Bianca moves closer to Nicholas’s side. She folds her arm around his, as if to say that a threat to one is a threat to both. She smiles at Henshawe with cold eyes. ‘Be careful what you drink tonight, Oliver,’ she says, giving him the icy look she reserves for customers at the Jackdaw who’ve outstayed their welcome and overspent their credit. ‘How do you think I got past the men Tyrone set to guard me? Could you tell if there was hemlock in your malmsey?’
There can be few more entertaining experiences, Nicholas thinks, than watching a man you loathe wondering if your wife is a competent poisoner.
After a moment’s silence, during which he seems unable to decide whether Bianca has spoken in jest or deadly earnest, Henshawe turns on his heels and stalks away.
‘Are you so determined to get yourself skewered, Husband?’ Bianca asks.
‘Your old paramour is up to something, Wife,’ Nicholas replies. ‘And now he knows that I know it. I should have kept my peace.’
‘That’s why you’ll never make a courtier.’
‘Odd that you should say that. While you were away – doing what I told Robert Cecil was impossible – I came to the same conclusion.’
‘I always trusted that you would.’
‘Little Bruno will grow to a far better manhood as the son of an honest physician than as an appendage to the Cecil household,’ he says, looking into Bianca’s eyes with a weary resignation. ‘Even if his mother is the match of Lucrezia Borgia and Locusta put together.’
Bianca kisses his ear. ‘It is a goodly thing in a marriage,’ she says, ‘for a husband to have the measure of his wife’s abilities. It prevents any possible misunderstanding.’
To Drogheda, thence to Dublin. The earl’s entrance into the city is made with much display and loud hosannahs. Yet if His Grace expects unalloyed praise for his new treaty with Tyrone, he is soon disabused. Within days, more stinging letters from Her Majesty and the Privy Council arrive. He has betrayed her by his inept handling of her army… he has disobeyed her instruction not to conclude a peace with her enemies… he has made a fool of himself and – worse – his queen.
The real culprit is Robert Cecil, Southampton tells Essex in Nicholas’s hearing. He’s poisoning Her Majesty against you. Take the best of us and go into England – stamp out this nest of vipers that infects the court and turns Her Majesty’s heart against her former favourite. Henshawe agrees. So does Christopher Blount, the earl’s stepfather.
‘Her Majesty has expressly forbidden Your Grace’s early return,’ Nicholas warns in a moment of something approaching pity for this ruined jewel of a man.
‘Hold your tongue,’ Henshawe snaps.
‘Look only to your physic, sirrah,’ snarls Southampton. ‘His Grace has no need of your counsel.’
‘Christ’s nails, Shelby!’ groans Robert Devereux as a sudden spasm of the gut heralds a return of his dysenteria. ‘Get me that syrup of yours, and hurry!’
Early in the morning of the twenty-fourth day of September, Nicholas is summoned to the earl’s chambers. Essex is not there. He waits patiently until Robert Devereux returns from chapel. Quiet prayer and impulsive action; unbounded optimism followed by deep despair; everything to gain, everything to lose. Such are the arcs marked out by the Essex pendulum. Today we get impulsive action, though not without a measure of self-serving apologia.
‘You called for me, Your Grace. How is your… your… inconvenience today?’
‘No man could have done more than I, in the circumstances,’ Essex asserts, as though Nicholas was his judge rather than his physician.
‘Are we speaking of the dysenteria, Your Grace?’ Nicholas asks as tactfully as he can.
‘I’m talking of this Irish enterprise,’ Essex snaps. ‘This isle is cursed. It ruins even the very best of men.’ He stalks to his desk and sets down the personal Bible he has brought from chapel. He turns to Nicholas, his face full of hurt, like a child wrongly chastised. ‘But I could have tamed it. I could have – had it not been for a Brutus, a Cassius, a deformed traitor who would sooner stab me in the back than face me like a man.’
Robert Cecil, thinks Nicholas.
‘I hope my physic eased your discomfort, Your Grace,’ he says tentatively, waiting for the next swing of the pendulum.
‘I know that Cecil sent you here, Shelby,’ Essex says, though strangely with no malice in his voice. ‘I know he was behind your appointment. But you’ve seen it. You’ve seen how this island is like a living creature, purging itself of an infected wound. Spenser was wrong. A heavy hand will not bring peace. We could slaughter half the population and still make no lasting gains here. We, too, will be purged. Ireland will form a pustule around us, and in the end it will expel us like corrupt matter.’
Nicholas is used to patients baring their innermost thoughts to him. He offers Essex no opinion. Staying silent, he has found, can often bring forth secrets a man might otherwise reveal not even to himself. But what Essex says next lands like a blow.
‘We are going to England, you and I – today.’
‘England? Today?’
The earl’s hand slams down on the leather cover of the Bible. ‘Decisiveness, Shelby – that is how battles are won.’
‘But, my lord, as I ventured to remind you a few days ago, the queen has expressly forbidden it.’
‘Because she doesn’t know the truth!’
‘But, my lord, why me? I can give you physic to take with you.’
‘It’s not about the physic,’ the earl announces, as though he’s just discovered the answer to all his problems. ‘You, sirrah, will be my witness at court.’
‘Me? But I’m merely a physician. What do I know of great matters of state?’
‘You will back everything I say to Her Majesty,’ Essex announces confidently. ‘After all, it was her signature on your letter of commission. Even if she won’t listen to me, she has to listen to you.’
Before Nicholas can begin to picture in his mind the full extent of the dire consequences of disobeying a direct order from the queen, Essex shouts for his attendants.
In an instant the chamber is full of men lauding their commander’s decision. Southampton and stepfather Blount embrace him as though he’s been miraculously cured of a fatal disease. His gallants – Sir Thomas Gerard, Sir Christopher St Lawrence, Sir Henry Danvers, Sir Oliver Henshawe, half a dozen more – fidget like hounds who’ve caught a scent and are straining to be unleashed. To Nicholas, they all appear to be indulging in a communal delusion, like simple milkmaids who’ve seen Christ’s face in the random folds of a cloud.
And then, for one of them at least, the Essex pendulum swings the other way.
‘Sir Oliver, be so good as to remain here in Dublin,’ Essex says. ‘Bring some order to the army. I don’t want it dissolving into a rabble behind my back. I may have need of it, if Cecil and the other traitors seek to do me down, once Her Majesty has heard the truth from my own lips.’
Henshawe looks like the child excluded from the party. His pretty features sour. ‘Your Grace, I was with you at Cádiz. Surely you cannot mean to deny me the joy of seeing you vindicated now.’
Essex cuts him off with a wave of his hand. ‘I’ve enough traitors to my front, Oliver. I need a reliable man to guard against them when my back is turned.’