Danby turns his horse’s head towards the bridge. ‘A vagrant is a vagrant, whatever he may be named.’ He tightens the reins. ‘I recall Baronsdale at the College of Physicians telling me you were a good physician once, Dr Shelby. But he said you could never let the past sleep peacefully. That wife of yours who died, and this vagrant child you seem unable to forget: let them go. That is my advice. What God has ordained for us in His plan is not ours to question.’
Does Danby also take that to include the murder of an innocent old Jew? Nicholas wonders. ‘If I take your advice, Master Coroner,’ he says as calmly as he can manage, ‘will you do a small service?’
‘If I can.’
‘When you find a moment’s ease from the arduous labours of your office, perhaps you can amend your report into Ralph Cullen’s death. Write down his name. Then he’ll be no longer “unknown, save unto God” – will he?’
‘How could Danby possibly think Farzad is a murderer?’ Bianca asks, unlacing her boots and wriggling her feet.
She and Nicholas have returned to the Jackdaw after another fruitless search, this time along the riverbank as far west as Gravel Lane, almost to the Lambeth marshes. They have lost count of the people they’ve stopped. Have you seen him? He’s an olive-skinned lad with tangled black hair and spice-stained fingers: a Moor, but an honorary Banksider, for all that… Farzad, the Persian boy who can curse the Pope with more invention than all the bishops of England put together…
‘Farzad ran. Therefore Farzad must be guilty,’ Nicholas replies. ‘Danby prefers his enquiries concluded swiftly, so that he can hurry back to the comforts of Whitehall.’
Ned Monkton and Rose are sitting at a nearby table. Rose is making a tally of expenditure. Ned can write his own name, though never in exactly the same way twice, and he watches his bride with undisguised admiration. ‘There’s nobody around here Danby could put on a jury who’d support that charge,’ he calls out.
‘Don’t you believe it, Ned,’ Nicholas answers. ‘There’s bound to be an alderman or a magistrate somewhere only too willing to agree with whatever nonsense the Queen’s Coroner spouts. If they find Farzad before we do, they’ll keep him chained up in the Compter or the Clink until the next Assizes. They might even beat a false confession out of him.’
Rose tosses her head angrily, her black ringlets tumbling about her cheeks. ‘Farzad wouldn’t survive more than a week in a damp, rat-infested cell,’ she protests. ‘He can catch a cold on a sunny day.’
‘What I don’t understand is why anyone would kill a gentle soul like Solomon Mandel in the first place,’ Bianca says. ‘And in such a cruel way.’
‘Because he was a Jew – according to Danby. Some zealot chose to hold him personally responsible for the death of our Saviour on the cross.’
Bianca’s amber eyes blaze with a mixture of anger and sadness. ‘In Padua, the city used to hold a horse race every year. The gallants rode their finest stallions, but the governors made the Jews compete on donkeys, just so the crowd could laugh at them. When my father told me of it, I wept for their humiliation.’
‘You’ve known Master Solomon longer than I have, Bianca. When did you first meet him?’
‘Shortly after I bought the Jackdaw.’
‘That would have been when – some four years past?’
‘It was around the time the Moor envoy came to London,’ Bianca says, her eyes gleaming at the memory. ‘I was in the crowd at Long Southwark, when the procession arrived. I can still see all those fine silk robes, and the strange hats they wore, like onions sitting on their heads. They had faces like hawks, haughty and noble – as if even the meanest of them was a prince. And the colour of their skin – as though they carried the desert sun within their very bodies and it was toasting them from the inside. They were a marvel, Nicholas. As grand as anything I’d ever seen in Padua.’
Her girlish thrill at the recollection makes him smile. He, too, remembers that cold January night when he and Eleanor had joined the expectant crowd on the north side of London Bridge. The Moor party had made landfall in Cornwall and news of its progress towards the city had kept the population on tenterhooks for days. When they eventually rode in, all bathed in flickering torchlight like a caravan sent from a pharaoh’s court, they had come attended by the leading members of the Barbary Company, riding escort.
But his own memory of the occasion is coloured not with bright silks, but with pain. That was the beginning of the year in which Eleanor had fallen with child. The year the match was put to the fuse. The slow-burning fuse that would take until the following summer to blow his life asunder.
‘He used to buy his chickens from my father’s shop,’ Ned calls out helpfully. ‘Pa said Master Mandel had told him he was born in Portugal.’
‘The queen’s physician, Dr Lopez, is a Marrano Jew from Portugal, too,’ says Nicholas. ‘He might have known Solomon. Perhaps he’ll agree to talk to me.’
‘None of this answers the question: who killed him?’ Bianca says. ‘Or where Farzad is.’
‘Perhaps your Captain Connell might know more about Mandel.’
‘He’s not my Captain Connell, Nick,’ says Bianca.
‘But Mandel knew the captain well enough to suggest that you invite him to drink here. I don’t know if you’ve looked into Connell’s eyes, but if you’re looking for a man capable of murder, there’s one in there, for sure.’
‘You really don’t like him, do you?’
‘Do you?’
‘That’s not the point. Connell was at the Jackdaw getting drunk and being uncivil, remember? We saw him leave with his crew, after we’d searched for Farzad.’
Nicholas admits defeat. ‘You’re right. The footprints suggest Mandel was taken from outside the Jackdaw sometime during the wedding feast – either when he went out for air, or perhaps as he was on his way home.’
‘So they were out in the lane, waiting for him?’
‘That’s my guess.’ Nicholas gives Bianca a pensive look. ‘But whatever Danby says, I don’t believe that the murder was a punishment. At least, not for anything Solomon Mandel was keeping hidden in his soul.’
There are buildings in London that seem ideally suited to their purpose. For an inquest into the murder of a solitary old man, thinks Nicholas, you couldn’t choose a better one than the deconsecrated church of St Margaret’s on the Hill. It, too, appears to be dying a slow and unmourned death. The stained-glass windows have been smashed out and bricked over. Half the graveyard has been dug up and replaced by cheaply built private tenements. Instead of worshippers, the nave now plays host to quarter-sessions of the peace, where the magistrates can dole out brandings and ear-trimmings to the felonious of Bankside. When Nicholas opens the half-derelict door and steps inside, the day after Coroner Danby’s visit to Bankside, the sound of his footsteps on the stone floor echoes like a warning whisper: be gone… be gone… be gone…
The nave is empty, the pews long ago sold off or turned to firewood. A cold easterly wind moans outside like the lamenting of a ghostly congregation. He catches the smell of stale sweat, a permanent memory of the prisoners corralled here before transfer to the Compter and the Marshalsea. There is a pile of straw where the rood screen once stood, to provide a measure of comfort for them. It reeks of emptied bladders and despair. If this was ever God’s house, He defaulted on the mortgage and handed back the keys long ago.
A murmur of voices reaches him from above. Looking up, Nicholas sees the nave has been cross-beamed and planked over, to make an upper floor in the ceiling vault. He climbs the narrow wooden ladder with a growing sense of dejection.