Nick briefly held the boy to him. “It’ll be all right, Henry. John is as strong as an ox, you’ll see.” His voice was even, but inside, Nick felt as if a fist were squeezing his heart.
Without bidding farewell to either Thomas or Kat, Nick and Henry ran down the stairs with Hector loping behind them.
On the way back to the tavern, all Nick could think was that John had been mistaken for him, that it should have been he, Nick, who was attacked, not his friend.
Please God, let him be alive. Please God, Nick kept repeating to himself as he ran down the streets. Then, It’s all my fault.
As they neared the tavern, Nick heard Hector howling.
* * *
Nick expected to find the taproom in an uproar, but after he had shushed Hector, it was strangely quiet. Two men were sitting quietly on a bench near the fire. Nick was astonished to see that it was Henry Gavell and Richard Stace. Nick heard Matty in the back rooms consoling a crying baby Jane.
“What are you doing here?” Nick asked.
“We’re the ones who brought him,” Gavell said.
Nick didn’t have time to question him further. “Where is he?”
“They carried him upstairs,” Gavell said, pointing up to where Nick’s room was located. “The doctors are with him now.”
Nick and Henry ran up the stairs and into Nick’s bedchamber.
John was stretched out on the bed, his face white, his nostrils strangely pinched at the edges and his eyes sunken. A bandage was wrapped around his head, obscuring most of his hair. Nick gave a shiver of premonition. John looked as if he had been prepared for burial with a bandage to keep his jaw from falling open. Maggie was on her knees beside the bed, holding one of John’s hands and weeping.
Henry rushed to kneel beside his mother, putting his arms around her.
“Is he …?” Nick began to say, but couldn’t get the word out. He was paralyzed by the facsimile of a deathbed scene before his eyes.
Rivkah came to him quickly. “He lives,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “His pulse is weak, but he lives.” Those were almost the exact words she had used for Thomas.
Nick suddenly felt as if his legs wouldn’t hold him up. He sank down on a stool and put his head in his hands.
“He is in a coma,” Eli said, his face grave. Then in a low voice so Maggie and Henry would not hear, “We fear he may not wake.”
Nick lifted his head. “What can I do?”
“Nothing,” Rivkah said. “All we can do is wait.”
Nick stood and went over to the bed. He looked down at his friend lying so still, so deathlike that the covers over his chest barely moved.
“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching down and touching John’s hand.
“Sorry?” Maggie said, looking up at him. “You’re sorry?” Then suddenly she was on her feet, beating at Nick’s chest and face with her fists, screaming into his face. “What was he doing in Seething Lane? He was only meant to go to the Brewers’ Guild. You should have gone yourself rather than always getting John to run your errands. You call him a friend, but he is nothing but a servant to you. As are we all to your exalted kind, Your Lordship.” She spat out this last, and Nick flinched.
He did nothing to defend himself but stood there, the blows thudding against him. In a strange way, he welcomed her anger, her fists striking his face. It was a kind of atonement for the guilt he felt. She was right. He had treated John like a lackey. Nick was no better than Essex. Not only had Nick used John to do his dirty work, but he had dragged all those he cared about most in the world into a cesspit of lies, treason, and death. Now his best friend lay mortally injured and might never recover. If Nick could have changed places with John, he would gladly have done so. Now, because of his abominable pride, it was too late.
Then Henry was pulling his mother off. “Don’t,” he said. “It isn’t Nick’s fault.”
“It is my fault,” Nick said. Then he turned and left the room.
* * *
In the taproom below, Nick sat heavily on a bench, his hands loose between his knees. Hector came over and leaned against his legs. Nick draped an arm over the dog’s flanks and pressed his face into his neck.
“Sorry about your mate,” Gavell said.
Nick sat up. “Forgive my manners,” he said. “I must thank you for bringing John here.” He got up, went behind the bar, and drew off three tankards of ale. He gave one each to the men and sat down with the third. Of course, it was possible that the two men had attacked John themselves and then, posing as Good Samaritans, brought him to The Black Sheep in order to get closer to Nick on his home turf. Nick knew he should not take anything they said at face value.
