Calmly Eli rolled up his sleeves and began to wash his hands. “My sister has a, shall we say, narcotic effect on men,” he said conversationally. “Which is a good thing, as what I’m about to do is going to hurt like the dickens. But I should watch it if I were you. She’s handles a mean scalpel.”
Nick remembered feeling a little resentful at this apparent lack of sympathy for his agony, then marveled at the sureness and rapidity with which Eli sewed up the wound and stanched the bleeding. He was right: it did hurt. A lot. But Nick clamped his lips firmly together and did not utter a sound, hoping the girl would notice his bravery. The rest of the night he spent sitting bolt upright before the fire, and when he asked if he could lie down, the girl shook her head.
“A drink?”
She clapped a beaker of water down by his elbow.
“I was thinking more of wine.”
She snorted. “Call if the wound reopens,” she said, a little callously Nick thought, given his ordeal. Then she and Eli took themselves off up the ladder to bed. Though dizzy with blood loss, something that would soon pass the girl informed him in the morning, Nick was quite certain he owed them his life. He returned to the house a few days later with a small bag of gold. Eli refused payment, but the girl, who he learned was named Rivkah, took the purse from him.
“My brother believes in a utopia where medicine is free to all. I, however, know that utopia means No Place and that even doctors must eat.” He noticed her use of the plural as she slipped the purse down the front of her bodice. She didn’t offer him a drink then either.
After that, he found himself dropping by almost every week to sit at their scarred kitchen table, drinking wine (she had smiled when she poured him his first beaker), talking with Eli, and watching Rivkah’s graceful movements around their tiny kitchen, listening to her comments—astonishingly learned—and her quick bursts of laughter, slightly disconcerting as she did this even when Nick didn’t think he had been funny. He even celebrated Shabbat with them one Friday at sundown, feeling a kind of hunger that had nothing to do with lust as he watched Rivkah light the candles and, with upturned palms, chant a low, melodious blessing in a language he didn’t understand. During the meal of lamb and bread, Eli raised his goblet.
“To Nick, the sacrificial lamb who daubed his blood above our lintel so the Angel of Death passed by.”
“Shalom Shabbat,” responded Rivkah solemnly, then spoiled it by crossing her eyes and singing the opening bars to the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” The next day, Nick changed the name of his tavern from “Ye Olde Cock” to “The Black Sheep.” John clearly thought Nick off his rocker. Rivkah and Eli thought it hysterical.
After the meal, he had leaned forward to blow out the candle, but she stopped him with an urgent hand on his arm.
“No, Nick,” she said. “God alone is Lord of Light.”
He sat back, uncertain of what she meant but feeling he had done a great wrong. Eli grinned but did not explain.
* * *
A knock on the door roused him from his reverie. It was soft, tentative, and Nick might have missed it if Hector hadn’t raised his head and looked at Nick as if to say, Aren’t you going to answer that already?
“Enter,” Nick called.
A diminutive figure appeared in the doorway.
“Come closer, where I can see you.”
It was a boy, clearly reluctant to enter. He was shooting terrified glances at Hector. “Don’t worry,” Nick joked. “He’s had his breakfast.” Then he immediately regretted it when the boy turned pale and swayed on his feet. “Sit down,” Nick said, gently guiding the boy to a stool and pressing him down on it, his body unresisting, the bones in his shoulders thin and brittle as a skinned rabbit’s. Nick poured a goblet of wine from a flagon on a side table and handed it to him. “Drink this,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”
The boy took the goblet and held it to his lips, his hands shaking so badly half of it spilled down the front of his white surplice. Nick looked away. The red stain looked like blood.
He sat facing the boy, leaning back in the chair and crossing his legs to give the impression of ease. Hector put his head on Nick’s knee, and he played with the dog’s ears. The lad continued to stare at Hector as if expecting him to leap on him and devour him at any moment.
“What’s your name?” Nick asked gently.
“Robin,” the boy replied, his voice unbroken, pure as spun glass. When he sang, his voice must soar like a bird in the vaulted ceiling of the chapel. He couldn’t be much more than ten, Nick thought. A child.
