‘Not really. But it might confuse a few at the Tabard.’
She stops turning and gives him a hard stare. ‘The Tabard?’
‘One Isaac Bredwell, bookseller, in particular. He’s convinced you’re a wise-woman, or worse. One of his drunken friends says he saw you flying down Black Bull Alley in the shape of a bat.’
Bianca peals with delight, her anger instantly forgotten. ‘Oh, God’s blood that I was able! I would sink my fangs into Master Bredwell and then refuse to make him a balm to relieve the sting.’
‘You know him?’
‘He paid court to me when I arrived on Bankside. He seemed to think I would beg him to make me respectable. He’s sixty, if he’s a day. And he smells of ink. If he touches anything, he leaves a smudge.’
‘What happened?’
‘What do you think happened? I spurned him.’
‘Kindly?’
‘Not really.’
‘That explains a lot.’
‘Why must people like him always think that a maid who seeks her own path must have a familiar and… and… fly across the face of the moon at midnight?’
‘You own a tavern, you tell me. Perhaps you should water your ale a little.’
She gives him a friendly push. It’s the first time a woman has touched him since Eleanor. Then he thinks of the hours she must have spent mopping the sweat from his body and feeding him her healing potions. A warm wave of gratitude flows over him.
‘You still haven’t told me how you make the theriac,’ he says. ‘There’s more to it than just herbs. Galen put snake-flesh into his. Don’t tell me you have your own pit of serpents – I think I’d believe you, if you did.’
‘I brought some vials with me from Italy. They were my father’s.’
‘So you come from a line of apothecaries–’
‘A proud line.’
‘You told me your father was a merchant.’
‘Well, in a manner of speaking, he was. We lived in rooms above his warehouse full of dried plants, spices, alligator skins, horns of the narwhal – you name it, Father probably had a sack of it somewhere. You could call him a merchant of cures.’
As the light begins to fade, Bianca suggests they return to the Jackdaw. By the time they reach Black Bull Alley, Nicholas has rehearsed the words sufficiently to tell her about the child on Vaesy’s dissection table and the real nature of Jacob Monkton’s death. Just telling someone will be a huge relief. But he knows that once those rehearsed words are out of his mouth, the bond he has begun to forge with Bianca will change for ever. It will not be a gift he is giving her, it will be a terrible burden. He’s about to speak – reluctantly – when a voice suddenly breaks into his thoughts.
‘Mercy, what have we here?’
‘Well, talk of the Devil,’ whispers Bianca.
At the end of the lane stands the bookseller, Isaac Bredwell. Beside him is a huge fellow of about twenty with fiery auburn hair, his face red-veined and sweaty with drink. Around his great stomach is tied a grubby leather apron. He wears a cloth cap on his head and his great fists rest on his hips, elbows thrust aggressively wide.
‘Ned Monkton,’ Bianca whispers in Nicholas’s ear, ‘the brother of the boy they found at the Mutton Lane stairs yesterday. He looks drunk.’ She gives the two men a direct and confident smile. ‘Go back to your father, Ned,’ she says calmly. ‘He needs you. There’s no profit for you here, troubling innocent folk out for a walk.’
Nicholas can’t help staring at Ned Monkton. He looks the sort of fellow to steer clear of, especially when he’s in his cups. Has he been on the ale because of Jacob? he wonders. He must know about his brother’s death by now. Even if the constable didn’t send him word personally, news travels fast on Bankside. He can hear the voice of the bystander on the jetty: If Ned sees him like this, he’ll start knocking holes in the brickwork. You know what he’s like…
Ned Monkton bares his teeth in a grin that’s halfway towards a snarl. He swaggers closer, leering at Bianca, seemingly oblivious to Nicholas’s presence. The ale has made him bold.
‘If the witch here don’t want you, Isaac,’ he says, ‘maybe she’s ripe for a younger buck. What say you – witch?’
It has not escaped Nicholas’s notice that, apart from the four of them, the lane is empty. Nor does he need to study Ned Monkton’s flushed face or his belligerent posture to know he is not a man likely to be agreeable to reason. ‘Be peaceable, friend,’ he says softly. ‘We mean you no ill. Let us pass.’
‘Away, friend,’ spits Ned Monkton, pushing Nicholas aside without even glancing at him.
‘Ned, your father wouldn’t like to see you like this,’ Bianca says, standing her ground. ‘Hasn’t he suffered enough?’
But Ned isn’t listening to her. ‘Witch-whore,’ he growls viciously. ‘Papist witch-whore!’
Whatever sympathy Nicholas might have felt for this man vanishes instantly. It’s been a while since he was in a proper fight. He’d been too drunk to remember much of the scrap that left him bloodied in the Greyfriars cemetery, and throwing the occasional rowdy out of the Jackdaw doesn’t really count as serious face-to-face bloodletting. But he knows, from treating knife and sword wounds, that London street brawls can quickly turn fatal, and if he’s learned anything in medicine it’s that a speedy cure is usually the best cure. So without warning, he hits Ned Monkton just below the corner of the left eye with all the force he can throw into his fist.
It’s a lucky shot. Monkton’s legs give way like a poleaxed heifer. He sags in an untidy heap in the mud. Nick is about to give him a kick in the groin to make sure he’s not going to get up in a hurry, when Isaac Bredwell strikes him on the back of his head with something very solid.
As Nicholas goes down, he’s taunted by a fleeting image: a wooden cudgel lying against a volume of Italian poetry. He hears Bredwell’s voice toll like a deep bell. ‘You should have listened to me when you had the chance, Shelby. I tried to be charitable.’
Nicholas sprawls in the dirt, the stench of horse-dung rank in his nostrils. The back of his skull seems to be ablaze. Clusters of fireflies swarm across his vision. The whole lane seems to have filled with a red fog. Ned Monkton is back on his feet, bending over him. And that indistinct gleam where Monkton’s hand should be must be the blade of a knife. He can almost feel the razor edge of it tearing through his stomach.
And then he hears Bianca’s voice.
She is speaking in a strange, low monotone that chills his blood even more than the expectation of the knife. It’s so far from the warm lilt of her singing that it seems to be coming from another woman entirely.
‘I curse thee, Ned Monkton,’ she is intoning, ‘I curse thee so thy limbs shall become serpents and their venom turn thy blood to fire… I curse thee that thou shall crawl upon thy belly in blindness through the slime… I curse thee to be the Devil’s sport and burn in brimstone for eternity… I curse thee, Ned Monkton, that thine eyes and thy privy member be made the feast of worms and all loathsome things that slither in the pit of hell…’
Now it is winter. Her bones are rods of ice that seem to chill her from within. The old burn on the right side of her face feels as though icy fingers are pinching and twisting the skin there. Sometimes the chattering of her teeth and the shivering of her body make Elise believe there is some frenzied creature trapped inside her, fighting to escape. When it rains, she cannot sleep for the rattling of the branches; when it’s dry, the ground is too hard to give her comfort.