‘He’s not summoning me. He’s inviting me. No one turns down an invitation to dine with Robert Cecil. I’m not going to insult one of the most powerful men in the realm, especially as he pays me a stipend to attend his son.’
‘What’s the point? I don’t wish to be rude, but you’ll probably be sitting at the very end of the longest table in London. He won’t even glance in your direction.’
‘Thank you for reminding me of my place.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way.’
‘There are members of the College of Physicians who would consider poisoning their own mothers for an invitation to Robert Cecil’s table. Besides, the queen’s physician, Dr Lopez, will be there. It’s the perfect opportunity to ask him about Solomon Mandel.’
‘Nicholas, you’re not the sort to find good fellowship in such company.’
‘Jealous?’ he asks with a lift of one eyebrow.
Bianca’s smile is laced with scorn. ‘Of dining with a serpent? Never.’ She pats him on the wrist. ‘But I hope you know where to find a reliable food-taster at short notice.’
It is the Monktons’ first spat as man and wife. Not really a spat at all, more an outbreak of tetchiness at the end of a long day at the Jackdaw. And it is over almost before it begins.
Nicholas and Bianca have departed – each to their own self-inflicted solitude – and Rose has just finished inspecting the day’s reckoning of victuals sold: eleven coney pasties; seven plates of stockfish; two tubs of oysters; twelve helpings of sprats; and twenty bowls of pottage.
Twenty.
There should be four portions remaining. Rose knows this because she made the pottage herself, at dawn, and she knows through experience the pot contains twenty-four helpings. Not twenty.
The discrepancy is important. With business slack, it is hard enough for the Jackdaw to turn a profit as it is, without giving away food. And Rose has promised Bianca she will be diligent in her stewardship.
Going in search of her husband, she finds Ned in the cellar. He’s standing beneath the open trapdoor in the far corner, taking sacks of hops from Timothy, who’s out in the yard above. His shirt is open and the auburn curls on his vast chest gleam like gold thread in the sunlight. She admires him at his labour for a while, before asking, ‘Have you been over-generous with those watermen friends of yours, Husband? There’s pottage missin’.’
Ned puts down the sack as though it were full of nothing but feathers, and wipes one ham-like forearm across his brow. ‘No, I ’ave not, Goodwife Monkton,’ he replies, savouring the delight in all the happy implications encompassed by the term goodwife. ‘I’d not treat Mistress Bianca’s gift to us in such a casual fashion. You know I would not.’
‘I must have tallied it up wrong then,’ Rose says with a diffidence that would astound Bianca, were she here to witness it. She tilts her head to look Ned in the eye – a manoeuvre that deliberately exposes her invitingly silky white neck and a dash of freckles. Coyly, and with a magnificently contrived fluttering of her eyelids, she announces, ‘In which case, Husband, I shall likely later have need of serious correction.’
Rose is not referring to any correction a magistrate might envision; at least not in his professional capacity.
If at this moment Ned Monkton could find space in his thoughts for anything but his new bride, it would probably be to offer a thousand hosannas to Bianca Merton and Nicholas Shelby for giving him a life beyond that of a mortuary porter at St Thomas’s hospital for the sick and destitute of Bankside. As for Rose, she’s too busy responding happily to her husband’s kisses to consider for a single instant that she might be right about the quantity of missing pottage.
9
Sheltering beneath the sailcloth awning of the tilt-boat, Nicholas watches the private water-stairs below Cecil House loom out of the rain. A Cecil barge blocks the nearest side of the jetty. It rocks gently on the swell, empty and unrigged, the raindrops glinting like jewels on the gilded bulwarks.
The helmsman lets the current carry them past. Then he leans on the tiller and the boat swings around. Rainwater pours over the edge of the awning, cutting off Nicholas’s view as though he were standing behind a waterfall. The oars dip twice, rise in unison and then the hull is hard against the jetty. Nicholas barely feels the impact. The jolt comes from above: a flash of lightning. Thunder booms from somewhere very close. Pulling his gabardine about him, he climbs out and hurries towards the Strand entrance of Cecil House beneath writhing black clouds.
Nicholas is not comfortable at grand tables. At Cambridge the gentlemen scholars mocked him for it, imitating his Suffolk burr and asking him if he needed instruction on how to use his knife and spoon, or whether he could tell Gascon wine from country ale. As a consequence, he associates formal feasting more with bloody knuckles than a full belly. But this is not what he has been expecting at all.
The privy dining chamber is panelled from floor to ceiling and softly candlelit. One side is given over to high mullioned windows that stream with rain. Four places have been set on a table large enough for fourteen, a little colony of high-backed chairs, fine plate and silver goblets clinging to an otherwise empty glacier of Flanders tablecloth. It is quite unlike any formal table at the College of Physicians, with old Baronsdale – the president – placed magisterially at the high table and flanked by the senior Fellows, while everyone else sits below the salt in strict order of status. This is more like an intimate gathering of colleagues.
Two men stand talking with Robert Cecil before a fire that crackles in a deep brick hearth. One of them Nicholas recognizes as Roderigo Lopez, the old white-haired Marrano Jew who attends the queen. He wears a formal black physician’s gown and starched ruff. The other man is much younger – a mischievous-looking fellow of about Nicholas’s age, with long, curly fair hair and a nose that appears to have been broken in a brawl. His beard, worn as close as Nicholas’s, looks as though it’s been trimmed by a drunken barber. But he’s smartly dressed in a well-padded black velvet doublet with braided trim. Nicholas feels underdressed. For the first time in three years he regrets throwing his own doctor’s gown in the Thames.
‘Dr Lopez, I am sure, is no stranger to you,’ says Cecil after Nicholas has made a formal bend of the knee. ‘And this disreputable fellow is my cousin, Master Francis Bacon. If you were hoping for the company of another contrarian, you’ll meet no one better.’
Cecil directs Bacon to sit beside him, with Nicholas and Lopez on the other side of the table. A Cecil chaplain flutters in to say grace. Expensive wine is poured from even more expensive silverware, by servants who seem to have acquired the knack of being only semi-corporeal. Over his host’s shoulder, Nicholas can see Lord Burghley in garter robes peering out on the gathering from within his picture frame, a disapproving look frozen on his painted face. It’s a fine likeness, but it makes Nicholas feel even more under close observation.
The food arrives, borne by a procession of liveried lackeys: vinegar fig tarts; a pie stuffed with hind-flank of beef, prunes, raisins and carrots; and salted carp that Lopez – giving his physician’s opinion – says is unhealthy for an old man such as himself, but eats anyway, on the grounds it is also good for easing the hot ague.
Save for the discomfort of eating too much, the meal turns out not to be the ordeal Nicholas had expected. The conversation is informal and wide-ranging: how the Privy Council fears Spain might yet send another Armada against England; how King Philip is stalking the Escorial in Madrid in a black rage over the Madre de Deus; how a bill has been read in Parliament proposing a ten-pound-a-month fine for allowing a recusant to dwell in your house, and the confiscation of your children if you happen to be one yourself.