by Alys Clare
Jack smiled. ‘However you came to be here, I’m glad to see you.’
‘Do you recall what happened?’ Hrype asked.
Jack shrugged. ‘I came to the house, I found the door open, the merest crack. I saw a small footprint and other marks in the snow on the step. I searched up above, on the ground floor, and there was nobody there.’ He paused. ‘Someone has been up in the attic room. The bed’s been destroyed. It could be they were searching for something,’ he went on before Hrype could comment, ‘but I don’t think so. I felt violence and—’ He stopped. It was better not to put what else he had sensed into words. ‘I came down here. I smelt something, I heard a whisper of breath, then I was collapsing. I would have fallen like a stone, for all power had left me, but somebody lowered me down. I heard a voice telling me not to come here because it wasn’t my concern, then nothing.’
Hrype nodded. ‘Did you feel afraid?’
‘There wasn’t really time,’ Jack replied.
Hrype smiled thinly. ‘I felt afraid,’ he said. ‘I came here, alone, and my fear began even before I stepped inside. I thought there was someone in the house; a listening, watching, silent presence, waiting to see what I was going to do. It intensified once I came down here, and then I thought I heard a very soft whisper, in another tongue. It was too much for me and I fled back up the steps. I was fumbling to open the door and I dropped the lantern, and in the sudden darkness I had a very clear image.’ He glanced at Jack. ‘Of a pearl.’
‘I’m surprised, then,’ Jack said after a while, ‘that you came back.’
Hrype smiled again. ‘I’m not sure I would have done without the prompt.’
All at once Jack wanted more than anything to get out of the crypt; to get out of the house. He realized as he struggled to stand up that he was both extremely thirsty and very hungry. Pushing Hrype’s restraining hand out of the way – ‘I’m all right!’ he muttered – he strode over to the steps, along the passage and up to the door. Turning to Hrype, he said, ‘Come with me. I know a tavern where they serve up good food and even better ale.’
He emerged onto the alley, watched as Hrype locked the door, and then, with Hrype’s footfalls right behind him, set off for the quayside.
He paid for the bread, bacon and mugs of ale. He felt that, Hrype having come to find him, it was the least he could do. When they had finished the food and the mugs had been refilled, he said, ‘So, now we know that a small, slight but nevertheless strong person who speaks words in a foreign tongue in a very soft whisper haunts Gurdyman’s house.’
‘Small, slight but strong?’ Hrype queried.
‘The footprint in the snow was small, and I had the impression that whoever came up behind me was short and slim. But he was strong, because he bore my weight as I fell.’
‘And you are neither short nor slim,’ Hrype agreed.
‘It’s all muscle,’ Jack muttered.
‘You have done better than I,’ Hrype said, ‘for, although I have felt this man’s presence in other places, I perceived no sense of his size.’
Jack shot him a look. ‘Where else have you sensed him?’
Hrype met his eyes. Jack sensed he was reluctant to answer. Then, with a sigh, he said, ‘Once out near Aelf Fen. Once on the track that leads from the fens into the town.’
Jack felt a stab of alarm. Both were locations he associated with Lassair.
‘He’s looking for her,’ he said.
But Hrype shook his head. ‘No. I do not believe he is any danger to her. She is far away in any case, and I cannot think he doesn’t know it.’
‘So what’s he doing here?’
Hrype didn’t answer for some time. Then he said, ‘I have given the question endless thought, and there is one answer that has occurred to me. Well, many have occurred, but all the others I have rejected.’
‘We’d better have the one you’ve held on to, then,’ Jack said. He hoped his impatience hadn’t been detectable.
Hrype’s brief look of apology suggested it had. ‘I think this person came here for a purpose, which was to prompt Gurdyman into setting out on his journey. Why he has to make it, who wants him to go and why he had to leave precisely when he did, I still cannot say. This person perhaps came as the agent of somebody else, and his role was complete once he’d put that token of the single, beautiful pearl in a place where Gurdyman would spot it.’
‘So why didn’t this person leave as soon as he’d achieved his purpose?’
