But human, Nick thought.
Suddenly weary of this strange little man, Nick looked at John. “I think that’s all. Anything else?”
John shook his head. “You can go,” he told Sir Christopher, who looked more than a little put out to be dismissed by an underling. He hesitated as if he were going to refuse to budge, but then, glancing at Nick, who gave him a bored stare, changed his mind.
“Right. I’ll be off then.” He scuttled to the door, then turned. “If you want my opinion,” he said, “it’s the Jews.”
“I beg your pardon?” Nick said.
“The Jews,” Sir Christopher repeated as if explaining to a particularly dull schoolboy. “That’s what everyone’s saying.” He was gone before Nick or John could respond.
* * *
“Bigoted git!” John said. He spat eloquently into the fire before moving the chair Sir Christopher had been sitting on back to its original position near the fire. He sat down in it and stretched out his legs.
“Bigoted rich git,” Nick said.
“Can’t buy balls.”
“True.”
“He’s right about one thing,” Nick said. “Everyone is saying the Jews are to blame.” He told John about the crowd at the gate. “I’m worried about Eli and Rivkah.”
“Want me to go back to Bankside and warn them?” John asked.
“Maybe later.” Nick got up and started pacing the floor. “We’ll have to check with the countess, of course, but it looks like Sir Christopher has an alibi.”
“Looks like,” John agreed morosely.
“But why lie about the time?”
John shrugged. “Who knows? Most people lie by instinct.”
“You’re probably right,” Nick said, “but it bothers me.”
“Want me to ask the countess about her nevvie?” John said, an evil glint in his eye.
“Tempting,” Nick said, grinning. They were both imagining the countess’s outrage at being interrogated by a steward’s son. Then he sighed. “I’d better do it.”
“Take Hector along to protect you,” John advised.
“Good idea,” Nick replied. “She hates dogs.”
CHAPTER 9
The Palace of Whitehall
It turned out the countess was still at her nephew’s house in Cheapside, so Nick decided to go in search of his brother, Robert. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to him since that morning in the chapel five days ago, and he felt guilty about his friend Sir Edward, Cecily’s father. He had briefly sought him out the day of the murder to give him his condolences, but he felt he should have done more. The fact that he was trying to find the person who had murdered the man’s daughter did not assuage his conscience. He decided to go for a stroll around the palace, looking for them. After being cooped up indoors for so long, he needed to stretch his legs.
“I’ll stay here,” John had volunteered, “in case someone comes looking for you.”
“So you can take a nap, more like,” replied Nick.
John gave him an innocent look.
Nick met the hapless page, coming in from outside with Hector, as he was leaving. As he feared, the boy’s clothes and face were sadly besmirched with mud, and there were leaves and twigs in his hair. But both boy and dog looked happy, the one beaming, the other with a silly doggy grin on his face.
“Thanks, mister,” the boy said, reluctantly handing Nick the leash. “Your dog’s magic.” He gave his new best friend a parting pat on the head and vanished down a corridor.
Nick and Hector wandered in the direction of the tilting ground, the dog bounding joyously ahead as if he had not just been out for a run. Frost rimed the grass, and the frozen stalks crunched under his feet. If it continued as bitter as this, Nick thought, the Thames would ice over, and children would strap beef shin bones to their shoes for skates. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, river trade would come to a temporary halt, the dockworkers and ferrymen taking full advantage of Mother Nature’s holiday, the rest of London cursing as they broke the ice in their water pitchers in the morning or resigned themselves to walking instead of taking a boat.
The huge rectangular expanse of the tiltyard, the center divided by a scarred wooden barrier, tiered stands rising on the eastern side so as not to impede the view from a long row of windows in the palace where the Queen and her ladies viewed the jousting, was empty and eerily silent. A flock of seagulls blown inland from the coast huddled miserably at the far end, white specks against the brown of the recently churned up, now frozen earth. Hector lolloped toward them, and they rose as one, giving their mournful cries, then slowly flapped toward St. James’s Park, the Queen’s private hunting grounds. A bare three weeks ago, Nick had been here for the festivities of Accession Day on November 17th, the most elaborate public celebration of the year. Usually he gave it a miss, having no patience with fake fighting, but this year he had come to cheer on Robert, who, to the surprise and consternation of the family, and citing his namesake, their great-grandfather, had entered his name in the jousting lists, styling himself Sir Trusty. Stopping by Robert’s tent to wish him luck before his bout, he had been amused to find his brother dressed in armor that looked as if it hadn’t been out of mothballs since the time of the War of the Roses.
