In one of the booths, Bianca and Nicholas sit together, replete. He eases loose the points of his white canvas doublet. He puts one arm around her shoulder. It is the first deliberate, unforced touch, and he has made it without design or even prior contemplation.
She leans carelessly into him. He has a natural scent that reminds her of her time in Padua, of the hemp sacks full of herbs and spices in her father’s warehouse, warming in the summer sun. She wonders what it would be like to lie with him. The thought has come to her more than once in recent days, hardly surprising given the impending wedding. He’s built pleasantly enough, she thinks. Neither London nor the College of Physicians has yet managed to knock the Suffolk yeoman’s son out of him. An efficiently rustic lover, she decides – pleasantly free of the elaborate and fake courtesies of a Venetian gallant, but sensitive enough not to take her as though she was no more than a heifer and he the village bull. And so far, thank Jesu, Nicholas hasn’t shown any tendency towards milky sonnets and dire poetry, which – she learned quickly upon arrival – is apparently de rigueur amongst all Englishmen who can read and write.
She likes how he escapes her attempts to catalogue him. A more predictable man would have married quickly after his wife’s death, seeking to make up for lost time in the practical business of raising sons. A less questioning one would never have blamed himself for losing her, in the first place. He looks like what he is, a tousle-haired, strong-limbed farmer’s boy. Yet given the chance, she suspects, he could give a Paduan doctor of philosophy a run for his money. No wonder the aristocratic students at Cambridge called him a country clod-pate, and the College of Physicians thinks him a heretic. A contradiction like that couldn’t possibly be boring between the sheets, could it?
And in a way she has already lain with him, in everything but the carnal pleasure of it. She knows his body better than he knows it himself. She remembers that October dawn when they had found him lying in the river mud – one-third frozen, one-third drowned, one-third hanging on to life because it couldn’t think of anything better to do. With the help of passing strangers, she and Timothy had carried him to the Jackdaw. There she had stripped him of his sodden clothes, laid him before the fire, washed the water slime from his body, carried him to the attic when he’d thawed a little, and then spent three weeks tending him in his delirium while she wondered who on earth he was, and what had prompted him to throw himself into the river – an act that her Catholic faith tells her is so sinful that God Himself can barely find the compassion to forgive it.
Yes, Nicholas Shelby is less unknown to her than he himself might imagine.
Before she realizes it, Bianca is tilting her head and offering him her mouth to kiss. She feels his body shift in anticipation, waits for his lips to meet hers.
And then she senses a movement at the edge of her vision. She hears a low voice calling, ‘Mistress, Mistress–’
Timothy is standing at the edge of the booth, fidgeting, his face on fire with embarrassment. Young Timothy, now almost a man. Timothy, who plucks such sweet tunes from his lute. And who – at this precise moment – is a harbinger of ill news, if ever she saw one.
‘Forgive me, Mistress,’ he says, staring at Bianca and Nicholas and wringing his hands together, consumed by misery for shattering the moment. ‘It’s Farzad. I’ve looked for him everywhere. He’s vanished!’
5
Nicholas stands in the lane, the cold night air stinging his face. ‘Farzad’s probably gone down to the river for some peace. He’s worked hard today. He’ll soon be back.’
‘And did he take his possessions – his second shirt and his knife – for a little tranquillity beside the river, too?’ Bianca asks. Her concern for Farzad is making her short-tempered.
They have searched the Jackdaw from the cellar to the attic, every nook and cranny. The only chamber they haven’t entered is Bianca’s old room. When one of Connell’s men – with a leer on his face – suggested it, Bianca silenced him with a single look. On this night, if on no other, Ned and Rose are to be allowed their privacy.
Cathal Connell steps unsteadily out of the Jackdaw’s entrance. ‘He’s soused, that’s what he is,’ he says, grinning like a traitor’s head on a pole. ‘Only a young lad – can’t hold his ale. He’ll be puking into a ditch somewhere.’
‘His religion doesn’t permit him to take drink,’ snaps Bianca, looking Connell up and down. ‘Unlike some I could name.’
‘What’s a Mohammedan doing in a Bankside tavern anyway?’ Connell asks, turning his face to the cold night air as though it might sooth his scoured cheeks.
‘He was saved from Barbary slavers by an English ship. Off the Ethiope shore,’ Bianca explains, looking up and down the lane as though she expects to see Farzad trotting home with his bright smile lightening the dark night. ‘They came into the Jackdaw with him one day. He had a cold – English weather doesn’t agree with him.’
‘He’s from Persia,’ Nicholas adds, as though a cold was something unknown outside England.
‘Which is why I don’t believe he’s gone down to the river,’ Bianca adds. ‘Not on a night like this. He wouldn’t.’
Connell shrugs. ‘Well, it’s time me and my fellows were in our hammocks. If we see him on the shore, we’ll send him back home with a flea in his ear.’
With the sailors gone and most of the revellers now departed, there are barely a dozen people left to carry out a search of the surrounding lanes, and most of those have difficulty walking a straight line. Southwark lanes at night are dangerous places for the solitary traveller, and there is always the danger of stumbling onto the riverbank in the dark. So Nicholas marshals them into groups of three, each group led by the least inebriated. With Bianca and Timothy in tow, he tracks down the night-watch at their brazier by the bridge and enlists their help.
They search for a good two hours: west into the Pike Garden and the open patches of ground around the bear-pit, east to the Compter prison. They circle the closed-up Rose theatre, which looms in the misty darkness like a monstrous bastion, silent and defended only by ghosts. They wander around the ruins of Rochester House, calling Farzad’s name and hoping all the while to hear one of his famously indelicate replies: The Pope is the spawn of a she-goat and a monkey… the King of Spain wears a woman’s farthingale under his gown… for it is well known throughout Southwark that Farzad learned his first English from the good Protestant sailors who rescued him. Tonight even Bianca would be happy to hear one of his slanders, even though she cleaves to her secret faith and has to hold her tongue when others laugh uproariously.
In the small hours they give up. Though no one says so – for fear of invoking bad luck – each imagines Farzad waiting for them on their return, innocently wondering what all the fuss has been about.
At the Jackdaw Timothy asks, ‘Shall we wake Master Ned and Mistress Rose?’
‘No,’ sighs Bianca wearily. ‘Let them sleep. They’ve earned their joy. Let’s not spoil it until we have to.’
The petitioners begin queuing outside the Strand entrance to Cecil House before sunrise. Some have legal suits they want the Cecils to back, some desire the family’s patronage, some hope for a hearing at court, perhaps even an audience with the queen herself. More than a few would like a little of the Cecils’ largesse, to finance schemes ranging from the practical to the downright mad. They eye each other like the beasts of the wildwood, though they try not to show it, gauging advantage or otherwise by the cut of a cloak, the fabric of a doublet or the quality of a pair of shoes. Their breath forms little clouds of envy or disdain in the pallid air.