The Raven's Seal

by Andrei Baltakmens

  “I am afraid I must decline. Your fees are rather sharp to me.”

  The mouth and eyes of the gaoler were all that appeared in the grate. The mouth drew up in a knowing leer, but the eyes were cold. “Suit yerself. Yer down for a long stay. Look about. Try the company!” With this exhortation, Swinge went upon his rounds.

  Grainger made a small repast on the basket Mrs. Myron had left behind, but the rolls were dry and tasteless in his mouth, as they had been the night before. How the hours passed, he barely knew, for the bells of the city were deadened by the massive rock of the gaol walls and the weight of towers and chambers that brooded above him. The damp, close air and the colourless walls became unendurable to him, and despite his tattered nerves, he resolved to go out of his cell, if only to find a draught of fresh air and a glimpse of the sky.

  Cautiously, he opened the cell door, and to his immense surprise he found, squatting opposite him against the wall, a small and filthy boy.

  The boy looked up and uttered a string of incomprehensible syllables.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Grainger.

  “Geehza farthen furtha tap, moster,” repeated the boy.

  Quite at a loss, Grainger could only gape at this apparition.

  The child stood and shuffled forward, holding out a grubby hand with the palm upright. “Geehv za farthen fur tha tap,” he repeated emphatically.

  “I have nothing to give you,” said Grainger, astonished.

  “Yer no gent!” shrieked the child. He dashed at Grainger and punched him sharply just above the knee and was running away before Grainger could even comprehend the stinging assault.

  With no better recourse, Grainger followed the way the boy had run.

  He was not at all sure of his route of the evening before, which seemed to have happened in another, unimaginable phase of his life. He passed cell doors, some open and some closed, and the inhabitants who marked him looked out with no more than sullen contempt or indifference. The atmosphere was heavy with coal-smoke from many small braziers, and the taint of human waste. There seemed to Grainger to be no order in the prison, no authority over its comings and goings. A boy scurried past him with hot water. A man drank milk from a flagon under a grate in the wall. Grainger took several turns, got lost, was sneered at and sent back, before he reached the worn set of steps that took him up into the yard.

  Cold, damp air washed down, but it lightened the miasma of the lower cells, and Grainger ascended eagerly enough. He came out in a corner of the courtyard. The morning was misty and frigid. The bleak, uneven flagstones were deep in mud and slush. It was bitterly exposed, and Grainger felt the ache and chill close within his bones. A few women were chattering at a pump, and a man was hawking bread from a covered basket. Clots and knots of men, and even a few children, were passing slowly up and down.

  An elderly gentleman, short, wrapped in a coat that had been the fashion of one year long lost and was now threadbare, rent and patched, and wound about by long scarves, stood not far from Grainger in a curious attitude, for his head was cocked as if staring into the sky, and at intervals he would emit a short, sharp whistle, as if calling something from the clouds. He was not startled as Grainger approached but merely glanced his way and nodded cautiously. As this was the most civil greeting Grainger had met thus far in the Bellstrom, he returned the nod with a grave good-morning.

  “Good morning to you,” the gentleman returned and lapsed into silence.

  Grainger waited, and the older man did not seem inclined to move. Encouraged, Grainger started anew: “Forgive me if I intrude.”

  The gentleman looked at him sideways again, but without rancour. “One of our green hands, I perceive. I know the regulars pretty well, and you are not one of them. Not at all.” He had a thin, rather sallow face, hollow-cheeked with years of want, and watery eyes.

  “I confess,” said Grainger, “I am new to this place and know not where to turn.”

  “Tsk!” said the man sharply. “Make no such admissions. If you are new here, you must stand for yourself. In this place the strong prey upon the weak, and pity and relief are strangers. Therefore, own your uncertainty to no one.”

  “Nonetheless,” replied Grainger, “I am grateful for any hints or guidance.”

  “My name is Tyre,” said the old man, shortly, looking to both sides and seeing that they were still alone. “Septimus, my mother called me, as the first of my six brothers and sisters before me that lived to be christened. I walk this yard every morning, rain or shine, since I am confined by debts, and have been so these many years. I am known here, and I am not often molested.”

