CHAPTER 32

The Black Sheep Tavern

“So you see, John,” Nick said, “Walsingham’s last words about Babington were intended to remind me that I am well and truly on his hook. I’ll never escape.”

Nick looked despairingly at the still form of his friend lying on the bed. They were alone in the room, Maggie having been persuaded to go downstairs to spend some time with her children.

How could he keep wading through the moral sewers of the espionage world without his best friend beside him? He and John had been companions since before they could talk. With Robert being ten years older than Nick, John was more of a brother to him than a friend. They had done everything together since they had been old enough to run outside and play: caught fish in the Windrush, poached rabbits off a neighbor’s land, built castles out in the woods, and when they were older, stood guard outside the barn while the other learned about the birds and the bees with a willing local girl. Then later, they’d guarded each other’s backs in vicious knife and sword fights in low taverns and back alleys in Spain and France. Nick could not imagine going through the rest of his life without him.

He put his head in his hands and pressed his fingers to his eyes.

“Stuff Walsingham.”

Slowly, Nick raised his head.

John’s eyes were open.

Nick grabbed his hand. “John,” he said. “You’re awake. My God. You’re awake.”

“It was Edmund who attacked me,” John said, the sound of his voice raspy, as if his vocal chords had dried up.

“I know.” Nick squeezed his hand. Typical of John to think of the case first.

“He’s the killer, Nick, not Annie.”

“I know that too. I’ve been telling you all about it.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me again,” John said. Then he frowned and squinted at the window. It was dusk. “How long have I been asleep?”

“More than a week.”

“A week!”

Nick couldn’t help but smile at the amazement on John’s face; then his smile turned into a laugh, a little unsteady at first, but once he began, he found he could not stop. Tears coursed down his face. And every time he thought he had himself under control, he looked at John scowling at him for being the object of ridicule, or so he thought, and started again.

The sound brought Maggie, Henry, and Matty carrying the baby running up the stairs, followed closely by Hector. Hector leapt on the bed, careful not to land on John, and began slavering John’s face, his tail pounding joyfully on the bed.

“He knows you need a wash,” Nick said. “You stink.”

Then Nick removed Hector so Maggie could take her husband in her arms. Up to now, she had not made a sound, just stared numbly at John smiling up at her, his wits and memory intact, the man she loved come back to her against all hope. As soon as she felt John put his arms around her, she began to sob, the sound tearing out of her like a barbed arrowhead being withdrawn slowly from a deep wound.

“Come, children,” Nick said. “Let’s leave them alone for a while.” And he led them quietly downstairs.

*   *   *

The next day, Nick put a sign on the tavern door: OPEN FOR BUSINESS: JOHN WOKE UP.

Almost immediately the place was crowded with well-wishers, people who had spent a week in unaccustomed and unwelcome sobriety, and the frankly curious. Despite Maggie’s strenuous and vociferous objections, and Rivkah and Eli’s quieter and professional ones, John insisted on being carried downstairs and placed in a chair padded with the lambskin the Queen had given him as a gift. Here, on his throne, as Henry called it, John sat while the entire population of Bankside, it seemed, came to pay court to the man they regarded with as much awe as had the friends and relatives of Lazarus.

As John’s doctors, Rivkah and Eli were much caressed and admired, and their standing in the community, already high, rose astronomically. John insisted they sit on either side of him, like lesser members of the royal family, in order to take the credit for his miraculous recovery.

Only Nick and Eli could see that this made Rivkah profoundly uncomfortable. Without her cloak and concealing hood to protect her, she felt exposed. She did not mind when neighbors and former patients came into the tavern, but by the second day, strangers from the city of London itself were making the trek over the bridge to see the man who had woken from the dead. Then she would look down, uncharacteristically tongue-tied, and Eli would have to answer for her. On the third day, she stayed home. Nick missed her but was glad that she was spared the torment of notoriety. Eli also stopped coming after the fourth day, but it was not shyness that kept him away but fear of persecution for heresy.

“There are many who would say that what we did with John was a blasphemy,” he said, his face grave. “The unlettered call it a raising from the dead, and this is a dangerous rumor. They do not understand that it is a natural waking from a long sleep. Of what kind this sleep is, we do not yet know. But we do know the patient is not dead, for his heart beats and his lungs fill with air. The irony,” he went on, “is that Rivkah and I did nothing but stitch the wound on his head and keep him warm and fed and clean. His body did the rest. Somehow, for reasons unknown to science, severe head wounds heal themselves by putting the body into a long and profound slumber. It is a miracle of nature, not of medicine.”

