There is no way out. Within minutes the event will be the talk of Bankside. It’s happened at last… Solomon Mandel saw it with his own eyes… Walter Askew, the waterman, was there having breakfast, and you know he’s too stupid to lie… Mercy! – how long has that taken them?… I thought we were going to have to wait for the Second Coming before they saw sense…
As kisses go, it’s really rather unremarkable – hardly unbridled. It’s not reticence that makes it so. Indeed, each has known this moment would come eventually. It’s just that neither of them ever expected it to happen in the middle of the Jackdaw’s taproom, to the enthusiastic approval of a dozen or more witnesses. Nevertheless, it’s a kiss that falls a long way short of Puritan.
It is only when Rose’s voice intrudes that Bianca and Nicholas notice everyone has stopped pounding the tables.
‘Fie, Mistress,’ she is saying, ‘anyone would think it was you and Master Nicholas getting wed, and not me and Ned!’
Bianca puts her hands to her cheeks. They feel as hot as the sides of a bread oven. She runs her fingers through the dense waves of her hair, noticing the beads of sweat on her brow. A part of her wishes the ground would open up and swallow her. The other part wishes she hadn’t invited Rose to use her chamber upstairs as her own.
And Nicholas? What is he thinking as he feels the extraordinary heat of her body through his fingertips?
In part, absence. Absence of guilt. Of grief. Of ghosts. Absence, at last, of Eleanor. And in its place, a growing understanding that it may indeed be possible for him to love two women and be faithless to neither. But most of all, he feels a desire that he thought was lost to him for ever.
All these thoughts – and more – tumble through their minds in the brief moment Nicholas and Bianca remain standing face-to-face, breathless, not quite able to believe they have finally crossed over from thought to deed. From past to future. It is a pause worth taking, because whatever public face they show now to Bankside, there is no going back.
‘Fine, you’ve all had your fun,’ Bianca says at last, raising her voice as a new outbreak of table-thumping closes the performance. ‘If you want more entertainment, you’ll have to wait for the Lord Mayor to reopen the Rose.’ She points a commanding finger. ‘Farzad – back to the kitchen. And those trenchers won’t clean themselves, Timothy.’
Deciding that the only way to shut the door on what has just happened is by being strictly businesslike, she draws Nicholas, Ned and Rose aside. ‘Before that happy little jape, Ned was telling us that trade is quiet. How quiet?’
‘The regulars are still coming, Mistress,’ says Ned. ‘And we’re still getting lodgers from the country who want to rest up before crossing the bridge. It’s the trade coming in the opposite direction – down by half, at least. Anyone would think the Puritans have taken over the City Corporation.’
‘Then we must bring in more custom,’ Bianca says, adopting her practical tone. ‘We need people with coin and the inclination to spend it.’
‘Goodwife Shelby,’ teases Solomon Mandel, curling his finger as he beckons to her from his nearby alcove. ‘I might have the answer to your problem.’
Bianca crosses to his bench and kneels beside him. She feels her face glowing. She has the awful feeling it will never stop glowing. ‘I am not Goodwife Shelby. It was a kiss, Master Mandel, not a marriage contract.’
Mandel sucks the crumbs off his thumb. ‘Oh, the women in this realm! The queen won’t marry. You won’t marry. No wonder the gallants have nothing to fill their hours with but writing verse!’
Bianca leans forward and whispers sweetly, ‘Perhaps you’d like to breakfast in the Good Husband. They won’t cook your special bread, and if you choose the sprats, don’t come seeking a cure for the flux from Master Nicholas.’
‘Ships, Mistress,’ says a chastened Mandel.
‘What of them?’
‘There are three Barbary Company argosies unloading at Lyon Quay,’ Mandel says. ‘The Righteous, the Marion and the Luke of Bristol. They arrived from Morocco last week. Captain Connell is their commodore. He’s an acquaintance of mine. We’ve traded spices together. Make him an offer.’
‘Three ships – that must be sixty thirsty mariners at least,’ Bianca muses. ‘Tell your friend Captain Connell that he can drink here for free, and we’ll stand his crew every fifth jug.’ She looks at Ned and Rose. ‘Do you concur?’
‘Aye, Mistress,’ says Rose. ‘It’s still your tavern.’
‘And Master Mandel may have as much of Farzad’s bread as he wishes, free until Easter. Does that please?’
‘It pleases,’ Mandel says with the sort wistful smile permitted to old men with good intentions. ‘I’d ask for a kiss, too, but judging by the time it’s taken for you and Dr Shelby to dance love’s measure, I doubt I’ve got the years left in me to wait.’
She leans over and gives his beard a gentle tug. ‘Then I’ll have to dance a little faster, won’t I?’ And with that, she gives him a kiss on his mottled forehead.
As she walks away to re-join Nicholas, Ned and Rose, something makes her look back over her shoulder at the solitary Solomon Mandel. He is one of barely a handful of Jews still living in London, and the only one in Southwark. The few others of his kind live in the House of Converts on Chancery Lane. He is staring down at the crumbs on his trencher as though he’s looking at the fragments of a life that was long ago lost to him. As if he’s assessing the pieces, before making a final accounting of it. The sight fills her with a deep sadness.
Later, when she has cause to think of Solomon Mandel again, she will remember this moment. She will also remember something her mother once said to her: the gift of second sight is no use to anyone, if they don’t comprehend what they’re seeing.
4
There are men on Bankside who look as though they might kill you for stepping on their shadow. For the most part they take their ease in the darker taverns, the cock-fighting pits and the bear-baiting ring. Occasionally one or two might try their luck in the Jackdaw, requiring Bianca or Rose to point out the size of Ned Monkton’s fists. But Cathal Connell, Bianca thinks, would put any one of them in fear of a cutting.
The captain of the Barbary trader Righteous is a parchment-skinned cadaver in a patched and padded russet doublet. He has the eyes of an old executioner who’s forgotten what mercy is, though something tells her he’s barely reached forty years. She can picture him staring at an empty horizon, wondering how long the rancid contents of the water casks will last, unsure of what he fears most: shipwreck or a safe landfall. Yet when he speaks, it is with the soft, dry voice of a poet.
‘Well now, I see ’tis true,’ he says, making an extravagant knee to her. ‘The Jew did not lie. There is an Aphrodite hiding herself away in Southwark, amongst the thieves and the tricksters. A diamond lost in the midden – who’d have thought it?’
‘Not an Aphrodite, Master Connell, more a Circe,’ Bianca replies, trying not to stare at the salt-flayed skin of his face.
‘Forgive the lack of education,’ he says with a smile that would be self-deprecating if it didn’t look more like an attack of the palsy, ‘I’m a simple Irishman from Leinster.’