‘It has nothing to do with jealousy,’ Nicholas protests unconvincingly. ‘I wasn’t the uncivil one.’ He adopts a gallant’s drawl. ‘Someone told me you were a farm labourer’s son who became a physician… better to have a fellow with a goodly length of steel in his scabbard… I could have punched him in his supercilious face.’
‘That would have been a good stratagem – attacking an officer in a tavern full of his own soldiery.’
‘I suspect they would have cheered me. The point is, if Henshawe is right about the threat, we’ll need someone who knows the lie of the land. Someone who can guide us without attracting every rebel within riding distance.’
‘Couldn’t we just stay in Dublin and send Spenser a letter?’
‘We could have stayed on Bankside and done that. I suspect it would have had much the same result.’ He swings his legs over the bed and slips his feet into his shoes.
‘Where are you going?’ Bianca asks.
‘Speaking of letters, you have one to write to Bruno. Send him his father’s love. I’m off to St Bride’s Street, to the sign of the Peacock, to speak to our grey merchant.’
Piers Gardener is as good as his word. By the time the clock bell at the Tholsel rings ten the next morning he has procured three hobbies – tough little horses that look sound enough for the journey to Kilcolman Castle. Nicholas braces himself for the bill. He may be using Robert Cecil’s coin to settle it, but a speedy means of escape from a city in fear of attack comes at a premium, and the keepers of the Cecil privy purse have a habit of rejecting anything they consider above the going rate – that usually being the rate pertaining during the reign of the third Edward.
In fact the price Gardener asks is a reasonable one. ‘No one in Munster overcharges me,’ he says, ‘not if they want my recommendation to the Surveyor of Victuals.’
By noon – just twenty-four hours after they arrived in Dublin – Nicholas and Bianca pass through the stout city walls by St Nicholas’s Gate, which Bianca proclaims a clear sign of good fortune to come. They follow a line of little thatched houses to a second, smaller archway beside St Patrick’s Church, and so out onto the Cork road. The late-September air is cool, a hem of grey cloud brushing the tops of the mountains that Nicholas can see on the horizon. To his right he glimpses an encampment huddled amid the alder trees on the opposite bank of a rushing stream of dark water.
‘Are these the Lieutenant-General’s men?’ he asks Gardener.
Gardener laughs. ‘Mercy! Even the Earl of Ormonde’s men aren’t that ragged.’
And indeed, as they draw closer, Nicholas can see the tattered tents made of scraps of hide, the turf-clad shelters and the thin, dispirited faces of the camp’s inhabitants as they tend their fires and cooking pots. Skinny cows and sheep graze disconsolately between the trees.
‘Refugees,’ Gardener explains, his golden hair dancing about his gentle face in the breeze, ‘English settlers from Ulster and Leinster, mostly. Tyrone and his fellows have burned them out of their plantations. There’s no room for them in Dublin – not that one in a hundred could afford. The Pale around the city is the only land left to shelter on.’
As they ride on, Nicholas cannot help but notice the look of doubt that has entered Bianca’s amber eyes. He does not press her. He knows what she’s thinking: that he is a fool for agreeing to come here. He tries not to imagine the fountain of molten anger that will flow if, upon reaching Kilcolman, they discover that the great secret Edmund Spenser wishes to reveal to Robert Cecil turns out to be nothing more than the fevered excesses of a poet’s imagination.
Piers Gardener turns out to be the ideal guide. His travels across Ireland as scrivener to the Surveyor of Victuals – making meticulous note of the provisions needed by the isolated English garrisons – means he can find food, a hearth and a comfortable place to sleep even when the landscape seems devoid of all human habitation.
On the first night, as Bianca is beginning to think they have become utterly lost amid a range of wild hills whose crests are buried in the rapidly darkening clouds, a tiny hamlet emerges out of the mist. On the second, as night begins to overtake them on a narrow path through a great expanse of bog, convincing her that they are doomed to drown when the hobbies inevitably stumble off the track, a simple hut of grey stone suddenly appears, huddling against the bracken of the rising hillside ahead. They reach it just before the last of the light goes.
And this smooth-faced boy with the saint’s halo of blond curls proves to have more skills than simply knowing where to find shelter. A scion of an ancient Anglo-Norman family from Waterford, he has learned enough of the Irish language to speak to those they come across who are not English settlers, but folk whose roots go deep into the ancient heart of the land, back to a time before St Patrick first hoisted his crozier aloft to bring God’s grace and mercy to the pagans. Some of them seem to Bianca like characters from tales of legend and myth where solitary women of great beauty cast spells in high towers, and men with unshakeable ideals embark on hopeless quests. Others look broken by toil or close to starving. Many of these people appear to have no fixed home, or choose not to have. Through Gardener, she learns that they come and go as the land and the mood take them, moving their small herds of cattle and sheep from pasture to pasture, or their labour from plantation to plantation. The timelessness of the landscape seeps into Bianca with the chill and the rain. It is a place as far away from the heat and colour of Padua as she can imagine: rolling hills of bracken turning to amber, gold and scarlet as autumn approaches; craggy grey outcrops of stone jutting like buried dragons’ teeth. Occasionally, when the land rises, they glimpse a smudge of smoke against the grey sky where it touches the horizon – a burning farmhouse or a sacked manor, Gardener tells them, his child’s face darkening. Signs, he says, that even though Tyrone’s forces are mostly in Ulster well to the north, here in Munster he has friends amongst the local population.
At night, when they reach whatever place Gardener has assured them will offer shelter and food, the welcome proves to be ungrudging, though always muted. It seems the scrivener is well known – trusted even. Nicholas and Bianca dine simply on oatcakes and buttermilk, or fish taken from fast-flowing rivers. They warm themselves beside smoky hearths of peat and sleep on pelts and fleeces. No one asks who they are and, from what Bianca can gather, Gardener does not volunteer the information. But she catches the frowns and worried glances when the subject moves to what she assumes is the rebellion.
On the third night they lodge on the fringe of a dense stand of fir trees that stretches as far as Bianca can see, in a single-storey cottage made of mud-brick and stone with a turf roof.
It has rained again during the afternoon. As she dismounts in front of the simple dwelling, she can hear the lachrymose singing of the wood as the uncountable droplets fall into the dense undergrowth. From somewhere deep inside the trees, the haunting cry of an owl carries on the damp air. By now she is ready to believe she has entered a world of sprites and spirits, or even the legendary Longana, the creature her Italian mother told her about when she was a child – a creature with the face of a beautiful woman and the hirsute limbs of a faun, who lives in the forests of the Veneto and can smell the future on the wind.
The owner of the cottage is an ancient woodcutter with lined grey skin like runnelled sand when the tide is out. He greets them without fuss, bestows an inexpressive hug upon Gardener and beckons them all to his hearth. His wife is a slight, silver-haired woman, dressed in plain broadcloth. Something about the couple makes Bianca believe they are more kin to the dark wood than the world beyond – if they even know there is a world beyond – for although Bianca cannot understand the words that pass between them and Gardener, there is none of the urgency that would suggest the exchanging of news. But they are welcoming to her and Nicholas in a quiet, reserved fashion.