CHAPTER 12

The trip across the river was quick but wet. Nick’s opportunity to feast his eyes on Rivkah during the crossing was thwarted by the fact that she was huddled deep inside the voluminous folds of her cloak’s hood with only her nose peeking out.

“Bloody awful weather for April,” the wherryman said cheerfully as he pulled with easy grace at his oars. Young and with the massive shoulders and arms of a man born to a life on the river, he seemed oblivious to the rain drizzling down. Nick grunted a response and thought longingly of the cover on Essex’s barge.

“Do you put in at Wood Wharf often?” Nick asked when they landed and he was handing Rivkah out of the wherry onto the dock.

“Not much call nowadays,” the wherryman said. “Now, in my grandfather’s day it were another matter. Lots of business doings hereabouts, merchants and such. The toffs at the big houses on the Strand mostly use Temple Stairs. And their own stairs, of course.”

All the great houses had their own private landing docks with stairs going right down to the river—York, Leicester, Somerset, and Savoy Palace. Wood Wharf, with its splintering dock, warped stairs, and derelict watchman’s shed, was a decaying remnant of a bygone era.

“What about a fortnight ago, late?” Nick didn’t have much hope, but it was worth a try. Most wherrymen would not row across the breadth of the river at night, but some would be willing to row along the northern bank, especially where the great river curved to the south because the great houses between the Middle Temple and Whitehall were often lit up with entertainments and there were fares to be made. It was safer to hire a wherry, even in the dark, than to risk the pitch-black London streets at night. Only the aristocracy who could afford to hire an armed guard to discourage the cutpurses and bully-boys who lurked in dark alleys would dare to cross the city at night.

“Funny you should mention that,” the wherryman said. “Me and the lads were just talking about it the other night in The Water Beetle. Sam said there were a lantern on the wharf and he thought it were a fare wanting to be picked up, so he made for it. He were down at Whitefriars. Not a hard pull with the tide coming in. Then, as he got nearer, he shipped his oars and glided in silent. Heard two men on the dock arguing. One had a funny accent. Foreign-like.”

“Dutch? Spanish?”

The man shrugged. “Dunno, just foreign. The other gent spoke normal. You know, proper English.”

Nick saw Rivkah hide a smile at the man’s unselfconscious bigotry.

“You say gent,” Nick said. “You mean he was a gentleman?”

The wherryman shrugged. “Sam didn’t say.”

Nick had the feeling this was the most valuable information the man could provide. The foreigner was probably del Toro; the Englishman, a traitor, if he were meeting a Spaniard in a deserted place at night. Either of them could have killed Winchelsea.

“Is there any way the second person Sam heard was a woman?” Nick asked. He was thinking of Annie.

The wherryman frowned. “He said the voice was soft, if that’s what you mean. Could have been a young gent, I suppose.

“Anyway,” he went on. “Sam were about to shout out his rates when one of them left. The other took the lantern and went off over there.” He pointed to the shed.

“What time would this have been?” Nick asked.

“Bells had just spoke twelve, Sam said.”

That was accurate enough. The noise from all the churches tolling the hours was cacophonous, even at night. A born Londoner could count the hours without stirring in his sleep, so used was he to the din. If all the bells were suddenly to go silent, the townsfolk would wake in a panic.

“Did Sam tie up at the wharf?” If so, then he could be a witness to Winchelsea’s murder. But the wherryman shook his head.

“Nah. He decided to call it a night. Shoved off and rowed home.”

Nick hid his disappointment.

“Good day to you,” the man said, tugging his cap.

Nick paid him above the going rate in gratitude for his information, although he did not think it would lead to anything.

“Is that where the agent was murdered?” Rivkah asked, pointing to the shed. “And his body found in the water along this dock?”

Nick nodded. He took her arm and tried to hurry her on, away from this place of violence and betrayal, but she shook him off. She stood looking at the abandoned wharf and shed. A lone white swan resolved itself eerily out of the tendrils of river mist and silently glided up to the dock. It seemed completely unafraid of them. As swans were normally seen in pairs because they mated for life, it was unusual to see one alone.

