She brings the horse to a halt beside the runnel of water. Even though the wind scythes the surface into little dancing wavelets, she can see now that it is shallow. She could wade through it without getting her knees wet. A brief shaft of sunlight escaping the scudding grey clouds makes it gleam invitingly at her. The horse catches her thoughts and starts to fidget. There is not a stretch of water anywhere, she thinks, that demands to be galloped through more than this.
It takes only a few moments, but every one of them is a joy, like running through a waterfall on a hot day to see if you can escape getting wet. Horse and rider arrive on the other side of the runnel panting with exhilaration.
Being this far out into the bay gives Bianca a sense of floating between the sea and the land. It is an extraordinary feeling of freedom. Reluctant to turn the horse around and head back to the bluffs, she lets her eyes wander over the rocks, watching how they lift into the high headland. From the edge of the cliff, a single seabird dives like a gleaming white arrow towards the water.
Bianca follows its plunge. Behind it, the rock face is little more than a blur to her. Yet something out of place, some anomaly in the background, registers in the back of her mind. She watches as the bird lances into the water, raising hardly a splash. A moment later it breaks the surface, a fish fatally trapped in its bill. The head goes back, the fish vanishes. Caught in the instant, it is a short while before Bianca lets her eye return to the cliff face, searching for what had caught her attention.
There – on a shelf of rock about four feet above the water. It looks almost as if someone’s arm is beckoning to her, a lazy wave, the sort of greeting an old friend might make. Taking up the slack in the reins, Bianca urges the horse forward into a slow walk towards the cliff.
‘Dr Shelby… Dr Shelby…’ Each word is a dagger thrust into Nicholas’s skull.
With consciousness comes pain, and a confusion that makes his head spin. For a moment his senses cannot find the slightest familiar thing upon which to anchor themselves. He is not in the sea, though his legs are soaking wet. He is not on the land, though he lies on stone. He is not in the air, though he seems to be flying. It is daylight, though he is in darkness. He feels someone cautiously gripping his outflung hand.
‘Dr Shelby… It’s Edmund Spenser. Can you hear me? Are you alright?’
And then a wash of pale daylight as Spenser steps back from the narrow space between the wreck and the fold in the cliff into which Nicholas has fallen. Looking around, he sees that he is spreadeagled on the rocks, the shattered floor of the master’s cabin some four feet above his head.
‘Can you move your limbs, Dr Shelby?’
The prospect of lying badly injured in a rocky Irish cove, leagues from help, while the tide come in sends a wave of fear through Nicholas’s body. He flexes his limbs. They ache, but they work. He eases himself off the sloping rock and rolls towards the light. Spenser reaches in to help him. Another wave funnels a cascade of water over his legs, icy cold but shocking him into full consciousness.
‘God’s mercy was with you, Dr Shelby. You could have drowned,’ Spenser says, as he helps Nicholas wade through the water towards the beach.
‘I must have walked into something, up there in the cabin.’
‘I heard you cry out. You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck, Dr Shelby.’
‘How long was I senseless?’
‘Only a moment or two. My greatest fear was that if another wave came in again, you might drown. Are you in pain?’
‘Just aches, mostly.’
Spenser smiles in self-reproach. ‘Mistress Bianca will take greatly against me for letting you climb up there in the first place.’
Nicholas places one palm behind his head. It comes away wet, but with salt water, not blood. ‘I’ve had a lucky escape, it seems.’
‘You found nothing up there, I take it?’
‘No, nothing. If there were any papers, Henshawe has recovered them. Or the sea swept them away. Nevertheless, Sir Robert is bound to ask me if I took steps to see for myself.’
Spenser helps Nicholas away from the wreck. As he climbs into the saddle of his horse, the effort makes him wince. Bianca is going to be incandescent when she sees the bruises.
‘You still haven’t explained to me why you wanted to bring me here,’ he says to Spenser.
‘Here to the wreck? Or here to Ireland?’ Spenser answers, swinging into the saddle.
‘Both – while we’re about it.’
Spenser thinks about this for a while in silence. His hands, clasped about the reins, churn, causing his horse to fidget. He seems to be struggling between the merits of confession and secrecy. Eventually secrecy wins.
‘I must speak to Cecil face-to-face,’ he says, determination hardening his scholarly features. ‘Only to Cecil.’
‘Has something occurred since you wrote to him?’ Nicholas asks. ‘Has something changed?’
‘I can say no more, Dr Shelby,’ Spenser replies, his eyes almost pleading. ‘It must be to Cecil, Dr Shelby. Only to Sir Robert Cecil.’
Nicholas persists. ‘But you told Sir Robert to send you someone he trusts. He trusts me. That is why I came to Ireland. That’s why I’m here, now.’
But Spenser has retreated into that inner, unbreachable bastion that Nicholas detected on his arrival at Kilcolman.
As they begin to ride out of the bay, Nicholas glances at Spenser’s breeches. They are stained and wet, just like his own. Did they get that way when the poet climbed into that space between the wreck and the rocks to see if I was alive? wonders Nicholas. Or did the poet follow me into the master’s cabin? Did I walk into a beam by accident? Or did the only other living person in this cove attempt to kill me, losing his nerve when he realized he’d failed?
He glances again at Edmund Spenser. Refusing to trust, he thinks, can work both ways.
Long before Nicholas reaches the grassy saddleback between the bays he can see that Bianca isn’t there waiting for him. The knoll is empty. A sudden wrench of alarm makes him drive his horse onwards. Has Spenser lied to him about how long he was senseless? Were there supposed to be two more bodies left to the gulls on this beach? The poet doesn’t strike him as a practised murderer. But where is Bianca?
And then, as he tops the rise, he sees her – far out in the next bay, across a band of water, sitting on her horse close to the cliff. Relief is followed swiftly by shame for having condemned Spenser so quickly. Perhaps, he thinks, there is something in the air of this island that lets distrust grow like spiders’ webs.
Riding down the bluff, he can now see in the churned-up sand the visible evidence of his wife’s irrepressible spirit. The hoof-prints run parallel to the land and then turn sharply out towards the stretch of shallow water that cuts the sandy bottom of the bay in two. He wonders what has led her so far out. Exhilaration or something more?
Dismounting, he sits down at the boundary between the bluff and the beach, his knees up under his chin. His body is beginning to ache from the fall. He is cold. His legs are soaked, his back damp from lying on the rocks. He begins to shiver. He shouts to attract Bianca’s attention. But the onshore wind and the sound of the sea beyond the bay throw his voice back at him. He whistles. She turns towards the beach and, after a few moments searching, lifts one hand in recognition.