What am I, he asks himself silently: the physician… or the disease?
And very slowly – though whether in victory or defeat, he does not yet know – Nicholas lowers the pistol.
It takes some time for Ned’s voice to penetrate. At first the words are not words at all, merely noises. They are indecipherable, like Adolfo Sykes’s last dispatch, waiting for the moment the magic makes them whole again.
Bianca…
The fire…
Hurry…
Dying.
Ned and Rose have laid her down at a safe distance from the funeral pyre of all her hopes and aspirations, as much to shield her eyes from the Jackdaw’s destruction as her body from the flames. Timothy and Farzad stand a little aside. Both are weeping, Farzad’s tears dampening the top of Buffle’s head as he clutches the dog protectively to his breast.
Their mistress’s amber eyes have closed. Her chest heaves in desperate spasms as she fights for breath.
Kneeling beside her, Nicholas sees in the light from the fire the black soot around her nostrils and her lips. He gently inserts a finger between her lips and slides it around her mouth. When he withdraws it, the wetness on his skin is slicked with more soot.
He’s seen the phenomenon before, in Holland: men who had escaped a burning town, apparently unharmed, dying a short time later as the damage caused by inhaling the fire’s breath spread, constricting the windpipe. He knows that if he doesn’t act immediately, it will be too late to save her.
And then, from the darker parts of his memory, the old fear comes back to haunt him. His physic had failed to save Eleanor and the child she was carrying. His inability to protect them had been the priming powder that set off the detonation that almost destroyed him. He knows he cannot go back there again – not just because of what it did to him, but because this time there will be no Bianca Merton to bring him back from the Purgatory he told Gault he doesn’t believe in, but which he’s tasted and knows to be only too real.
He lays his fingers on Bianca’s throat. For an instant he thinks she has placed her own fingers upon his, because he senses another’s hand about his own. But her arms are lying motionless by her sides. He smiles as he recalls Surgeon Wadoud’s impassive brown eyes. You have the hands of a good man. And a good surgeon, too… tell them what you saw here in the Bimaristan al-Mansur. Tell them we are not all heathens…
Nicholas searches for the pulse in Bianca’s neck.
A risk of severing the carotid arteries, leading to death…
When he feels the beat of her life against his fingertips, Nicholas’s fingers linger, fixing the line of the arteries in his mind.
‘Ned, I need a knife. A sharp one,’ he calls out.
‘One of them lads had a poniard as well as a sword,’ Ned replies. ‘Hang on while I fetch it.’
There is also the danger that the wound becomes foul…
Nicholas calls after him, ‘There’s a piece of window frame there – to your right – still burning. Put the tip of the poniard into the flames. Count to twenty, then bring it to me.’
The trick is in keeping it clean…
‘Timothy, there’s good water in the well at the crossroads. Fetch me a little.’
‘Water’s no use now, Master Nick,’ Timothy protests, staring at the flames.
‘It’s not for the fire! Now, hurry!’
As Timothy sprints towards the well, Nicholas takes Rose gently by the sleeve.
‘I want you to run to Mother Fissel at the chandler’s on Black Bull Alley. She keeps bees. Tell her we need honey. And clean linen. Tell her it’s for Mistress Bianca. If she plays her usual game, don’t quibble. I’ll pay whatever she demands.’
Rose hurries away at a velocity unseen till now.
‘Farzad, give Buffle to Ned,’ Nicholas commands.
For a moment he seems reluctant to obey.
‘It’s important, Farzad. Give Ned the bloody dog!’
‘I’m to look after the dog?’ queries Ned. ‘Is that the only task I’m to be trusted with?’
‘I want you to hold the dog tightly, Ned, because when I do what is required, your instinct will be to stop me. So I need you to have your hands full. I’ll be no use to her if you try to stop me.’
He turns back to Farzad. ‘Go to the Pike Garden. Fetch me half a dozen of the strongest reeds, each about the length of a finger.’
‘Yes, Master Nicholas,’ says Farzad, grinning with the pleasure of responsibility.
‘And Farzad…’
‘Yes, Master?’
‘This time, don’t take it into your head to go missing.’
47
The ashlar walls of Nonsuch Palace gleam like bleached bone in the August sunshine. Built by the late King Henry for Jane Seymour, it has for many years been home to John and Elizabeth Lumley. Though Lord Lumley has returned it to the queen in lieu of his many debts to the Crown, Her Grace has granted him enduring tenancy until both he and his long-suffering wife have moved on to more heavenly accommodation.
When not at Bianca’s bedside – an excusable intimacy, given that he is her physician – Nicholas is often to be found in Baron Lumley’s vast library: the equal, it is said, of those at Oxford or Cambridge. He has spent many hours there, battling the Latin translations of Avicenna and Albucasis, though in his mind they will now for ever be Ibn Sina and al-Zahrawi. He wonders if one day he might read the words of Surgeon Wadoud, though he hasn’t yet managed to construct a satisfactory Latinized version of her name. But he has sent a letter to her – via Captain Yaxley – thanking her for the gift she so unknowingly gave him.
He has considered describing to the College of Physicians the procedure he employed to save Bianca Merton’s life, but has decided against it. They would most likely denounce him as a butcher.
Thinking of that night – as he does often – he recalls the anguished faces of his friends as he placed the tip of the knife against Bianca’s arched throat. Yet not even Ned Monkton had sought to intervene, as he’d feared. They had trusted him to do the right thing. And in so doing, they had given him the strength to trust himself.
Dawn had broken behind the smouldering ruin of the Jackdaw before he’d been even halfway sure that death had been – if not cheated – at least delayed. By then half of Bankside had gathered to gaze in wonder at the destruction, more than a few shedding tears for the Jackdaw and the remarkable woman who had owned it.
Ned had carried her to the vicarage at St Saviour’s, where Parson Moody had made a bed available. And there Nicholas had stayed for two whole days, taking it upon himself to clean Bianca’s wound with water and honey as Surgeon Wadoud had instructed. To ease the pain of the burns to her throat, and to heal the damage the smoke had done, he’d made her take regular draughts of a distillation of marshmallow root, sage and cinnamon, prepared by an apothecary he trusted on Bucklersbury Lane near Cheapside. Robert Cecil, he’d decided, could wait a day or two. With Connell dead – Sumayl al-Seddik, too, for all he knew – and Gault exposed, the conspiracy was decapitated.
Only when he was sure Bianca was out of immediate danger did Nicholas take a wherry to Cecil House. There he entrusted his dispatch to the same black-gowned secretary who had shown him to Robert Cecil’s study the night he’d been so rudely summoned from his bed at Mistress Muzzle’s lodgings.
‘If he has need to speak to me, you’ll find me at St Saviour’s,’ he’d said. ‘If he summons me to Windsor, I shall have need of an armed escort.’