In their tent, Bianca stares at Nicholas in astonishment. He shakes his head to throw off the rain.
‘How can you tell, after such a brief examination?’
Nicholas lays aside his gaberdine cloak. ‘Oh, I’m not that clever. Old Dr Lopez, the queen’s physician, once told me there was a rumour the earl was infected.’
‘And look what happened to him,’ Bianca says in alarm.
‘He does show some symptoms of the dormant stage of the disease: the sudden wild swings of mood, the pains, the broken blood vessels in his eyes, the chancres. But I could hardly ask him to let me inspect his privy member, could I?’
‘Please God, say you didn’t tell him.’
‘Of course not. I may be wet through from this accursed rain, but my brains haven’t dissolved quite yet.’
‘Do you think he knows?’
‘I can’t say. I wouldn’t imagine his own physicians in England have dared to tell him.’
Bianca shakes her head in disbelief. ‘That’s all we need. We’re trapped with an army well on the way to being defeated, in a place that seems to be sinking into the sea, in the hands of a pox-ridden adventurer beset by a chronic mania, who might decide to hang us if the mood takes him.’
‘You forgot to include this: he knows I’m here to spy on him for Robert Cecil.’
‘Well, that just puts the marchpane on the pastry, doesn’t it?’
Nicholas sinks onto their pallet and puts his head in his hands. ‘Do you think the Earl of Tyrone might have use for a physician?’
‘We could try to slip aboard a ship at Waterford,’ Bianca says.
‘That would make us deserters. Then he’d have a real excuse to hang us.’
Bianca joins Nicholas on the pallet. She throws her arms around him, holding him close.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I should never have brought you back from Padua. We should have stayed.’
‘If I had wanted to stay, Nicholas, I would have stayed. There was nothing for us there, not after Cousin Bruno died. Padua holds too many bad memories.’
‘It’s where our son was born.’
‘And we brought his goodness with us to Bankside.’
‘I know you miss him more than you admit.’
‘I’m his mother.’
‘When we finally escape from here, when we’re back on Bankside, I’ll renounce all ambition. I’ll give up medicine and become a humble barber-surgeon: mend broken bones and stitch wounds. I’ll do what I know works. The queen won’t call me to Whitehall to hear about that. She’ll soon forget who I am. And as for Robert Cecil – well, Bankside is as good a place as any for our Bruno to grow strong and true. He might not end up quoting Virgil and marrying a rich nobleman’s daughter, but at least he’ll know the difference between dissembling and straight talking.’
‘You’ll do what you know to be right,’ Bianca tells him gently. ‘You always do. Your decency is the most infuriating thing about you. But I’ve learned to admire it.’
They stay entwined for a while, each giving and drawing strength and comfort. Then Bianca looks up at the canvas about her head. It has stopped trembling.
‘Nicholas, look,’ she says. ‘I think the rain is easing.’
28
Cachorra lays a hand against Constanza’s clammy brow. Her mistress groans, turns her head away, dampening the pillow with her sweat and the little bubbles that froth at the corners of her plump lips.
What shall I do if she dies? Cachorra asks herself. What will be my purpose then? Where shall I go? Not back to Valladolid – there is nothing there for me now.
It is the awful weather that has laid her mistress low, Cachorra is sure of it. A few days in the heat of Castile and she would soon recover. But here, in this wet, cold, wild place, Cachorra fears her mistress will succumb to the sickness that came upon her only days after reaching what they had both assumed was a kind of safety.
The Earl of Tyrone has sent his physicians every day, old men as grey as the weather. They have bled Constanza regularly, holding up the glass beakers to study the colour of the blood against a candle flame. They have bathed her in icy water from the nearby river, given her purgatives that stink even worse than the resulting eliminations. They have made her drink water with barley stewed in it, with crushed violets, with marjoram and with agrimony. They have laid kerchiefs soaked in hot oil over her breasts. They have fed her a sludge of hares’ brains to absorb whatever is causing her to tremble so. One even brought her a dead toad, bandaging it against her belly to draw out the dampness in her. In Cachorra’s mind, the only improvement in Constanza’s condition is that her exhaustion has shut off her continual complaining.
The Earl of Tyrone has proved a gentle and courteous host. He is an imposing man, sturdy and bearded. Before she fell ill, Constanza had even deigned to speak to him in English. He has dispatched a messenger to Scotland, there to take ship for Antwerp. The fellow is carrying a letter to Constanza’s intended husband in the Spanish Netherlands, telling him of the shipwreck and asking him to send men to bring her to him. What will they find when they come, Cachorra wonders – that he has been a widower for months without knowing it?
The letter, Cachorra reasons, will have an unintended – and undesirable – consequence. News of the shipwreck will eventually find its way from Antwerp to Madrid. Questions will be asked. Questions like: what was the San Juan de Berrocal doing off the coast of Ireland in the first place? If anyone asks her, she has already decided to play the innocent. What could a servant possibly know of her master’s secret intentions?
Cachorra remembers the care her dear Don Rodriquez had taken to ensure that she understood the importance of his mission. The implication was clear, though never actually voiced. If something were to befall me, I don’t trust Constanza not to make a hash of things in my absence. I must therefore trust in you, my brave leopard cub.
No, if they ask her, she will plead the ignorance of the lowly.
There is another fear troubling Cachorra as she wipes Constanza’s brow, the kerchief cold and damp, as though the malady has seeped into it, infecting the linen. What if Constanza – in her delirium – cries out in English the true reason Don Rodriquez brought them to Ireland? It would be just like her contrary, mutton-headed mistress to blurt out things that are best kept silent. Now that she has spoken English in Tyrone’s presence, she might even spill the truth: that Don Rodriquez had not come to Ireland to offer him Spain’s support in his rebellion against the heretic English. How welcome would they be then?
Cachorra has long wondered if there might be some way, some stratagem, to find the Englishman, Spenser. But where in this damp, misty island is he? Has he heard of the shipwreck? Does he know there are survivors? Is he, at this very moment, leading men in search of them?
A terrible weight of responsibility bears down upon her. She feels her eyes begin to prickle as the tears well. The loneliness and the rain she can tolerate. She even allows herself a moment’s resigned pleasure at the thought of her mistress being restored to her former cantankerous self. But failing Don Rodriquez Calva de Sagrada – that is too great a shame for her to bear.
Ned Monkton dips a rag into a pail and scrubs vigorously at the little lozenges of glass set into the window-leads of the Jackdaw tavern. Rivulets of dissolved dirt stream down the brickwork below the sill. He rubs harder. Although Mistress Bianca is not here to show her disapproval of the amount of mud and horse-dung that gets thrown up by the traffic in the lane, Ned cannot escape the feeling that somehow she is able to see even the slightest lapse in housekeeping. Besides, she has Rose to ensure that standards are maintained. ‘What if the queen were to happen by?’ Rose had asked him barely an hour ago, as though Her Majesty was in the habit of popping over to Bankside for a jug of knockdown and a plate of oysters whenever the burden of monarchy became too great to bear.