by Barbara Kyle
“Winchester geese,” the cellarman said over his shoulder to Isabel.
“Pardon?”
“Whores.”
Isabel blushed. “Oh.”
They passed out of the women’s ward, though no barrier separated it from the corridor to keep the other wards’ inmates from mingling. “What’d you say the felon’s name was?” the cellarman asked as they walked on.
“Richard Thornleigh,” Isabel said.
The man looked around at her, brightening. “I know him. Brought in yesterday, he was. Older bloke, right? Kind of quiet?”
Isabel’s eyes widened in amazement. What luck! Of all the prisons in London she had chosen the Clink first only because, of the three in Southwark, it was the first one across London Bridge. “That’s right,” she said, eagerly. “Can you take me to him?”
“Aye.”
Isabel clamped down her excitement.
They arrived at a barred door. The cellarman unhooked a wooden truncheon that hung at his waist. “Thieves and murderers,” he said darkly, and knocked on the door. It was opened by his counterpart. Isabel stepped into a large, dim ward. She immediately began rationing breaths in the foul air. The cellarman slapped the end of his truncheon against the flat of his hand as if preparing himself.
Some of the prisoners sat on the packed earth floor, their wrists chained to the walls. Others, unfettered, lay on matted mounds of filthy straw. A few were walking aimlessly, a few were sleeping. A cluster of them squatted on the floor by a pillar, gambling. There were some women too—apparently, by their dress, prostitutes from the women’s ward. Male and female faces looked around with malevolent stares at the visitors. Another cellarman idly patrolled the ward, truncheon in hand. Isabel saw that the door she had come through was the only exit.
She felt a sudden wave of panic. It would be impossible to get her father out of here! She looked at the mercenary. He was scanning the ward with his usual intense, determined look. His resolution calmed Isabel a little. He knew what he was doing.
“Where is he?” she whispered to the cellarman.
“Over there.” He nodded toward a tall, gray-haired man among the gamblers. His back was turned. The mercenary immediately started toward him and Isabel followed, her heart quickening with every step. The cellarman came, too. When they reached the gamblers the cellarman clapped a hand on the gray-haired man’s shoulder and said, “Thornleigh. Visitor for you.”
The man cackled. Isabel felt a stone sink to the pit of her stomach. She knew, even before he turned—a wild-eyed stranger—that it had been too good to be true.
They were halfway across London Bridge, the mercenary on foot, leading the mare.
“Stop,” Isabel said from the mare’s back. The mercenary glanced around with a frown but kept walking.
“Stop, I say!” She jumped down off the mare. Foot traffic and horse traffic flowed around them. She felt trapped. With a lurch of panic she pushed through to the side of the bridge.
She reached a gap between the three-storied shops and looked out over the gray, wind-whipped Thames. She took several deep breaths of the cold air, but it did nothing to ease her anxiety. They had just left the Clink, and the mercenary had declared it was too late in the day to search another prison: all prisons turned out the public before dusk in preparation for locking up for the night. They should go to an inn, he said, and wait for morning. But Isabel found thedecision a torture. To have come all the way to London only to find such heartbreak at the Clink. And now, to have to wait … when an assassin hired by the Grenvilles might be stalking her father in some verminous ward at this very moment. It was unbearable….
She looked out at the water. The river was crowded with barges and ferries, and the watermen’s whistles shrilled above passengers’ shouts from various wharf stairs of “Oars!” and “Westward, ho!” A drayman near the German merchants’ wharf was dumping a cartload of refuse into the water. Isabel watched a goat carcass float toward the bridge. In summer, she thought, there would be swans here. Scores of swans forming downy white clouds on the water. The memory pierced her—the summer sweetness of it—like a shard of a poignant dream impossible to hold on to.