Rivkah crouched down and, taking a piece of bread out of her basket, offered it to the swan. It took it from her fingers delicately. Nick shivered. For a moment, he fancied the swan was the spirit of Winchelsea haunting the place of his murder.

“A lonely place to die,” Rivkah said.

It was as if she had uttered Winchelsea’s epitaph, and it made Nick feel ashamed that he had been too concerned with his irritation at Essex and Walsingham’s spy games to have given much thought to the man who had died so terribly and, as Rivkah had reminded him, so alone. As they walked up to the Strand and made their way through the streets to Thomas Brighton’s lodgings in Cheapside, Nick vowed that he would bring Winchelsea’s killer to justice.

*   *   *

Rooms of Sir Thomas Brighton, Aldersgate

Nick, John, and Rivkah climbed the stairs to Thomas’s room. The door was ajar.

“Thomas, you old malingerer,” Nick called, knocking lightly on the door. “Up for visitors?”

They entered when there was no reply. Thomas was lying across the middle of the bed on his back, his arms flung out, as if he had been sitting on the side of the bed and had toppled back. He was gasping for air, his limbs shaking. A wineskin lay on the floor at his feet, its sticky contents already drying in a brownish stain on the wood boards. Rivkah rushed over to him and put her fingers against the side of his neck.

“His pulse is racing,” she said.

Nick bent to pick up the wineskin.

“Don’t touch that,” Rivkah said. “Thomas has been poisoned.”

Now Nick could see flecks of some darkish substance at the corner of Thomas’s mouth, his face pouring sweat as if from a high fever, his hands plucking convulsively at the coverlet.

“He must be moved to the infirmary at St. Mary Ovarie,” Rivkah said. “But a ride in an uncovered wherry in this weather will kill him.”

“John,” Nick said, turning to his friend, who was staring aghast at the twitching figure on the bed. “Run to Leicester House. Beg Essex for the loan of his barge. Have it pull up at Blackfriars Stairs, closest to Aldersgate as the crow flies, and wait for us there. Make sure you tell him there’s been another attempt on an agent’s life. Then return here with Edmund so we can move Thomas to the barge.”

“Christ’s Hospital is nearest,” John said.

Nick shook his head. “Not safe. Whoever did this can find Thomas there and finish the job. We need to get him over the river to Bankside. Besides, it’s closer to Rivkah and Eli.”

John nodded and left the room.

Nick regretted involving Essex, especially as he did not know who was trying to kill off Walsingham’s agents, but felt he had no choice. They had to get Thomas to the infirmary as quickly as possible.

“What can I do?” Nick asked. He had absolute faith in Rivkah’s skill; if anyone could save his friend, it was she.

“Help me prop him up on the pillows. He cannot breathe on his back.”

Nick lifted Thomas and laid him lengthwise on the bed. Then he stacked pillows behind him so that he was almost sitting up. Immediately, Thomas’s breathing became less labored.

“I need water and salt,” Rivkah said. “A lot of both.” She lifted each of Thomas’s eyelids and saw that the pupils of both eyes were unnaturally enlarged, giving him a staring look. “Hurry, Nick.”

Nick ran down the stairs and out into the street. Three doors down he found a tavern and burst through the door.

“I need a bucket of water and as much salt as you have,” Nick demanded of the tavern-keeper. He placed a silver crown on the bar. “As quick as you can. It’s a matter of life and death.” Briefly he explained what he needed it for, and the tavernkeeper ordered his boy to draw two buckets from the well and to help carry them to Thomas’s lodgings. His wife silently handed Nick a large cake of salt wrapped in burlap.

Back at Thomas’s rooms, Nick watched Rivkah shave the salt into a goblet of water and stir vigorously. Then she picked up a bowl of fruit from a table, dumped out the contents onto the floor, and placed it on Thomas’s lap.

“Tip his head back and pinch his nose,” she instructed.

