“I hear you named your parrot after me,” said the Queen at last.
Nick blinked. This was the last thing he’d thought she would say, but he had heard her opening gambits in chess were tricky.
“I won the bird in a card game, Majesty. She was already named.”
“By whom?” the Queen asked, regarding him slyly.
“I forget. I was rather drunk.” He would not betray his friend Kit, who had named the parrot in a fit of pique after the Queen had read one of his poems and said it was rubbish. He was always in trouble, ranting and raving against the authorities—“purblind, lily-livered, three-inch, dribbling, doltish, and babbling sons of whores” was one of his more moderate rants for the men who comprised the government of the realm—and he didn’t need Nick to dig him in any deeper. Kit’s influence on the parrot’s execrable vocabulary was plain to all who set foot in The Black Sheep.
“Horseshit,” the Queen said. “It was Christopher Marlowe. Now there’s a dark horse for you, to continue the equine theme. But clever, very clever.”
Takes one to know one, Nick thought.
He and Marlowe had become friends when Kit had started frequenting The Black Sheep a year ago. Snooping through Cecil’s desk the last time he had been called in to report and Cecil had briefly left the room, Nick found out that Marlowe was also a spy. They had never talked about it, nor had their paths ever crossed on missions; Nick did not even know if Kit was aware he was also in the espionage business, but he suspected he did. With his quick dark eyes, sarcastic tongue, and fearsome intellect, nothing got past Kit Marlowe. He was obsessed with characters who were convinced they were either demigods or demons. One day, Kit swore, he would pen bloody dramas that would break upon the literary world like the Trump of Doom. So far he was still working on a play about a monomaniacal tyrant called Tamburlaine. As far as Nick knew, this seesawing from impossible heights to unimaginable depths matched Kit’s temperament perfectly. He was either flying high as a kite or sunk in deepest melancholy. In either state, he drank more than Nick had ever seen anyone drink—more than he himself drank, and that was saying something. As Kit always seemed to have plenty of gold, he was one of The Black Sheep’s best customers, so John and Maggie put up with his drunken soliloquies, often letting him sleep it off on a bench in the corner, as Nick himself had done the previous night, too inebriated to climb the stairs to his chamber above the taproom. But he had a soft spot for Kit, sensing a sensitive and tortured soul beneath the bravado. The parrot, Bess, referred to her former owner as “Mephistopheles.”
The Queen picked up the flagon and poured the wine. She handed him a glass and sat back, cradling hers, but not drinking. “You’re loyal to your friends, I’ll say that for you.” Then, in one of her famous mercurial changes of mood: “This is a terrible business, Nick. I’m relying on you to get to the bottom of it.” She looked at the fire and shook her head. “Poor, poor girl,” she murmured. “Her parents are beyond grief.” She looked back at him. “You realize the implications, do you not? The political implications.”
“I do, Majesty,” he said.
The Queen had spent her reign skillfully balancing between religious extremists—not only Protestants versus Catholics but also various Protestant sects, the Puritans’ chief among them—that denounced the Church of England her father had established as being closet Papist. They sought to establish their own “pure” version of the Christian faith based on a literal interpretation of the Bible unmediated by clergy. Nick knew Elizabeth privately regarded the Eucharist as no more than a symbolic commemoration of the Last Supper, rather than a sacrament of the actual body and blood of Christ, but she strictly maintained the outward observance of all the pomp and ceremony of the Church of England, the official religion of the land. Publically she attended morning and evening services, took the Host once a week, maintained a choir that performed the masses of Byrd and Tallis, and read the Book of Common Prayer. Privately, she was rumored to pour over the writings of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, an activity that would have sent her to the block in her father and sister’s time. Her younger half-brother, the sickly Edward VI, was said to have shared his sister’s interest in the new religion sweeping the Continent, but he died of consumption, at the age of sixteen, before he could legislate comprehensive religious change.
