The Course of All Treasons

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  Nick had often observed that people who lived alone tended to develop peculiar habits. Witness Sir John upstairs. Nick had him pegged as a widower who had decided to eat, drink, and be merry before he died, which would probably be of apoplexy fairly soon, the way he was going. Better than the pinched life of a Mistress Shrewsbury, who was doubtless tormented by the conviction that her renters were engaged in riotous living at the expense of her diminished circumstances. To complete the picture of the batty widow, Nick counted at least six cats in the room.

  “They’re to keep the rats down,” the landlady said, seeing the direction of Nick’s gaze. “Sir John’s room is a veritable Lord Mayor’s Banquet for rats with all that rotting food lying around. If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times. Throw it on the rubbish heap out back. But does he listen? No, he does not.”

  Nick had the strange impression he was listening to a conversation that went on inside her head most of her waking hours. He could see that she had focused all her unhappiness, loneliness, and blighted hopes on the gargantuan figure of Sir John. In an odd way, her ongoing war with him probably gave her life purpose. Nick had observed this in feuding neighbors back in Oxfordshire, sometimes over something as trivial as an errant cow grazing on the wrong side of a fence. When one old fellow died, his septuagenarian nemesis often followed within weeks, his reason for living gone.

  “Please be seated,” Mistress Shrewsbury said, with an oddly touching sort of faded gentility.

  Nick looked in vain for a chair that was not piled with clothes or pots or, indeed, a cat. “I’ll stand, thank you.”

  “Suit yourself.” She removed a ginger tom from a chair and sat down, arranging the cat on her lap like a fur muff, where it began a stentorian purring. Two sets of eyes, one pair dark, one green, stared up at him disconcertingly. What with Sir John upstairs, Mistress Shrewsbury downstairs, and a poisoner on the loose, Nick was beginning to feel as if he had stumbled into an insane asylum.

  “Was a wineskin delivered yesterday for Sir John?” Nick began.

  “Must have been,” she replied. “Same every day like clockwork. How that man can drink so much and still be standing is anyone’s guess.”

  Nick resigned himself to a flood of irrelevant commentary on Sir John, clearly the landlady’s pet peeve.

  “But you didn’t see who delivered it?”

  “I was otherwise occupied.” She glanced back at the bedchamber and then reddened, as if she had given herself away about doing something shameful like dressing. “But it is usually the boy from The Rising Sun.”

  “At what time?”

  “St. Martin’s had just struck the half after nine. I was getting ready to go to market.”

  “I see.” Nick was disappointed. He had hoped that, like all landladies in his experience, she would have been nosy enough to look out her door whenever someone arrived at her premises.

  “I went up to Sir Thomas to ask him if he needed anything, poor man.”

  Nick perked up.

  “I tapped on the door and opened it.”

  “Was there a wineskin outside his door?” Nick asked.

  “If you will let me finish, young man,” she said, severely. “I didn’t go in, of course. It wouldn’t have been proper.”

  Not to mention fear of catching the influenza, Nick thought.

  “Sir Thomas was sitting on the side of the bed pouring a drink from a wineskin. He asked me if I had seen who delivered it. I said no. Perhaps it was Sir John? I said. Sir Thomas said that it was probably his friend Nick.”

  Nick’s heart sank. He felt more responsible than ever. “Did he say where it had been left?”

  “Just inside his door. He never locked it when he was at home. Only when he went out.”

  So the boy from The Rising Sun had delivered the wineskin as usual for Sir John; then someone else had spiked it with deadly nightshade and put it inside Sir Thomas’s room for him to find when he woke up. Sir Thomas would have thought Nick had dropped by, found him asleep, and, not wanting to wake him, left it for him.

  “Did you see or hear anyone else on the stairs after you returned from market?”

  Mistress Shrewsbury shook her head.

  “Is there a back entrance?” Nick asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Show me, please.”

  She led Nick down a passageway on the ground floor to a door at the far end. Just to the right of the door was a small staircase. When Nick asked her where this led, she told him to the upper floor and on to the attic.

