The Course of All Treasons

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  “Is he going to die?” she whispered, tears leaking from her eyes.

  Suddenly, Nick understood. It had been John who had first interviewed Matty when they were investigating the murders of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting; it had been John who had first shown her kindness and gained her trust. And it was John’s baby that she looked after now. Not only was she mourning the loss of a friend, but she must be terrified she would be sent back to the palace if John should die.

  Nick knew he could not reassure her as if she were a child, that he owed her the truth. “We don’t know, Matty,” he said. “But be assured that The Black Sheep is your home. We are your family now, whatever befalls. This I promise.”

  He tilted up her chin and looked into her eyes. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now go back to bed and say your prayers for John.”

  She turned away, then quickly spun round and planted a kiss on Nick’s cheek before disappearing into the family quarters at the back of the tavern.

  Even Hector was subdued. He lay on the floor of the tavern with his great head on his paws, his eyes mournfully following Nick. When Nick wasn’t sitting staring at nothing, he was pacing up and down, unable to keep still but not able to set his hand to anything. His mind was in turmoil. He simply could not forgive himself for putting John in harm’s way. If only he had not asked him to go to Seething Lane. He should have known that was the first place Annie would look for him.

  There was another thought at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t come at it clearly. It had something to do with the fact that it had not been raining that day and John had not taken his cloak. Every time Nick thought he was on the point of understanding why this was significant, it slipped away. Eventually, he gave up, hoping that it would come back to him when he least expected it. Since receiving his own head wound, he hadn’t been thinking clearly, but he knew that did not excuse him from culpability for John’s grievous injury. He refused to think about what he would do if John died.

  A week passed. As there was no change in John’s condition other than that he seemed to shrink each day as his flesh wasted off his bones, and as there was no swelling Eli or Rivkah could detect over the site of the wound, Eli spent more time at the infirmary. It was Rivkah who came more often.

  One evening, Nick watched as she picked up her cloak and, as was her habit when she went outdoors, wrapped it tightly about her and put up her hood.

  “Any change?” Nick asked from the shadows of the room.

  Rivkah jumped. “I didn’t see you there.” Then she shook her head. “No change.”

  “I’ll walk you home,” Nick said, lighting a lantern with a taper he’d lit from the fire.

  “No need,” she replied.

  “Hector needs a walk.”

  Nick called the dog to him and took her basket. Then he opened the door so she could step out first.

  They walked in silence, the lantern casting just enough light that the ground immediately in front of them was illuminated and they could avoid the potholes and deep ruts the heavy winter rains had made in the street. Hector coursed ahead, then doubled back, never leaving them for long, as if he were scouting ahead to make sure it was safe.

  As if by mutual agreement, they passed Rivkah’s door and carried on along the river. It was late, and the night was pitch-black. A mild spring breeze was blowing off the river, bringing the smell of river mud and seaweed, fish and the tang of smoke. When they came to a stone wall next to some steps, Nick stopped and set the lantern on the wall. Without speaking, they both sat down and gazed into the blackness ahead, the sound of the river murmuring at their feet, a giant slumbering presence in an otherwise empty world. Nick felt as if he and Rivkah had been cast up on a distant island, the mainland visible but unattainable because he had never learned to swim.

  “What you said about loyalty to your people?” Nick began. He stopped and looked at Rivkah. She had thrown her hood back, and her hair was blowing in the wind off the water. He saw the white flash of her hand as she smoothed it back from her face. He looked back into the blackness ahead. “I feel the same way, except my people are not members of a race or even a religion, but those I love. My family, my friends, my neighbors.”

  You.

  Now she turned to look at him, her face a white oval in the dark, her black hair indistinguishable from the night. “Love is the best kind of loyalty there is,” she said. “Most people are loyal to ideas. They turn God into an idea in order to justify their acts of cruelty. But it is themselves and their desires whom they serve, not God.”

  “And what of vengeance on behalf of someone you love?” Nick asked. “Is that not also an act of loyalty?”

  “You are thinking of the woman who attacked John?”