Seated on one side of the unconscious man, Nick held him up and cradled his neck in the crook of his arm so that his head lolled back, although his body was upright. Then he pinched Thomas’s nose while Rivkah poured as much of the salt water down his throat as she could. Thomas gagged and thrashed, trying to resist. It was the first sign of awareness of what was happening to him that Nick had seen. He looked for reassurance to Rivkah that this was an improvement, but her eyes were fixed on her patient, a small frown on her face, watching for any sign that Thomas was not too far gone for his body to reject the poison he had unwittingly imbibed.

Suddenly Thomas arched back, then threw himself forward and violently vomited the contents of his stomach into the bowl Rivkah was holding. His convulsions seemed to go on and on, but at last he went limp and they laid him back on the pillows. Rivkah climbed off the bed with the bowl and examined the contents, swirling the bowl and sniffing it.

“Belladonna,” she said. “He was lucky he only ingested a small amount and we found him so soon. Otherwise he would be dead.”

Nick thought guiltily of the wine he himself had brought Thomas on his last visit and had encouraged him to drink, despite Rivkah forbidding it. Belladonna, or deadly nightshade, was one of the most common poisons; it grew wild as a weed, and almost anyone could gather it and use the berries or roots. In small doses, it was used as a remedy for palpitations of the heart. In large doses, it sent the heart into fatal arrest. Its name—belladonna, or beautiful lady—derived from the fact that women used it to enlarge the pupils of their eyes so that their eyes looked bigger.

Rivkah cleaned out the goblet of salt water and refilled it with fresh water from the bucket. Then she held it to Thomas’s lips.

“Drink,” she ordered.

Thomas’s eyes flickered open briefly. “Yes, Doctor,” he managed to croak. She hushed him and dribbled some water into his mouth. Exhausted with the effort, Thomas’s eyes closed again, and he seemed to slip away into a deep slumber.

“Will he recover?” Nick asked, mopping his friend’s brow with a rag he had dipped in the clean water from the bucket.

“Time will tell. He’s already weak from the influenza, but he is a strong man and has recovered well from wounds before.” Rivkah was referring to the sword and musket scars on Thomas’s torso. “But we must get him to Eli.”

At that moment, there was a clattering on the stairs, and John, Edmund, and Essex burst into the room.

“How is he?” Essex asked Nick. Then he caught sight of Rivkah.

“I am Sir Thomas’s physician,” she said to his unspoken question. “We need to move him to your barge with all speed.”

If Essex was surprised at Rivkah’s gender or her quiet authority, he didn’t show it.

“My carriage is waiting downstairs. I thought it easier than carrying him through the streets to the barge.”

“Thank you,” Nick said. And meant it. In his state, Thomas might not survive being carried in the rain across town to the river. Even with foot traffic impeding the carriage’s progress through the streets, at least he would be dry and warm.

Together the men wrapped Thomas in a coverlet and carried him down the stairs. He was still unconscious, but his eyelids flickered occasionally as if he were at least in part aware of movement.

“Will he die?” Edmund asked.

Nick glanced at Edmund’s face and saw it was as pale as when he had killed the assassin on the London Road. Another thing that made him unsuitable as an agent: Edmund was squeamish about violence and sudden death.

“We don’t know,” Nick said.

Carefully, they laid Thomas along one of the seats of the carriage, covering him with furs that Essex had been thoughtful enough to bring. Rivkah climbed in beside him and placed Thomas’s head in her lap so she could monitor his breathing.

“You go too, John,” Nick said. “Tell the bargemen to row for St. Mary’s Queen Dock. They can help you carry him into the infirmary from there.”

John nodded. St. Mary’s Queen Dock was located at the southern tip of London Bridge, directly opposite St. Mary Ovarie Church.

“Eli will still be there,” Rivkah said. “He will know what more can be done for Thomas.” What she did not say, but what everyone understood, was that she did not know whether it would be sufficient to save his life. That all depended on how much poison had been purged by the vomiting and how much remained in his body. Only time would tell.