  She opened the back door, and Nick noticed that it was unlocked. He remarked upon it.

  “No point,” she said. “Sir John uses it to avoid his creditors. Which are legion, I can tell you. He kept losing his latchkey and breaking it open. Cost me a fortune to repair it each time.” She sniffed. “So now I just leave it unlocked. Sir Thomas uses it too. I prefer they leave the front door for me. More private.”

  Nick surmised that her dislike of Sir John was probably stronger than her fear of being murdered in her bed.

  The door opened onto the usual tiny garden surrounded by an old-fashioned withy fence, rotting and sagging in parts. A gate at the end of the garden led to a lane. In better times there had been a vegetable garden, but now weeds, overgrown blackberry bushes, and broken household detritus had taken over so that the garden was little more than a junkyard with a beaten path down the center. At the end of the garden to the left of the gate was an enormous rubbish dump. Those householders who were lucky enough to back onto the river merely dumped their rubbish and the contents of their chamber pots directly into the water. Households in the center of the city, like Mistress Shrewsbury’s, used their backyard. A city ordinance decreed that these refuse dumps should be removed every month at the householder’s expense, but few people obeyed this rule. Some used the compost heaps on their vegetable gardens—Rivkah and Eli did—but most simply left them to grow huge and noisome, fouling the air of the entire neighborhood and bringing hordes of rats from the river to feast on them at night.

  Nick had seen enough. He now knew how the poisoner had gained access to the house without being seen by the inhabitants or people in the street at the front. He would have known the time the wineskin was delivered each day and simply slipped inside and up the back stairs, poured in the poison, and placed it inside Sir Thomas’s rooms. The callousness of it bit into Nick’s soul. Even as he followed the landlady back into the house and climbed the back stairs to the upper floor, Sir Thomas, his friend, could be breathing his last.

  * * *

  Nick searched Sir Thomas’s rooms again but found nothing. Once back out on the street, he discovered that the tavern where he had obtained the water and salt was, indeed, The Rising Sun. Seeing as it was only a few doors down from Mistress Shrewsbury’s lodging house, it made sense. Now that he had been given a definite lead, and not trusting Edmund’s thoroughness, Nick ducked in and quickly ascertained that the same boy who had helped him carry the buckets up to Sir Thomas’s rooms was the boy who delivered the daily wineskin to Sir John. The lad had not seen anyone on the stairs when he had dropped it off outside Sir John’s door.

  “I hope Sir John is not in trouble, sir,” the tavern owner said. “He’s our best customer.”

  Nick assured him Sir John was not a poisoner. Unless he was guilty of poisoning himself with gluttony, Nick thought to himself.

  * * *

  Although Nick was eager to return to Leicester House to ascertain where Gavell and Stace had been that morning, he knew he must report in to Walsingham. He was now certain that del Toro was a Spanish assassin sent to destabilize the English network prior to some act of war, an act of great audacity, since Mendoza, the erstwhile Spanish ambassador, had been expelled from England two years prior for being implicated in a plot to kill the Queen. It was common for foreign agents to be assigned as low-level diplomats to embassies, Nick knew. It allowed them more freedom of movement and more protection. What better way to cut
off the flow of intelligence than to kill an enemy’s agents? Not only would it break the line of communication between the continent and London, it would also throw Walsingham’s network into utter confusion as they labored to find the murderer. As a ploy, it was crude but effective.

  Accordingly, he made his way to St. Paul’s and then turned east on Fenchurch Street. But when he arrived at Seething Lane, he found Walsingham being helped into a carriage by his secretary, who solicitously tucked fur rugs around his master’s knees.

  “Climb in,” Walsingham ordered. “We’ve been summoned to Whitehall.”

