‘It’s better than having them wandering the streets, passing on contagion,’ Jenny Solver says with a busy flick of her hair.
But Bianca will not have it. ‘It’s a tragedy the monasteries have all been pulled down,’ she says. ‘They could have sought shelter there. When we had the plague in the Veneto, the holy houses were a place of refuge.’
Taking the pot of medicine Bianca has prepared for her – a decoction of drop-wart to get her urine flowing properly – Jenny Solver purses her plump lips in objection. ‘Then we’d have two plagues, Mistress Merton: pestilence and papistry.’
Fuming, Bianca watches her leave. I should have put pepper in it, she tells herself – that would put a stop to your gossiping for a while.
Once alone, her thoughts turn to Reynard Gault. She has yet to prepare the preventatives she’d promised him. She wonders if he really needs them, or if it was – as she suspects – simply a way of drawing her closer to him, so that he can discover what he thinks she knows about Nicholas’s journey to Barbary.
She has concluded – if there had ever been any doubt – that she does not care for Reynard Gault. There will be no fetid, temporary communal sick-houses thrown up for the likes of him. His kind have comfortable homes in the countryside to flee to. Men like Gault can distance themselves from the pestilence. They can buy themselves a measure of safety. Here on Bankside, people do not have that luxury.
For a moment she considers letting him stew, only attending to his request when she’s exhausted every reason to delay. But then the old, familiar worm of curiosity starts to squirm. She knows in her heart Gault wants more from her than medicines.
She can feel now, as she recalls their exchange in his fine new house, the insistent pressure of his fingers squeezing her arm in a manner quite at odds with the gallant’s mask he wears. His sudden reaction still makes her shudder, even now. She wonders, not for the first time, what brought about such a sudden parting of the curtain, allowing her to see a darker world beyond. His desire to know why Robert Cecil sent Nicholas to Morocco burned in his eyes like a fever. For a moment, she feared he was going to try to beat out of her a secret she didn’t possess.
Which means Nicholas has lied to her; there is something more to the commission he’s undertaken for Robert Cecil than the mere desire for knowledge. Nicholas, she hisses to her empty, silent shop, what have you got yourself mixed up in? Haven’t you learned your lesson yet, that nothing good can come of dealing with the Crab?
But as she begins the task of gathering the ingredients to make Gault’s preventatives, spooning sweet-smelling powders from clay pots, taking up sprigs of herbs, pouring oils from little pewter pots into a stone mortar, the fear begins to gnaw at her heart that this time Nicholas has placed himself in a danger too distant for her to come to his aid.
She thinks again of going to Robert Cecil at Windsor and confronting him. But she knows she wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near him, certainly not now that the pestilence has come to Southwark. They’d slam the town gate in her face.
No, she thinks, the only way to find out what Nicholas has got himself embroiled in is to pay reluctant court to the one man who seems to want to know as badly as she does.
Arnoult de Lisle arrives next morning after the al-fajr prayers, to conduct Nicholas to the Bimaristan al-Mansur. The Frenchman is dressed in the Moor fashion, in a cream linen djellaba. With his tanned face, it is all too easy to take him for a native of Barbary, expect when he speaks. His French accent is cultured, his English fluent.
Professor de Lisle is reader in Arabic at the Collège de France, appointed by King Henri himself, Nicholas can hear al-Seddik telling him. He wonders what other talents de Lisle might be keeping hidden: subversion of the alliance between the Moroccan sultan and the English queen, for instance.
The walk to the Bimaristan takes them across a broad public square thronged with people. The sun beats down on merchants selling oils, honey, parsley and oregano; troupes of wrestlers; jugglers and snake-charmers; young boys with solemn faces and bells on their wrists, performing energetic dances to the applause of the crowd. There are men sitting on stools who turn spindles on foot-lathes, fortune-tellers, acrobats, professional storytellers, even a display of severed heads stinking and plum-dark on their poles, reminding Nicholas of the traitors’ heads that grace the top of the gatehouse on London Bridge. Were it not for the heat, it could be Bankside on any May Day.
But when he enters the Bimaristan al-Mansur, Nicholas wonders if perhaps the Frenchman hasn’t led him to one of the sultan’s palaces by mistake.
It takes Nicholas a while to grasp the full magnificence of what he’s seeing. He stares in silence around the high vaulted chamber of gleaming white marble; at the slender pillars whose spreading crowns seem made of stone lace; at the intricate patterns of blue, red and gold tiles beneath his feet, each one no larger than a pebble; at the glittering water flowing from a fountain in the shape of a six-pointed star laid on its side and set upon a stepped dais. It is unlike any hospital he has ever seen. He imagines the patients must think themselves already in heaven.
Sitting on the lowest step of the fountain is an old man in a white djellaba. He plucks strange notes from a stringed instrument with a long neck, which looks too fragile to produce such calming music. His face seems unmoved by the beauty of the sound he makes. He could have been sitting here for a thousand years, Nicholas thinks, his music soothing back to health countless generations of the sick.
Al-Seddik appears, his white beard jutting out beneath his gleaming smile of welcome, his round little body wrapped in pale-blue silk – a plump damson in bejewelled slippers.
‘It is our tribute to Allāh, the most generous, the most bountiful, for his gift of physic,’ he says proudly, one downy forearm wafting carelessly to encompass the magnificence.
‘It’s beautiful,’ says Nicholas, almost lost for words. ‘Very clean.’
‘For hygiene,’ al-Seddik tells him. ‘This is the command of the great al-Abbas al-Majusi. A Christian may know him better as Haly Abbas. You have heard of him in England, perhaps?’
‘I studied a translation of his Complete Art of Medicine, at Cambridge,’ Nicholas says. ‘Not entirely with success; my Latin is a little shaky.’
‘We have a copy in our library,’ says al-Seddik proudly. ‘It is an original – six centuries old.’
Nicholas purses his lips to show how impressed he is. He’s not even sure there were physicians in England that long ago. ‘I’d like to see it,’ he says, thinking of John Lumley. ‘A friend of mine has a translation of Avicenna’s Canon in his library – printed in Paris more than a century ago.’
Al-Seddik beams with pleasure. ‘Ah, the great Ibn Sina! We have an original of the Canon – the al-Qānūn Fi al-Tabb – too.’
‘An original?’
‘Of course.’
‘Six hundred years old?’
‘Give or take a few decades,’ al-Seddik says, clapping Nicholas on the arm in friendly commiseration. ‘Personally, I prefer al-Majusi. His method for siting hospitals was the guiding principle when this location was chosen.’
‘That must have been the part where I had trouble with the Latin.’