Although she may be noteworthy, Cachorra is not exactly a rarity. There are others amongst the camp-followers who, judged by the colour of their skins, are clearly not descended from Brutus of Troy, or Joseph of Arimathea, or King Arthur, or any other of England’s ancient forebears. Three of Sir Henry Bartlett’s musketeers – a company only recently transferred from the Low Countries – have married native women from the Dutch settlements in the Indies. One of Captain Mackworth’s pikemen has a Moor for a wife, taken as bounty at Lisbon, during Essex’s somewhat more successful expedition there three years ago. One of Nicholas’s own barber-surgeons, when serving aboard The Dolphin, took an African wife while in port in the Azores.
Even so, Cachorra will still need a story, a background, an explanation. Bianca has one readily to hand, dreamed up while waiting in the birch wood for dusk to fall before she swam the river. She had remembered Edmund Spenser’s recounting of the foreign ships that traded with the honest merchants of Cork. Thus Cachorra now becomes a Carib servant taken from Hispaniola by a foreign ship’s master – which in itself is an approximation of the truth – who ran away when her ship docked at the Watergate. Entering into a marriage of convenience with a Munster settler who abandoned her when the rebels stormed out of Limerick, she was taken captive.
When Bianca rouses her from a deep sleep – more than a little envious, for she and Nicholas have managed no more than a few hours – she explains the importance of speaking only English or her native Carib. Spanish must be avoided at all costs.
‘What shall I do about Piers Gardener?’ Bianca asks Nicholas as they strike down the tent and load the supplies of physic into a waiting wagon.
‘He’s a spy. It will be our duty to report the fact.’
‘If we tell anyone, and Master Piers is taken, I imagine his end will take a long while to come and the journey will be hard on him. Very hard,’ Bianca says, hoisting a small sack of powdered ragwort into the wagon. ‘Hasn’t there been enough pain and suffering already?’
Nicholas shrugs. ‘He will have been responsible, even if only at a distance, for the deaths of who knows how many people: soldiers, settlers attacked by the rebels… Yet I can only see him on the journey to Kilcolman, sitting with us at the Seanchaí’s house, listening to those magical tales.’
‘Who are we to sit in judgement on a man’s conscience,’ Bianca asks, ‘if he truly believes that what he is doing is in a just cause?’
‘That rather depends upon what he’s doing. Still, there’s a sort of peace in place, so perhaps you should forget you ever saw him. Now that you’ve escaped, I doubt very much if he’ll risk returning to any town with an English garrison.’
An agreement is reached. For the sake of conciliation – domestic as much as political – the name of Piers Gardener is quietly consigned to a faulty memory.
And just as well, because the discussion has barely ended when Sir Oliver Henshawe arrives. His field armour bears no more than a light coating of dirt on the sabatons, where his feet have had to encounter the rebellious Irish mud. The rest looks as though some hapless groom has been up all night with the cleaning oil and the rags.
‘Well, I didn’t dare believe it true,’ he says, looking Bianca up and down as though she were an unveiled painting set before him to be admired. ‘They say you swam across the Lagan with a Blackamoor in tow.’
‘What did you expect her to do – sit in Tyrone’s chamber working at her sewing and improving her soul by reading a psalter?’ Nicholas asks hotly.
‘It’s alright, Nicholas,’ she says. ‘Oliver should be used to women escaping a tedious confinement by now. You’re still unwed, I think, Oliver?’
Henshawe ignores the riposte. ‘This Blackamoor I heard you brought with you – where is she?’
‘Returning the clothes that we borrowed,’ Bianca tells him. ‘And she’s not a Blackamoor, she a Carib – from Hispaniola. Nor is she mine. In fact she’s not anyone’s. Not any longer.’
‘Hispaniola – New Spain,’ Henshawe says with a slight lift of an eyebrow.
‘Being conquered doesn’t make you the conqueror, Oliver. It makes you a slave.’
She tells him the story she has concocted for Cachorra. It seems to satisfy him.
‘It’s you I’m more interested in,’ he says airily.
‘Me? I thought your interest in me ended long ago.’
A smile like a wince. ‘We shall need to know exactly what you saw and what you heard during your captivity,’ he says, a smirk crawling its way across his pretty mouth. ‘And whether or not it undermined your loyalties in any way.’
The insinuation could not be plainer.
‘And why would it do that?’ Bianca asks.
‘Captivity can do strange things to a person’s judgement, especially if that person is half-Italian and is known for her heretical tendencies.’
Not for the first time Nicholas restrains himself from planting his fist squarely in the centre of those supercilious features. ‘Are you suggesting my wife is a spy?’
‘If the husband is prepared to spy on His Grace for Robert Cecil, who is to say the wife would not spy for the heretic rebels?’
Bianca lays a restraining hand on Nicholas’s arm. ‘He’s trying to bait you, Husband. It’s what weak men do when they can’t have their way.’
‘Have I discomforted you, Nicholas?’ Henshawe asks, his voice oily with provocation.
‘Only by your continued existence,’ Nicholas replies. ‘Now carry away your pretty carcass before I tell someone with real authority around here about the game you’re playing.’
It lands as well as any punch Nicholas could have thrown. But the unshockable courtier’s mask slips for only a moment.
‘And what game, precisely, is that?’
‘Keeping your English levies back, so that you can use them for a purpose other than fighting Irish rebels.’
With the eyes narrowed so, the symmetry of Henshawe’s face breaks down. He looks like a petulant child trying to peer through a keyhole.
‘What do you imply, Shelby?’
‘You’re the one whose ensign did the mustering, Henshawe – the mustering of English levies. Still in Chester, are they? Why aren’t they here? It’s not as if His Grace doesn’t need the replacements. Do you bother to count the men you have under your command? How many have you lost to sickness this week alone? Don’t you need to fill the holes in your company’s ranks?’
With a glare of unfettered malice, Henshawe draws a length of steel from his scabbard. The heavy, bejewelled rings on his fingers flash like a warning.
‘I’ve killed men for speaking to me with more civility than that, Shelby. What say I run you through here and now?’
Out of the corner of his eye, Nicholas catches a movement. Without turning his head, some unfathomed sense tells him that Bianca has just slipped her hand into his box of instruments and has pulled out an iron lancet. Against a sword, it will be useless. But then Henshawe won’t be expecting an attack from that quarter, and even a lancet blade can ruin a gallant’s swordplay if it’s thrust into his neck when he’s least expecting it. He raises his right hand a fraction, spreading the fingers towards her, warning her not to be precipitate.
‘But you won’t, will you?’ he says, holding Henshawe’s gaze. ‘Your master needs me alive to mix his potions – potions to stop up the other shit he keeps company with.’
For a moment no one moves. Then Henshawe gives a grunt of sour amusement. He lets his sword slip back into its scabbard. ‘There will be a reckoning between you and me, Master Physician,’ he says in a matter-of-fact voice that – judged against the rage in his eyes – comes from another man’s mouth entirely. ‘You may count upon it.’