CHAPTER 16

Rivkah and Eli’s House, Bankside

Once again, Nick found himself being stitched up in Eli and Rivkah’s house.

He had yet to summon the courage to tell Rivkah that one of his recent attackers was a woman.

“Ow!” he said.

“Don’t be a baby.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t have a hole in your head.”

“It’s a cut, not a hole,” Rivkah said, snipping off the thread on the last stitch. “Made by a fire poker, if I’m not mistaken, judging by the soot in the wound.” She put a linen pad smeared with some ointment on the stitches and secured it with a bandage that she wrapped around the top of his head. She frowned. “It’s not the cut but the dizziness from the blow that I’m worried about.”

When Nick had come to on the floor of the tavern room and tried to move his head, he’d felt like an axman with poor aim was chopping at it in a botched execution. Very slowly he sat up, the room spinning. His stomach heaved. Once he had thrown up, he felt a little better. He found his sword and began the long process of trying to stand.

Once upright, he held on to the walls and staggered onto the landing and down the stairs. His legs didn’t seem to want to cooperate, so he had to sit down again in the taproom. No one remarked on his state. He probably looked drunk, he thought, although a tentative exploration with his fingers had told him the back of his head was caked in blood and it had run down the side of his face while he was unconscious, giving him the appearance of a ghoul. Vomit stained the front of his jerkin. One or two of the customers glanced at him but made no comment. Perhaps they thought he had been in a drunken fight. Judging from its dark, smoky interior, the tavern was probably the type of lowlife establishment that was used to brawling and knife fights.

How he made his way out into the streets, over London Bridge, and back to Bankside, he wasn’t sure. Vague images came back to him like snatches of a dream: the openmouthed shock of a matron and the way she dragged her child to the other side of the road; the disapproving glance of a cleric plainly disgusted that Nick was drunk in the middle of the afternoon; the grin of a carter as he passed in a jingle of harness. No one offered to help him. Nick felt a bit like the poor sod in the gospel parable who had been attacked and robbed and lay there bleeding while everyone passed him by on the other side of the road. He vaguely wondered when his Good Samaritan would appear.

Somehow he ended up sitting on Rivkah’s doorstep, his head cupped in his hands. He hadn’t even had the strength to knock, but a local, correctly identifying him as a would-be patient of the Jewish doctors, knocked for him.

“Thankee,” Nick croaked. Then, when the door opened, “Hello, Rivkah. Thought I’d drop by.”

Silently, she had helped him stand and brought him indoors. Sitting him down on a stool, she had set about cleaning the blood off his face and head so she could get an accurate look at the damage.

Now handing him a beaker of water, Rivkah held up her hand in front of Nick’s face.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” she asked.

Nick squinted. “Four?”

“Two,” she said. “You’re seeing double.”

“Two of you can’t be all bad,” Nick replied, trying to grin but wincing instead as his head throbbed.

Rivkah ignored his feeble attempts at flattery. “You may feel sleepy, but you mustn’t go to sleep yet,” she said. “We don’t know why, but head injuries can lead to coma if you sleep, and then sometimes death. Perhaps due to bleeding inside the skull.”

Nick looked at her. She was being wonderful. That was the problem. Her kindness and professionalism meant he was merely her patient. But he didn’t want to be her patient; he wanted to be her friend, and perhaps more, and he was terribly afraid that he had irretrievably damaged their relationship with his lies and secret life as a spy.

“Rivkah,” he said. “I need to explain a few things.”

“Not when you are like this,” she said. She began to get up from her chair.

“Sit down. Please,” he added when he saw her frown at his tone.

She sighed. “You really shouldn’t be talking, you know.”

“Will you damn well stop being my doctor for a moment?” Nick said. Then immediately regretted it. “Sorry,” he muttered. “But I need you to hear me out.”

Rivkah folded her hands in her lap. “I’m listening.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you about the attack on the London Road,” Nick said. “It was an assassination attempt, not a robbery.”