  Only a royal summons could have enticed Walsingham out of his warm study. The man was clearly at death’s door, judging by his ghostlike pallor and hands that trembled uncontrollably until he tucked them out of sight under the rugs. Nick marveled at the iron will of the man that could keep his body, and more importantly, his mind, functioning. Even so, the spymaster had been seldom seen at court of late, preferring to use Sir Robert Cecil as his liaison with the Queen. This must be serious, Nick thought, placing himself opposite Walsingham in the carriage.

  “Before you ask, I know about the attempted poisoning of Sir Thomas,” Walsingham said. “So does the Queen.”

  So Essex had informed her as soon as he left Sir Thomas’s lodgings, as Nick had known he would. Although on the periphery of real intelligence work, Essex was eager to appear at its center.

  Nick told Walsingham of the conversation he had overheard between Essex and Annie. “I don’t think she can be trusted,” Nick said. “She seems to be playing some kind of devious game of her own, and she has a habit of disappearing and then reappearing. I think she’s up to something.”

  Walsingham kept his eyes on the window, as if the passing scenes of London were of great fascination.

  “My Lord,” Nick said, his irritation growing at Walsingham’s continued silence, “if there is something going on, I think now is the time to tell me.”

  Walsingham turned toward him. “Patience, Nick,” he said. “Patience.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The Palace of Whitehall

  When Walsingham presented himself outside the royal apartments, dressed in funereal black like the Grim Reaper, his gold chain of office glittering around his neck, the guards stood smartly to attention, the stocks of their halberds rapping in unison on the polished floor as they uncrossed the blades to give him admittance. Nick grinned as he followed Walsingham through the door.

  “Thanks, lads,” he couldn’t resist saying. “Keep up the good work.”

  His grin faltered when he saw that the Queen was pacing up and down the long room. Always a bad omen. Another bad sign, as far as Nick was concerned, was that the Spider was also present. Essex, however, was conspicuously absent.

  Walsingham gave a low bow, then tottered on his feet and had to put a hand on Nick’s shoulder to steady himself.

  “Sit down, Moor,” Elizabeth said, “before you fall down.” She said it brusquely, but there was a flicker of compassion in her eyes.

  “Most kind, Your Majesty,” Walsingham murmured, availing himself of a hard-backed chair. Both Cecil and Nick were standing, and Elizabeth did not offer them the same courtesy. Codpiece was leaning against the window behind the Queen, and he raised his eyebrows at Nick. Squalls ahead, his look said.

  “Let me see if I understand this,” the Queen said, still pacing, her arms crossed, chin down. “There is an assassin out there murdering my agents. One is dead, one is like to die of poisoning, and one”—here she glanced at Nick—“was shot at with a crossbow on the London Road.”

  “That is correct, Your Majesty,” Walsingham said.

  “And you have no idea who the assassin is?”

  Both Cecil and Nick opened their mouths to speak, but Walsingham forestalled them. “None, Your Majesty.”

  Nick tried to hide his amazement at the bald-faced lie. From the look on Cecil’s face, he too was having a hard time concealing his dismay. Nick saw Richard, aka Codpiece, looking at him intently, a frown on his face.

  Oh, bollocks, Nick thought. Walsingham is running some kind of operation behind the Queen’s back.

  To Nick’s mind, the need for subterfuge and the monumental riskiness of lying to the Queen could only mean one thing: Mary, Queen of Scots.

  Elizabeth had made it abundantly plain that she had no interest in executing her cousin, even though Mary had been used as a figurehead in countless treason plots since her imprisonment nineteen years before. For almost twenty years she had been a thorn in the side of Elizabeth, a thorn that the Queen chose to live with rather than pluck, as Walsingham and Baron Burghley had repeatedly advised. In fact, whenever the subject of her cousin was raised, Elizabeth flew into a fury.

  Nick understood why. Her own mother, Anne Boleyn, had been beheaded by her father, Henry VIII. As an anointed queen, Anne’s execution was a clear case of regicide. Elizabeth was determined not to follow in her father’s footsteps. If an anointed monarch could be executed, then Elizabeth herself could be similarly deposed. The current situation regarding Mary, Queen of Scots, and her chief ministers’ desire to get rid of her against Elizabeth’s express wishes was one of uneasy stalemate.

