Aboard the San Juan de Berrocal, Don Rodriquez huddles in the tiny cabin afforded by his status as a courtier and longs himself back in the Escorial in Madrid with his dying monarch. Anywhere but here, where the world seems as if it is trying to disassemble itself in a shrieking, plunging, battering paroxysm. Clasped in a terrified trinity with his daughter Constanza and her Carib maid Cachorra – calm, stately, brave Cachorra – his only comfort is that if tonight he must die, he will not die alone.
‘Is it to be thus, Father?’ Constanza asks in a moment when the howling of the wind, the crashing of the sea and the tortured groaning of the vessel subside just long enough for her voice to be heard. ‘Am I not to know the blessings of marriage and motherhood? Am I to perish in the company of common mariners? Is this the pass you have brought me to, my lord Father?’
To the mind of Don Rodriquez, common mariners are all that now stand between his daughter and a watery grave. But Constanza is made in the mould of her late mother, choosy about the company she keeps ever since she was old enough to distinguish one face from another. She is a plump, haughty girl, whose fingernails have been sunk in his skin almost from the moment he entered the cabin to warn her of the approaching storm. He cannot see her face in the darkness, but he knows the look she is wearing well enough: the full lips turned down at the edges; the eternal crease between eyebrows stiffened to the texture of a brush with kohl, charcoal and grease (Constanza cannot come down to breakfast each morning until Cachorra has properly applied it); the air of permanent dissatisfaction, despite never knowing a moment without luxury until she boarded this ship.
At least the storm has taken away her hunger, he thinks. Every day since leaving Coruña she has turned up her nose at the food, utterly unaware that the very mariners she so disdains are on hard rations because half the St Juan’s hold is packed with crates containing her trousseau.
‘God grant His torment will soon be over,’ Don Rodriquez tells her with more certainty than he has any right to feel. ‘And when we are done with Ireland, which will be no more than a day or two, we shall continue on our way to Antwerp and the joyous occasion of your wedding.’
Unobserved in the heaving darkness, he allows himself a shallow smile. A joyous occasion indeed, if only for the fact that Constanza will become someone else’s worry. She is to marry a preposterously mannered cousin, currently in the service of King Philip’s commander in the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Ernst of Austria. By all accounts they will be well suited. They can look down their noses at the Flemings, the Brabantians and the Dutch to their hearts’ content. He will stay for the ceremony, of course, but not a moment longer. With God’s grace and favour, he will be back at the Escorial in time to mourn his dying king.
Don Rodriquez feels his daughter’s chest heaving against his. He takes this as evidence of her mounting terror. Then the stomach-churning stench of vomit permeates the closed air of the cabin and he senses an uncomfortable warmth spreading into the weave of his expensively brocaded jerkin. God’s punishment, he thinks, for his lack of charity.
From above the deckhead – though at this moment if they were capsized and upside-down Don Rodriquez is certain he would be none the wiser – comes a rapid series of crashes, loud enough to beat down even the frenzied screaming of the wind. He has grown uncomfortably familiar with the booming of the sea hammering against the San Juan’s planks. But these sounds are different. One of the masts must have gone, carrying heavy spars and tangled cordage with it. This is it, then, he thinks: the end. The sacred mission entrusted to him is ruined, stillborn, smothered even before it has left the cradle.
And then Don Rodriquez feels the fingers of another female hand, less frantic than his daughter’s. They are seeking out the profile of his face in the darkness, as though the owner of them is trying to fix a last memory of him in her mind before the sea breaks in. He knows at once they are Cachorra’s fingers. They have a strength in them, a resolve that he knows well, though no physical intimacy has ever existed between himself and his daughter’s Carib maid. Freeing one hand from his daughter’s frantic grasp, Don Rodriquez places it over the other woman’s fingers and presses them against the side of his face. There is no light to see by, because the cabin lantern has long ago spun itself off its hook and now lies shattered somewhere amongst all the other debris that slides around in the darkness. So it is in his imagination that Don Rodriquez looks into Cachorra’s astoundingly large brown eyes – eyes that every Spanish woman who has ever seen them says can only be the result of taking a measure of belladonna, because no one is ever born with eyes like those – and, for the first time since the storm struck, he knows comfort.
At Greenwich Palace the performance of The Faerie Queene is drawing towards its ponderous and impenetrable close. Several of the players, Bianca has noticed, are regulars at the Jackdaw on Bankside. She knows them well. She can see their hearts aren’t in their work. She feels for them. It cannot be rewarding when the one person you have come to entertain has spent most of the evening in conversation with the Earl of Essex and several serious-looking members of the Privy Council, taking little notice of your performance.
Nicholas is almost asleep on his feet. Every few moments his head pitches forward and his close-cut beard rasps on the starched ruff that Rose Monkton insisted on laundering for him. Dear Rose. She still cannot quite comprehend that she is no longer Bianca’s maid but the legal tenant of the Jackdaw, along with her husband, Ned.
It was Ned Monkton who had made it safe for them to return to England. It was Ned who had killed the lie that Nicholas was old Dr Lopez’s co-conspirator in a plot to poison the queen, a slander that had forced Bianca to accompany her husband across the Narrow Sea, eventually seeking refuge in her birthplace, Padua, until his innocence could be proved. That acquittal had taken more than a year. By the time word reached them, Bianca was pregnant with little Bruno. Nicholas, too, was fully occupied studying anatomy under Professor Fabricius at the Palazzo Bo. Returning at once was out of the question. Besides, Robert Cecil valued having proxy eyes and ears in the Veneto and had wanted Nicholas to stay.
Then, last Twelfth Night, one of Cecil’s enciphered messages had arrived at their house. The queen, apparently, had found time to enquire what had happened to that fetching young physician, the one with the tousled black hair and the frame of a ploughman, the Suffolk yeoman’s son with the country burr in his voice, the one guaranteed to discomfort the grey, hidebound ranks of her royal stool-inspectors, urine-watchers and medical astrologers.
There had been no argument from Bianca about leaving. She had no family left in Italy, and before fleeing England with Nicholas had made a good life for herself on Bankside. Her sojourn in Padua, while pleasing enough, had merely reinforced her conviction that England was her home now. Besides, had Nicholas elected to stay in Padua, he would have announced himself a traitor to his sovereign and the country of his birth.
But which one of us is the worm in the apple’s flesh – me or my husband? she asks herself as she watches the players end the performance with a lively jig played on sackbut and tambour. Does Robert Cecil not wonder if Nicholas might have warmed a little to the Catholic heresy while he was away in Italy? All those papist professors at the Palazzo Bo whose intellect Nicholas so admired… all those provocative altar paintings he was exposed to in the churches she took him to, the forbidden Masses he attended…