Nicholas drops his pack onto the quayside while the man’s eyes linger on him. He can feel the inspection as though it’s being done by touch rather than by sight. The searcher is taking note of the close-cut nature of Nicholas’s beard, the style of stitching on his tan doublet, the weave of his venetians, the buckles on his leather shoes. He’s looking for that tiny lapse in attention to detail that might tell him the man standing before him hasn’t really come from Bristol at all, but from Douai, or Rome, or Valladolid, or any other of those foreign nests of Jesuit vipers where they prepare Catholic Englishmen to return home and foment sedition.
‘I believe you’ll find I do not need to state anything in present company,’ Nicholas says as pleasantly as he can manage, handing the man a folded sheet of parchment about the size of a small book. It introduces Nicholas as a functionary of the Stationers’ Company in London, come to discuss with Master Edmund Spenser his pamphlet A View of the Present State of Ireland, which is currently the subject of a dispute with the Stationers’ Register, and as yet without a printer. It is as close to an official passport as Robert Cecil’s clever secretaries can contrive. It bears the Stationers’ Company wax seal. There is a grand signature upon it, too, executed in broad strokes of the nib. The president of the guild, were he to be asked, would undoubtedly recognize it as his own – as long as he didn’t look too closely. Nowhere does it bear the name of Mr Secretary Cecil.
‘But I know nothing about printing or publishing,’ Nicholas had protested on the eve of his departure.
‘Don’t worry,’ Cecil had assured him. ‘Spenser is a poet. He’ll be too busy talking about himself to notice any ignorance on your part.’
‘Can you not just provide me with a letter of commission under your seal?’ Nicholas had persisted.
‘I’d rather not. There are certain people I would prefer didn’t learn that I have a new man in Ireland. If you go around flashing a letter of commission with my name on it…’
‘I take by certain people you refer to the Earl of Essex.’
Cecil had given him only a tight smile in reply. Then he’d said, ‘When you meet Spenser, wait a while before you tell him that it was I who sent you. Get under his skin. Talk about his pamphlet. Get the measure of him.’
‘To what purpose?’ Nicholas had asked, perplexed.
‘Spenser says he has something vital to tell me, but he won’t say what. I mistrust his reticence. He might be trying to manoeuvre me into an indiscretion.’
‘Why would he seek to play you false?’
‘He’s a poet,’ Cecil had said. ‘You could thatch Essex House with all the poets the noble earl likes to keep there. Essex promotes them, encourages them, indulges them – probably lasciviously. He could be planning to entrap me in some enterprise he can use to my disadvantage with Her Majesty, employing Spenser as bait.’
Bianca leans over the rail of the pinnace and hands her pack down to Nicholas. He sets it beside his own and reaches out to help her down. As she lands, a gust of wind blows her dark waves of hair into a tangled halo.
‘There’s nothing in there about a woman,’ the searcher says, handing back the letter. ‘Who is she – a mermaid you fished out of the sea?’
‘She’s my wife.’
‘Ah,’ says the searcher, giving Bianca a similar scrutiny to the one he’s just this moment given Nicholas, but for a quite different reason. ‘Well then, you’re one less body who’ll be needing precious firewood to keep himself warm at night.’
‘Do you perchance know if Master Spenser is in the city?’ Nicholas asks.
‘The fellow named in that letter?’
‘Yes, Edmund Spenser – the poet.’
‘Is he any good?’
‘Ask my wife.’
The searcher shakes his head. ‘You could try the castle. I’ve seen some fine verse scratched on the walls of the jakes up there.’
‘I don’t think that’s Master Spenser’s sort of poetry.’
‘Then ask at the Tholsel.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s where the sheriff’s clerks keep the register of strangers. You’ll have to go there to give your name, and where you’re lodging, anyway.’
‘Is that necessary? We won’t be staying long.’
‘The Council of Munster likes to know who’s in the city, if you understand my meaning.’ The searcher points vaguely towards the city walls. ‘It’s that way, on Skinner’s Row, hard by the castle. You can’t miss it; it’s got a clock on the tower.’
Looking down the quay, Nicholas can see a section of city wall that has been smashed in; and, behind it, the shell of a house with no roof.
‘I thought the rebels lacked ordnance,’ he says. ‘Are they already close enough to bombard?’
The searcher laughs. ‘Mercy, no. The rebels wouldn’t know which end of the match to light. That was last year, that was. Some shallow-pate managed to set off the black powder they was unloading. One hundred and forty barrels of the stuff.’ He puffs his cheeks and spreads his palms to indicate the magnitude of the explosion. ‘Took away half of Fishamble Street, Cook Street and Bridge Street in one clap; and almost as many souls as barrels went with it. They’ll get around to the rebuilding in time, but at the moment we’ve other woes to occupy our minds.’
‘Can you tell us where we might find a bite to eat?’ Bianca asks.
‘I hope you don’t have large appetites. Food is scarce.’
‘Why? The city isn’t under siege, is it?’ Nicholas says.
‘Not yet. But the rebels have burned most of the harvest and carried off half the cattle.’ He gives a knowing smirk. ‘That and the fact that Dublin has more billeted soldiers feasting on it than it has rats. And we have a lot of rats.’
‘We’ll need a bed,’ Nicholas says.
‘I should think so,’ says the searcher, casting another sly glance at Bianca.
‘Can you advise?’
‘Well, given that you’re official, I’d suggest the castle again. But don’t expect comfort. Even if you’ve got a title, you’ll likely have to sleep on straw.’
‘Is there a tavern?’ Bianca asks wearily.
The man looks at her in disbelief. ‘A tavern? You’re in Dublin, Mistress; what do you think? Try the Brazen Head.’
The walk from Wood Quay into the city is a game of hazard played against carts laden with fodder for the cavalry horses, waggons piled with newly turned pikes, squealing pigs being driven to the shambles, and groups of young gallants in the gaudy doublet and trunk-hose costume of amateur officers, all careering through the streets with no more regard for the hurt they may do the civilian population than they hold for the enemy. And piled head-high on almost every vacant space, a steaming midden filling the air with the stench of decay. Dublin seems a poor prize. Nicholas wonders why the rebel Earl of Tyrone would want it.
‘I’d expected somewhere larger,’ Bianca says as they walk up a narrow street lined with equally narrow houses. ‘This is no bigger than Bristol. Have we come to the right place?’
Small Dublin may be, but the port searcher was right: it contains more troops than any town Nicholas was ever in. Some of them look to him like veterans of the war in the Low Countries, serious fellows with unreadable faces, who sit quietly in doorways and against walls while they whet their blades, cut neat lengths of wick for their matchlock firing pieces or trim cock feathers for the fletches of their arrows. But the majority appear no more martial than the file he had seen mustering at the Southwark Fair – underfed and under-equipped, looking as though they would rather be anywhere but here.