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And he remembers, too, his unspoken response: that there are worse things in life than to be a traitor to a tainted cause.

42

From Nonsuch, Nicholas returns to Bankside. The journey is far less frenetic than the one made only a few days before, almost leisurely. He makes it alone, on a chestnut palfrey borrowed from the Nonsuch stables. As he rides, he watches the labourers in the fields sowing the winter wheat. They’ll be doing that now at Barnthorpe, he thinks. Perhaps that is where I should be, when the dust has settled: helping my father and my brother Jack, earning my living from the land. What is the point of practising medicine that I don’t trust to people I don’t respect? I’ve seen enough of court life now to last me a lifetime. I’m done with it. When Cachorra is safely delivered to Robert Cecil, perhaps it is to Barnthorpe that I should go. He manages to make the notion last almost until he reaches the first houses at the bottom of Long Southwark. In his heart he knows he won’t leave Bankside. Bianca’s life is too firmly rooted here. She has the Jackdaw, and her apothecary’s shop on Dice Lane. She would droop like sodden corn in the wilds of Suffolk.

Take Cachorra and sail for England, he had told her in the snatched moments before his departure with Essex and his faction. We’ll meet again at the Jackdaw.

He had chosen the tavern, rather than their house at Paris Garden, because it is minutes nearer the road in from the country. And Ned is there. If Cecil or the Privy Council were to suddenly summon him back to Nonsuch, having Ned around when Bianca arrives might ease the underlying sense of anxiety that has refused to leave his mind, even though Robert Devereux has been taken into custody. So it is directly to the Jackdaw that he goes.

He arrives as the St Saviour’s bell tolls eight in the evening. By the time he has stabled the palfrey at the Tabard and walked to the Jackdaw, sunset has made dark caverns of the Bankside lanes. A mist is rising from the river, lapping through the streets as if the Thames is starting to flood. He sees dark figures ahead of him, customers dropping by for a jug of knockdown, stitch-back or bishop’s-folly after a hard day’s work. The firelight gleaming through the new glass tiles in the windows dabs their silhouettes with orange, but not enough for him to recognize anyone.

And perhaps twenty paces further on, and almost lost to him in the darkness of the lane, the figure of a man watching the tavern’s entrance.

A prickle of disquiet puckers the flesh on Nicholas’s arms. He recalls the animosity of Southampton and the others during the ride to Nonsuch, and the hard glances they had cast his way as their champion’s insane enterprise had crumbled around them. Men like that feast on revenge, he thinks. And they don’t forget.

But when he looks again, the figure has gone.

Little Bruno is asleep on the truckle of the bed in Rose and Ned’s chamber. Nicholas refuses Rose’s offer to wake him. There will be time enough for a proper reunion in the morning. He tiptoes into the room to feast his eyes on his son, grinning at the sight of the boy curled up with Buffle, the Jackdaw’s dog. He wonders where Bianca and Cachorra are. They should be approaching London. Perhaps in a day or so they will be here. He turns his back on the sleeping pair and softly closes the door behind him.

Down in the taproom, when he has cleaned himself from the ride and fed himself on Rose’s coney pie, Nicholas sits down for a jug of small-beer with Ned.

‘Is it true – ’bout the Earl of Essex?’ Ned asks. ‘All Southwark’s talkin’ about it. Did ’e really burst in on ’Er Majesty while she was wearin’ naught but her night-shift?’

‘Yes, he did, Ned. I was there.’

‘Christ’s nails! And so ’e’s confined at York House – for seein’ ’Er ’Ighness as God made ’er?’

‘I’m sure there are many women who would wish to have detained at their pleasure those who catch them unpainted, Ned. But not in this case.’

Ned announces proudly, ‘I know about Barnabas Vyves. I worked it out, while you was away.’

‘I did too, Ned. He’s holding back men for Oliver Henshawe, to support the Earl of Essex in a planned strike against his enemies at court. Mercifully – for all – that cannot happen now.’

Ned stares at him. ‘No, ’e’s not,’ he says. As he shakes his head, his great auburn beard sways back and forth like a thicket in a high wind.

‘Isn’t he?’

And then Ned tells him about the fraud Vyves and Strollot are playing on the Exchequer, mustering companies of ghosts who fade away as soon as the money is paid over. Nicholas shakes his head in disbelief.

‘I really did think it impossible to find the bottom of that man’s well of wickedness. But the deeper you go, the deeper it gets. There was I, thinking that even in sedition Henshawe might be acting at least from a measure of principle – when all along it was nothing but a grubby little deceit to steal money from the Treasury.’

‘I would ’ave denounced them to the magistrates myself, but they said if I did, they’d swear it was me what slew poor Lemuel.’ Ned raises his branded thumb. ‘An’ with my ’istory, I couldn’t take the chance.’

‘I’ll tell Sir Robert Cecil when next I see him,’ Nicholas promises. ‘Young Master Godwinson will have his justice.’

Then he remembers the figure he glimpsed watching the Jackdaw from the lane. He asks, ‘Before I arrived, did you have cause to throw anyone out – a troublemaker perhaps?’

‘Not tonight. Why?’

‘I thought I saw someone watching the door. I wondered if he was thinking of coming back inside to argue the toss.’

Ned laughs and shakes his great head. ‘Most peaceable tavern on Bankside, the Jackdaw is, these days. ’Alf our customers is convinced Mistress Bianca knows exactly what they’re about, even if she’s not ’ere to see it; the other ’alf is ’fraid of my Rose. I don’t ’ave to lift a finger these days. Maybe it was a cut-purse.’

‘Maybe it was,’ says Nicholas, though in his heart he knows that local cut-purses are no more inclined to target Bianca Merton’s Jackdaw than troublesome drinkers are.

Next morning at sunrise Bruno bursts into Nicholas’s chamber, prompted by Rose to discover who might possibly be sleeping behind the door. His four-year-old legs are no match for Buffle, and so – with both being equally determined to greet him – Nicholas is soon laughing uncontrollably under a squirming mass of dog-boy-dog-boy-dog.

‘Where is my lady mother?’ Bruno asks, when a measure of calm has been restored.

‘Your lady mother? Who’s been teaching you court manners?’

‘I’ve taught ’im proper, Master Nicholas,’ says Rose proudly from the doorway. ‘For when ’e grows up to be a young gallant at court.’

‘Kind of you, Rose,’ Nicholas says. ‘But wasted, I fear. After what I’ve seen of court life, I’d be happier if he was a potboy in a Bankside bawdy-house.’

At noon Bianca and Cachorra arrive, mud-stained and weary, but safe. They have made good time from Bristol. It is some while before Bianca will relinquish Bruno long enough to listen in astonishment to Nicholas’s recounting of his experiences at Nonsuch.

‘So we are free of Robert Devereux, Husband?’ she says at last.

‘I trust so,’ he replies, fearing she won’t detect the hollowness in his voice. ‘And we shall be free of Robert Cecil, too, once we have brought Cachorra before him.’