by S. W. Perry
‘Well then, Husband, that fills me with the greatest confidence,’ Bianca says with a smile of encouragement. ‘Just as long as they don’t come at us at the gallop.’
Nicholas’s judgement proves sound. In the tranquil dusk of Midsummer Day they enter Gravesend. The little town is still a scene of revelry. On the Hythe, the gravel strand that thrusts out into the river, a crowd of citizens is singing its way through a repertoire of bawdy songs, most of which involve anatomically impossible acts of copulation between the Pope, the King of Spain and a variety of animate and inanimate objects. Inside the Mitre tavern an uneasy Midsummer Day truce is in play. The sailors from the foreign ships anchored off the Hythe keep to themselves, heads down, enjoying their ale in silence, lest their foreign tongues attract attention. The rest of the trade is in boisterous mood. The drinkers are making the most of the day; the field or the river, the furnace or the lathe, will reclaim their labour soon enough. Nicholas and Bianca push their way carefully through the taproom throng. An overturned shovelboard or an inadvertent elbow interrupting a game of hazard will not go down well here: there’s enough sharpened steel being carried to armour a porcupine.
Nicholas scans the faces. Porter Bell is not a large man. He could be hard to spot. When they had first seen him here, Bianca thought she was looking at a ghost. Porter’s treatment in Holland at the hands of his Spanish captors, and the loss of a son to their muskets, had turned him into a husk of a man, a husk half-drowned in drink. He had lost a second son to a murderer. What must he look like now?
But Nicholas has a feeling that revenge might just have saved Porter Bell, a revenge he himself had contrived, though he has never told Bianca of it. And so he is looking for a face with the first colour of rebirth in it. And indeed, when he turns in response to a tug at his sleeve, he sees that his hopes were well founded.
‘Good morrow, Dr Shelby. An’ Mistress Merton, too. I’d not thought to see you two again.’
The smile Porter Bell gives them is heartfelt, but uncertain – the smile of a man trying to remember how to do it. But the eyes are not as shrunken as once they were. The skin is no longer spectrally translucent, as though the suffering of the body had thinned the life-force within the flesh.
‘You look well, Master Porter,’ Bianca says.
‘And you may thank the man beside you for that, Mistress.’
For an awful moment Nicholas thinks Porter Bell is going to reveal the cause of his recovery, right here in a crowded tavern. So he says, as nonchalantly as he can contrive, ‘That parcel I sent you some time ago – it must have been almost three years…’
‘The foreign one,’ Bell says, understanding at once.
‘Yes. I trust it arrived safely.’
Porter Bell gives him a contented nod. He glances towards the river. ‘All that needs saying is that it was successfully delivered to an appropriate destination.’
‘Was anyone around to witness its delivery?’
‘It was pitch-dark,’ Bell says, shaking his head. ‘But I’d warrant there’s more than a few of us who fought in the Low Countries who would willingly raise a jug in praise of what you did, Dr Shelby.’
Nicholas gives an awkward smile. ‘And others who would wish me dead for it, so let us speak of other matters. Are you still a waterman?’
‘I am. An’ I prosper at it now.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
Bell gives him a sly glance. ‘I don’t suppose you had anything to do with Lord Lumley sending me that generous sum?’
Nicholas just smiles.
‘Well, it was the mending of me, Dr Shelby, that’s all I can say. Now I have two boats: the old skiff, an’ a new pinnace for carrying goods. An’ trade on the river is always brisk.’
‘You’ll be putting the ferry to Tilbury out of business, Master Porter,’ Nicholas says with a grin.
‘There’s room on the river for us all,’ Bell says. ‘Besides, there’s some folk who care not to be seen on the official ferry, if you understand me – on account of it being, well, official.’
‘Then it seems that fortune has favoured us both,’ Nicholas says. ‘Because that is exactly what we’ve come here to talk to you about.’ He hails a passing potboy and orders a bottle of sack to celebrate Porter Bell’s resurrection.
In the opaque dawn light the shingle promontory of the Hythe disappears in front of them, a path leading to the lip of an unseen chasm. The fog has stolen the river away, along with all the ships moored upon it. To the east, a thin spread of misty gold lies like the first stroke of a painter’s brush on a new canvas.