  Nick breathed a sigh of relief that he had not mentioned del Toro to the Queen when he had first returned to London after being sent to Oxford. Essex had been present, and Nick hadn’t wanted him sniffing around someone Cecil had thought bore watching. Nick had thought merely to keep well clear of any rivalry between Essex and Cecil. Now he realized that the presence of a Spanish agent—possibly an assassin—had far more serious implications and that Walsingham was up to his neck in something devious and dangerous.

  Cecil was clearly having similar thoughts. His face was pale with anger, although his expression remained impassive as always. He had now realized that Walsingham had kept him in the dark about del Toro. All Cecil had known at the time was that del Toro was a mysterious Spaniard who had landed at Dover and should be investigated. By merely doing his job, Cecil might have compromised an important spy mission. The fact that Walsingham had not seen fit to inform him would not lessen the appearance of incompetence if the mission should fail because of his tampering, however innocent his intention might have been.

  “I find that hard to believe, Moor,” the Queen said, coming to a halt in front of his chair.

  Walsingham rose, one hand on the back of the chair. “We are doing everything in our power to see that the culprit is caught, Your Majesty.”

  Elizabeth looked at him narrowly, trying to gauge the veracity of his words, but all Walsingham’s face betrayed was that he was a deeply ill man near the end of his resources after the jolting carriage ride to the palace. She sighed in defeat.

  “You may go,” she said. “And you,” she said pointing a jeweled finger at Cecil. “You stay,” she said to Nick.

  For the first time, Nick saw a look of unease flicker over Walsingham’s face, and his eyes sought Nick’s. But Nick ignored the urgent message in them to keep quiet about del Toro. Like Cecil, Nick was furiously angry with Walsingham. He felt he was being played. And more than his own hurt pride, he was enraged that Winchelsea had been murdered so hideously and Thomas poisoned. He could still see his friend twitching and shaking on the bed, his face deathly white, his hands clutching convulsively at the covers of his bed. Even now, Thomas could be dead. Nick did not care what game Walsingham was playing; he was going to go after del Toro if it was the last thing he did.

  “So Nick,” the Queen said when the door had closed behind Walsingham and Cecil. “What is really going on?”

  This was the moment Nick had been dreading, the moment when he was forced to choose between loyalty to Walsingham and loyalty to the Queen. In truth, it was really no choice at all: Elizabeth was his sovereign, with the power to take away not only his livelihood but also his life.

  He had just opened his mouth to speak when there was a loud commotion outside the door to the royal apartments.

&nbs
p; “Let me in, God damn you,” a familiar voice said. “I’ll have your heads for this, you varlets.”

  A look of extreme irritation passed over Elizabeth’s face; whether from the noise that had interrupted her or the unwelcome appearance of Essex, Nick could not tell, but she strode over to the door, wrenched it open, and barked, “Let him in.”

  Nick had never been so glad to see Essex. And Essex in a snit was a sight to see.

  “What is the meaning of this, Your Majesty?” he raged, barely taking time to give a cursory bow to his Queen, a serious breach of court etiquette that would have resulted in a week in the Tower in the days of her father, Fat Harry. “I was told you were in a private meeting with Walsingham and that gutless wonder Cecil. Am I not also your spymaster?”

  “Yes, yes, Robin,” the Queen said. “An oversight, no more.”

  “Ha!” Essex replied.

  Both Nick and Codpiece exchanged shocked glances. This was tantamount to accusing the Queen of being a liar. Even though there was no such thing as an oversight in Elizabeth’s Machiavellian brain, it was simply not permissible to accuse the Queen point-blank of dissembling. But Essex seemed oblivious of the unmistakable signs of the Queen’s displeasure: the pallor of her face, apparent even beneath the white face paint; the small tic along her jawline; the way her eyes shrank to pinpoints like twin bodkins.

  “I will not be treated like this,” Essex said, and actually stomped his foot.