The Course of All Treasons

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  “I wondered at the time why you did not invite the man you claimed was a messenger into the inn to get warm. It’s what I would have done. But then,” Nick said, “you couldn’t have me seeing him.”

  “He wasn’t much of a servant at the best of times,” Edmund said. “Typical of him to bungle it. I should have done it myself.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Nick asked.

  Edmund smiled. “I had already wounded myself. Stupid, really. Did it on the spur of the moment without thinking. I should have run you through when you were in the ditch, but I couldn’t get the damn horse to calm down.”

  Nick remembered seeing Edmund struggling with his rearing horse, and by that time he was bleeding heavily from the shoulder.

  “Besides,” Edmund said, “on the way back to London, I got to thinking that it would have been too quick if you just died. You needed to suffer more, like I have suffered, like my father suffered. That’s when I decided to go after your friends. Those Jews would have been next, by the way.”

  Nick looked at him. All pity for Edmund had fled. Whatever he had suffered could not excuse the evil that lay at the very center of his being, an evil that was almost palpable in the small room, like the stench of sulfur from the flames of hell.

  “You can come out now!” Nick called.

  The door to the adjoining room opened and Harold the rat-catcher, and Hector, came out. Nick signaled to Hector to stand beside him. To Harold, he said, “Is this the man you saw on the landing picking up Sir John’s wineskin and entering Sir Thomas’s room?”

  “He’s the one,” Harold said with satisfaction.

  “Congratulations, Harold,” Nick said. “You just caught your first rat.”

  Nick waited long enough for Harold to savor his triumph, then nodded at the door. “Hop it,” he said.

  Harold left the room without a murmur. He had been thoroughly briefed by Robert before Nick or Edmund had arrived, and he knew it was for his own safety.

  “You too, Robert,” Nick said.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  This was said in Robert’s big-brother voice. Nick recognized it from his childhood scrapes and smiled. When he was five, he had climbed onto the roof of the barn and then slipped down the side until he was hanging from the edge by his fingertips, the ground fifteen feet beneath him. Robert had come running and had instructed Nick to let go, saying he would catch him. When Nick was too scared, Robert had said exactly the same thing: “I’m not going anywhere.” So Nick had closed his eyes and dropped. Robert caught him, set him safely down, and soundly cuffed him for putting himself in such danger.

  Robert’s stolid presence at his side was like a small candle burning in the vast darkness that was Edmund and the legacy of hate he had inherited from his father. And on Nick’s other side stood Hector, perhaps loyalty incarnate. The dog’s very stillness told Nick that all Hector’s senses were directed at Edmund and his desire to protect his master from threat. Another small light burning bravely in the great darkness.

  “You slipped up when you came to Thomas’s room with Essex,” Nick went on. “You told me you were going to throw the wineskin on the midden out back.”

  Edmund frowned, trying to remember.

  “But how would you have known there was definitely a rubbish heap if you had never been to the house before?”

  “Every house has one,” Edmund sneered. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “True,” Nick said. “But the way you stated it with such confidence told me you were absolutely sure there was one, which meant you had been there before. I didn’t realize at the time, but I knew something was wrong and it niggled at me. Harold’s identification just confirmed it.”

  Edmund glanced at the knife on the table. Robert had forgotten to remove it when he picked up the documents. Robert suddenly realized his mistake and took a step forward, but Nick put out his hand and stopped him. Now it was his turn to protect his brother.

  Suddenly Edmund lunged for the knife. Hector sprang at him, and Nick threw himself forward at the same time, sword out. But Edmund had fooled them. As soon as Nick and Hector started to move right, Edmund moved left and leapt out the open window.

  “Shit,” Nick said.

  Then he followed Edmund out the window.