She hardly knew which distress weighed her down most heavily. The thought of her fevered mother possibly dying onboard the ship was too horrible to contemplate, so she didn’t; her mother must recover. But the other bonds that held her life together—her father and Martin—were equally threatened, and their claims to her loyalty warred inside her. She was pledged to take Wyatt information about the French Ambassador’s support, information that might be essential to the cause, and to Martin’s very life. Yet the search for her father was keeping her from doing so. But could she leave her father to his fate? Impossible! She glanced toward the city, where Ambassador de Noailles was, then looked anxiously back toward Southwark. The Marshalsea prison was there, and King’s Bench prison, too. Was her father chained in one of them?
The mercenary came beside her, the horse’s reins in his hand. She turned to him. “Could we not manage a look into the Marshalsea?” she entreated.
He shook his head, then nodded toward the horizon. She looked at the sun dipping toward the Westminster reach of the river. Of course, it was too late. She must wait until tomorrow.
Behind her, a girl was loudly hawking eels and spiced meat pies to passersby. A trio of horsemen trotted down the bridge’s center. An oxcart joggled by.
“I despair of finding my father at all,” Isabel said softly.
The mercenary turned, putting the river scene behind him. “The turnkey said there are seven prisons,” he said, adjusting the bridle on the horse’s nose. “Thornleigh is in one of them. If we keep looking, we will find him.”
“But … will you really be able to rescue him?”
He did not look at her. He never looked at her. “There are ways,” he said.
His coolness was a goad to her grief, and she lashed out. “I recently watched a madman shoot my mother. She may die. I will not let them kill my father, too. Surely even you can you sympathize with that. Or perhaps you did not know who your father was.”
His gray eyes suddenly fixed her with what felt like contempt. “No. My mother was a camp whore.”
Isabel was shocked. Not so much by the fact as by his indifferent acceptance of it, his total lack of shame. She felt instantly contrite, knowing that, for her unprovoked insult, she was the one who should feel shame.
He glanced toward the bridge’s gateway that led to the city. He moved to the horse’s side and jerked the stirrup toward Isabel. “Get up,” he said roughly.
Isabel held her tongue. She mounted the horse.
The Anchor, where Isabel decided they would stay, was a small inn on cobbled Thames Street. It was snugly tucked away, with its stable and tiny courtyard, between a brewery warehouse on the corner up from Dowgate Dock and the fortress-like enclave of the Hanse merchants, called the Steelyard. Going to the Crane Inn, so comfortable and so full of friends in Master Legge and his family, was now out of the question, since Master Legge believed Isabel was on her way to Antwerp with her mother, as her father had commanded.Nor could she go to Martin’s family. With her father imprisoned for murder, and her traveling companion an escaped felon, her very presence might endanger the St. Legers. She had no wish to do that.
The Anchor was a scene of blithe family chaos. Isabel and Carlos, the inn’s only guests at the moment, sat at a table in the common room. Isabel was halfway through a much-appreciated mug of ale and a saffron bun, and the mercenary, who had downed two mugs already, was busy cleaning his sword. Three of the innkeeper’s young children ran about noisily playing hide and seek, chased by a yapping black-and-tan terrier, the resident ratcatcher. Two older children, a boy and a girl, neither more than ten, sat in a window seat arguing over a basket of kittens whose mother, indulging the small invading human hands, watched them through eyes narrowed in vigilance. The innkeeper’s wife, a woman with rolls of flesh at her waist and under
her floured chin, stood at a table pummeling a lump of dough into submission, while the innkeeper himself sat in state in a nook with several of his cronies, examining a gorgeously combed fighting cock. The room was chilly, for the hearth fires, here and in the kitchen, had been dowsed for the ministrations of the chimney sweep who had just been and gone, and the chambermaid, after serving the newcomers their ale, was now busy on her knees at the cold hearth, her head invisible halfway up the chimney and her voice reverberating through it as she invoked curses on the sweep for having left a mess of soot and cinders.
“He’s going to drownd,” a high voice beside Isabel said somberly.
She turned to a small face beside her, a buck-toothed little girl with wild, golden curls. The child was squatting beside the dog’s pudding bowl of water on the floor. A finger-sized piece of dough, crudely formed into the shape of a man, had sunk to the bottom. The child was looking up at Isabel with an expression of sad resignation.