‘Yes, that is the question,’ Hrype agreed. ‘He was delayed somehow – perhaps he was injured, perhaps he was sick – and by the time he was able to go, it was no longer possible.’
Jack, nodding, saw what he meant. ‘Because there were no more ships,’ he said. ‘Winter had tightened its fist, and few if any boats were setting out even for the coast, never mind for destinations further away.’
Hrype was watching him with a strange, eager light in his eyes. ‘What do you think?’ he demanded. ‘Does it make sense?’
‘Yes,’ Jack said simply. He picked up his mug, drained it and stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ Hrype asked.
‘The weather is still bad, but it’s warmer than yesterday and soon, maybe, the snow and the ice will clear. River traffic will start up again as soon as it’s at all feasible – commerce doesn’t wait any longer than it must, and there are livings to earn – so there’s no time to lose.’
‘You’re going to find him.’
‘I am going to try. Even if he manages to elude me, I’m going to look for the place he’s been putting up. If you’re right, and he was indeed sick or injured, then it may be he’ll have kept out of others’ way. I’ve been doing the rounds of the better-frequented places but I’ve been asking for news of the dead vagrant with the pearl. But now we know he was merely incidental. I’m going to search again, widen the area and change the description of the man I’m looking for.’
‘He attacked you,’ Hrype said softly. ‘He administered some substance that put you out cold on the floor of Gurdyman’s crypt for a day and a night.’
‘He won’t do so again.’ Jack stared down at Hrype. ‘I’ll be here tomorrow evening, so you can come and find me if you have anything to report, and I’ll return at the same time on all subsequent days until we find him.’
‘Very well.’
‘In the meantime, if you need me I’m sure you know where I live.’
‘I do.’ Then, as Jack turned to go, Hrype added, ‘Good luck.’
It was only after they had gone their separate ways that Jack realized he had omitted to ask Hrype what he was planning to do.
It took Jack almost a week but in the end he met with success, of a sort.
Methodically he did the rounds of all the places he’d been to before. The taverns, the brothels, the houses of charity run by the monks and the nuns. He spoke to the boatmen, shut up in their boats while they waited on the weather. He spoke to the apothecaries and the healers. Everywhere he asked the same question: have you seen a slim, slight, foreign man who was laid up injured, or sick, some time in the late autumn?
And it was a healer who gave him the first clue.
It gave Jack a stab to the heart to stand in the tiny shop where the healer made his preparations and advised his patients, for the smell of herbs, spices, ointments and sweet oils reminded him so forcefully of Lassair that he almost felt she was right there beside him.
But this healer was, in all important respects, entirely different. He was a very old man, his long white hair and beard were tangled and not very clean, the black cap and gown stained with ancient food. He was impatient and irascible, and as soon as he understood that there was no money involved in this interaction, that Jack was only there to ask for information, he tried to shoo him out through the door. Jack was obliged to tell him he was a man of the law and threaten him with obstructing a legitimate enquiry before he would relent.
‘Why d’you want to know about this little foreigner, then?’ he
demanded. ‘Done something wicked, has he?’ He gave a hoarse, malevolent chuckle, which loosened phlegm in his throat. He coughed, spat, then added, ‘Attacked someone, has he?’ He chucked again, with the same result. ‘Some fine specimen like yourself, and him a dainty little runt of a fellow?’
‘You know who I mean?’ Jack said, pouncing on the last few words.
‘I might and I might not,’ replied the healer. ‘Oh, very well!’ Jack had taken a step forward. ‘I did treat a man who sounds like the one you’re after, although for the life of me I can’t imagine what you want with him, nice, polite, innocuous sort of a fellow that he was.’
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘He was sick, like you said. He had a cough and he couldn’t breathe. Soon as I saw him I reckoned it was the cold and the damp, and he said that was so, and that he was used to warmer, drier weather, even in the fall of the year.’ He chucked again, and the malice was even more noticeable. ‘I told him, I did, then you don’t want to go visiting the fen country in the autumn or the winter, because warm and dry conditions are not what you’ll find!’ He laughed uproariously at his own wit, and Jack thought that the ensuing coughing fit was well deserved.