“I will return to The Black Sheep later,” Nick said to John. A look passed between them. Their plan for John to watch Nick’s back had just gone up in smoke with the attempt on Thomas’s life. And that attempt now made it certain that Walsingham’s agents were being systematically targeted.

Nick leaned into the carriage, his voice so low only John and Rivkah could hear. “Watch over Thomas until you can get one of Black Jack Sims’ boys to do it. There may be another attempt on his life. And, John,” Nick said. “When Thomas is able to talk, find out who brought him the wineskin.”

“The wine was fresh,” said Rivkah. “So it would have been siphoned from a barrel relatively recently.”

“Good to know,” Nick said. That meant tavernkeepers’ memories would also be fresh and they might remember someone purchasing a wineskin in the last couple of days.

“What’s the killer’s motive?” Rivkah asked. “Don’t tell me robbery.”

Nick knew she had worked out that the attempt on Thomas’s life was connected to the attempt on his own and was not, as he had allowed her to believe before, a botched robbery.

To avoid the accusation in her eyes, Nick slapped the rump of the leading horse, and the carriage pulled away down Aldersgate, turned right at Newgate, and was gone.

Rivkah’s look of sorrow burned in his chest. His refusal to answer her proved that he had been lying to her through omission. Given that she knew Sir Thomas was one of Walsingham’s agents, it was no stretch of the imagination to assume Nick was also in the same business. Somehow he would have to put things right between them. How, he did not know, unless he came clean about his secret life. He shuddered at the thought.

When Nick got back to Thomas’s room, he found Edmund holding the wineskin. “I thought I would throw it on the midden behind the building,” Edmund said. “That way, no one will be tempted to use it again.”

“It’s evidence,” Nick said. “We need to show it to every tavernkeeper in the area and find out who bought it.”

“Good,” Essex said. “Edmund can do that.” He looked at Edmund standing there. “Well, you heard Nick.”

“At once, my Lord,” Edmund said, leaving the room, face averted.

Nick turned his back on Essex and started searching the room; he was mortified that his friend had been treated so peremptorily in front of him. Once again, Essex seemed oblivious of his rudeness. It was as if he regarded all men beneath his own exalted class as mere servants, tools to be used. No wonder his presence in the Netherlands had been so disruptive; he had the uncanny knack of putting people’s backs up without being aware of it. Nick himself was only just holding on to his temper despite his gratitude to Essex for loaning his barge and carriage to transport Thomas.

Essex was a strange, mercurial mix of generosity and callousness, thoughtfulness—witness the fur rugs he had included in the carriage—and utter obliviousness to others’ feelings. It was as if there were two men inhabiting one skin—one whom Nick despised; the other whom he couldn’t help but like.

And if Nick was honest with himself, he also despised Edmund’s servility. Perhaps that was why he had avoided him when they were at Oxford. There was something about Edmund’s very desire to please that set Nick’s teeth on edge. Nick hated himself for it and suspected it made him more like Essex than he would have believed possible.

To distract himself from these depressing thoughts, and the knowledge that his friendship with Rivkah might be irretrievably damaged, Nick concentrated on searching Thomas’s room. He stripped the bed, but found nothing except Thomas’s dagger under the pillow, and examined the cracks in the flooring to see if anything had fallen between them. He was looking for some clue to the identity of the person who had brought the poisoned wineskin to Thomas, but he knew it was hopeless. Whoever it was could have placed it in Thomas’s room while he was sleeping; it would have been easy enough, as Thomas had not kept his door locked. One thing Nick did know: whoever had tried to poison Thomas knew he was sick in bed and knew he had visitors who brought wineskins. Nick had not only been seen the last time he visited, but he had unknowingly provided the killer with the perfect means to murder Thomas.

“Seems like you have everything in hand,” Essex said. “I’ll be off. I must report to the Queen what has happened.”

Get in before Walsingham has a chance, thought Nick uncharitably. But the Queen would have to be told, and Nick would rather Essex break the news to her than do it himself. He was also relieved not to have Essex hanging over his shoulder while he investigated.

*   *   *

Once Essex had gone, Nick went onto the landing on Thomas’s floor and knocked on the door opposite.

