Ignoring Henshawe’s bloodied sword, Bianca rushes to Nicholas’s side. She rips the pleated collar from her gown and holds it against his chin.
‘You should learn to keep hold of your tongue, Shelby,’ Henshawe says. ‘Like Spenser, you ask too many questions. It would have been wiser for him to remember he was no longer commissioner for the Cork muster. If he hadn’t gone poking his nose where it wasn’t wanted, he might still be scratching out his God-awful verse.’
‘We’ll be no use to you dead, Oliver,’ Bianca says, glaring at Henshawe. She, too, has understood. ‘If you kill us to hide your dirty little crimes, you won’t be able to use us to Robert Devereux’s benefit. Have you thought of that?’
‘They say you can’t slander the dead,’ Henshawe tells her with a smile. ‘It’s not true. It’s just a matter of what people are prepared to believe.’
‘And if we refuse to come with you?’ she asks.
‘Were you at the cove with your husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then close your eyes awhile. Remember what you saw on the bluffs above the wreck of the San Juan. Remember the eyes pecked out by the gulls. Remember the smell. Then ask yourself if I am a man overly concerned with mercy.’ He looks at the kneeling Timothy. ‘And when you have reached a conclusion – be sure to tell him.’
‘This is not the Oliver Henshawe who paid court to me,’ Bianca says, appealing to whatever scrap of humanity might still lie gasping at the bottom of his deep well of bitterness.
‘You never got to know me properly.’
His eyes are blank, almost fish-like, as though he were a creature of deep, dark water, hunting the minnows that swim where the sunlight still penetrates.
‘Then thanks be to Almighty God that I didn’t,’ she says, admitting defeat. ‘Given the choice, I would rather have taken the Devil to my bed.’
Ned Monkton calls out, ‘We’ll summon the watch, the moment you’ve gone.’ He looks as though he’s struggling to restrain himself from springing upon the two men guarding him, swords or no swords. Nicholas gives him a pleading look. For all Ned’s size and strength, it would be a suicidal act.
‘Then your friends’ deaths will be on your conscience, not mine,’ says Henshawe.
Bianca glances at the stairs to the chambers above the taproom. Nicholas knows at once that she is thinking of little Bruno, asleep. Her pain hurts him even more than his own wounds. Bruno will wake to find his mother and his father gone – probably for ever. Yet if either of them begs Henshawe to allow Bruno to accompany them, he will probably die too. For Nicholas is certain now that Henshawe would happily kill them all to keep his secret.
‘Are you coming?’ Henshawe asks, as though he’s inviting them for a pleasant stroll along the river. He looks contemptuously at Timothy. ‘Or must we begin with this weak sapling?’ The tip of his blade swings in the direction of Rose Monkton. ‘Or maybe with this woman?’
Defeat – together with pain – brings a rasping tone to Nicholas’s voice. ‘We have no choice,’ he tells Bianca. ‘If we don’t go with him, he’ll do as he threatens. We have ample evidence of that. We know what he’s capable of.’
Henshawe lets out a bark of laughter. ‘At last! The physician has learned how to make a proper diagnosis.’
Nicholas feels his mind begin to topple. This is my own fault, he thinks. We are here because of me. When Robert Cecil called, I should have had the courage to turn my back… Holding Bianca’s blood-soaked scrap of linen against his jaw, he turns towards the street door. It is all he can do to make his legs function. Helplessness – like shame – is a poison that saps the will.
Henshawe sheathes his sword. In the dying firelight his face is infused with harsh satisfaction. ‘Come,’ he says quietly. ‘Come.’
And then, for the first time since the door flew open, Cachorra speaks.
‘We go with this man,’ she says simply. ‘I trust him.’
Standing in the shadows by the hearth, she has a powerful stillness about her. She could be a stone guardian in the doorway to a temple. Or a priestess deep in supplication to some ancient deity. Immutable. Ageless.
‘Oh, that all Spaniards were so biddable,’ Henshawe says sneeringly, stretching out the words like a song.
Cachorra steps forward. One arm hangs loosely at her side, the other held across her body. She moves with grace and nobility, as if she hasn’t understood Henshawe’s intentions at all. Bianca wonders if it might not be best to allow her a few more moments of ignorance.
And then – with Henshawe partly blocking her way – Cachorra speaks again.
‘Are you English really so ill-mannered?’ she enquires, her head tilted upwards slightly in a manner Bianca suspects she has learned from Constanza. ‘I was informed Englishmen know what is galantería – what is correct.’
Henshawe laughs brightly. He could be indulging in a bout of flirtatious dinner-table repartee. He gives Cachorra a mocking frown of self-recrimination. Then he makes an elaborate courtesy to her, an exaggerated flourish of a bow, slowly sweeping one hand from his temple down across his body in a theatrical arc, bending from the waist as he does so.
‘Please,’ he oozes. ‘Your Imperial Majesty of Spain…’
He straightens as she passes, stepping back to make way for her. The small retreat brings him up against one of the Jackdaw’s oak pillars that support the ceiling beams.
And that is when the leopard strikes.
Afterwards, Nicholas and Bianca, Rose and Ned, even Timothy, will offer differing accounts of what actually happened. Each will note, or fail to note, minor differences in time and movement, in sound and action. But all will agree that it happened almost too swiftly for the human eye to catch.
It was like a spider pouncing on a fly, Bianca will say. Ned will prefer the image of a hawk taking a sparrow on the wing. Rose, being of a romantic inclination, will liken it to a sudden, stolen last embrace between doomed lovers. Nicholas will not describe it at all, as his back was turned slightly and his eyes were on Barnabas Vyves, wondering how much brief agony he would endure if he threw himself on the man’s sword in a last attempt to give Ned the opportunity he needed.
Bianca will also say that she caught a brief flash of gold in the dying firelight. And so will the others, though their recollections vary. But all will agree they heard a sound like the last choking breaths of a man drowning.
As Cachorra steps back, Oliver Henshawe falls to his knees, a marionette whose strings have been cut. He twists slightly, his body rotating so that he lands on the flagstones, head back with a sickening crack, eyes staring at the ceiling. Embedded beneath his jaw – right up to the crossbar – is Constanza’s gold wedding present. The firelight gleams on what remains visible of the sharp little crucifix, rammed upwards with almost superhuman strength through Henshawe’s chin, through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.
Instinctively Henshawe’s two swordsmen turn towards their master. It is the moment both Ned and Nicholas have been praying for, as though privy to each other’s thoughts.
Ned moves with all the speed and dexterity of a Bankside street-trickster playing a sleight of hand. One blow to the side of the head sends the nearest man reeling into the other. He falls, already senseless, across his companion’s blade, opening up one arm from the shoulder to the elbow, before hitting the floor. The second man has only half-turned back towards the threat when Ned’s fist fells him as efficiently as a good slaughterman fells cattle.