‘You’ve missed the excitement,’ Ned Monkton tells Nicholas the next day as they sit together in the Jackdaw’s taproom, watching Bianca and Rose fuss over little Bruno. ‘There was a slayin’ while you were away.’
‘On Bankside? That’s not exactly uncommon, Ned. Who was it?’
‘Do you recall that young fellow you spoke to at the Southwark Fair?’
Nicholas searches his memory without success. ‘I must have spoken to several people that day.’
‘The one like a beanpole,’ Ned prompts. ‘The lad who’d answered the muster.’
The vague recollection of an awkward young lad with a schoolboy’s glow on his cheeks hoists itself into Nicholas’s consciousness. ‘Oh, him. Yes, vaguely.’
‘Well, he’s dead.’
‘Even less uncommon, given that he went to Ireland.’
‘No,’ says Ned, wondering how a man clever enough to be a physician can sometimes be so block-headed. ‘’E died ’ere, on Bankside. They says it was a purse-cutting gone wrong. But I ’ad me doubts. Still ’ave, to be ’onest.’
‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same fellow? The one I’m thinking of should be in Ireland, with Sir Oliver Henshawe’s company.’
Ned nods towards the hearth. ‘Constable Osborne and the watch brought ’im one night a while back. Laid ’im down right there.’
At once Nicholas is back in Cork, kneeling beside Henshawe’s boy with the wounded leg. He remembers the confusion in his eyes when he told him he would soon be home in Surrey.
My home is in Leinster… All the fellows I served with were mustered in Leinster.
And he remembers Oliver Henshawe’s response when he’d asked him about the band mustered at Southwark:
You know how disorganized the Privy Council is… My brave fellows are still languishing at Chester, for want of a ship.
‘So what was the lad doing in Southwark, when he should have been in Ireland?’ he asks Ned, his interest suddenly pricked.
‘That’s what I wondered.’
‘Did you ask anyone?’
‘I asked that one-eyed muster ensign, Vyves.’
‘And what was his reply?’
‘That Godwinson – that were the poor fellow’s name – was kept back to ’elp gather in the plate and powder needed for the company.’
‘That’s plausible enough, I suppose. Perhaps it was just a robbery that went awry.’
Ned rubs his chin, tangles of auburn beard spilling through his fingers. ‘There was somethin’ else that struck me as odd.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, this Vyves ’as taken to drinkin’ at the Jackdaw. An’ a while before ’e died, young Godwinson came in. He looked real discomforted. Vyves ’ad this friend with him – Strollot by name, an alderman’s clerk from Cornhill; looks like a sow what’s chewed on a lemon. They all ’ad a little parley together. Then piggy-Strollot hands Godwinson some coin and ’e leaves. Few days later ’e gets brought in ’ere, cold as yesterday’s brawn.’
‘Do you believe these two men were somehow connected with the boy’s death?’
‘I ’ave no reason to think it, Master Nicholas, but my mind keeps wranglin’ on it.’
‘There could have been any number of reasons why they met together.’
‘Aye, but what I can’t get my ’ead around is that it was Strollot what paid ’im – not Vyves. That puzzled me. I mean, it was Vyves what was ’is master.’
‘Perhaps he ran some errand, performed some service for Strollot. Maybe that’s why it was Strollot who paid him.’
Ned gives Nicholas a look of pained uncertainty, a simple man doubting the value of his own thoughts.
‘Out of curiosity, I went to the coroner’s inquisition. I was right foxed to see Vyves an’ Piggy ’ad got themselves appointed on the jury. I asked Strollot about knowin’ young Lemuel – Godwinson, that is, or rather that was – but Strollot denied havin’ met ’im. Vyves ’ad to correct ’im.’
‘Maybe he simply made a mistake.’
Ned accepts the proposition equitably. He places his great palms flat on the table. ‘Maybe ’e did. But I’d be more inclined to believe it if I didn’t ’ave the impression neither of those two ’ad told anything but a lie since the moment they was spawned. It’s just a feelin’ I ’ave, a feelin’ what won’t go away.’
‘Have you thought about speaking to a magistrate?’
Ned lifts his right hand and presents Nicholas with the underside of his thumb. The scarred M of the branding stands out like a signal. ‘I don’t care much for being near magistrates,’ he says in a low rumble.
Nicholas colours. ‘I sorry, I didn’t mean to…’ His voice trails off into silence. Ned’s official punishment for his efforts to disprove the false case made against Nicholas – that he had been involved with the queen’s late physician, Dr Lopez, in a plot to poison her – is a constant reminder to Nicholas of the price his friend has paid for loyalty.
‘I’ll speak to Constable Osborne,’ Nicholas says. ‘We’ll see what Vyves and Strollot were up to on the night Godwinson was murdered.’
‘Oh, they’ll ’ave an alibi,’ Ned says. ‘Folks like them always do.’
Robert Cecil has appointed the little house in the Paris Garden to be the place in which to drain Edmund Spenser of the last drops of intelligence in the matter of Don Rodriquez Calva de Sagrada. Cecil himself stays away, sending a procession of grey, legal-looking men to do the work for him. Bianca tolerates the intrusion, knowing there is little she can do to deny the principal Secretary of State. Besides, their presence seems to make Constanza’s existence more corporeal. She imagines a waif-like beauty with wide eyes, lost, frightened and wandering in a vast, dripping forest like the one where the Seanchaí lived.
Nicholas, being a trusted Cecil intelligencer and the nearest thing to a witness, is allowed to attend these sessions. Sometimes he is even the subject. They are held either in the main hall or – if the weather is not too wintry – in the small orchard garden beside the house.
Describe the captain of the Portuguese carrack who brought the first approach from Robert Persons… Were the letters all in the same hand?… What position did Don Rodriquez hold at the Escorial?… Have you ever, even inadvertently, let slip anything in the presence of Robert Devereux or anyone connected to him that might hint – however tenuously – at your correspondence with the Royal College of St Alban, the Jesuit seminary set up by the traitor Robert Persons at Valladolid?
Spenser grows visibly irritated by the questioning, but Cecil’s men are skilled. The more the poet protests, the more indulgently reasonable they become. Nicholas sometimes wonders who Cecil might send if Spenser ever decides not to cooperate. Then he has a clear image in his mind: the bulky, ungentle body of the servant, Latham, peering down on the palsied rebel prisoner in the cellar beneath Cecil House.
When not acting as a go-between, Nicholas returns to his physician’s practice on Bankside. It does not pay, other than in chickens, fruit or labour. For income, he has Cecil’s stipend. With the Jackdaw and her apothecary shop on Dice Lane, Bianca is the real money-earner. What Nicholas makes from the few richer patients he permits to visit him from across the river, he sends to his father at Barnthorpe.