As a young woman, Elizabeth had seen just how destructive religious mania could be: her half-sister, Mary, a fanatical Catholic besotted with her husband, Philip II of Spain, had sought to bring back the Popish religion with fire and the sword. Elizabeth had chosen a middle way, stating that she did not intend to make windows into men’s souls, something the populace correctly took to mean that as long as their bodies observed the rituals of the Church of England and they refrained from sedition, their souls were free to believe whatever they wanted. It was a brilliant stroke of statecraft, but there were those who murmured against Elizabeth and questioned the integrity of her faith. In short, she walked a fine line between opposing factions. A very fine line indeed. This murder could tip the balance if either her Catholic or Puritan enemies could make the case that the blasphemous nature of the murder somehow indicated her reign was spiritually corrupt and thus illegitimate. As the daughter of an anointed Queen executed for witchcraft, Elizabeth knew from harsh experience that a smear of holy oil on the forehead in Westminster Abbey did not guarantee the throne.
“Any progress?” the Queen asked.
“Not much,” Nick replied and proceeded to fill her in on Eli’s findings. When he came to the manner of Cecily’s death, the Queen slammed her glass down on the table so violently, Nick was sure it would shatter. She did not speak, but her face was stony, her lips a thin line, her eyes obsidian in the firelight. He explained his theory about the killing: that it was not from sexual lust but from something infinitely cold and calculated.
“A premeditated assassination,” Nick said, “as if the killer is sending a message.”
“And what might that be?”
Without breaking eye contact, he said, “That your reign is a blasphemy.”
“And, by extension, so am I,” the Queen said.
Nick nodded. “I would guess that the placement of the body is in some way a stab”—he winced inwardly at the word—“an attack aimed at you personally or the church.”
“Same thing,” the Queen snapped. “My father, God rest his soul, saw to that.”
Whether this was said with irony or not, Nick did not know, but he acknowledged the truth of it. When Henry VIII had broken with Rome, he had appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church in England.
Nick laid out the objects he had found in the chapel: the note, handkerchief, and the stone discovered by Robin.
The Queen took the note, read it quickly, then handed it back. “He must have known her,” she said after a short silence. “This would not have worked on one of the older girls. It’s too brief, for one thing, and the tone is all wrong. Not a declaration of love so much as a command.”
Nick nodded, surprised at the Queen’s perceptiveness. Perhaps she had received love letters in her youth. For years there had been rumors that she and her favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had been lovers. Childhood friends and less than a year apart in age, only the suspicious death of Robert’s first wife, Amy, from a fall down the stairs at their home, had kept them from marrying. The Queen, it was said, would never choose a prince consort who was suspected of murder. Perhaps this was one of the reasons Cecily’s death had affected her so deeply. Once again the taint of murder clung to her court. She had recently appointed Dudley Commander of English forces in the Netherlands since that country’s revolt against Spain, to get him out of the way, it was rumored, because he was now old and paunchy, a mere shadow of his dashing former self. But Nick knew such talk was mere jealousy because of his long and close relationship with the Queen. Truth be told, she trusted no one as completely as she trusted Dudley. His appointment was, in part, a cover for the establishment of an espion
age network. Marlowe had just returned from Holland, and Nick surmised that he and Dudley had been in close contact, meeting in out-of-the-way inns to exchange information. Despite the tittle-tattling, or maybe because of it, Nick had nothing against him. His own mother, Agnes, the Dowager Countess of Blackwell, was Dudley’s friend and neighbor, as he kept a great estate in Oxfordshire near their family seat of Binsey. Dudley was fiercely loyal and, like the Queen, Nick too prized that quality above all others. In the shifting sands of court and the world of espionage, trust was a rare commodity indeed.