  CHAPTER 30

  City of London

  Luckily, the room was only one story above the ground floor, and there were barrels of ale stacked against the wall under the window. Even so, Nick landed hard, and a searing pain shot up his legs. He jumped from the barrels to the ground, praying he hadn’t broken any bones. To his relief, his legs held him up. Glancing right and left, he saw Edmund limping down the alley east on Budge Street in the general direction of Billingsgate Fish Market and the docks. He was favoring one leg, and Nick thought he had probably twisted an ankle on landing. From the front of the tavern, he heard Hector baying and the voice of Robert shouting something. Nick had stationed Gavell downstairs in the taproom in case Edmund should try to escape. He should have put him outside but hadn’t thought Edmund would be reckless enough to jump out the window.

  Stupid, stupid, he chided himself.

  “This way,” he yelled, and set off at a run after Edmund. He knew Hector would pick up his scent and the others would be following close behind.

  The warm weather had brought out all of London onto the streets. Edmund must have realized that he had a better chance of escape if he forsook the back alleys and kept to the main thoroughfares, no doubt hoping to get lost in the crowd. But Nick was able to keep him in sight, partly because he had the use of both legs while Edmund was limping. Still, Edmund was running for his life, and this gave him an edge in both speed and cunning. He dodged between shoppers and barged others aside; once Nick almost lost him as he entered a tavern and came out the other side, but Nick was prepared for this, as Annie had done the same thing, and he was determined not to be taken in again.

  Only when Edmund veered left on Walbrook Street and made for the Royal Exchange at the junction of Cornhill and Threadneedle Street did he almost lose him. Nick skidded to a halt at Bank Junction where these two streets converged and surveyed the great open area in front of him. Thronged with people shopping for goods ranging from precious metals to expensive imported wine to bolts of silk and velvet, it was a sea of people in constant motion. Almost anything could be had at the Royal Exchange for a price, and trade was especially brisk this fine May morning. But most people were strolling through the area, and Nick spotted Edmund’s head bobbing through the crowd, parting it like a rampaging bull trampling a wheat field. Then Edmund looked back and Nick saw his face, white and staring, his mouth open as he drew in great gasps of air.

  Nick took off after him, ignoring the shouts and curses of people he was forced to elbow out of his way. When he got to where he had seen Edmund, he looked around and saw him doubling back toward the river. If Edmund caught a wherry, Nick would likely lose him. Somewhere above the hubbub, he heard Hector baying and knew he was tracking Nick through the city.

  When Nick looked back on that day, he couldn’t explain why Edmund did not make for Old Swan Stairs, directly in front of him, but suddenly turned and ran toward St. Mary-at-Hill and the graveyard where Protea was buried. Perhaps he knew that the chances of a boat being immediately available to him were slim to none and that waiting for one would give Nick the precious time he needed to catch up; perhaps he could not run any farther and had decided to seek sanctuary in the church if he could just get to the altar and lay his hands on it, claiming the protection of the church for forty days. After this, he would have to either surrender to the secular authorities or confess his crimes publicly and then abjure the realm. As this meant he would go unpunished, Nick was determined Edmund should not gain asylum. Perhaps Protea herself, the mystery woman Edmund had murdered on The Dalliance, was also of this mind, for when Nick arrived, he saw Edmund leaning on her gravestone trying to catch his breath.

  Nick circled him, sword
drawn, and placed himself in front of the gate that led to the church.

  “It’s over, Edmund,” he said. “In a few moments, my brother and Gavell will be here. You cannot escape.”

  Edmund’s mouth twisted at the corners. Nick couldn’t tell if it was a grimace or a smile.

  “I will never surrender to you,” Edmund said. “You will have to kill me first, as your family killed my father.”

  “Your father took his own life,” Nick reminded him.

  “He had no choice. He was bankrupt.”

  “He did have a choice. As did you,” Nick said, slowly walking toward him. “You are leaning on the gravestone of the woman you murdered on the ship. How will you explain your choice to her?”

  Edmund looked down, surprised, and stepped away from the grave. “I know of no Protea,” he said.

  “That’s the name I gave her, thinking she was Annie.”

  Now Nick and Edmund were facing each other perhaps ten yards apart, swords drawn.

  “Tell me who she was, so I can have the name changed on her tombstone.”

