CHAPTER 21

The Black Sheep Tavern, Bankside

Instead of walking around Southwark, Nick spent the next week wandering around London with Hector. He now realized he should have done this from the first, that Annie was not likely to cross London Bridge into his territory, that she would have more chance of stalking him in the city. He had given Hector a handkerchief of Annie’s that he had taken from her room at Leicester House to smell, but in a city as large and populated as London, Nick knew even Hector’s nose would not be able to track her.

Each night he returned to The Black Sheep to keep vigil beside John’s bed while Maggie slept with her arms pillowed under her head on the coverlet. Maggie had forgiven him, or at least she did not rail at him anymore but went about the tavern quietly, almost without speaking, even to her own children. Nick would have preferred her to take out her anger at him, to scald him with words of reproach and vituperation, to bruise his face with her fists. It was what he deserved.

Nick, Maggie, and Henry spelled each other beside John’s bedside, seeing to his needs, dribbling water and clear broth into his mouth in order to give him some nourishment. Rivkah and Eli came multiple times a day, each time checking for bleeding in John’s brain. Each day they did not find it, they counted it a good sign. But still John did not awaken out of his deathlike slumber.

The tavern remained closed. Customers came to ask about John, then went away again, shaking their heads. If they were angry that they had lost their chief source of entertainment and gossip after a hard day’s work, no one gave a sign of it. Instead, small gifts were left outside the door or placed shyly on the bar top—homemade pies, a bucket of fresh milk for the baby, cress and asparagus newly picked from Paris Garden, a bunch of wildflowers, an enormous carp. Even Black Jack Sims, the local crime lord, sent one of his heavies round to ask if there was anything he could do. Maggie turned him away—she would have no truck with criminals—so the man left a gold angel on the bar top and silently left.

Codpiece arrived by barge with a servant carrying a huge basket of luxury foods, like quails’ eggs and white manchet loaves made only with the finest flour for the royal table, custard possets, honeycombs, plucked capons for making broth, and many other good and nourishing things. And a magnificent coverlet made from a dozen lambskins expertly stitched together by the Queen’s ladies and backed with crimson velvet. This was especially welcome, as lambskins were used not only to keep the gravely ill warm but also to prevent bed sores from forming.

“A gift from the Queen for the invalid,” Codpiece announced to an astonished Maggie, who could only bob a shy curtsy as if to the Queen herself and then run back up the stairs with tears in her eyes. Nick noted Codpiece’s deliberate use of the word “invalid” to signify an assumption that John would recover and therefore give hope to Maggie. At that moment, Nick felt an enormous affection and gratitude for his friend’s delicacy. And toward the Queen, whose emissary Codpiece was.

Just before he left, Codpiece handed Nick a piece of parchment. “I know it’s not a good time,” he said. “And the title is unfortunate, to say the least. But the Queen has invited you to a play put on by the Earl of Leicester’s Men at Whitehall on May Day. Will has written it and would especially like you to come. The Queen will understand if you are absent.”

When Codpiece had gone, Nick glanced at the title of the play. The Ghost. It was to be performed at the palace in five days’ time on May first. Nick crumpled the paper in his hand and stuffed it in his pocket. Codpiece was right; given the circumstances, the title couldn’t have been more ironic.

Kat came over every day and saw to the children, making sure their clothes were cleaned and darned, that they were fed. Her girls took it in turns to clean the tavern and the private family rooms and take away John’s bedding to be laundered.

Three days after the attack, Edmund showed up. He seemed ill at ease and did not stay long, refusing the offer of ale.

“Will he die?” he asked.

Nick remembered him using those exact words about Thomas. “We don’t know.” He had made the same reply then. It was strange how history was repeating itself. Compared to the sensitivity Codpiece had shown, Edmund seemed curiously detached. Nick remembered how Edmund had not defended himself against Gavell and Stace’s attack at Wood Wharf, merely curling himself up in a ball with his hands over his head waiting for the kicking to stop. Again, Nick wondered at Essex’s lack of judgment in hiring Edmund, a man who seemed to have such an abhorrence of violence.

“I’m sorry,” Edmund told Nick, as if sensing that something more sympathetic was required. “I know you and he are good friends. It must be terrible for you.”

Nick didn’t reply. His haggard and unshaven face spoke volumes.

Edmund put a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “I know how it feels to lose someone you love.”

Nick was left with a strange feeling of having received formal condolences after a funeral.

The one conspicuous absentee among the well-wishers was Essex. He had shown himself capable of compassion when Thomas was poisoned, but as he doubtless considered John Nick’s servant, the wounded man was obviously beneath his concern.

No one except the immediate family, Nick, Eli, and Rivkah were allowed upstairs. Maggie stood watch over her husband like a she-wolf, making sure there was no noise to disturb him except the soft sound of her voice murmuring endearments, begging him to open his eyes for the love of God, sometimes berating him for leaving her a widow a second time. When Nick would hear this, he would put his arms about her and hold her while she wept inconsolably into his chest, even in her grief trying to smother the sound so John would not be disturbed in whatever place he had retreated to.

“John has the best wife in the world,” Nick whispered. “And when he wakes up, I will tell him that.”

