Whatever her curative talents, Bianca makes an unlikely tavern-keeper. She’s slender, with a narrow, boyish face topped by a trace of widow’s peak, and extraordinarily amber eyes that gleam with a mischievous directness. Having been born of an Italian mother and an English father, her skin still boasts a healthy lustre infused by the Veneto sun, despite all that three years in Southwark have contrived against it.
‘Shame a someone isn’t here to see it,’ says Rose, a plump, jolly young woman with a mane like tangled knitting. ‘How did he manage it? I thought he were out of all regard with them physicians in their pretty college on Knightrider Street.’
‘He called in a favour, Rose,’ Bianca says wryly. And beyond that she will not go. The memories of the horror she and Nicholas endured together are still too raw. Before he left for Suffolk to make his peace with his family, they’d scarcely spoken of it between themselves, let alone with outsiders. The nightmares still come to her, though less frequently now. When they do, they have a terrifying fidelity about them. Once again she is back in that vile place deep in the earth, feeling her flesh tense as it awaits the draw of the scalpel. She consoles herself with the knowledge that no more bodies will wash up on Bankside. The man who put them in the river has met his just reward, thanks to Dr Nicholas Shelby, who came to her as a talisman from out of that very same river.
She wonders what Nicholas is doing now. Is he reconciled with his family? Do the ghosts of his wife and child haunt him still? Will he return to Bankside, as he promised? And how will she feel about him, if he does?
He’s so very different from the men she’d known in Padua. A yeoman’s son from the wilds of Suffolk who’d found the intellectual courage to battle the stultifying hand of tradition during his medical studies is as unlike a fashionably clad libertino as she can possibly imagine. She scolds herself for the sudden, unexpected surge of jealousy that comes with knowing how capable of love Nicholas is, despite his stolid roots. It would be so much better, she thinks, if he could devote that love to the living, and not the dead.
Her reverie is broken by the sole of Ned’s boot on her hand as he descends the ladder.
‘God’s mercy!’ she cries, snatching her hand away and shaking it vigorously. ‘Have a care where you’re putting your feet, you clumsy buffle-head!’ Catching herself using the vocal currency of the London streets, she smiles. She thinks, soon I shall have lost that accent Nicholas says he can hear in my voice whenever I get fractious. Soon I shall be as English as Rose.
Ned Monkton, just turned twenty-one, built like King Henry’s great Mary Rose – and just as liable to capsize, if too much liquid flows in through an open port – steps back to earth. He scratches his fiery auburn hair and slaps his belly with his great fists. ‘There now, Mistress,’ he says, looking up at the two signs, ‘they can’t beat that at the Turk’s Head or the Good Husband, eh?’
‘You’ve hung it upside-down,’ says Rose.
And for just a moment Ned is taken in.
They’re an odd pair. Rose is as ungovernable as a sack of wild martens. Her idea of a day’s leisure is a trip to Tyburn to watch a good hanging. Ned used to be the mortuary warden from St Thomas’s hospital down by Thieves’ Lane. Smiling, Bianca remembers her mother’s firm conviction: there’s always someone for someone.
It’s good to see Ned above ground now, she thinks, instead of deep in the hospital crypt, surrounded by the dead. He’s even getting some colour back in his face. Since Nicholas set off for Suffolk, Ned has taken his place as the Jackdaw’s handyman and thrower-outer-in-chief. There’s been not a jug spilt in anger since. And with Rose beside him, he’s beginning to recover a little from what befell young Jacob, his younger brother, whose death gave Nicholas his first lead in tracking down the man they all now describe – in lowered voices that still have an echo of dread in them – as the ‘Bankside butcher’.
Bianca looks up at the two signs again, satisfaction welling in her breast. A measure of cautious contentment stirs within her. She waves happily at a fee of young lawyers – the invented collective noun slips into her head, unbidden. They’ve come across the bridge for the stews and the cock-fights. They’ll be lucky to get back to Lincoln’s Inn with the hose they put on this morning. She receives their clumsy, ribald replies as down-payment and ushers them towards the Jackdaw’s entrance.
And then her taproom boy, Timothy, comes running down the lane. In the excitement of raising the apothecary’s sign, she’d almost forgotten she’d sent him down to Cutler’s Yard to pay the sign-maker.
‘Mercy, young Timothy, what’s the alarm?’
‘The watermen say a new barque will drop anchor in the Pool tomorrow,’ he tells her breathlessly. ‘She’s coming up from the Hope Reach on the morning tide. Four masts!’ He raises the appropriate fingers to indicate the wonder of it. ‘Imagine it: four!’
For the denizens of Southwark, a newly arrived ship is like a freshly killed carcass to a wolf. There are victuals to be replenished at twice the going rate; goose-feather mattresses for men who’ve spent months sleeping on salty boards; a predictable uncertainty of the legs, which makes lifting a purse that much easier; an outlet for desires that until now have been only solitarily satisfied. It’s been this way since the Romans were here, and Bianca Merton isn’t about to pass on the opportunity.
‘From which state is she? Do they say?’ she asks, factoring translation into the equation – French and Spanish mariners take less time to serve than those from Muscovy, and Moors don’t take drink at all.
‘Venice,’ says Timothy eagerly, with not the slightest comprehension of just how much powder he’s about to ignite. ‘She’s the Sirena di Venezia.’
It is the day after the story of the whitewash. Being a Wednesday, it is market day and Woodbridge is busier than Nicholas can remember. Well-heeled wool merchants, weavers, tanners and saymakers bellow at each other in the shadow of the session house like sailors in a storm. Stolid, boxy-faced Dutch refugees from the war in the Low Countries greet each other expansively and puff on their long clay pipes. In the stocks on Market Hill, scolds, habitual drunks and other disturbers of the queen’s peace look on with sullen resignation.
Once the carts are set up, there is really very little for Nicholas to do. His father, sensing his restlessness, says, ‘Away with you, boy! Find your ease where you choose.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘With a physician in the family, they’ll think I’m after robbin’ them.’ It’s meant kindly, but there’s a grain of truth in Yeoman Shelby’s words.
With no real purpose in his steps, Nicholas heads down to the river.
After years of helping his father scatter seeds on the ploughed fields, he has a mariner’s sway in the shoulders when he walks. At Cambridge, the sons of gentlemen took it for upstart arrogance and beat him for it – until the day he forgot his place and broke the wrist of a minor baronet-in-waiting.
He’s stopped by people he knows at least half a dozen times before he reaches the foot of Market Hill. They observe that he’s put on weight; that he’s thinner; that he looks younger without his beard; that he looks older. In truth, he knows exactly what he looks like: a yeoman’s son – possessed of all his former rough edges. The man of medicine who spent a summer in Holland serving as surgeon to the Protestant army of the House of Orange, or the London physician, is someone else entirely. None of them ask why he’s returned. None of them ask him about Eleanor, though he can see the question clearly enough in their eyes.