  “Thaddeus Grainger, at your service.”

  Mr. Tyre shook his hand carefully, but his eyes strayed to the dreary sky and the misty line of the prison roof.

  “It seems to me, as a newcomer,” continued Grainger, “that there is no regulation here.”

  “We are consigned to a most exemplary neglect,” said Mr. Tyre, with a short sigh. “Your felons, debtors, and whores all tumble together. Your felons generally wait for trial, or scourging, branding, or the noose thereafter. If you have the means to pay, you may do much as you please. If you have no money, then confinement and fetters are your lot. A few of us keep to a trade. Swinge lets certain debtors out on a ticket-of-leave, and a handful go to beg outside or in the streets, the better to gather their garnish.” The old man scratched the side of his nose. “Swinge and his sons are always here. Generally, there are four or five turnkeys about the wings and a man on the gate. They will procure small services—for a commission, as it were.”

  “At the risk of making another admission,” said Grainger, “I have no idea where things stand in this place.”

  “Over there,” said Mr. Tyre, with a nod, “is the tap-room, where every form of indolence and vice is indulged. Below us is the common prison-room, where the most miserable wretches are chained. Do not go there unless you have an aim to sample more human suffering than your own. The debtors are in there; some keep their household with them. Beside them is the chapel arch, the gate, the gaoler’s lodge, where Swinge, his family, and servants—”

  At that moment, a shadow fell and fluttered between the two men. Grainger, unguarded, leapt back. Mr. Tyre gave a shout of satisfaction as a great, black-feathered bird swooped between them, crossed the yard at a single thrust of its inky wings, rose again to the mists, and returned to land on the ground before the old man and cock its shining, sleek head.

  “What is this creature?” cried Grainger.

  “This,” said Mr. Tyre, with an indulgent smile, “is Roarke. I give him leave to fly each day, but he always returns. Clever fellow!”

  The old man reached into his pocket and held forth a lump of wormy bread. In an instant, the raven had jumped to his forearm and busied about pecking and digging at the bread with its dagger of a beak.

  “You are pretty familiar with the gaol,” said Grainger faintly.

  “Roarke and I are generally known here. I keep to myself and keep busy with my trade. I advise you do the same. No one bothers me, or Roarke, who is something of a favourite among us,” said Mr. Tyre, smoothing the sleek feathers of the bird’s wide back. “I am not the oldest prisoner: that honour belongs to Mr. Ravenscraigh, whom you will no doubt meet, by and by.”

  The bread was pecked almost to crumbs in the old man’s hand. Suddenly, the bird croaked and cast a glittering, suspicious eye at Grainger. It stretched its black wings.

  “He is unsettled. He does not care for strangers,” said Mr. Tyre mildly.

  “Then I will not be a cause for further disturbance,” said Grainger, drawing away.

  “There is one rule here that all must keep,” said Mr. Tyre. “I advise you this once. Do not ’peach! Ignore it at your peril. Do not ’peach!”

  The bird gave another warning cry. Grainger, shivering, hastened away.

  Grainger crossed the desolate yard. Glancing back, under the cloisters he saw two men walking. One, tall and thick-set
, in a black greatcoat, and behind him a lean, elderly, somewhat clerical man with his head bent, as if listening attentively to the first. The door that Mr. Tyre had indicated as the tap-room was open, and an indistinct gabble, the rattle of dice and chains, coal-smoke, tobacco, and fumes of beer rolled out. Three men were playing dice on the threshold.

  Grainger peered inside, meeting a scene of riot and disorder that he would not have credited at that hour. The tap-room was a great buttressed and vaulted hall. A voluminous fire was alight in the fire-pit, but the chimney barely drew, and gouts of black smoke were driven down and inwards. Shifting in the murk were fettered prisoners and debtors, lounging, circling, or gathering in small knots. Many were lined up before the tap, taking beer handed out in pint-pots by one of Swinge’s men. Others were playing at cards or leaning against the walls and easing the burden of their shackles. Among them were women and a few quick, cautious children.

