Feeling a little better at the mere thought of it, Bianca swings her legs onto the floor, washes from the bowl of well-water in the corner, puts on a clean smock and goes down stairs, infused with renewed purpose.
Admittedly, grouse or partridge might be difficult to find at short notice.
But St Saviour’s market will be opening at daybreak, and the fowlers might have caught a few in their nets. And if not, she could always use a capon as an alternative. By midday, she should have the magic completed. Then she’ll be in a better state to put on her green brocade kirtle and her carnelian bodice and set forth to enchant the Crab into sending a fast pinnace to fetch Nicholas home from the clutches of the cruellest man in the world.
She is in the process of gathering the other ingredients from her kitchen when Jenny Solver rushes into the shop, her face flushed.
‘Am I first in, Mistress Merton?’
‘You are, Mistress Solver. I haven’t really opened – it’s barely daybreak.’
‘So there hasn’t been a run?’
Bianca looks puzzled. ‘A run? On what?’
‘Vinegar.’
‘No. Should there be?’
‘In that case, I shall need’ – Jenny Solver starts crossing off her fingers – ‘at least a quart of vinegar… tincture of squills… three scruples of wormwood… four drachms of water germander… camphire…’
‘Wait a moment, Mistress Solver,’ Bianca says, trying to slow her down. ‘These are the ingredients for a fumigant: to protect against the pestilence.’
Jenny Solver looks at her as if she’s the village clod-pate. ‘Why else do you think I’m here at cock-fart, Mistress Merton? It’s crossed the river. There’s plague on Bankside.’
Bianca’s usual habit is to ignore Jenny Solver’s gossiping. But something about the look in her eyes says this isn’t just rumour. ‘How do you know?’
‘Parson Moody told me. He buried the first body, late last night.’
Bianca lifts a hand to her mouth. ‘No! Who was the poor soul? Did he say?’
‘Do you know Constable Willders’s daughter, Ruth, the one who married that glover’s son? They live on Pocket Lane. Only she’d been across the bridge for a while, see, an’ when she come back–’
Bianca feels a wave of cold dread surge through her, taking all the strength out of her legs. She can hear Goodwife Willders’s voice in her head: He’s just gone down to our daughter Ruth’s place on Pocket Lane with a pot of my broth. Ruth’s taken a little poorly…
And she recalls the way that Willders, on his return, had seemed somehow distracted. He knew, she tells herself. He knew. And yet he kept silent. God alone knows how many people might already be infected!
For a moment Bianca thinks she’s going to faint. She steadies herself against the table. Jenny Solver is leaning very close to her, her eyes rolling, her lips drawn over her teeth to emphasize the horror of it all. Her voice seems unbearably loud – as if she’s shouting into Bianca’s face.
‘Imagine it: Constable Willders having to confine his dying daughter in a plague house an’ all the time wondering if he’s tainted himself – an’ anyone who’s been near him. So if it’s all the same to you, Mistress Merton, I’ll have that fumigant just as soon as you can manage. Mistress Merton… Mistress Merton… are you alright?’
16
At night Nicholas sleeps in a hammock, rigged in a little alcove where the cases of matchlock muskets destined for Sultan al-Mansur’s armoury are stored. On the Righteous, that is as close to privacy as anyone – save Connell – can get, a meagre nod to his position as a messenger of the Privy Council. It reminds Nicholas of a crypt in a mausoleum. The only light – until dawn breaks and the hatch forward of the foremast is thrown open – comes from a single horn lantern swaying on a hook from a deck beam. When that happens, the resulting shaft of lurching grey luminosity makes Nicholas fear the sea has broken in. The hatch is open now.
The wind has ceased to howl. The waves have calmed. The first day-watch is going on deck, a procession of grumbling, cursing men clambering sleepily up the ladder to take their turn in the head, the narrow grating beneath the bowsprit – the only place on the Righteous a man may empty his bowels, and usually then only shoulder-to-shoulder with his neighbour.
Nicholas takes this daily ritual in good spirit. He is no stranger to enforced communality. In the Low Countries, as surgeon to Sir Joshua Wylde’s company, he’d learned to dig a jakes as speedily as any man and use it without complaint, regardless of the stink. Here, at least, a fellow’s waste goes into the water, not some stinking ditch or the open drains of London.
But before Nicholas can attend to himself, first he must check on his patient, poor Edmund Hortop.
Yesterday the apprentices lashed the oars of the cockboat together to form a makeshift stretcher, trussed the lad like a rolled carpet and – as gently as they could – lowered him through the hatchway into the darkness below. It had looked to Nicholas as though they were already burying him. ‘He’s a brave English lad – see, he makes no complaint,’ the mate said, though Nicholas could tell Hortop’s silence had more to do with his injury than with any courage he might still possess.
Several times throughout the night Nicholas has woken and made his stumbling way by the lantern’s light to Hortop’s place behind the hatchway ladder, stooping to avoid dashing his brains out on the low deck beams. Kneeling beside the injured lad he has calmed and soothed, talked of the inconsequential, mopped away sweat, moistened the boy’s lips. There is precious little else he can do, and he long ago learned that activity, however futile, is a good mask for helplessness where a physician is concerned.
‘Will Edmund live, Master Physician?’ one of Hortop’s friends asked, a rangy lad with the ever-questioning eyes of a child who’s lost a parent in a crowd. Nicholas replied with some now-forgotten assurance that he suspects sounded as shallow to the apprentice as it did to himself.
‘He must live,’ another said resolutely. ‘He’s come all this way. It’s within grasping distance now. Courage, Edmund. You’ll soon be living like a prince.’
At the time Nicholas had been too tired to question what he meant. But now, as he follows the line of mariners towards the ladder, he recalls thinking that it had seemed an odd thing to say. True, Hortop had come from a humble shepherd’s hut, but a life at sea in the service of the Barbary Company hardly seems like a beckoning paradise.
Nicholas reaches the ladder. In the pale wash of light from the hatchway he can see the space behind it is empty. The lad’s gabardine coat is lying discarded against a stout timber rib. But Hortop himself has gone.
From hope to terror and back again. Tumbling, always tumbling. One moment Bianca is certain that she’s suffering nothing more alarming than a mild ague brought on by too much thinking. The next, she knows in her bones that she has the plague. I’m going to recover. I’m going to die. Recover… die…
The only question is: when? In the next hour? Within the day? The pestilence can take you so swiftly you don’t even have time to make a Will. Healthy at noon; dead by nightfall. I’m feeling a little better than I was an hour ago… I’m feeling worse…
She has closed her shop on Dice Lane. She will not open it, no matter how urgent the call for her balms and tinctures. She dares not risk coming into contact with another living soul.