‘It’s a her, actually.
‘A woman? I wasn’t aware we licensed women.’
‘She won her approval solely by the influence of Lord Lumley. He funds the chair of anatomy at the College of Physicians. He was acting on behalf of a certain young physician who wished to advance her. A favour. I didn’t object at the time. Perhaps I should have.’
‘A female licensed apothecary! Whatever next – doctors in farthingales?’ Gault flicks a hand as though to brush away a fly. ‘I shall make it my duty to have her barred immediately, Sir Robert.’
Robert Cecil lays a hand on Gault’s arm. ‘All in good time. There is no need for haste. Not yet.’
A watery sun sits just above the great houses along the Strand, bathing nearby Lincoln’s Inn in a sickly light. ‘Look at that,’ Sir Robert says absent-mindedly. ‘The lawyers get the light before the Cecils. How on earth did my father let that happen?’
The kiss has led to a glorious intimacy, just as Nicholas has always known it would. They are lying together naked, coiled in blissful heat. Bianca is kissing his face, whispering endearments to him. He can feel the wetness of her tongue exploring the side of his neck. Why did it take me so long? he mouths happily. Why did I fight against it so resolutely? And then she nips him on the earlobe. A sharp-toothed little bite.
Sitting bolt upright, his head collides with something hard, bringing him rudely awake. Then Buffle launches another joyous assault on his ear. Nicholas groans, pushes the dog aside and crawls out from beneath the table, where he’s spent all too few hours of sleep.
The taproom is empty, save for Timothy sleeping on his pallet by the hearth. Bianca, he supposes, is still asleep in the one free lodging chamber. Ned and Rose are presumably still deep in the warm oblivion of love. Climbing stiffly to his feet, Nicholas goes to the door and lets Buffle out into the lane.
In the insipid early-morning light the houses opposite stare back at him like drowned faces. A lad in a broadcloth coat far too large for him is driving a pair of heifers towards the Mutton Lane shambles. If they knew what awaited them, Nicholas thinks, the heifers could simply turn and trample him underfoot. Yet they go uncomplainingly to their fate, compelled only by a small lad with an even smaller stick. Has Farzad fallen for such a simple deception? he wonders uncomfortably.
By the time the search was abandoned – in the small hours – the theories had already begun to bloom. Farzad had run away because he feared the plague would soon reach Southwark. Farzad was sleeping it off under a hedge, or in a doorway, having put aside his religious objections and taken drink during the celebrations. Farzad, almost eighteen and notable for his lustrous black hair and dark complexion, had at last lost his innocence to some pretty Bankside blower and was snoring contentedly in her generous embrace.
And then there were the darker theories, the ones that no one wished to give voice to: that he had left the fug of the Jackdaw’s taproom for some fresh air and fallen prey to a particularly violent cut-purse, or that while taking his ease for a moment out in the lanes, he had got into a fatal quarrel with someone who held Moors in the same contempt as he did papists.
Nicholas stretches to ease his aching joints and waits for Buffle to finish her morning patrol. Rose has a fear that the dog will be taken for fighting, and doesn’t like her being in the lane unwatched. Lazily his eyes follow her, and so he takes a deeper interest in the scene than otherwise he might.
Around the tavern entrance the boot-marks from the night’s search are preserved in the mud. They spread out like the voyage lines drawn on Robert Cecil’s globe. Just a few paces from the door, a single track turns sharply right, looping back towards the tavern wall. It is overlaid in several places, suggesting it was made before the search began. Nicholas looks at it for a moment while Buffle barks ineffectually at the departing cows. Are the footprints Farzad’s? he wonders.
He dismisses the probability immediately. Dozens of people came and went during the course of yesterday’s celebrations. This set of imprints could belong to any one of them. Enough sack and mad-dog had been consumed for a least one person to have had to steady themselves against the wall of the tavern before continuing on their way. Nevertheless, an image of Farzad in his leather cook’s apron, his cap at a jaunty angle, stepping out unnoticed into the lane to cool down, compels Nicholas to venture into the lane to take a closer look.
At the point where the solitary imprints reach the wall there is a second patch of churned mud. Multiple footprints lead out into the lane. He can picture the scene: a reveller dancing one last drunken jig in celebration of the happy couple, before being helped home by his companions.
And then he sees it.
Splashed across the old brickwork directly below the chamber where Ned and Rose are at this moment slumbering through their first dawn as husband and wife is a dark stain that holds an awful familiarity for Nicholas. A sudden tightening in his chest turns each breath into an act of protest.
It’s not a large stain. But then it doesn’t have to be. Once set free, blood finds freedom intoxicating. From his days in Holland, tending the torn and the hacked, the speared and the shattered, he knows exactly how ungovernable blood can be when it’s loosed from the body by a blade or a ball. Sometimes it can flow as though it will never stop, yet less than an hour later you’re laughing about what a close shave you’ve had. Sometimes you can die while you’re still trying to find the puncture. But splashed on a wall, however small the amount, can mean only one thing: a sudden attack, full of motion and fury.
Now he can see a very different pattern in the mud. The night’s events unfold in his mind’s eye: a body supported on either side by its assailants as they drag it away from the shelter of the wall.
Not a street robbery, then. If you’re going to cut away a purse, you don’t take the owner along with it.
Nicholas searches for signs of a blood trail. It doesn’t take him long to find them. At regular intervals, dark drops of blood keep company with the confused line of prints that head out into the lane. Some are pristine circles; others have left only a discoloration in the crust. By their distribution he can gauge the stride of the men dragging Farzad’s body. It’s a long, steady pace. Nicholas has a picture of two men practised at bearing heavy burdens. Men skilled in what they were about.
At the crossroads there is a public conduit. Three women are drawing water, the sleeves of their kirtles rolled up, their plump arms yellowed by the jaundiced sun rising over the rooftops. ‘Have you lost something, Dr Shelby?’ one of the women asks.
Her companion replies, ‘Aye, he’s dropped the wedding ring – the one he’s going to place on Mistress Merton’s finger.’
He thinks his attempt at a self-deprecating smile must look to them like the leering of a madman. He mumbles an incoherent excuse. But they have had their moment of fun at his expense and are once more lost in conversation.
At the crossroads the tracks disappear altogether, churned beyond recognition into the cloying mud. He looks back towards the Jackdaw with a heavy heart. Telling Bianca is going to be bad enough, but the news is going to turn the happiness of Master and Goodwife Monkton into gall.
Refusing to abandon Farzad, if only in his imagination, Nicholas tries each of the other three lanes issuing from the crossroads. All are narrow and overhung with the teetering fronts of tightly packed wood-and-plaster tenements. He goes into the first two only as far as it takes him to determine that the ground is too recently disturbed to show which way Farzad’s attackers carried him. Outside one house he thinks he’s picked up the trail again, but the dark spot turns out to be nothing but a rusting tin button. He turns, walks back to the crossroads and tries the third lane.