“He exploited her youth and naïvety,” the Queen said. “Anyone could see her head was filled with romantic rubbish. She was so innocent.” This last was said with such sorrow that Nick thought for one panicky moment the Queen would cry, a thing unheard of except perhaps by the women who attended her in her private chambers. Even in the dicey years of her sister’s reign, when her life hung by a thread due to the deep animosity Mary bore her for the supplanting of her mother, Katherine of Aragon, in favor of Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had not shed a single tear, but held her head high, or so Nick’s mother reported with something akin to wonder. Only the fact that Mary failed to produce an heir and that even she had apparently balked at shedding royal blood, albeit only a half-sister’s, had saved Elizabeth. All those who had stuck by her in those perilous times had been rewarded with high office and titles when she ascended the throne in 1558: Dudley had been appointed Master of Horse and became the Earl of Leicester, Sir William Cecil was given the title Baron Burghley and the post of Secretary of State, which he held until, fourteen years ago, he was made Lord Treasurer.
Nick sometimes wondered if the Queen’s tolerance of his own outwardly disreputable and rather seedy life at The Black Sheep was due more to her friendship with his mother than his work for the Crown. Certainly she had never lectured him on his duty to uphold the glory of an ancient and noble house by marrying appropriately nor, God forbid, upbraided him for his questionable morals (she must be aware of his “friendship” with Kat, the wildly successful and notorious madam of a Bankside brothel). Elizabeth might be changeable by temperament, but she was loyal to her friends—to a fault, some whispered. Eight years before, she had forgiven Dudley for secretly marrying her cousin, Lettice Devereux, Countess of Essex, without her permission, perhaps because Lettice gave birth a suspicious five months after the nuptials, clearly a marriage of convenience rather than a love match. Nick suspected Dudley’s posting to the Netherlands was, in part, to keep him from the undeniable charms of Lettice, much younger than the Queen and blessed with a glorious auburn mane of her own hair. The Queen was a woman after all.
“I want this devil caught,” the Queen said, her eyes glittering with anger. “I want his head rotting on London Bridge. I want to see ravens feasting on his eyes.” Then, as if suddenly exhausted by her desire for vengeance, she raised a hand in weary dismissal, the merest flick of the fingertips. “Give my best to your mother when you next see her.”
Nick rose and bowed.
“And Nick?”
“Majesty?”
“Nice scar.”
CHAPTER 4
Kat’s Brothel, Bankside
Despite the lateness of the hour and the peril of a river crossing at night, Nick decided to return to The Black Sheep after leaving the Queen’s study. It would have made more sense to stay the night in the rooms made available to him, but he was suddenly overcome by a powerful urge to flee the palace, that labyrinth of corridors echoing with footfalls and whispers and suspicions. He had always hated court life with its intrigues and power plays, the artificially courteous manners concealing the burning ambition, the petty jealousies and rivalries, the backbiting. Not for the first time, he was profoundly glad he had been born a younger son. Let Robert, older than Nick by ten years and stolid as a Flemish burgher, negotiate those treacherous waters.
Sitting in the boat, the sound of the oars rising and dipping, the occasional grunt of the oarsman as the boat caught the current and had to be kept steady, its prow resolutely pointed at the farther shore, Nick gazed into the blackness all around him, and it seemed to him that this void, this nothingness, was where the case was leading him. Into the soul of a man who had premeditated the murder of an innocent girl, who had lured her and murdered her and posed her, all for some as yet unknown purpose. He felt adrift in this blackness, cast off from solid ground, where motives and desires were plain, understandable—jealousy, ambition, lust, greed, anger, those he recognized. The lantern hanging on an iron stanchion at the prow of the boat cast a lurid glow on the straining face of the oarsman, a ghostly Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across the River Styx. Nick shivered and wrapped his cloak more tightly about him, comforted by the warm weight of his dog leaning against his legs. He was being fanciful, he knew. As Will had said, a murderer was not a demon but a man of flesh and blood. As such, his motives, however torturous, must surely be decipherable. All Nick had to do was find the beginning of the thread, the motive, and follow it step by step to its source.