‘When did you last see him?’ he asked, once the old man had recovered enough to speak.
‘Oooh, two, three weeks back. He came in for more supplies of horehound, and he asked me how soon the boats’d be running again. I told him it’d be a while yet.’ He nodded as if in verification of his words.
‘Did he say where he was bound?’
The old man shook his head. ‘Up to the coast, I’m guessing, if he was waiting here for a boat, as that’s where they mostly all go.’ He chuckled again. ‘But that won’t be the final destination if I’m any judge, what with him being foreign.’
‘Foreign,’ Jack repeated. It was no more than he already knew. ‘You can’t add anything to that? Hazard a guess as to where he came from?’
‘How should I know?’ countered the old healer. ‘One accent sounds like another, far as I’m concerned. I don’t like foreigners,’ he added with sudden venom.
‘I expect you like their money,’ Jack observed.
The old man spat again, which seemed to be his eloquent comment on the matter.
Reasoning that a man who wished to leave the town on the first boat that would take him to the coast would probably try to put up close to the quay, that was where Jack went next.
And there too, increasing his frustration, he met with the man’s trail and not the man himself.
At a dim, dark little place tucked away almost at the end of the quay, beyond the last of the brothels and hidden by a large warehouse, Jack learned that a short, slim foreign man had indeed been staying for perhaps six weeks and probably longer. Nobody seemed quite sure when he had arrived – the management of the place appeared to be fairly haphazard, with nothing in the way of a record of who had stayed and for how long – but the consensus was that it was well over a month, according to a woman who did the laundry, and that the man had arrived around All Saints’, according to a fat man whose role, judging by the broom in his hand, appeared to be to sweep the floor.
‘He was sick, wasn’t he?’ Jack asked the woman, who seemed to be the more intelligent of the pair.
‘Oh, that he was,’ she replied. ‘He’d have gone weeks ago otherwise, or that’s what I thought. He gave the impression he couldn’t wait to leave.’
‘He was frightened, he was,’ put in the man with the broom. ‘His big brown eyes used to widen with fear, and you could see the whites all the way round. He was wary of everyone as was put in with him, and when she – not her,’ he said, jerking a thumb at the washerwoman, ‘I mean her, the mistress – when she said his coughing was that bad it was keeping folks awake and putting off the customers, and he’d have to move to the outhouse, he were glad of it!’ His eyes rounded in amazement at anybody preferring an outhouse to a communal sleeping chamber.
‘Show me this outhouse,’ Jack ordered.
Still holding his broom the man did so, leading the way out of the low, dark building, around its end and across a dirty, stinking yard to a short row of lean-tos on the far side. ‘In there,’ he said, pushing at a door whose planks were rotted at the base.
Jack stepped inside.
The room was very small, and there was little within except a straw mattress, a neatly stacked pile of cracked platters and a few small items of furniture too far gone for repair, presumably chucked out from the inn. There was a circle of stones in the middle of the floor, the earth black with ash. The occupant, he reflected, had done his best with his meagre accommodation.
‘Mistress said he could light a fire,’ the fat man said. He pointed at the pile of broken tables and stools in the corner. ‘No shortage of fuel, if you weren’t fussy. And he had his own blanket – good and thick it was.’
A blanket. A straw mattress. A fire. Dear God, Jack thought, even so it was no place for a man with a bad chest to overwinter.
‘Where is he now?’ he asked.
The man had begun to move his broom to and fro across the floor, but in such a desultory fashion that you couldn’t really call it sweeping. ‘No idea,’ he replied.
‘But he’s settled up? He’s paid you and he’s gone?’
The man nodded. A sly smile spread across his huge face. ‘Gave me a tip,’ he said, reaching into a pouch at his belt. ‘I fetched him food and drink when he was too poorly to go out, see, and he remembered.’
He was holding up a pale object between finger and thumb.
It was a very small pearl.
