Is that a flicker of relief Nicholas thinks he sees on Hadir Benhassi’s face? If it is, it’s gone in an instant. The lad throws up his hands in a gesture of delight, the djellaba sliding down his brown arms.
‘I have the honour, Sayidi, of being the factor of the Barbary Company here in Morocco. I come from Marrakech to see all is well with Captain Conn-ell’s cargo. Three days on a camello!’
Nicholas searches Benhassi’s face for signs of artifice. He finds none. But if this lad really is the Barbary Company’s factor, as he claims, then where is Adolfo Sykes? In his thoughts, Nicholas can hear Robert Cecil’s voice: Three Barbary Company ships have returned to England without a single one of Adolfo Sykes’s dispatches. I fear some mischief has befallen him…
‘That’s an important responsibility, Master Benhassi,’ he says cautiously. ‘Do you bear it alone?’
‘Yes, Sayidi. All alone.’
‘In Safi?’
‘No, Sayidi; in our great city of Marrakech.’
If Hadir Benhassi is lying, Nicholas decides, he’s more practised at it than his innocent countenance would suggest.
‘Are you returning there, Master Benhassi? Because that’s where I am bound. I carry a letter from my queen to your sultan.’
Hadir Benhassi’s eyes widen in awe. ‘Then you are a most important man, Sayidi Nich-less. And in Morocco, all important men must have a secretary. Do you have already a secretary?’
‘I do not, Master Hadir,’ says Nicholas, understanding at once how this conversation will end. ‘But as I have not a single word of your language, I suppose I should hire one. Might you suggest someone?’
I could do worse, he thinks, than keep this engaging young man close. And what better way to learn – with a little careful diplomatic enquiry along the way – what has happened to Adolfo Sykes. They agree on half a ducat a week.
‘Because you are an important man, Sayidi Nich-less, you will need the finest camello for the journey to Marrakech to see the sultan,’ Nicholas’s new secretary says as they follow the dusty track towards the Kechla, between trees that look to his stranger’s eye like giant dandelions. ‘I will get you one. Very comfortable. Only eight English pennies.’
‘The lad at the quayside was offering a camel for seven,’ Nicholas says, instantly wondering why he’s being cautious with Robert Cecil’s money.
‘You can pay him seven if you wish. But I do not recommend it.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re not his camellos.’
Nicholas smiles. He decides he quite likes Hadir Benhassi – whoever he really is.
They are approaching the high sandstone walls of the Kechla and a fine arched gateway set between two high towers. In their shade is a small tented encampment, where men with faces as dark and furrowed as a Suffolk field in winter tend herds of grazing goats. The men wear robes dyed as blue as the sky, and their heads are swathed in broadcloth. The women, garlanded in necklaces of polished stones, sit in circles, chattering gaily as they brew some sort of drink in brass urns.
‘Tell me, Hadir, how long have you been the Barbary Company’s factor?’
‘Since the second Jumada,’ Hadir says. ‘Two months.’
‘And the previous factor – was he your father?’ Nicholas asks, feigning no more than a passing interest.
Hadir’s bright face clouds over. ‘Sayidi Sy-kess was very good man to me. But he is dead now.’
Nicholas struggles to keep his face from betraying emotion: he doesn’t know of Adolfo Sykes. Never heard of him. Wouldn’t know the name if it were painted in letters ten feet high.
‘Dead? An old man, was he?’
‘No, Sayidi. My friend Sy-kess was not old. Was an accident. Very unlucky accident.’
21
Bianca sits in the pews at St Saviour’s, a mannered look of submissive piety on her face. It is a mask she adopts whenever she visits a Protestant church. The effort costs her less than the fine for non-attendance. She lets Parson Moody’s sonorous voice enfold her like an old woollen blanket that’s been left out in the rain. Cloying. Musty.
Moody is telling his flock that the Devil has visited the pestilence upon them because of their own sinfulness. She fancies calling out that she knows of a certain house near the Falcon river steps where the bawd keeps a selection of wickedly pliable canes to employ upon the parson’s plump buttocks. But she does not. The arrival of the plague is shock enough for Bankside.
It is two weeks now since she awoke to discover she had escaped its black enfolding wings. The entire Willders family is in the cemetery. In the same plot lie daughter Ruth’s husband, the glover, and his twin sisters. The landlord of the Walnut Tree on St Olave’s Lane is interred nearby, along with several of his customers, including the tanner Jack Prout and all but one of his family – a grandmother. This ancient survivor has become so deranged by what she witnessed in the closed-up plague house, while her kin died around her one by one, that she now visits the graveyard to be closer to them. There she crawls amongst the tombstones, eating handfuls of earth until the churchwarden shoos her away with a broom.
Walter Pemmel is dead, his old man’s whining now for ever cut off, after an ill-advised visit to his son on Pepper Alley. The Lazar House behind Bianca’s physic garden has been turned over to the confinement of the sick, although she wonders how much more quickly they might expire if they knew what had happened to her in that awful place. The bookseller Isaac Bredwell, Ned’s former drinking partner, has been carried off by the sickness and now lies at St Saviour’s, along with everyone in his lodging house: twelve in all, including two girls aged three and seven and a six-month-old babe. Ned has managed to find in his heart a measure of sadness for Bredwell, who once tried so hard to turn Nicholas against Bianca when he first came to Bankside in the year of his great grief.
Bianca’s attendance at church has little to do with gratitude for her survival. It is a matter of practicality. The parish authorities are wary of doing business with anyone who is not a willing member of a congregation, and so she sits in the pews at St Saviour’s and listens to the sermons with as much forbearance as she can muster, trusting that God will understand that in a nation of heretic Protestants, the faithful must sometimes do things they would rather not.
Not that her offers of help have been accepted unanimously. More than a few sidemen, vestrymen and wardens have made it clear they believe a woman cannot possibly understand the complex methods by which the pestilence spreads. Nevertheless, her little apothecary shop on Dice Lane has become the place where the banners of defiance still fly, the place on the battlefield where the survivors can regroup and rearm themselves, refusing to countenance defeat. As a consequence, her physic garden is becoming depleted. She often has to borrow Timothy from Rose and send him across the bridge to the merchants’ warehouses on Petty Wales near the Tower to buy dried replacements.
On a schedule that she has organized for the parish, squadrons of women sally forth at dawn and dusk to ensure the lanes and alleys are cleaned of waste and detritus. Even Jenny Solver plays her part, though Bianca suspects mostly to enjoy the opportunity to gossip. These parts of Southwark have never been so clean. Doorways are scrubbed with vinegar; those where the plague has visited with quicklime. The open drains are sluiced with river water twice daily. The Mutton Lane shambles is cleared of blood and scraps at noon and again after Evensong. Middens and dunghills are burned, the debris buried. Fires are lit to incinerate old floor-rushes and the corpses of stray dogs. Buffle is not allowed out and must confine herself to the Jackdaw’s yard, except when it is dark. And only then in Ned’s company.