And just before the next approaching wave of hallucinations breaks over her, the spinning of the world slows. The blurred earth comes again into sharp focus, its patterns once more familiar.
There – just a few yards ahead, slightly to the left! Is that what I think it is? Yes! Mother, let me lick my fingers, just this once – so I’ll know for sure.
Bianca takes her chance. She breaks free from the man with the damaged face who is guiding her, but is not Nicholas. She runs as fast as she can – though she knows full well there’s nowhere to escape to. He’s not expecting her break for freedom and she manages to put a little distance between them. But there’s no strength in her legs. She falls, sprawling headlong in the undergrowth.
But it’s enough. She’s made it. All she has to do now is hope they haven’t understood. For a moment she just lies there, with slow, quiet sobs of relief racking her body, while her hands claw frantically at the decaying scrub around her as if she’s trying to fashion herself a nest. When the man reaches her, she lashes out with her feet – not so much as to hurt him as to buy herself more time.
‘Take care,’ says Kat Vaesy gently into her left ear, arriving to help Quigley pin her to the ground. ‘You don’t want to harm yourself. Come, Mistress Merton – we have work to do.’
47
Having set a match to the powder trail, Nicholas discovers the resulting explosion doesn’t go quite where he’d anticipated.
When he attempts to raise the matter of the Lazar House, not one head turns in his direction. It’s as if men of this rarefied elevation have too much of their own sun in their eyes to see his sort. Hunsdon wants to send word to the ports and harbours to shut up the exits. Knollys wants to arrest every recusant in the land, just to be on the safe side. Essex wants to go to the queen and get put in charge of everything.
So Nicholas gets Lumley to intercede.
‘My lords, Dr Shelby here has a view on where Quigley may seek refuge.’
The grand heads finally turn.
‘I believe he sometimes uses the empty Lazar House on Bankside,’ Nicholas says, his mouth suddenly tinder-dry. He adds for effect, ‘It would be the ideal place for him to hold secret Masses.’
‘In addition,’ adds Lumley, setting his jaw against what he must say next, ‘I would recommend someone rides to Cold Oak manor at Vauxhall. Lady Katherine Vaesy may well be harbouring him. She’s an associate.’
‘They can arrest that charlatan of her husband while they’re about it,’ grunts Knollys. ‘Never did trust the fellow. Wouldn’t let him physic a lame horse.’
Burghley nods his assent.
After that, Nicholas knows the powder blast will go where he intends. If Quigley is taken, he can protest that he’s not a Jesuit until he’s blue in the face. Denounced by Lumley, and with the contents of Francis Deniker’s pine box for evidence, these men will not hesitate to deliver him to the mercies of one Master Richard Topcliffe.
The very thought of the man makes the hairs on the back of Nicholas’s neck lift. When he was young, his mother would invoke the threat of Topcliffe whenever she wanted to frighten him into good behaviour. The boys in his class at petty school called their most feared teacher Topcliffe.
Richard Topcliffe – the man who will happily apply more than enough bone-breaking pressure to Gabriel Quigley’s limbs for him to confess to whatever it is Knollys and the rest of them desire. Richard Topcliffe – the Privy Council’s tame tormenter of the ungodly and the treasonous; the queen’s gentleman torturer-in-chief. Once delivered into his clutches, Quigley can howl that he’s only a harmless murderer until his screams beat against the walls of his cell like the clapper of the bell of doom. But the pain won’t stop until Topcliffe hears the words ‘I willingly confess to treason’.
After that, there will be no more eviscerated bodies troubling the wherry passengers of Bankside.
They have brought her to a room high up in the eaves – a dark, dusty place with a small grimy window she can’t see out of. They have chained her by one ankle. She can’t move more than a short distance in any direction. Through some warped sense of compassion, they’ve let her lie on one of half a dozen filthy mattresses scattered around the chamber.
‘When will it be? We can’t have much time left,’ she hears the woman ask.
‘Soon,’ comes a harshly masculine reply. ‘This is too important to hurry; I have to cast an astrological matrix for guidance. I’m not just going to cut her up like a village butcher. Mathew would not want it so.’ Then they close the door on her and slide home the bolt.
Lying curled up on the mattress, Bianca fights against the waves of nausea and confusion that sweep over her as the poison she’s drunk works on her body. She wonders if Ralph Cullen or Jacob Monkton slept on this very pallet, suffered these same wild visions, had their will and control of their limbs stolen away from them in the same manner. Then she decides it doesn’t matter if they did – she does not intend to die like them.
But she knows that soon the hallucinations will return. She wonders how long she has: minutes? Hours? She slithers as close to the door as the chain will allow. Listening for footsteps beyond, she has to battle the noisy thudding of her heart. When she’s satisfied there’s no one nearby, she moves back to the mattress.
Reaching into her gown, Bianca pulls out a few of the leaves she’d gathered so frantically when she’d thrown herself headlong into the wilderness outside the Lazar House. She prays to all the saints that what she’d seen there was not a part of the hallucination; that the knowledge her mother has bequeathed her has not played her false. She holds the leaves to her nose, rubs them between her fingertips. At once the sharp scent of ginger rises like smoke from a chafing dish. She whispers just one word of blessed relief, like an incantation: Asarabacca!
In England, Bianca knows, they call the plant hazelwort. She hopes the English variety is as good a purgative as the one her mother used to give her when she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have – like the time she tried to lick her poisoned fingers.
There’s no possibility of making an infusion; she’ll just have to eat the leaves raw. Look on the bright side, she tells herself: they’ll work faster that way. The only question is: did I manage to gather enough?
She puts the leaves into her mouth and begins to chew. The taste of them makes her face pucker. Her whole body cries out to her: Spit the vile stuff out – now!
But there’s no going back. This is her only hope. Bianca swallows the pulp and waits for the pain to start.
Burghley has given Nicholas a private wherry for the journey to Bankside. He’s detailed four of his men as crew – tough, weatherbeaten little fellows. Nicholas suspects they’re former sailors from Effingham’s fleet.
The captain of this small band is a leathery-skinned man named Brabant. He sports a pigtail and a brass earring. At his belt is slung a sword and buckler. There’s a violent energy about him that seems barely constrained. He’s one of those fearsome English privateers who keep the protests flowing from the Spanish ambassador, whenever a Don ship gets taken up and its cargo appropriated by the Treasury. The only thing that seems to give him pause is the thought of contracting leprosy.
‘This lazar hospital – I’ve seen how quickly contagion can spread through a mess-deck,’ he says as he settles himself deftly into the boat, leaving Nicholas to follow, in his own ungainly landlubber’s way.