S. PERRY - The Saracen’s Mark

When Rose seeks further explanation, Bianca – uncharacteristically – loses her temper. After that, Calum is not mentioned in her presence again.

Bianca has barely slept since her meeting with Gault on the river. The dread that haunts her mind has become mountainous. Whatever Gault is plotting, she understands now that Nicholas has been sent to Morocco to thwart it somehow. Which means he is in great danger. And if what Gault told her about Solomon Mandel was true, none of them are safe. She has begun to curse herself for taking such an insane risk. What was she thinking, when she embarked on unmasking a man she now knows – by his own admission – to be a heartless killer?

At night, when she does finally manage an hour or two of sleep, she dreams of Nicholas being flayed alive like Solomon Mandel. Then she wakes in a drenching sweat, her mouth dry and her fingers clawing at the sheets.

By day, the yearning to have him back with her plays havoc with her reason. Whenever the image of him enters her mind, her thoughts whirl around like leaves in a gale. The customers who come to the Jackdaw – now that her shop on Dice Lane is closed – have to repeat what they say to her, because she appears as distracted as a madwoman. Jenny Solver has even put it about that Bianca is besotted with a rich and handsome merchant from across the river.

On the seventh day, as arranged, she goes to see Gault at Smithfield. Calum tags along beside her, his copy of The Courtier tucked into his leather jerkin. He still seems to have missed its finer points on humility, giving way for no one he encounters, glaring about ferociously as though he owns the city and everyone in it. She imagines teacher Gault must be proud.

The green expanse of Smithfield is unnaturally empty – the ban on entertainments and gatherings has seen to that. There are no lovers making sweet-talk beneath the trees, no pedlars, sharpers or jugglers to be seen anywhere. Even the birds have stopped flying. The cattle she’d followed on her earlier visit to Gault’s house on Giltspur Street graze placidly in the sunshine, a single cowherd asleep against the trunk of a beech tree.

Calum leads her towards the half-ruined priory of St Bartholomew. By a section of monastery wall she sees Gault and the other apprentices standing together beside a row of hawks perched on their blocks.

‘Well, that explains the paucity of songbirds,’ Bianca says. ‘I wonder how they know when there are predators about, even when they can’t see them.’

‘What’s that you say?’ grunts the surly Calum.

‘The hawks,’ she says. ‘I can see he’s training you all very thoroughly. I can see that you’re all going to be the model of fine gentlemen.’

‘Oh, this isn’t part of our education, Mistress,’ Calum tells her. ‘This is our ease. We all learned how to hawk back in Ireland. Master Gault has the finest mews in County Leinster. Everyone there knows that. They call him the Falconer.’

In the end it is Nicholas’s impatience to be with Bianca, rather than the inclement gale, that determines the Marion ’s landfall – and the fact that the constable of Dover Castle is Lord Cobham, Robert Cecil’s father-in-law. If anyone can promise a fast horse for the ride to London, it will be him.

Just shy of three days after his conversation with Yaxley the little vessel is safely moored beneath Dover’s towering ramparts. Before Nicholas climbs down into the waiting skiff to be rowed ashore beneath voluminous white farthingales of summer cloud, Yaxley shakes his hand.

‘When you see Sir Robert Cecil, be sure to tell him I had no part in whatever that rogue Connell was about.’

‘That, Captain Yaxley, is the very least I can do to discharge my debt to you.’

Yaxley gives him a parcel wrapped in sailcloth. ‘Here, take this,’ he says.

By the heft of it, Nicholas knows it’s the wheel-lock pistol Yaxley had offered him in Safi bay.

‘I believe you know why I gave you this before, Dr Shelby. Keep it, as a memento of a fortunate deliverance. You’re a man who seems to have the Devil’s luck. But even the Devil can have his back turned every now and then, and I wouldn’t want anything to stop you reaching that light you spoke of – the one that’s waiting for you on Bankside.’

‘It’s impossible. It cannot be done.’ Bianca struggles not to sound as though she’s pleading. ‘You have set me a trial I cannot pass.’

For privacy, she and Gault have walked a little way from the priory wall. Even though Smithfield is all but empty and there is no one close enough to overhear, speaking openly of poisoning a queen’s privy councillor does not come comfortably to her. Her senses seem blade-sharp. She can hear the jangle of the bells on the hawks’ leather jesses, and a sudden murmuring of the wind in the grass.

‘I thought you were more adroit than that, Mistress Merton,’ he says, eyeing her critically. ‘Have I misjudged you?’

‘Ignoring the fact that he’s in Windsor – with the queen, and no one from London is allowed there, and certainly not my sort – how am I to gain access to Cecil’s food or his wine? I’m his informer, not his cook.’

Gault looks at her like a schoolmaster who’s spotted a glaring error in a pupil’s work. ‘But you are a comely young woman…’

‘How is that supposed to help – even if it were true?’ she asks. ‘And I can tell you, Master Gault, if you’ve ever seen me with an English cold and snot running down my chin, you’d revise your understanding of comely .’

‘He’s a stunted crook-back. An abomination to beauty. And a Lutheran. Surely it can’t be beyond your imagination. Or your wiles.’

She wonders if she punched Gault, in that otherwise oh-so-pleasing face, she could outrun his apprentices, reach the river and a wherry before they caught up with her.

‘Cecil’s devoted to his wife,’ she says, as an alternative. ‘He dragged Nicholas – Dr Shelby – out of bed in the middle of the night to have him treat their child. Robert Cecil is probably the one man in London I couldn’t drag to Bankside, even if I promised to dress up as Salome and dance for him in the middle of Whitehall.’

‘You’ll find a way,’ Gault says chillingly.

And to her horror – because she realizes that she’s almost as vulnerable here as she was on his tilt-boat on the river – he grabs her wrist. He squeezes it like a lover who’s begun to exhibit an unwelcome fondness for insistence. ‘Don’t disappoint me, Mistress Merton,’ he whispers. ‘We have made the act of confession to one another. And a confession cannot be taken back. Not without consequences.’

Lord Cobham turns out not to be in residence, but at his home some fifty miles away near Gravesend. After announcing his arrival at the porter’s lodge, Nicholas is led to the new battery of cannon at the southern end of the ramparts, where the High Sheriff, a bluff man in his late forties named Sondes, is making one of his periodic inspections. He has troubling news.

‘London?’ he says doubtfully, when Nicholas tells him he’s carrying an urgent dispatch for Cecil House. ‘Have you not heard that the city is rife with plague?’

Nicholas feels his legs lose their strength, and not because of his days at sea.

‘How rife?’

‘Her Grace, the queen, has removed to Windsor,’ Sondes tells him, as though Elizabeth were the city’s only occupant. ‘The Inns of Court and Parliament are shut up, and all the feasts and fairs cancelled. They say the mourning bells have hardly stopped tolling.’