“What kind of dog is it?”
“Irish Wolfhound,” Nick replied.
“Did you breed him?” the boy asked. “My father breeds dogs—greyhounds—but not as big as yours. My pony, Bob, is the same size.” Then he added, “I call him that because that’s what I do when I ride him. Bob up and down.” He gave a tiny smile at the memory. A little color had come back into his cheeks, whether from the wine or the mention of his family, Nick didn’t know, but he was relieved. He had thought the poor lad was going to faint dead away when he first saw him. The boy was the chorister Nick had seen being sick in the chapel when he’d first arrived there—the one who had found the body.
Nick was not averse to taking his time. Although he knew most children were well acquainted with death by the age of ten, most having lost younger siblings to disease, or a mother in childbirth, he was quite certain the boy had never encountered anything as brutal as what he had seen in the chapel that morning. “He was starving in an alley in Spain. I adopted him. Isn’t that so, Hector?” At his name, the dog lifted his head and regarded his master with a look of great sagacity.
Almost tripping over him near the docks in Valencia, Nick had found Hector emaciated and covered in sores, with a broken front paw and three cracked ribs. He had obviously been savagely kicked and beaten, but whether he had been abandoned or had run away, Nick did not know. What he did know was that he wanted to kill the man who had brutalized such a noble beast. Still a puppy but huge nonetheless, the dog had calmly regarded Nick when he hunkered down and spoke softly to him for a long time, eventually putting out his hand for the dog to sniff. At first, the dog had growled from deep within his chest, a sound not unlike that of a ship’s hull scraping against a stone jetty, but Nick could tell he didn’t have the heart for it. He was too battered, too hungry, too close to death. Carefully and speaking softly to him all the while, Nick lifted him, the dog whimpering in pain but otherwise acquiescent, a dead weight in his arms. Nick thought his back would break as he staggered to the inn where he was staying. He ordered meat and water and a bowl of hot water, splints, and bandages. Then he set about trying to save the life of the dog that he had already christened Hector for his courage and his refusal to die. Ever since that night, Hector had been his shadow, refusing to leave the man he clearly regarded as his savior.
At first when Nick had to leave him back at the inn, the whole neighborhood had complained of the dog’s doleful baying.
“Like a tormented soul in hell,” Mistress Baker, who else but the baker’s wife, had informed Nick, her arms, beefy as a man’s from hauling great trays of bread out of the oven, folded primly over her capacious bosom. “Fit to wake the dead, it were. Give me quite a turn.”
Eventually, as Hector understood that Nick had not abandoned him and would always come back, he took to lying in the corner of the tavern, his head toward the door, watching for his master’s return. Maggie, John’s wife, told him that she always knew when Nick’s wherry landed at the dock because Hector would give a low whine of excitement, his tail sweeping rapidly back and forth like a demented broom, his eyes locked on the door. Maggie was very fond of Hector, as his quiet, massive presence in the tavern inhibited even the most pugnacious and ale-soaked neighborhood bullyboys. Unlike the other tavern owners in the area, Maggie never had to mop up blood, send for the bonesetter, or have John throw someone out. At the first sign of trouble—a harsh w
ord, a hand snaking toward a dagger—Hector would lumber to his feet; the troublemaking patrons would take the hint and leave.
“Do you want to pet him?”
The boy gulped.
“Hector,” Nick said, “go and make friends.”
The dog padded over to the boy and lifted a great paw. When Robin tentatively took it, Hector, as if recognizing a wounded soul akin to his own a year ago, began to slaver the boy’s face with his great raspy tongue until the boy giggled and fended him off.
“You found the body,” Nick said while the boy was distracted. He had often found that people answered more truthfully and with greater accuracy when their minds were on something else.
The boy nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Tell me,” Nick said. Hector nuzzled the boy’s cheek as if in encouragement.
“It was dark,” Robin said. “It’s my job to light the candles. I’m the youngest, you see. The others get to sleep in. It’s not fair.” Then he brightened. “But I’ll be eleven after Christmas.”
