Ahead of them, the street disappears into the very heart of the bridge, a tunnel drilled through a procession of grand buildings, a whole city thoroughfare – three hundred yards long – laid out across the Thames. Most of the inside frontages she passes are shops: a milliner’s… a silk-maker’s… a grocer’s… There’s even an old chapel turned over to private lodgings, six storeys high, at the centre point. At only three places does the bridge open itself to the night. Then Bianca hears the roar of the river surging between the huge stone starlings set into the river, glances up and sees that perfect moon. Then it’s back into the belly of the worm.
Here and there lanterns burn, spilling a smoky mist around the doorways and boarded-up counters. In a doorway lies a reveller snoring drunkenly in a pool of vomit. As Bianca passes, she sees a neat rip in his grubby jerkin – Bankside’s parting gift has been to cut away his purse while he sleeps.
She is certain the echo of their hurrying footsteps on the cobbles will wake the entire bridge. All the way across she waits for the first opening of a window, the first challenging cry, the first shout for the watch. For who else can be dashing through the night at this hour but brawlers, felons and vagabonds?
The help Bruno promised is waiting for her on the quayside in the shadow of a tall wooden crane: two wiry little knife-fighters from the slums of the Venetian Giudecca, named Cesare and Marcello. Cesare has a vertical scar running from just beneath his right eye to his jaw, which makes him look as though his face has been assembled from two different people. Marcello has a broad, boyish face and the flinty eyes of a practised killer. She recalls both had been at the Jackdaw the day Bruno was hurt – how they’d watched anxiously as Nicholas had saved his life. Now they’re eager for a quarrel with anyone who would do him harm. Silently she thanks her cousin for keeping his word.
Halfway up Petty Wales, Munt’s warehouse stands gaunt and grey in the moonlight. The sign of the three tuns hangs over the street like the banner of an enemy army. Suddenly a fire begins to burn in her with a heat she has never felt before. The night is hers alone to win or lose. And even though the stakes could not be higher, Bianca discovers she is smiling.
‘If anyone addresses you, Ned, say nothing. Just look at them as if you don’t understand. They’ll assume you’re Venetian.’
‘Aye, Mistress.’
‘And don’t do anything unless I give you a clear sign. They could kill Nicholas before we can intervene.’
‘No, Mistress.’
‘Promise me – no sudden foolish attempts to save him. Move only at my instruction. Understood?’
‘Clearly, Mistress.’
Bianca turns to Cesare and Marcello and gives similar orders in Italian. Then she nods towards the broad double doors of the warehouse. Ned raises a giant fist and raps three times on the planks.
The answering silence seems to last an age – an age in which she imagines she’s too late. She sees Nicholas in her mind, lying on the other side of the door, bloodied and broken, his death a slow, drawn-out masque of agony staged for the entertainment of Thomas Tyrrell and Angelo Arcampora.
And then she hears Munt’s muffled voice coming from the narrow gap between the doors. ‘Who calls? Name yourself!’
Bianca fills her lungs with night air to steady her racing heart. Then she says softly, but in a commanding tone, ‘It is Mistress Merton! In the name of His Eminence Cardinal Santo Fiorzi of the Holy Office of the Faith, open these doors!’
She hears the rumble of a wooden beam sliding through iron hoops. Then one of the doors opens outwards just enough to let one person through.
Bianca goes first, Cesare and Marcello next. Ned casts a glance over his shoulder to check the street is empty, pulls the door a little wider to allow his great bulk to pass through and steps in after them.
Clouds of hemp dust hang slackly in the flickering light of Munt’s burning torch. Ahead of her, Bianca can make out a dark maze piled high with sacks of spices, lengths of Baltic timber, barrels of Dutch salted herring… When she breathes the air it has the sour tang of unwashed trencher boards about it.
She follows Munt down an avenue of wooden pillars supporting the ceiling beams, Cesare, Marcello and Ned close on her heels. Munt seems more respectful than when she saw him last. Has Tyrrell told him of her supposed desire to witness what is to come? she wonders. Does he think she has a stone for a heart? If they only knew the truth.
And then she sees him.
His body is at the centre of a cleared space, limp, pitched forward a little, like a martyred saint. A rope disappears into the darkness above him.
Oh, my poor Nicholas: I’m too late. They’ve hanged you!
But then he moves – like an old man trying to find a stance that eases the aches of a hard life lived too long.
A wave of relief sweeps over her, then breaks on the realization of what they’ve done to him. Or are about to do. Strappado. It’s what the Holy Office of the Faith did to her father to make him confess that the Devil had guided his pen. It had broken him. She fights the overwhelming desire to rush to Nicholas’s side, to take him in her arms, to hold him and protect him. To make him whole again.
In the semi-darkness she can sense Ned Monkton battling the almost overwhelming urge to act. She wants so much to let him loose, but it would destroy everything Nicholas has risked his life for. Unseen, she lays a restraining hand against his arm. Cesare and Marcello she keeps leashed in with a single shake of her head.
Tyrrell is standing by Nicholas’s body. Two paces behind him is Arcampora. The physician looks up at her approach. She sees that cold mouth twitch. It’s almost a smile of gratitude. She guesses he’s already read Nicholas’s second letter and believes every word of it. If that is the case, whatever happens now, his fate is settled.
Behind Arcampora stand two heavyset men. One of them is holding a wicked-looking iron rod with a wooden handle at one end and a flattened, circular cutting blade at the other. She doesn’t need to know much about instruments of torture to guess its purpose.
Nicholas turns his head towards her. He looks almost unrecognizable. One eye is closed and swollen. His face is streaked with dried blood. It has spilled onto his ruined shirt in a dark tracery of pain.
Does he know it’s her standing in the shadows, almost within reach? He makes no sign of it.
‘I have to confess I thought you would lose your nerve, Mistress Merton,’ says Tyrrell in a disdainful voice.
‘Well, you thought wrong.’
‘And, pray, who are these fellows with you? This is not some Bankside entertainment for the lower sort. We are not at the playhouse now.’
‘I am a cardinal’s emissary,’ Bianca says as haughtily as she can manage. ‘Would you have me wandering the streets alone at midnight, like a common doxy? They’re from the Sirena. Signor Barrani has sent them for my protection.’
Tyrrell gives a grunt of indifference. He yanks on the rope, wrenching Nicholas’s arms away from his back and tearing a rasping moan from his upturned throat. Bianca feels Ned begin to move. She steps directly in front of him, blocking him, although if he was of a mind to, he could flatten her just by pushing forward.
‘Master Florin, Master Dunstan, the heretic is all yours,’ Tyrrell says. ‘Serve him well. Give him all the misery he can swallow!’
‘Strappado or the auger, my lord?’ asks Florin, as if he’s offering Tyrrell wine at supper.