Rivkah did not say anything but bowed her head as if accepting his apology. At least he hoped that’s what she was doing. He couldn’t bear to think that she was hanging her head in sorrow.

He plowed on. “I am, as you now suspect, an agent for Walsingham.” He went on to explain how Sir Robert Cecil had coerced him into becoming a spy. “My family’s status as a recusant Catholic family puts us all in great jeopardy,” he said. “It means, in effect, that we have to constantly prove our loyalty to the Crown. Or at least I do. That means I cannot afford to turn down any assignment I am given, especially if it has to do with Spain. If I spy on Catholic Spain, then it means that I am loyal to the Protestant Crown of England. Do you understand?”

“Why didn’t you tell Eli and me this when we first became friends?” she said. “Did you think we would betray you to our fellow countrymen?”

“No! I …” Nick swallowed. “I did not want to lose your friendship.” It sounded weak and self-serving. He had not meant it to come out like that. What he’d meant to say was that he could not bear never seeing her again, that the mere sight of her cloaked figure hurrying down a street filled him with gladness.

“And we have been useful to you,” Rivkah said, thoughtfully. She was referring to the way she and Eli had examined the bodies of the murdered ladies-in-waiting the previous winter and had been able to help Nick find the killer from the clues left on the bodies.

“No!” Nick said. “I mean, yes, you and Eli were invaluable to me. But that’s not why I did not tell you I was an agent.” He took a drink from the beaker of water she had given him. The words he had in his head were not the ones that came out of his mouth—at least, not the way he wanted to say them. The conversation was slipping out of his grasp.

Rivkah got to her feet and began to put away the bandages and needle and thread she had used on Nick.

“There is something I must tell you,” she said, “so that you understand who Eli and I are, where our loyalties lie. It is a long story, but you need to hear it all.”

Nick leaned his elbows on the table. “Go on.”

“Our great-great-great-grandfather settled in Salamanca in the last century. He was a physician of great repute, and his colleagues were Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans. These religions were all called the People of the Book, and we lived in harmony with one another.”

Nick wished Rivkah would sit down, but she continued to move about the tiny room, placing scissors in a jar, rolled bandages in a basket. It was as if she could not keep still. His head ached, but he concentrated on what Rivkah was telling him as best he could.

“Then Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon were married, and they united the north of Spain. They took a holy vow before the Pope that they would cleanse the south of Mohammedans and heretics. This they did with great bloodshed and suffering, calling upon the Inquisition to root out heresy by torture and public burnings. Then their attention turned to the Jews. In 1492, a proclamation of expulsion was signed by Isabella and Ferdinand. Only those Jews who were baptized and became conversos were allowed to remain. My great-great-grandfather decreed that the family should become conversos. This happened long before my birth, so I was born a converso. And so,” Rivkah said, smiling at Nick, “you and I are the same. You are a recusant Catholic and I am a converso Jew. And this state of things was decided for us, by our families.”

Nick stared at her. He had not known this, although he had wondered why Eli and Rivkah did not have contact with other Jews living in London and, although the practice of their faith was banned, did not gather in Jewish homes that were secret synagogues.

“We are despised by those Jews who refused to be baptized,” she explained, seeing his expression. “That is why we keep ourselves apart. We are doubly exiled, you see.”

“But I have eaten with you on your Shabbat,” Nick said.

She smiled at him. “See how we trust you?” she said. “We have delivered ourselves into your hands.”

“I would never …”

“Do you think we do not know this?” Rivkah said. “We are not foolish, and neither are we suicidal.”

She paused and gazed for a long time at the kitchen table, tracing the scarred wood with her fingertip.

“For a while, we conversos were safe. In order to wage this religious war, Isabella and Ferdinand had borrowed vast amounts of money from Jewish moneylenders. They needed us. And they needed the skills of the physicians of Salamanca to heal their soldiers and combat the plagues that swept through their armies.” She looked at him. “But there came a day when Torquemada, the Grand Master of the Inquisition, turned his gaze on us.”

