CHAPTER 31

The Black Sheep, Bankside

Sitting at John’s bedside in The Black Sheep, Nick was haunted by Edmund’s final words: “I wanted to be you.”

He kept seeing Edmund as he had been at Oxford, his wheat-colored hair falling on his forehead, his hesitant smile, his bitten fingernails, the way his eyes looked down and a flush of color suffused his face when Nick and John spurned him. Nick kept asking himself if things would have been different if he and John had invited Edmund into their company. Would a simple act of kindness have been enough to turn away the evil that Edmund had been bequeathed?

Nick had to keep reminding himself that the taint of Edmund’s father’s sins and his self-murder had already laid their mark on Edmund’s soul by the time he came up to Oxford, like the first spot of rot in an apple. What was it the Old Testament said? That the sins of the father were visited on the children unto the third and fourth generations?

“Could we have done differently?” Nick asked John.

He told John everything that had happened since he came across Annie in the graveyard of St. Mary-at-Hill.

*   *   *

“Annie,” he had said.

“Nick,” she replied, a youthful voice issuing strangely from the guise of an old woman. “Put your sword away and come with me.”

“How can I trust you?” Nick said.

Annie laughed. “You can’t. That’s why I’m taking you to meet someone who will vouch for me.”

That someone was Sir Francis Walsingham, His Nibs himself, and he was not in a good mood. He nodded curtly to the two chairs in front of his desk, favored Annie with a smile, and then glared at Nick.

“What the devil have you been up to?” he barked. “You expressly disobeyed my order to leave Annie alone.”

“I did no such thing,” Nick retorted. He was caught off guard. He had felt all along that Walsingham was keeping something from him, but even more strongly, he felt he had been used as a pawn in a devious game, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. He felt his anger mounting. “You asked me to track down the person who had been murdering your agents, despite saddling me with Essex. I did. I discovered Annie and del Toro conspiring together. She even tried to kill me.”

“How’s the head, Nick?” Annie inquired.

“Still hurts.”

“It was only a love tap, don’t you know,” she said. “Wouldn’t have killed a fly, let alone a big strapping fellow like you.”

Nick recalled that it had been Annie who had bent down to his prone body and informed del Toro that he was dead. She had gone for a head wound because she knew they bled a lot and would make a more convincing injury. Suddenly Nick realized that, by knocking him unconscious and declaring him dead, Annie had actually saved his life.

As if reading his mind, she winked at him, the effect more grotesque than friendly, considering her getup.

He looked at the woman sitting across from him with a new respect. He had known she was highly intelligent and had admired how she could magically change her appearance and character, but he had not suspected how accomplished an agent she was, nor how ruthless. The best agent he had ever seen, if he was honest. Bar none, and that included himself. He had made too many mistaken assumptions in this case.

Walsingham cleared his throat. “I suppose he deserves some explanation,” he said. “What do you say, Annie?”

She grinned. Not a pretty sight, seeing as she had blacked out most of her teeth. “I’d say he’s earned it.”

“On one condition,” Walsingham said to Nick, raising a finger. “That you do not reveal any of what I am going to tell you to anyone. Especially the Queen and your friend Codpiece.” He said this last with a small moue of disgust that told Nick that, great spymaster that he was, Walsingham had no idea that Richard, aka Codpiece, was Elizabeth’s personal spy on her own court.

“Agreed.” Nick sat back and folded his arms.

Walsingham sighed. “Annie is, and always has been, working for me. Initially, I put her in Essex’s network to keep me apprised of what he was up to. Then, later, to keep him from sniffing out what I was up to. I sent you into his network for the same reason: to keep Essex occupied with finding a murderer so he would not be tempted to look …” Walsingham paused as he searched for the right word. “Higher, shall we say.”

“Higher?” Nick repeated. Then the penny dropped. “As in Mary, Queen of Scots, higher?”

“I told you he was bright,” Annie said.