“Who knocks?” a voice boomed. “Speak, gentle, or forever hold thy peace.”

Nick blinked and wondered briefly if he had stumbled into a farce, perhaps as the hapless messenger to a king. “Open up in the Queen’s name,” he shouted. Mention of the Queen usually did the trick, Nick found, and this was no exception.

The door flew open to reveal a man so enormous that he entirely filled the doorway, blocking all view of inside. Even though it was still morning, he was holding the leg of a capon in one fist and a tankard in the other. His chin was shiny with grease, and as he chewed, he regarded Nick through tiny, intelligent eyes sunk deep into the folds of his face like currants in a suet pudding. His jerkin was fouled with not only his present repast but many earlier meals, judging from its malodorous condition. Nick wrinkled his nose at the sour smell coming off the man, at his unwashed, unshaven appearance. But despite the overwhelming impression of a pig in a trough, the man’s expression was cheerful, as if he was delighted to be interrupted in the middle of his breakfast by a stranger.

“Greetings,” the man said, waving the capon leg as if it were a royal scepter. “Prithee, enter.” He backed away so that Nick had room to squeeze through the doorway. A table groaning with food sat under a window with a chair pulled up to a platter with the rest of the dismembered capon on it. The rest of the room was littered with past meals, shriveled apple cores, bones picked clean, the sour smell of spilled wine and ale. It was truly a sybarite’s palace.

“Sack?” the fat man offered, holding up a jug.

“No, thanks,” Nick said. “But don’t let me stop you. I just have a few questions.”

“Please,” the man said grandly. He sat down heavily in the chair and carried on eating. “Don’t mind me,” he added. “I have to keep my strength up.”

“Did you see anyone deliver a wineskin to the room opposite either today or yesterday?” Knowing Thomas, he would have poured himself a drink almost as soon as he got the wine.

“So that’s where it went,” the man said.

“I don’t follow,” said Nick.

“My daily wineskin. I have one delivered every morning from The Rising Sun tavern, only yesterday it didn’t come.” He regarded Nick dolefully. “It just goes to show, does it not, that you cannot trust your neighbors. And Sir Thomas seemed like an honorable sort, not one to filch another fellow’s tipple.” He sighed as if the perfidy of the world weighed heavily upon his soul. “What’s this about?”

“I’m afraid Sir Thomas has been poisoned.”

The man’s face turned pale, and he looked balefully at the tankard in his huge fist.

Before Nick could point out that the man would certainly have known about it by now if his sack had been tampered with, there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and Will Shakespeare burst into the room.

“Sir John, you old devil,” he cried. “How goes it?”

“Will?” Nick said.

“Hello, Nick. Sorry about Thomas.”

“How did you hear?”

“We were rehearsing at Leicester House when John came rushing in with the news. Thought I would come over and see if I could help.”

Nick sighed. As a spy agency, Leicester House was a joke. It leaked like a sieve. “You obviously know this gentleman.” Nick pointed to the fat man.

Will laughed. “Sir John Staffington is a generous patron of our acting troupe.”

Clearly overcoming his qualms about his sack being poisoned, Sir John raised his tankard in a toast. “Here’s to you, immortal thespians.”

So that explained Sir John’s initial greeting, Nick thought. He was a theater buff. Which meant that half of what came out of his mouth was pure fiction and the other half pure intoxication. It hadn’t taken Nick long to figure out that Sir John was already three sheets to the wind despite it being only midmorning.

“Can we get back to business?” Nick asked.

“Sorry, Nick,” Will said. “I’ll keep mum.” He sat opposite Sir John and, after sniffing at the flagon, helped himself to a cup of sack. The fat man and the would-be playwright chinked tankards. Nick sighed. But for the absence of scantily clad nymphs, Nick felt like a Puritan who had inadvertently stumbled into a bacchanalian orgy.

He pressed on manfully. “You were saying that you did not receive your usual wineskin yesterday from The Rising Sun, Sir John.”

“That’s right. Most peculiar. I flatter myself I am their best customer.”

