‘I will have need of a horse, Master Sondes,’ he says. ‘A fast one with strong legs. Better still, find me one with wings.’
Distillations, syrups, purges, balms and potions; in her revived apothecary’s cellar at the Jackdaw, Bianca has spent the day making a dozen or more of each. It has taken all her concentration not to put tansy instead of walnut leaves in the salve that she makes for dog bites, or hyssop in the headache cure instead of houseleek. More than one customer has enquired if she is feeling a little unwell. ‘You appear a mite distracted, Mistress Merton,’ Jenny Solver observed barely an hour ago when she’d come in search of some horehound for a wasp sting. ‘Are you ailing again?’
Distracted? Ailing? Try desperate, she’d wanted to shriek at the woman. Desperate beyond measure. For the first time in her life she feels like a condemned prisoner without the slightest hope of commutation. And she can put her imminent demise down to her own impulsiveness. If only she hadn’t tried to get the better of Reynard Gault.
She knows there is no possibility she can do what he has demanded of her. Even in the unlikely event she could contrive to poison Sir Robert Cecil, every Catholic in the city would be rounded up within the day. The Privy Council torturers would have no rest.
On more than one occasion her thoughts have turned instead to poisoning Gault himself, doing away with the cause of her misery. But his apprentices know her. They’ve witnessed her visits to Giltspur Street; they know what remedies she brings. They’d have the justices on her inside the hour.
And to cap it all, she has started to weep without warning. It is only a matter of time before Rose or Ned catches her with her eyes brimming.
She stabs her pestle into the mortar as though she means to kill it.
Nicholas, where in the name of Christ’s holy wounds are you?
The town is named Faversham. It is a busy little place on the Swale, with an anchorage for shallow-draught vessels, oyster beds and a gunpowder mill. It has cobbles where most places of its size have nothing but ruts, and taverns, too. Nicholas stops at one to rest his horse, and to quench his thirst and take a hurried meal. The landlord regards the djellaba he is still wearing, now dust-stained, with consternation.
‘You’re not some papist priest, are you, come here to corrupt the queen’s religion?’ he asks, his eyes wide with suspicion. ‘Or has a company of players come to town?’
‘I’ve come from Morocco,’ Nicholas explains wearily. ‘I’m on important Privy Council business.’
‘Oh, aye,’ the landlord says, as though his custom comprises nothing else but passing couriers in exotic garb. ‘You’re going to London, then?’
‘That is my intention. I hear there’s plague there.’
‘So there is, an’ it’s cut our trade in half. Never seen the London road so empty.’
‘Do you know if Southwark is spared?’ Nicholas asks.
‘I have a cousin who’s a drover. He took a flock up last Thursday. He told me it’s not as bad as in the city, but not healthy enough for him to want to stay more than a night.’
‘Do you by chance know which tavern he stayed at?’
The man shakes his head.
‘Is he here, your cousin? May I speak to him?’
‘Only if you want to wait a day or two, Master. He’s away at Canterbury.’
Nicholas finishes the rest of his meal in despondent silence.
Once clear of the town, and with the London road ahead of him, he pauses only to load and prime Yaxley’s wheel-lock pistol. There are many more miles still to go, and some of them are across Black Heath. He has not come this far, he tells himself, to fall prey to cut-purses now.
In the garden of his fine new house on Giltspur Street, Reynard Gault listens without interrupting as the lad Calum delivers his daily account of life at the Jackdaw tavern on Bankside. There is envy in his voice, but also a weary disappointment.
‘She’s had no contact with the Cecils that I could see, Master. Nor could I identify anyone who might have come to her from Cecil House.’
‘And you’ve overheard nothing?’
‘They keep their words short whenever they see me around. If she’s lying to you, Master, I’ve no proof of it.’
Gault considers this for a while, studying his fine kidskin gloves. Then he says, ‘If we thought to search the place – or if she proved false – how might we gain entry unobserved?’
‘I can’t see how you could, Master. There’s always someone there. And it’s Bankside, remember. They keep the windows and the street door locked at night – against house-divers. Not that anyone would dare, of course. Not with her.’
‘It’s a tavern, young O’Neil, not a fortress. There must be a way.’
The lad Calum ponders this awhile. Then his face brightens, like a fox that’s come across an unguarded coop. ‘There is the cellar.’
Gault looks up. ‘Go on.’
‘You wouldn’t credit what she keeps down there: enough brimstone to keep hell warm for a week, an’ more potions than you’d need to cure or poison half the city. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling, to the yard. The yard wall isn’t that high. Not if you’re fit. Not if you don’t mind being cursed.’
45
A day and a half after leaving Dover, Nicholas Shelby rides up Long Southwark towards the southern gatehouse of London Bridge, his sweating mount gleaming in the July sunshine as though it were carved from solid marble. Passing the Tabard Inn, he hears the St Saviour’s bell ring out the second hour of the afternoon. When its chimes have died away, he is struck by the uncustomary quiet. Bankside should be teeming with people. But today the twenty-sixth ward of the city – the liberty of Bridge Ward Without – appears almost deserted. A stark contrast, he thinks, to the last time a visitor from the Barbary shore came this way. Then, crowds of Banksiders had turned out to gawp, wide-eyed, at the splendour of the Moor delegation and to marvel at the finery of the Lord Mayor and the merchants of the Barbary Company, who’d come south across the bridge to welcome it. Today none of the few people he passes even notice the dust-stained, weary rider in a blue-cloth djellaba, Yaxley’s wheel-lock pistol tucked into the belt, who has appeared so suddenly amongst them – even though Nicholas thinks he must look like a supporting character in a performance of Master Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.
He is filled with a sudden sense of foreboding. He thinks of the promise he made to Muhammed al-Annuri, to bring Gault to a reckoning. Connell is dead, but the second head of the snake still lives. Gault is just as responsible for the deaths of Adolfo Sykes, Solomon Mandel, Hadir, grandmother Tiziri, Gwata and his sister Lalla – even young Hortop – as Connell ever was. But to discharge that promise he must take another life, a course utterly at odds with another oath he has sworn: the oath to heal.
What am I becoming? he wonders, remembering the total absence of remorse he’d felt when he killed the defenceless Connell.
Thinking now of Tamburlaine, he recalls a line from the play, a line that chills him to the core: I mean to be a terror to the world…
Bianca hears Rose scream, even in the depths of the cellar where she’s at work at her temporary apothecary’s table. It slices into her thoughts about Gault and the fatal dilemma he’s set her, like an axe through a sapling. She’s halfway up the stairs to the taproom – her head full of dreadful images – before she realizes the scream has given way to a tide of joyful but tearful jabbering. Then Buffle begins to bark rapturously.