“Tell me what happened,” Nick said, turning to Gavell.
Gavell was looking at him suspiciously. He took a drink, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, perhaps a delaying tactic in order to get his story straight. Nick waited, idly fondling Hector’s ears but keeping a sharp eye on Gavell’s expression for any sign that he was lying.
“Me and Richie figured that if we staked out Seething Lane, sooner or later we’d catch you going in to report to Walsingham.” He gave a small smile. “We thought we’d rough you up a bit to teach you a lesson.”
“Fair enough,” Nick said. So far, Gavell’s account had the ring of truth. Nick had gotten the best of them in two fights, and it must have rankled them deeply. He could imagine them brooding on their humiliation and plotting revenge.
“Then we saw your friend go in. We wondered if he were just meeting you and that you’d come out with him, so we waited. Then we saw this man come round the side of the building. He looked suspicious-like, as if he’d been hiding there. When your friend came out, this other man hit him with something from behind.”
Gavell looked at Nick. “It wasn’t sportsmanlike,” he said, “to come at him from behind. A dirty trick, if you ask me.”
So was waiting to ambush Nick in Seething Lane, Nick thought. This was where their story began to sound implausible.
The lines around Gavell’s eyes crinkled in amusement.
“Think I’m just a thug, don’t you?” he said. “But I have my standards.”
Nick nodded. “I don’t doubt it.”
“Anyway, me and Richie shouted and ran over. The man was going to hit him again in the head, but he scarpered when he saw us coming.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
Gavell shook his head. “He was wearing a cloak with the hood pulled up.”
Conveniently anonymous, Nick thought. Only John could tell him what really happened, so there was no evidence to gainsay Gavell’s story. Even if John woke up, there was a very real possibility he would remember nothing of his attack. Rivkah had warned Nick that memory loss was a common side effect of severe blows to the head.
“Could John’s assailant have been a woman?” Nick asked.
Gavell opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. He looked into his drink. “I hate to think it.”
That, at least, was an honest answer, Nick thought.
They sat in silence for a few moments. Nick was picturing John facedown on the ground, his assailant poised to give him his death blow. Wary as he was of Gavell and Stace, he would always be grateful to them for intervening.
“Anyway, I checked to see if he were living,” Gavell went on. “Then I got Richie to pick him up, and we brought him here.”
“Why didn’t you take him into the house on Seething Lane?” Nick asked.
“We thought his wife would prefer it if we brought him here,” Gavell said.
When Nick looked startled, Gavell chuckled. “We’ve done our homework on you and your friend,” he said. “We’re not as dumb as we look. Well, I’m not,” he added. “Now Richie there”—he nodded at his friend leaning against the bar happily consuming his fourth tankard of ale—“is as dumb as he looks. But there’s no harm in him. Born like that.”
Like Ralph, Nick thought.
“Why did you set on Ed
mund at Wood Wharf?” Nick asked.
Gavell shrugged. “Can’t stand the little git. Always licking Essex’s arse. Showing up when he’s not wanted.”
To a man like Gavell, who had probably been born into poverty and made his own way in the world since birth, a man like Edmund, who had been raised in comparative wealth as the son of a prosperous farmer, was incomprehensible. What Gavell took for weakness and sycophancy was probably Edmund’s anxiety at the very real prospect of penury. The highways and byways of England were filled with landless men looking for work. Edmund must be terrified of becoming one of them—unshaved, ragged, starving, wandering the countryside like packs of feral dogs. It made Nick feel all the more guilty that he couldn’t, in all conscience, recommend Edmund to Walsingham when Essex returned to the Netherlands. He wondered whether Robert could take him on as a secretary or recommend him to someone in Oxford. Nick made a mental note to ask his brother when he next saw him. After all, he owed Edmund his life.
Before Nick could defend Edmund to Gavell, Eli and Rivkah came down the stairs. Both were somber.
Nick stood, expecting the worst. “How is he?”
