Black Bull Alley is empty when Bianca reaches the Magdalene. But she feels no alarm. If Katherine Vaesy is here, she can know nothing of what Bianca has discovered. Nevertheless, she’s caught off-guard when the door is opened by a well-dressed but brittle-faced woman in her late thirties, wearing a smart winter gown of russell worsted. Can this be her: the woman who was all over Nicholas like a rash of the buboes?
‘Mistress Merton – from the Jackdaw?’ enquires the woman, peering past Bianca into the lane to see if she’s brought company.
‘Yes. And who are you?’
‘Mistress Warren. I was passing by when I found the poor woman lying close to death on the doorstep. I had no idea what manner of place this was, but they told me you were skilled in apothecary. Come in – quickly.’
Her mind set at ease, Bianca ducks below the sagging lintel.
She finds herself in a press of hot, unwashed bodies. Fingers prod her skin. Stroke her gown. Tug at her hair, as if she’s one of those exotic creatures that princes keep in their menageries. She recoils from the stench of sweat, rancid food and those human emanations that come with the flux. In the half-light from a small, high window all she can see is a moving huddle of rags and grey human limbs that look as though they belong to the already dead. And watching, while they mob her, is a man with a face like pitted slate.
‘Come to join us, Mistress Purity?’ calls one of the inmates in a voice harsh and throaty. ‘We’s all friends here!’
‘I know her – she was here asking questions a while ago,’ says the vegetable woman, the only remotely familiar face in the entire place.
‘Come to rob us, more like!’ shouts another voice.
‘Quick, Gondall, hit her with your piss-pot!’
‘I can’t – it’s been made away with,’ cries the woman Gondall.
‘The thief’s stolen Gondall’s piss-pot!’ shrieks someone else.
‘Mercy, it’s not a thief,’ says the first woman. ‘It’s the Virgin Mary come to wash away all our sins.’
‘It shocked me too, at first,’ says the woman who calls herself Mistress Warren, as she eases Bianca onto a small bench beneath a high casement that lets in minimal light. ‘We shouldn’t blame them. They’re as deserving of God’s love as the mightiest in the land.’
‘Here, have some of this. It’ll calm the nerves,’ says the man with the pumice face, offering Bianca a clay jug. His mouth is a little too close to her ear for comfort. ‘Not as fine as the Jackdaw’s, I’m sure. But it will serve.’
Bianca takes a mouthful. It tastes unusual, but not at all unpleasant. It’s sweet – refreshing. She takes another gulp. Then a few more, until her heart stops pounding.
‘That’s it – don’t stop. It’ll fortify you,’ the woman says, smiling.
‘No, really, I’m fine,’ says Bianca, not wanting to appear like a wilting flower in the presence of such suffering.
‘You’ll feel better for it, I promise you,’ says the woman kindly. ‘I was the same the first time I came here.’
It’s as though someone has slapped her. Bianca thrusts the jug at the woman. ‘The first time? But you said just now you’d no idea what manner of place–’
‘Drink,’ snaps the woman in an altogether harsher tone than Bianca feels is called for.
And then – somehow without her noticing – the man has pinioned her arms. Her bag of balms and ointments falls to the floor. It’s quickly snatched away by the woman called Gondall.
Mistress Warren pulls Bianca’s head back by the hair. She starts pouring the liquid directly into Bianca’s open, protesting mouth. Bianca slams her jaw shut. But the ale flows into her nostrils. She can’t breathe. She can’t stop her mouth from gaping open.
Her last clear sight, before her vision begins to blur, is of the inmate Gondall waving the balm bag to and fro – as if to say: who has your knife now, fool?
Burghley is the most influential man in the realm, yet it takes even his great engine of power a while to lurch into motion.
The other members of the Privy Council present at the interrupted conference must be summoned: Hunsdon, the queen’s chamberlain; Lord Howard of Effingham, her Lord High Admiral; Francis Knollys, the Puritan scourge of heretics everywhere, who appears sniffing like a deer-hound tracking a scent. Five minutes later the young Earl of Essex sweeps in on a tide of gloriously clad acolytes. They wear his tangerine ribbons on the tops of their boots and their beards are oiled and primped. They deliver the noble earl to Burghley’s table and sweep out again, like a wave casting up a pearl on a beach.
The last to arrive is Robert Cecil. He comes in wearing a black silk gown and his boots crackle against the flagstones, reminding Nicholas of a cockroach scuttling over a kitchen floor. He glares impotently at John Lumley, like a schoolboy who’s had his nose tweaked by his teacher. He does not acknowledge Nicholas.
But Nicholas has his own thoughts to keep himself occupied, thoughts that have been troubling him throughout the journey here; thoughts such as: does a new lock on an old door mean anything at all? And did I – or did I not – mention Bianca Merton’s name when I told Gabriel Quigley I’d seen the bodies?
She’s in the open air. But where? And when?
The visions come to Bianca in waves: brilliant hallucinations at the crest, moments of near-lucidity in the troughs.
On one of the crests she’s in the garden of her parents’ house in Padua, bathed in eye-straining sunlight that makes everything around her twice as sharp as usual. She can hear the sounds of chickens pecking in the dirt. She can hear her mother telling her how to mix a draught to make your enemy do your bidding: This much of hellebore root… lide-lilly for a pleasant smell… This many seeds of black henbane… and if still they persecute you, hemlock… until it rids you of their troublesome presence entirely…
But she cannot be in Padua. Though there’s sunlight, the air here is too cold. And it cannot be her mother speaking. Her mother is buried in the plot beside the old church on the hill, the plot that Father Rossi tends so lovingly – though he must be ninety now, if he’s a day, and can barely lift the rake.
Once, aged nine, she’d dipped a finger in a concoction her mother had been mixing and lifted it to her lips. Her current fantasy had been that of a spurned lover determined upon death; she’d wanted to know what poison tastes like. Her mother had beaten her mercilessly – out of love, of course.
Now, in a brief interlude of clarity, she realizes what the man with the ruined face and the woman who seems to direct him have done to her. She knows what was in the liquid they forced her to drink. She knows also that she’s standing in the wilderness surrounding the Lazar House, staring up at its forbidding walls.
How did I get here? she asks. There must be some passageway or door, between the Magdalene and the Lazar House grounds, though she can’t remember passing through one. ‘Look, Nicholas,’ she says out loud, her voice slurred, ‘that’s how they bring them here. In through the almshouse, out through the culvert and into the river. See? It’s obvious now.’ She’s elated at having shown him a truth he’d been unable to find for himself. ‘Didn’t think of that, did you? – Master Nicholas Shelby, the oh-so-clever physician who lives in a palace and doesn’t write. Hurry back, because soon it will be your turn to fish me out of the river. Only this time, you’ll need more than theriac to cure me.’