As Christmas approaches the sessions with Spenser become less frequent. The poet has given up everything he knows that might be of use. The grey men from Cecil House find other subjects for their quiet persistence. For Bianca, this decline reminds her of mourners drifting away from a graveside. A grave in foreign soil, in which a young woman – still very much alive – stares up at the cold December sky, whispering softly and with fading strength for someone to come and pull her out.
There is ice on the Thames. Not thick enough for a Frost Fair, but rather a floating patchwork of giant white water-lilies. After three drunken visitors to Bankside attempt to walk back across the river, rather than take the bridge, and pay the price, the treacherous, shifting surface is left to the slithering gulls, ducks and swans. The clear water in the arches of London Bridge where the water-wheels turn, and along the outer curve of the river at Whitehall where the current flows fastest, is as dark as a demon’s soul. The wherrymen steer their boats cautiously along the jagged channels between the floes, and charge the passengers huddled beneath their heavy winter cloaks an extra ha’penny each way for the trouble.
At Whitehall the mood is a strange mix of Christmas merriment seasoned with venom. On the surface, the courtiers go to chapel, dine, dance and disport themselves with customary polished elegance. But behind the façade, the Cecil and the Devereux factions spit their silent enmity at one another with every mannered exchange.
This is supposed to be a Christmas to remember, a celebration before the Earl of Essex leads an army of some sixteen thousand foot and a thousand horse to subdue the queen’s rebellious subjects across the Irish Sea. The subsidy rolls have been consulted to raise the money to pay for it, the muster expanded to almost every county, and young men of quality with an eye to making a reputation by the sword – and more than a few older ones who have been languishing without gainful employment since the expedition to Cádiz – are flocking to Essex House to plead their case for inclusion.
On Christmas Eve one of Cecil’s gowned ghosts arrives at the house in Paris Garden. He brings a summons to court. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men are to perform Master Shakespeare’s The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, and Dr and Goodwife Shelby are invited. Nicholas accepts graciously, though he knows that – just as they had when they’d attended The Faerie Queene – they will be standing behind several hundred far more important guests, all arranged according to their luminosity in the courtiers’ cosmos, with only the brightest being allowed anywhere near the royal sun.
On the twenty-sixth day of December, as the bells of St Saviour’s Bankside ring ten in the morning, under a sky as dull as the eyes of dead fish, Nicholas and Bianca take a boat upriver to the Whitehall public river stairs, leaving young Bruno in the care of Rose and Ned at the Jackdaw.
‘Whitehall, Dr Shelby?’ asks the wherryman, one of the tavern’s regulars, with a conspiratorial laugh. ‘Has the queen raised another boil on her royal arse that needs drawing?’
‘If she has, she won’t be allowing me anywhere near it, Jed Tubley.’
‘We’re going to see a play, by Master Shakespeare,’ says Bianca as the oars send fragments of thin ice spinning on the water like shattered sugarloaf.
‘Will the Earl of Essex be there?’ says the wherryman, as though proximity to glory – even at this distance – might bring a little of it his way.
‘I would guarantee it,’ Nicholas replies.
‘It must be a rare fine thing to be so close to England’s new Caesar that you might reach out an’ shake his hand,’ Jed Tubley says in wonder.
‘We’ll be allowed no closer to the Earl of Essex than we will to the royal backside,’ Nicholas assures him.
‘Aye, well, even so, you’ve come up in the world, Dr Shelby – an’ you, too, Mistress Merton.’
As Tubley puts his back into the rowing, Nicholas lets his hand trail in the water. The icy shock rushes up his arm, making him gasp.
You’ve come up in the world, Dr Shelby.
He looks back at the receding grey shape of the Mutton Lane water-stairs. In his memory, he sees himself as he was on a cold night eight years ago, walking those wet planks resolutely towards the edge, ready to let the river have him, driven to self-destruction by his failure to save his first wife, Eleanor, and the child she was carrying.
And the river would have had him, too, if the temperature hadn’t been warmer than today, and his body strong… and if Bianca Merton hadn’t made the decision to come to England and purchase a tavern on Bankside… and if her taproom boy hadn’t gone down to the riverbank that morning to dispose of a pail of slops… Ifs. Nothing but ifs. What is life, he wonders, if not a careless cavalcade of happenstance?
Tubley delivers them to the Whitehall privy water-stairs – no public jetty for a passenger who is very nearly a queen’s physician. Nicholas and Bianca present their invitations to one of the Lord Chamberlain’s liveried ushers. Passing through the Shield Gallery, its walls hung with pasteboard escutcheons bearing mottos and aphorisms in praise of the woman whose majesty is the heart of this sprawling, labyrinthine place, they pass along narrow corridors, across courtyards like roofless dungeons, up winding stone staircases and into a world of priceless hangings, magnificently moulded plaster ceilings and floorboards so polished that they reflect the light from uncountable candles, like a still lake beneath a clear night sky.
In Whitehall’s great hall rows of benches have been set out, cushioned for the rumps of the quality at the front, bare wood for the lesser mortals at the back. An excitable chirruping rises to the high ceiling set with gilded stars. But Nicholas’s eyes are not drawn to the setting, or the fine dress of the men and women gathered here. His gaze is for Bianca alone. Her dark hair, tamed – for once – beneath a French hood, her boyish form flattered by the cut of a satin de Bruges orange gown that will require a significant outbreak of ill health amongst his wealthier patients to pay off, her complexion still blessed by the Italian sun, she is – for him – a treasure greater than he could find if he walked the halls and chambers of Whitehall Palace from now until the Thames itself turned to sand. Not even the imminent arrival of Gloriana herself can make him think otherwise.
The heavy floor-to-ceiling doors of the watching chamber swing open. The chattering dies, cut off as though an axe has fallen.
First comes a band of cherubic young choristers, trilling a sugary paean to majesty. Then the Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, strides in, his white cassock and black stole at odds with a face that looks as though it has come straight from a drunken night in a Bankside dice-house. He is accompanied by a dean and four acolytes. Then a row of trumpeters, whose deafening fanfare makes Bianca wince.
When the queen herself walks in, behind a hedge of pearl-studded, silver-threaded silk, the hall falls silent, the echoing trumpet notes fading away in the far reaches of the plaster cornices. Then there is a great sighing, like a sudden wind through a forest, as three hundred sets of clothes rustle over three hundred genuflecting bodies. As she passes, Nicholas notices her eyes dart momentarily towards him. Their cold appraisal takes no more than an instant. Then the thin, painted lips crack the plaster-white face in the briefest of tiny smiles. Staring at her back, Nicholas is unsure whether it was a smile of approval or a marking for later censure. But Bianca has seen it too. Her arm slides around his, pulling it against her body in a congratulatory hug.
In Elizabeth’s wake glide her privy councillors and senior courtiers. Mr Secretary Cecil bustles in with his uneven gait, like a man about to put his shoulder to a stuck door. He nods to Nicholas, who makes a second formal knee. Bianca gives him a grudging little dip that looks more like a passing spasm of cholic than a curtsey. Whispering, Nicholas identifies the two men with Cecil. The first is Henry Brooke, the eleventh Baron Cobham, son of the former Lord Chamberlain who gave his patronage to the troupe of players performing this afternoon. Cobham is a dull-looking man about Cecil’s age. He towers over the diminutive Principal Secretary like a particularly placid bear over his bearward; all that’s missing is the chain. The second man is about decade older than the other two. He has a thin, contemplative face, though he looks untroubled for a fellow who’s just lost his Irish plantations; but then the world knows that nothing short of the Second Coming could discomfort Sir Walter Raleigh.