Maggie gave him a watery smile, her lips trembling. “He knows,” she said.

Even more forlorn than Maggie was Matty. Nick had not paid her much attention as she looked after Jane, the baby. From her days as a cinders in Whitehall Palace until he had brought her to live at The Black Sheep the previous autumn, Matty had developed the habit of keeping in the background. In the palace, she had been a night creature, tiptoeing into people’s bedchambers to make up the fires for the morning. Her unobtrusiveness was deeply ingrained, although Nick had seen signs of more confidence in her of late, especially when she sat with Henry in a corner of the taproom in the evenings. He was teaching her to read and write, and sometimes Nick saw her laughing at something Henry said.

One night, as Nick sat with Hector beside the fire in the empty taproom, she approached him. The first he was aware of her presence was her small hand on his shoulder, which made him jump.

“Matty,” he said. “Is all well?”

In the darkness of the room, the dying flames of the fire flickering on the walls, dressed in her nightdress, Matty looked as ghostly as when she had lived all her days indoors like a woodland creature that came out only at night.

“Is he going to die?” she whispered, tears leaking from her eyes.

Suddenly, Nick understood. It had been John who had first interviewed Matty when they were investigating the murders of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting; it had been John who had first shown her kindness and gained her trust. And it was John’s baby that she looked after now. Not only was she mourning the loss of a friend, but she must be terrified she would be sent back to the palace if John should die.

Nick knew he could not reassure her as if she were a child, that he owed her the truth. “We don’t know, Matty,” he said. “But be assured that The Black Sheep is your home. We are your family now, whatever befalls. This I promise.”

He tilted up her chin and looked into her eyes. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “Now go back to bed and say your prayers for John.”

She turned away, then quickly spun round and planted a kiss on Nick’s cheek before disappearing into the family quarters at the back of the tavern.

Even Hector was subdued. He lay on the floor of the tavern with his great head on his paws, his eyes mournfully following Nick. When Nick wasn’t sitting staring at nothing, he was pacing up and down, unable to keep still but not able to set his hand to anything. His mind was in turmoil. He simply could not forgive himself for putting John in harm’s way. If only he had not asked him to go to Seething Lane. He should have known that was the first place Annie would look for him.

There was another thought at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t come at it clearly. It had something to do with the fact that it had not been raining that day and John had not taken his cloak. Every time Nick thought he was on the point of understanding why this was significant, it slipped away. Eventually, he gave up, hoping that it would come back to him when he least expected it. Since receiving his own head wound, he hadn’t been thinking clearly, but he knew that did not excuse him from culpability for John’s grievous injury. He refused to think about what he would do if John died.

A week passed. As there was no change in John’s condition other than that he seemed to shrink each day as his flesh wasted off his bones, and as there was no swelling Eli or Rivkah could detect over the site of the wound, Eli spent more time at the infirmary. It was Rivkah who came more often.

One evening, Nick watched as she picked up her cloak and, as was her habit when she went outdoors, wrapped it tightly about her and put up her hood.

“Any change?” Nick asked from the shadows of the room.

Rivkah jumped. “I didn’t see you there.” Then she shook her head. “No change.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Nick said, lighting a lantern with a taper he’d lit from the fire.

“No need,” she replied.

“Hector needs a walk.”

Nick called the dog to him and took her basket. Then he opened the door so she could step out first.

They walked in silence, the lantern casting just enough light that the ground immediately in front of them was illuminated and they could avoid the potholes and deep ruts the heavy winter rains had made in the street. Hector coursed ahead, then doubled back, never leaving them for long, as if he were scouting ahead to make sure it was safe.

As if by mutual agreement, they passed Rivkah’s door and carried on along the river. It was late, and the night was pitch-black. A mild spring breeze was blowing off the river, bringing the smell of river mud and seaweed, fish and the tang of smoke. When they came to a stone wall next to some steps, Nick stopped and set the lantern on the wall. Without speaking, they both sat down and gazed into the blackness ahead, the sound of the river murmuring at their feet, a giant slumbering presence in an otherwise empty world. Nick felt as if he and Rivkah had been cast up on a distant island, the mainland visible but unattainable because he had never learned to swim.

“What you said about loyalty to your people?” Nick began. He stopped and looked at Rivkah. She had thrown her hood back, and her hair was blowing in the wind off the water. He saw the white flash of her hand as she smoothed it back from her face. He looked back into the blackness ahead. “I feel the same way, except my people are not members of a race or even a religion, but those I love. My family, my friends, my neighbors.”

You.

Now she turned to look at him, her face a white oval in the dark, her black hair indistinguishable from the night. “Love is the best kind of loyalty there is,” she said. “Most people are loyal to ideas. They turn God into an idea in order to justify their acts of cruelty. But it is themselves and their desires whom they serve, not God.”

“And what of vengeance on behalf of someone you love?” Nick asked. “Is that not also an act of loyalty?”

“You are thinking of the woman who attacked John?”

“And Thomas. And murdered Simon Winchelsea.”

“You are not asking the right person. I have taken an oath to do no harm.”

“You also have a saying, ‘An eye for an eye.’ What would you do if someone tried to harm Eli?”

“I would kill him.”