Three times.
Each without an answer. The lad must be asleep somewhere.
But why has no one else come? Where is the Berber Methuselah woman who does the cooking? Where is the boy who fetches water, and the young girl who does the infidel’s washing and still hasn’t stopped staring at him with those immense brown eyes? All he can hear is the twittering of the sparrows as they dart around the upper gallery. He steps out into the courtyard.
They have planned the ambush to perfection: two figures, moving unnaturally fast from the blurred edges of his vision, so indistinct they could be apparitions. In a moment of startled comprehension, Nicholas realizes they have waited patiently for the moment when moving from darkness into dazzling sunlight makes the victim almost blind.
They strike so swiftly that Nicholas has little chance to defend himself. Before he can even think of resisting, one of them has his head in an armlock that forces him to close his eyes or stare directly into the sun. Inside a hot orange mist, the blood vessels in his eyelids become a dark spider’s web ensnaring him. The arm about his neck tightens. Nicholas begins to gasp for breath, clawing with frenzied fingers at the suffocating weight crushing his windpipe.
Before the blackness takes him there is a brief moment of dreaming. The merest flash of a fantasy. Bianca Merton is crouching over him, moving her lips towards his upturned throat. She is preparing to put Eleanor into her rightful place in the archive of his past. And this time there is no kissing knot, no audience in the Jackdaw’s taproom to make a mockery of it. His neck arches. Waiting. Waiting for the moment he has denied for so long.
But when her tongue touches his throat, it is not the hot kiss of long-delayed consummation that he feels. It is the icy thrust of Surgeon Wadoud’s scalpel.
30
‘Bastarda!’ Bianca barks under her breath as the pestle flies out of her hand and rolls across the tabletop. She steadies the mortar before it can follow, and retrieves the pestle in the very last moment before it crashes to the floor. Then she blames Reynard Gault for being the cause of her clumsiness.
She has spent the last hour preparing the pomanders of rose leaves, tragacanth gum and camphor for him to hang about the necks of his investments, should the pestilence ever have the temerity to stick its nose around the front door of his new-toy house in Smithfield.
She thinks again of her visit to Giltspur Street, and how she’d left with the distinct impression that Gault was as interested in what Nicholas might have told her about his mission for Robert Cecil as he was in her physic. Now she is more convinced than ever that Nicholas has not told her the whole story. As a consequence, Bianca fears for him more than ever. And though she will not admit it, she knows that is the real cause of the pestle taking on a wilful life of its own.
And there is something else troubling her. It is the lie Gault told her about not knowing the name of Solomon Mandel.
Was he somehow involved in the Jew’s death? she asks herself, as the leaves she is pounding release their heady scents. Why else would he have lied to her?
She wonders how she might prove that Gault knew Mandel, or at least met him, as she suspects. Perhaps the Barbary Company has a record of the events surrounding the Moor envoy’s visit to London – the visit that was welcomed by its leading merchants. She shakes her head as she imagines the welcome she’d get if she turned up at the guildhall and asked to see it. Besides, Gault would be bound to hear of it.
She is about to resign herself to defeat when her eyes alight on a small earthenware pot, sitting all by itself on the window ledge by the street door, softly lit by the late-afternoon sun. It contains ointment for Parson Moody’s tired eyes. She is expecting him to call today and collect it, if he can find time away from the growing number of funerals that he must conduct.
Of course. Parson Moody!
Chiding herself for not having made the connection when she was preparing the ointment, she almost drops the pestle again. Her jaw stiffens with satisfaction. Parson Moody is the priest at St Saviour’s where the parish records are stored, the same records that include the subsidy roll that enabled Nicholas to learn that Solomon Mandel was the Turk’s man.
And Southwark was where the entourage of the Sultan of Morocco’s envoy entered London, after its landfall in Devon in 1589.
Grinning like a crazed woman, Bianca wields her pestle victoriously in the air, as if she has just battered an assailant into submission. Because it has dawned on her that if she’s learned only one thing about Englishmen like Reynard Gault since arriving from Padua, it is this: when it comes to matters of great civic occasion, they would rather walk naked through the Royal Exchange than have their names left out of the record.
She arrives at St Saviour’s to find Parson Moody preparing for Evensong. He is flustered. He’s only just returned from burying the entire Molestrop family: husband, wife, one full set of grandparents and an unmarried daughter of sixteen, all of whom were only permitted to leave their plague house behind the pike ponds when they had been dead long enough to satisfy the parish collectors.
‘I do not know why God punishes the innocent so,’ Moody says harshly, wiping his brow so that his brimmed hat tilts back over his temple. ‘We pray. We abjure from sinfulness as best we can. And then we pray some more. It makes no difference. What His plan for us is, I cannot imagine.’
‘I’ve brought the medicine for your eyes, Parson Moody,’ Bianca says, handing him the pot.
‘You are a good woman, Mistress Merton,’ he says with a priest’s unassailable smile. ‘Whatever some in this parish may say about you.’ He pats her arm. ‘I want you to know I never believed the wilder speculations.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Is there news of when Dr Shelby might return? I had not imagined he would abandon us at such a time as this.’
‘I don’t believe he has abandoned us, Parson Moody. Had he known the pestilence would increase, he would have stayed.’ As a defence, she thinks, it’s not entirely watertight. ‘Besides, there is little a physician can do that we are not already doing ourselves. Nicholas said as much before he left.’
‘Then that simply reminds us that we sinners are all dependent upon God’s continuing grace.’
She nods sagely, if only to make him feel better. ‘I would ask a question of you, Parson Moody. Will you spare me a moment of your time?’
‘And what question is that, Mistress Merton?’ he replies as she follows him into the coolness of the church.
‘When Dr Shelby was called to the inquest into Master Mandel’s brutal murder, he came here to ask if he could inspect the parish records, to see if he might find out a little about Solomon’s past.’ She can hear her words echoing faintly off the ancient stones. ‘Before he left, Nicholas asked me if I would continue his investigation.’
‘Is that so?’
‘As you know, Solomon’s murderer has not yet been brought to justice.’
‘I thought that young Moor of yours was a suspect.’
‘Farzad? No. I can vouch for Farzad. It couldn’t have been him. Even Constable Willders knew him to be wholly innocent.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. We have so many foreigners in the city these days, I sometimes marvel that more of us are not murdered in our beds.’
‘I would remind you that I am also a foreigner in this land,’ Bianca says emphatically. As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she regrets them. This is no time to alienate Parson Moody.