Nick knew he should knock on her door and beg her pardon for lying to her about the attempt on his life on the London Road; even more importantly, he should explain why he was a secret agent working against the country of her birth. But he allowed himself to keep on walking.
When he stepped through the door of The Black Sheep, Bess the parrot’s greeting of “Who’s a lily-livered varlet then?” sounded depressingly like the voice of his conscience, but at least Hector’s rapturous greeting lifted his mood.
“How’s Thomas?” John asked. He had just opened a new barrel behind the counter in readiness for the night. A few early drinkers were slouched at the bar. Nick could hear Maggie, Matty, and the children in the back rooms of the taverns having dinner. John came around the bar with a couple of tankards and put one on a table for Nick, who had his hands full of Irish Wolfhound.
“He’ll live, thank God,” Nick said, fending off Hector, who had placed both paws on his shoulders and was attempting to rasp the skin off his face with his tongue.
“Down,” he commanded. “I’m glad to see you too.”
Nick wiped his face on his sleeve, then unbuckled his sword and laid it on a table. He told John that Thomas had been moved from the infirmary to Kat’s brothel. He didn’t have to tell him not to bruit the news about.
“You think someone from Essex’s crew is the murderer?” John asked, frowning.
Nick picked up the tankard John had brought him. “We can’t take any chances. But, in spite of whatever game Walsingham is playing, I intend to go after del Toro.” Nick then told John what had transpired in the Queen’s apartments, describing how Walsingham was keeping the existence of del Toro from the Queen and how he himself had narrowly escaped giving the Queen del Toro’s name by the arrival of an irate Essex.
“Tomorrow,” Nick said, putting his booted feet up on a stool, “we go hunting.”
CHAPTER 15
City of London
Over breakfast the next day, Nick and John discussed how to best go about finding del Toro in a town as large as London.
“It will take at least a week to inquire at every inn in the city,” Nick said. “And, for all we know, he is being sheltered by someone in their home. Then we’ll never find him. What we need to do is have someone lead us to him.”
“One of Essex’s people?”
“Possibly,” Nick replied. “If it doesn’t work, then at least we’ll know they are in the clear. The important thing is for you to keep in the shadows. I don’t want them to know there are two sets of eyes on them.”
“Sounds more like fishing than hunting,” John grumbled.
They both put on dark cloaks, the better to remain undetected from recessed doorways. Luckily, it was raining again, so they would not appear suspicious with their hoods up. Both men were dressed in dark clothing, and both were armed with sword and dagger.
“Sorry, old man,” Nick told Hector. “You have to stay here today.”
The last thing he wanted was to advertise his identity by the presence of his distinctive dog.
Hector gave a sad whine but obediently lay down on the floor, his nose toward the door, to await his master’s return.
* * *
Leicester House
While Nick and John leaned against a yew tree in St. Clement’s churchyard across the Strand from Leicester House, they paid a lad loitering outside The Angel—in the hope that someone would buy him ale—to give a message to Essex. He was to tell Essex and anyone else within hearing that Nick was on the track of the assassin who was killing off agents. The lad was to act stupid—not a difficult thing for him to do, Nick concluded, judging from his sleepy-eyed look—when asked exactly where Nick had gone. Only someone who already knew where del Toro was hiding would know where to go. From what Nick had observed, Essex himself did not seem to know about del Toro’s existence.
At the mention of agents, the lad’s eyes grew round. He swiped at his runny nose with a dirty sleeve. “Are you one of them, then?” he asked. “A secret agent?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” Nick said with a straight face.
The boy took a step back.
“If you do it right, you’ll make enough money to buy all the ale you can drink,” Nick said, relenting. “So be off with you.”
When he had gone, John looked at him. “Threats followed by an appeal to his baser instincts?”
“Did I leave anything out?” Nick asked.
“Nope. You pretty much covered the totality of human venality.”
“That’s what I thought.”
