The attic is bathed in a watery grey light that spills grudgingly through the leaded window. He throws the latch to let in the cold morning air. Looking down, he sees the alley is empty, the houses opposite emerging only slowly from the shadows.
Then, below him, he hears the door of the Jackdaw open.
Even wrapped in a thick cloak and hood, he knows it’s Bianca. She looks up and down the lane, as though checking to see if she’s alone. Then, apparently satisfied, she sets off in the direction of the Mutton Lane shambles.
Where is she going at this early hour? he wonders idly. If it’s an errand, she’d send Timothy, or Rose. And why has she lowered the latch so carefully as she steps out into the new morning, as though she wants to avoid making the slightest noise? Is it because she fears someone will, by pure chance, look out of a window and see her?
It happens again – three times over the following week. Three times he watches her slip furtively away from the Jackdaw in the early hours. On each occasion he’s woken by the soft creak of her feet on the stairs. The latest was this morning, just as dawn was breaking. His last glimpse of her – before cursing himself for a suspicious busybody and carefully closing the window, lest she hear him – was as a fleeting shadow, barely visible beneath the sign of the basket-maker on the corner of Black Bull Alley.
Why do I do it? he asks himself. Why do I ease open the window with a guilty heart, just so I can peer out into the lane to observe her? The old Nicholas wasn’t a snoop. Why does the new one want to spy on his benefactor? Perhaps it’s for the same reason I want to know where she got the theriac from, he tells himself. Or perhaps it’s because simple trust is no longer enough.
Later, when the Jackdaw is fully awake, he finds Bianca in the kitchen. She’s making entries in her tally book in a small, confident hand. She looks up, framing her brow with slender fingers and running them back through her hair. It’s a habit, he’s noticed.
‘Ah, Nicholas. I’m glad to see you up and about. Will you do me a small service?’
‘Of course. Name it.’
‘Go down to the Mutton Lane stairs. Meet a wherry for me. About eleven, depending on the tide.’
‘Visitors?’
‘A merchant coming across from the Vintry. He’s got a shipment of imported malmsey. My present supplier’s decided he wants an additional sixpence a cask just for the risk of doing business in Southwark. I don’t want this one falling prey to the dabs and purse-divers before I get the chance to wring a good price out of him.’
He asks, as casually as he knows how, ‘Sleep well, last night?’
The answer is a pretty smile and a flash of those brilliant amber eyes.
‘Like the infant Jesus in the arms of Mary. And you?’
When Nicholas steps out of the Jackdaw he finds Bankside teeming with people. What’s brought them onto the street? he wonders. A new play on at the Rose? A bear-baiting in the Paris Garden? Then he remembers the date. It’s the seventeenth day of November: Accession Day. We’re celebrating the anointing of our sovereign lady, England’s Gloriana, our most noble, high and puissant Elizabeth.
For warmth he’s borrowed a buffin-lined coat, a forfeit for an unpaid tab at the Jackdaw. The frost snaps noisily beneath his boots. Outside St Mary Overie the urchins are begging alms from passers-by, their young faces as hard and grey as the winter sky. In the doorways of the stews the doxies huddle together and hope for trade, if only for a few brief moments of promised heat. A flat smoke-haze hangs above the chimneys. The Tabard is doing a brisk trade in steaming sack-posset; but Nicholas knows he’ll have to hurry if he’s to make the Mutton Lane stairs on time.
In the pale mid-morning light, the houses hugging the far bank of the Thames look no more solid than their watery reflections. They’re the frontier of a foreign land he can’t remember visiting.
On the way to the Mutton Lane stairs he passes the old Lazar House. Once home to Southwark’s lepers, it stands now like an empty prison amongst the close-packed tenements of uneven timber beams and sagging brickwork. It’s lain empty and abandoned since before Elizabeth’s reign even began. Yet its grim, forbidding air remains. Not even vagrants seek shelter here, as Nicholas himself can attest. He’s not superstitious, but he can’t help muttering as he hurries by, ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine’ – grant them eternal rest, O Lord.
His use of the Latin makes him realize how free he is, here in Southwark. If anyone across the river heard him muttering prayers in Latin, they’d probably denounce him for a papist.
At the Mutton Lane shambles they’re preparing the last of the winter pigs driven in from the Kentish fields. The steam from their slaughtered carcasses billows into the still air. The lane reeks of blood, offal and damp hog-skin. There’s a small knot of people on the jetty, waiting to catch a boat across or, like Nicholas, for a passenger to arrive.
No one pays him much attention. And why should they? He looks a deal better today than the last time he came this way. Beneath the buffin-lined coat he’s still wearing his white canvas doublet, but Rose has managed to get most of the stains out of it, pounding away with the black-soap as though she was trying to exorcise his demons for him. She’s darned his hose. Timothy has brushed his boots. His hair is still unkempt and there’s a lingering look in his eyes that warns you to step aside, but his beard is trimmed tight against his jaw and neat enough. These days the watchmen hardly recognize him. And he doesn’t stink of knock-down any more.
As he approaches the end of the jetty he hears a shout, swiftly followed by another. He looks out over the ranks of spiteful little wave-crests. A wherry is holding off just beyond the shore.
And between the boat and the stairs, arms outstretched as though exhausted after swimming a vast distance, a body falls and rises on the tide.
Elise squats by an empty crossroad, watchful like the hind in the forest. She is watching for the Devil.
The Devil has many disguises. If he can assume the form of a woman, an angel even, then how easy will it be for him to take the form of the waggoner who passed by a few moments ago, or whoever next comes down the road?
There are only a few people Elise can be certain are definitely not the Devil. The widow Alice Welford is one of them.
In the days before Mary took them off to the Cardinal’s Hat, Alice Welford would look after her and Ralph when Mary either couldn’t or wouldn’t. No, Alice would have been a disguise even the Devil could not have contrived.
Then there were those whom Elise had met in the Devil’s cage. She acquits them now in her memory: first, the two women who sat from dawn to dusk just hugging each other. One had empty sockets in her face where her eyes should have been. She wore a little bell on a cord around her neck, which tinkled softy as she rocked back and forth smiling sightlessly at nothing. Then the young fellow, spindly and warped, who endlessly brushed the palm of one hand across his cheek. And she can acquit, too, the old man with the wispy beard and just one hand, who’d asked her name four times before she realized he forgot the instant she told him.