The Course of All Treasons

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  Now handing him a beaker of water, Rivkah held up her hand in front of Nick’s face.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked.

  Nick squinted. “Four?”

  “Two,” she said. “You’re seeing double.”

  “Two of you can’t be all bad,” Nick replied, trying to grin but wincing instead as his head throbbed.

  Rivkah ignored his feeble attempts at flattery. “You may feel sleepy, but you mustn’t go to sleep yet,” she said. “We don’t know why, but head injuries can lead to coma if you sleep, and then sometimes death. Perhaps due to bleeding inside the skull.”

  Nick looked at her. She was being wonderful. That was the problem. Her kindness and professionalism meant he was merely her patient. But he didn’t want to be her patient; he wanted to be her friend, and perhaps more, and he was terribly afraid that he had irretrievably damaged their relationship with his lies and secret life as a spy.

  “Rivkah,” he said. “I need to explain a few things.”

  “Not when you are like this,” she said. She began to get up from her chair.

  “Sit down. Please,” he added when he saw her frown at his tone.

  She sighed. “You really shouldn’t be talking, you know.”

  “Will you damn well stop being my doctor for a moment?” Nick said. Then immediately regretted it. “Sorry,” he muttered. “But I need you to hear me out.”

  Rivkah folded her hands in her lap. “I’m listening.”

  “I’m sorry I lied to you about the attack on the London Road,” Nick said. “It was an assassination attempt, not a robbery.”

  Rivkah did not say anything but bowed her head as if accepting his apology. At least he hoped that’s what she was doing. He couldn’t bear to think that she was hanging her head in sorrow.

  He plowed on. “I am, as you now suspect, an agent for Walsingham.” He went on to explain how Sir Robert Cecil had coerced him into becoming a spy. “My family’s status as a recusant Catholic family puts us all in great jeopardy,” he said. “It means, in effect, that we have to constantly prove our loyalty to the Crown. Or at least I do. That means I cannot afford to turn down any assignment I am given, especially if it has to do with Spain. If I spy on Catholic Spain, then it means that I am loyal to the Protestant Crown of England. Do you understand?”

  “Why didn’t you tell Eli and me this when we first became friends?” she said. “Did you think we would betray you to our fellow countrymen?”

  “No! I …” Nick swallowed. “I did not want to lose your friendship.” It sounded weak and self-serving. He had not meant it to come out like that. What he’d meant to say was that he could not bear never seeing her again, that the mere sight of her cloaked figure hurrying down a street filled him with gladness.

  “And we have been useful to you,” Rivkah said, thoughtfully. She was referring to the way she and Eli had examined the bodies of the murdered ladies-in-waiting the previous winter and had been able to help Nick find the killer from the clues left on the bodies.

  “No!” Nick said. “I mean, yes, you and Eli were invaluable to me. But that’s not why I did not tell you I was an agent.” He took a drink from the beaker of water she had given him. The words he had in his head were not the ones that came out of his mouth—at least, not the way he wanted to say them. The conversation was slipping out of his grasp.

  Rivkah got to her feet and began to put away the bandages and needle and thread she had used on Nick.

  “There is something I must tell you,” she said, “so that you understand who Eli and I are, where our loyalties lie. It is a long story, but you need to hear it all.”

  Nick leaned his elbows on the table. “Go on.”

  “Our great-great-great-grandfather settled in Salamanca in the last century. He was a physician of great repute, and his colleagues were Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans. These religions were all called the People of the Book, and we lived in harmony with one another.”

  Nick wished Rivkah would sit down, but she continued to move about the tiny room, placing scissors in a jar, rolled bandages in a basket. It was as if she could not keep still. His head ached, but he concentrated on what Rivkah was telling him as best he could.