Nick hid a smile. “Go on,” he said.
“I had a candle I lit from the brazier in the courtyard. I’m too short to reach the torches on the wall. So I could find my way, you see,” he explained as if that weren’t perfectly obvious. From his intent, inward-looking expression, his half-closed eyes, Nick could tell he was reliving the events of the morning, almost talking to himself.
“First I lit the sconces in the choir stall, as I always do, and then I went to the altar.” He stopped, and the skin around his mouth stretched thin, his eyes widening at the memory.
“It’s alright, Robin,” Nick said. “Take your time.”
“I didn’t notice anything amiss at first,” he said. “I was trying not to let my candle go out. It’s very drafty in the chapel, you know.” He swallowed. “It was only as I was reaching up to light the first candle that I noticed … it.” He was twisting his fingers together now, Hector forgotten, his eyes beginning to swim. “Her. The Lady Cecily.” He looked up, his face crumpling like gold foil. “She used to smile at me, gave me a sweetmeat once. Said I sang like an angel. She was so pretty.” He buried his face in his arms and cried as if his heart were breaking. As it probably was, Nick thought. Another innocent victim, one more reason, if he had needed it, to bring the killer to justice.
He waited. In his experience, grief was better let out than kept in. Eli agreed with him, saying that people who never showed emotion were prone to all sorts of stomach ailments, disorders of the bowel. At last Robin’s sobs turned to hiccups and then to a sad, intermittent snuffling as he wiped his nose on the sleeve of his once-white surplice. When at last he raised his eyes to Nick’s, he looked as if he would never be happy again.
“Did anything seem out of place?” Nick asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Something out of the ordinary,” Nick explained. “Something missing that should have been there or something that was there that shouldn’t have been.”
Robin sat quietly, his hand absently rubbing the top of Hector’s head, all fear of the dog forgotten.
“Not really,” he said after a long pause. “Only …”
Nick leaned forward, careful not to startle him. “Yes?”
“There was a funny smell.”
“What kind of smell?” Perfume? Tallow? Urine from a terror-loosened bladder? Nick did not suggest any of these, wanting Robin’s memory to be untainted, clear.
“Like medicine,” he said eventually. “Like when I had a cough and Mama put stuff on my chest. It made my nose tickle.”
Liniment, Nick thought. It was used as a kind of rub or poultice for all kinds of ailments, including strained tendons in horses, chest colds, bruises, and sprains. He would ask Eli and Rivkah about its ingredients and pray they weren’t so common as to be useless as a clue. He recalled the handkerchief and wondered if his killer had a cold. Not much use to him as half the court was snuffling and sneezing with winter colds.
After questioning Robin further, it became clear that he had no more to tell.
“Why did you call him Hector?” the boy asked as he was leaving.
“It’s the name of a great soldier,” Nick replied, not feeling it necessary to burden the child with the plot of the Iliad.
“Are you a soldier?” he asked, pointing to Nick’s scar, which ran from his temple down the right side of his face, not raw and lumpy like so many scars, but straight, clean, and white thanks to Eli’s expert stitches.
“Yes,” Nick said, thinking, If a spy can be called a soldier.
“I love your dog,” Robin replied, impulsively kissing Hector on the nose. The dog reciprocated enthusiastically. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He withdrew a hand from deep within the folds of his surplice and handed something to Nick. “I found this on the floor by the choir.” Then he was gone, immeasurably happier than when he had arrived, his face glistening with dog saliva.
In his palm, Nick saw a pea-sized yellow stone, topaz by the looks of it, and small enough to have fallen from the inlaid pommel of a dagger. Nick would have said a woman’s earring, except he had already decided that the killer was a man. He would have to ask the Queen to order all men at court to surrender their personal daggers so he could examine them, a time-consuming task and one he was certain would yield no results. The knife used to kill had been a stiletto—an assassin’s blade—and no courtier in his right mind would carry such a thing openly about his person in the Queen’s presence. It would have been tantamount to treason.
* * *
Nick spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening questioning most of those who had been in the chapel or had known Cecily at court. He learned little of value except that he could now construct a fairly accurate timeline for the day and evening of her death. Mary, her friend, was inconsolable.
