For his part, Nicholas visits as many of Essex’s commanders and captains as he can reach. The earl has put out the word that his new physician has experience on the field of battle, that he is no dusty academic. They treat him courteously, but seem to think he won’t be needed much – save for those who’ve served previously under Ormonde and know the score.
He receives a letter from the College of Physicians, reminding him that it is a physician’s duty to diagnose and prescribe, not to physically treat. Taking off limbs, setting bones or stitching wounds is best left to members of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons, the letter points out. ‘They’ll probably be glad when I’ve gone,’ he tells Bianca as he tears it up and uses the scraps to light that evening’s fire. ‘First they couldn’t abide me because I question the medical canon, now they can’t abide me because the queen invites me to her presence chamber.’
At Cecil House, Sir Robert is dismissive when Nicholas reveals that Essex has deduced why Nicholas has been appointed. ‘I wouldn’t have expected otherwise. I’d have thought the same,’ he says, as though it’s all simply part of the courtier’s game.
But if Cecil is to be apprised of his rival’s progress, the means by which he receives the news must still be secure. Nicholas is instructed to employ the cipher he and Cecil have always used for privy correspondence. But who can be trusted to carry it? asks Nicholas. The new Lord Lieutenant of Ireland will control the post. He will have clever secretaries who can open and reseal a letter, making it look to the receiver quite untouched. And some of those secretaries may be so clever that they might even be able to unlock the code. What then?
You won’t send them through the official post, Cecil informs him airily. And so Nicholas must commit to memory the names of the masters of the ships who are in the principal secretary’s pay: Graham of the Arrow; Acliffe of the Sweet Reward; Boyce of the Goshawk… ‘Wherever possible, route your dispatches through Chester,’ Cecil says. ‘The captains know which post-riders are in my service.’
Nicholas has not forgotten the rigours of his time in the Low Countries. But he was more than a decade younger then. In preparation, he improves his fitness. Every other day he spends an hour in the company of Master George Silver from the Guild of Fencing Masters. His only previous experience of swordplay was at Cambridge, during a short-lived and futile attempt to fit in with the gentlemen students. Now he sweats and aches in a frantic effort to master the stop-hit, the riversa, the mandritta and the stoccata.
‘You’re not a dancer, are you?’ says Silver – a grizzled fifty-year-old with three times the stamina of his younger pupil, as Nicholas tumbles clumsily to the floorboards in his Blackfriars studio.
‘Not really,’ Nicholas replies, climbing to his feet for some more humiliation. ‘I’m a farmer’s son. A carrot tends to give itself up without much of a fight.’
‘I suggest a backsword, rather than a rapier,’ Silver says. ‘With only one edge to the blade, you’re likely to do less harm – to yourself.’
And all the while, the muster gathers pace.
Barnabas Vyves has not returned to the Jackdaw since the day Nicholas caught him out in his lie about the whereabouts of Oliver Henshawe’s recruits. Bristol or Chester? A mistake, or a deceit?
There is every reason to believe he is busy scouring the towns and villages of Surrey, raising men for the earl’s army, a task that leaves him no time for taking his ease – and other men’s misguided charity. Or at least there would be, if he hadn’t made such a hasty exit when he’d realized who he was speaking to.
When Ned Monkton hears from Talbot Appletree, the plumber’s apprentice – who has stopped by for a jug of knockdown after repairing the public cistern behind Winchester House – that he has heard from Will Baldock, the warden of the old Bermondsey Abbey, that on the morrow a parade is to occur there in which a troop bound for Ireland will drill with their pikes, he decides to attend as a spectator.
The day brings a spiteful east wind that sets the banners on the flagpoles at the Rose theatre crackling like pistol fire. A convoy of wagons bringing hay up Long Southwark gives Bankside a shower of dry rain when the straps come loose and the dust escapes on the breeze. Low clouds as grey as old linen fly westwards as though they can’t escape the city fast enough.
On the open ground beside the ruined abbey a troop of about sixty men stand in three ragged lines, their faces pinched and deathly white. Ned wonders idly if they’ve decided to do their dying before marching off to war, to get it out of the way. Like the muster at the Southwark Fair, they are a picture of improvisation, their plate, padded tunics and morion helmets consistent only in their dissimilarity. The recruits do their best to look suitably bold, while – to Vyves’s shouted commands, delivered in a quite unmartial falsetto – they practise their advances, their shouldering, their porting and their trailing. They finish with a flourish, presenting their pikes to face an imaginary cavalry charge: anchoring them under the right foot, the shaft thrust upwards at an angle and braced against a bent left knee, the right hand swinging over it and across the semi-crouching body to draw the sword and point it along the pike as a secondary defence. This they manage with only a few stumbles from the less robust and coordinated amongst them. The small crowd shows its approval with a rousing cheer. Tyrone’s papist rebels are assumed to be already vanquished.
As the recruits take their ease, their frosty breath torn away like cannon smoke, Vyves catches sight of Ned. For a moment he seems uncertain what to do. His high, domed forehead gleams like alabaster in the pale light. The long, lank hair and the single eye give him the appearance of a disreputable faun escaped from an enchanted glade. Then he walks over, puffing out his chest, as if he believes it might actually intimidate.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Thought I’d come to see what the Earl of Essex keeps in the way of grey’ounds,’ Ned replies amiably. ‘This lot look like they couldn’t catch a cold, let alone a coney.’
‘Don’t you worry, Master Ned,’ says Vyves. ‘A week or two under Sir Oliver’s captains an’ these lads will soon have the rebels running back to their bogs.’ He nods towards one of the recruits, a pimply, whey-faced lad hanging onto a pike with all the assuredness of a man who’s been handed a chain at the end of which is a wild beast. From the tip, a banner showing a boar’s head against a red chevron ripples angrily on the wind.
‘I’ll take your word for it, Ensign Vyves,’ Ned says. ‘Any likelihood of you goin’ with them?’
By the look Vyves gives him in reply, Ned might think that he’s just suggested selling the Crown Jewels to the French.
‘Without sound fellows in England to make the arrangements, an army is naught but a band of wandering vagabonds,’ Vyves announces confidently.
‘I ’aven’t seen you in the Jackdaw of late, Ensign Vyves,’ Ned observes. ‘Run out of folks to gull, ’ave you?’