  Edmund shrugged. “Just a whore I picked up on the docks. Told her there was good business to be had on the ship with the sailors, gave her one of Annie’s rings. She thought it meant she had to fuck me.” He laughed. “That suited me. Afterwards, I strangled her and left her in the cargo hold.”

  Again, Nick was stunned by the casual manner in which Edmund referred to his killings. He showed no more emotion than if he had put down a fox that had been raiding the chicken coop. Briefly, Nick wondered if Edmund was insane, but there was no manic gleam in his eyes such as Nick had seen in gaze of the lunatics at Bedlam. Edmund’s eyes registered no grief or joy, nor anger, but a kind of deadly boredom, as if the world did not interest him except as a means of satisfying his desires.

  Only his fingernails, bitten to the quick, a habit even in his Oxford days that Edmund had not succeeded in conquering, suggested something that ate at him without mercy, some torment inside him.

  “And it was you, of course, who locked me in the gunpowder room and started the fire.”

  “Naturally. Shame you escaped. Again.”

  Edmund had been the man the sailor had seen escaping the burning ship. What had niggled at him when the boatman imparted this bit of gossip to Nick on his way to Whitehall was how improbable it was for a sailor not to have recognized someone from his own crew.

  “Richard Stace did not escape,” Nick said. “You have his death on your conscience too.”

  Edmund just shrugged.

  It was fitting, Nick thought, that their final confrontation should end in a graveyard with the dead lying beneath their feet. Edmund’s passage through the world had been marked by death: his father, Simon Winchelsea, the unnamed whore, and indirectly, Richard Stace. That he had failed to kill Thomas, John, and Nick did not signify. He had intended to kill them and must bear the guilt of it on the day of reckoning.

  “Nick!” It was Robert’s voice.

  Nick glanced over his shoulder. “Stay back,” he shouted.

  The momentary distraction was all Edmund needed. He leapt forward and slashed at Nick’s sword, striking it out of the way, then quickly thrust before Nick could bring up his guard, and Nick felt the edge of the blade slice through the shoulder of his sword arm. Immediately, he changed sword hands. He could fight almost as well with his left as his right.

  He saw Edmund’s face register rage for the first time. “Oh, well done,” he mocked. “All that expensive training with a sword master.”

  Nick did not reply. He closed on Edmund, driving him back toward Protea’s grave. Edmund was beginning to parry and slash wildly now, clearly tiring, his twisted ankle slowing him down.

  A kind of fury was building in Nick as he drove Edmund inexorably back. Gone was the pity he had felt for him at Oxford when they were boys, gone the sympathy for the misfortune of Edmund’s family and the guilt that his own family had wanted for nothing. Even if all this was true, it did not exonerate Edmund from his crimes, nor did it explain them. At the heart of Edmund was a great evil, and this evil must be purged from the world if the world were to survive in any form that Nick recognized, a world in which loyalty was based on love and not hate, on protecting life, not taking it.

  Nick’s blade pierced Edmund’s side, and Edmund staggered but remained upright. His doublet began to darken with blood.

  Nick was also bleeding from his shoulder, and droplets of blood flicked onto the gravestones as he moved. The next thrust of his sword took Edmund square in the chest. Edmund blinked and looked down at the shaft of steel protruding from his flesh, Nick’s hand still holding the blade. He looked up at Nick and smiled. It was one of the most ghastly things Nick had ever seen.

  “Finish it,” Edmund said.

  Even on the point of death, Edmund clung to the belief that his father had been a victim, that he himself was a victim. This was the heart of his delusion, Nick realized, the seed that had grown into a great black flower. And now Nick suddenly understood why Edmund was smiling. He would die a victim. In death, he would be vindicated. In his own mind, he saw himself as Hamlet, the tragic prince, done to death by an unjust world.

  All this passed through Nick’s mind as he held the sword. He could withdraw it, and perhaps Edmund would live long enough to be tried and executed. But looking into Edmund’s eyes, he knew he was begging to be allowed to die with his illusions intact.

  “Kill me.”

