But he had noticed that the door had been locked behind him. His claim to be working for Bruno Barrani was clearly not yet believed without question. Not that that had stopped him sleeping. Not even the crack of doom would have achieved that.
On the courier’s arrival, the atmosphere at Cleevely turns in an instant to purposeful action. Dunstan is dispatched to ensure there are enough fit horses for the journey, leaving Nicholas to dwell bitterly on the mare lying dead beside the stream at the edge of the beech wood. Arcampora sweeps in and out imperiously, but does nothing of any practical worth. Florin, when he encounters Nicholas, looks as though he’s been cheated out of a fortune.
It is during this frantic preparation for the journey that Nicholas once again comes face-to-face with Samuel Wylde.
They meet when Isabel Lowell leads the boy out to the waiting horses. His face is shockingly pale. His thin fingers twist nervously, and his eyes look as though they’re still getting accustomed to sunlight after a long imprisonment in a very dark cell. He seems eager to please. He stoops slightly whenever someone asks him to move aside. His Adam’s apple rises and falls in his thin neck. His mop of corn-coloured hair droops in an unruly fringe, which he has to brush continually from his eyes. Nicholas is horrified. If the Brothers of Antioch are allowed to use this boy as they desire, if they proclaim him as Mary’s grandson either in this realm or abroad, then Robert Cecil and the Privy Council – should they get their hands on him – will eat him alive and gnaw on his bones for the marrow.
Samuel is equally shocked by Nicholas’s battered appearance.
‘Is this not the gentleman my father engaged to bring news of me? He came here with Grandma Mercy. Who has used him so roughly?’
‘A misunderstanding,’ says Arcampora. ‘It is resolved now. And he was not sent by your father. He was sent by certain friends of yours. Good friends.’
‘My friends have gone away, back to London. I don’t have any others.’
‘You have more friends than you know, sir,’ says Isabel Lowell. ‘Powerful friends. You will meet them soon – in London.’
‘As you can see, Dr Shelby, the boy is well,’ announces Arcampora in an extraordinary display of bluster. ‘I am encouraged by his progress. But we still have a distance to go. Once Signor Barrani has had an opportunity to see him, I must be allowed to continue the treatment without interruption.’
That afternoon, beneath a pale sky that seems to Nicholas like a canvas stretched too tightly on its frame, ready to rip at the first touch, the small party rides out of Cleevely. Arcampora and Samuel take the lead. Nicholas follows. Dunstan and Florin ride close on either side of Nicholas, casting him the occasional hungry glance, as if to tell him they don’t buy his alibi for a moment.
There’s no escaping it, thinks Nicholas – it’s going to be a miserable journey. It’s not the stamina of the horses that will dictate how long it lasts, it is Samuel’s ability to endure it. He rides well, but tires easily. Arcampora gives him frequent doses of a syrup of heart’s-ease to help stave off his fits.
As for Nicholas, the pain in his body has barely eased. They’ve wrapped him in his gaberdine, the collar pulled up to hide most of his face. He hasn’t looked in a mirror glass, but he doesn’t need to – he knows instinctively that he looks like the loser in a fist-fight at a country fair.
The inns they stop at are low places. Nicholas is made to take his rest in barns and outbuildings, always in the company of Florin and Dunstan. And all the time he wonders: how long can this deception survive? Because reaching Lord Tyrrell’s house is only the beginning.
Bianca has been aboard the Sirena for four uncomfortable nights. Bruno has ordered a makeshift berth furnished for her in a rope-store on the deck immediately below his small cabin. It smells overpoweringly of hemp cordage. But the crew treat it almost as they would a shrine, lowering their voices whenever they are close, never daring to get within three feet of the curtain they’ve rigged up to provide privacy. Santo Fiorzi had told her more than once that she isn’t a prisoner – so why, she wonders, does she feel so much like one? And not just a prisoner of the cardinal, but of her mounting fears for Nicholas. He left early on the tenth day of April. Today is Thursday, the eighteenth. He should have returned by now. Where is he?
Perhaps the roads are bad. Perhaps his horse has cast a shoe, somewhere far from a smithy.
But apart from the rain on Easter Eve, the weather has been good. So good, in fact, that if she were not cooped up on the Sirena she’d be taking a stroll along Bankside, or in the fields behind the ruins of Bermondsey Abbey.
Fine weather means more people on the road. That must be the reason for his delayed return – he’s held up by farm waggons and other travellers. Rose will soon be here, bearing news of his arrival, just as instructed.
But by the next afternoon Bianca has become so concerned she mentions it to Bruno, while she’s changing the dressing on his wound.
‘He’s probably entertaining himself in some tavern somewhere,’ her cousin says, trying to put her mind at ease. But his explanation serves only to make things worse.
As the bells call the faithful to Evensong in the churches beyond the waterfront, a stir goes around the Sirena di Venezia. Fiorzi appears in Bruno’s cabin. He’s no longer dressed in his mariner’s jerkin and slops, but smartly attired in a plum-coloured doublet and black trunk-hose. With his runnelled face, the white stubble on his head and his dagger-blade of a beard, he makes a striking figure, though still as unlike a cardinal as she can imagine. His eyes gleam with anticipation.
‘She’s arrived,’ he says to Bruno, a trace of awe in his voice. ‘She’s lodging at the sign of the Blind Archer on Botolph Lane.’
Bianca knows at once he’s speaking of Mercy Havington.
Fiorzi turns his head towards her. The years seem to have released their grip on him. He looks younger, more vigorous. ‘Is that far?’ he asks.
‘It’s just the other side of the Customs House,’ she says, trying to smother an involuntary smile. ‘A quarter of an hour at the most.’
‘Will you accompany me, Mistress Bianca? I find this city of yours a veritable labyrinth.’
‘I’d be honoured, Your Eminence,’ she says, grinning.
‘I think you’d better get used to calling me plain “Signore”, Mistress Bianca. When the Sacred College of Cardinals finds out what I’m up to, the nearest I’m likely to get to a position in the church is a job as Father Rossi’s gardener.’
At Botolph’s Wharf, Bianca and Fiorzi put the river at their backs and head north towards St George’s church. The lane is quiet, the people mostly at church.
‘Do you not fear the Brothers will seek revenge, when Samuel is stolen from them?’ Bianca asks.
‘Once again, Mistress Bianca, your idea of theft is somewhat at odds with mine. Just as Tyrrell’s letters were not yours to lose, so my grandson is not theirs to keep. Besides, Tyrrell, Lowell and Kirkbie are men of the past. They have no real power – that is why they were so eager to embrace Arcampora’s insane story.’ He sees the confusion on her face and laughs. ‘Oh, they may sit behind the walls of their seminary at Douai, plotting until they wither, but it is too late. They cannot see how the world has changed.’
‘What do you mean, changed?’
‘After Spain’s great Armada was scattered three years ago, her coffers are exhausted. Philip does not have the money, let alone the power, to wage a war of faith with England.’