‘As innocent as the holy lamb.’
She waits for a response. Willders inspects the patches on his shirt. ‘That is what Dr Shelby told the inquest. And if a man cannot put his trust in a physician–’
‘If I were to say that I know where Farzad was on the night Solomon Mandel was murdered, and that he is wholly guiltless in the matter,’ she continues, ‘could it perhaps result in the parish sparing him incarceration? After all, they only want to question him. And I can answer for him.’
‘He is your servant, I take it?’
‘Oh yes, without question,’ she says, though in her own mind Farzad – once she’d got used to his parroted slanders against the Pope – has become, like Timothy, more the younger brother she never had than a servant, just as Rose has become not her maid, but her infuriating little sister.
‘Then you are his mistress and you may speak for him. That is the law.’
‘And I say he is innocent.’
Willders studies her awhile. She tries not to notice the spittle gleaming around his forelock.
‘You have him, don’t you?’ he says, as though he’s just fathomed out a troubling mystery.
Bianca says nothing. She feigns childish innocence.
‘Do you know who slew Master Mandel? Or should I not tax your honesty further?’
‘I have an idea, Constable Willders. But I cannot be sure. The man in question can make an account of himself throughout that night.’
‘Then perhaps it is him we should be examining.’
‘I’m afraid he, too, is out of the realm.’
Willders rasps his chin with one palm while he considers what Bianca has told him – or hasn’t. It takes him a while to reach a conclusion.
‘I will tell the parish that the young Moor may be discounted from the felony, Mistress Merton,’ he says at length.
‘That is good of you, Constable Willders.’ She smiles. ‘I hope your daughter Ruth is soon restored to health. Please let me know if I can be of help. Anything at all, just send word to Dice Lane.’
Willders says very quietly, ‘To avoid any unwanted tumult, may I suggest you keep the young Moor out of sight.’
‘I didn’t tell you I’d found him,’ she says innocently.
‘And you, Mistress Merton, didn’t quite get around to telling me you were honest.’
15
The lines etched into the surface of Robert Cecil’s Molyneux globe had looked so constant when Nicholas studied them at Cecil House: thin but unbreakable chains of gold carved into the lacquer, connecting the continents as though anchoring them in place. Follow them, and so long as God calmed the waters and gave you favourable winds, you would arrive in the New-Found Lands, or Bothnia, or Panama. Each line represented a voyage of discovery made by one of England’s sea dogs: Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh…
The chain connecting England to the Barbary Coast had seemed to Nicholas barely long enough to require more than a few days at sea. But he has been aboard the Righteous now longer than the voyage that took him to the Low Countries, a newly minted physician who had volunteered to serve as a surgeon in the struggle against the Spanish occupation there And out here, in the empty wastes of the ocean, there is no comforting gilded line to follow. There is only the slow concussion of wave after wave, slamming against the ship with a noise that sounds to him like the slow, muffled tolling of a great cathedral bell heard through a wall of sackcloth. Now the tales he’s heard the water-men tell when they drink at the Jackdaw have a new and worrying pertinence: the Squirrel, lost with all hands in a violent storm off the Azores; the crew of the John Goodwill, wrecked on the shores of Bambouk and left there to rot, the poisoned arrowheads still in their bodies; the men of the Firebrand, who exchanged a quick death by drowning, when she was wrecked off Hispaniola, for a lingering one, drifting day after day on the open sea aboard a raft only large enough for ten men, until murder became the only way to delay the inevitable starvation of the remaining nine.
But at least he knows he’s in competent hands. His distaste for Cathal Connell hasn’t weakened a jot. But he cannot fault the man’s skill. He handles the Righteous with calm proficiency. And he has drilled his men well. Even in the roughest sea they move about the rolling deck as though they’ve known no other life but this.
Nicholas has even come to like many of them. At first they had been wary of him, being – like all sailors – practical one moment and deeply superstitious the next. Now they seem content enough with the presence aboard of a competent man of physic, a rarity they seem to think will guarantee their safe return to England. He hasn’t the heart to tell them to trust to their own knowledge rather than his.
And as an envoy carrying letters from the queen, he is regarded by the crew almost as a courtier, shown exaggerated deference one moment, teased unmercifully the next. Nicholas takes it with a smile. It reminds him of his time with Sir Joshua Wylde’s company in Holland.
And he has learned a little of their strange language. He knows the difference now between his windward and his leeward. When someone tells him to get out of the way yarely, he knows they mean quickly. When Connell shouts in his rasping voice to the helmsman, ‘Lay her ahold’, Nicholas now knows he wants the Righteous held on a course close to the wind.
When the sea runs high and the wind howls over the deck, reading his edition of William Clever’s The Flower of Physic becomes impossible, so then he goes below to muse on what he might do when he reaches Safi, the old Portuguese trading harbour on the coast of Morocco.
At sunset, the Righteous goes to sleep. Save for the helmsman and the hands required to man sail and cordage, everyone else takes to their hammocks. There is little dice or card-playing. Connell will not permit any naked flame below the main-deck, for the hold is packed with bales of good English cloth. More than sea serpents and hurricanes, every man aboard has a dread of fire.
Like many English merchant venturers, the Righteous is armed. Set on the fore- and sterncastles are an array of culverins, demi-culverins and falconets. These are fired off for practice whenever Connell feels in a belligerent mood. They produce huge clouds of vile-smelling smoke, which even in a strong wind seem to infuse the ship with the stench of sulphur.
‘If you encounter a Spanish ship, do you intend to give battle?’ Nicholas asks Connell after one such display. The smoke has cleared and the two men are standing on the high, raked stern, watching the five young apprentices studying the documents with the grand wax seals that Reynard Gault brought with him on their departure from Lyon Quay. To Nicholas, they look like schoolboys cramming for a Latin test.
‘If she’s a galleon, we’ll run from her,’ Connell says. ‘The Dons build them big, but not fast.’ He glances aloft, making one of his periodic assessments of the sky. ‘If she’s a merchant, we’ll seize her. We can’t expect another Madre de Deus, but it will still make us rich men.’ He gives Nicholas a sly, conspiratorial look. ‘Do you fancy being a rich man, Master Physician?’
Nicholas doesn’t answer. ‘What about the crew?’ he asks. ‘There’s no room on board the Righteous for prisoners.’
‘I shall relieve them of their riches, wish them a sweet Buena fortuna, and send them on their way,’ Connell replies, staring out over the vast expanse of water. He looks to Nicholas as though he’s revisiting memories. ‘What else would you have a God-fearing man do?’