles wistfully, as though she’s seen a great and important truth written there. ‘Tell him he can trust Nicholas not to betray him.’
‘Are you sure about that? Master Nicholas may be a good man, but he is still of the corrupt faith.’
Bianca’s reply is harsher that she intends.
‘I’m not sure he has any faith. He too has lost the woman he loves. And a child. But if it were not for him, Cousin – if he hadn’t worked his physic on you – you’d be lying unshriven in a foreign grave. You should count yourself lucky. When they kill a heretic here, they scatter his ashes into the nearest river, so that no trace of him remains.’
It seems an age before Fiorzi returns. When he does, he has a troubled, indecisive look about him. In one hand he’s carrying a writing box. In the other, a sailor’s knife, the blade sharp enough for splicing cables, carving lucky charms, opening up roughly stitched black doeskin gloves – or disposing of meddlers whose loyalty you cannot quite bring yourself to trust.
‘I fear I may have badly misjudged the hazard,’ he says.
The boy is an apparition, a creature conjured from a nightmare. When his mouth gapes to emit a howl of terror at Nicholas’s explosive entry, no sound emerges. He screams silently, as though some dense but invisible barrier exists between them that sound cannot penetrate.
In the spill of light from the broken door, Nicholas notices the wounds on either side of the boy’s neck. The pig trick, he thinks with a shudder; the great Galen’s favourite public demonstration: cut the laryngeal nerves and turn shrieks of pain to a silent mime-show, to the astonishment and applause of the audience. Only instead of entertainment, here it’s been done to keep the subject quiet. And the subject is not a pig, but a terrified young lad.
The air inside the room is rank with the smell of captivity, overlain with the cloying residue of burnt herbs and oils. Nicholas’s senses begin to spin again. He has to steady himself.
He moves towards the apparition, raising his hands to show he means no harm. But the boy darts out of his reach. The chain rasps on the flagstones.
‘Don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm,’ says Nicholas soothingly, though his face is contorted with disgust at what Arcampora has done to the boy.