The Course of All Treasons Page 3

  “We have to report the death to the local magistrate,” Nick said, getting to his feet. “Can you ride?”

  Edmund nodded.

  “Then let’s get out of here.”

  Nick caught up the reins of the dead man’s horse, soothing it in a low voice to keep it calm. Edmund held it steady while Nick heaved the corpse across the saddle and tied it on. Next, he looped the reins over his pommel and mounted his own horse. Edmund did the same, although Nick could see he was in pain.

  “What were you saying to him?” Nick asked.

  “I asked him if he needed help,” Edmund said.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he had a message for you.”

  Nick frowned. “For me specifically?”

  “Yes. The Honorable Nicholas Holt.”

  Then not a robbery but an assassination. Del Toro.

  “Then you arrived, and, well …” Edmund trailed off. Glancing at him, Nick saw he was swaying slightly in the saddle. His wound must have been more serious than he had first thought. Edmund’s sleeve was red to the wrist, and blood was dripping down his hand and onto the neck of his horse.

  Nick held his questions and concentrated on getting them both to Didcot, where Edmund’s shoulder could be properly treated. He tried to remember what Eli and Rivkah, twin brother and sister doctors in Bankside and his closest friends after John, had told him about infection. Something to do with cleaning the wound with wine and then smearing it with honey before binding it in clean linen. It had sounded more like a recipe for a ham to Nick, but he would do his damnedest to follow the instructions to the letter if such things as wine, honey, and clean linen could be had. Such was his faith in his friends’ medical skills.

  Their friendship had begun when Eli found Nick bleeding in the streets of Bankside and stitched up the deep gash in Nick’s face that had been meant for his throat. Now a neat white line ran down from his right temple to just under his right jaw. Nick thought the scar gave him a dashing, piratical look; Rivkah said it made him look like a Bankside cutthroat.

  Nick smiled to himself as he remembered what Rivkah had said. Sitting on a stool in their tiny kitchen the night he was wounded, he had not known whether he was in shock due to blood loss or from the sight of Rivkah in a flowing nightgown inadequately covered by a cloak. At first he had thought her Eli’s wife, but when he realized they were twin siblings, his heart had given a great lurch, and he wasn’t sure it had ever recovered. Perhaps that was why every time his friend Sir Thomas Brighton eyed Rivkah with more than gentlemanly interest, he wanted to throw him through the nearest window.

  * * *

  The death of the unknown assassin, albeit killed in self-defense, took two days to sort out. The local magistrate—a gentleman farmer—was not the sharpest tool in the shed, and it took repeated explanations to satisfy him that the killing was lawful. Neither Nick nor Edmund said anything about assassination but let the magistrate believe it was a robbery gone bad.

  “Here’s your gold, then,” he said, handing Edmund the small bag. He had assumed Edmund had been the target, as he was the one wounded.

  “Er …” Edmund said, looking embarrassed.

  “Thanks for your help, sir,” Nick said before Edmund could blurt out the truth, steering him firmly to the door of the magistrate’s home. They had accepted the offer to stay for a couple of nights at the manor; Nick was concerned for Edmund, but he also needed to find out the identity of the man who had tried to kill him. Leaving Edmund recovering at the manor, he galloped back along the way they had come to make inquiries, but no one seemed to know the man or have any information about an accomplice. On the second day of fruitless searching, he gave up, aware of how late his report to Cecil was going to be. He just hoped Cecil didn’t learn of del Toro’s escape before he, Nick, could break the news to him.

  Edmund’s arm was in a sling, but he said he could ride. The wound had been small but deep, and he had lost a fair amount of blood. The magistrate’s wife had patched him up proficiently, even putting in a couple of stitches.

  “We have five boys,” she told them, breaking off the thread and surveying her handiwork with complacence. “You have no idea how many cuts and scrapes I’ve patched up in my time.” Nick had been pleased to see her clean the wound with wine, but when he mentioned honey, the woman had looked at him as if he were mad, although she grudgingly complied. “Never heard of that,” she said. “Must try it next time one of my lads lops something off.” She said this quite cheerfully. Nick admired her spirit and thought she would make a good battlefield nurse. She was far more intelligent than her husband, for one thing. And much younger. Her firm round body filled out her bodice quite charmingly, he thought.