I bet, Nick thought, eyeing Sir John’s enormous girth.

“I heard footsteps and I thought, ‘Aha, my wineskin has arrived. Oh, joy!’ But when I opened the door a little while later, there was nothing there. Most disappointing.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“Not a soul.” Sir John looked downcast; then he brightened. “Lucky for me, eh? Otherwise it would be me that was poisoned.” Then, as an afterthought. “Poor Sir Thomas.”

“Indeed,” intoned Will.

“You might ask the landlady downstairs,” Sir John said. “A Mistress Shrewsbury.” He laughed, a huge sound that boomed off the walls. Will looked at him fondly, Nick not so fondly, as he was sure he was now partially deaf. “Shrew, more like.” Sir John slapped his knee with delight at his own wit. “Mistress Shrew.” He jerked his head at the floor. “Lives below in the nether regions.”

Nick felt sorry for the poor woman. He would not like to have a neighbor the weight of Sir John galumphing around just above his head at all hours of the day and night.

“Thank you, Sir John.” Nick could now inquire at The Rising Sun and find out who delivered the wineskin and precisely when. Perhaps Edmund had already done so.

“Not at all, young sir. My infinite pleasure. And please convey my deepest commiserations to Sir Thomas. I trust he will recover?”

“We hope so.”

*   *   *

The woman who opened the door to Nick on the ground floor was so tiny and wore so many layers of clothing that she did indeed look like a shrew peeking out of its nest. To add to this impression, her long nose twitched at the sight of him, as if Nick had brought the rank odor of Sir John with him; tiny, black eyes darted over his face and clothes, assessing him as a possible threat. Nick had to suppress a smile at the aptness of Sir John’s name for her. In addition to a cap, she had a shawl over her head and a blanket around her shoulders.

“Mistress Shrewsbury,” Nick said, bowing. “I hear that nothing goes on in this building without your knowledge.” A bit of flattery never went amiss, Nick reckoned. “May I come in and ask you a few questions? I am on the Queen’s business.”

“Is this about poor Sir Thomas?” the landlady said in a surprisingly strident voice that belied her diminutive appearance.

“It is.”

“Then you’d better come in,” she said. “Make sure you wipe your feet on the mat.”

After dutifully wiping his feet on a threadbare rug just inside the door, Nick was free to look around the room. It was cold and dark, with an empty fireplace despite the large basket of logs standing on the hearth. In other circumstances, this lack of a fire would have suggested poverty, but Nick could see that the furnishings of the room were of good quality—a solid oak sideboard with silver candlesticks (candles unlit) against one wall; a threadbare Turkey carpet; a glimpse of a four-poster bed hung with painted cloth through the doorway into the bedchamber beyond. The room was literally stuffed with belongings, and Nick surmised that Mistress Shrewsbury was a widow who had rented out the rest of her house to make ends meet and had somehow managed to cram all her furniture and knickknacks from the entire house into these two rooms. The lack of a fire and light was probably her mistaken notion of economizing, although he couldn’t see that she needed to with the high rent Sir Thomas and Sir John undoubtedly paid in such a respectable neighborhood as Aldersgate.

Nick had often observed that people who lived alone tended to develop peculiar habits. Witness Sir John upstairs. Nick had him pegged as a widower who had decided to eat, drink, and be merry before he died, which would probably be of apoplexy fairly soon, the way he was going. Better than the pinched life of a Mistress Shrewsbury, who was doubtless tormented by the conviction that her renters were engaged in riotous living at the expense of her diminished circumstances. To complete the picture of the batty widow, Nick counted at least six cats in the room.

“They’re to keep the rats down,” the landlady said, seeing the direction of Nick’s gaze. “Sir John’s room is a veritable Lord Mayor’s Banquet for rats with all that rotting food lying around. If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times. Throw it on the rubbish heap out back. But does he listen? No, he does not.”

