Nicholas then turns his attention to the side of the ship. The gallery wraps around the corner of the stern and the quarterdeck to run along the hull for about twelve feet, canted down at an angle. There is an open doorway set into the hull wall halfway along, barely large enough for a man to squeeze through. The door itself has been torn off. Inside, Nicholas can see only blackness. From a carved frieze running below the gallery, the weathered wooden faces of Castilian lions peer out forlornly at a world they can no longer menace.
Reaching the point where the captain’s gallery ends, no more than the length of a hand above his head, Nicholas notices a circular hole cut into the planks. He guesses its purpose at once: a private jakes, where the master might relieve himself without having to go forward to the grating beneath the bowsprit used by the rest of the crew. Rejecting the idea of using the lip of the hole for purchase, he jumps up, grips the outer rail of the gallery and folds his knees under his body, swinging for a moment as he gauges whether the rail will hold his weight.
‘What are you about, Dr Shelby?’ Spenser calls out. ‘Surely you’re not planning to go inside.’
Nicholas drops back into the shallow water. ‘Of course I’m going inside. She’s a Spaniard. And judging by that body back there, she was carrying someone of note. There could be papers, or ciphers, that Henshawe’s men may have missed.’
‘You’ve lost your reason, Dr Shelby,’ Spenser protests. ‘This wreck has been battered by the elements since it came ashore. For all you know, those timbers may have no more strength in them than kindling. You would have to be bereft of reason to go up there and poke about inside.’
‘Bereft of reason, or in the service of Robert Cecil,’ Nicholas laughs. ‘They’re one and the same really.’
He jumps up again, seizing the rim of the gallery, swinging his body sideways to get a foothold on the hull. A wave slides in, breaking over his dangling feet.
It takes Nicholas three attempts to get enough purchase to pull himself up. But on the third, he finds himself standing on the slanting gallery, legs astride the jakes hole, breathless, wet, his arms aching, but triumphant.
Moving up the incline towards the stern, he reaches the open doorway leading into the master’s cabin.
‘Is all well?’ Spenser calls out.
‘Well enough.’
‘Take care, Dr Shelby. We are a long way from help.’
The door is barely large enough for a grown man to pass through. Nicholas has to stoop to enter.
Inside, shafts of mournful daylight pierce the salty grime on the small stern windows. The reflection of light off the water makes swirling patterns on the deckhead inches above his skull. There is an almost overpowering stench of salt water and rotting kelp.
He is standing on a tilted deck that slopes away some ten feet to the other side of the hull. The cabin wall there is all but smashed to pieces against the rock face. To his right is a narrow void about five feet wide, where the shattered beams that support the floor of the cabin are jammed fast against the fold in the cliff. The noise of the sea is somehow amplified in this little space, the hull acting as a soundbox. With every surge of water on the rocks below his feet, a roar echoes around the small chamber. He feels as though he’s trapped at the back of a cave, facing an incoming tide.
Looking about, the first thing that strikes Nicholas is that the cabin is a simple one for a man of importance, if that’s what the corpse with no fingers was. There are no signs of comfort, other than a wooden cot attached to the side with the door in it, and the remains of a second on the far side. A row of cupboards runs beneath the stern windows, gaping like ransacked tombs, their doors flung open or torn from their hinges. A bank of sand, kelp and shattered glass and timber has fetched up against the demolished cabin wall where it lies against the cliff. A single pewter jug lies spout downwards, half-embedded in the mess.
Looking at the gaping cupboards, Nicholas wonders if Henshawe’s men have been here before him, searching for the same haul he himself had hoped to find. If they have, so be it. Even if it ends up in the hands of Robert Devereux, Cecil is bound to hear of it when Essex lays it before the Privy Council. Still, thinks Nicholas, it would have been nice to have been the man who found the key to the Dons’ ciphers.
Nicholas is mulling this thought in his mind when a wave, larger than the others, rolls in out of the ocean. It breaks against the cliff barely twenty feet away. The din inside the cabin is deafening. A blast of spray bursts up through the gap by the fold in the cliff face, making him fear for an instant that the wreck has broken loose. Losing his balance, he staggers.
The blow takes him utterly off-guard. The breath leaves his lungs in an agonized grunt as he topples. Too stunned to stop himself, or even register the secondary pain of hitting the deck, he slides sideways towards the gap between the shattered cabin floor and the cliff.
And then he is falling. Falling into blackness. Falling into a bottomless ocean. Falling towards the crabs feasting on the bones of those who never made it as far as the beach.
10
The wind has picked up a little, dragging tendrils of grey cloud over the headland. Bianca pulls her riding cloak tighter about her shoulders. From her place on the grassy saddleback, she looks again towards the far side of the right-hand bay. She can just make out the two horses where the bluffs meet the beach. But she can see no sign of Nicholas or Edmund Spenser. It would be exactly like Nicholas, she thinks, to go climbing over the wreck like a schoolboy in an apple orchard. She curses herself for being weak. Dead men don’t frighten her. She should have stayed with her husband.
The bay to her left is the smaller of the two, but its beach is more substantial. With the tide out, the damp sand stretches out almost halfway to the narrow mouth of the cove. She thinks, with a pang of longing, how pleasing it would be to play with little Bruno on these empty sands. Far better for him this wild freedom than the close, stultifying confines of Cecil House with all its formality. Better for company the sea, the wheeling gulls and the wide sky than boys who looked down upon him and tutors who spoke only Latin.
A band of shallow water cuts the bay neatly in half, running diagonally from one side to the other. Perhaps one hundred paces before this runnel reaches the far cliffs it turns sharply into a wider channel that leads to deeper water and the open sea beyond. Unlike its grim neighbour, this cove looks a peaceful place. It has a timelessness that makes her think she might be the first person ever to ride a horse over that pristine sand. She remembers with sudden delight a moment from her girlhood in the Veneto: she and her friend, Lorenza Montegalda, galloping through the marshes beside the lagoon on horses borrowed from Lorenza’s father. They had told Signor Montegalda that they wanted to pick flowers. In truth they had desired only to watch the bronzed, muscular young fishermen at work, to call tantalizingly to them like sirens and then ride off at high speed.
Bianca turns her back on the bay with its stench of death, and urges her horse down off the grassy saddleback, across the bluffs and onto the beach. Reaching the sand, she puts her heels to her horse’s flank.
The salty wind purges her spirit, fans her hair into a dark halo, brings her joys remembered from childhood. The faster Bianca drives the galloping horse, the more cleansing it becomes. All she can hear is the rushing of the air, the thundering of her mount’s hooves and the joyous exclamation of her own breathing. Even though the tide is out, they move together in a mist of spray like a single creature of the air and the sea, scorning the land and its tediously solid sobriety. She is fourteen again, astride Signor Montegalda’s horse, hearing the fading catcalls from the fishermen, all the world hers for the taking.