To our right beloved and trusty friend, the princely al-Abbas al-Mansur, King of Barbary, greetings…
‘Did she dictate this?’ Nicholas asks. It is the closest he has come in his life to the presence of the monarch. He cannot deny feeling a little awestruck.
‘The queen? Of course not,’ says Robert Cecil, sealing the letter with his privy councillor’s ring. ‘If we relied upon Her Majesty to set us to action, Philip of Spain would be sitting in Whitehall with his feet up on the table, the Pope would be giving the sermon at St Paul’s, and Mary Stuart would still have her treacherous head. So we anticipate. It’s what privy councillors are for.’
‘And the other part?’ Nicholas enquires.
‘If any good comes from it, then it is our task to point out it was all her idea from the start.’
‘It sounds like a marriage.’
‘Except that the annulment can have fatal consequences,’ Cecil replies, with a snort of laughter that makes his little body lurch like a crow with indigestion.
‘How am I supposed to pay my way while I’m there? Letters of credit?’
‘The Portuguese are paying. Their currency is still accepted by the Moors.’ Cecil points to a small chest that sits on his study table. ‘There were enough ducats aboard the Madre de Deus to send you around the globe a hundred times in some considerable luxury. What’s in there should be plenty for your needs.’ His eyes narrow. ‘I shall expect an accounting, so don’t develop any expensive tastes.’
Next come the secret ciphers. Lord Burghley and his crook-backed son have spies in almost every major city from Paris to Constantinople. For their correspondence to remain secure, it must be encrypted. Robert Cecil shows Nicholas the letter-transposition code in which Adolfo Sykes sent his. ‘Commit this to memory, then burn the paper,’ Cecil tells him. ‘If you happen to recover any messages that Sykes was unable to send, use this to read them and make your assessment on whether they should be dispatched with haste or brought back when you return.’
‘And if they are urgent?’
‘Put them aboard any fast English ship you can find. Tell the master they are urgently expected by the Privy Council, and that he shall have his reward from me.’
‘Should I use the same cipher for my own messages, Sir Robert? If anything ill has befallen Sykes, it could already be compromised.’
Cecil laughs drily. ‘You’re already thinking like an intelligencer. Good.’ He asks Nicholas for a section of prose or poetry. ‘Something you can remember without having to tax your memory.’
‘What about Hippocrates? “Medicine is of all the arts the most noble…” I had to memorise extracts from The Law for my medical studies.’
Cecil makes him write down the first twenty lines. Then he takes up the nib and goes over the text, ringing certain characters, making broad slashes between various letters and words. When he’s content, he says, ‘See: let us say, for example, that you wish to encipher the word send. The first s you come across in your extract can be found at the end of is. Go back a letter – to i. Then forward again, skipping the next five. You arrive at an l. So the first letter of send will be l. The second, the e – first found in the word medicine – will become an n. And so on… Twenty lines will ensure you have a large enough stock, whatever you wish to encipher. Remember: one back, skip five forward. Do you have that in your head?’
Nicholas does. But he also has the awful image of Solomon Mandel’s flayed chest there, too. Just because a word is enciphered doesn’t mean it can’t be revealed.
‘Yes, I have it.’
‘Good. You have your memory – I have this,’ Cecil says, tapping the annotated text. ‘Of course there may be some wholly innocent explanation for why Sykes’s dispatches have ceased. If you cannot find him, or if some ill has befallen him, then seek the Moor courtier I told you about – al-Seddik. He was a gentleman of the sultan’s envoy who came here, back in 1589.’
The Turk’s man. Nicholas wonders if Solomon Mandel’s master had been the Moor al-Seddik.
Robert Cecil picks up a second letter from amongst the many documents on the desktop. ‘Give him this. It is from my father, Lord Burghley. They spoke many times while al-Seddik was in London, and he has a little English. He is an ally. This letter commends you to him.’
‘Did you write this, too?’
‘Of course not, Nicholas,’ says Robert Cecil with a frown. ‘Deceiving one’s queen is one thing. But deceiving one’s father…’
Cecil takes both letters and places them in an expensive leather pouch. Pressing the pouch into Nicholas’s hand, he says, ‘Think how grateful – and generous – Her Grace will be when I am able to assure her that the concord between our two realms is unbroken.’
‘But what if I discover it is broken? What then?’
Cecil claps Nicholas on the shoulder and offers him a mirthless smile. ‘Then we are all relying upon your ingenuity to mend it.’
12
‘He’s keeping something from me, Ned. I know he is.’
Ned Monkton prays silently for a sudden act of God, a loud one with not too many ill consequences – anything that will avert the penetrating stare of those amber eyes.
‘He’s concerned for you, Mistress, what with the pestilence an’ all.’
‘Then why is he leaving us?’ Bianca asks. ‘You’re a man; he must have confided in you. Because I’m certain he’s lying through his teeth to me.’
Ned’s squirm of discomfort makes him look like a bear shaking water from his coat after a swim. ‘P’raps you should go down to Lyon Quay and ask him yourself, before it’s too late. It’s not a goodly thing to part with harsh words.’
‘So he did confess himself to you?’
‘No!’
‘Then what are the two of you hiding from me?’
There can be no harm in telling her of the letter, Ned thinks. It might even put her off the scent. If she persists with the inquisition, he fears he won’t be able to keep to himself Nicholas’s story about Robert Cecil threatening to shut her down.
‘He’s given me a letter, addressed to Lord Lumley at Nonsuch.’
‘A letter? Should I know what it says? Or is it more of men’s secrets?’
‘If the plague comes south, Master Nick wants us all to seek refuge from it there. He says it’s arranged.’
Her reply is not what he expects, though with Bianca Merton he long ago learned that it seldom is.
‘Arranged?’ she hisses. ‘What are we to him – a bunch of posies to be neatly tied into a garland? Does he not think us capable of our own deliverance?’
‘I think he was trying to help, Mistress,’ Ned says, bemused at the unpredictability of women. Especially women from Padua.
And then, to his further bewilderment, he sees her eyes begin to moisten. But before he can find even the clumsiest words of comfort, she is already on her way out of the Jackdaw.
As Bianca hurries towards the bridge, anger fights a battle with longing for control over her feet.
It is five days now since the exchange with Nicholas in her physic garden. He has been to the Jackdaw more than once, though she’s left Rose in no doubt about her disinclination to see him. This morning, when she awoke in her chamber above the apothecary shop, she thought she saw him standing at the foot of her bed. But it was only the Good Samaritan painted on the wall. Later, at the Jackdaw, she half-expected to see him in the taproom and wondered what she would say to him if she did.