Nick had the strange impression he was listening to a conversation that went on inside her head most of her waking hours. He could see that she had focused all her unhappiness, loneliness, and blighted hopes on the gargantuan figure of Sir John. In an odd way, her ongoing war with him probably gave her life purpose. Nick had observed this in feuding neighbors back in Oxfordshire, sometimes over something as trivial as an errant cow grazing on the wrong side of a fence. When one old fellow died, his septuagenarian nemesis often followed within weeks, his reason for living gone.

“Please be seated,” Mistress Shrewsbury said, with an oddly touching sort of faded gentility.

Nick looked in vain for a chair that was not piled with clothes or pots or, indeed, a cat. “I’ll stand, thank you.”

“Suit yourself.” She removed a ginger tom from a chair and sat down, arranging the cat on her lap like a fur muff, where it began a stentorian purring. Two sets of eyes, one pair dark, one green, stared up at him disconcertingly. What with Sir John upstairs, Mistress Shrewsbury downstairs, and a poisoner on the loose, Nick was beginning to feel as if he had stumbled into an insane asylum.

“Was a wineskin delivered yesterday for Sir John?” Nick began.

“Must have been,” she replied. “Same every day like clockwork. How that man can drink so much and still be standing is anyone’s guess.”

Nick resigned himself to a flood of irrelevant commentary on Sir John, clearly the landlady’s pet peeve.

“But you didn’t see who delivered it?”

“I was otherwise occupied.” She glanced back at the bedchamber and then reddened, as if she had given herself away about doing something shameful like dressing. “But it is usually the boy from The Rising Sun.”

“At what time?”

“St. Martin’s had just struck the half after nine. I was getting ready to go to market.”

“I see.” Nick was disappointed. He had hoped that, like all landladies in his experience, she would have been nosy enough to look out her door whenever someone arrived at her premises.

“I went up to Sir Thomas to ask him if he needed anything, poor man.”

Nick perked up.

“I tapped on the door and opened it.”

“Was there a wineskin outside his door?” Nick asked.

“If you will let me finish, young man,” she said, severely. “I didn’t go in, of course. It wouldn’t have been proper.”

Not to mention fear of catching the influenza, Nick thought.

“Sir Thomas was sitting on the side of the bed pouring a drink from a wineskin. He asked me if I had seen who delivered it. I said no. Perhaps it was Sir John? I said. Sir Thomas said that it was probably his friend Nick.”

Nick’s heart sank. He felt more responsible than ever. “Did he say where it had been left?”

“Just inside his door. He never locked it when he was at home. Only when he went out.”

So the boy from The Rising Sun had delivered the wineskin as usual for Sir John; then someone else had spiked it with deadly nightshade and put it inside Sir Thomas’s room for him to find when he woke up. Sir Thomas would have thought Nick had dropped by, found him asleep, and, not wanting to wake him, left it for him.

“Did you see or hear anyone else on the stairs after you returned from market?”

Mistress Shrewsbury shook her head.

“Is there a back entrance?” Nick asked.

“Of course.”

“Show me, please.”

She led Nick down a passageway on the ground floor to a door at the far end. Just to the right of the door was a small staircase. When Nick asked her where this led, she told him to the upper floor and on to the attic.

She opened the back door, and Nick noticed that it was unlocked. He remarked upon it.

“No point,” she said. “Sir John uses it to avoid his creditors. Which are legion, I can tell you. He kept losing his latchkey and breaking it open. Cost me a fortune to repair it each time.” She sniffed. “So now I just leave it unlocked. Sir Thomas uses it too. I prefer they leave the front door for me. More private.”

Nick surmised that her dislike of Sir John was probably stronger than her fear of being murdered in her bed.

The door opened onto the usual tiny garden surrounded by an old-fashioned withy fence, rotting and sagging in parts. A gate at the end of the garden led to a lane. In better times there had been a vegetable garden, but now weeds, overgrown blackberry bushes, and broken household detritus had taken over so that the garden was little more than a junkyard with a beaten path down the center. At the end of the garden to the left of the gate was an enormous rubbish dump. Those householders who were lucky enough to back onto the river merely dumped their rubbish and the contents of their chamber pots directly into the water. Households in the center of the city, like Mistress Shrewsbury’s, used their backyard. A city ordinance decreed that these refuse dumps should be removed every month at the householder’s expense, but few people obeyed this rule. Some used the compost heaps on their vegetable gardens—Rivkah and Eli did—but most simply left them to grow huge and noisome, fouling the air of the entire neighborhood and bringing hordes of rats from the river to feast on them at night.

