‘You’re not afeared of marrying a sorceress?’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve been putting a love-charm under my pillow all this time, and I never knew it.’
‘No, but I warn you: I shall weave magical chains, to stop you going anywhere that Robert Cecil commands.’
‘Can you delay the weaving until after I get back from Windsor – for Solomon Mandel’s sake?’
She raises a cautionary eyebrow. ‘After that, no more obeying a summons from the Pigmy – other than to attend the queen’s bedside when she’s ill. Promise?’
‘I promise.’
Nicholas rolls the length of thread between his fingers until it become a little ball. He leans over her.
‘What’s that?’ she asks, as the weight of him pushes her into the yielding comfort of the bed.
‘It’s a kissing knot,’ he replies, letting it fall gently between her breasts. ‘Isn’t that how all this started?’
It is a witch’s night, tendrils of cloud beating across the face of the moon. The river is pitch-black like the inside of a sealed tomb. A single lantern, masked for concealment, glows in the prow of the tilt-boat as it approaches the Mutton Lane stairs.
The boy Owen is ashore first. Hauling on the boat’s painter, he pulls her against the jetty and makes the rope fast to a wooden pile festooned with sinking river weed. Calum and two other apprentices are next, showing a practised agility even in the darkness. Reynard Gault is last. He pulls his half-cloak about his shoulders and, with one hand on the hilt of his sword, orders Calum to lead the way into the lanes of Bankside.
The sound of the call to prayer from the Koutoubia mosque brings Nicholas out of a deep and contented sleep. For a moment his senses are confounded. Then the hot thrill of memory infuses his body. Sleepily, he looks around. In the corner of the chamber a candle gutters in its sconce. Beyond the lozenges of glass in the single window the moonlight paints the houses across the lane with a lacquer of ghostly grey.
Then he realizes Bianca is not beside him.
The coverlet on her side of the bed is thrown back, revealing not the amber smoothness of her sleeping body, but a crumpled sheet. And then, to his bewilderment, the high-pitched cry follows him into full wakefulness. It takes him a moment to realize that, somewhere in the Jackdaw, Buffle the dog is howling.
He waits to hear the sound of the street door being unlocked as Bianca lets her out into the lane. It does not come. Curious, Nicholas climbs out of her bed, pulls on his woollen trunk-hose and goes out onto the landing.
He is halfway down the stairs before he smells it: a sulphurous stench that sticks in the nostrils and makes his eyes stream. Then he catches the throat-rasping taste of smoke. By the time he reaches the taproom floor, he can see wraiths of it drifting in the weak moonlight. He turns into the passage that leads to the parlour, the kitchen and the door to the cellar that Bianca has reclaimed for her apothecary store. The stench of brimstone is stronger here. And then he sees a figure ahead of him – a slender figure in a night-shift, leaning against the cellar door as though for support. He hears a woman coughing: deep, lung-tearing rasps.
‘Bianca!’ he calls, starting towards her.
She turns as though to wave him back, her face contorted by the fumes.
‘The cellar… burning…’
Another breath of the sulphurous air cuts her off. Even as Nicholas reaches out to pull her away, he sees her body fold as she chokes. And as she rises again – one hand at her throat, the other still grasping the door-latch – she stumbles forward, dragging the door open behind her.
Nicholas feels a cool draught flow over him. The black doorway to the cellar suddenly turns a brilliant yellow. He hears a deep whooomph issue from its depths as the bundles of dried plants ignite, followed swiftly by the oils and the liquors, the pastes made of fat, the desiccated skins, all the flammable materials of the apothecary’s art. The night becomes as black as hell, as a dense cloud of smoke bursts up the stairway, bringing with it a heat that chokes his cry of alarm almost before it’s left his throat.
He moves without thinking, an animalistic reaction that rebels against the body’s thirst for life and overwhelms it. He ducks down into breathable air and lunges forward into the passage. Before he’s even conscious of movement, he’s stumbling backwards, away from the heat, dragging Bianca after him even as she sinks to the floor.
He pulls her into the taproom as though he were dragging a carpet, shouting between racking coughs, ‘Fire!.. fire!.. hurry – we are undone…’
By the time Rose, Ned, Timothy and Farzad join him, the passageway is ablaze, the flames ravishing the Jackdaw’s ancient timbers in a fiery consummation. The air in the taproom is caustic in the throat. Buffle barks in high, agitated yelps in a corner, until Timothy lifts her up and calms her.
Nicholas kneels beside Bianca’s body. Cradling her against his chest, he runs his fingers through her hair. A short while ago it had smelled of rosewater. Now it has the sharp tang of burnt straw. Her eyes are open and she seems to comprehend the danger, gripping his wrist tightly as though she fears he’s going to leave her again.
‘Someone fetch the keys, or we’ll all burn here,’ Nicholas shouts.
Timothy, whose task it is to lock the street door at night against house-divers, hands Buffle to Farzad and sprints up the taproom stairs to the attic. He returns with a ring of heavy iron keys. In the glare of the spreading flames, he quickly identifies the correct one and advances on the door. He’s about to slot the bit into the lock when he suddenly ducks to one side and peers out of the window. He turns back, confusion on his face.
‘There’s people in the lane.’
‘Of course there’s people in the lane,’ growls Ned impatiently. ‘The tavern’s afire, if you hadn’t noticed. Let’s hope they’ve come to help, not gawp.’
‘Not just people,’ says Timothy, oblivious to the harshness in Nicholas’s voice. ‘That Gault fellow’s there. They ’ave swords. Why ’ave they got swords? You can’t fight a fire with a sword. What do they want?’
Nicholas knows exactly what they want. He’s seen the bloody proof in a pretty courtyard garden in Morocco.
Bianca, too, understands what Gault’s presence means. Tears stream down her face, lacing her skin with a delta of soot. Her grip on Nicholas’s wrist tightens. To his alarm, he notices little specks of soot in the spittle around her lips.
‘Forgive me, Nick… My curiosity… Kit Marlowe was right: you can’t make a bargain with the Devil and expect to come off best.’
He hugs her to his breast.
‘Perhaps not,’ he whispers into her ear. ‘But this, my love, is Bankside. If you can’t gull the Devil here, where can you gull him?’
He calls to Rose and Ned to take his place. Gently prizing Bianca’s fingers from his wrist, he stands up and looks back at the passage leading to the parlour. The far end, by the cellar door, is a wall of roaring fire, smoke rolling along the ceiling of the passage and spilling out into the taproom. He judges that even if he can get into the parlour, he’ll have only moments before the fire cuts off his escape. But there is no other way. The choice Gault has given him is stark: die by the sword, or burn like a heretic.
Unless…
The heat almost stops him before he reaches the parlour door. He feels as though he’s pushing into the teeth of a gale greater than anything he’s experienced aboard the Righteous or the Marion. Every step he takes is a trial of strength against its scorching breath. But at last he makes it, finding a measure of relief as he slips into the chamber.