They ease their hunger with vegetable pottage flavoured with wild garlic, ladled from a communal cauldron on the hearth. The woodsman offers them rich, dark ale from a clay jug. As they relax, Gardener explains that the woman is a Seanchaí, a keeper of ancient stories.
Bianca leans forward to learn more. She is already remembering how, in Padua, her mother enchanted her with tales. Mostly they had been about the Caporetti women of ancient times, and their mythical ability to turn almost anything that grows into a healing balm or a fatal poison. For her, the excitement in the stories was never just about the women’s skills, but about who was the beneficiary or the victim. So now, if there is an intriguing tale to be told, Bianca is always ready to hear it – even if it does have to be translated for her by a young lad who seems barely old enough to have acquired stories of his own. As she settles back against the earthen wall of the cottage, her face thrown into sharp relief by the firelight, she leans into Nicholas so that they might share, as one, whatever is to come. She feels like a child again: eager, slightly apprehensive, ready to be transported into a magical realm.
And so, on their third night on the road, huddled together in a dark cottage on the edge of a weeping wood, with Piers Gardener translating, Bianca and Nicholas hear for the first time of the Merrow: the woman who walks out of the sea to capture the hearts of men.
There are families in Munster that claim their descent from the Merrow, the Seanchaí explains in a soft, lyrical voice that belies her great age. These mythical women live in the ocean, she says. They converse with the sea and the air, and thus have knowledge of the future. They are beyond beautiful. No man, however resolute, can withstand their sweet song. They grow rich upon the treasure from drowned wrecks. Sometimes, when lust takes them, or the loneliness of the deep ocean becomes too much to bear, they swim ashore to seduce a land-bound mortal.
The Seanchaí relates a haunting tale of one such Merrow, and the man she came ashore to woo. It ends with the man, and his son, standing heartbroken on a beach, staring out at the empty ocean.
‘So be warned,’ the Seanchaí says, when the story has drawn to its close. ‘A man can never keep a Merrow long. One day she will return to the sea, leaving her husband and their children bereft and consumed by an impossible longing.’
‘I always wondered why you take such long walks beside the Thames,’ Nicholas whispers. ‘Are you planning to swim away?’
Bianca jabs him with her elbow. It is a good tale, she thinks. Retold well, it should boost the takings in the Jackdaw on a cold night in winter – especially if Timothy the taproom lad plays a haunting accompaniment on his lute.
Nicholas, who has grown up to the tales of strange creatures dwelling in the Suffolk marshes, says in his practical physician’s voice, ‘How is it that the Merrow do not die, as a fish dies when it is brought from the sea into the air?’
The Seanchaí gives him a sympathetic smile, as though he is a poor fellow cursed with the dullest of brains. ‘The Merrow wears a magical hat,’ she explains. ‘She must take it off when she comes out of the sea.’ She looks at Bianca and raises a gnarled, cautionary finger. ‘Be careful, Mistress,’ she says. ‘If you find a Merrow’s hat on the shore, watch out. She has probably come to steal your husband’s heart.’
7
In the Jackdaw tavern on Bankside a company of players is arguing volubly about whether they can claim exemption if the city aldermen send their sheriffs into the playhouses to conscript men for the Irish war. Outside, it is raining. Inside, the fuggy air turns the windows the colour of dusty charcoal. The St Saviour’s bell has just tolled nine. Only the hardened drinkers remain, and those – like the players – whose occupation does not require them rising with the dawn.
‘I cannot go to the wars!’ Ned Monkton hears one cry. ‘I am engaged at the Curtain, to play the part of Shallow in Master Will’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.’
‘But you must go to the wars. You’ll feel at home, dear lad,’ comes the reply. ‘Every part I’ve ever seen you take was a bloody battle.’
Ned knows that, of all the factions who drink in the Jackdaw, actors are the most prone to riotous behaviour. Too much knockdown and the outcome will likely be either weeping self-pity or drawn swords.
He is keeping a tally of the jugs and victuals they have ordered. Being a stranger to writing, he is using an invented notation of his own. He can write the numbers well enough, but for letters Ned has to use symbols that are comprehensible only to himself, Rose and Timothy. It works well enough. It’s known in the Jackdaw as Ned-hand.
He still feels a surge of pride whenever he looks around the rebuilt Jackdaw. Sometimes he walks out into the lane to assess the tavern as though he were a thirsty traveller in search of rest and company. Then he thinks: Rose and I achieved that.
On these occasions he is careful not to boast. After all, it is really the bricklayers who are responsible for the almost-straight herringbone masonry stretching some forty feet between a tallow shop on one side and a private house on the other. The row of diamonds that decorate the base of the upper floor jutting out above his head – rendered fetchingly in alternating yellow and red, and each the size of a man’s hand – is down to the artistry, and sobriety, of Bankside’s painters. (Rose hadn’t let them touch a drop of knockdown until they’d finished.)
When, from the lane, he stoops to peer inside, the distorted view through the lozenges of window glass into the taproom is by courtesy of the glaziers. The casks, counter, benches and booths, the low ceiling beams and the pillars that support them – all of which prevent him seeing as far as the stairs to the lodging rooms, even when the windows are clean – are the work of the joiners. Nor can he claim responsibility for the thatched roof, or the rebuilding of the two narrow wings at the back that enclose the yard and the brew house, and where, in the eaves of one of them, Master Nicholas had his attic lodgings – until he and Mistress Bianca at last accepted what the rest of Bankside had known for months.
But none of these would exist as they do today if Ned and Rose Monkton hadn’t overseen the rebuilding in Nicholas and Bianca’s absence. Quite an achievement, he thinks, for a fellow who can neither read nor write and who had previously overseen nothing but the binding of the dead at St Thomas’s hospital.
The street door opening causes him to look up from his work. Two men enter. He recognizes the taller at once. It is Vyves, the lank-haired, one-eyed muster ensign he had seen at the Southwark Fair.
The other man is smaller, with a flushed, porcine face fixed in a frown of permanent disgruntlement. On his head is a tall, thimble-shaped felt hat, gleaming with rain.
‘God give you good morrow, Master Ned,’ says Vyves, shaking his cloak as he approaches the counter. He has exchanged makeshift military for a tattered open-necked jerkin of green frieze.