“Where did you get that piece of junk?” Nick asked.
“Found it in the attic above the brew house,” Robert replied. “According to mother, it used to belong to Sir Robert the Doughty, our great-great-grandfather.” Robert flexed an arm, the joints screeching hideously. “It needs oiling,” he said apologetically.
Nick knew the roof in the brew house leaked. Their ancestral home, Binsey House in Oxfordshire, was perpetually falling down; when it wasn’t the tiles on the roof blowing off, it was the well silting up or the stone flags in the kitchen sagging due to the slow subsidence of the foundations. A veritable money pit was how Robert glumly described it. Nick loved its hodgepodge of ramshackle buildings, the original core of the medieval manor haphazardly added to over the centuries by various ancestors with no eye for architectural harmony or planning. A wing here, a new stable block there, a solar with a balcony that gave onto the picturesque view of the laundry wall.
Still, he sympathized. As the eldest son, it fell to Robert to maintain it so it could be passed down to Pip, his nine-year-old son and heir, who that day was standing proudly beside his father as his squire. Nick winked at his nephew and then scooped up his youngest niece, Meg, who had toddled toward him and was gripping his leg for support, in danger of bringing down his hose. Placing his lips against her blond, duck-down curls and breathing in her baby scent, he surveyed his brother affectionately.
Ten years older than Nick, Robert was more solid in build and, to his own everlasting chagrin, three inches shorter than his little brother. He compensated for his thinning brown hair by wearing a luxurious spade-shaped beard of which he was inordinately proud. His wife, Elise, Nick’s sister-in-law and mother of his five nephews and nieces, was always nagging her husband to shave it off.
“Why can’t you go clean-shaven like Nick?” she would ask. “It looks like a dead badger.”
Robert would say nothing, but neither did he shave. He knew how to keep the peace and go his own way. Not for the first time, Nick saw that a wise man lurked beneath his brother’s placid exterior. Sir Trusty indeed.
Robert was the reason Nick was a spy, although his brother didn’t know it. Nick had received a summons from Cecil, Walsingham’s newly appointed spymaster. Surprised and more than a little curious, Nick had showed up at Cecil’s offices in Whitehall. While at Oxford, he had been approached by one of Sir Francis Walsingham’s lackeys and asked if he would spy for his country. Nick had sent the man away with a flea in his ear, and he and John had gone out to The Spotted Cow in an alley behind New College and got rip-roaringly drunk. This was the first time he had met The Spider, the man who ran the day-to-day business of Walsingham’s spy network, and his first impression when he saw him hunched behind a larg
e desk, with a soft April dusk falling outside the windows and the candles not yet lit, was that the spymaster’s nickname was well deserved: he did indeed look like a spider, one of those seemingly innocuous brown ones that like to hide in dark corners of kitchens and potting sheds, but whose bite is deadly.
“Ah, the Honorable Nicholas Holt,” Cecil said. “Do come in.” He didn’t stand, nor did he offer Nick a chair. Nor, Nick soon learned, did he believe in beating around the bush.
“Do you recognize this?” Cecil said, pushing a sheet of parchment across the desk. Puzzled, Nick picked it up and immediately recognized his brother’s handwriting and seal. He quickly scanned the contents: a newsy letter of the sort that friends would exchange. Glancing at the salutation at the top of the letter, Nick felt his legs go weak. It was addressed to an old Oxford friend of Robert’s, a Francis Vaux, who had fled to France and had since become a Jesuit priest. The letter was dated only two months before. He threw the document back on the table as if it had scorched his fingers. “There is nothing treasonous here,” Nick said. “It is merely news about the county. Francis used to live near Oxford.” He pointed to a sentence. “Here Robert is telling him that a parcel of land along the Windrush River has been sold. What of it?”
