He considers his chances of dodging Henshawe’s blade. If he could reach Strollot, whose confidence with a sword appears the weakest, he might be able to disarm him, take up his blade. But before the idea is even half-formed in his mind he remembers the advice that sword-master Silver had given him before he left for Ireland: I suggest a backsword, rather than a rapier… With only one edge to the blade, you’re likely to do less harm – to yourself. No, he thinks; the only chance they have is if he can give Ned the opportunity to act. And to do that, he must risk baiting Oliver Henshawe further.
‘So where is your company?’ he asks, glancing around at Henshawe’s companions. ‘Surely this can’t be it. Does the Privy Council know what they got for their money? A coward with one eye, a corrupt alderman’s clerk, two hired swordsmen and a cheap trickster to lead them?’
Timothy stares at him in disbelief, as if he’s just been handed a death sentence.
The movement is fast and horribly accurate. For an instant Nicholas thinks Henshawe has punched him on the right clavicle. Then he feels the icy burn of steel twisting on bone – and a warm release flowing down over his breast. Finally the pain. Hot and dizzying.
‘Nicholas!’ Bianca screams. But as she tries to run to him, Henshawe holds her back with a jab of his now-bloodied sword. With a smile of professional satisfaction, he observes the tear in Nicholas’s shirt and the blood flowing freely down over the linen.
‘Shall I kill the lad now?’ asks Vyves, a sickening eagerness in his voice.
But again Henshawe lifts one hand. And, like an obedient hound, Vyves lowers his head.
Sensing that Henshawe has a reason for keeping Timothy alive – at least for the present – Nicholas finds the courage to risk another push at his opponent’s one weakness: his brittle self-regard.
‘Tell us the truth, Oliver,’ he says through gritted teeth. ‘The Privy Council have bought themselves nothing but a company of ghosts.’
Henshawe moves the point of his sword slowly across Nicholas’s throat till it rests on the opposite collarbone. He makes a play of gauging whether his next thrust will balance the first. Nicholas forces himself not to step back. All his instincts tell him to run. But that would be a humiliation he could not bear. Better to take what’s coming. Better to hope. He glances at Ned Monkton. Ned’s face is twisted with impotent fury. And his two guards know their business well enough not to take their eyes off him for even an instant.
‘Prove it,’ Henshawe sneers. ‘I mustered one hundred fellows in England. I had one hundred fellows on the company’s roll in Ireland.’
‘But they weren’t the same fellows, were they? You paid off your English recruits and mustered Irish ones at, what, half the price? You’ve been keeping the coin for their pay and supply ever since. Lemuel Godwinson was the only man whose conscience got the better of him. And for that, Vyves there had him murdered.’
The second strike lands before Nicholas even notices Henshawe’s arm move. As accurate as the first, it twists a small gobbet of flesh out of his shoulder, spattering more blood across the front of his shirt. This time he cannot stop himself crying out.
‘Oliver, for mercy’s sake, stop it!’ Bianca shouts in anguish.
‘I know of no Lemuel Godwinson,’ Henshawe says dismissively.
‘But Vyves and Strollot do,’ Nicholas says through teeth gritted by pain. ‘Together, they lured him to Bankside and killed him before he could go to a magistrate.’
The sword tip hovers at the centre of Nicholas’s throat. But Henshawe does not strike. Instead he looks at Barnabas Vyves.
‘Do you know of this Lemuel Godwinson, Master Vyves?’ he asks.
‘I do not, Sir Oliver. Never heard of him.’
‘And you, Master Strollot?’
‘Nor me, neither.’
‘Do you see?’ Henshawe enquires pleasantly. ‘We know naught of Master Godwinson. His name is unknown to us.’
Sow discord, Nicholas thinks. Foster distrust. Cause friction. Buy time.
‘That’s not what Strollot admitted to the coroner’s jury,’ he says. He turns to Vyves. The ensign has moved his sword tip an inch or two away from Timothy’s neck. ‘You even helped him to remember, didn’t you, Master Vyves?’ The pain from the twin holes that Henshawe has carved into his shoulders feels, to Nicholas, like a burning brand thrust deep into his body. But he keeps going, almost daring Henshawe to strike again, praying that he can survive another thrust, that Ned’s guards will reward his pain with a moment’s inattention.
‘How many dead men did you have still serving in your company in Ireland, Oliver, still being fed and sheltered on Her Majesty’s coin? I’d wager my own money that Lemuel Godwinson’s name is on the muster roll, still earning his pay.’
‘There are no names on the muster rolls, Shelby,’ Henshawe says sneeringly. ‘Only numbers. And the Privy Council won’t have the time, or the inclination, to chase their tails investigating the allegations of a man who conspired with his wife to aid the Spanish and the rebellious Earl of Tyrone.’
‘Or a brute who bears the brand of a killer on his thumb,’ says Vyves, safely removed by several feet – and the length of his own sword blade – from Ned Monkton’s response.
Timothy looks around as though he still cannot bring himself to believe what is happening. Nicholas’s only satisfaction is that Vyves’s blade is no longer as close to the lad’s neck as it was.
‘We’re wasting time,’ says Henshawe. ‘You, your wife and the Blackamoor are to come with us, now.’
‘Where?’ Nicholas asks.
‘Somewhere secure, until morning.’
‘As secure as Lemuel Godwinson is?’ Nicholas asks, certain now of Henshawe’s intentions.
A knowing gleam flashes in Henshawe’s eyes. ‘More secure even than Edmund Spenser,’ he says with a slack grin.
Nicholas forces himself to stay calm. He breathes slowly. Henshawe must not see his fear. Bianca must not see that he has no notion how to stop Henshawe killing them all. Because it has occurred to Nicholas that Henshawe doesn’t need them to be alive when he presents them as evidence of Cecil’s secret communication with Spain. Indeed, it might be better all round for him if their tongues were stilled. Dead, there is no one left to disprove a claim from the Essex faction that Cecil has been plotting to capitulate to Spain. Dead, there is no one to expose Henshawe’s fraud.
I’m thinking too hard, he tells himself. Since when did Oliver Henshawe need an excuse to kill?
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, he remembers a fragment of his conversation with Edmund Spenser at the Whitehall revels in December, while Bianca had been dancing with Robert Devereux. He had enquired whether Spenser knew anything about Henshawe’s Irish recruits. I seem to recall Sir Robert telling me that you were once in charge of the muster in Munster. Is that true? he had asked. Now he understands.
‘Spenser was once a commissioner of the muster for his country in Ireland, wasn’t he?’ he says. ‘He must have realized what you were up to. Is that why you killed him? What did you do: smother him with a pillow? Poison him?’
This time Nicholas has a moment’s warning. He sees Henshawe’s hand tighten on the grip of his sword. He turns his head up and away, closing his eyes – waiting for the pain.
It starts just beneath his jaw. A blaze of cold fire that seems to flow up through his skull and pool behind his eyes. Fire that screams in his ears for an instant, until it dawns on him that it is his own cry of agony that he can hear. He feels the blood course over his stretched throat and wonders if Henshawe has deliberately cut through a jugular vein. He grasps his chin – and feels the most extraordinary relief when his fingers encounter only a flap of hanging flesh and blood that merely flows over his hand, not pumps out in a fatal gush.