  “God go with you,” the magistrate said, waving them off. He seemed pleased that his first dead body had been sorted so quickly and he hadn’t had to go fagging the length and breadth of the county in search of a murderer. Judging from his girth and easygoing nature, Nick thought the magistrate was the type to settle for the obvious solution of an attempted robbery. If it had been him, Nick would have left the case open and continued the search for the family of the dead man in order to identify him. Nick left a letter to be sent back to Robert by the magistrate, asking his brother to make further inquiries into the identity of the man.

  Nick gave the magistrate a few coins to bury the body decently.

  “That was good of you,” Edmund said, “seeing as he tried to kill you.”

  They were, once again, riding east on the London Road. This time Nick was careful to set a gentle pace so as not to jar Edmund’s shoulder. Unfortunately, this meant there was ample opportunity to talk.

  “He wasn’t a suicide,” Nick replied, conscious of the men he himself had dispatched into eternity. “He had the right to a decent burial.” Even suicides deserved to be buried in a churchyard, Nick thought. In his opinion, most people’s lives were so brutish and short, it was no wonder some poor unfortunates gave way to despair and decided to off themselves. If everyone who felt despair was going to hell, then heaven was going to be a very sparsely populated place. Perhaps that was what the clerics wanted: paradise as an exclusive gentlemen’s club.

  “I really don’t feel comfortable keeping this,” Edmund said, trying to give the gold back. “It feels wrong somehow. Like blood money.”

  “You saved my life,” Nick said. “If anyone deserves it, you do.”

  Nick realized that not only was he was in Edmund’s debt, but he had misjudged him. Edmund’s reaction to being given the purse of the dead man indicated he was a decent man with a conscience.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Palace of Whitehall

  “What do you mean, you lost del Toro and then he tried to have you killed?” Sir Robert Cecil said.

  Nick had walked into his office, ignoring the cries of Cecil’s flunkies that their master was not to be disturbed. Even though Cecil was only in his early twenties and a relative newcomer to court, he had already established a reputation for ruthlessness. His remarkable memory and his penchant for compiling lists of names in his own personal code of those foolish enough to make disparaging remarks about Queen and country kept his underlings in a state of silent, feverish employment. The son of Baron Burghley, he was rumored to be being groomed as the successor to Sir Francis Walsingham as head of the Queen’s spy network. Until that happy day, he effectively ran the day-to-day business of the spy network, answering only to his father, Walsingham, and the Queen.

  Nick made his report, offering no excuses for his failure.

  “I don’t know for a fact it was del Toro who hired the assassin,” Nick said. “But the coincidence seems too great.”

  Cecil steepled his fingers and, resting his chin on them, regarded Nick across his desk. His thinking pose. Nick wondered if he practiced in a mirror. From this angle, Nick could hardly see the hunch on his back. It was his bent-over creeping gait that had given him the sobriquet of the Spider. That and the fact that he was s
eldom seen outdoors, preferring instead to lurk silently in dark corners. His deformity was also the reason he chose to receive visitors sitting behind a desk littered with piles of parchment, which were covered in Cecil’s precise, minute script. The desk was a symbol of his power and it made him seem almost normal, like a clerk or a librarian.

  But Nick wasn’t deceived. Cecil, he was convinced, was more encyclopedia than man. Open up his skull and there would be more lists with more names on them. Names of traitors and informers and double agents and recusants. Nick’s name. His brother, Robert’s, name. Hell, his whole family, living and dead. In 1559, the former earl, Nick’s father, and Nick’s mother, Agnes, had been forced to comply with the Act of Uniformity of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacrament, which made it compulsory to attend Anglican services and established the Book of Common Prayer as the liturgy of the land; nonattendance at services was punishable by the massive fine of twenty-five pounds a month, imprisonment, or, as was increasingly the case as Elizabeth’s paranoia grew, death.