  “And Thomas. And murdered Simon Winchelsea.”

  “You are not asking the right person. I have taken an oath to do no harm.”

  “You also have a saying, ‘An eye for an eye.’ What would you do if someone tried to harm Eli?”

  “I would kill him.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Somers Quay, Port of London

  Nick had just returned to The Black Sheep after a fruitless day of wandering around London in the hopes that he could draw Annie out into the open when someone hammered on the front door. When Nick opened it, Henry Gavell was standing there.

  “Come in,” Nick said, opening the door wider. He assumed Gavell was paying a call to ask about John. Whether he was doing this out of the kindness of his heart or because he feared that John might awake and tell Nick it was Gavell who had attacked him, Nick did not know. He was surprised to see Gavell on his own and not accompanied by his silent shadow, Richard Stace.

  Gavell remained standing in the street. There was a curious tension in his face, the skin stretched taut around the mouth, his expression flat. “I think I have a lead on Annie. I overheard Essex giving instructions to a sea captain. Apparently, Essex has stock in a ship moored at Somers Quay, bound for Antwerp. He told the captain to expect a passenger and that this passenger were to be hidden until after the ship sets sail tonight on the outgoing tide. Richie’s keeping watch on the ship now.”

  Nick buckled on the sword belt he had just taken off and slipped a dagger in a sheath down his right boot.

  “Let’s go,” he said. Then, as Hector got up, “Not you, pal. Sorry.” Hector gave a mournful whine and flopped down on the floor again.

  Although Hector was a strong swimmer, Nick was afraid that if he went into the water, he would be crushed between the ships moored at the quays, and the current near London Bridge could be fierce.

  Twilight was falling as Nick and Gavell walked north over London Bridge, the sun sinking in red and pink ribbons behind Whitehall Palace and St. James’s Park. Shopkeepers were putting up their shutters for the night. It was that time of day when the gender, character, and moral intent of those out and about in the streets underwent a sea change. Innocent shoppers—mostly women, household servants, or children sent on errands—had gone home. Empty carts driven by farmers that had come laden with produce to the city that morning were now trundling south again toward the countryside a few miles past the sprawl of Southwark.

  Now Nick and Gavell were jostled by bands of loud, inebriated young men walking south along the bridge toward the brothels, taverns, and bear- and bull-baiting rings of Bankside. The only people going north into the city, aside from Nick and Gavell, were Black Jack Sims’s lads—footpads and latch lifters, in the main—eager to prey on the careless and unsuspecting citizens of London. A few of them recognized Nick and grinned unashamedly. Their nightly commute from Bankside to London was as ordinary to them as if they were on their way to a night shift as stevedores at the docks. Like Johnnie, Black Jack Sims’s grandson, most of them had been born into the criminal underworld of Bankside and knew no other life.

  “Hello, Phil,” Nick said to one of them. “Don’t get nabbed by the bailiffs.”

&
nbsp; Phil grinned. “You know me better than that, Nick.”

  Then they lost sight of him in the crowd flowing in the other direction over the bridge.

  Gavell was looking at Nick oddly. “You know that man?”

  “Phil’s one of the best latch lifters in London,” Nick explained. “He can be in and out of a house in a trice, no one the wiser.”

  “He’s a thief?” Gavell exclaimed.

  Nick shrugged. “Phil’s never been violent. Only steals from the wealthiest houses where there’s rich pickings and plenty of money to buy more of what he nicks. He’s got a wife and five children to feed. It’s all the profession he knows.”

  “He’d still hang if he were caught. That’s the law.” Gavell looked astonished that Nick should know, and condone, such a man.

  Nick was perhaps not as surprised at Gavell’s moralistic attitude as he could have been. Though Gavell had doubtless committed many an illegal act in his life—with or without the sanction of his master, Essex—Nick had found that those who had managed to lift themselves out of poverty by finding a legitimate profession were often the most condemning of those who operated on the other side of the law.

  Even his own brother Robert was scandalized by the company Nick kept, although he tried to hide it. It was not Gavell and Robert who were at odds with the times, but Nick himself. If he was honest with himself, he had been much like them before he had taken up residence in Bankside.