Nicholas and Bianca walk their horses down to the water’s edge. At the extent of their reins, the horses have already begun to fade from view, as though the unseen river is washing away their substance, dissolving them.
‘How will we see him?’ Bianca asks.
‘We won’t have to. He’ll see us. He told me once he can tell where he is on the river even in the dead of night – even if there’s not a single lantern lit in any of the ships. One hundred paces to the east, he said.’
‘But how shall we know east from west in this fog?’
‘We keep the Hythe to our backs. If our feet get wet, we turn a little to the right.’
They pace carefully a short distance, until shingle begins to give way to tufts of sedge and rising ground. Looking back, Bianca sees the Hythe has disappeared, with only a scattering of rooftops and masts visible above the fog bank.
A low whistle comes out of the whiteness somewhere close by, as Porter Bell hears the sound of their horses at the water’s edge. A dark shape looms ahead.
The pinnace is about twenty feet long, flat and ugly in the water, a tub for transporting bales of wool and other light cargo across the river. Bell has chosen a place on the bank where the earth has slipped into the water. He has grounded the pinnace on the riverbed, so that the blunt prow is just about level with the land. Even so, it takes a deal of coaxing to get the horses to step down onto the wooden planks of the hull. At first Nicholas fears the clatter of hooves and the shrill whinnying will wake all of Gravesend, but the fog and the river seem to steal away the sound.
When the horses are aboard and tethered, and Bianca has been assigned to calm them, Bell sits on one of the two cross-benches and motions Nicholas to take the other. At each bench is a pair of sturdy oars. Nicholas wonders if two men will be strong enough to get the pinnace away from the bank.
‘We’ll float off when the water rises,’ Bell says confidently, as though reading Nicholas’s thoughts. ‘It won’t be long, if I’ve timed it right.’
‘Today is not the first time you’ve done this, Master Porter,’ Nicholas suggests.
Bell laughs. ‘Throw a stick on the Tilbury marshes an’ you’re like to hit a horse-thief on the noddle. As I told you last night, they like to steer clear of the ferry.’
Within a few moments the pinnace begins to shift, her keel sending up the sound of iron on gravel from the riverbed like the groaning of a sea monster fighting to shake off its chains. How Bell guides them across the river, Nicholas has no idea. He can see nothing beyond the stretch of his oars, hear nothing but their watery slash as they rise and dip. The river itself is silent. It is back-breaking work; he would never have thought the sinewy figure behind him, calling out encouragement, capable of it. But there is a hardness in Porter Bell’s body that is not apparent at first sight. He has endured a Spanish cell in the Netherlands. Pain of his own choosing is easy for him to bear.
Bell has just announced they are approaching the northern shore – though how he knows is a mystery – when the pinnace strikes something in the water. One of the horses begins to panic. Its head tosses wildly, threatening to yank the reins out of Bianca’s hands. The huge chest begins to rise; the hind legs flex; the wide black eyes roll; the nostrils gape. The horse is on the verge of rearing. In the next instant it will hurl itself into the river. Worse, thinks Nicholas, the fear will spread to its neighbour and they’ll all be
dashed beneath the flailing hooves. And Bianca is the first one in the way of a ton of terrified horseflesh.
He lets go of the oars. Caught in an ungainly crouch between sitting and standing, he can only watch in horror as the horse begins to rise.
And then all is calm again. The horse is standing foursquare, its pupils no longer the size of angel coins, snorting as if it’s the humans causing all the fuss. Its companion goes back to scratching its lower lip on the gunwale of the boat.
And there is his wife: as slender as one of those boys who play the female parts at the Rose, calming the beast with a caressing hand on its neck. From the sleeve of her gown she had produced – with the skill of a Bankside street trickster – a sprig of camomile and is wafting it under the horse’s nose.
‘Something else you learned from the young jockeys of Padua?’ Nicholas asks, half in jest, half in stupefied admiration.
‘Preparation, Husband,’ she says with a sweet smile. ‘A horse is much like a man. You have to think ahead for them.’
