‘There’s occasions when I could think ill of Mistress Bianca for bringing that slippery soap stuff back from Italy,’ Ned Monkton says wearily. He leans over the boy like a brown bear inspecting a beehive for honey. ‘Does you think, young gallant, that Sir Walter Raleigh likes to take his tobacco flavoured with soap?’ he asks gruffly.
Bruno, the only male in Southwark utterly unintimidated by Ned Monkton’s size and fiery auburn beard, stares up at him and nods vigorously.
‘Better Bruno blowing bubbles than you fogging up the taproom with them awful fumes,’ Rose chides.
Ned rolls his eyes. ‘Least ’ave my pipe washed for when I get back. If word gets ’round that Ned Monkton blows bubbles out ’is nose when ’e takes ’is tobacca, there’s some on Bankside will think I’ve gone soft.’
‘Soft, Ned Monkton?’ Rose says. ‘You’s been soft since swaddling.’
Bianca marvels at the change that has come over her former maid. There was a time when Rose’s propensity for daydreaming led Bianca to nickname her ‘Mistress Moonbeam’. But her stewardship of the Jackdaw’s rebirth has been everything Bianca could have hoped for. The responsibility seems to have tamed Rose’s wilder flights of fancy. Or perhaps, she thinks, it’s simply that Rose has grown to full womanhood.
Nicholas ties off the points of his doublet and offers Bianca his arm. ‘Is my lady ready to parade down Long Southwark, like the queen on her summer progress?’ he asks archly.
‘Ready, good husband,’ she replies, her amber eyes gleaming. The day might not have the colour and warmth of Padua in September, but it is good to be home.
There is only one cloud darkening her thoughts as she steps out onto the muddy lane, barely having to dip her head to avoid the new, higher lintel.
When is her husband going to get round to telling her the truth about Ireland?
Bianca Merton puts on a brave face as she, Nicholas and Ned battle the crowd on Long Southwark. The fair is in full cry: jugglers, tumblers, rope-walkers, fire-breathers, quacks selling cures for everything from piles to the pox, old women offering charms to chase away sprites and witches. In the yard at the Tabard a bearward is handing round his cap while his beast dances a fancy pavane to the accompaniment of a flute. Outside Bridge House, where later the Lord Mayor and his aldermen will enjoy a banquet of more dishes than most Banksiders will see in a year, a strongman is lifting giggling maids in pairs. Once hoisted aloft, they perch on each bicep like puffed-up hen harriers.
Now that it’s common knowledge on Bankside that Dr Shelby is sometimes called upon to attend the queen, people treat him differently. The shouts of greeting he receives are occasionally accompanied by a formal bending of a knee, even a bow or two. But although it’s nice to know her husband has come up in the world, Bianca is minded to call out, ‘It’s alright for you – Robert Cecil doesn’t manoeuvre you into acting against your wiser inner counsel’ or, ‘You can bow when my husband is free of the Crab’s malign influence.’
It cannot be ambition that makes Nicholas such easy prey, she has decided. If it were, they wouldn’t still be renting lodgings in the Paris Garden. They would have built themselves a nice house on Kentish Street, where it runs into open countryside. Nicholas would not still be offering his skills to St Thomas’s hospital for the poor every Tuesday, which he does for a paltry shilling a session because that’s the sort of man he is.
Since their return from Padua, Bianca has become used to the summons that arrive from Cecil House, commanding Nicholas to drop everything and rush off to Greenwich, or Richmond, or Nonsuch, or Whitehall, or wherever else that appalling, cantankerous old battleaxe with the whitewashed face and the fake hair has mentioned in a moment of distraction that she’s bored, and rather fancies spending an hour or two discussing the latest advances in physic with a handsome fellow half the age of her usual doctors. And now this:
Sweet Bianca, Robert Cecil wants me to go to Ireland…
Sweet Bianca, it is only a small matter – a discreet message to collect…
Sweet Bianca, I will be back inside three weeks, given a following wind…
If wealth was measured in sweetness, she’d be the richest woman in Christendom!
Of one thing she is sure: Nicholas is not going to Ireland alone. She has heard enough talk in the Jackdaw’s taproom to know it’s a wild and dangerous place, even without the presence of full-blown insurrection. She has made up her mind. Her place is beside her husband. Little Bruno can stay with Rose and blow soap bubbles through Ned’s tobacco pipe. Three weeks, Nicholas has told her. Just three weeks. Bruno won’t even realize she’s been away.
Does that mean I am a bad mother?
She tries to push the self-recrimination out of her mind, like all the other times since she decided she couldn’t let Nicholas go to Ireland alone. She has come to the conclusion that, to reconcile herself, she must employ the English Bianca Merton and not the Italian one. In England, she reminds herself, children of all ages are farmed out to relatives, benefactors or patrons, sometimes to almost total strangers. It’s normal for an English child to be banished at the earliest opportunity. It’s the only way for them to rise – an indentured apprenticeship, or an education in a richer man’s household. She could believe that half the children now alive in England would be hard pressed to recognize their parents in a parade. Leaving Bruno with Rose and Ned Monkton for three weeks is nothing to trouble her conscience with. Even so, she cannot prevent herself imagining Robert Cecil as a child’s cloth doll, and Bruno gleefully pulling his arms and legs off. Yes, she thinks, the Devil take Robert Cecil and all his works.
As they walk three abreast – Nicholas on one side of her, Ned Monkton on the other, arm-in-arm – down Long Southwark, the wind ruffling the feather in Nicholas’s new cap of black sarcenet, Bianca’s thoughts turn from her husband and her son to the man whose courage allowed them all to return to England in the first place.
She admires how Ned carries himself these days. When he nods courteously to acknowledge a greeting, she wants to smile. She can see the wariness in their faces, even as they bid him good morrow. She knows what they’re thinking: can this really be the same poulterer’s son from Scrope Alley whose readiness for a jug of knockdown, customarily followed by an explosion of raw violence, was once the stuff of Bankside legend? What happened to the old Ned Monkton?
It had been Nicholas who first realized the cause of Ned’s ill-suppressed rage. Underneath that fiery, terrifying carapace lay a soul in despair. Trapped for most of the working day in the mortuary crypt at St Tom’s, his only company the vagrant and impoverished dead, Ned had been trying to drown his despair in quarts of knockdown and aggression. But that life is behind him now. Ned Monkton is reborn, and halleluiah for it. And though Bianca may feel a measure of pride that she and Nicholas have played their part in this resurrection, there is no question that it is Rose who can rightly claim most of the credit. Rose has given Ned back his soul.
Bianca glances at him now. She notes how he walks with a new confidence. Only his right hand shows any tension. It is clenched. Perhaps it is the sight of those huge fingers balled into a fist that makes those who acknowledge him in the street seem a little unconvinced by his apparent transformation. But Bianca knows that Ned does not keep his fist clenched for fear of being unable to control it. He does so because he doesn’t want anyone to see the M of scar tissue that disfigures his right thumb – the brand that shows he has taken another man’s life.