  The younger son of an earl, he had kept to his exalted social class during his boyhood, he now realized, seldom mixing with boys from the village or surrounding crofts. And when he went up to Oxford, he mostly socialized with his own class, the sons of lords, earls, and gentlemen, or at least those boys fortunate enough to come from families who had money to pay for their education. Soldiering for a few years on the Continent had rubbed away some of the lines that divided the classes. In order to lead soldiers effectively, he had had to get to know them. They had mostly been poor men from failing farms, or even in one case an escaped prisoner about to hang for poaching, just like Simon Winchelsea. But on the battlefield, it was bravery and the bond that came from living at close quarters with one another in almost perpetual danger that counted, not the privilege of birth. Nick had been accepted as one of them, not because he was the son of an earl but because he was quick-witted, decisive, and courageous in a fight. The shared goal of staying alive each day created a strange kind of democracy, almost a brotherhood.

  Once back in England, Nick had gone to live in Bankside, and this same sense of democracy existed among people who knew they were considered scum by decent society. His neighbors—whores, pimps, thieves, hired thugs, vagabonds, forgers, drunks, pickpockets, exiles, and actors—were all considered the dregs of society, but Nick had seen the human face of these social outcasts and called many of them friends. Somehow he doubted that in the wealthier neighborhoods of London, like the great houses on the Strand or the rich merchant houses in Cheapside, John and his family would have been gifted with such generosity and sympathy during their time of need.

  They turned east off the bridge toward the Tower. This stretch between the Tower and the eastern side of London Bridge constituted the great Port of London, with its deep-water berths and long row of quays and wharves. Giant cranes set up along the wharves stood against the darkening sky like enormous gallows, their ropes and pulleys creaking in the wind that blew off the river; massive warehouses, their doors perpetually agape like giant maws insatiable for the goods that poured into London from Europe and the New World, lined the wharves. Nose to stern, the ships were moored from St. Katherine’s Wharf east of the Tower all the way to London Bridge. There must have been a hundred of them. Even with night falling, the wharves were alive with stevedores stacking crates onto carts, which were then pulled by drays to the warehouses and stacked in geometrically aligned rows; customs officials with inky fingers checked off the crates as they were loaded and chalked coded symbols on them so they could be precisely stored and then instantly retrieved for delivery. It was a massive and complicated operation, but somehow everyone on the docks seemed to know their part and where each item should go. The paperwork from the docks alone must be staggering, Nick thought. No wonder his friend Thomas had uncovered widespread fraud at the Custom House last winter. To find a purloined crate of Venetian glass here, a bale of costly tapestries from Bruges there, would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. But discover them Thomas had.

  Fortunately, Nick and Gavell did not have far to walk. Somers Quay was the wharf used exclusively by Flemish merchants, even though trade with Brabant had declined precipitously since the fall of Antwerp the previous year. The quay was the fourth from the bridge, and only one ship was moored there.

  “There she is,” Gavell said, pointing. “The Dalliance.” A sailor nonchalantly leaning against a rail on the ship straightened up and peered down at them.

  “Are you sure she’s on board?” Nick asked.

  “Has to be. She’ll be keeping herself out of sight until the ship sails.”

  “All right. Let’s wait until full dark.”

  They left the wharf, and Gavell led Nick to the mouth of an alley opposite. The massive form of Richard Stace was leaning against the wall of a warehouse. He nodded to his partner.

  “Most of the crew are on shore leave in the taverns and brothels until dark,” Gavell explained. “Then they’re supposed to report back to the ship to get ready to set sail. There’s only a skeleton crew on board now, but they smuggled in doxies so they wouldn’t miss out. We have to go now if we want to search the boat. The man on the gangway knows me from before. I slipped him some coin to let us on board.”

  After waiting for night to fall, they made their way over the road and up the gangplank. As Gavell had promised, the sailor guarding access to the ship let them pass without a challenge. Silently he handed them each a lantern containing a single tallow candle burning behind horn windows.