  When the Act of Uniformity had first gone into effect, Nick had been in long skirts and Robert twelve. Nick had grown up in the Anglican Church but was well aware of what this change of spiritual allegiance had cost his brother and parents. On his deathbed, the old earl had repeatedly called for a Catholic priest to come and shrive him, to take away the sin of his apostasy to the old faith. However, in return for their compliance, Nick’s family had been able to keep their title, their hereditary lands, and most importantly, the Queen’s trust.

  Despite the risk of losing everything, including their lives, Nick suspected that his brother and mother still practiced their faith. As a boy, Nick had accidentally discovered a secret panel in the library that led to a tiny priest hole deep within the walls. He had never told anyone of his find and was afraid to discover that it was still in use. However cunningly priest holes were hidden, Walsingham’s men were adept at discovering them, and Nick sometimes woke up from a nightmare of torches flickering on the stone walls of the Tower torture chambers while the screams of his brother, sister-in-law, and mother being racked echoed in his ears.

  * * *

  “Tell me again exactly what happened,” Cecil said.

  When Nick got to the part where he had checked the pockets of the dead man, Cecil interrupted for the first time.

  “Are you sure there was nothing else on him?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “And you have no idea who he was?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Very dead.”

  Cecil scowled. “I meant, was he an Englishman?”

  “Not a Spaniard, at any rate.” The dead man had been fair-skinned and blue-eyed.

  “What about your friend Lovett?”

  “He’s an Englishman too.”

  Again, Cecil gave him the evil eye.

  Nick sighed. He was getting tired of this. “He didn’t know him either.”

  “But definitely not an attempted robbery?”

  “No,” Nick said. “It didn’t play like that. The man was waiting. He told Edmund he had a message for me.”

  “And Lovett told you he himself was working for Essex?”

  Nick shifted impatiently. “Yes. Before. At the tavern. I already told you that.”

  Cecil tapped his fingers against his lips, his expression introspective. He looked as if he were praying, only Nick couldn’t imagine what kind of prayer Cecil would be capable of offering. Or to whom, for that matter.

  “What?” Nick demanded as the silence stretched out.

  Cecil looked up, as if surprised to see Nick still sitting there. “Instead of del Toro, perhaps our Boy Wonder is trying to eliminate his rivals?”

  “Essex, you mean? Surely not. Even he is not rash enough to start murdering Englishmen.”

  “You don’t know him the way I do,” Cecil said. “He cannot tolerate being bested by anyone, especially if it has to do with what he laughingly calls his honor. He doesn’t give a fig for the law. Thinks his exalted birth and the Queen’s favor make him exempt.”

  Nick suspected Cecil was thinking of the times Essex had pinched his toys when they were boys. In addition, Cecil’s own mother had been of comparatively low birth, and this was, Nick thought, the root of the bitter rivalry between the two men: Essex had the birth; Cecil had the brains. For the first time in their acquaintance, Nick suspected he was witnessing Cecil’s emotions getting the better of his judgment. He was fascinated but also deeply worried. The last thing Nick wanted was to end up in the middle of a feud between Cecil and Essex.

  “I thought Essex was in the Netherlands,” Nick said.

  The previous October, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and Essex’s stepfather, had been sent to the Netherlands to aid the Protestant Dutch in their uprising against Catholic Philip II of Spain. Dudley had promptly appointed Essex his General of the Horse, an act of blatant nepotism. It was rumored that the twenty-year-old Essex had spent the staggering sum of a thousand pounds kitting out his entourage and had occupied his time in Holland by feasting, performing pointless military exercises, and generally quarreling with anyone who crossed his path. Essex, and his close friend Sir Philip Sidney, viewed war as a type of chivalric sporting event where the man with the most trophies won. A veteran of several bloody battlefields, Nick was not only amazed at such naïvety but also deeply disgusted at the callous disregard for those killed and maimed, usually the pikemen, archers, and foot soldiers of the lowest social rank.

  “He’s back,” Cecil said sourly. “Apparently the Dutch told Leicester that if he didn’t curb his stepson’s excesses—he and his friends had been raiding the local villages for food and women and whatever else they could snaffle up—they would assassinate him themselves. So Leicester sent him back to the court carrying dispatches for the Queen and told him not to hurry back.”