The lad was gone for some time. When he returned and reported that he had told the “posh gent” (Essex), the “hot wench” (Annie), and a man who looked like “a right hard bastard” (Henry Gavell, no doubt), Nick tossed him a shilling, well satisfied that he had put the cat among the pigeons.
They didn’t have long to wait. Annie, in her guise as Meg the prostitute with a shawl over her head, slipped out of a side door of Leicester House and walked quickly north on the Strand. A few moments later, Gavell and Stace left by the front entrance and went south.
“Damnation,” Nick said. “We’ll have to split up. I’ll take Annie. You follow the other two. Meet up later at The Black Sheep.”
* * *
Nick followed Annie up Fleet Street, over Ludgate Hill and the Fleet, and past St. Paul’s. He almost lost her in the crowd, who were listening to a preacher harangue them about the evils of the Seven Deadly Sins from the steps of St. Paul’s Cross.
“You, sir, with the ponderous belly,” the preacher shouted, pointing at a prosperous-looking merchant. “How will you account for your gluttony in the next life?”
“I will feast mightily at the heavenly banquet. And so should you, you scarecrow,” the merchant bellowed. “You look like you need a good meal.”
This provoked gales of laughter. The preacher was, indeed, tall and thin and dressed in a faded black robe, as if he had only one suit of clothes and the color had run with repeated washings. His dour appearance made him look suspiciously like a Puritan, even though public preaching by that sect had been banned. He had opened his mouth to reply when he caught sight of Annie trying to dodge her way through the crowd.
“Lust!” he screeched, spittle spraying out of his mouth onto the unlucky people in the front row. “There goes one of the devil’s paramours.”
Everyone craned to see where his shaking finger was pointing. If Annie was chagrined at being singled out, she didn’t show it. Giving a gap-toothed grin, she blew him a kiss.
“He’s one of me best customers,” she gaily informed the crowd. “Likes to dress up in women’s clothes and have his arse whipped for his sins.”
Again the crowd roared. The preacher turned crimson. He shook his fist and shouted something, but it was lost in the raucous merriment of the onlookers. Someone threw an apple, and then a whole barrage of missiles made up of rotten fruit and lumps of mud began to rain down on the hapless preacher. He scuttled off the steps of the cross and made off down an alley, his long robes hoicked up around his skinny white calves.
Nick followed as Annie pushed her way to the edge of the riot she had created and turned left toward Cripplegate. He had to admire her practice of spy craft. She constantly doubled back on herself, leading him in circles, apparently wandering the streets aimlessly, sometimes fending off men who thought she was trolling for customers. Once she entered a house, and it was only by chance that Nick, by running down an alley at the side of the building, saw her emerge out of the back entrance now dressed as a young man in hose and a doublet with a slouchy hat pulled low on her forehead.
Something looked familiar about her appearance, but he couldn’t place it. He shrugged it off; Annie now looked like any young man with modest means on the streets of London. Nick could not help but be in awe of her ability to change character and gender. He remembered what the boatman had told him about his friend Sam hearing a third voice at Wood Wharf the night Winchelsea was murdered. A soft v
oice. Could it be that Annie was the murderer? He was now sure it had been Annie in her disguise as a whore whom he had seen at The Spotted Cow in Oxford. Somehow she had recognized Nick and led del Toro out of harm’s way. Nick burned with shame when he remembered how easily she had outwitted him.
Nick was now convinced he was following a traitor. It was obvious that Annie had decided to back two horses at once in order to regain her family heritage. By playing the Queen against the Spanish, she was insuring herself against the possible success of a Spanish invasion when it would be Mary, Queen of Scots, in alliance with Spain, who would be handing out favors of land and titles. And given that Ireland was still a Catholic country, in defiance of its Protestant overlords in the north, what better advocate than His Most Catholic Majesty, Philip, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, to plead for the restoration of Annie’s ancestral lands? Codpiece had made it plain to Nick that the Irish owed loyalty first to their clans, second to their faith, and only a distant third to their nation.
In Scotland, Robert the Bruce’s greatest achievement and the key to his military success had been to convince the clans to put their country first in order to resist Edward Longshanks’s invasion of Scotland. No leader in Ireland had yet arisen to do the same.