  “Careful with them lights,” he cautioned.

  “You take the stern, and me and Richie will start at the bow,” Gavell said. “We’ll meet in the middle.”

  It was dark enough on the deck, but once Nick had climbed down the ladder into the first level of the ship, it was like night. His lantern gave a feeble glow, illuminating only a small circle around him. With the constant sound of creaking and the sense of the floor moving beneath his feet, it was like being inside a living thing, like Jonah inside the whale.

  Nick moved cautiously forward, trying not to trip on coils of rope and, in some cases, the bare legs of a copulating seaman and a whore. A couple of the women watched Nick pass by with the same lack of interest they seemed to have for the sailor laboring on top of them.

  “Anything?” Nick asked Gavell when he approached in the center of the boat. Stace was not with him.

  “Nothing.”

  “She won’t be on this level where the sailors’ quarters are,” Nick said. “She’ll be hiding down below in storage, at least until the ship sails.”

  They descended another ladder to the next level and then down again beneath the water line, where the cargo was stored. Except for the dim light of their lanterns, it was pitch-black. As before, Nick turned toward the stern and Gavell to the bow.

  Gingerly Nick made his way forward, listening intently. But all he heard was the rustle and squeak of rats as they scampered away from the light and the sound of his feet stepping around barrels and bales, crates and hogsheads of ale. There was only a narrow plank running down the center of the hull like a spine, the cargo packed above shoulder height on either side. Climbing onto a crate, he held the lantern aloft and looked along the small space between the tops of some bales and the deck above to see if Annie was hiding there, but the space was empty. Then he thought he saw a glimmer of light coming from the far end nearest the stern. From his many voyages to the Continent on ships just like this one, he knew this was where the gunpowder was stored for the muskets the sailors used if they were
attacked by pirates, separated from the rest of the ship by a thick leather curtain and a wooden door lined with tin. The door was ajar and a faint light showed round the edges, flickering as if from a guttering candle. To take a naked flame into a gunpowder room was suicide. Perhaps Annie did not realize the danger she was in.

  Stepping as quietly as he could, he walked toward the opening. Nick felt sweat running from his hairline into his eyes, not only from the fetid closeness of the ship under the water line but also because of the mortal danger of fire and gunpowder. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, then carefully reached down and drew his dagger from his boot. The hull was too crowded with cargo for him to use his sword.

  Just as he reached the door, he heard a sound behind him. He swung round and held up his lantern, but he could see nothing there. He turned back to the door and very gently pushed it open.

  The tiny, triangular room was empty. A lit candle had been stuck down in its own wax on top of one of the gunpowder barrels. Cursing, Nick stepped into the room and pinched it out. That was when he heard the door slam behind him and the sound of a wooden bar being dropped onto iron hooks.

  He heard footsteps moving away. Then he smelled smoke.

  CHAPTER 23

  Somers Quay, The Dalliance

  Cursing, Nick set down the lantern and inserted his dagger into a crack in the door beneath the wooden bar. Then he struggled to lift it. Straining with the weight, he thought he had almost lifted it high enough when it dropped down again. Cursing, he tried again.

  Now smoke was beginning to creep under the door in gray tendrils. Nick coughed and threw all his strength into his wrists and arms. Again, the bar seemed to be lifting clear, but then a sharp pain shot through his wrist and he had to lower the weight of the bar.

  The smoke was thicker now, and he could hear an ominous crackling and feel the door beginning to grow hot. Desperately, he tried again, choking and almost blinded by the smoke. A lick of flame showed through the door near the hinges. Wincing from the pain in his wrists, he tried one more time and felt the bar lift and fall from the door. Pushing open the door, he was almost beaten back by the flames and smoke, but to remain in that confined space with those deadly little barrels of gunpowder was certain death. Placing his arm over his nose and mouth, he ran the gauntlet along the plank down the center of the cargo hold, the bales of cloth stacked on either side a mountain of fire, black smoke roiling from them, sparks singeing his hair and face, flames licking at his body as if he were falling into the very pit of hell.