  “That old chestnut. I’m surprised Essex didn’t twig to it,” Nick said. Much employed on the battlefield since the time of Julius Caesar, the “urgent dispatches” ruse was a way for generals to get rid of useless officers without political blowback.

  “I’m not. Essex was delighted, apparently. Came galloping up to Whitehall in a lather as if the Visigoths were at the gates.” Cecil snorted in derision. “All Leicester had written to the Queen was, ‘I beg you to keep my stepson in England for as long as possible.’”

  Given Essex’s reputation for mayhem, Nick could imagine the heartfelt tone. “How long has he been in London?”

  “Since January.”

  So, plenty of time to stir things up, then, Nick thought. It was now April.

  The previous summer, it had been the talk of the court when Essex had announced he was establishing his own spy network to work “hand in hand” with Walsingham’s. While the court toadies had lined up to congratulate him for his patriotism, behind his back they sniggered at his vainglory and correctly interpreted it as yet another instance of his rivalry with Robert Cecil, who had just arrived at court to work for Walsingham.

  The chief spymaster himself had been furious. Dressed in his customary black and looking like a disgruntled crow, he had stalked in to see the Queen, intending to ask Elizabeth to order Essex to cease and desist. Instead, Elizabeth had waspishly reminded him of his failure to prevent the assassination attempt on her life when William Parry had hidden in the grounds of Richmond Palace and then leapt out of the bushes with a knife. Surrounded only by her shrieking ladies, Elizabeth had faced down her would-be killer with breathtaking hauteur, commanding him to stop trampling the lavender and put down his weapon forthwith.

  “Where were you when Parry popped out of the shrubbery?” Elizabeth had raged.

  To this Walsingham had wisely given no reply, seeing as William Parry was, in fact, one of his own spies who had been recruited by the Spanish. Not his network’s finest hour.

  Parry had refrained from carrying out the assassination only because he was overcome, he late
r confessed, by the Queen’s uncanny likeness to her father, Henry VIII, whom he revered. Despite her being ten stone lighter, not to mention the wrong sex, it must have been Elizabeth’s bowel-loosening tone of command that did the trick. In Nick’s opinion, Parry’s fondness for Fat Harry more than confirmed the fact that he was a complete loon. This did not, however, save him from a traitor’s death.

  Nick got to his feet. “I’m off to see Her Maj. I’ll give her your best, shall I?”

  He had received the royal summons as soon as he entered the palace but had chosen to make his report to Cecil first in order to get the confession of his botch-up with del Toro over with and alert the network so that the man could be found. He hoped the Queen would not be aware that he had made a detour. She took a narrow view of being kept waiting.

  At the mention of the Queen, Nick saw a tremor of discomfit pass fleetingly over Cecil’s face before he schooled it into its habitual mask of impassivity. Only a few months before, the Queen had sent one of Cecil’s spies to the Tower, thinking him—erroneously, as it turned out—a suspect in the murders of two of her ladies-in-waiting.

  In reality, Sir Thomas Brighton was working for Cecil, who had tasked him to uncover a tax fraud at the Custom House. When Elizabeth had learned of Sir Thomas’s true identity, she had flown into a monumental snit. Ever since, she had treated Cecil with glacial politeness. So glacial, in fact, that Nick was sure Cecil had a severe case of frostbite in his extremities. Something that cheered Nick immensely.

  Let the Spider sort out his own problems, Nick thought as he left Cecil’s rooms. Nick had enough on his plate. To wit: someone, as yet undisclosed, was out to kill him.

  * * *

  Next stop, the Queen. Nick had arrived back in London only a few hours before and had not even dumped his saddlebags back at The Black Sheep in Bankside but had ridden straight to the palace. Edmund had veered off toward Leicester House near the Middle Temple while Nick had continued along the Strand and then south on King Street to Whitehall. Nick was once again saddlesore and hadn’t bathed in days. Still, perhaps the fact that he reeked would encourage the Queen to cut the audience short. He had no idea why she wanted to see him but fervently hoped she didn’t have a job in mind. The previous winter he had identified the “Court Killer”—the nickname given to the murderer by the people of London—and this had convinced Elizabeth that Nick was now her personal fixer, much like a trusted plumber when the sewers started backing up and she found herself knee-deep in shit.