That night the Jackdaw rings again with companionable laughter. Nicholas loses track of the times he’s asked to recite his account of the impetuous earl and his encounter with unrobed monarchy. ‘I honestly didn’t see very much’ is his stock answer to questions like Is her royal body made of flesh like ordinary folk? and Is she really a man underneath? – because surely no woman could be possessed of such puissance as our Gloriana.
But the true fascination of the night is Cachorra.
Bankside is no stranger to the remarkable. Her taverns, dice-houses, stews, cock-fighting pits, bear-rings and playhouses are a daily – and nightly – lure for mariners from the ships moored on the river, ships from lands that most Londoners could not place with any accuracy on a terrestrial globe. Some of them have even settled here. But a tall, stately Carib woman from Hispaniola is enough of an attraction to lure customers from the nearby Turk’s Head and the Good Husband. When they learn she has escaped from Spain, they assume she was once a slave. Their loud condemnations of Spanish perfidy are received with polite reserve. A servant I may have been, Cachorra thinks. And one whose patience has been sorely tested by her mistress. But a slave? She finds that a hard judgement on Don Rodriquez Calva de Sagrada.
‘Why do you keep looking out of the window?’ Bianca asks Nicholas later, as they help Ned, Rose and Timothy clean up.
Nicholas wonders if he should tell her of the figure he saw watching from the street on the evening of his return. But then Bianca would only worry that the Privy Council has reconsidered their view on whether or not her husband was party to Devereux’s mad scheme, or that Southampton is having him watched for some dark reason.
‘It’s nothing,’ he says. ‘I’m just amazed at how clean Ned has kept the windows since we went away.’
It is two days before a brief meeting with Robert Cecil can be arranged. Mr Secretary Cecil has been kept busy in the aftermath of His Grace’s fall. There are formal accusations to prepare for the Star Chamber. The full extent of the ill-advised agreement with Tyrone must be considered, as must the ease of breaking it. Then there is the cost of the whole calamitous enterprise to be weighed. The Lord Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, is of the firm opinion that England could have launched an outright attack on Spain, for all the money Robert Devereux has poured into the bogs and marshes of Ireland.
Nicholas cannot help but feel a measure of pity for his former patient. Are physicians allowed entry to York House? he wonders. Is anyone prepared to treat a man so publicly shamed? The answer to both questions appears to be no.
The trio – Nicholas, Bianca and Cachorra – are finally granted a few minutes with Sir Robert in his study at Cecil House. Beyond the windows, the leaves are beginning to fall from the trees in Covent Garden. Autumn seems the wrong time to bring hopes of peace. Such a gift as Cachorra brings is better suited to spring.
‘Don Rodriquez was a most excellent and brave man, Mistress,’ Cecil says expansively as he cranes his neck to meet her proud gaze. ‘Would that we had his like in England.’
‘You are safe now, Cachorra,’ Bianca assures her friend. ‘You may be further than ever from one home, but you are far closer to a new one. It is time to complete what Don Rodriquez gave his life trying to achieve.’
And so Cachorra – once, a long time ago, Yaquilalco – begins to give up her secrets in a clear and commanding voice:
‘Juan Fernández de Velasco, Lord of Castile… Count Villamediana… Señor Alessandro Robid–’
‘Wait just one moment, Mistress,’ interjects Robert Cecil. ‘I shall need paper, ink and a pen.’
Bianca has broken out the best glasses for the occasion. She raises one, the firelight making the measure of sack gleam like liquid gold. ‘To the memory of a brave man, Señor Don Rodriquez Calva de Sagrada,’ she intones. ‘And to his even braver leopard cub.’
The little group in the corner of the Jackdaw’s taproom acknowledge her toast and lift their glasses to their lips. Cachorra lowers her eyes. She is still unaccustomed to the notion that she is beyond Constanza’s beck and call – a person in her own right, with her own life to make. She allows herself a slight smile. ‘And to my old mistress. May her husband be granted patience everlasting.’
It is the evening of their return from Cecil House. Outside in the lanes the same cold mist is spreading, as it has done for several nights in a row. Nicholas has joked more than once that the river is sulking at the fall of the Earl of Essex. But inside the tavern there is nothing but warm good-fellowship. News that Dr Shelby and Mistress Bianca have returned safely from Ireland has spread. The Jackdaw is busy. Rose works her usual miracles in the kitchen. Timothy marshals the other serving staff more efficiently than the Earl of Essex ever marshalled his army, carrying stacks of brimming tankards around with the panache of a performer at a country fair. The atmosphere cannot be soured even when Constable Osborne arrives with news that the watch has spotted a suspected cut-purse skulking by the Winchester water-stairs.
‘If you’re planning on walking back to Paris Garden, we’ll escort you,’ Osborne tells Bianca. ‘Would the eleven-o’clock bell suit?’
‘That’s a kind offer, Constable Osborne. But there’s no need. We’re lodging at the Jackdaw for a few days. There is much for us to catch up on with Ned and Rose, and it’s going to take a while to prise my son away from their affections. Besides, I want to introduce Mistress Cachorra to my shop on Dice Lane tomorrow. She’s going to be my apprentice.’
One of the watchmen – a new recruit – mutters, ‘So they’re making women apprentices now?’
Constable Osborne gives the man a poke in the ribs with his official cudgel. ‘Now that you’ve come across the river from Cripplegate Ward, Master Barnaby, it would be wise to remember whose tavern you drink in.’
‘Just the one man?’ Nicholas asks.
Osborne turns back to him. ‘Aye, just the one, Dr Shelby. But he could be a watcher, spotting for his fellows.’
‘Did you manage to get a look at him?’
‘No. Afore we could gain on him, we lost the rogue in the mist.’
Bianca says, ‘I’ll pass the word around, so folks can go home in numbers.’
One man, thinks Nicholas. Keeping watch. But keeping watch on who? And why?
By the time the St Saviour’s bell strikes eleven the watermen and the labourers, the artisans and the tellers of long tales have all departed. Most of them will rise with the dawn for an honest day’s work, though being Banksiders that honesty will depend somewhat upon their own individual interpretation.
Bianca and Cachorra are helping Rose tidy the kitchen, Nicholas is assisting Ned and Timothy to gather up the soiled rushes on the taproom floor. When the street door shudders to four distinct and imperious blows they pause in their work almost in unison.
‘In the name of Her Majesty’s Privy Council, I order this door unlocked!’ comes a shout from outside.
But the door isn’t yet locked. Securing the Jackdaw is Timothy’s final duty before he goes to his pallet in the pantry to sleep. He has more work to do before he turns the key. But, being the queen’s obedient subject – and by chance nearest the door – he has unlatched it before anyone even thinks of stopping him.
The taproom fire flares for a moment, then dies, as a blast of night air sweeps in from the street, and with it a spray of autumn rain. It is a cold, ill wind. It carries with it a faint smell of decay and corruption from the river.
And five cloaked men.