He goes in search of Piers Gardener, hoping the scrivener’s journeyings to the more remote English garrisons, and his contacts with the people of the countryside, might produce some rumour, some gossip, of a woman taken by the rebels – he is certain Bianca would make her presence known somehow. But Gardener is out of the city on one of his meanderings.
Nicholas senses he is walking on the edge of a high parapet. One misstep and he will plunge into the abyss. The only barrier to prevent him falling is the hope that Bianca is still alive, that the rebels have taken her – spared her – for her skills. He imagines her plotting her escape, enchanting her captors into carelessness, slipping away in the night. If anyone can do it, she can.
But even this thought brings Nicholas little comfort. How will she find her way back to him? What if her captors are attacked by English forces? In Ireland, giving quarter – it seems – has long since gone out of fashion. She might not be lucky a second time.
His dreams darken even more when news of another disaster arrives: a force under Sir Conyers Clifford, Governor of Connaught, is defeated in Roscommon and put to rout. The rebels cut the head off Clifford’s corpse for a trophy. When the news reaches Dublin, Nicholas has cause to recall Ormonde’s words with bitter irony: Severed heads are not the only coin of exchange in this benighted island…
For days, he cannot hear a cart rumble past without seeing in his mind Bianca’s head lying on the tailboard, her amber eyes for ever dulled.
32
Like everyone else in the baggage train, Bianca had mistaken the men running out of the forest for returning English soldiers. In the fog it had been almost impossible to tell otherwise – until the throat-cutting had begun. She remembers emerging from her tent to be confronted by three bearded men dressed like characters from a Bible story. They wore simple knee-length gowns of wool that glistened with the tears of the fog. Each carried a small round shield buckled to the left arm. In their hands they wielded heavy, archaic swords. To Bianca’s mind, they could have been soldiers of King David about to do battle with the Philistines. One of them shouted at her in a language she could not comprehend. Gaeilge, she had assumed. But she hadn’t needed to understand their speech. Their intent was clear by the delirium of slaughter she could see in their eyes. Then they had noticed the jars, pots, bottles and mortars, the boxes of dried leaf and root, the weighing scales, the ladles, spoons and iron lancets.
‘You serve a physician?’ one of them asked in English.
‘I serve no one,’ Bianca had replied indignantly. ‘I am Bianca Merton, mistress of the Jackdaw tavern on Bankside.’
‘Then you are a camp whore?’ he had suggested menacingly.
‘Certainly not! I am wife to Dr Nicholas Shelby.’
‘Are these his medicines?’
‘Not all of them. Many are mine. I am also an apothecary – licensed by the Worshipful Company of Grocers, in London.’
While they discuss this information in their native Gaeilge, Bianca takes the opportunity to try to worm her way under the tent wall. But she only gets one arm through before they seize her by the ankles and haul her back.
She can tell by their agitation that they are expecting a counter-attack. One of them takes off his cloak and fills it with as much of the physic as it will hold. Then they drag her outside, where she averts her eyes from the five fog-shrouded corpses strewn about the now almost empty camp.
The one who had spoken to her in English sheathes his sword, draws a dagger and cuts a length of tent-rope and fashions a noose out of it. For a moment she thinks they intend to hang her. It is not the prospect of death that makes her begin to tremble; rather it’s the image that springs into her head: a bereft Nicholas weeping as he kneels at her gently swinging feet.
In fact they have nothing more lethal in store for her than simple indignity. The noose makes an efficient leash. They slip it around her head, tighten it so that she can only just breathe and lead her into the forest like a pack-mule. So much as a whisper, they warn her, and she will join the dead whose blood is already pooling in the sodden grass.
After the initial violence of the capture they had shown her no further anger or hostility, but rather a studied indifference, as though she was nothing more than a package they had been ordered to transport from one place to another. During the first few days of her captivity the urge to escape had flowed through her body like the shock of ice-cold water on the skin. Her senses had trembled with expectation. She thought she might take any risk to find her way back to Nicholas, to return safely to Bruno. But her captors had never let go of the leash, not even when the call of nature forced her to beg them to stop. Then she had to endure the humiliation of relieving herself like a dog on a lead, though they had shown her the small civility of turning their backs while she crouched. At night, or when they were resting during the march, a guard was always appointed to keep hold of the leash. Besides, where would she go? she asked herself. She had no real idea of where she was, or in what direction Dublin lay.
Looking back, she can place a form of order on events. First, there is the period that she calls Hoodman Blind, after the child’s game. The raiding party – now a dozen strong – makes little dashes through the landscape. These are interspersed with periods of hiding from English patrols. Then there is the Strolling period. It takes place in territory that Bianca assumes is firmly under rebel control, because the crops stand unburnt in the fields and cattle graze contentedly under the first proper sunshine in weeks. Were it not for the fact that she is a prisoner, and sick with worry that Nicholas might have been caught in the ambush, or what he must going through after her disappearance, she might even enjoy it.
But the pace never slackens. However, now it is driven not by the possibility of pursuit, but by some definite intent on the part of her captors. Where they are taking her, they will not say. What is to happen when they get there is a secret she is not permitted to learn. Eventually a numbing resignation takes hold of her. She becomes submissive, a condition previously alien to her. She no longer resists when they hurry her with a tug of the rope. She sleeps when they sleep. She eats what they eat: oatmeal and bread – never less than her equal share, which serves to confirm her growing view that she is important to them.
Finally comes the Progress. In this, the most recent period, Bianca becomes in her imagination very much like the queen, journeying through her realm and lodging by night in the houses of the nobility. In truth, these start off as the humblest of dwellings. But they show a definite improvement as each day passes. So much so that within a week she is sleeping in substantial stone tower houses, much like Kilcolman.
The Progress is her very own achievement, and Bianca is rightly proud of it. It begins on the night they spend in the company of the first host, who looks as though he might have some authority over her captors. He is a fidgety, bald little man but well dressed, and his house has real furniture: high-backed chairs, a table and a good collection of pewter. The sword he wears is a size too big for him, as – apparently – is his own self-regard. But by the deference her captors show him, Bianca assumes he is a minor chieftain of some sort. When she is brought before him, she decides that now is as good a moment as any to play her hand. Adopting the haughtiest pose possible on the end of a leash, she tosses her head to display her mane of dark tresses to best effect – ignoring the fact that she has only ever washed them in cold water from a pail or a stream since leaving Dublin.