As the north bank of the river appears out of the fog – another magic trick, he thinks – Nicholas cannot help but wonder if what Southwark says about his wife’s supernatural abilities might not, after all, be true.
Porter Bell has brought them to a safe landing spot, far enough from the ramparts of Tilbury fort and the ferry jetty to slip unnoticed into the county of Essex. He wishes them good fortune and vanishes back into the foggy river, a diminutive Charon who’s found a way back from his own personal Hades.
‘How do we find our way from here?’ Bianca asks as the sound of the oars striking the water fades. ‘I can barely see my hand in front of my face.’
Nicholas explains his plan. They will take the track that runs from Tilbury to Chelmsford, then join the old drovers’ road to Melton, crossing the Suffolk border below Nayland. The Tabard’s palfreys are sturdy beasts, accustomed to long distances. Three days, he reckons, if the weather holds.
But striking out from the shore into the white soup of early morning would be insane, he adds. It might just be possible to keep the golden blur of the rising sun to their right as they head north, but the Tilbury marshes are dangerous. Lose the path, and there any number of stinking creeks waiting to suck the unwary down into the ooze. Better by far to wait for the fog to burn off a little. So they hobble the horses and settle down to wait.
And within a short time the fog begins to dissolve, like breath left in the air on a cold day. Nicholas wonders if it’s another of his new wife’s skills she hasn’t yet told him about.
In the long shadows of evening, Nicholas and Bianca take shelter below the treeline of Botwulf’s Wood on the outskirts of the little hamlet of Barnthorpe. The setting sun burnishes the thatched-roof houses and the tithe barns with a soft golden light. It is dusk on the third day following their crossing of the Thames, as Nicholas had anticipated. But he is not yet ready to announce his arrival.
Bianca knows why he’s hesitating. He’s waiting for the villagers to come in from the fields; then they won’t have to lie, if the Privy Council’s men arrive to ask them if they’ve seen one Nicholas Shelby, son of this hamlet, wanted for the wholly fictitious crime of attempting to poison their queen.
When the way is clear, they walk the horses quietly down into the courtyard of Yeoman Shelby’s farmhouse. Through the little leaded windows Nicholas can see his mother and his sister-inlaw, Faith. They are laying out the board for supper, heads slightly bowed as they chatter while they work. He goes to the porch, stands for a moment in its familiar shelter before knocking.
It is Faith who opens the door. She stares at him in the gathering darkness, refusing to believe what her eyes are seeing. Then she cries out, ‘Mercy! Jesu and all His saints save and protect us!’ A pewter dish slips from her hand, rattling itself into stillness on the flagstones. Then she flings herself at him.
‘Faith, whatever is it?’ his mother calls out.
And when Faith draws enough breath to answer, Nicholas is forced to endure a warm and enveloping scrimmage of arms and cheeks and hands and bosoms before he can utter a word. He catches a melee of images: Faith beaming as rosily as an apple hanging ripe from a bough; his mother, eyes bright with tears; his father holding him at arm’s length to get a proper look at him – once he’s laid aside his long-stemmed clay pipe, something he doesn’t do even when Parson Olicott comes to call; his brother Jack taking him in a well-meaning headlock as if they were boys again; and what seems to be an ever-growing litter of Jack and Faith’s children, who shriek in delight at the return of Uncle Nicholas and insist on being hoisted aloft, protesting tearfully at any imagined favouritism whenever they’re not staring in silent awe at the slender, comely young woman with waves of dark hair who stands silently, but smiling slightly, in the doorway.
‘And this must be our new daughter,’ his mother says, when he has been allowed to disentangle himself.
Now it is Bianca’s turn to endure the emotional avalanche. ‘You are right welcome, child,’ Goodwife Shelby says, embracing Bianca as though they’ve been friends for ever. ‘My son does not write much’ – a glance of reprimand in Nicholas’s direction – ‘but when he does, it’s mostly about you.’
As they fuss over her, Bianca feels a sweet pain grow inside her. The comfort of family has been denied her for so long. Her father and mother are both dead, her own birthplace is in a different land. She surrenders to this unconditional welcome, aware that her own familial past has never felt more distant.
