In his tent, Nicholas studies the parchment roll on which he records the daily scything of sickness through the English army. To the accompaniment of the relentless liquid hammering against the canvas, he wonders if the Lord Lieutenant’s once-grand enterprise will simply dissolve away before the skies clear. He aches with tiredness. He has caught only fragments of sleep for days. The sick-roll blurs before his sore eyes and he falls momentarily into a trance.
First had come the grand ceremony: Essex accepting his sword of office in the cathedral at Dublin. It was followed by wise counsel from men like Ormonde: wait. Wait until the rivers have given up at least some of the winter deluge. Wait until the tracks and bogs are a little easier to navigate. Wait for the pastures to ripen, so that enough cattle may be fattened to feed the army. Because Tyrone is canny. Tyrone is waiting in the north, in his Ulster fastness. It will take all that and more to reach him, let alone defeat him.
But England’s Caesar is hungry for the glory he thinks is his due. The father was ruined by Ireland. The son will not wait for revenge. Essex orders a pointless meandering to the west and to the south, through Leinster and Munster. A few castles held by tiny, unsupported rebel garrisons surrender to him. Undefended towns throw open their gates and welcome him with loud but shallow protestations of loyalty. He takes it as a form of conquering, and it goes to his head. He thinks he is invincible.
And all the while, for every slight advance there are setbacks. The ambushes become ever more audacious and bloodier. He garrisons the towns he passes through not with fit men but with convalescents. The rest tire and sicken. The more experienced amongst them – those who have been taken from the army in the Low Countries – are beginning to give voice to the unthinkable: that whatever else Robert Devereux may be, when it comes to Caesars, he is more a Claudius than a Julius.
And still it rains. Dear loving Jesu, how it rains.
‘Nicholas? Nicholas!’
Bianca’s voice, breaking into his thoughts, makes him think for a moment that he is back on Bankside. Then the drumming of the rain on the canvas takes him again, like a nagging toothache that will not ease. Rubbing his aching eyes, he looks up from the campaign chest that he uses as a table.
Bianca ducks through the entrance of the tent they share, pitched amongst the baggage train and camp-followers. They are lucky. Those without such a luxury are forced to shelter under the trees, or in the lee of the wagons beneath whatever cover they can find or steal.
She has been out treating three men who – being previously farmhands from Warwickshire and thus uneducated in the science of combustion – thought that lighting a fire might be made easier by stealing a bag of black powder from the armourers. They had thrown it on the meagre flames that their flints had managed to strike out of the damp kindling.
‘Are they improved?’ Nicholas asks.
‘The two with burnt hands bear their hurts well enough,’ she replies. ‘As to the third, there is no sign yet of his sight returning.’ She wipes her brow with the rim of her hood before pulling it back over her shoulders. ‘This place is thick with alder. I can make a decoction that might soothe. What are you doing?’
‘The sick-roll – again.’
‘Some of the women were saying we move tomorrow.’
‘For Limerick, to receive supplies,’ Nicholas tells her. ‘Oliver Henshawe told me, while you were away.’
‘What was he doing, skulking around the baggage train?’
‘He said the constant rain was giving him a headache. I told him he had plenty of company.’ Nicholas glances at the stack of pots and jars in the corner of the tent. ‘Have you any oil of camomile and spikenard left? I told him you might be able to spare him a little.’
‘Do you think Essex will take this rain as a sign from God that he should admit defeat and go home?’ she asks.
‘He hasn’t yet,’ Nicholas replies. ‘I had hoped this would all be over quickly. Now I fear it could go on till the winter. I think you should go home. Be with Bruno.’
‘Do you think I don’t consider it every day?’
‘I could arrange it. There’s bound to be a ship at Waterford. And that order from the queen says nothing about a wife.’
Bianca places her palm against his cheek. The rain has chilled her flesh, but the touch feels warm to him. She says, ‘How could I abide such a thing? How could I leave you here?’
‘Are you frightened the Merrow will come and enchant me?’ he asks, trying to lighten her mood.
Bianca looks again at the misty landscape beyond the tent. She laughs. ‘When the Seanchaí spoke of the Merrow coming out of the sea, she said nothing at all about her bringing the ocean along for company.’
Nicholas is about to kiss her, to escape the immediate world if only for a few moments, when a shadow falls across the canvas and a figure fills the entrance.
‘Dr Shelby, you are commanded to attend His Grace – at once.’
Nicholas recognizes Sir Henry Norris, one of Devereux’s senior commanders.
‘Is he sick?’ Nicholas asks.
‘Whatever else ails him, his anger seems healthy enough,’ Norris says, pulling the face of the long-suffering subordinate. He is an old soldier, well into his fifties, a twinkling eye softening his flinty exterior. He glances at Bianca. ‘I wouldn’t tarry if I were you, Physician – however pleasing the cause might be.’
Nicholas throws his gaberdine cloak over his shoulders and follows Norris outside into the rain.
The army is encamped around Cahir Castle, given up by the rebels after a desultory bombardment. The oxen for hauling the artillery graze peacefully in the water meadows beside the River Suir. A few have wandered into the tented lines of the baggage and powder trains. Nicholas and Henry Norris must shoo a pair out of their way with shouts and wild gestures as they hurry across the furrowed mud towards the grey walls of the castle, their boots spraying ochre torrents from the puddles. Nicholas asks again why he’s being summoned.
‘A reverse,’ is all that Norris will tell him.
‘Is the earl wounded?’ Nicholas asks, chiding himself for a momentary wish that Essex has achieved a martyr’s end in battle and they can all go home.
‘Only in the heart,’ Norris tells him, rolling his eyes at the cascading clouds.
Essex is in the great hall of the castle. Surrounded by his senior commanders, he is reading a dispatch. His hair, at court so generously curled and primped, now hangs about his face like the torn remnants of an old sack. His skin has an unhealthy pallor. There is sweat on his brow. On the surface, he looks to Nicholas like a man in the late stages of quatrain fever. However, his body is shaking not with sickness, but with rage. When he notices Nicholas and Norris enter, he calls out, ‘Dr Shelby, do you have a cure, perhaps, for cowardice, mutiny and sheer bloody incompetence?’
‘Your Grace?’
Essex thrusts the dispatch at the messenger who brought it, as though he would make him eat it. ‘Kill or cure?’ he demands to know of Nicholas. ‘As of this moment, my preference would be to kill.’