It is said without the slightest malice. He could be repeating a pleasing joke they had all shared over the supper board last evening.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she says, feeling her cheeks redden.
‘Come now, Mistress Bianca. I’ve had all night to think about this. The Stationers’ Company doesn’t indulge its messengers by allowing them to take their wives with them on their travels. And since when did it employ physicians to do its bidding? Dr Shelby has come a very long way to waste time on subterfuge.’
‘I think you should speak to my husband,’ Bianca says, hearing the sound of her own artifice shattering.
‘Oh, I intend to, Mistress Bianca,’ Spenser says, smiling as though he’s uncovered a child’s white lie. ‘But I have a feeling I already know who sent him.’
‘Why didn’t you simply tell me when you arrived?’
Spenser pours Nicholas a glass of malmsey from a polished pewter jug and gestures him towards a pair of high-backed chairs set beside the study hearth. He has ordered a fire lit, perhaps to make the act of confession more domestic. The rain beats against the windowpane in a conspiratorial whisper.
‘Sir Robert thought a measure of discretion would be in order,’ Nicholas says, conscious of the slight falter in his own voice.
‘Mr Secretary Cecil doesn’t trust me, does he?’
‘I’m sure that’s not the case.’
‘No matter; the feeling is mutual. His father, Burghley, was a snake. I don’t suppose the son is any different.’
‘Perhaps it might be better if we were candid with one another,’ Nicholas suggests.
Spenser gives a tight little laugh. ‘Candid? It is not I who have attempted to deceive.’
‘For which I am duty bound to apologize,’ Nicholas says, trying to limit the damage. ‘My deceit was only at Sir Robert’s insistence.’
‘Ah, but so many deceits are swirling in the winds of this rebellion, Dr Shelby. Sometimes the small ones can turn out to be more dangerous than the great. How am I to gauge the measure of yours?’
‘Sir Robert understands the need for caution as well as do you. He wished only for me to form an opinion of you before I disclosed why I had come.’
‘Oh, I already know Mr Secretary Cecil’s opinion of me,’ Spenser says. ‘Some time ago I wrote some verses about Lord Burghley. They were… shall we say, less than flattering. I can understand his son’s reluctance to trust me.’
Exasperated, Nicholas asks, ‘How can there be trust if you will not tell me what it is you wish Sir Robert to know?’
For a moment he is sure the poet is going to end the conversation, turn his back, dismiss his guest and retreat into that inner remoteness that has its visible expression in the flinty walls of Kilcolman. Then Spenser emits a sharp little cough. He turns back to face Nicholas, the resolve clear in his eyes.
‘Tell me, has news reached Robert Cecil yet of the wrecking of the Spanish ship?’
9
They hear the screeching of the gulls long before they hear the murmur of the sea. The wind moans through the wild grass, a monotone lament that Bianca can believe has not paused for breath in centuries. Between the riders and the distant headland, the ground slopes away towards a low grassy saddle-back, the central spine between two bays. Beyond it, a steeper incline rises towards the cliff top. Nicholas wonders how Spenser has managed to bring them to this inlet amongst all the others along his fractured coast. It strikes him that he must have been here before.
It has taken three days to reach the coast. At night, they have rested in the houses of Spenser’s settler friends. More than once they have noticed fear in the eyes of their hosts.
‘Refuse to go,’ Bianca had said, when Nicholas had told her of Spenser’s proposal. ‘Tell him you’ve had enough of his secrecy.’
‘Robert Cecil will want to know of this,’ he’d replied. ‘He doesn’t employ me just to treat his children when they catch an ague.’
And Nicholas had known in his heart that he was right. Even though Cecil would likely already have received word of a Spanish wreck from other sources, he would want to know the details: what size of vessel, how many troops it might have accommodated, whether there are still pennants hanging from the wreckage, whose design might reveal what grand admiral she sailed under. A single wreck can tell you a lot about Spanish intentions. Most of all, Cecil would want to know if any ciphers had been recovered. Nicholas already knows there were no survivors. Spenser had told him that a company of English cavalry had been in the area when the ship was driven onto the rocks. They had killed all who managed to struggle ashore.
‘There, do you see it now?’ shouts Spenser, bringing his horse to a stop and thrusting out an arm towards the cove to their right.
Nicholas narrows his eyes as he searches. The bay sweeps away from him in a wide arc, the bluffs beyond the narrow beach lifting until they run against another rugged promontory some quarter of a league away. He can see no wreck lying in the sheltered water. Wherever the vessel has come ashore, it has not been run aground on the beach in an attempt to save the crew.
‘Fix your eye on the cliffs at the far edge of the bay, where it meets the open sea,’ Spenser commands. ‘Then come inland a way, following the water line – about an arrow’s shot. Look for the breaking waves.’
And then Nicholas sees it: a darker smudge between the sea and the cliff. Not a whole ship. Not even a dismasted hull, but part of a high stern-castle, the regular lines of planking the only indication of something man-made lying smashed against the irregular rock face.
‘The waves have had their sport since it went aground,’ Spenser says. ‘Another month and there’ll be nothing left but driftwood.’ He looks at Bianca, a concerned frown on his studious face. ‘There were dead men here, Mistress,’ he says. ‘They may not have been removed. Are you sure you wish to continue?’
‘I have a strong stomach, Master Edmund,’ Bianca says. ‘You need not fear. I will not wilt.’
She considers changing her mind almost as soon as they have ridden off the grassy saddleback and down into the cove.
Nicholas is the first to pull a face at the smell of death. The stench – that sweetly cloying assault on the senses that can defeat all but the strongest, or most callous, resolve – is only too familiar to him from his time with the Protestant army in the Low Countries. ‘I think you should wait back there,’ he suggests.
‘I’m not a timorous child, Nicholas,’ Bianca says, remembering the three severed heads she’d seen in Dublin and mustering a courage she does not feel. ‘I have as strong a stomach as any man.’
‘I know,’ he says gently. ‘But this will not be a pretty show. They have lain here awhile.’
In grim silence they ride down through the bluffs towards the beach.
The first corpse they come across wears a pair of tattered sailor’s slops and nothing else – no shirt, no shoes. He must have been the one who evaded the cavalry the longest, Nicholas thinks. He lies on his back, half-hidden in a clump of gorse, his eyes pecked out by the gulls. Nicholas cannot place his age, because decay has swollen the body, distorting the features, stretching back the grey lips to reveal an uneven snarl of teeth. Like a fashionably slashed doublet studded with pearls, the mottled torso gapes black wounds where maggots crawl.
Bianca feels the gorge rise in her throat. Even more than the sight, it is what it suggests that sickens her. This man must have thought himself blessed by God’s mercy for having survived the wreck. Then he had seen the soldiers waiting for him on the beach.