The bells of London had struck the hour twice before Annie eventually stopped in front of a small tavern tucked away down an alley in Bishopsgate—ironically, not far from the Tower and Seething Lane, as if hiding in plain sight of the authorities. She looked up and down the alley before she ducked inside. Nick went round the back to see if she emerged, but there was no sign of her, so he entered, pulling his hood down over his face.
She was not in the crowded taproom, but he noticed stairs leading to an upper floor. Trying to look as if he had legitimate business there, Nick went up. No one prevented him. Hearing a door close on the tiny landing, he put his ear to it and heard voices—the higher voice of a woman and a man’s deeper voice in reply. Drawing his sword, Nick kicked in the door and entered.
The scene that met his eyes was like a frozen tableau in a tapestry—Annie pouring wine into a goblet from a heavy pewter flagon; del Toro seated in a chair in front of a fire about to drink from his goblet. Both of them had turned their heads toward the door when Nick suddenly burst through. The only noise in the room after the crash of the door hitting the wall was the sound of the logs crackling in the fireplace and the ticking of rain against the casement window.
Then time resumed, and Annie picked up the goblet she had just filled and held it out to him.
“Join us?” she said.
Nick had to admire her coolness. “No, thanks.”
She shrugged and took a long drink. “I should have figured you set this up to follow me,” she said. “I warned Essex you were clever.”
“Sit,” Nick commanded. “And you, Señor del Toro. Drop your dagger on the floor and slide it towards me with your foot.”
Del Toro glanced briefly at his sword lying out of reach on the bed, then looked at Annie.
“Better do as he says, Francesco,” Annie said. “I think our friend the Honorable Nicholas Holt means business.”
Shaking his head as if in regret, del Toro took his dagger off his belt and dropped it on the floor, sliding it toward Nick. “You are the Earl of Blackwell’s brother?” del Toro said, something clicking behind his dark eyes.
Nick picked up the dagger and stuck it into his belt, trying to conceal his shock that del Toro knew who Robert was.
“Why do you think I went to Oxford?” del Toro said.
“Shut up, Francesco,” Annie said, sharply. “Let me do the talking.”
Nick closed the door and leaned against it, his sword pointed at del Toro. He tried to keep his sword hand from shaking, but cold tendrils of fear were coiling around his heart, making him feel as if he had the ague. He remembered Cecil showing him a letter that Robert had written to an English Jesuit in exile. It was the reason Nick had been coerced into spying for Walsingham. At the time, he’d thought the letter entirely innocent and that Robert was too wise to be in treasonous correspondence with Jesuit agents, but del Toro’s words had shaken him badly.
“Are you saying you were in Oxford to meet with my brother?” he said.
“I am interested in talking to all the prominent recusant families,” del Toro replied. “Alas, we missed each other, and I did not end up seeing him.”
“Keep your mouth shut,” Annie said, rounding on him. “Nick knows nothing.”
“I know you are a traitor,” Nick said, turning his eyes on her.
It was unnerving to see her dressed as a man. She had even stippled charcoal on her chin to make it appear like stubble. If he hadn’t seen her enter the tavern as a whore and leave as a man, Nick would have been utterly fooled. She had even walked like a man, striding along, swinging her shoulders instead of her hips.
Annie picked up the heavy flagon. “Sure you won’t have some?”
When Nick did not reply, she laughed. “Afraid it’s poisoned?”
“Is it?”
In answer, she poured more wine into her goblet and drank.
“Did you kill Winchelsea?” Nick said. “He recognized you from The Angel, didn’t he? Couldn’t have him reporting that you were working for the enemy?”
“What’s he talking about?” del Toro asked.
Annie ignored him and kept her eyes on Nick. “You think you’ve got everything worked out, don’t you?” she said.
“I can’t prove it yet, but I will. Once I take you both in.”
“How are you going to accomplish that?” Annie asked. Again she refilled her goblet from the heavy flagon.