  A woman passed by him in the press, and he felt a deft hand tug at his watch-chain. He shied away. The woman grinned lopsidedly at him. Her face was powdered but could not conceal the pockmarks on her cheeks.

  “Hullo, dearie. Looking for company?”

  “I thank you, no,” he said, and bowed, and felt ridiculous.

  “Don’t he talk fine?” the woman crowed to a clutch of her sniggering friends.

  Grainger made to turn away. The stone floor was covered by a layer of crushed and filthy straw. He blundered against a bench being used as a card-table, and four sets of cold eyes turned towards him. He made a disjointed apology. Near to the tap, he thought he saw faces he recognised; two men who had been pointed out to him in the Saracen. One seemed to glance at him and then whispered to his grinning companion.

  Grainger made for the door. He had been unutterably foolish, hasty, and ill-advised. He had tainted himself with the chaos and inanity of the prison. He was about to step between the men playing dice that he had passed before, when one of them rose nimbly.

  “Where you going, green hand?” this person demanded. He was a short, scruffy, dirty man with broken teeth.

  “I wish to go outside,” said Grainger. “Do not detain me.”

  “Oh-ho, you are a gent,” exclaimed the man. “Though you ain’t legged, you won’t last long here.”

  “Pray, let me pass,” said Grainger.

  But the man reached out a finger and touched one of Grainger’s coat-buttons. “These are very nice. What are they, silver?”

  “They are no concern of yours,” replied Grainger.

  “I like your silver buttons. I’d like some on my coat. How do you think I could come by some of these, Master Silver-buttons?” asked the man, with a side glance and a foul twist of the mouth.

  “I don’t know,” said Grainger. “Enquire of your tailor. Buy them.”

  “Buy them!” the man repeated. “That’s nice. And me just now losin’ half me stake.”

  “Let me pass,” said Grainger, desperate now to escape.

  The man flicked a filthy finger across one of Grainger’s buttons. “My fee’s a silver button. Fork over.”

  Grainger fumbled in his coat pockets for some coins he still had left. “Damn you, there’s your fee,” he snarled, and cast the coins on the ground where the dice lay.

  Grinning, the man stood back. His two companions were already scrambling and reaching for the coins. Grainger paced away, not daring to expose himself by running, but the mocking voice reached him very clearly:

  “Silver-buttons. Welcome—and fork over!”

  Grainger hurried back to his cell, harrowed by shame and disgust. As he passed along the edge of the yard, he heard a dull, harsh Craw! The shabby old man, Tyre, half concealed in the mist, was crooning to the preening raven, as if in conversation with its oracular soul.

  QUILLBY FOUND Thaddeus Grainger thus, on the morning of his third day in the grip of the Bellstrom: dishevelled, unshaven, in a black mood. Yet Grainger rose eagerly as soon as his friend appeared at his cell door.

  “William, my dear fellow! You bring news from Mr. Fladger?”

  William could not face him but looked closely at the floor. “I have, after a fashion.” His interview with the lawyer at the prison gate was fresh in his thoughts.

  “Excellent fellow. I tell you, something must be done. This place is intolerable.”

  William looked at him again, and his distress was evident in his plain face. “Mr. Fladger declines to act further on your behalf. He has just told me so, Thaddeus. He has avoided me these three days past, but I came across him here at the gate.”

  “Absurd,” replied Grainger. “He is holding out for an increase in his fee.”

  “Truly no, I do not think so.”

  His sudden, hectic energy abandoned Grainger. He dropped onto the chair.

  “It is unthinkable,” he murmured.

  “The general prejudice,” began Quillby, “is strongly against you. And Mr. Fladger hints that considerable personages are proven and determined against you and make your case a hopeless one.”

  “It is Lady Tarwell.” Grainger covered his face in his hands. “She has arrayed all her connections to condemn me.”

  “I fear it is a force even greater than a mother’s grief and vindictiveness,” said Quillby.