  Holding Edmund’s gaze, Nick stepped forward and pushed his sword up to the hilt into Edmund’s chest. Their faces were only inches apart, almost like lovers, and Nick felt a great sigh issue from Edmund’s lips, and with it a bloody froth. Edmund’s legs collapsed under him, and Nick caught him under the arms and sat him down, the sword still buried in his chest, grotesquely erupting out his back. Gently, Nick leaned him sideways so that his cheek rested against Protea’s gravestone.

  Edmund’s eyes were beginning to dull, but he was still alive. He tried to speak and his right hand twitched, beckoning. Nick put his ear to Edmund’s mouth.

  “I wanted to be you,” he said.

  And died.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Black Sheep, Bankside

  Sitting at John’s bedside in The Black Sheep, Nick was haunted by Edmund’s final words: “I wanted to be you.”

  He kept seeing Edmund as he had been at Oxford, his wheat-colored hair falling on his forehead, his hesitant smile, his bitten fingernails, the way his eyes looked down and a flush of color suffused his face when Nick and John spurned him. Nick kept asking himself if things would have been different if he and John had invited Edmund into their company. Would a simple act of kindness have been enough to turn away the evil that Edmund had been bequeathed?

  Nick had to keep reminding himself that the taint of Edmund’s father’s sins and his self-murder had already laid their mark on Edmund’s soul by the time he came up to Oxford, like the first spot of rot in an apple. What was it the Old Testament said? That the sins of the father were visited on the children unto the third and fourth generations?

  “Could we have done differently?” Nick asked John.

  He told John everything that had happened since he came across Annie in the graveyard of St. Mary-at-Hill.

  * * *

  “Annie,” he had said.

  “Nick,” she replied, a youthful voice issuing strangely from the guise of an old woman. “Put your sword away and come with me.”

  “How can I trust you?” Nick said.

  Annie laughed. “You can’t. That’s why I’m taking you to meet someone who will vouch for me.”

  That someone was Sir Francis Walsingham, His Nibs himself, and he was not in a good mood. He nodded curtly to the two chairs in front of his desk, favored Annie with a smile, and then glared at Nick.

  “What the devil have you been up to?” he barked. “You expressly disobeyed my order to leave Annie alone.”

  “I did no such thing,” Nick retorted. H
e was caught off guard. He had felt all along that Walsingham was keeping something from him, but even more strongly, he felt he had been used as a pawn in a devious game, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. He felt his anger mounting. “You asked me to track down the person who had been murdering your agents, despite saddling me with Essex. I did. I discovered Annie and del Toro conspiring together. She even tried to kill me.”

  “How’s the head, Nick?” Annie inquired.

  “Still hurts.”

  “It was only a love tap, don’t you know,” she said. “Wouldn’t have killed a fly, let alone a big strapping fellow like you.”

  Nick recalled that it had been Annie who had bent down to his prone body and informed del Toro that he was dead. She had gone for a head wound because she knew they bled a lot and would make a more convincing injury. Suddenly Nick realized that, by knocking him unconscious and declaring him dead, Annie had actually saved his life.

  As if reading his mind, she winked at him, the effect more grotesque than friendly, considering her getup.

  He looked at the woman sitting across from him with a new respect. He had known she was highly intelligent and had admired how she could magically change her appearance and character, but he had not suspected how accomplished an agent she was, nor how ruthless. The best agent he had ever seen, if he was honest. Bar none, and that included himself. He had made too many mistaken assumptions in this case.

  Walsingham cleared his throat. “I suppose he deserves some explanation,” he said. “What do you say, Annie?”

  She grinned. Not a pretty sight, seeing as she had blacked out most of her teeth. “I’d say he’s earned it.”

  “On one condition,” Walsingham said to Nick, raising a finger. “That you do not reveal any of what I am going to tell you to anyone. Especially the Queen and your friend Codpiece.” He said this last with a small moue of disgust that told Nick that, great spymaster that he was, Walsingham had no idea that Richard, aka Codpiece, was Elizabeth’s personal spy on her own court.