Shushing her to silence, Bianca glances at the guards. They are still engrossed in their stone-throwing.
‘It’s alright. No one but us need know you’ve been poisoning your mistress, not healing her.’
Cachorra’s strong features crumble. ‘But only I wish to stop her complaining. No poison her!’
‘I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,’ Bianca says, laying a comforting hand on the other’s wrist. ‘I come from a long line of poisoners myself. Didn’t anyone in the castle kitchen notice?’
‘They leave me to myself. They frightened of Carib woman. They think I make witchcraft.’ She looks back towards the castle. ‘What have I done? I have killed the daughter of Don Rodriquez!’ Tears begin to run down her cheeks. They glint against her dark skin like beads of mercury flowing over polished teak. Bianca pulls her kerchief from her sleeve and offers it.
‘I don’t think you’ve given her a fatal dose. But it’s certainly time to dispense with the remedio. We’ll pretend she’s suffering from a malady of the stomach,’ she says. ‘Fitzthomas’s people stole most of my physic. But I think I still have some sow-fennel. And I saw some euphorbia growing over there. We’ll get an egg and some wine from the kitchen and mix a purgative. Your mistress will have her dignity affronted for a while, but she should recover.’
Leading Cachorra down to the river’s edge, she washes her hands in the glittering clear water to remove the smears of hemlock, instructing the Carib to do likewise.
‘Death is most usual sentence for poisoning a mistress,’ Cachorra says wretchedly. ‘I should die.’
‘Don’t be silly. I suspect Constanza wouldn’t be alive at all if it were not for you. How did you both manage to survive the wreck?’
In short, unadorned sentences, Cachorra tells of how she and Constanza were swept overboard from the San Juan de Berrocal, how they were found by a young lad who hid them until they could be passed into the household of a local chieftain, and hence into the care of the Earl of Tyrone himself.
‘It was fortunate that you were swept into the sea,’ Bianca says when she has told her tale. ‘Had you remained on the ship–’ She can barely bring herself to recall the scene of murder she witnessed with Nicholas and Edmund Spenser at the site of the wreck. ‘Do you understand that Don Rodriquez is dead?’ she says gently.
‘How do you come to know all these things?’ Cachorra asks.
‘Because my husband works for the man who was to receive the information that Don Rodriquez was carrying. That man’s name is Robert Cecil.’
It is a close enough approximation to the truth, thinks Bianca. She would not be here, were it not for Mr Secretary Cecil and his intrigues.
‘I have heard Don Rodriquez speak of this Say-sill,’ Cachorra says with a wise nod.
‘Master Edmund Spenser was to be the intermediary, wasn’t he? That is why your barque was in Irish waters, I think.’
‘What is intermediary, please?’
‘He was to be the go-between. The first safe harbour for this information that Don Rodriquez was carrying.’
‘Yes,’ Cachorra agrees. ‘That is what he was, the between-going.’
‘But I am afraid that Edmund Spenser too is dead. He died in London, after telling Robert Cecil about Don Rodriquez and his like-minded friends in Spain. The question I have to ask you is this: does your mistress know the names that Don Rodriquez was carrying in his head?’
Cachorra fixes Bianca with a look of great seriousness. ‘My mistress might be the daughter of a good man, the daughter of a lord, but she has the brains of the tábano.’ She makes a buzzing sound and flutters her fingers in imitation of an insect.
Bianca’s face falls. All this effort, all this way – for nothing. She closes her eyes in disappointment.
And then she hears Cachorra laugh, a sweet trilling as merry as the babbling of the river flowing so close to where she kneels. Opening her eyes, Bianca sees the kneeling Cachorra tapping her own forehead. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Is all in here.’
‘You have the list in your head?’ Bianca asks in disbelief.
‘With Padre Persons, with Don Rodriquez – my mistress is always the same: la-la-la…’ Cachorra says. ‘Always daydream! No thought of anything, only of the danza. Which is why her Cachorra must always be the one who pay the attention. Otherwise’ – an explosive puff of breath to signify the ruin of everyone’s dreams – ‘nobody learn nothing.’
34
The healing of Constanza Calva de Sagrada is swift but insanitary. The purges Bianca spoon-feeds her flush the poison out of her body, but in a manner no Spanish noblewoman with even a passing regard for her dignity is likely to consider agreeable.
‘I poisoned her,’ says Cachorra. ‘Therefore I should be the one who carries the buckets to the midden. It’s only fair.’
‘No,’ says Bianca. ‘I prescribed the purgative, so I will live with the consequences.’
In the end they leave the bucket in the corridor for the guard to dispose of.
Within days Constanza is back to her old cantankerous self. The chamber is too cold. The chamber is too hot. The servants who washed her soiled clothing have not soaked it in rosewater to make it pleasant to the nostrils. How is she to face her waiting husband in clothes borrowed from Irish serving maids?
For it is clear she is determined that the marriage is merely postponed, not cancelled. And, indeed, it appears that is Tyrone’s intention, too.
‘I have sent a messenger into the Spanish Netherlands,’ he reveals one evening when he summons Constanza and Bianca to join him at supper in the castle’s hall. ‘In a few days, when Mistress Bianca considers you well enough, I shall send you to Scotland. You will be safe there until your intended husband can recover you.’ Then he makes clear his motive. ‘I trust he will inform Madrid that I have done all I may do, in difficult circumstances, to aid a friend.’
Bianca wonders how he would react if he knew the true reason Don Rodriquez had come to Ireland. Best he never finds out, she thinks – at least until she is free.
‘And now that I have done what you asked me to do, my lord,’ she says, ‘may I too be permitted to return to my husband?’
‘I shall see if it is possible to send a message informing him that you are safe,’ Tyrone says, which Bianca notes is not at all the same thing.
‘They’re not going to let me go,’ Bianca tells Cachorra on one of their visits to the riverbank.
‘But you do what they ask you to do.’
‘Yes, but I saw Master Piers Gardener here. They think I’ll betray him.’
‘Then you must come with us, to Scotland.’
‘I don’t think Tyrone will let me do that, either. I have only one other option. I shall escape.’ She says it as though it were something simple, like choosing to take a wherry across the Thames rather than brave the throng on London Bridge. ‘You must write down the list of names that Don Rodriquez wishes to pass on to Robert Cecil.’
Cachorra replies with a look of true regret in her eyes. ‘I cannot do. I swear an oath to Don Rodriquez never to place these names on paper. Is too dangerous.’
‘But you were going to let Edmund Spenser write them down.’
‘But Spenser is dead. So, I cannot write.’
Bianca can see the despair in Cachorra’s eyes. She reaches out to take her hand. ‘Don Rodriquez gave his life to get that list into friendly hands.’