This new place had turned out to be as dark and noisome as the stew she’d run away from. But somehow by then she had lost all ability to think and act for herself. She had strange, vivid dreams, even in the daylight. Often, she could not tell when she was dreaming and when she was awake. Again, now, she knows that was the angel’s magic at work.
But there had been one sliver of hope before the descent into terror: Elise had discovered that she and Ralph were not alone. There were others here in this new place, others the angel had rescued.
Other victims trapped in the angel’s cage.
9
‘Stay for a while,’ Bianca suggests. ‘I could use the help.’ Finding a man who can haul casks and labour in the brewhouse – which Nicholas finds ever easier as his strength recovers – and can also read and write is a tall order south of the river. She’s glad when he accepts.
She already suspects that the man she and Timothy fished from the river is no run-of-the-mill vagrant. He’s educated. She knows this because, in his delirium, she’d heard him curse God – in Latin.
She thinks perhaps he’s a fallen priest, though as he fills out again, he looks more like a sturdy yeoman’s son than a man of God. But then how many farmers’ boys have a churchman’s Latin? Still, she does not pry. In the two years she’s lived on Bankside, she’s learned that many who come here do not wish to be the people they once were. Besides, his presence helps keep Rose’s eyes off the better-looking customers.
As for Nicholas, where else does he have to go?
Not back to his old life. That’s gone for ever. To Suffolk, then? Back to his family, back to brother Jack and his sister-in-law Faith, adoring parents to a hearty new acorn? No, he couldn’t stand the pity. Or the constant reminder of what he’s lost.
He thinks perhaps when the spring comes he’ll head for the Low Countries again, re-enlist in the army of the Prince of Orange, go back to patching up wounds and strapping shattered bones. You don’t even need to be a physician for that. They’re desperate enough in their fight against the Spanish to take a monkey, if it could learn the right tricks.
So, while he waits for the season, Nicholas retains his place in the attic. The little window becomes his spyhole to the past. He closes it when the sounds of the slaughtering in the Mutton Lane shambles become too intrusive. But when it’s open, and the air is clear enough, he can just make out the spire of Trinity church across the river. He imagines Eleanor sitting there alone, waiting for him to join her on his way home from administering to some jumped-up alderman’s self-induced dyspepsia. But when he slides onto the pew beside her, he discovers she is someone else entirely.
On most days the Jackdaw heaves with dice-players, coney-catchers, purse-cleavers and every other sort of hard-drinking, loud-throated sharp-trick you can put a name to. They sup raucously from leather bottle and tankard until their cheeks bloom. They play primero and hazard, the cards and the dice going down between the laden trenchers while young Timothy, the tap-boy, strums his cittern and sings sorrowful songs in a high voice about slain lovers and broken hearts. Sometimes Nicholas wants to tear the instrument from his fingers and throw it into the fire.
He dines in a corner of the taproom on pottage and maslin bread. Bianca joins him when she can. They develop an easy friendship, though he senses in her, too, an unspoken wariness that prevents anything deeper. Some pains are too expensively purchased to be traded carelessly, he thinks.
Bianca Merton.
Why does the name seem oddly familiar to him? For several days now he’s racked his memory. But it’s too brim-full of pain to see to the bottom clearly. It takes a while for the tiny nugget of recollection to float clear. Even then, it seems to have come from someone else’s memory, for it is surely a different Nicholas Shelby struggling to stay awake after the feast at the Guildhall on Knightrider Street, while he listens to President Baronsdale fulminating against the tricksters and fraudsters who practise illegal physic: Imagine it: a woman! A common Bankside tavern-mistress by the name of Merton. They say she concocts diverse unlicensed remedies, without any learning whatsoever!
A broad smile creases his face as he imagines Baronsdale learning the truth. And smiling seems just as much of a new experience as all the others he’s encountered recently.
Yet still Bianca does not volunteer where she got the theriac from.
He likes the simple tasks she sets him. They require no thought. Thought leads him inevitably to the darker places.
He realizes life cannot be easy for an unmarried maid trying her best to carve out a place for herself on Bankside. He’s noticed how her temper flares when she thinks some would-be gallant is paying her attention solely because he finds appealing the idea of a wife who could bring a profitable tavern to a marriage. But how to learn a little more about Bianca Merton, without it sounding like an interrogation?
She solves the dilemma for him. Over a late bowl of pottage one evening she lets slip that she’s been in England barely two years. ‘From Padua,’ she tells him when he gently probes further. She places her hands either side of her face, sets the thumbs at her jaw, then pushes the fingers back along the crown, running them through her hair as if she’s clearing the deck for action. ‘My father was an English merchant there,’ she tells him.
‘That explains the accent I can hear in your voice. It was puzzling me.’
‘My mother was Italian, but my father made me speak English always. He wanted me to assist him in his business with the Englishmen who came to Italy to trade,’ she explains. ‘And what of you?’
‘Me? I was born in Suffolk.’
‘Is that in England?’
‘Almost.’
‘And does everyone speak Latin there?’
He looks at her blankly. ‘Latin?’
‘You rambled in it – when I bathed your fever. You cursed too profanely to be a priest, and you’re not rich enough to be a lawyer. So I wondered if all Suffolk folk have it.’
This startles him. Until now he had not imagined the intimacy of her bathing his sweat-drenched body. He doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or grateful. So he blusters.
‘Oh, every man who has ambitions for his son has him learn Latin,’ he tells her breezily, looking at his fingertips. ‘We start at petty school. We’re reading Ovid by ten. If you can recite a few verses of the Bible in Latin, the magistrates will let you off your first capital crime with no more than a branding. Not that I’ve actually committed a capital crime – nothing above the occasional misdemeanour, really.’
‘So definitely not a bishop then?’
He shares her laughter. ‘And your father and mother – are they still in Padua?’
‘They’re both dead: my mother of the sweating sickness, these eight years past. My father died on the voyage to England. He was old, and it was a hard sea.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘The authorities in Padua may claim it’s an open city, but underneath they mistrust anyone from outside the Veneto, especially an Englishman. They thought him a threat. It was only a matter of time.’
‘It’s the same here. If the apprentice boys can’t push a foreigner off London Bridge when they parade, they count it a very poor year.’
She says, ‘I’ll make a note not to cross on feast days.’
First light on a raw November morning. Nicholas dreams that Eleanor lies beside him. She whispers softly that if he should ever sup in the Jackdaw’s taproom with Bianca Merton again, she will marry the wool merchant from Woodbridge with the comely calves who tried to court her while he was away in Holland. Nicholas is midway through his promise never to do so again when some sound, some groan or creak the Jackdaw makes as it emerges from its nightly torpor, wakes him. As he opens his eyes, the absence of Eleanor tugs at him like a retreating wave.