“Sit down, for pity’s sake,” the Queen commanded.
As if by magic, a servant placed a chair on the Queen’s left. Nick sat.
“Tell me about this traitor, Annie O’Neill.”
So Nick did, trying to keep his voice low.
“Pity,” Elizabeth said. “I was going to issue a patent restoring her family’s ancestral rights next year. Her father would have been an earl again.”
At the word earl, Essex leaned forward and glowered at Nick. He must have thought Nick and the Queen were talking about him. Either that, or he was still sulking about the loss of his ship and the fact that Nick had not gone down with it.
“Ignore him,” Elizabeth said. “He’s miffed because I’ve ordered him back to the Netherlands.” She shot Essex an irritated look. “If he can’t keep his own agents in check, he’s better off on the battlefield. Isn’t that right, Robin?” she called in a loud voice.
He hadn’t heard her conversation with Nick so did not know to what she referred, but like the good obsequious courtier that he was, he smiled and kissed the tips of his fingers to her.
“Pah!” the Queen snorted, turning her back on him. Perhaps she had gotten wind that Essex and Annie had been lovers.
Nick saw an angry color rise in Essex’s cheeks at Elizabeth’s contemptuous dismissal. For a moment, Nick thought he was going to storm off in a snit, but evidently he wasn’t that rash. Instead, he snapped his fingers at a hovering page carrying a ewer of wine and held out his goblet to be refilled. He drank deeply and held it out again. It was obvious that he had decided to keep his temper and his seat, but he would steadily drink himself insensible.
So much for poor Will Shakespeare’s hopes of impressing his patron with his first attempt at a play. Essex had abandoned any attempt at polite conversation with the girl next to him and sat hunched over his goblet, glowering at the stage. Caught between Essex’s black mood and the Queen’s, the poor girl must have felt that summer had quickly become deepest winter.
Nick had not yet told the Queen that he was sure he had spotted Annie, alive and well, in the tiltyard that morning. He was debating whether to do so when there was a beating of drums from the stage and an actor stepped forward.
“Your Majesty,” he said, making a deep bow to Elizabeth with an elaborate flourish of the hand. He bowed to the Queen of the May and then to Essex, as protocol demanded. The girl blushed. Essex grunted and slurped his wine.
“Gentles,” the actor said to the rest of the audience, again bowing.
“Get on with it, man,” the Queen snapped.
Nick saw the anxious face of Will peek around the curtains. Nick gave him the thumbs-up, but he could see his friend was so overwrought that he looked on the verge of vomiting.
“The Ghost!” the actor proclaimed.
Another drumroll and the curtains opened to reveal the battlements of a castle at night and two men standing guard. A third man entered stage left.
“How now, good men. Hast thou seen it again this night?”
“Not I, Prince Hamlet.”
“Not I.”
“Well, ’tis but your fantasy. Good morrow to you both.”
“Stay a while and watch with us. We swear it is not a dream of fevered minds, but fact.”
The Queen yawned. Nick winced for his friend. So far the play was not exactly gripping. Nick wondered what Will had been thinking when he offered it to Essex for the grand finale of the May Day celebrations. It was set at night, in winter, and, instead of the theme of new life, the action of the play was about death and ghosts.
Nick envisioned all the sad, drunken soliloquies in The Black Sheep with Will opining the play’s disastrous opening night, and it would be Nick’s ear Will would be bending.
Nick watched with a fixed look of interest on his face as the play proceeded, but he was not really paying attention. He was thinking of what the boatman had said about the woman the sailor had seen sleeping on The Dalliance before it caught fire. At first Nick had assumed the woman was Annie, but now that he had seen Annie alive and well with his own eyes, he realized it must have been someone else, probably a whore lured there by Annie with the gift of her jasper ring, then murdered so that if her body were found, it would appear Annie had perished. That meant that either Stace’s death had been an accident—he had always moved slowly—or Annie had called on her friends to lure Nick to the boat.
Nick thanked his stars that he had had the foresight to ask Eli to look at the corpse. He had the jasper ring in his possession, intending to return it to Annie’s family. Nick smiled wolfishly to himself. Now he would return it in person, just before he arrested her for murder and treason. Once in the Tower with all its fearsome instruments of torture, Annie would give up Gavell.
Nick tried to pick up the thread of the play: apparently, the ghost was the murdered father of Hamlet who had demanded that his death be avenged. As far as Nick could tell, Hamlet was thrown into a tizzy by this revelation. Nick couldn’t really follow it, but the plot somehow meant something to him, although he couldn’t for the life of him think what it was.
“Swear.”
His eye fell on Edmund, who had moved to the front of the crowd and was standing next to Essex. He seemed absolutely enthralled by the action on stage, his face pale with concentration, his fingers playing with the chain at his neck. At least Nick would be able to report to Will that someone was enjoying his play.
“Or such ambiguous giving out, to note you know ought of me.”
Well, that was certainly true of Annie, Nick thought. He had had no idea of how treacherous she was.
A faint snoring came from his right. Nick glanced over and saw that the Queen had dropped off.