Fetching up at St. Mary’s Queen Dock, a little upstream from the Great Stone Gate connecting London Bridge with Southwark Street, Nick alighted and paid the boatman. He fixed a leather leash to Hector’s collar, not to restrain him but to use as a guide through the dark warren of Bankside, where the Watch did not venture; where no lights shone above the doorways of wealthy merchants; no liveried page stood at the doors to welcome late-night revelers. Turning west along the bank, he passed the dark outline of the church of St. Mary Overie on his left, the river on his right, careful to keep his gaze straight ahead, his steps purposeful. His cloak was thrown back over his left shoulder, his right hand on the hilt of his sword by his hip, and he was aware of being observed by myriad eyes from alleys and dark recesses, assessing him with expert, criminal intelligence for signs of weakness, the merest hint he was unarmed, lost, unprepared.
Hector padded noiselessly ahead, making a left and then a right on Clink Street, unerringly nosing toward home, a huge black shape more effective as a deterrent than any blade or skill with which Nick could wield it. As he drew closer to home, Hector uttered a low deep-throated growl, a vibration of the air, a sign he had caught the wild, sharp scent of the bearbaiting ring, the distant belling of the dogs as they circled their prey, snapping and snarling, yipping as they were hurled against the wooden barricades that ringed the blood-soaked arena. Although hugely popular as a sport, Nick had no stomach for either bearbaiting or bullbaiting; the sight of a noble beast, chained to a stake, unable to defend itself, sickened him; the faces of men contorted by cruelty and bloodlust even more so. But situated a mere block west of the bearbaiting ring with the bullbaiting ring to the east, The Black Sheep was the tavern of choice for many of these spectators, and Nick could little afford to alienate them by revealing his revulsion for their sport.
Suddenly unable to stomach the sea of drunken, if amiable, faces, the slaps on the back, and the inevitable questioning by John he knew would greet him as soon as he set foot in The Black Sheep, Nick abruptly changed his mind. He had promised Eli he would drop in on him, but he couldn’t face even that. He would stop by in the morning.
“Kat’s,” he murmured, and Hector obediently turned to the left.
Kat had been Nick’s first friend in Bankside. He had met her five years before when he had visited her premises after a long stint on the Continent. An accident, really, that he had fetched up there. His ship had moored at St. Mary’s Queen Dock, and he had been in need more of a tankard of ale than a swift roll in the hay. He had walked into Kat’s brothel thinking it was a tavern. One look at Kat—statuesque, lush of body, and with a mass of shining dark hair that tumbled over creamy shoulders, he had quickly forgotten his thirst. She had flashed him a smile, nodded to the big bruiser stationed at the door (Joseph, as Nick later learned) and, taking his hand, led him through a back door and up some stairs. Nick went meekly as a lamb, his eyes riveted on the hypnotic sway of her
hips beneath scarlet velvet as she preceded him up the narrow stairs. Later he was to learn that he was the exception to the rule, that Kat had long since “retired.”
“I suppose I should feel flattered,” Nick said, lying exhausted but deeply contented on her bed some time later.
Kat shrugged a naked shoulder. “I have needs too,” she said.
Nick looked at her and noticed her quick, ironic gaze and the strong set of her mouth and chin. He grinned. “Maybe you should pay me,” he said, running an exploratory finger down the column of her neck, over her shoulder and around the curve of one breast.
“Maybe I should,” Kat murmured. “But first you have to earn it.”
Afterward, Kat told Nick something of her life. Orphaned at twelve, she had been taken in as a scullery maid in a great house, where she was repeatedly molested by the master. When she went to the cook for help, that worthy lady told her it was the master’s right to use her so in return for a roof over her head and food in her belly. The next morning, before dawn, she tied her meager belongings in a handkerchief—a shift, cap, and five pennies she filched from the cook—and fled, instinctively making for London, where she knew she could disappear. Even the theft of a penny or a single handkerchief was a hanging offense, and she had no intention of swinging from the gallows. Once there, she soon ran out of money and had to sell the only thing of value she owned—ironically, the same body she had sought to protect. Naively thinking she was working for herself, she was soon disabused of this when she was kidnapped off the street, held against her will in a house of ill repute in Southwark, and repeatedly beaten and raped. There she was told, in no uncertain terms, that if she did not want to end up floating in the Thames, she would have to go to work for Gorgeous George, a notorious pimp who ran prostitutes for Black Jack Sims, the local area crime boss.
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