Nick just had time to wonder why she was drinking so much when she suddenly flung the flagon at him. Instinctively he ducked, and it glanced painfully off his shoulder, clanging heavily off the door behind him. But Annie had distracted him long enough for del Toro to launch himself at Nick and grab him in a bear hug. He was a big man with huge shoulders and long, simian arms. He pinioned Nick’s arms to his sides so that his sword was pointing uselessly at the floor. Nick tried to twist free, but del Toro just squeezed harder, crushing Nick’s chest so that he had difficulty drawing breath. Spots of light began to dance in front of his eyes, and he knew he was close to passing out. Nick head-butted del Toro in the face and felt the Spaniard’s nose break, blood spraying into Nick’s face and blinding him. But the Spaniard did not loosen his grip. Through a haze of red, Nick saw Annie coming toward him, an arm raised.
“Hold him,” she commanded.
Then he felt a tremendous blow to the back of his head as if a giant elm had fallen on him, and his limbs went slack like a puppet with its strings cut. The next thing he knew he was falling, the side of his face cracking against wooden floorboards gritty with dirt. He lay absolutely still and held his breath. Then he sensed someone crouching beside him.
“He’s dead,” he heard Annie say.
Nick waited for the sound of the door opening and closing and footsteps moving away before taking a huge, ragged, breath.
Then he did the sensible thing and passed out.
CHAPTER 16
Rivkah and Eli’s House, Bankside
Once again, Nick found himself being stitched up in Eli and Rivkah’s house.
He had yet to summon the courage to tell Rivkah that one of his recent attackers was a woman.
“Ow!” he said.
“Don’t be a baby.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have a hole in your head.”
“It’s a cut, not a hole,” Rivkah said, snipping off the thread on the last stitch. “Made by a fire poker, if I’m not mistaken, judging by the soot in the wound.” She put a linen pad smeared with some ointment on the stitches and secured it with a bandage that she wrapped around the top of his head. She frowned. “It’s not the cut but the dizziness from the blow that I’m worried about.”
When Nick had come to on the floor of the tavern room and tried to move his head,
he’d felt like an axman with poor aim was chopping at it in a botched execution. Very slowly he sat up, the room spinning. His stomach heaved. Once he had thrown up, he felt a little better. He found his sword and began the long process of trying to stand.
Once upright, he held on to the walls and staggered onto the landing and down the stairs. His legs didn’t seem to want to cooperate, so he had to sit down again in the taproom. No one remarked on his state. He probably looked drunk, he thought, although a tentative exploration with his fingers had told him the back of his head was caked in blood and it had run down the side of his face while he was unconscious, giving him the appearance of a ghoul. Vomit stained the front of his jerkin. One or two of the customers glanced at him but made no comment. Perhaps they thought he had been in a drunken fight. Judging from its dark, smoky interior, the tavern was probably the type of lowlife establishment that was used to brawling and knife fights.
How he made his way out into the streets, over London Bridge, and back to Bankside, he wasn’t sure. Vague images came back to him like snatches of a dream: the openmouthed shock of a matron and the way she dragged her child to the other side of the road; the disapproving glance of a cleric plainly disgusted that Nick was drunk in the middle of the afternoon; the grin of a carter as he passed in a jingle of harness. No one offered to help him. Nick felt a bit like the poor sod in the gospel parable who had been attacked and robbed and lay there bleeding while everyone passed him by on the other side of the road. He vaguely wondered when his Good Samaritan would appear.
Somehow he ended up sitting on Rivkah’s doorstep, his head cupped in his hands. He hadn’t even had the strength to knock, but a local, correctly identifying him as a would-be patient of the Jewish doctors, knocked for him.
“Thankee,” Nick croaked. Then, when the door opened, “Hello, Rivkah. Thought I’d drop by.”
Silently, she had helped him stand and brought him indoors. Sitting him down on a stool, she had set about cleaning the blood off his face and head so she could get an accurate look at the damage.
The Course of All Treasons Page 15