A candle burning behind a wooden grille. Another door opening. A room smaller than the one she has come from. A chapel, of sorts, set deep inside the Lazar House.
As her eyes grow accustomed to the glow of the candle’s flame, Bianca sees faded images of the saints staring at her from the walls and wonders: Have they killed me already? Have the angels come to take pity on another martyr?
A low archway, barely more than a deeper patch of blackness. A yawing mouth with only the bottom teeth left in it – like Father Rossi’s. But the teeth are a curving flight of ancient stone steps leading down into Purgatory.
She must break free now, before it is too late.
But where will she go? She has no knowledge of her surroundings. She’d just blunder about helplessly until they caught her again. Then they’d tie her hands and feet.
No, I must choose the moment carefully. I will get just one chance.
The Mutton Lane shambles is silent now, but Nicholas can smell the place from the wherry. The iron perfume of butchery still lingers in the air. It even rises from the river, where the unwanted offal of the day’s slaughtering has been dumped. Nicholas takes it as a dreadful warning.
‘You want to stop at a tavern?’ says Brabant incredulously when they’re standing on the jetty. ‘How shall I tell His Grace we lost a Jesuit, all because you fancy a jug of knock-down?’
‘I don’t fancy a jug of anything,’ says Nicholas hotly. ‘Mistress Merton is a witness, and I fear Quigley may intend her harm. Besides, to reach the Lazar House from here you have to pass the Jackdaw. I just want to make sure.’
When he enters the taproom it feels like a homecoming. The tang of wood-smoke and hops, the dry scent of the rushes on the floor, the herbs Bianca sets in the nooks and crannies are more pleasing to him than the aroma of a prince’s bejewelled pomander. Even Ned Monkton is there. Nicholas spots him at once, deep in conversation with Rose. Nicholas decides to bring him along. If anyone deserves to be in at the kill, it’s Ned.
But when Nicholas hails him, Ned turns towards him with eyes harrowed by worry. ‘God’s wounds! Thank Christ you’ve come,’ he growls. ‘She’s been gone since yesterday – and the woe is all my doing!’
She has been led almost to the bottom of a deep, dark well.
She is buried so far in the earth that in the spring her limbs will turn into pale shoots, forcing their way upwards until she spills out into the sunlight in a profusion of sweet-smelling flowers. A girl with an interest in herbs will pass by, pluck her leaves, set them in a bowl and make a heady infusion to place beside her pillow to help her dream.
But first must come the small matter of her death.
49
‘When she didn’t return, I went looking for her,’ Ned says as they leave the Jackdaw behind, heading at a brisk pace for the physic garden. He’s brought a blazing torch to augment Brabant’s lantern. By its light Nicholas can see how much he blames himself. ‘At the Magdalene they said she’d already left, with a man and a woman. I couldn’t get any sense out of them. They’re all much like my Jacob in there.’
‘It’s not your fault, Ned; you weren’t to know it was a trap,’ Nicholas says for at least the third time. ‘When her mind’s made up, that’s it.’
‘I found the overseer – but he was that drunk he wouldn’t have noticed if the Pope had dropped by, asking for a bed for the night.’
They press on through the darkened lanes. Nicholas carries the key to the physic garden door, given to him by Rose. Both she and Timothy had wanted to come, but Brabant had refused: ‘A maid and a callow boy with my crew? That’s unlucky.’ So Nicholas has left Rose to comfort Timothy in his own self-recriminating misery.
What he hadn’t expected was the look that Rose bestowed on Ned as they parted company: a mix of admiration and anxiety. Clearly, life at the Jackdaw has been getting along just fine without him.
On Black Bull Alley he can count the lighted windows on the fingers of one hand. To the south, towards Winchester House, barely a dozen more points of light resist the darkness. The Lazar House seems to have leached its black heart into the night.
In the physic garden Burghley’s men begin inspecting the wall, looking for a suitable place to climb. Nicholas is acutely aware that the moving circle of light must be clearly visible to anyone chancing to look out of those eye-slit windows below the eaves of the ancient hospice.
Brabant chooses his spot. His men go over with ease – a stationary wall, even if it is ten feet high, holds no challenge for men used to swarming aloft from a heaving deck in a high sea. But for Nicholas, the prospect does not sit so lightly.
Ned comes to his rescue. He’s the largest of any of them, and his huge cupped paws give enough impetus to minimize the scraped hands and knees as Nicholas sails over into the dark wilderness beyond.
And then, almost before he knows it, he’s standing in the waist-high weeds, while before him the great black bulk of the Lazar House looms up into the night like some dreadful pagan temple.
Brabant uses an iron crow he’s brought along to take the lock off the door. He makes almost no sound. Nicholas guesses it’s a privateer’s skill – honed by years of climbing mooring ropes, prizing open cabin windows and storming aboard to commit violence with pistol and sword, all in the name of England’s queen. Or perhaps the lock was just older than he thought. If that’s the case – and Quigley’s not inside the Lazar House – then Bianca is either dead, or soon will be. And there’s not a thing he can do about it.
The same awful feeling of helplessness he’d known when he’d realized Eleanor’s fate was completely out of his hands floods over him now. A trickle of sweat runs down his forehead. Through pursed lips, he empties his lungs of air to relieve the tension. And the fear.
It wasn’t a prison, it was a hospital. That’s what he’d told Bianca. Leprosy is a sickness, not a sin. So why is he so grateful when Brabant goes ahead of him into a narrow pitch-black passageway?
They emerge into cloisters around a central courtyard. There’s no sound, other than their own breathing. Brabant and the others now seem reluctant to move any further – like sailors everywhere, they’re innately superstitious. Each one of them is already conjuring ghosts out of the darkness.
And Nicholas has no trouble understanding why. By the light from Brabant’s lantern and Ned’s flickering torch, he sees, scattered around the cloisters, poignant reminders that the Lazar House was once a community of outcasts shut away from the world. There’s a handcart collapsed against a wall like a Bankside drunk; a reed basket all but unravelled, its contents of washing mallets forming a forlorn and jumbled altar in the centre; even a child’s wooden study-book lying in its frame, the painted letters of the alphabet so badly faded they are little more than shadows on its face. It’s as if the occupants of a house have fled impending catastrophe, not daring to stop to take their possessions with them.
In the central courtyard grows a miniature forest of fern, hart’s tongue and buckler. Nicholas remembers the night at Barnthorpe when he and Jack first climbed out of the window to go coney-hunting in the barley by lantern-light. He’d been barely tall enough to see over the gently swaying crop, imagining that he was alone and adrift on a vast black sluggish ocean. Then an owl had swept low over his head in the darkness and frightened him clean out of his boots. He’d had nightmares for a month.