John had lost much weight; now he had awoken, he could not stop eating. And so neighbors and friends brought gifts of food whenever they came round and sat and watched John eat with a satisfaction that revealed they considered themselves a small part in his recovery.

Will Shakespeare dropped by with Sir John Staffington in tow. While Sir John went to sit by John to congratulate him on his recovery and watch him eat with a look of profound admiration on his face, as if he had discovered a kindred spirit, Nick took Will aside. He could see the young would-be playwright was down in the dumps despite his happiness for John’s recovery.

“The Ghost was a disaster,” he said mournfully. “When the Queen told Edgar—he was the one who came out to introduce it, you remember?—to ‘get on with it, man,’ I knew it was all downhill from there.”

“It helped me solve my case,” Nick said, refilling Will’s tankard. As usual, Will was more than a little tipsy. He and Sir John must have started early, as it was only midday.

“It did?” Will said, brightening.

“The theme of revenge and loyalty,” Nick said. “That was the heart of the motive. Of course,” he said, slyly, “I know what a classicist you are.”

Will goggled at him. “Are you accusing me of nicking the plots of Greek tragedy?”

“The name of Orestes did spring to mind,” Nick said.

Will buried his nose in his tankard. Then he looked at Nick, his eyes twinkling. “Don’t tell anyone, especially that git Marlowe.” Will and Christopher Marlowe had an intense, if mostly friendly, rivalry.

“Swear.” Will said this in the deep voice of Hamlet’s father’s ghost.

Nick laughed. “I would, but I can’t make up my mind. Whether ’tis nobler …”

Will punched him in the shoulder, making Nick spill his drink. “You bastard.”

“I swear.”

*   *   *

That evening, Nick stopped by Eli and Rivkah’s and asked if they wanted to go for a walk in Paris Garden.

“You go, Mouse,” Eli said. When she turned to get her shawl, he winked at Nick. Nick gave him two fingers.

As they strolled along the riverbank, Nick told Rivkah how Edmund had begged Nick to kill him.

“Did I do right?” he asked, stopping and looking out across the river. In the rosy dusk, there were still plenty of craft on the water, some lit by lanterns hanging from stanchions on the sterns. To the east, gulls circled and canted in the darkening sky over Billingsgate, swooping down behind the bridge to snatch up the offal thrown by the fishmongers into the river. Their plaintive cries came to him clearly. A lone raven beat the air upstream, cawing for its mate.

“You ended his torment,” Rivkah said, putting a hand on his arm. “And you prevented a far more hideous death.”

She was referring to the death of traitors. If he had lived to stand trial, Edmund would have been dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn amid jeering crowds lining the route, hanged, cut down while still alive, and then disemboweled, castrated, and cut into quarters. Only then would he have been beheaded. It was the most hideous and most agonizing death the state could mete out. A nightmare even to contemplate. Even being burned at the stake for heresy or boiled alive in a vat of lead for poisoning were not as hideous, as death came quicker.

“I suppose,” Nick said.

“You are not convinced?”

Nick turned to look at her. Behind her the sky flamed violet and rose, the sun a gold sovereign slowly slipping into the velvet pocket of a gorgeous dress.

“His last words were, ‘I wanted to be you.’ I have thought and thought about that, and now I think it was the last lie he told.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think that, by killing him, he made me him. Do you see? I think he really meant, ‘I want you to be me.’ He wanted me to kill him out of revenge for Simon, Thomas, John, Protea, Stace, his former servant, all those he murdered or tried to murder. When I thrust home my sword, I felt …”

Nick faltered and looked out at the river. He could now barely make out the shapes of the wherries plying to and fro on the water.

How quickly day fades to night, he thought.

Nick looked back at Rivkah, who was quietly waiting for him to go on. Backlit by the sinking sun, her face was in shadow, her expression unreadable.

Nick took a breath. “I felt like God.”

Rivkah stepped close to Nick, so close he could feel the warmth of her body. She took both his hands in hers.

“Listen to me, Nick,” she said. “I think you are right; I think his last act on earth was to finish what he had begun. To destroy you. To infect you somehow with the poison of his hate.” She squeezed his hands hard.

“Do not allow that to happen. You can pity him. You can regret you were not kinder to him in your youth, but know that you will never, ever, be like him. He could never have been you, and you will never be him. Don’t let him make you a traitor to yourself. Do you understand?”

Despite his melancholy, Nick smiled at the ferocity with which she had spoken. Perhaps it was this that he loved most about her, her indomitable strength that fought tooth and nail for the good and would never surrender to evil.

“I understand,” he said.

Then he bent his head and kissed her on the lips.