Now she did sit down on the chair in front of him, as if suddenly weary with the telling of such an ancient and oft-repeated tale of woe.

“At first they ordered that we live in ghettos. ‘For our protection,’ the decree said.” She smiled bitterly. “But we knew better. Always the first step leading to annihilation is separation. No longer were we neighbors to the Christians with children just like them, hunger just like them, illness just like them. Now we were set apart like lepers. Soon we were no longer even human.”

She poured herself a beaker of water and drank. “One summer the plague was very bad. Many, many died. The Inquisition began to whisper that it was the conversos who had caused it by our hypocrisy in ‘converting’ and the continued practice of our ancient faith. For proof, they pointed to the fact that far fewer of our people had died in the plague. In vain did our rabbis and physicians tell them that it was because we had never had the custom to have rushes on our floors, that we cleaned our houses each week, that somehow the ritual cleansing of our persons and our household goods kept the sickness away. And then there was the fact that we were separated from the Christian populace in the ghetto, so we were protected, to some degree, from contagion.”

Rivkah smiled and looked at Nick directly for the first time. “It was common sense, no? You yourself have seen how spotless we keep the infirmary.” She held her arms out. “And this house?”

Nick nodded. It was true. Compared to most every other house in Bankside, Eli and Rivkah’s house always looked as if an army of invisible servants cleaned the floors and tabletops every day. And he had noticed that Eli and Rivkah seldom got sick.

“But it did no good,” Rivkah went on. “The Inquisition said that only fire could purge the evil spells we had put upon the people, that fire alone would destroy the plague. So they incited the people to set fire to the ghetto so these ‘holy’ churchmen would not have murder on their conscience.”

Nick looked down, ashamed. He was a Christian and a Catholic, tainted by the same hypocrisy that had caused his kind to make the Jews scapegoats for their own evil.

“That is how my family died,” she said. “That is how Eli and I came to be here as exiles.”

Nick opened his mouth to tell her that she had found a home in Bankside, that there were many, many people who loved and revered them, not least he himself. But she held up her hand to forestall him.

“Let me finish,” she said. “You may think that when I refer to ‘my people,’ I mean my family. That is what you mean, is it not? Your family?”

Nick nodded.

“But for Jews it is different. When we think of our people, we mean the Jewish race and not merely our family or our country of birth. I am a Spaniard, but I am a Jewess first. We are in perpetual exile until we can return to the land that Moses led us to out of the wilderness, to our holy city Jerusalem. Until then, we belong nowhere and everywhere, scattered to the four winds.”

There were shadows around Rivkah’s eyes, as if the telling of her people’s history had cost her all her strength.

“This is why I do not consider that you have betrayed us by working against Spain. And neither will Eli.”

“What will I not do, Mouse?”

They looked up and saw Eli step into the room. Neither of them had heard him open the door.

“It seems that Nick is a secret agent working for the Crown,” Rivkah said, taking her brother’s cloak from him.

Eli sat down at the table opposite Nick and poured himself some water. He drained it and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said.

“You knew?” Nick said.

Eli smiled. “Hard not to with the Queen putting so much confidence in you to solve last winter’s murders and the Spider constantly watching your every move. Not to mention your frequent trips to the Continent.”

Nick was flabbergasted. “And you knew, too?” he said to Rivkah.

She shrugged. “It was not hard to guess.”

“So why did you pretend you did not know when I told you?” Nick said. He felt humiliated and embarrassed. But, most of all, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. They had both known all along and still had not withdrawn their trust of him.

“Because you needed to tell us yourself,” Rivkah said. “It is clear to us both that you have been troubled and this guilt has been inside you a long time. It is good to let the poison out of an infected wound.”

“Ever the doctor,” Nick said, a little wistfully.

“Of course,” she replied. “What did you expect?” But when she took his hand, it was not to take his pulse but to clasp it tightly in both of hers.