“Nothing,” Cecil said, “On the surface, it is all very innocent, boring even. Very like your brother, in fact.” He smiled nastily. “But what if this is code? How better to hide a treasonous plot than in something as seemingly innocent as a discussion of farmland or who has married whom? I’m sure Phelippes would be interested.” Cecil was referring to Thomas Phelippes, Sir Francis Walsingham’s crack code breaker. “At the very least,” Cecil murmured, “it is treasonous to even correspond with a Jesuit. Especially if one is from a famous recusant family. Perhaps I should have a little chat with your brother?”
Nick went very still. The not-so-veiled threat of torture hung in the air like noxious smoke, making it hard to breathe. He badly needed to sit down but somehow managed to remain standing.
“My brother is entirely blameless,” Nick said, trying to master his rising panic and keep his voice even. “His only fault is that he is too innocent, too trusting.” He tapped the letter. “This proves it. If he were plotting with Jesuits, do you really think he would be so stupid as to write this?”
Cecil’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Calm yourself,” he said. “I am merely discussing what might be construed. Your brother is probably guilty of no more than a misguided sense of loyalty to former friends. Dangerous friends, I might add. However …” Cecil let the word hang in the air for a moment in order to allow Nick to hear Robert’s screams as the winch was turned on the rack and the ropes tightened. “It might be as well to be sure.” If Nick could have saved Robert by plunging a dagger into Cecil’s heart, he would not have hesitated even if it had meant the ax. But that was not how The Spider worked; if Cecil had seriously thought Robert were conspiring with the Jesuits, he would already have ordered his brother’s arrest. Cecil had merely threatened the castle in order to take the knight. Walsingham’s attempt to recruit Nick when he was at Oxford had merely been the opening gambit in a long, intricate game. Nick should have known that, as the younger son of a prominent recusant family, he was ideal spy material. His mother’s friendship with the Queen notwithstanding, Walsingham and Cecil would always be able to coerce him to do whatever they required merely by the threat of treason.
“What do you want?” Nick said, although he already knew the answer.
In exchange for burning the letter and forgoing an investigation of Robert and his contact with Francis Vaux—“For now,” Cecil warned, making it clear that this would be held over Nick’s head forever—Nick was to work for him.
He was by no means a coward, but Nick knew that he was putting his head in a noose. London was crawling with Spanish and French spies—most commonly merchants who had easy access to ships and could smuggle letters in and out of the country in casks of butter; bales of velvet, rolls of tapestry; tubs of rice, millet, and peppercorns. But there were other, more dangerous, types walking the streets—landless men on the make who had no loyalty other than to their purses, who would work for any master if the price was right, and slip a blade between someone’s ribs if the price was even better. In a backstreet or seedy tavern, Nick’s noble blood would not save him from the assassin’s knife: if anything, his lineage would make him more identifiable, at least in London. On the Continent, he would have a better chance of blending in.
“For how long?” Nick asked.
“For as long as I need you,” Cecil replied blandly.
Nick didn’t even need to think about it. “On one condition,” he said. “My brother is never to know.”
“Agreed.”
* * *
It would break Robert’s heart to know that he had become a spy in order to protect him, Nick thought, watching his brother affectionately as he tramped up and down testing his armor. He creaked with every step.
“I think you should call yourself Sir Rusty,” Nick said. “Much more appropriate.”
Elise laughed. She was sitting on a stool in the corner of the tent, surrounded by her children and Constance, their overworked, frazzled nursery maid. Thirteen-month-old Meg finished exploring Nick’s face and pulling on his ears with her chubby hands, and held out her arms to her mother. Nick deposited the child in Elise’s lap and kissed his sister-in-law on the cheek. Agnes, his seven-year-old niece and mother’s namesake, was sitting beside her mother with her arm around Bess, just turned three. Nick made an elaborate bow.
“Ladies,” he said. They giggled and Bess put her thumb in her mouth.