“The same,” Eli said. “I’m going home to study some of my books about head injuries. I may learn something there that will help, but I think the only thing we can do is keep him quiet and wait. Sometimes the brain has a way of healing itself. We don’t know why. So far there is no sign of swelling. If that should happen, I will have to relieve the pressure on his brain.”
“How will you do that?” Nick asked, fearing the answer.
“By removing a small piece of his skull and draining out the blood,” Eli said. “The ancient Greeks did it, and I have seen it done in Spain.”
Nick shuddered. “Was it successful?”
Eli shook his head. “The procedure is simple enough, but the shock of it can kill the patient even if the subsequent infection does not. I’m sorry I do not have better news.”
“Pray for him,” Rivkah said, putting her hand on Nick’s arm and giving it a squeeze. “We will be back later. If there is any change, send for Eli at home and me at the infirmary.”
Nick and Gavell sat down again. Maggie had stopped wailing, but somehow her silence was worse. Nick was afraid to go up in case he provoked her again. He felt utterly helpless. He couldn’t even help with the baby, as he could hear Matty singing a soft lullaby to her in the back room.
“I’d better get Richie back or he’ll drink himself blind,” Gavell said after a while.
Nick nodded. “Will you inform me if you spot Annie?” That would be a test of Gavell’s story, Nick thought. If they truly wanted to catch John’s assailant and the murderer of a fellow agent, they would do as he asked, even if that meant betraying a friend.
Gavell nodded glumly. “I reckon. But I still can’t believe that lass could be capable of such a cowardly act.”
* * *
After Gavell and Stace left, Nick took a piece of parchment and wrote on it: Closed until further notice: sickness in the family. Then he nailed it to the front door of The Black Sheep.
CHAPTER 21
The Black Sheep Tavern, Bankside
Instead of walking around Southwark, Nick spent the next week wandering around London with Hector. He now realized he should have done this from the first, that Annie was not likely to cross London Bridge into his territory, that she would have more chance of stalking him in the city. He had given Hector a handkerchief of Annie’s that he had taken from her room at Leicester House to smell, but in a city as large and populated as London, Nick knew even Hector’s nose would not be able to track her.
Each night he returned to The Black Sheep to keep vigil beside John’s bed while Maggie slept with her arms pillowed under her head on the coverlet. Maggie had forgiven him, or at least she did not rail at him anymore but went about the tavern quietly, almost without speaking, even to her own children. Nick would have preferred her to take out her anger at him, to scald him with words of reproach and vituperation, to bruise his face with her fists. It was what he deserved.
Nick, Maggie, and Henry spelled each other beside John’s bedside, seeing to his needs, dribbling water and clear broth into his mouth in order to give him some nourishment. Rivkah and Eli came multiple times a day, each time checking for bleeding in John’s brain. Each day they did not find it, they counted it a good sign. But still John did not awaken out of his deathlike slumber.
The tavern remained closed. Customers came to ask about John, then went away again, shaking their heads. If they were angry that they had lost their chief source of entertainment and gossip after a hard day’s work, no one gave a sign of it. Instead, small gifts were left outside the door or placed shyly on the bar top—homemade pies, a bucket of fresh milk for the baby, cress and asparagus newly picked from Paris Garden, a bunch of wildflowers, an enormous carp. Even Black Jack Sims, the local crime lord, sent one of his heavies round to ask if there was anything he could do. Maggie turned him away—she would have no truck with criminals—so the man left a gold angel on the bar top and silently left.
Codpiece arrived by barge with a servant carrying a huge basket of luxury foods, like quails’ eggs and white manchet loaves made only with the finest flour for the royal table, custard possets, honeycombs, plucked capons for making broth, and many other good and nourishing things. And a magnificent coverlet made from a dozen lambskins expertly stitched together by the Queen’s ladies and backed with crimson velvet. This was especially welcome, as lambskins were used not only to keep the gravely ill warm but also to prevent bed sores from forming.