Walsingham nodded. “That woman has been a thorn in the side of Her Majesty for almost twenty years. Not only that, but she is positively lethal. As long as she lives, she will be the figurehead of every assassination plot in the land, as well as a perpetual excuse for war with France and Spain. She cannot be allowed to live.” He struck the table hard. “But we have never been able to obtain actual evidence—written evidence—that she condoned any of the numerous assassination plots on Her Majesty,” he went on. “And the Queen demands proof of treason if she is to sign a death warrant for her cousin.”

“And now you have the proof?” Nick asked.

Walsingham frowned. “Not yet,” he said. “But we hope to have it by the end of the summer.” He indicated Annie. “Annie is the go-between between the Spanish …”

“Del Toro,” Nick said.

“Just so.”

“She made initial contact with del Toro the night Winchelsea was murdered,” Walsingham said.

“As a whore,” Annie said. “I was hiding in a doorway and snagged him, set up our meeting in Oxford. Safer, we thought, than London. Saw Simon in the shadows watching. He was a good tracker was Simon.” She crossed herself. Walsingham pretended not to notice, but Nick saw his mouth set in disapproval.

“Then after receiving the letters in Oxford, Annie brought them to me first,” Walsingham said.

“Ran into you here,” Annie said, grinning. “Literally.”

Nick recalled the young man he had bumped into on the doorstep of Seething Lane. He had thought nothing of it. Just one of Walsingham’s myriad runners, he had thought at the time.

To hide his embarrassment, he said to Walsingham, “Who is the English traitor?”

“Anthony Babington.” Walsingham leaned back in his chair. He looked exhausted, and Nick reminded himself that he had just suffered a relapse and had returned to London only a few days ago. Annie had told him this on the walk over to Seething Lane.

“His Nibs being away,” she had told him, “was a major pain in the arse. Normally, I could have hidden out at Seething Lane, but with His Nibs being gone, I had to shift for myself. The only way I could be safe was to constantly change my appearance.”

“Why risk going to court on May Day?” Nick had asked her.

“I wanted to explain things and I knew you’d be there.”

“Then why did you run away?”

“Because you drew attention to me and were asking all and sundry if they’d seen a young man. You blew my cover, you big loon.”

Another mistake. But understandable, Nick thought, considering the torturous nature of the case. Nothing had been what it seemed: Annie the traitor was Annie the patriot; unassuming, shy, bungling Edmund was a devious and devilish murderer and traitor; except for the deaths of Winchelsea and Stace and the unnamed prostitute on The Dalliance, all attacks had been personal and not political. Even del Toro, a Spanish agent and sworn enemy of the state, was working, unbeknownst to himself, for Walsingham.

*   *   *

Nick turned his attention back to what Walsingham was saying.

“Babington and his coplotters have found a way to contact the Scottish queen. They are sending messages to her in the bung of an ale barrel that is delivered to her household. And her replies are sent out the same way.”

“And you have intercepted them,” Nick said.

Walsingham allowed himself a thin smile. “We’ve done better than that. The man who delivers the ale is in my pay. We read each letter, copy it, and then reseal it and send it on its way. She is a vain and impetuous woman. It is only a matter of time before Babington gets her written approval for his plot. When that happens, we will have her.” He closed his fist.

“It was imperative that del Toro be allowed to make contact with Annie,” Walsingham went on. “He had brought the Spanish ambassador’s approval of the plot to be passed on to Babington.”

“That’s why you allowed him to land at Dover,” Nick said. “And pass unmolested through the country.”

“Correct.”

“And that’s why you were adamant that he had not murdered Winchelsea,” Nick said. He sat forward in his chair so he could be sure that he had Walsingham’s attention. “But you had no proof of this. He could very well have been Simon’s killer. If I had not found Edmund’s seal, del Toro would still be a suspect.”

At this, Walsingham had the grace to look down. But when he looked up again, there was steel in his eyes. “I would not have arrested him even if I had seen him cut Winchelsea’s throat myself,” he said. “He had to be allowed to deliver his letters and then return to France to report to the Spanish ambassador that all was well.”

“Even if you had seen him put out Winchelsea’s eyes?”

