The drowned – including his father – come to visit him frequently. They bump against him in friendly greeting as the currents inside the wreck bring them to the surface like fruit bobbing in a cask. He is alone, but unafraid. Being a pilgrim, when the vessel sinks he is certain that he will see again his father, sister Sabra, cousin Ramin, grandma Abijah and uncle Hassan.
It is then that he prays to Allāh, the most merciful, the most compassionate, that his mother too might fail to graduate from Aži Dahāka’s madrasa of endurance. Because then they will all be together in heaven.
When, through salt-scorched eyes, he sees a vessel bearing down on him in the glorious sunset of the second day adrift, he begins to scream, fearing the cruellest man in all the world has returned for him. But the ship is a Christian ship, an English merchant venturer exploring the Arabian Sea, challenging the Portuguese who claim these waters for their own. And she is safe from corsairs because she carries cannon. Safe from Aži Dahāka…
Rose is sobbing into Ned’s vast chest. Ned himself has that old familiar, fiery scowl, which warns that his temper is having difficulty constraining itself. Timothy has his arms protectively around Buffle, as though he fears the dog is in imminent danger of kidnap. Only Bianca is motionless, though in the firelight the glistening of her eyes is clear to everyone.
‘So I did not come to heaven,’ Farzad says wistfully as he stares at the embers in the hearth. ‘I come to Southwark instead. And I don’t know if you can get to heaven from Southwark.’
Ned’s voice is like the low rumble of a landslide. ‘But you can go to hell from here, and that’s where Connell will be going, if ever he should show his face here again.’
‘Why did you not come to us, Farzad?’ Bianca asks. ‘We would have called the constable.’
‘There is no constable who can tame Aži Dahāka, Mistress. When I was insulted in St Saviour’s market by some apprentice boys, they said Conn-ell was here – in London; that he would know what to do with a Blackamoor like me. Then I saw him here. I feared that if he recognized me, he would kill me – and perhaps all of you. I could not risk such a thing.’
‘But you waited until after Ned and Rose’s marriage before you fled,’ Bianca says, her voice almost breaking. Rose, her head still buried in Ned’s chest, begins to make a noise like a distressed goose, her body heaving in dismay.
‘Only when I saw he had sailed away did I dare to come out of hiding.’
‘If he saw you, he didn’t remember you,’ Bianca says. ‘Which means there was no cause whatever for you to go prancing off and toppling all our hearts like skittles.’ Her voice is harsher than she intends, but it is the harshness that follows relief.
After what she’s heard, Cathal Connell seems the obvious suspect in the Jew’s murder, even if he was at the wedding feast all night. Perhaps Aži Dahāka has the power to be in two places at once, or to become invisible. She pulls herself up short, recalling the nonsense some people on Bankside have claimed about her. Then she remembers Nicholas’s warning, that the coroner’s jury still wants Farzad questioned. ‘Now you are returned to us, my young gallant, you are to stay here at the Jackdaw. Do not venture outside. Do you promise me?’
‘But I must go outside, Mistress,’ Farzad says.
‘You have no need, not for a while. I forbid it.’
For a moment she thinks he’s about to weep. His dark eyes are vast in the light from the embers, a look of desperation in them. ‘But I must go out. I must go to Master Nicholas – to tell him that I am home.’
14
Nicholas is drowning. Nicholas is clinging to a sharp rock while the waves pound his body to pieces. He is being eaten by a great fish. He is in the hands of the cruellest man in all this world.
Bianca has lived with the first three images in her head since the Righteous sailed, five long days ago. The fourth – conjured by Farzad – is new to her. And having already looked into Cathal Connell’s eyes, it is the image now that she fears above all the others.
Unable to sleep, she hears the watch calling midnight, and the answering bell from St Saviour’s steeple. Unwilling to abandon Farzad to his troubled dreams, she has rejected her bed above the shop on Dice Lane for a mattress in the Jackdaw’s attic, though it has required stern words to keep Ned and Rose in her old chamber on the first floor. So she lies now where Nicholas used to lie when he was here, and wishes he was beside her and not at the mercy of the new Aži Dahāka.
She wonders if Reynard Gault knows what manner of man he employs to command the Barbary Company’s argosies. Or if Robert Cecil – if he knew – would be content to have his emissary in the bloodstained hands of such as devil. But being a woman of the Veneto, she knows only too well how merchant venturers can hide away their Christian consciences when profitable trade pouts its painted mouth alluringly at them.
She remembers the time when a Paduan mariner had returned home, ransomed after three years as a slave of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople. Half the city had turned out to see him arrive. But the rejoicing of his family had soon quietened when they’d seen what captivity and hard labour had done to him. Barely twenty-three, he looked like an old man broken by illness. Her only comfort now is that Nicholas is Robert Cecil’s man, and Connell wouldn’t dare harm him. She stares at the rafters in disbelief, wondering how on earth it is that she’s come to be grateful – yes, grateful – to the Lord Treasurer’s crook-backed son.
There must be something I can do, she repeats in a low murmur, thinking herself like one of those religious zealots who repetitively chant the same line from the holy scriptures. But what? How does a Bankside tavern-mistress and apothecary rescue her almost-lover from peril on the high seas?
She knows what at least half of Bankside would expect her to do: cast a spell, weave some magic. After all, at Ned and Rose’s wedding feast, hadn’t Connell himself said to her, ‘You’re the one witch nobody dares hang’?
The answer springs into her mind like a mischievous sprite: cast a charm over Robert Cecil. At daybreak put on your best brocade kirtle, the green one, and the carnelian bodice, have Rose pin up your hair the way that gets Nicholas’s eyes dancing in their sockets – don’t think I haven’t noticed – and go to Cecil House. Enchant the little Crab with all your Paduan wiles. Convince him to send the fastest vessel in the queen’s fleet to apprehend the Righteous, bring Nicholas safely home and clap Connell in chains for a murderer. So what if Aži Dahāka had three heads and could breathe fire? He’d never met Costanzia Merton’s daughter, Bianca, had he?
Contented, she closes her eyes and tries to sleep. But then another sprite jumps into her thoughts, this time with a warning wave of its little claws.
What to do about Farzad?
The lad is still the subject of an order requiring his taking up for questioning over the killing of Solomon Mandel. The thought of him languishing in some stinking, verminous hole like the Marshalsea or the Clink, while the law grinds its way to an eventual acceptance of his innocence – possibly months in the future – and then remembers to let him out, has her biting her lip in distress.
No, I will not let that happen, she resolves – not to a lad who has suffered so grievously.