During Jack’s week of searching, Hrype had been out of town.
The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that he’d guessed correctly concerning the elusive figure of the slight foreign man: that only mischance had kept him in Cambridge over the winter.
He will leave very soon, Hrype thought as he trudged along.
On an impulse he stopped, left the track and forced a way through snow-laden trees and undergrowth until he came to a small area of clear ground. It was too cold to sit, so he squatted down instead, then took his rune stones out of their bag, cast them on the piece of cloth he kept with them and, for some time, simply stared at them.
They confirmed what he already suspected.
After the moments of silent thanks to whatever spirit empowered them, he put them carefully away.
Then, his mission on the fen fringes all the more important now, he went on his way.
With so much to tell Hrype, Jack found it immensely frustrating that, evening after evening, he failed to show up in Marcus’s tavern. When finally he did, looking wet, cold and tired, Jack restrained his impatience until he had drunk and eaten, then succinctly outlined all that he had learned.
‘The pearl,’ he concluded, ‘seems to suggest he’s the right man. Maybe he had a small supply of them, and used them in payment as well as for throwing Gurdyman into a state of panicked alarm.’
Hrype said nothing for a while. Then, with a sigh, he muttered, ‘The right man, yes, so it indeed appears. But where does that take us, if we can’t find him and still have no idea where he came from, who sent him and why they had to make Gurdyman set out on his journey? And if he—’ He stopped.
‘We can’t find him yet,’ Jack said, concentrating only on the first part of Hrype’s complaint.
‘But you think we will?’
‘He’s desperate to leave,’ Jack replied. ‘We’ll just have to watch the boats, once they start moving again, and wait till he approaches one.’
‘And how do we do that?’
Jack grinned. ‘I’m not without resources,’ he said. ‘I’ll set men to watch.’
‘And what if he sets out over land?’
‘He won’t. He needs to get to the coast, and travelling by water is the only option in this season when the land is flooded.’
Hrype was watching him with a peculiar intensity. ‘Impress on these resources of you
rs how important it is,’ he said very softly. ‘He’s restless now. You tell me he’s left the place he’s been lodging, and you don’t know where he is now. He’ll leave soon, Jack. Very soon.’
‘He can’t go unless there’s a boat,’ Jack pointed out.
Hrype muttered something that sounded like There will be.
Deciding not to ask how he could be so sure, since the answer would undoubtedly take them into realms where he preferred not to trespass, Jack reached for their empty mugs and went for refills.
That night as the town slept, the thaw that had set in a few days ago, slowly building momentum, suddenly increased its pace.
Residual floes of ice on the river grew smaller and disappeared. Drifted snow on the banks of a hundred tributary streams and ditches melted. Soft rain began to fall.
And the river that had been all but unmoving since the freeze set in slowly came back to life.
On the quay in Cambridge an old and experienced shipman, uneasy and wakeful as he lay in the storage space of his boat, felt the alteration. He got out of the huddle of blankets and skins with which he’d kept himself warm and clambered up on to the deck. Yes, his instincts had been right. He stood watching as the water flowed strongly past, and something in him responded to its joy in this release from deep winter’s hard grip.
‘Getting moving at a pace now, aren’t you?’ he muttered softly. ‘Well, I reckon I’ll go along with you.’
He had a cargo of salt pork, herbs and spices waiting for him at Lynn, and buyers who would shove each other out of the way with desperation-born ferocity the moment he brought it back upriver. He’d be able to add on a coin or two to the going rate. He smiled to himself.
As soon as it grew light, he went back into the hold, kicked awake his three-man crew and told them what was happening.
A little over an hour later, with an even stronger current flowing, he was ready to leave. He’d sent the lad to draw in the plank they’d set up to enable them to fetch last-minute supplies from ashore, and the boy already had his hands on it.
Then a cloaked, muffled figure came hurrying up. The lad let go of the plank and rubbed his eyes. ‘Now where in God’s name did you come from?’ he muttered. ‘I was looking right at the spot where you’re standing, and I’ll swear you weren’t there a moment ago.’
