Bredwell looks around theatrically. ‘They say she has the healing touch of St Brigid. She can make a talisman to ward off almost every known medical trial, short of rigor mortis. It’s even rumoured she took baptism as a cloak, and in secret venerates the old gods, practises magical cures learned in ancient times.’
‘Is that so?’ asks Nicholas, who happens to know the going rate for denouncing your neighbour as a secret Catholic or a witch. As a physician, he’d received more than one letter that began ‘In the discharge of my Duty to our Sovereign Majesty, I must draw your attention to Diverse Faults in the conduct of the said mistress…’ Usually they were from spurned suitors or jealous neighbours.
‘Someone at the Tabard told me he’d seen her – with his own eyes, mind – in the dead of night, sailing in the sky in the shape of a bat with a woman’s face!’
Nicholas tries not to laugh, but fails. ‘I’m sorry, Master Bredwell, I don’t wish to offend, but I suggest you ask the quarter sessions to investigate what the Tabard is putting in its ale.’
‘You may mock me, Mister Shelby,’ Bredwell says in a hurt voice, ‘but no heretic can escape the bonfire for long, nor any witch for that matter. Just remember this: they burned a woman in the Spital fields last Pentecost, for casting a charm that poisoned her master’s Rhenish wine.’
‘Blame bad wine on the vintner, Master Bredwell; not on some poor woman who can scarcely afford small-beer,’ says Nicholas, trying to keep the anger from his voice and not entirely succeeding.
But Bredwell isn’t to be deflected. He leans a little too close for Nicholas’s comfort and warns, ‘Take my advice, Physician: when that bonfire is lit, make sure you’re not standing too close to the flames.’
When the vintner from across the river walks into the Jackdaw – alone – Bianca confines her anger to a secret jab with her heel against the foot of the bench. Her sideways glance at Rose says, ‘We should have expected as much – Nicholas has run off with my penny!’
She knows her temper is somewhat volatile. In Padua, her mother used to call her Signora Zanzara, after the biting insects that plagued their summers. Trying to be rational, she asks herself if Nicholas would really make a run for it with just one penny of her hard-earned coin in his pocket. Frettoloso – hasty. Something else her mother used to say of her.
As the vintner extols the quality of his malmsey, Bianca finds herself blushing. She fans her face with one hand; resolves to have Timothy damp down the fire. But underneath she’s cursing. It’s dawned on her that she hasn’t put on her white Haarlem blouse and the cornelian bodice for the vintner’s benefit at all. Rose was right, damn her to perdition. I must be going soft in the head, she tells herself.
In Padua there had been any number of fellows seeking her father’s permission to pay suit to her. But God had given her eyes, hadn’t He? She’d seen how Italian men were, once all the over-elaborate corteggiamento was done with – interested in nothing but their guilds, their societies and their reputations.
When she’d left Italy, she’d been interested to see the mettle of her father’s own race. The only ones she’d had any contact with before that were the merchants who passed through her father’s house, bringing their spices, plants and curiosities from foreign lands. They were all serious-minded men of business, full of charters, bonds, conditions and parcels vendible. Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull.
On the voyage she’d been astonished by the English sailors: strange, weather-beaten little men who could climb rigging like monkeys, who carried charms of aquamarine to calm the waves and the storms, but whose speech she couldn’t understand – apart from the profanities and blasphemies that seemed to make up most of their vocabulary.
They can’t all be like this, she’d told herself. And indeed, when they docked at Tilbury, she’d discovered they weren’t. But they weren’t much better.
She had rapidly come to the conclusion that there appeared to be only two types of native male: silk-gloved gallants who thought God had made woman solely to provide a subject for their sonnets or to breed their sons; and the rest – pasty, ill-mannered rogues with a fondness for bear-baiting, cock-fighting, thieving and falling over drunk. And to think she’d begun to hope that Nicholas Shelby might be different–
The vintner is looking at her with a satisfied gleam in his eyes. God’s wounds! She’s just agreed a price a full ha’penny a barrel above what she’d intended. She curses Nicholas and all his works.
‘I wonder if the Mutton Lane stairs are open again,’ the vintner says as he gets up to leave. ‘We had to land by the Falcon tavern. There was a body in the water – off Mutton Lane.’
Bianca starts as if she’s just been slapped: hard.
‘A body? What sort of body?’ she asks, a cold stone of dread forming in her stomach.
‘I don’t know. I was too far off to see.’
She keeps her composure barely long enough for the vintner to reach the door. As he disappears down the lane, Rose has to steady her. It’s a while before she can persuade her mistress to take her hand from in front of her mouth.
‘Jesu, Rose,’ Bianca whispers, ‘you don’t think he’s gone and–’
‘Don’t be foolish, Mistress,’ Rose says, giving her a gentle shake that at any other time would be unforgivably familiar. ‘He’ll be back, by and by.’ She pours her mistress a shot of the malmsey sample the vintner has left behind.
And then, as if on cue, Nicholas walks in.
Bianca’s expression travels from relief to rage and back to somewhere in between. He’s too far away to hear her muttered welcome: stupido farabutto!
‘They shut the Mutton Lane stairs,’ he says apologetically. ‘Somebody drowned.’
He says no more than that, knowing the details will be common knowledge by sunset. He’s not yet ready to trust her with his conviction there’s a killer on the loose on Bankside. He thinks to himself, there’s too much I don’t know about you, not least where you go when you slip away so furtively from the Jackdaw when you think no one is looking.
When he wakes the next morning the attic is flooded with a bright winter light. Opening the little window, he breathes the crisp, cold air surging in like a wave foaming into a rock-pool. Across the river the church spires stand out sharply against the early sunshine. From somewhere close by comes the sound of Bianca singing as she and Rose air the lodging-room sheets. She has a fine voice, he notices. The faint accent of the Veneto gives it a richness he hasn’t heard before.
At breakfast she tells him she has no urgent tasks; the morning is his own. He thinks he will visit the parish authorities, tell them what he knows: that the little lad taken from the Wildgoose stairs and Jacob Monkton were killed by the same person. Perhaps they might listen to him now. But then Bianca suggests a walk to the Paris Garden.
The notion appeals. The fresh air might help him think. He can’t remember the last occasion he made time for simple pleasures. Surely a few idle hours passed in pleasant company can’t hurt.
As they walk their breath hangs in the air like ghostly smoke. If you didn’t know better, you might take them for a couple at the tentative beginnings of a courtship. They have an easy way about them: he in the buffin coat, walking with a slow swing of his Suffolk yeoman son’s shoulders; she in the green brocade kirtle, occasionally dipping her head as she laughs at something he’s said. But that is where it ends. Each of them has secrecy in their blood. Perhaps today is the day to wash a little of it out.