  “Then Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon were married, and they united the north of Spain. They took a holy vow before the Pope that they would cleanse the south of Mohammedans and heretics. This they did with great bloodshed and suffering, calling upon the Inquisition to root out heresy by torture and public burnings. Then their attention turned to the Jews. In 1492, a proclamation of expulsion was signed by Isabella and Ferdinand. Only those Jews who were baptized and became conversos were allowed to remain. My great-great-grandfather decreed that the family should become conversos. This happened long before my birth, so I was born a converso. And so,” Rivkah said, smiling at Nick, “you and I are the same. You are a recusant Catholic and I am a converso Jew. And this state of things was decided for us, by our families.”

  Nick stared at her. He had not known this, although he had wondered why Eli and Rivkah did not have contact with other Jews living in London and, although the practice of their faith was banned, did not gather in Jewish homes that were secret synagogues.

  “We are despised by those Jews who refused to be baptized,” she explained, seeing his expression. “That is why we keep ourselves apart. We are doubly exiled, you see.”

  “But I have eaten with you on your Shabbat,” Nick said.

  She smiled at him. “See how we trust you?” she said. “We have delivered ourselves into your hands.”

  “I would never …”

  “Do you think we do not know this?” Rivkah said. “We are not foolish, and neither are we suicidal.”

  She paused and gazed for a long time at the kitchen table, tracing the scarred wood with her fingertip.

  “For a while, we conversos were safe. In order to wage this religious war, Isabella and Ferdinand had borrowed vast amounts of money from Jewish moneylenders. They needed us. And they needed the skills of the physicians of Salamanca to heal their soldiers and combat the plagues that swept through their armies.” She looked at him. “But there came a day when Torquemada, the Grand Master of the Inquisition, turned his gaze on us.”

  Now she did sit down on the chair in front of him, as if suddenly weary with the telling of such an ancient and oft-repeated tale of woe.

  “At first they ordered that we live in ghettos. ‘For our protection,’ the decree said.” She smiled bitterly. “But we knew better. Always the first step leading to annihilation is separation. No longer were we neighbors to the Christians with children just like them, hunger just like them, illness just like them. Now we were set apart like lepers. Soon we were no longer even human.”

  She poured herself a beaker of water and drank. “One summer the plague was very bad. Many, many died. The Inquisition began to whisper that it was the conversos who had caused it by our hypocrisy in ‘converting’ and the continued practice of our ancient faith. For proof, they pointed to the fact that far fewer of our people had died in the plague. In vain did our rabbis and physicians tell them that it was because we had never had the custom to have rushes on our floors, that we cleaned our houses each week, that somehow the ritual cleansing of our persons and our household goods kept the sickness away. And then there was the fact that we were separated from the Christian populace in the ghetto, so we were protected, to some degree, from contagion.”

  Rivkah smiled and looked at Nick directly for the first time. “It was common sense, no? You yourself have seen how spotless we keep the infirmary.” She held her arms out. “And this house?”

  Nick nodded. It was true. Compared to most every other house in Bankside, Eli and Rivkah’s house always looked as if an army of invisible servants cleaned the floors and tabletops every day. And he had noticed that Eli and Rivkah seldom got sick.

  “But it did no good,” Rivkah went on. “The Inquisition said that only fire cou
ld purge the evil spells we had put upon the people, that fire alone would destroy the plague. So they incited the people to set fire to the ghetto so these ‘holy’ churchmen would not have murder on their conscience.”

  Nick looked down, ashamed. He was a Christian and a Catholic, tainted by the same hypocrisy that had caused his kind to make the Jews scapegoats for their own evil.

  “That is how my family died,” she said. “That is how Eli and I came to be here as exiles.”

  Nick opened his mouth to tell her that she had found a home in Bankside, that there were many, many people who loved and revered them, not least he himself. But she held up her hand to forestall him.

  “Let me finish,” she said. “You may think that when I refer to ‘my people,’ I mean my family. That is what you mean, is it not? Your family?”

  Nick nodded.

  “But for Jews it is different. When we think of our people, we mean the Jewish race and not merely our family or our country of birth. I am a Spaniard, but I am a Jewess first. We are in perpetual exile until we can return to the land that Moses led us to out of the wilderness, to our holy city Jerusalem. Until then, we belong nowhere and everywhere, scattered to the four winds.”

