‘I had not planned it,’ Gardener says. ‘But I am at your service, should you have need of me.’
Spenser offers to provide two of his servants as guides for the return to Dublin.
‘In that case,’ says Gardener with a smile, ‘I wish you both God’s good peace. If I do not see you tomorrow, let us hope we shall meet again soon in a happier Ireland.’
Before Nicholas and Bianca retire to a small candlelit chamber with a narrow, arrow-slit window that opens onto a void blacker than any Nicholas has seen, Spenser takes them to his study. Opening a chest, he hands Nicholas a sheaf of pages tied with a ribbon. ‘Take this,’ he says. ‘Something tells me you haven’t read it. It’s my pamphlet – A View of the Present State of Ireland.’
‘I’m just the messenger,’ Nicholas says.
Immediately he sees the question form in Spenser’s cool eyes. From the Stationers’ Company? Or from Robert Cecil?
‘The messenger from London,’ he adds hastily, and not entirely satisfactorily. ‘From the Stationers’ Company.’
‘I always find it hard to sleep in a new bed. Perhaps this will help,’ Spenser says with a self-deprecating smile. ‘I don’t expect you to read it all. You’ve had a long journey’ – he places the pages into Nicholas’s hands – ‘whoever sent you.’
‘No wonder they won’t license anyone to print this,’ Nicholas says, waving a page of Spenser’s manuscript. ‘To call it incendiary doesn’t do it justice.’
A pale band of morning light from the narrow window slices in two the opposite wall of the chamber. A candle gutters by the bed.
Beside him, Bianca shakes off the lingering cobwebs of an interrupted dream: little Bruno sitting on a riverbank, fidgeting with joy, while she – his Merrow of a mother – tries to walk out of the water to reach him, the distance between them never shrinking.
‘You haven’t been reading that all night, have you?’ she says, yawning.
‘No, but I’ve been awake awhile. I thought at least I’d better skim through it – pick up where I left off last night.’
‘Is it as tedious as the Faerie Queene?’
‘Only if you think starving a population to death by famine tedious.’
Bianca props herself up on one elbow, the better to look Nicholas in the eyes. Waves of dark hair spill over one shoulder of her linen night-smock. ‘What?’
‘Our great poet is not the quiet man he appears. He has some deeply troubling thoughts on how best Ireland may be pacified.’
‘What are you saying – he wants the people to starve?’
‘For their own benefit, of course. Apparently they are a simple race who need only strong government to bring them to order.’
‘And he thinks famine is the most efficient way to bring that about?’
‘He thinks it’s the speediest, and therefore least costly.’
‘But how does he propose to do it?’
‘Chop down the forests, destroy the crops, force the rebels and their cattle off the land – preferably so that they face a winter where they must eat the cattle or starve, thus robbing them of their only wealth. After that, they will be not only peaceable, but apparently grateful, too.’
‘And who is going to bring about this monstrous event? The English settlers?’
‘Reading between the lines, the Earl of Essex, with an army of ten thousand men and a thousand horse. That’s what Spenser recommends in this.’ Nicholas throws the manuscript onto the coverlet. ‘He even spells out what bridges to build for the army to cross, where garrisons should be established, how many men in each…’
Bianca lies on her back and runs her fingers through her hair to tame its morning wildness. ‘But at supper he seemed such a reasonable fellow. Surely the Privy Council wouldn’t countenance such a monstrous thing. Even Robert Cecil isn’t that callous.’
‘I’m sure he’d argue against it. But he’s only one man. The Council might have thought this View of Spenser’s too rich to stomach last year, but things in Ireland have changed. Now there is open rebellion. If it spreads, they might decide Spenser is right and urge the queen to agree to his proposals.’
‘And Essex would seize the chance with both hands, wouldn’t he?’
‘Indeed he would. He’s already in the queen’s presence chamber almost every other day, petitioning her to make him Lord Lieutenant. With an army at his back, he would descend upon this island like a great pestilence.’
Bianca looks at the manuscript as though it were an adder she’d just discovered sleeping under her pillow. ‘Is this the great secret that Spenser will reveal only to someone Robert Cecil trusts? Is that thing why we’re here?’
‘That’s what I don’t understand,’ Nicholas says. ‘The Stationers’ Register has already read it, which means so has the Privy Council. Cecil must already know exactly what it contains. Spenser must be aware of that.’
‘So that’ – a jab of her finger as if to keep the manuscript at bay – ‘isn’t why he wanted Sir Robert to send Spenser a trusted messenger?’
‘Edmund Spenser isn’t a fool. He must know that Mr Secretary Cecil has either read every word of this… this insanity or his secretaries have done so for him. So, you’re right. This cannot be his secret.’
‘Think of him as a patient who’s reluctant to admit to his symptoms,’ Bianca suggests. ‘You’ll get him to talk eventually.’
‘I was hoping I might enlist you.’
‘Me?’
‘You’re more subtle and persuasive than I am.’
Bianca mulls over the suggestion for a while. ‘There will be a price,’ she says.
‘Name it.’
‘You must promise never to make me sit through another night of verse at Greenwich – unless it’s one of Master Shakespeare’s new comedies. Men with grand schemes and deep secrets will be the ruin of this world.’
How to persuade a monster to share his monstrous thoughts?
Should I just be bold and come straight out with it? Bianca asks herself as she prepares to corner the poet in his garden later that morning. Tell me, please, Master Spenser, will you have us eat our children to reduce the number of infant beggars on the London streets? Should we burn our elderly for fuel when winter bites? Can you think of a crueller punishment for traitors than the scaffold? Have you forgotten all compassion in your cold, stone carapace in the wilds of Ireland?
And yet Edmund Spenser looks to her such an unlikely ogre. She can see him now, stooping to better appreciate a clump of late-flowering heleniums – the most unlikely Horseman of the Apocalypse she can imagine. He places one palm on his hip to massage some inner ache or twinge. How, she wonders, can a man who dwells in a tranquil valley, who finds beauty in verse, possess a heart that can countenance the idea of starving a whole population in order to force their compliance? She shudders at the thought of being in his presence. Still, she’s promised Nicholas to do her best. And Edmund Spenser won’t be the first man she’s charmed into being less discreet than he might otherwise have intended.
In the event, the cat turns out to be Spenser, and Bianca the mouse. Even as she’s about to greet him with some trivial nonsense to put him at his ease, the poet straightens from his inspection and smiles.
‘Mistress Shelby, I trust you slept well.’
‘It’s Bianca. All my friends call me Bianca. And yes, I slept well, thank you.’
‘Good. And your husband – the man who says he’s from the Stationers’ Company, but knows as much about printing as I know about needlepoint?’