Later, when the horses are fed and stabled, the dust of the ride has been brushed from doublet and gown, bellies filled with steaming lamb pottage, thirsts slaked with ale and sack, and Faith has taken Bianca away to show her the chamber where she and Nicholas will sleep, Nicholas and his father share a moment together.
‘You’ve hardly said a word, lad, all evening.’
‘That’s not true!’ Nicholas protests. ‘I’ve barely had a moment to put food in my mouth.’
‘I mean about why you’ve come back.’
‘I thought it was time you met Bianca,’ Nicholas says, feeling the guilt warm his cheeks.
‘Nothin’ to do with that fellow they put to death in London – the queen’s physician?’
‘Why would you think that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps because you’re a physician, too, an’ you work for Sir Robert Cecil, an’ you’ve had audiences with the queen ’erself, an’ ’er old physician just got himself quartered for tryin’ to poison her, an’ you don’t make a habit of dropping by out of the blue to discuss the price of wool at Woodbridge market. Will that do you?’
‘I hadn’t imagined you’d heard about Dr Lopez up here.’
‘This is Suffolk, Nick, not the moon. Jed Blackwell took a flock down at the end of May; got home the day before yesterday. He told me folk down there spoke of little else.’ His craggy face, scoured by salt-marsh and the east wind, darkens. ‘How could a man of medicine plot to poison the queen? He must have had the Devil in his heart.’
‘He didn’t poison anyone. They butchered an innocent man.’
Now there is real fear in his father’s eyes. ‘Are you involved in this somehow, Nick? Is that why you’ve come here, without a word to warn us?’
‘Yes. And it’s only for tonight.’
A cruel payment, he thinks, for such a welcome.
‘Deal straight with me, boy,’ Yeoman Shelby says, leaning forward across the table. ‘Are you a fugitive?’
Nicholas considers his answer before speaking. ‘Not yet. Sir Robert Cecil is still for me.’ He shrugs. ‘But for how long…’
His father takes a draw of his pipe. For Nicholas, the scent of the smoke he exhales brings back a flood of childhood memories, all the more poignant for knowing he cannot seek shelter here.
A look of sad admonishment from his father. ‘What, in the name of all that’s holy, have you got yourself mixed up in, Nick? And you with that sweet new bride of yours. I had hoped you’d found
a new, happier life for yourself – after Eleanor.’
‘I have.’
‘Then why are you on the run?’
‘I was denounced. An anonymous accusation. It has no merit.’
His father says, ‘It’s not your way to run from a fight, boy. Remember those bloody knuckles you got at Cambridge, when the “gentlemen” mocked you as country-pate?’
‘This is different, Father. There’s such a madness amongst the Privy Council these days – they see plots against the queen even when there are none. That is how innocent men go to the scaffold.’
His father gets up from his chair and walks to the window. He peers out into the dark night as if he expects to see men-atarms already dismounting in the courtyard. ‘We’ll hide you here at Barnthorpe – in the old priest hole.’
Nicholas remembers the tiny space under the parlour stairs where, as a boy, he’d played hide-and-seek. His grandfather had fashioned it during the reign of the sixth Edward, to hide any Catholic priest who might manage to slip into the county by way of the Deben river. His father, though obedient to the new religion, has never bothered to seal it up.
‘No, Father,’ he says. ‘I’ll not put the family in danger. I’m going back to the Low Countries. It will be safer for me there.’
‘How long?’
‘Until Sir Robert can unmask the source of this slander against me.’
‘Will you tell me where?’
‘Best if I do not – for your own sake.’
‘Exile then?’
‘For a while. When Bianca and I are safely sheltered, I’ll send word to Sir Robert, ask him to tell me when it’s safe to return.’
His father turns back from the window, jabs the bowl of his pipe in Nicholas’s direction. ‘Have you no mind for the sorrow that will bring your mother?’ It is not in Yeoman Shelby’s nature to speak of the sorrow it will bring him, but Nicholas can see it in his eyes.