“Even so.”

Nick sat back in his chair. He no longer felt anger, but a kind of weary revulsion. No matter what Walsingham said to the contrary, his agents were expendable pawns in his great game of espionage. A religious fanatic, he would cheerfully watch the whole world burn for the sake of his Queen and the realm. In this respect, Walsingham was no different from his Catholic counterparts in the Inquisition. Perhaps, in his way, he was no different from Edmund himself, who had justified his actions by claiming loyalty to his father. For Walsingham, loyalty to his Queen justified all manner of betrayals.

The Bible that Walsingham was rumored to so assiduously study had not been written by God, as he thought, but by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was he who had given religious and political fanatics their first and only commandment: “The end justifies the means.”

To Nick’s ear, this was the most demonic statement he had ever had the misfortune to read.

“Robert Cecil does not know,” Nick said. It was a statement, not a question. He thought of how the Spider had set him to tracking del Toro to Oxford, and how eagerly he had run to the Queen to inform her that Annie was a traitor, impelled by a burning desire to discredit his hated adoptive brother, Essex.

“He does now,” Walsingham said.

Nick could imagine how that conversation had gone. The Spider would have been informed that he had very nearly destroyed the biggest and most important sting operation in his master’s career. And he had done it out of a personal animus against Essex. He must be devastated by his ineptitude, Nick thought, wincing inwardly, knowing that he would bear the brunt of the Spider’s deep professional embarrassment.

“Robert is young and has much to learn,” Walsingham said, as if reading Nick’s mind. “I thought I was protecting him by not telling him of the Babington plot, but I was mistaken. I underestimated his hatred of Essex.”

“Protecting him?” Nick said.

Walsingham gave a weary smile. “Do you think the Queen will thank me when I force her to sign her cousin’s death warrant? Robert’s father, Baron Burghley, and I know that, if I am successful, and I pray God that I am, it will mean the end of our service to Her Majesty. She will never trust us again. She will never forgive us for forcing her to spill royal blood. I had promised Robert’s father I would keep him away from the taint of this. Young Robert is to succeed me, you see.”

Suddenly, Walsingham looked very old and shrunken in his chair. His greatest espionage triumph was simultaneously his greatest failure. The irony of it was staggering.

“But to look on the bright side,” he said with an attempt at jollity that was grotesque, given the bleak outlook for his future, “an early retirement from public service will allow me to spend what little time I have left with my family.”

Nick thought that in all of Walsingham’s grim life—his witnessing of the Bartholomew Day Massacre, the early onset of cancer, all the blood he had seen spilled and ordered to be spilled—he had never experienced a single day that could have been called bright. Even now, on this warm spring day, a fire was burning in the grate; the windows were closed against the cheerful sound of the birds; thick curtains were drawn against the brightness and warmth of the sun so that the room resembled more a place for the dead than a place for the living. No doubt it was his doctor who had instructed him to keep out the fresh spring air—unlike Eli and Rivkah, most doctors considered fresh air dangerous to the health—but it seemed fitting somehow. Walsingham was entombed alive by his obsession with Catholic plots and conspiracies, an obsession that was slowly killing not only his body but his soul.

And yet, blighted as Walsingham surely was, Nick still respected him. There was no question that he was a genius at what he did. If there was a man who could permanently remove the threat of Mary, Queen of Scots, after nineteen years of imprisonment and Elizabeth’s refusal to send her to the block, he was sitting before Nick on the other side of the desk.

As a Catholic, albeit a recusant one, Nick could not condone this. But nor could he condone assassination plots against his own queen. He was caught as surely as a fly in amber. And, for his family’s sake, his brother in particular, he would have to remain caught.

Nick glanced at Annie. She was in the same position as he, forced to cooperate with a government that was inimical to her faith if she were to help restore her family fortunes.

“It goes without saying that you must not breathe a word of the Babington plot to anyone,” Walsingham said. “On pain of death.”

Then, as if as an afterthought, he added, “Anthony Babington is a young recusant.” He smiled. “Like you, Nick.”