‘Perhaps he just plain forgot,’ says Rose.
‘No, Gault’s too sharp a knife to be that easily blunted. Besides, it was the event of the season.’
Ned rises from his bench, his huge form filling the space between the table and the wall of the booth. ‘I’ll go to Giltspur Street and wring the truth out of the overdressed Jack-a-dandy.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ Bianca tells him. ‘The young men he keeps about him go armed. Besides, it was hard enough keeping Farzad out of the Clink. I don’t want to have to worry about you ending up there, too.’
‘This is Bankside,’ Rose points out. ‘Why not lure him into a cross-biting? I’ll play the bait and lead him on. Then Ned can burst into our chamber just as Gault’s about to drop his hose. If he doesn’t spill what you want, we can threaten to haul him before the judge for attempting to seduce a married woman.’
‘That’s very sweet of you to offer, Rose, dear, but he’s not a green-pate fresh in from the countryside. And have you thought how Ned might feel about that?’
‘I could tolerate it, if it were done to help Mistress Bianca,’ Ned says nobly. ‘As long as no clothing other than his own was taken off. An’ no pawing. I couldn’t ’ave you pawed, Wife.’
Bianca slaps a hand on the table. ‘No, I’m not having any of it. It won’t work. I don’t want Rose’s reputation impugned. And I don’t want the Jackdaw known for cross-biting. This is about the only tavern in Southwark where new customers can feel safe.’
‘Just trying to help,’ says Rose with a shrug. ‘It goes on all the time in the Good Husband.’
Bianca calls an end to the conversation. ‘If I can’t come up with something soon, I’ll just have to wait until Nicholas returns. Then perhaps he’ll tell me what Gault was really up to, and he can have Cecil take a closer look at Master Reynard-peacock-feather-Gault.’
‘I wonder where he is now,’ says Rose distractedly.
‘On his way back to Giltspur Street, I expect.’
‘No, I meant Master Nicholas. I wonder if he’ll come back to us dressed like a Moor prince? He’d look ever so bonny.’
‘Rose, dear, he’s a Suffolk yeoman’s son. It’s all we can do to get him to wear a bright ribbon in the points of that old canvas doublet of his. I don’t think you’ll be seeing Nicholas dressed up like Master Kit’s Tamburlaine this side of Judgement Day.’
‘Kit Marlow.’ Rose gives a wistful little laugh. ‘Mercy, how I remember the look in Master Nicholas’s eyes when first you called that saucy fellow Kit. I thought to myself: Hello, that’s green jealousy, that is. Our Master Nicholas is afeared Mistress Bianca is smitten with Christopher Marlowe, or my name’s not Rose Fludd. ’Course, it’s not Fludd now, it’s Monkton. But it’s a shame he’s dead – Marlowe, I mean, not Ned, or Master Nicholas…’
But Bianca isn’t listening to Rose’s prattle. She’s too busy trying to quell the competing voices that have suddenly begun to shout in her head.
Because Rose had just made her realize there is a way to lure Reynard Gault into giving up his secrets. Forget an alliance, she thinks. It’s time for Christopher Marlowe to pay for all the tribulations he put her and Nicholas through, by coming to her aid.
Even if he has to make his restitution from beyond the grave.
For Nicholas, the storeroom of Adolfo Sykes’s house has become a death-cell. All that is missing is a priest to give him holy absolution.
He has waited all night and much of the following day for the moment when the door is unlocked and they come for him. There has been not a moment’s ease. The chamber is as hot and stifling as the hammam, but without the comforts. If he sits against the wall, the rough masonry presses into his sweating back; if he lies on the floor, it’s like trying to sleep on a bed of nails. To distract his mind, he’s spent much of the time attempting to recite the Hippocratic Aphorisms in Latin and then in English. Even so, the expectation has become almost unbearable, an ever-present current of panic. Whenever he catches the sound of movement, every time he hears voices raised, his stomach turns to icy melt-water and he has to fight against a breaking wave of terror.
Not that he’s a coward. He hadn’t flinched from stepping off the Mutton Lane water-stairs, to finally drown for ever Eleanor’s reproachful voice whispering in his head, Why could you not save me? During the fighting in the Low Countries there had been times when he’d thought death’s eyes were fixed on him, and him alone. And when Dr Arcampora’s two murderous rogues had been about to kill him in that warehouse in Petty Wales – before Bianca has saved him – he’d resigned himself to destruction, though admittedly he’d been too roughly used to have much comprehension of what was happening.
No, it’s not a lack of courage that threatens to unman him, it’s the helplessness. It’s his inability to seize Cathal Connell by his sparse hair and smash that salt-scoured face against Adolfo Sykes’s stone talisman until the memory of Hortop, of Hadir, of grandmother Tiziri, little Gwata and his sister Lalla is expunged from his mind.
By counting the calls to prayer, he reckons it is early afternoon on the day following the ambush. His captors have given him no food and only a little water since yesterday. Perhaps they mean to starve him to death.
Before they brought him to the storeroom, he had spent several hours in the courtyard hunched beneath Adolfo Sykes’s stone talisman, fettered by an ankle-chain. Connell had greedily weighed in his palm the ring Sultan al-Mansur had given Nicholas, then left him with the bodies for company.
Even with his eyes shut, Nicholas had been unable to block out the image of Hadir hanging from the old pomegranate tree, or grandmother Tiziri and the two children lying at his feet. In the heat, it hadn’t taken long before the first faint stink of putrefaction began to replace the scent of citrus. And he couldn’t shut his ears to the monotone mourning of the gathering flies.
After the al-’isha prayers, when the moon bathed the garden in a pale corpse-light, they had unchained him and moved him here, to the storeroom. Thankful to be turning his back on the garden, he’d wondered if they were going to dispose of the bodies before a new sun spread the stench of what they had done from one end of the Street of the Weavers to the other. He prays now that they have done so, because if they take him back there, he’s not sure his sanity will bear it.
During the night, sleeping only briefly, he entertained wild notions of escape. Somehow he would reach the Badi Palace and shout al-Seddik’s name to the guards until they saw sense and fetched the minister. But there is no way out of the storeroom, let alone out of the house. Even if he managed to reach the roof terrace, it is a thirty-foot drop to the hard dirt surface of the street.
He wonders if Connell might let him have Adolfo Sykes’s writing box, so that he can pen a last letter to Bianca. He doubts it. If there had ever been compassion flowing in that man’s veins, it long ago turned to bile. So instead he composes the letter in his mind: I am a farmer’s son. I cannot make words like Kit Marlowe, or Philip Sidney. I do not have the graces for it. I cannot make a pretty phrase or write a gallant’s verse…
Shamed by the clumsiness of the words, he strikes an imaginary line through them and starts again: I had not imagined I should never see you again. The thought of it grieves me past all description. Though I am not of your faith, and confession is not permitted me by the new religion, I would there was a priest here – not to shrive me, but to hear me admit before God the fault of my dereliction: I should not have left you.