Five-year-old Nicky, his own namesake, was sitting by himself in a corner of the tent, disconsolately throwing walnuts at his mother’s lapdog, Tarquin, who had one eye shut and one open in a vain attempt to sleep and simultaneously look out for missiles.
Nick squatted beside him. “What’s up, little man?” he asked.
“I’m not a squire,” Nicky said. His face was streaked with dirt where he had rubbed his grubby knuckles in his eyes.
“Want to be my squire?” Nick said. The little boy’s face brightened and then immediately fell when he saw his uncle wasn’t wearing armor or carrying a lance.
“You’re not a knight,” he said.
“Good point,” Nick replied. “But I do need a page.”
“No thanks.” Nicky glumly resumed tormenting the dog.
Nick gave up. He knew when he’d been bested in a joust of logic by his small nephew.
“Forget Sir Sulky,” Elise said. She cocked an eyebrow in her husband’s direction. “Will you be the children’s guardian when their father kills himself later today?”
“I’ll do my best,” Nick replied.
“I’m not proposing to kill myself,” Robert grumbled, his voice echoing strangely behind the visor of his antique helmet as if emanating from a deep well.
“You will if you wear that thing down,” his wife retorted. “You’re blind as a bat.”
Nick was fond of his sister-in-law. Some thought her shrewish, but Nick correctly identified her sharpness as a desire to see Robert succeed in his manorial responsibilities. Her sometimes acerbic comments concealed a deep love and fierce protectiveness. Nick admired her unflagging devotion and, for the most part, good humor. It couldn’t be easy birthing five children in nine years, and they had lost a newborn son to whooping cough just the previous spring. He could see by the shadows in Elise’s eyes that she still grieved.
As it turned out, Robert was not killed. Knocked off his horse in the first bout before he even had a chance to level his lance, he limped off the field with nothing more serious than injured pride. Afterward, in the tent, he and Nick had toasted the bruised family honor with a keg of ale.
* * *
Nick slowly walked the perimeter of the tilting ground, thinking how strange it was that a place could be so desolate when only a few weeks before it had been teeming with life. That w
as the way with death—a sudden, incomprehensible, and permanent cessation. Just days ago, Cecily had been pulsing with life. He kept seeing her at the Accession Day Ball: late in the evening when only the young still had the energy to keep on dancing, he had seen a youth grab her hand and swing her into the dance, an elaborate chain that circled and wove, faster and faster, until there was only the bright kaleidoscope of whirling skirts, the flash of jewels warmed by perspiring flesh, the stamping of feet and rhythmic clapping of the older onlookers gathered, as Nick was, on the periphery. Then her cheeks had been flushed, not ashen; her breast heaving, not still; her eyes sparkling, not closed in permanent sleep.
Suddenly cold, Nick called to Hector and turned back to the palace. As he neared, he heard the tolling of the chapel bell and saw a funeral cortege emerge from beneath the Court Gate, Sir Edward and Robert leading, the chief pallbearers shouldering a pathetically small coffin. A priest, an open prayer book in his hands, intoned a prayer that, on the crisp winter air, came cleanly to Nick’s ears:
We brought nothing into this world; neither may we carry anything out of this world. The Lord giveth, and The Lord taketh away …
The rest of the words were drowned out by the keening of a woman, Cecily’s mother, supported bodily by her ladies. Near them stood a cart with two ebony horses at its head, black-liveried groomsmen holding their bridles as they stepped nervously and tossed their heads, spooked by the sound of such desolation.
Nick turned away. Cecily’s murderer had wiped out her future as casually as someone smudging an insect crawling on a page. She should have known love, held a newborn baby in her arms, watched grandchildren romping at her feet, died in her own bed with her family about her. And God had allowed it to happen. For a brief moment, he was tempted to shout his fury aloud, drown out the prating priest, who thought the words written by Archbishop Cranmer could smooth the lines of grief etched on the faces of Cecily’s parents, aging them a decade in a few days; could shore up the ruin of their hearts. Instead, Nick stepped forward as the coffin was slid gently onto the back of the cart and covered with a black cloth. Mounds of winter greens were spread over the top.
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