“He needs a boat,” Isabel said. She reached across the table toward a bowl of walnuts and carefully cracked one open, splitting it into perfect halves. She picked the meat out of one half and held up the shell. “Fetch him out,” she told the child, nodding toward the water. The child obeyed with a wide-eyed look of anticipation and held up the soggy pastry man between her pudgy fingers.
Isabel took it, then bent and whispered another suggestion in the child’s ear. The child scampered across the room to the side of the hearth where a bough of leftover Christmas holly lay, and brought it back to Isabel. Isabel set to work. She tugged off a holly leaf and propped it inside the walnut shell to act as a sail. She shook water from the pastry man and, turning her back to hide the operation from the child, nipped off half his body and refashioned him much smaller, then turned back and placed him inside the shell. She bent over the bowl and set the tiny craft afloat.
The child beamed. She crouched and was immediately engrossed in prodding the little boat on an erratic voyage around the small ocean’s surface.
Isabel glanced up, smiling, and caught the mercenary looking intently at her. He quickly went back to wiping his sword. Always, he avoided her eyes. But his aloofness did not bother her now. She had accepted the delay in continuing the search, and she had made a stirring decision. She was going to go to Ambassador de Noailles for his instructions—now. De Noailles was lodged at the Charterhouse just outside Aldersgate; she could easily get there and back well before the nine o’clock curfew when the city gates closed. She felt energized, full of renewed purpose. She would leave as soon as she finished her ale … and as soon as she gathered the courage to say what she wanted to say to the mercenary. His words on London Bridge had sprouted a doubt in her mind.
The little girl, still beaming, lifted her boat from the water, clearly intent on showing it off. She cried to the mercenary, “Look!” and lurched straight toward his deadly blade. He jerked the sword away, up above her head, in a movementso swift the air hissed. The child’s mother at the table gasped. Isabel was astonished at how quickly he had reacted.
The woman crossed herself. “Lizzy, come away from there!” she called. “Come and help Mama!”
The child had frozen in fear—not of the blade but of the mercenary’s fierce scowl. Isabel reached out and gently drew the child back into her arms. “Go to your Mama,” she whispered. “She needs you.”
The child shot a smile up at Isabel and toddled off toward her mother, giving the mercenary a wide berth.
“Lord, I’ll skin that sweep alive!” This came from the chambermaid, emerging from the chimney. Backing out on hands and knees, she cursed the sweep with imaginative oaths for leaving the hearth in such a state. “Just wait till I get my hands on the wastrel. He’ll wish his mother had birthed him in China!”
Her litany of invective had brought her to her feet, slapping her hands of charcoal dust as she moved through the room. She stopped and gave the mercenary a frankly appraising look while wiping her hands on the top of her dirty apron, leaving thick black streaks down her bosom. It crossed Isabel’s mind that the young woman, apparently about her own age, was not unattractive under the smudges of soot on cheek and chin. “What won’t I do to that little bugger?” the maid finished with a suggestive grin to the mercenary. With her eyes still fixed on him she unwrapped her apron, displaying a low-cut bodice that barely concealed heavy breasts. The mercenary did not look away.
Isabel stood. “I’d like a word with you,” she said tersely to him. She moved to the door, out of earshot of the family. He sheathed his sword in its scabbard hanging on the chair and followed her.
“I’m concerned,” she said to him in low tones. “Do you really know what you’re doing?”
He frowned. “What?”
“You seem to know very little about London prisons. We had to be told that the Clink doesn’t take prisoners from outside London.” The cellarman had explained that fact following the abortive meeting with the other prisoner named Thornleigh. “Well?” Isabel waited for some response. The mercenary only looked away in that habit he had of avoiding her eyes. Exasperated, she asked, “Do you have any plan at all for freeing my father?”
He finally looked at her. “No use to talk tactics before you know the battlefield.”
She considered this. “I see,” she conceded.