  Grainger looked up at his friend. A ghost of his old, careless smile touched his lips, and was then utterly swept away by bleak despair. “It is rather a hard thing, William. I do not believe I can endure here. I was not active in any pursuit but my own amusement, formerly, but the lack of occupation here is stifling. I have only these four walls to consider, and they are suffocating me by degrees. There is no company here. No relief from ghastly thoughts.”

  “Rise up!” urged Quillby. “Rise up against it! We have not yet exhausted every means of relief. Your story is a scandal. It must be put in every ear. We will persist and come to the truth of it. And you must persist also.”

  Grainger rose, crossed to the bed, the cell door, the chair again. “Could it be found out? Could you find out that ill word or will that binds me here?”

  “I do not know,” said William, and then, “but I will try, by every avenue.”

  Grainger put his hand to his mouth. “But I forget—I am under sentence of the court, and it is the court that must release me.”

  For a full minute, both men were silent, pursuing their own thoughts. The one, full of wild chances and strange surmise, the other gloomy and baffled.

  At length, William rose again. “I shall attend to it. My every effort henceforth will be to find the evidence that will bring about your release.”

  “I thank you, William. I truly thank you. You may call at any time.” Grainger indicated, with one hand, the scratched walls. “Rest assured, you will always find me in.”

  PREOCCUPIED WITH thoughts of whispered conspiracies, his own wrongs, and present helplessness, Grainger spent the weary hours stirring for nothing, in the grip of his own dull, circular misgivings and fears. Little is more intolerable than a breathless room and one’s own bad imaginings. Therefore, he was distracted and half-dazed when the gaoler, Swinge, sloped up to his cell door and stood, grinning and leering, in the doorway.

  “What is it?” he demanded, surprised and half afraid of some new intrusion.

  “Vista furya,” the gaoler growled and then stumped away.

  While Grainger was still trying to decode this utterance, Cassie Redruth appeared at his door.

  She stood quite naturally, regarding him openly and without distaste, but he was suddenly acutely conscious of his dishevelled dress, his coarse and unwashed face. He rose immediately.

  “Miss Redruth.”

  “Oh, sir. This is a hard, hard place.” She looked to where Swinge had passed. “That man would not own you were here, or take me to you, until I had given him a farthing.”

  He had thought little of her in the past few days. It is something of the selfishness of the condemned that they regard such connections as eternally severed.

 
“I would that you had not come here.”

  “Should I go away then?”

  “No. No. I am truly gladdened to see you, but this is no place for a young lady.”

  She looked around sharply, and sniffed. “I’ve been around places and folk like this all my life.”

  “Then come,” he said, “let us at least walk outside.”

  He took her by the arm, and they turned out into the dark passageway that ran beneath the wall. It was that hour of the day when the forlorn light of the sky was fading, and yet there were no lights beneath the yard, and so the passage was sunk in old gloom, and only a vague, dispersed haze stole in from the high gaps on one side of the barrel ceiling.

  He hesitated before beginning. “I am grateful for and deeply conscious of your regard. Yet I feel you should not have come here, for all it heartens me. You have risked much for me already, but I am very much changed, and I would not have you further tainted by an association with a convict in this place.”

  “Tainted? I am not so highborn,” she replied, “that I am shamed to be seen here. And, as for my good reputation, he saw to that, that fat ape of a lawyer. He put me in my place. He made me look a fool, and then he took my words and made a liar of me. He would not treat me like that if I was a lady.”

  “It pains me that you suffered on my behalf. And therefore, our further association can only disadvantage us.”

  She regarded him, hollow-eyed, unshaven, weary and haggard, barely able to stand, and already infected with the prisoner’s shuffling gait. She drew herself up and raised her fine brows. “You hold yourself pretty high, still, if you think any care aught of what happens between us!”

  He seemed shaken, and then a gust of true laughter escaped him. “You are right. I play the part of a proud man, with little to be proud of.”

  “You are over hard on yourself.”

  “Therefore, let us be friends and care not for the prating of the world.”

  He took her hand with something of a courtly air, but made no florid bow, and so a plainer, more honest understanding was made between them.