Bianca considers the sins she has committed recently: asking God to make Rose lose her voice for a month… vanity… carnal thoughts… jealousy… and the really big sin: wanting to steal away Nicholas Shelby’s love for his dead wife.
‘Can you imagine,’ Fiorzi asks, ‘what it is like to know that when your daughter died, no one prayed for the easement of her soul? The heretics will not allow it. Isn’t that so? They believe it has no purpose.’
‘That’s because they don’t believe Purgatory exists.’
‘Then you may tell your heretical friends, from one who’s been somewhere very similar, that it surely must.’
That’s the answer, she thinks. Pray for Eleanor’s soul. If she can escape Purgatory, perhaps Nicholas can, too. ‘When you have Samuel here, how can you be sure he will want to go with you?’ she asks. ‘Italy is as foreign a land to him as the moon.’
‘He’s Mercy’s grandson. He’ll know what to do.’
For a moment she’s appalled by his selfish determination. And then it dawns on her: Mercy is going with him! They’re abandoning faith, country – everything – to be together, to snatch whatever fragments are left to them of the life they were denied; the life they denied to themselves.
‘Am I allowed to return to the Jackdaw, or am I now to be your prisoner?’ she asks.
‘Why should I wish to keep you a prisoner aboard the Sirena, Mistress Bianca?’
‘Because I could go straight to the Privy Council and betray you.’
‘Why would you do such a thing?’
‘My father, for a start.’
He looks at her quizzically. ‘Your father?’
‘Simon Merton. I suppose the Holy Office of the Faith imprisons so many heretics you can’t be expected to remember them all. He died in a miserable cell in Padua. It was the Holy Office that put him there. That is why I came to this country.’
‘I’m sorry, Mistress Bianca, truly sorry,’ Fiorzi says, his grizzled face suddenly softening. ‘Of course I remember your father. He had written discourses on matters of physic that were considered blasphemous, is that not so?’
‘They were just harmless books. He was eccentric, that’s all.’
‘I thought so, too.’
‘Then why did you imprison him?’
‘I didn’t. It may have escaped your attention, Mistress Bianca, but I am not the sole member of the Sacred College of Cardinals. In the matter of your father’s inquisition, I was a lone voice. I was unable to prevail. For that, I am truly sorry.’
From his cot, Bruno says softly, ‘Eminence, we really must decide upon a course of action. Time will not abide prevarication.’
Fiorzi puts his head in his hands. He seems to be struggling with his thoughts, though Bianca suspects the conflict is far from theological. Then he gives her a resigned smile, as if admitting he’s been outmanoeuvred.
‘Very well, Mistress Bianca. You may have that letter. You had better hurry. I understand the English consider it the height of bad manners to keep someone waiting.’
‘And the second letter?’ Bianca enquires, the relief flooding through her body.
But Santo Fiorzi has already turned his back to leave the cabin.
Nicholas sits beside Tanner Bell and tries to coax him down from his terror. He talks a lot about Dorney. About how he held him while he died. But even Dorney’s eyes never showed such raw fear as he can see in Tanner’s.
When Florin and Dunstan return to the lodge, the boy tries to slither out of their reach. But the chain stops him short. He curls up into a ball, howling silently into the darkest corner of the room.
‘Hope you’re going to pay the Professor for the damage to that door,’ says Dunstan to Nicholas in a hideously cheery voice. ‘Have you any idea how much locksmiths charge out here?’
‘That’s if you can find one,’ says Florin, hawking a gobbet of phlegm onto the floor. Nicholas notices it has a skein of fresh blood in it. Otherwise, he seems unnaturally untroubled by the loss of two of his teeth.
‘For mercy’s sake, have pity on him,’ Nicholas says. ‘He needs help. He needs a physician.’
‘He’s already had one of those,’ Dunstan says with a vile laugh. ‘He’s had the very best there is. Didn’t get charged even a penny.’
‘Tanner is playing his humble part in a great and wondrous enterprise,’ Florin explains. ‘You’d think he’d be more grateful, ’stead of pissing himself like a Bedlam madcap.’
Dunstan walks over to where Tanner lies at the end of his chain. He squats down behind him and gathers the boy’s torso between his legs, almost as though he intends to calm him. But his voice sends an icy chill through Nicholas’s heart. ‘The Professor says you’ve played your part, young gentleman. He need trouble you no longer. You may be about your business.’
And before Nicholas can even begin to shout in protest, Dunstan wraps his arms around Tanner’s head and with one smooth, practised and brutal movement snaps his neck.
For a moment Nicholas is speechless. He stares at Tanner’s lolling head. The bandage has come adrift, and now he can see the suppurating hole drilled into Tanner’s shaved skull. With a gentleness that turns Nicholas’s stomach, Dunstan lays the body out on the flagstones and says to it, ‘We’ll come back later. Plant you somewhere nice, like we did with Finney. You’ll like that.’
Then he and Florin advance on Nicholas.
For a moment he thinks they’re going to beat him to death right here in the lodge. But they don’t. Instead they bind him hand and foot and drag him outside, where three horses are tethered, grazing patiently. Dunstan throws him bodily over the back of the nearest, like the spoils of a day’s hunting. Then they set off on a swaying, lurching journey that Nicholas assumes is going to end somewhere his body will be left to the foxes and the worms, just like Finney’s. Just like Tanner’s will be, soon.
In fact it ends at Cleevely House. In a deep cellar. In darkness. Where they throw him down and leave him to fitful dreams of a mad-eyed boy with a lolling head, who dances like a Bankside bear on the end of its chain.
10
Nicholas wakes to the sound of the cellar door opening and a woman’s voice calling his name. The darkness is absolute. For a moment he thinks: they’ve killed me while I slept; the voice I hear is Eleanor’s. Then he feels the ache deep in his bones and the cold, hard bite of the cobbles against his back and knows he’s very much alive. But how long he’s been asleep, or whether it’s day or night, he cannot tell.
A brilliant light flares above and to the right of him, then descends, sloping through the blackness. Before he can make his eyes function properly, Isabel Lowell is standing over him. She’s not so finely dressed as the last time he saw her: just a plain brown kirtle. And her auburn hair is worn loose. Lit by the glare of the burning torch, her round face takes on a pallid, pinkish hue. She reminds him of a creature born to live her life underground, without need of light. With her right hand she clutches the crucifix at her bloodless throat. Nicholas gets a shadowy impression of someone standing just behind her – a Cleevely servant, his fist gripping the shaft of the burning flambeau, his shadowy arm connecting the light with the darkness.
‘Master Shelby, I urge you to deal openly with me,’ she says, leaning down to untie Nicholas’s bonds. The crucifix swings gently before his eyes, mesmerizing against her pale flesh. He can smell a cold, acidic perfume on her that makes him think of flowers slowly dying on an altar. Bianca could no doubt tell him what type, but he can’t see how he might survive to describe it to her.