CHAPTER 28

City of London

Nick slept the night again in the palace, using the same room, so that he would be closer to the city the next day.

He arose at sunrise, about five o’clock, stopped off in the palace kitchens on his way out to beg some bread and small beer from the yawning servants, then walked to King Street, the road running west of the palace, and followed it north toward Charing Cross. At the cross, he turned right and walked east up the Strand toward the center of London.

His plan was vague. All he knew for certain was that he intended to revisit the house near Moorfields, hoping against hope that Annie would return to it. If she was running around London in disguise, then she would need her costumes and makeup in order to change her appearance. He was still astonished that she would have been so rash as to appear at court the day before, albeit disguised. Was she tracking him in order to complete her mission and kill him? Is that what her Spanish masters required?

Nick did not know what she was up to, but he intended to make himself an easy target. His former qualms about killing a woman had completely vanished. If he could not take her alive, then he would run her through with his sword without hesitation. She was far too dangerous to be allowed to live.

His route to Moorgate took him past Thomas’s lodgings. On a whim, Nick decided to go in. Thomas was not in residence. After recovering from the poisoning attempt, he had decided to visit his home in the country despite being on the outs with his wife. He had left a jokey message for Nick saying that, if he died, Nick was to consider his wife the prime suspect. Considering how close his brush with death had been, and how much his wife hated Thomas, Nick did not think this amusing in the least.

He knocked on the landlady’s door. No answer.

“She’s gone to market,” a voice said.

A stunted, malodorous figure emerged from the gloom of the hallway.

“Harold?”

“At your service.” Harold, the usually out-of-work rat-catcher, gave an incongruous bow, his rattraps swinging from one hand.

“I thought you were … well, unemployed,” Nick said.

Harold shrugged. “I keeps me hand in,” he said. “Besides, me rates are cheap, and Mistress here likes cheap.”

Nick remembered the empty grate in the fireplace even though the room was cold, and there was a big basket of logs on the hearth. He had been right about her; she was one of those women who was penny wise, pound foolish. Employing a hopeless case like Harold who, if Bankside gossip was to be believed, hadn’t caught a single rat in his entire sorry career, was a case in point.

Mistress Shrewsbury was the type of woman who would buy one mangy turnip at the market and one scrawny pullet and then live on the soup for days. Then she would have to pay a quack an exorbitant fee for an elixir that settled her stomach after having given herself food poisoning. Given the size of her house in such a prosperous neighborhood, and the fact that she had only herself to feed—and her cats, of course, and from what Nick had seen on his last visit, they were so well fed and indolent that they wouldn’t turn a whisker if a rat ran right under their noses—Nick could not imagine that she needed to live this way. She was obviously a miser, and now she had employed the worst rat-catcher in London, foolishly thinking she was saving money.

“How long have you been coming here?” Nick asked.

“Oh, ages.”

Typical, thought Nick. Harold had been coming for months, and Mistress Shrewsbury was still complaining about her rat infestation. But it gave Nick an idea.

“Were you here the day Sir Thomas Brighton was poisoned?”

“I come every morning to inspect the traps.”

Which were empty, Nick noticed. Any rat worth his salt could outwit Harold’s traps. In the rat community, they probably passed around blueprints and discussed ways of springing them without injury. This thought diverted Nick somewhat from his growing impatience. Harold was infuriatingly obtuse. Having a conversation with him was as frustrating and pointless as explaining the finer points of geometry to an ape.

“Harold, did you see anyone?”

“A young man on the stairs.”

Finally.

“Was he a lad?” It could have been the boy from the tavern down the street delivering the wineskin to Sir John.

“I just told you. A man. Young.”

“Could it have been a woman dressed up as a man?”

Harold just stared openmouthed.

Nick gave up on that one. Obviously, the notion of cross-dressing had never entered his innocent—or vacuous—mind. “What was he doing?”

“Dropping something off in that man’s room.”

“Which man? The fat one or the thin one?”

Harold grinned. “Nah. Stealing from Peter to give to Paul.” When he saw Nick’s incomprehension, he added, “Nicked a wineskin leaning against the fat git’s door and put it in the other git’s room opposite.”

Even though Nick usually avoided touching any part of Harold’s disgusting clothes—more rags than cloth—he gripped him by both shoulders. Harold looked alarmed and glanced down at Nick’s hands, then up into his face.

“Are you arresting me?” he asked.

“No, Harold, me old chum,” Nick said. “But there’s a shilling in this if you think very, very carefully before you answer my next question.”

Harold’s red-rimmed eyes came alive for the first time. He was a notorious toper.

“Would you recognize this ‘man’ if you saw him again?”

“Expect so,” Harold said, hawking a gob of phlegm into the back of his throat.

Nick let go hurriedly and tossed him a shilling.

Harold bit it, then put it somewhere in the pile of rags he called clothes. “Ta, Nick.”

“Did he see you?”

“Nah,” Harold said. “I was in the hallway looking up at him.” He pointed up the stairs, and both doors were clearly visible. “Then I went out back. I was crouched down at the side of the house laying me traps when he came out. Got a good old look. He had no idea I was there.”

Better and better. As much as Nick tried to avoid being in close proximity to Harold, owing to his stench, Nick did not want to see him floating facedown in the river.

“Make sure I can get hold of you in a hurry,” Nick warned.

Harold slung his empty rattraps over his shoulder. “I’ll let you know when I go on me holidays, then,” he said, and went out the front door, turning left toward the tavern.

Nick stared after him. To his knowledge, Harold had never made a joke before.

*   *   *

When he arrived at the small house in Moorgate, Nick discovered that the door he had kicked in had been repaired. Aside from his glimpse of Annie in the tiltyard, this was the first hint he’d had that she was indeed alive and no ghost. He kicked the door in again and entered.

Her bedchamber and dressing room looked almost the same as when he had searched it with John. Except, he noticed, items on the dressing table were slightly rearranged—the pot of glue for sticking on beards was in a different place; the candles on the mirror had burned lower. And there was a faint scent of sandalwood in the room. Annie’s perfume. She had definitely been here recently. The bedcover was more rumpled than he remembered, and there was an indentation in the pillow. So she had slept here.

He checked the other room, but it was empty, although there were charred logs and ash in the fireplace whereas it had been swept clean before. He put his fingers on the ash; still faintly warm. Another indication that the rooms had been recently occupied.

He sat down in a chair and prepared to wait for Annie’s return. Then his eye caught something on the floor, halfway under the bed. He bent to pick it up. It was a forget-me-not, broken at the stem. Staining the planks of the floor were yellow pollen stains and a single buttercup petal. Wildflowers.

Nick got up and left the house. Looking over the wall onto Moorfields, he saw that the entire area was covered with buttercups, forget-me-nots, and flowering clover. He went back inside the bedroom and stood looking at the floor for a long moment, then made up his mind. Leaving the house, he quickly walked through the Guildhall district to Fenchurch Street, then south into Eastcheap and thence east into the Ward of Billingsgate and to the church of St. Mary-at-Hill.

In the graveyard, he saw an ancient crone placing flowers in a tin cup on Protea’s grave.

At Nick’s approach, the old woman turned. Her back was bent; long gray hair straggled over her face, obscuring it; a filthy shawl covered her head. But the eyes under matted gray eyebrows were not wrinkled at the corners or clouded with cataracts. They were as green as the Emerald Isle, as clear as its mountain streams.

Nick’s hand went to his sword. “Hello, Annie.”