CHAPTER 8

The Angel

“Right,” Nick said. “Who wants to go to the boozer?”

Edmund looked at him askance. “It’s a bit early, isn’t it? I thought you’d like a tour of the house?”

“I’m game,” Annie said, leaping up. “Just give me a minute. I’ll meet you at the front.” She hurried from the room.

Nick looked after her. “She looks fine to me.” Then, shrugging, he turned to Edmund. “What was the name of the tavern Winchelsea was last seen in?” he asked.

“The Angel.”

As Nick suspected, this was the closest tavern to Leicester House and Wood Wharf, where, Nick was certain, Winchelsea’s body was dumped in the river. “Let’s go there.”

On the way out, Edmund couldn’t resist showing Nick various rooms on the ground floor. Most of them turned out to be offices with more clerks beavering away in them. Nick was impressed by how many people Essex employed. No wonder he was a thorn in Walsingham’s side. His base of operations was ten times the size of the one in Seething Lane and must have been an enormous drain on his purse.

When they reached the main entrance and stepped out under the portico, Nick saw a woman leaning on one of the pillars. She was dressed in the scanty and gaudy dress of a whore, brown hair falling in rat tails on her shoulders rather than decently covered by a hood or cap, her bodice so loosely laced Nick was amazed her breasts didn’t fall out.

“Wotcha, handsome,” she greeted Nick in a Bankside accent so thick he could have curried his horse with it.

“Mistress,” Nick said, bowing. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“A shilling if you want the full treatment.”

Her screeching cackle made Nick’s molars ache, but Hector didn’t seem to mind. Surprisingly, he was wagging his tail.

Nick studied her face carefully. Now he thought about it, there was something familiar about her. Perhaps she had worked at Kat’s?

Then the woman scratched Hector behind the ears and murmured to him.

“Annie?” Nick exclaimed.

“Took you long enough,” Annie said in her own voice. She did a pirouette. “Like the getup?”

“You look … ravishing,” Nick said gallantly. In truth, she looked like a proper drab—more ravaged than ravishing—but, then again, that was the point. He was filled with admiration. “You should be on the stage.”

“That’s what Will says,” Annie replied, slinging a shawl over her head against the rain, which was still bucketing down. “But women aren’t allowed. Only pretty boys.” She bared her teeth at the injustice of it. Nick saw she had blackened one or two of them. It changed her expression, not to mention her age, amazingly.

“Where did you learn to shapeshift like that?” he asked in wonder. “You are a veritable chameleon.”

Annie shrugged. “Came naturally. And then, in the troubles, it helped me stay alive.” The light in her eyes dimmed. “My mother and sisters were butchered,” she said in a low voice. “I escaped the castle by posing as a beggar at the gate. Tyrone’s men didn’t even notice me when they sacked the place. Raped my mother and sisters.” She shot Nick a fierce look, behind which lay an ocean of pain. “There was nothing I could do.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, aware of how inadequate his words were. She shrugged, then gave a bright smile. Too bright. It glittered like steel.

“I’m an O’Neill,” Annie said, as if the name alone was sufficient. And it was. The O’Neills were a formidable clan where even the women, it was rumored, rode to war. “What’s past is past,” she said. “Let’s go to The Angel.”

“How did you know we were going there?” Edmund asked.

She gave him a scornful look. “That was the last place Winchelsea was seen alive.”

*   *   *

The Angel was situated opposite Leicester House but two streets over. They crossed the Strand, the smartest road in London, made especially wide to allow royal carriages with their numerous retinues to pass in style, then cut through St. Clement’s churchyard and crossed Wiche Street. The inn was down a short alley on Wiche, the joke being that any woman patronizing the tavern was transformed from a witch to an angel by a few short steps. As few respectable women frequented taverns, Nick thought this witticism back to front, as it was commonly believed that a woman entering a public house changed from an angel to a witch. Nonsense, of course. His friendship with Kat had taught him that a person’s occupation did not necessarily tally with their character. Many people he knew in Bankside, especially women, had been forced into a life of prostitution or crime due to crushing poverty. And he knew plenty of aristocrats who would sell their own mothers for a court appointment. In his opinion, poverty was a better excuse for wrongdoing than naked ambition.

Glancing with fascination at Annie, he saw that with every step she took she transformed herself into a Bankside trollop. No longer striding purposefully beside them, she began to swing her hips and toss her head. She laughed raucously and linked her arms through Nick’s and Edmund’s. A merchant’s wife looked askance at her, but her husband lustfully followed Annie with his eyes until his disapproving wife brought him back to his marital duty by thrusting her overladen basket at him and dragging him down the street.

“I’m known here as Meg,” Annie whispered in Nick’s ear as they entered the tavern.

The place was heaving with the noonday crowd, and they had to push their way to the bar accompanied by lewd but friendly shouts to Meg and Edmund, who were clearly regulars.

“Fishing for trout in a peculiar river, are you, Nick?” This from a voice Nick recognized.

“Will,” he exclaimed, slapping his friend on the back. “I thought The Black Sheep was your regular? I’m hurt.”

“It is. I had to run a script by the earl,” Will replied. Then he winked at Annie. “Meg!” he cried, puckering up his lips and squeezing his eyes shut. “Give us a kiss, darling.”

“A pox on you, Will Shakespeare,” Annie replied in her Meg voice, pushing him away with a grin.

“That’s what you gave me last time,” Will replied, feigning dismay. “The pox.”

This was greeted by ribald whistles and mock groans from the patrons propping up the bar and watching this little scene with relish.

“Get stuffed,” Annie told him with great good humor.