  There were shadows around Rivkah’s eyes, as if the telling of her people’s history had cost her all her strength.

  “This is why I do not consider that you have betrayed us by working against Spain. And neither will Eli.”

  “What will I not do, Mouse?”

  They looked up and saw Eli step into the room. Neither of them had heard him open the door.

  “It seems that Nick is a secret agent working for the Crown,” Rivkah said, taking her brother’s cloak from him.

  Eli sat down at the table opposite Nick and poured himself some water. He drained it and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said.

  “You knew?” Nick said.

  Eli smiled. “Hard not to with the Queen putting so much confidence in you to solve last winter’s murders and the Spider constantly watching your every move. Not to mention your frequent trips to the Continent.”

  Nick was flabbergasted. “And you knew, too?” he said to Rivkah.

  She shrugged. “It was not hard to guess.”

  “So why did you pretend you did not know when I told you?” Nick said. He felt humiliated and embarrassed. But, most of all, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. They had both known all along and still had not withdrawn their trust of him.

  “Because you needed to tell us yourself,” Rivkah said. “It is clear to us both that you have been troubled and this guilt has been inside you a long time. It is good to let the poison out of an infected wound.”

  “Ever the doctor,” Nick said, a little wistfully.

  “Of course,” she replied. “What did you expect?” But when she took his hand, it was not to take his pulse but to clasp it tightly in both of hers.

  CHAPTER 17

  City of London

  Still reeling from what Rivkah and Eli had revealed to him and also from his head wound, Nick went with John straight to Seething Lane the next morning. But Nick was told that Sir Francis Walsingham had collapsed and had been ordered by his physician to retire to his country estate to recuperate. Typically, he had taken his most trusted men with him: Thomas Phelippes, his code cracker, and Laurence Tomson, his chief secretary. Nick could not imagine that Walsingham planned on getting much rest. Nick left a sealed message revealing Annie’s treachery; he demanded that it be sent straight to Walsingham by courier.

  Ordinarily, Nick would have thoroughly searched the room in which he had found Annie and del Toro the previous day, but given the state he was in at the time, he was lucky to have made it back to Bankside in one piece. Now he was going to rectify that omission. He led John through the streets to the hole-in-the-wall tavern, thanking God that the blow to the head had not impaired his memory. The tavern was empty except for two sad cases who had collapsed head-down on the rickety tables and were sleeping it off, and the tavernkeeper who was wiping a desultory rag along the bar. When they went up the stairs, the tapster did not even look up, let alone challenge them, which told Nick he was used to people coming and going to the upstairs rooms.

  Nick expected to find the room cleaned up in readiness for another occupant, but he was surprised to find it exactly the way he remembered it from the day before. A pool of his blood had dried on the floor where his head had lain, and a couple of the year’s first bluebottles were lazily zooming around the blood.

  “Del Toro was sitting there,” Nick said, pointing to the chair closest to the window. “Annie was there.” This was the chair beside the fire with easy access to what he now realized was the poker. The table with her goblet on it was on the other side of the chair, the flagon still lying on the floor where she had thrown it, the poker discarded near the door as soon as it had done its job.

  Together they searched the room, stripping the bed down to the straw mattress and then flipping it over to see if anything was hidden underneath, feeling for loose floorboards, slicing pillows open. Nick even ran the tip of his dagger along the sides of the bricks in the hearth to see if there was one that was loose and could be used as a hiding place. Nothing.

  “The room doesn’t feel as if del Toro was staying here,” John said, looking around. “It feels as if it was only used for meetings.”

  “I think you’re right,” Nick said. “We need to talk to the tavern owner.”

  On the way downstairs, Nick knocked on the other door on the landing. When there was no reply, he lifted the latch and went in. It was empty, the bed stripped, the fireplace swept clean. Except for the fire that had been burning in the other room the day before, this room had the same unlived-in feel as the other one. He wondered how a tavern as poor as this could afford to turn away prospective tenants.