“If only I hadn’t been ill,” she wailed, her noisy lamentation interspersed with violent sneezes, her face puffy from weeping. “I was in bed all day,” she said. “I was even excused from chapel that morning.”
So that meant she would not have seen anyone pass the note to Cecily, Nick thought with regret.
“Otherwise, she would have told me she was going to meet someone. We told each other everything,” Mary said sadly.
“You didn’t see her at all?” Nick asked.
“Only once.” Mary burst into a fresh fit of weeping, and Nick passed her his handkerchief. Her own was a grubby, sodden mess. “I was mean to her when she asked if I needed anything. I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ ”
Nick didn’t think that a particularly sarcastic thing to say, but eyeing the girl shrewdly, he surmised she was a bit of a mouthy one. A right goer, as John would have put it (out of earshot of his wife, of course). He comforted her as best he could and dismissed her. There were several people he had yet to see: the Countess of Berwick was so stunned, she had been sent home to her nephew’s London house by the Queen and ordered to rest, and then there was Codpiece the Fool.
He got up and stretched. The small chamber they had given him was comfortable, part of a suite kept for visiting dignitaries. The walls were covered in tapestries to keep out the chill, and there was a roaring fire in the grate. A pewter flagon and matching goblets stood on a side table inlaid with tortoise-shell, along with a silver bowl of fruit. Cold chicken and a loaf of bread had been carried in on a tray just as darkness fell. He had shared his meal with Hector, who had gulped the meat in two bites, then coveted the bones with his eyes.
“Forget it, pal,” Nick said. “Rivkah says they’re bad for you.” She had told him that, unlike beef bones, the bones of poultry splintered easily and could pierce the stomach like sharp needles.
Hector flopped down before the fire with a long-suffering sigh only partly feigned. He had a huge appetite, and Nick knew he needed more food. But before he left the palace, he needed to see the Queen and report in.
As if on cue, a royal page knocked on the door.
* * *
Nick was
led to the royal apartments and shown into a book-lined room that was obviously the Queen’s private study. A large table next to the window was littered with papers, and an enormous ring, carved with the Tudor rose, lay next to an embossed seal as if it had just been pressed into warm wax. Otherwise the room was plain, functional, its only concession to luxury a fortune in beeswax candles that bathed the room in a golden glow and the sweet scent of honey. Elizabeth was alone, sitting in an armchair in front of a crackling fire, with her feet up on a low stool. On a table beside her, two long-stemmed goblets of Venetian glass stood to hand along with a matching crystal flagon glowing a rich ruby red. Draped over her bony shoulders, she wore a heavy, loose garment of deep-pile tawny velvet over a fine linen under-dress. He had never seen her without her armor of stiff brocade and jewels, intended to dazzle and, more to the point, distract the eye that would otherwise have noticed the aging flesh and webbing of fine wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. He made a low obeisance.
“Yes, yes,” the Queen said, waving him to a seat opposite. “Sit down for God’s sake before you give me a crick in the neck. And tell your monster to guard the door.”
Nick signaled to Hector and then sat down opposite her, waiting for her to speak while enduring the royal scrutiny for what seemed an age. He was careful to look calmly back, showing neither insolence nor fear nor a craven obsequiousness. A man was a fool to underestimate Elizabeth just because she was a woman. Plenty had made that mistake and had paid for it with their heads on Tower Green. But Elizabeth was not only a canny Machiavelli—over the years she had successfully strung along countless suitors seeking her hand in marriage, not to mention the French and Spanish ambassadors—she was reputed to be one of the most learned women in Christendom. She rode to hunt, won at chess, spoke several languages and read Latin, Hebrew, and ancient Greek fluently. She also swore like a dosshouse toper. All in all, Nick was quite fond of her and thought her a great improvement on her sister, Bloody Mary, and her syphilis-crazed father, Henry VIII, who solved his marital problems by lopping off heads. But Nick never made the mistake of letting down his guard.
A Murder by Any Name Page 4