The play droned on, people leapt about, and then there was a fight scene at the end in which everyone, so far as Nick could tell, died. The bodies were carried off by two stagehands posing as servants—Will was one of them, looking thoroughly tragic, and Nick could tell he wasn’t acting—noble attributes were ascribed to the hero, although Nick had a hard time remembering why he was so heroic, considering he had been utterly indecisive for most of the play and was definitely a mamma’s boy. Then the actors appeared on the stage and took their bows.
The desultory clapping wakened the Queen.
“Oh, marvelous,” she shouted, throwing wilted flowers onto the stage. “Bloody marvelous. Well done indeed.” Then she grabbed Nick’s arm. “Help me up,” she said. “I’m dying for a pee.”
CHAPTER 28
City of London
Nick slept the night again in the palace, using the same room, so that he would be closer to the city the next day.
He arose at sunrise, about five o’clock, stopped off in the palace kitchens on his way out to beg some bread and small beer from the yawning servants, then walked to King Street, the road running west of the palace, and followed it north toward Charing Cross. At the cross, he turned right and walked east up the Strand toward the center of London.
His plan was vague. All he knew for certain was that he intended to revisit the house near Moorfields, hoping against hope that Annie would return to it. If she was running around London in disguise, then she would need her costumes and makeup in order to change her appearance. He was still astonished that she would have been so rash as to appear at court the day before, albeit disguised. Was she tracking him in order to complete her mission and kill him? Is that what her Spanish masters required?
Nick did not know what she was up to, but he intended to make himself an easy target. His former qualms about killing a woman had completely vanished. If he could not take her alive, then he would run her through with his sword without hesitation. She was far too dangerous to be allowed to live.
His route to Moorgate took him past Thomas’s lodgings. On a whim, Nick decided to go in. Thomas was not in residence. After recovering from the poisoning attempt, he had decided to visit his home in the country despite being on the outs with his wife. He had left a jokey message
for Nick saying that, if he died, Nick was to consider his wife the prime suspect. Considering how close his brush with death had been, and how much his wife hated Thomas, Nick did not think this amusing in the least.
He knocked on the landlady’s door. No answer.
“She’s gone to market,” a voice said.
A stunted, malodorous figure emerged from the gloom of the hallway.
“Harold?”
“At your service.” Harold, the usually out-of-work rat-catcher, gave an incongruous bow, his rattraps swinging from one hand.
“I thought you were … well, unemployed,” Nick said.
Harold shrugged. “I keeps me hand in,” he said. “Besides, me rates are cheap, and Mistress here likes cheap.”
Nick remembered the empty grate in the fireplace even though the room was cold, and there was a big basket of logs on the hearth. He had been right about her; she was one of those women who was penny wise, pound foolish. Employing a hopeless case like Harold who, if Bankside gossip was to be believed, hadn’t caught a single rat in his entire sorry career, was a case in point.
Mistress Shrewsbury was the type of woman who would buy one mangy turnip at the market and one scrawny pullet and then live on the soup for days. Then she would have to pay a quack an exorbitant fee for an elixir that settled her stomach after having given herself food poisoning. Given the size of her house in such a prosperous neighborhood, and the fact that she had only herself to feed—and her cats, of course, and from what Nick had seen on his last visit, they were so well fed and indolent that they wouldn’t turn a whisker if a rat ran right under their noses—Nick could not imagine that she needed to live this way. She was obviously a miser, and now she had employed the worst rat-catcher in London, foolishly thinking she was saving money.
“How long have you been coming here?” Nick asked.
“Oh, ages.”
Typical, thought Nick. Harold had been coming for months, and Mistress Shrewsbury was still complaining about her rat infestation. But it gave Nick an idea.
“Were you here the day Sir Thomas Brighton was poisoned?”
“I come every morning to inspect the traps.”
Which were empty, Nick noticed. Any rat worth his salt could outwit Harold’s traps. In the rat community, they probably passed around blueprints and discussed ways of springing them without injury. This thought diverted Nick somewhat from his growing impatience. Harold was infuriatingly obtuse. Having a conversation with him was as frustrating and pointless as explaining the finer points of geometry to an ape.
“Harold, did you see anyone?”
“A young man on the stairs.”
Finally.
“Was he a lad?” It could have been the boy from the tavern down the street delivering the wineskin to Sir John.
“I just told you. A man. Young.”
“Could it have been a woman dressed up as a man?”
Harold just stared openmouthed.
Nick gave up on that one. Obviously, the notion of cross-dressing had never entered his innocent—or vacuous—mind. “What was he doing?”
“Dropping something off in that man’s room.”
“Which man? The fat one or the thin one?”
Harold grinned. “Nah. Stealing from Peter to give to Paul.” When he saw Nick’s incomprehension, he added, “Nicked a wineskin leaning against the fat git’s door and put it in the other git’s room opposite.”
Even though Nick usually avoided touching any part of Harold’s disgusting clothes—more rags than cloth—he gripped him by both shoulders. Harold looked alarmed and glanced down at Nick’s hands, then up into his face.
“Are you arresting me?” he asked.
“No, Harold, me old chum,” Nick said. “But there’s a shilling in this if you think very, very carefully before you answer my next question.”
