In the swaying light from the boat’s lantern, he reads again the brief letter with its heavy seal dangling on a length of fine ribbon:
To our trusty and beloved servant Master Nicholas Shelby, greetings… It is our desire that you should go into Ireland with the forces of our Earl of Essex, our true and valorous friend and Lieutenant… there to make service in physic unto our troops hurt in the suppression of the rebellious Tyrone…
Nicholas stares ahead at the sickly pallor of the coming dawn, his stomach chilled by the ease with which Robert Cecil has played him. And he can hear Bianca’s voice over the wind and the splashing of the oars:
Must you forever dance to Robert Cecil’s tune?… It was a pact with the Devil. I should never have let you make it.
She’s right, he thinks. A pact with the Devil. And his soul exchanged in payment.
Bianca kneels on the hard earth and hacks at the cold finger of sanicle root. She imagines that it runs from her hand down through the earth, out of her little riverside physic garden set between Black Bull Alley and the Mutton Lane shambles, and all the way to Cecil House, thickening as it rises through the foundations, through the gaps in the floorboards, into Mr Secretary’s study, where it seamlessly melds into his lower limbs. It is Cecil himself that she is striking at with her knife. Cecil, whose malign roots seem to spread everywhere.
The Devil take Robert Cecil and all his works.
Bianca has come to her secret place with the intention of fetching the fragment of sanicle to pound into mulch and boil in wine, to make a healing decoction for the bawd at the Arbour of Venus on Kent Street. One of the bawd’s poor, undernourished girls is showing symptoms of the French gout. The bawd is an unforgiving woman. If the girl cannot be cured, she will likely be turned out, joining the growing ranks of those made destitute by the bad harvests and the quarrel with Spain. Nicholas has gone to the stew to do what he can for her.
In a way, Bianca is glad he has been called away barely an hour after returning from King’s Street. His news, she thinks, is best considered in solitude, and with a task at hand to stop her thoughts spinning out of control.
The Devil take Robert Cecil and all his works.
Spenser – dead. That’s shock enough. But to return to Ireland because the Crab wants a spy in Robert Devereux’s camp: that is a poison sharper than even a Caporetti could mix.
As she hacks at the sanicle root, in her mind Bianca tries to lay a solid foundation upon which to construct the edifice of her response.
First, Nicholas is not to blame. Even though instinct had made her want to hammer at his chest with her fists and call him weak, to tell him to defy Cecil and spit on his shadow, she knows that would have been unfair, untrue and unwise. Nicholas is in the Crab’s service only because of her. If she were not a Catholic, Cecil would have no hold over him. Second, she must accept Nicholas’s assurance – because her husband is an honest man – that what drives Mr Secretary is not simply a scheming and devious disposition, but an unbreakable loyalty to the realm and its monarch. Whatever ill methods he might employ, he acts only for the queen’s protection and, by extension, her subjects. He does what he thinks is right, and the Devil can worry about the method.
Haven’t I done exactly the same thing?
Bianca remembers a cold, starlit night on London Bridge, and the sound of two bodies striking the water below, the bodies of men who had intended Nicholas mortal harm.
Have I not sinned in protecting those I hold dear? she asks herself. Did I not sanction – nay, contrive – the deaths of those men solely to save Nicholas’s life? What right do I have, then, to condemn Sir Robert Cecil?
And then there is Constanza Calva de Sagrada. She, too, has cast her own enchantment. Bianca cannot deny it. And she knows Nicholas feels the same. She wonders if, perhaps, they have both fallen under the Merrow’s spell.
Finally, there is the inescapable matter of the queen’s command.
Bianca has read the words for herself, stared in awe at the imperious signature. Nicholas can no more deny his queen than fly to the moon. It matters not if Cecil has whispered in the queen’s ear, directing a growing approval of her new – and undeniably striking – physician. She could mix no balm, distil no concoction, cast no enchantment that could overturn the written order of a monarch.
No, Nicholas must go again to Ireland.
And therefore, she whispers as the sanicle root finally yields to the knife’s blade, I must go with him. I must keep watch on the precious talisman that came to me out of the river that cold October dawn eight years ago.
We shall go as one. Because when I saved Nicholas from himself, and he saved me from Cecil, we forged the links that bind us. We forged them willingly. They bind us still, even more so now that we have Bruno. But the fact remains: Nicholas and I are two comets that have wandered by mistake into the wrong sky. For as long as we blaze, we blaze together, but otherwise alone.
25
It is a lavish funeral for a man who claimed he was barely more solvent than a beggar. But then Robert Devereux is paying. Whence does the earl’s generosity stem? Nicholas wonders. From an appreciation of Spenser’s verse? Or from the poet’s approval – his validation?
A sharp frost crackles underfoot as the cortège approaches the great North Door of Westminster Abbey. Ahead the dean awaits to receive the coffin, his hands together in reverence for a man he doesn’t know, and whose views on the subjugation of the Irish rebels might, Nicholas dares to hope, appal his Christian sensibilities. Behind the cortège a trail of poor folk, paid to attend, do their best to adopt a grieving look. Count yourself fortunate, Nicholas thinks, as he glances back at their pallid faces from his place in the procession, that you don’t know how the great poet would have wanted you brought to order, if you were rebellious enough to dare protest your lot.
Inside, the Abbey is dark and cold, the steps of the pall-bearers as they traverse the flagstones echoing like a slow, rhythmical lament.
They’ve all come, Nicholas notices. There’s young Ben Johnson, a smaller version of Ned Monkton, but who shares the same fierce scowl; Will Shakespeare, whose eyes when they look into yours, Nicholas has often noticed, seem to be fixed on a part of yourself you haven’t met yet; Walter Raleigh, who considers himself no mean versifier; Southampton, patron of poets… and all those clever fellows favoured by Essex House, who throw copies of their own verse into the open grave dug close to Chaucer’s tomb in the South Transept and weep. Listening to the eulogy, Nicholas finds his thoughts not with Spenser, but with his wife Elizabeth, and Katherine, Sylvanus and Peregrine, mourning without the comfort of ceremony, or even a body, in beleaguered Cork. Nicholas has written a letter of commiseration and sent it with the Cecil House post. A natural death, he has assured them, brought on by the calamity of losing Kilcolman. What good would it do, he thinks, to tell them otherwise – if there ever really was an ‘otherwise’?
It is no small task to equip England’s Caesar with a host befitting his new estate. Sixteen thousand foot and one thousand horse cannot be supplied out of thin air. Nor can they be assembled swiftly. The general muster gathers pace, sweeping up unemployed veterans and farmhands with little or no knowledge of where on the surface of the globe Ireland may be found. Meanwhile, men with an eye for profit line up at Whitehall, at Cecil House, at Essex House – anywhere a contract is on offer. Because an army cannot bake its bread without ovens, so the humble brick suddenly attracts a premium; fish cannot be salted and dried if there are not nets to catch them. To feed a company of a hundred men requires more cooking pans than may be found in a small village. They cannot march without an adequate supply of water butts, or take their ease afterwards without ale or sack to drink. And they cannot be armed without such a forging and hammering of plate as might deafen all the angels in heaven.