“That’s the general idea,” Will retorted. The patrons cheered.

Nick could see that both Annie and Will were enjoying their little drama. He often forgot that Will was an actor too, and he sometimes thought his friend pretended to be drunker than he was in order to better observe his fellow imbibers. Nick had long been aware that Will was a watcher. Not a spy, exactly, more a student of human nature. Perhaps that was why he burned to write plays that dealt with all the vicissitudes of human life, from comedy to tragedy, king to commoner, and everything and everyone in between.

And looking around, Nick could see that the inn was indeed filled with people from all walks of life, from courtiers and bureaucrats fagging up and down the Strand to and from Whitehall, to wherrymen who had tied up their boats at Wood Wharf, to lawyers from the Middle Temple and a host of prosperous merchants and weedy, undernourished apprentices from the more upscale shops on the Strand, to the more homely ones catering to the middle classes on Wiche Street.

“All the world’s a stage,” Will was wont to say. “And we are players on it.”

Nick bought the first round, deliberately overpaying by a shilling. The innkeeper, a florid-faced fellow who looked as if he drank his own stock on the sly, raised his eyebrows.

“A word,” Nick said.

The innkeeper jerked his head to the back of the room. “Take over, Molly,” he instructed the serving wench, and slid out from behind the bar. “I need to get up another barrel.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” Nick said, following him to a flight of dank cellar stairs, but before the innkeeper could go down them, Nick put a hand on his arm. “Did you know Simon Winchelsea?”

The man nodded, glancing over Nick’s shoulder to make sure none of his patrons were within earshot. He needn’t have worried. There was such a racket in the main room of the tavern that, unless someone had the ability to lip-read, it would have been impossible to understand what they were saying.

“Was he in the night he was murdered?” Nick asked.

Again the man nodded. “Earlier in the evening.”

“Who with?”

The man shrugged, but Nick could see he knew and was afraid. “I give you my word no one will know the information came from you,” Nick told him.

The innkeeper swallowed and glanced down the pitch-black well of the cellar steps as if he were contemplating throwing himself down. Instead, he leaned closer to Nick. “He didn’t talk to them, but I saw him watching Gavell and his mate Richie.”

“Watching?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“Did he talk to anyone?”

“He wouldn’t, would he?” the man said. “He weren’t a regular. Came in from time to time if he were in the area. That’s how I got to know him a bit. He told me his name, said how he hated the city. But that night I thought he just stopped in because of the rain, to shelter like. It were a shocking night.”

“How long did he stay?”

The man shrugged. “I were busy serving. One moment he were there, and when I looked up again, he were gone. That were just after St. Clement’s tolled seven.” Situated just across the street from the tavern, St. Clement’s was the chief timekeeper for the neighborhood.

An honest answer but not very helpful. Nick knew from experience that time could pass quickly when serving in a busy tavern. What seemed like a brief time could have been much longer and vice versa.

“Thank you.” As Nick turned to go back into the taproom, he almost bumped into Edmund. Nick hadn’t heard him approach, and as he had left Hector sitting outside the inn by the front door, he hadn’t been alerted. Nick didn’t know if he had overheard the names of Gavell or Stace and wasn’t sure it mattered, as Edmund knew he was investigating Winchelsea’s murder. Used as he was to acting independently, this constant shadowing was beginning to irk him. He didn’t know if Edmund was acting on instructions from Essex or if he was simply doing what Nick had found so exasperating when they were at Oxford. But one thing he did know: he would have to put up with Edmund’s presence if he was to keep Essex sweet. Not for the first time, he cursed the Queen and Walsingham for sending him on this mission.

“Were you here the night Winchelsea was killed?” Nick asked.

“I stopped by briefly,” Edmund admitted. “I might have seen Winchelsea, but I wouldn’t have known who he was. I bumped into Gavell and Richie on the way in. They were just leaving.”

“What time was that?”

“St. Clement’s had just tolled seven.”

That tallied with what the innkeeper had said.

Returning to the bar, he picked up his tankard of ale and gulped it down. “Right,” Nick said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “I’m off.”

“Where are we going?” Edmund asked. Nick sighed. In the last few days he had heard far too many people use the word we, and he was beginning to feel like a twin in a bad play, as if he had a constant shadow at his back: Edmund, Essex, Walsingham, the unknown killer. He would have given anything to have John with him instead of Edmund.

“I’m going for a walk,” Nick said. “You’re going to stay here.” Something in Nick’s tone made Edmund step back.

Nick pushed through the crowd to the door. Annie was sitting on the lap of a man who was clearly drunk, trying to fend off his big roving paws. Despite her laughter, Nick could see the hard set of her jaw, the dangerous glitter in her eyes, and knew she was filled with disgust. He was suddenly overcome by a great weariness. Everyone was pretending to be someone they weren’t: Annie, Essex, Will, Winchelsea’s murderer—who, even now, could be one of the inn’s patrons laughing and joking with people who had no idea he had blood on his hands. Nick himself was playing the part of a disaffected agent. He was sick of the whole business. Without caring if Edmund was following or not, Nick collected Hector and made for the river.

If Simon Winchelsea had last been seen alive at The Angel and Gavell and Stace had left the inn soon after he did, then that insalubrious duo had just risen to the top of Nick’s list of suspects. It wasn’t unheard of for agents and assassins to go rogue, especially if they thought they could help their paymasters without risking a veto on their actions beforehand. If all went well, they could claim credit; if it went belly-up, then they could disavow all knowledge. But Nick couldn’t rule out Essex, drunk on his own ambition, ordering a hit on one of Walsingham’s best agents.