‘How did it end?’
‘Uncomfortably. He stormed off in a huff. No matter. I’m sure there was a whole legion of foolish maids only too happy to flutter at his pretty plumage and his empty song.’
‘Oh, good. I mean–’
Bianca takes pity on him. Laughing, she says, ‘He never stood a chance. You may ask Rose, if you care to.’
‘No, no, it is of no matter…’ Nicholas’s voice tails off as the file of men marches away to a merry rhythm beaten out on a tambour and a smattering of cheers from the crowd. ‘I’m sure they’ll be fine,’ he says, ‘with the bold Sir Oliver at their head.’
Bianca doesn’t indulge him. Inside, she’s thinking: my husband is going to Ireland for Robert Cecil, and all he’ll have around him to keep him safe are a band of spotty farm boys and an ensign with only one eye.
It is late afternoon. Ned has returned to the Jackdaw. Bianca has brought Nicholas to the one place on Bankside where speaking freely always seems that much easier. It is her secret physic garden. Near the bottom of Black Bull Alley and close to the riverbank, it lies hidden from view behind a sagging brick wall with single door in it that looks as though it’s never been opened in a hundred years. In her absence in Padua, Rose tended it with thought and diligence. Her stewardship of this fragrant little paradise has allowed Bianca, on her return, to reopen her apothecary’s shop on Dice Lane. It has always proved a place where, if you sow and tend with honesty in your heart, good things will inevitably grow.
‘Must you forever dance to Robert Cecil’s tune, Nicholas?’ she asks when they are safely behind the door.
‘I made a compact with him. I would be his intelligencer, and he would not hang you for a papist and a witch. It seemed a sensible bargain.’
‘It was a pact with the Devil. I should never have let you make it.’
‘Cecil has kept his side of the bargain. I can hardly deny mine.’
‘I’m starting to think you actually admire him.’
Bianca plucks a sprig of hedge-mustard, remembering a promise to make up a syrup for Alice Nangle’s sciatica. She pops one of the little yellow seeds into her mouth. When speaking of the Crab, it seems to her sensible to chew on something efficacious in warding off poisons. The bitter taste makes her pull a face.
‘His mind is much consumed with thoughts for the safety of the realm and the queen,’ Nicholas says. ‘And with good reason – even more so now that his father, Lord Burghley, is dead.’
‘When you returned from Cecil House, after we came back from Greenwich, I could swear that he had asked you to do something troubling to your conscience. Has he?’
A slight hesitation tells her all she needs to know.
‘We have both had our consciences troubled in the service of Robert Cecil,’ he says.
She waves the sprig of hedge-mustard at him. ‘Anything I may have done was to protect you, Husband.’
‘I know.’
‘Then leave his service,’ she says defiantly. ‘Cast off the grip he has over you.’
‘How can I?’
‘Return to Barnthorpe if you must. Become a country physician.’
‘Most people around Barnthorpe would rather trust old Mother Cotton, the wise woman, than a fellow with a doctorate in medicine from Cambridge. They think physicians are mostly charlatans. Besides, there’s not one in fifty who could afford to pay me. We’d likely starve.’
‘Then help your father on the land. I’m sure he and your brother Jack could do with the extra hands.’
‘Me – a farmer?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll come with you. I promise I’ll try to behave as a good yeoman’s wife should, and not scandalize the labourers and the local parson.’
Nicholas stifles a smile at the thought of Bianca Merton setting the inhabitants of the wild Suffolk marshes on their ears. ‘You know that I cannot.’
‘You will not, more like.’
‘First, there is the stipend Robert Cecil pays me to be his children’s physician. And now that the queen, too, calls upon me I may command a goodly fee, if I choose to take patients from amongst the court.’
‘But you despise that manner of physic,’ Bianca tells him insistently. ‘You’ve told me before – you would rather give up altogether than waste your time prescribing purges for rich men who don’t know when to stop gorging themselves.’
‘I need the money.’
Bianca rolls her eyes. ‘The Jackdaw is turning a profit. My apothecary shop is prospering. Is this a matter of pride? Are you discomforted by the idea that a wife should maintain the household and not her husband?’
‘It has nothing to do with pride.’
‘Ambition, then. That must be it. The man I married – the man who would rather earn a shilling treating the poor at St Tom’s than a gold angel listening to a gentleman complain about his gout – has become ambitious.’
‘It has nothing to do with ambition – Kate.’
Bianca’s amber eyes narrow. Her head tilts slightly, which is never – as Nicholas knows to his cost – a good sign.
‘Kate? Why Kate?’
‘Sir Robert seems to think I’ve married Master Shakespeare’s Shrew.’
‘Is that a fact?’ Bianca says, ramming her fists into her waist. ‘You’ve married a shrew?’
‘I didn’t agree with him.’
She turns towards a clump of sow-fennel, addressing it directly. ‘Did you hear that? My husband doesn’t agree with the Crab that his wife is a shrew. Marry! I must dance for joy.’ She spreads her arms wide to encompass all the contents of the physic garden, calling out, ‘Come, ladies all, we must sing hosannahs – to husbands bold and brave.’
And then she begins to sing.
‘So happy I… no shrew am I… not mouse, nor vole, but vixen sly…’
Nicholas, taken aback as much by the beauty of her voice as by her sudden flight of wild fancy, sits down on an upturned pail. ‘Alright, alright. I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Be serious for a moment.’
Bianca turns towards him. The afternoon sun gives her hair the sheen of burnished mahogany. ‘Very well, Nicholas, I shall be the very model of seriousness. If it’s not pride, and it’s not ambition, then what is it?’
He chooses his words carefully.
‘I learn more from Robert Cecil than merely how to fill the queen’s occasional moments of boredom. I learn things most people do not.’
‘Such as?’
‘The country we have returned to is not the one we left.’
‘What do you mean, Nicholas?’ Bianca asks, her face suddenly made serious by his tone.
‘Although Cecil hasn’t admitted it, I think the cost of this war with Spain is weighing very heavily on the Privy Council and the Treasury. And that cost cannot be borne purely by invoking the subsidy rolls and dipping into men’s purses. While we’ve been away there have been four years of bad harvests. I didn’t need Robert Cecil to tell me that; I’ve heard it from my father. Not enough feed for the cattle; not enough grain for the bread; vagrants flocking into the city and sleeping under hedges. People starving. Look at the fair today. The produce on the stalls was as meagre as we’ve ever seen it. And the prices – well, there’ll be plenty of Banksiders who can only look on and wish. How long before there is real famine? And if the Spanish come again, I reckon the realm will collapse like a house made of rotten timbers.’
Bianca hurries to him and takes his hands in hers. ‘Nicholas, I’ve never seen you like this before.’
He looks up into her eyes and she sees the yeoman’s son in them, the country boy before he went to Cambridge and discovered he might have found a way into the world of those clever, successful men who would never need to face an empty larder.