“A gift from the Queen for the invalid,” Codpiece announced to an astonished Maggie, who could only bob a shy curtsy as if to the Queen herself and then run back up the stairs with tears in her eyes. Nick noted Codpiece’s deliberate use of the word “invalid” to signify an assumption that John would recover and therefore give hope to Maggie. At that moment, Nick felt an enormous affection and gratitude for his friend’s delicacy. And toward the Queen, whose emissary Codpiece was.
Just before he left, Codpiece handed Nick a piece of parchment. “I know it’s not a good time,” he said. “And the title is unfortunate, to say the least. But the Queen has invited you to a play put on by the Earl of Leicester’s Men at Whitehall on May Day. Will has written it and would especially like you to come. The Queen will understand if you are absent.”
When Codpiece had gone, Nick glanced at the title of the play. The Ghost. It was to be performed at the palace in five days’ time on May first. Nick crumpled the paper in his hand and stuffed it in his pocket. Codpiece was right; given the circumstances, the title couldn’t have been more ironic.
Kat came over every day and saw to the children, making sure their clothes were cleaned and darned, that they were fed. Her girls took it in turns to clean the tavern and the private family rooms and take away John’s bedding to be laundered.
Three days after the attack, Edmund showed up. He seemed ill at ease and did not stay long, refusing the offer of ale.
“Will he die?” he asked.
Nick remembered him using those exact words about Thomas. “We don’t know.” He had made the same reply then. It was strange how history was repeating itself. Compared to the sensitivity Codpiece had shown, Edmund seemed curiously detached. Nick remembered how Edmund had not defended himself against Gavell and Stace’s attack at Wood Wharf, merely curling himself up in a ball with his hands over his head waiting for the kicking to stop. Again, Nick wondered at Essex’s lack of judgment in hiring Edmund, a man who seemed to have such an abhorrence of violence.
“I’m sorry,” Edmund told Nick, as if sensing that something more sympathetic was required. “I know you and he are good friends. It must be terrible for you.”
Nick didn’t reply. His haggard and unshaven face spoke volumes.
Edmund put a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “I know how it feels to lose someone you love.”
Nick was left with a strange feeling of h
aving received formal condolences after a funeral.
The one conspicuous absentee among the well-wishers was Essex. He had shown himself capable of compassion when Thomas was poisoned, but as he doubtless considered John Nick’s servant, the wounded man was obviously beneath his concern.
No one except the immediate family, Nick, Eli, and Rivkah were allowed upstairs. Maggie stood watch over her husband like a she-wolf, making sure there was no noise to disturb him except the soft sound of her voice murmuring endearments, begging him to open his eyes for the love of God, sometimes berating him for leaving her a widow a second time. When Nick would hear this, he would put his arms about her and hold her while she wept inconsolably into his chest, even in her grief trying to smother the sound so John would not be disturbed in whatever place he had retreated to.
“John has the best wife in the world,” Nick whispered. “And when he wakes up, I will tell him that.”
Maggie gave him a watery smile, her lips trembling. “He knows,” she said.
Even more forlorn than Maggie was Matty. Nick had not paid her much attention as she looked after Jane, the baby. From her days as a cinders in Whitehall Palace until he had brought her to live at The Black Sheep the previous autumn, Matty had developed the habit of keeping in the background. In the palace, she had been a night creature, tiptoeing into people’s bedchambers to make up the fires for the morning. Her unobtrusiveness was deeply ingrained, although Nick had seen signs of more confidence in her of late, especially when she sat with Henry in a corner of the taproom in the evenings. He was teaching her to read and write, and sometimes Nick saw her laughing at something Henry said.
One night, as Nick sat with Hector beside the fire in the empty taproom, she approached him. The first he was aware of her presence was her small hand on his shoulder, which made him jump.
“Matty,” he said. “Is all well?”
In the darkness of the room, the dying flames of the fire flickering on the walls, dressed in her nightdress, Matty looked as ghostly as when she had lived all her days indoors like a woodland creature that came out only at night.
The Course of All Treasons Page 19