And indeed – to his surprise and joy – Nicholas finds himself beginning to smile at little things again; like the drayman they pass at the riverbank who’s trying to force an unwilling mare to drink, or the creaking of the sails of a windmill that sounds to Bianca like a parrot calling ee-nough… ee-nough…, which is what Timothy shouts at closing time. If it wasn’t for the ever-present dark current drifting sluggishly in the well of his soul, Nicholas might even feel carefree.
‘Will you stay long?’ Bianca asks as they follow the riverbank towards the Paris Garden. ‘You seem much recovered.’
‘I don’t know,’ he replies. ‘I had thought of perhaps going into Holland in the spring.’
‘For trade?’
He laughs. ‘No, I have no head for business.’
‘Then to fight – against the Spanish?’
This amuses him even more. ‘I’m not a soldier. I was a physician.’
‘Ah,’ she says, looking down at the hem of her gown. She has kept a list of possible occupations in her head. She’s been crossing them off as she’s grown to know him better. ‘I knew it would be something learned.’
‘I wasn’t much good at it. There was someone I couldn’t cure – someone very dear to me.’
She nods wisely. ‘Is that why you went into the river?’
A bold question. To his surprise, he finds it comforting, rather than intrusive. It’s the comfort of invited confession.
‘Yes. I think I wanted to pay God back, by committing the worst of sins – the self-destruction of His own creation. They say He loves us all. Well, I suppose I wanted to remind Him what it’s like to lose someone you love deeply.’
‘If a man should esteem me that much, I should think myself blessed.’
‘But I couldn’t even do that properly. The river spat me out.’ She looks at him in silence for a moment.
‘Good,’ she says, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Good.’
In the Paris Garden they eat coney roasted on a brazier. Afterwards they watch a bear dance to a jig his master plays on a hurdy-gurdy. The beast has a sorrowful look in his yellow eyes, as though he’s dreaming of distant forests. He seems quite tame. Bianca gives him an apple, which he chews with stumpy teeth.
As they walk back along the river, Nicholas picks his moment.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.’
‘Then ask it. Like that poor bear, I do not bite. At least, not too sharply.’
‘When I recovered from my fever, you told me you’d treated me with theriac.’
‘It worked, didn’t it? It appears not to have poisoned you.’
‘Theriac is a medicine of the ancients. The great Galen himself distilled it in the time of the Caesars. Its substance is known only to a few. I don’t know of more than a couple of physicians in London who have it.’
‘Is that so?’ she says, with a nonchalant smile playing on her mouth.
‘So how does a tavern-mistress come by it?’
‘Come with me,’ she says.
The journey does not take long. She says nothing as they walk. Her movements are swift but still graceful. English women, he thinks, don’t move like this. He has to hurry to keep up with her.
In the grim shadow of the Lazar House, just to the west of the Mutton Lane shambles, Bianca stops. Nicholas can smell the river, a pungent mix of mud and putrefaction just out of sight.
Perhaps it had been a house once, or a shop. All that remains of it now is a jumble of blackened bricks and charred timbers, left by the fire that destroyed it. Dead weeds and scraps of plaster lie around the rubble like grey silt. Rangy cats stalk rats amongst the wreckage. Bianca hoists up the hem of her gown. Nicholas follows her across the wasteland.
At the back of the plot is a wall of sagging brickwork and crooked timber, about ten feet high. He guesses it might have been the back wall of a courtyard once. It is pierced by a stone arch with an ancient door. Looming beyond the wall is the roof of the Lazar House itself.
Seen up close, the door looks as though it’s not been opened since Henry was on the throne. Yet to his surprise, when Bianca takes a key from the sleeve of her gown, it swings easily on new hinges.
‘Timothy’s father is a locksmith,’ she explains, seeing the look on his face. She beckons him through.
Immediately he is almost overwhelmed by the rich scents that even the November air cannot diminish: winter cherry, mugwort, asarabacca… He is standing in a small space between the adjacent buildings, open to the sky, perhaps thirty feet wide by twenty deep, bordered on the far side by the wall of the Lazar House garden.
‘It’s the poorest physic garden you ever will see,’ she says proudly, spreading her arms to tell him that, however humble, it’s still hers. ‘I have agrimony, toadflax, goatsbeard and comfrey. I can make an infusion of cudweed for aching bones, or a paste of juniper for the dropsy. I’ve pennyroyal for cleansing water, and borage to banish melancholy. In summer I sometimes come here just for the smell.’
He’s seen them before, of course, on his travels. He knows of a barber-surgeon named Gerard who has a garden in Holborn, mostly given over to medicinal herbs. He’d owned a copy of Turner’s Great Herbal and an edition of Bankes’s Treatise – until he sold them to Isaac Bredwell for sixpence each. But he’s not visited the gardens of either man, and as far as he knows, there’s not another private physic garden planted anywhere in England, and certainly not in a patch of waste ground beside the Thames. Now he understands where Bianca Merton goes when she slips away from the Jackdaw.
‘You told me you weren’t an apothecary,’ he says, trying to suppress a grin as he rubs leaves of winter cherry in his palm, smelling the deep scents on his fingertips.
‘I told you no such thing. I told you–’
‘I know what you told me – that day at the Jackdaw, you told me to look out of the window at the tavern sign. You asked me if it was the sign of an apothecary.’
‘And was it?’
‘You know full well it wasn’t.’
‘So there was no lie, was there?’
‘Bianca Merton, you dissemble worse than a fellow of the College of Physicians.’
She smiles sweetly.
‘So why are you the mistress of a tavern on Bankside and not a licensed apothecary with a shop on Cheapside?’
‘Because the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London do not approve of women apothecaries,’ she says hotly. ‘Nor do the Grocers’ Guild and the College of Physicians. They think women should have no place in physic, that we should confine ourselves to mixing paste to sooth the feet of sick cattle.’ She brushes away a lock of hair that has fallen across her brow. Her fingers leave a small streak of dirt and crushed thyme leaf on her skin. ‘And they have set those fine men of the Grocers’ Guild to search out anyone who so much as dries a bunch of herbs in the fireplace.’
‘The Grocers’ Guild has been given its authority to license apothecaries by the queen, to stamp out–’ He stops, realizing he’s about to hurl a boulder into a millpond.
‘Go on, say it,’ she snaps. ‘Charlatans. That’s the word you were thinking of, isn’t it? If I were a charlatan, Nicholas Shelby, you’d be cold in your grave, not standing here defending those bores in the Grocers’ Guild.’
‘I’m not defending them,’ he insists, holding up the palms of his hands as a gesture of peace. He can’t help smiling at her vehemence.
‘Perhaps if I were to wear a horse-hair beard and dress like a man,’ she says, turning with her arms outstretched, so that he might imagine the unlikely spectacle, ‘would that make me more acceptable to the Grocers’ Guild?’