Nick had seen enough. He now knew how the poisoner had gained access to the house without being seen by the inhabitants or people in the street at the front. He would have known the time the wineskin was delivered each day and simply slipped inside and up the back stairs, poured in the poison, and placed it inside Sir Thomas’s rooms. The callousness of it bit into Nick’s soul. Even as he followed the landlady back into the house and climbed the back stairs to the upper floor, Sir Thomas, his friend, could be breathing his last.

*   *   *

Nick searched Sir Thomas’s rooms again but found nothing. Once back out on the street, he discovered that the tavern where he had obtained the water and salt was, indeed, The Rising Sun. Seeing as it was only a few doors down from Mistress Shrewsbury’s lodging house, it made sense. Now that he had been given a definite lead, and not trusting Edmund’s thoroughness, Nick ducked in and quickly ascertained that the same boy who had helped him carry the buckets up to Sir Thomas’s rooms was the boy who delivered the daily wineskin to Sir John. The lad had not seen anyone on the stairs when he had dropped it off outside Sir John’s door.

“I hope Sir John is not in trouble, sir,” the tavern owner said. “He’s our best customer.”

Nick assured him Sir John was not a poisoner. Unless he was guilty of poisoning himself with gluttony, Nick thought to himself.

*   *   *

Although Nick was eager to return to Leicester House to ascertain where Gavell and Stace had been that morning, he knew he must report in to Walsingham. He was now certain that del Toro was a Spanish assassin sent to destabilize the English network prior to some act of war, an act of great audacity, since Mendoza, the erstwhile Spanish ambassador, had been expelled from England two years prior for being implicated in a plot to kill the Queen. It was common for foreign agents to be assigned as low-level diplomats to embassies, Nick knew. It allowed them more freedom of movement and more protection. What better way to cut off the flow of intelligence than to kill an enemy’s agents? Not only would it break the line of communication between the continent and London, it would also throw Walsingham’s network into utter confusion as they labored to find the murderer. As a ploy, it was crude but effective.

Accordingly, he made his way to St. Paul’s and then turned east on Fenchurch Street. But when he arrived at Seething Lane, he found Walsingham being helped into a carriage by his secretary, who solicitously tucked fur rugs around his master’s knees.

“Climb in,” Walsingham ordered. “We’ve been summoned to Whitehall.”

Only a royal summons could have enticed Walsingham out of his warm study. The man was clearly at death’s door, judging by his ghostlike pallor and hands that trembled uncontrollably until he tucked them out of sight under the rugs. Nick marveled at the iron will of the man that could keep his body, and more importantly, his mind, functioning. Even so, the spymaster had been seldom seen at court of late, preferring to use Sir Robert Cecil as his liaison with the Queen. This must be serious, Nick thought, placing himself opposite Walsingham in the carriage.

“Before you ask, I know about the attempted poisoning of Sir Thomas,” Walsingham said. “So does the Queen.”

So Essex had informed her as soon as he left Sir Thomas’s lodgings, as Nick had known he would. Although on the periphery of real intelligence work, Essex was eager to appear at its center.

Nick told Walsingham of the conversation he had overheard between Essex and Annie. “I don’t think she can be trusted,” Nick said. “She seems to be playing some kind of devious game of her own, and she has a habit of disappearing and then reappearing. I think she’s up to something.”

Walsingham kept his eyes on the window, as if the passing scenes of London were of great fascination.

“My Lord,” Nick said, his irritation growing at Walsingham’s continued silence, “if there is something going on, I think now is the time to tell me.”

Walsingham turned toward him. “Patience, Nick,” he said. “Patience.”