There was a frantic flapping of wings. In the nook the fighting cock had made a leap for freedom into the air. The men laughed and one of them caught its leg and forced it to the ground.
Isabel felt awkward standing in silence next to the mercenary. “I am going out,” she said suddenly. “I have business to attend to alone. I will take the mare. I may be some time, so have supper yourself. The landlady says there’s a cookhouse round the corner where she is taking her pies to be baked. I’ll see you in the morning. Please be ready early.”
She turned to go back to the table for her cloak.
“Wait,” he said, catching her elbow. As soon as he touched her he let go of her as if he had been burned. “I do not—” He looked down, angry-faced, unsettled. He spoke through tight jaws. “For food, I … have no money.”
“Oh,” Isabel said. “I’m sorry.” She took out her purse and dug inside. As she dropped three shilling coins into his palm she noticed a tough, white rib of scar tissue running the length of his thumb.
She looked up and caught him staring at the ring on her forefinger. “It’s just like one my father wears,” she murmured. “He uses it to stamp the lead tags that mark his wool bales. See? It’s a thorn bush. Our family seal.” His attention was fixed on the ring with open-eyed interest, and Isabel could not resist a small smile, though a sad one. Perhaps, she thought, under this man’s armor of alienation he was capable of some feeling after all.
He looked at her with a sudden scowl and turned away abruptly, snatched up his sword, headed for the door, and left without a word.
Isabel blinked after him. What an unaccountable man, she thought. But she could not waste time fretting over his quixotic moods. She had work to do. And an ambassador to meet.
Carlos stomped up the snow-dusted south steps of St. Paul’s cathedral. Damn the girl, he thought. Damn her soft eyes. Damn her sympathy. He had not asked for any of it!
He stalked inside the cathedral and halted. The stone-vaulted nave was crowded—it was London’s only covered, public meeting place—and he was not sure where to find what he was looking for. The late afternoon light glowed duskily through the rose stained-glass window at the east end, making the movements of the people bustling around him look furtive. Porters and maids hurried by. Water carriers with tankards strapped to their backs trudged through, taking the short cut from Paul’s Wharf Hill through the nave and on out to Newgate Street. Moneylenders and their customers stood bargaining at the font. At a pillar servingmen loitered, hoping for work. At other pillars lawyers murmured with their clients. A dog sniffed Carlos’s boot. A plump whore sidled by.
There was a shout. A woman was chasing a young pickpocket up
the north aisle. Carlos felt his shoulder banged. He whipped around, coming toe to toe with a foppish gentleman brushing his red satin sleeve and grimacing as if this contact with a peasant’s dirty sheepskin coat had soiled him. The man strode on. Carlos’s lip curled. A week ago I owned a manor house, he thought. A week ago I was the lord of tenants and three hundred acres! His fist clenched around the paltry coins the girl had given him. He grabbed a passing choirboy by the shoulder. “Clerks,” Carlos said. “To write a letter. Where are they?”
The boy pointed to the west end. Carlos saw them— scribes seated at tables writing letters and legal documents for customers. He moved the boy out of his way and started across.
He stood for a moment beside other customers at one of the tables and watched a spectacled clerk work the mysterious scrawl. Further along the bank of scribblers a young clerk sat sharpening his quill with a knife, obviously idle. Carlos moved to him. “You can write a message?” he asked.
The young scribe looked up. “Certainly, sir.” He took a fresh sheet of paper and dipped his quill. “To whom shall I direct it?”
Carlos hesitated. He did not know the man’s real name. But since leaving Colchester a worry had been gnawing at him. The employer who had sent the man to the jail to commission him would likely have heard of Thornleigh’s transfer, and the riot, and would assume the assassination had been thwarted. Carlos wanted to reassure him, but the only information the man had given him had been: Bring proof to the Blue Boar Tavern on Cornhill on Candlemas Night. If you must contact me before then, ask for Master Colchester at the Blue Boar. They know me there. Carlos had decided against showing his face in person at the tavern. Too risky. There had been search parties out for him in Essex. It was possible they’d be looking in London too.