  Noting that there were no stairs leading to an attic, Nick and John descended to the taproom.

  The previous day when he had arrived, Nick had been too intent on following Annie to take notice of the tavern owner. And when he left, he had been far too groggy. Now he made a beeline for him.

  “What can I get you gentlemen?” the tapster asked. He showed no sign of having seen Nick the previous day, nor did he comment on what they had been doing upstairs nor even on the dried blood that Nick had yet to wash out of his hair, making it stand up in spikes like the spines of a hedgehog.

  Behind the counter, the man’s huge belly overhung his belt and swayed like a sack of oats stuffed down his shirt as he moved. Forced to stand a pace or two behind the bar to give his enormous girth room, he was round-shouldered from reaching across the gap to set tankards down on the table in front of him. He gave them his new-customer smile, which was not as welcoming as he thought, as it only served to reveal the blackened stumps of his teeth; if his belly proclaimed him to be a prodigious ale drinker, his decayed teeth told Nick that the tapster was also fond of sack, a wine heavily sweetened with sugar and lime.

  Nick could almost hear Rivkah’s voice telling him that sugar was iniquitous to teeth. He could imagine her lecturing the Queen on this point, as it was well known that Elizabeth was fond of sweetmeats, and it had been ruinous to her teeth.

  “I haven’t got all day,” he said, abandoning his friendly demeanor. With his bald head, unshaved jowls, and lowering brows above small, hostile eyes, he had the surly appearance of a bulldog about to be loosed into the bear-baiting pit. “What’ll it be?”

  Nick stepped back from the charnel-house reek of his breath. “Just a few questions.”

  The man belatedly registered that they were somehow connected with the authorities and had no business going upstairs. Nick saw a shutter slide down behind the man’s eyes like a shopkeeper putting his board up for the night. “As I said, I’m busy.”

  John pointedly surveyed the two sleeping patrons and the otherwise empty tavern. “He’s run off his feet,” he observed to Nick. “This place is heaving. We must
ask him what his secret is.” As a tavernkeeper himself, he knew that mornings were the slackest time of the day.

  “When did the Spaniard and the young man first approach you to rent the upstairs room?” Nick asked.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the tavernkeeper replied.

  But Nick had seen his eyes shift sideways and knew he was lying. He leaned his elbows on the table, even though it brought him in contact with the man’s odious breath. “I warn you that if you do not cooperate, you will find yourself on a treason charge.”

  The man reared back as if Nick had spat in his face. “Treason!” he blustered. “I am a loyal citizen of Her Majesty. I know of no treason. I only wanted to make a few shillings.”

  This last utterance had been tantamount to an admittance, and the man knew it. He looked at the snoring forms of the men at his tables. “Let me see them off first,” he muttered. Lumbering around the bar, he grasped each by the back of his collar and heaved them unceremoniously out the door into the street, where they lay in the mud, blinking blearily in the sunlight. The barman slammed the door and bolted it.

  “It weren’t no Spaniard paid me for the rooms, nor no young man neither,” he said, coming back and standing behind the bar as if glad to have a barrier between him and his interrogators. “It were an Englishman. A gent.”

  “What did he look like?” Nick asked.

  The man rubbed his nose. “Dunno,” he said. “A gent.”

  That was how the boatman had said his friend Sam had described the voice of the man talking to the foreigner at Wood Wharf. The foreigner was del Toro, of that Nick was now certain. But the description of the “gent” from both Sam and the tavernkeeper was too vague to be of use. Nick believed him. People from different classes tended only to notice the general characteristic of a class not their own—velvet instead of fustian; an educated voice instead of the cant of local dialect. To most aristocrats, servants were anonymous beings who did the daily chores they themselves were too privileged to soil their hands with. To a working man, a gent was someone who did not work as hard as he did for a living. Both attitudes lay rooted in contempt.