Harold’s red-rimmed eyes came alive for the first time. He was a notorious toper.
“Would you recognize this ‘man’ if you saw him again?”
“Expect so,” Harold said, hawking a gob of phlegm into the back of his throat.
Nick let go hurriedly and tossed him a shilling.
Harold bit it, then put it somewhere in the pile of rags he called clothes. “Ta, Nick.”
“Did he see you?”
“Nah,” Harold said. “I was in the hallway looking up at him.” He pointed up the stairs, and both doors were clearly visible. “Then I went out back. I was crouched down at the side of the house laying me traps when he came out. Got a good old look. He had no idea I was there.”
Better and better. As much as Nick tried to avoid being in close proximity to Harold, owing to his stench, Nick did not want to see him floating facedown in the river.
“Make sure I can get hold of you in a hurry,” Nick warned.
Harold slung his empty rattraps over his shoulder. “I’ll let you know when I go on me holidays, then,” he said, and went out the front door, turning left toward the tavern.
Nick stared after him. To his knowledge, Harold had never made a joke before.
* * *
When he arrived at the small house in Moorgate, Nick discovered that the door he had kicked in had been repaired. Aside from his glimpse of Annie in the tiltyard, this was the first hint he’d had that she was indeed alive and no ghost. He kicked the door in again and entered.
Her bedchamber and dressing room looked almost the same as when he had searched it with John. Except, he noticed, items on the dressing table were slightly rearranged—the pot of glue for sticking on beards was in a different place; the candles on the mirror had burned lower. And there was a faint scent of sandalwood in the room. Annie’s perfume. She had definitely been here recently. The bedcover was more rumpled than he remembered, and there was an indentation in the pillow. So she had slept here.
He checked the other room, but it was empty, although there were charred logs and ash in the fireplace whereas it had been swept clean before. He put his fingers on the ash; still faintly warm. Another indication that the rooms had been recently occupied.
He sat down in a chair and prepared to wait for Annie’s return. Then his eye caught something on the floor, halfway under the bed. He bent to pick it up. It was a forget-me-not, broken at the stem. Staining the planks of the floor were yellow pollen stains and a single buttercup petal. Wildflowers.
Nick got up and left the house. Looking over the wall onto Moorfields, he saw that the entire area was covered with buttercups, forget-me-nots, and flowering clover. He went back inside the bedroom and stood looking at the floor for a long moment, then made up his mind. Leaving the house, he quickly walked through the Guildhall district to Fenchurch Street, then south into Eastcheap and thence east into the Ward of Billingsgate and to the church of St. Mary-at-Hill.
In the graveyard, he saw an ancient crone placing flowers in a tin cup on Protea’s grave.
At Nick’s approach, the old woman turned. Her back was bent; long gray hair straggled over her face, obscuring it; a filthy shawl covered her head. But the eyes under matted gray eyebrows were not wrinkled at the corners or clouded with cataracts. They were as green as the Emerald Isle, as clear as its mountain streams.
Nick’s hand went to his sword. “Hello, Annie.”
CHAPTER 29
The Mermaid Tavern
Nick had been gone from Bankside almost two days—all May Day and most of the next. When he returned to The Black Sheep, he found a message waiting for him from his brother. Robert had arrived and was staying at The Mermaid Tavern near St. Paul’s; could Nick come by as soon as may be, as Robert had some urgent news for him?
Nick could guess what Robert had to tell him, as Nick had asked him to make some inquiries for him weeks ago, just after he returned to London. Robert had obviously thought the information he was bringing too important to entrust to a messenger; besides, Robert was keen to purchase a house in London. It gave him a good reason to come to the city without anyone getting suspicious.
On the third of May, Nick returned to the city of London, first leaving a message at Leicester House and then walking to The Mermaid, where he and Robert talked until after dark. Then he made his way home across London Bridge to Bankside.
The following morning, Nick went upstairs to his old room—now John’s sickroom—to check on his friend. There had been no change except that John was progressively wasting away, diminishing before Nick’s very eyes.
His eyes filmed over as he looked at the still figure on the bed.
“I will avenge him, I swear,” Nick said to Maggie. Her face was haggard as she looked up at him from her vigil beside the bed, her eyes dull.
Then, to John, “Just hold on. Almost there. Be patient, my friend.” Nick was conscious of echoing Walsingham’s words to him when they were in the carriage on the way to Whitehall.
Nick turned on his heel and left the room, his face grim.
Hector looked up hopefully from his place near the front door of the tavern.
“Come on, then,” Nick said.
Hector sprang joyfully to his feet and nuzzled Nick’s hand by way of thanks. Nick had been leaving him at The Black Sheep to guard the family in place of John. Now Nick could see he might have a use for his gigantic hound. Besides, he had missed him, and the poor dog needed to stretch his legs after being cooped up for so long.
Before taking a wherry across the river, Nick let Hector bound around Paris Garden for an hour, stretching his long legs and sniffing at every rabbit hole and clump of weeds in the vast area. The maypole was still standing, its ribbons blowing in the breeze from the river. Hector urinated copiously on it, marking it for his own.
The Course of All Treasons Page 24