The Thief Taker

by C. S. Quinn

  The baker girl’s gaze dropped to her hand, not understanding. Then she squealed with delight. ‘Charlie! You found it!’

  She held out her fingers to admire a battered tin ring.

  ‘Did I not say I would?’

  She seized his head in her hands and kissed him quickly.

  ‘Thank you Charlie. How did you get it back?’

  ‘Thief-taker’s hunch. I asked a few of the right people.’

  His eyes slid to the basket of hot rolls. ‘Can you spare a few of those?’ he asked.

  The baker girl beamed at him. ‘How many do you want?’

  Chapter Four

  Charlie discovered two things about the mystery girl in quick succession. First that her name was Anna-Maria and second that she was of a decidedly better-fed upbringing than his own. It had been a flash of chivalry to cash in his only credit with the bakery. But as they sat outside she let the gift rest uneaten in her lap. Charlie watched it with hungry annoyance. He’d dispensed with his in two short bites. The rolls were a half-penny a piece, and he pushed down his outrage as she began to turn it absentmindedly in her hands, picking at it and letting the crumbs fall.

  If it wasn’t for the fact that Charlie hadn’t paid for the food, he would have considered snatching it back.

  The second clue to Anna-Maria’s privileged upbringing was her reaction to his name. ‘Charlie Tuesday?’ she had retorted when they’d exchanged names. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

  The kind of people who Charlie associated with were well-versed with Foundling Hospital names, where surnames were allocated to children based on what day of the week they’d been abandoned outside. Not a single acquaintance had ever found his name strange.

  Clearly, he thought, she had never before had reason to associate with those who had fallen so low on the City’s charity as to be orphans.

  ‘We were frightened they would shut up our house,’ she was saying. ‘We hoped Eva had some other illness and not the plague. But you know how strict the rules are if any illness is reported.’

  Parliament had ruled that heavy red crosses be scrawled across the doors of plague houses. As a result fewer Londoners than ever were willing to report an outbreak.

  Charlie nodded. ‘I have moved to a different part of town,’ he said. ‘I had a penny bed in a lodging house on Drury Lane. Now I sleep on the floor of a butcher’s shop for five times the price. The walls are horse-hair and mud, and they take in the summer heat so it is stifling. But it is better than risk being shut-up in a plague district.’

  ‘That was wise.’ Anna-Maria for once seemed approving. ‘Father did not send for a plague doctor,’ she added. ‘We are a country family by origin, and though some might think us backward, we do not like the tricks of City physicians. Their leeches and toads and such seem strange to us. And besides, in their plague dress they look like monsters and we thought they would fright the younger children.’

  Charlie summoned the image of a plague doctor to mind. In their dark capes, ghoulish masks and crystal eye-glasses they frightened adults as well as children. The long metal beaks were stuffed with camphor and vinegar to protect the wearer from the foul air, lending the doctors an acrid stench. And their treatments almost always involved blood-letting and lancing of plague buboils. Certainly he crossed over the road if he saw one.

  Anna-Maria fiddled with the last few crumbs of bread roll in her hand.

  ‘But my sister asked for a plague doctor when she took to her bed. So there was nothing to do but let him inside, and in truth I was relieved that we may know whether she had the plague or no.’

  She paused to take a great shuddering breath. ‘When we found her . . .’ A dead tone crept into her voice. ‘She was murdered, that is all. Most dreadfully.’

  Charlie nodded in what he hoped was a respectful fashion, but he was wondering how he could best escape. Not only had he no intention of helping solve a mystery which was so vastly out of his usual jurisdiction, but the girl had self-confessedly had contact with a plague carrier. Following her to the jaws of death was not how he planned on spending the rest of his afternoon.

  ‘I will pay you handsomely,’ she said suddenly, sensing his desire to leave.

  Charlie coughed in an embarrassed kind of way. ‘It is not the cost of engagement which prevents me,’ he explained in what he hoped was a gentle voice. ‘This is not a crime I can help you with. I catch thieves Maria.’

  ‘Anna-Maria.’

  He ignored the correction. ‘I do not find out those who have made murders. That is for the coroner and the magistrate. My talent is in tracking property. With no stolen item to trace my skills are limited.’

  ‘I hear you are the best,’ challenged Anna-Maria. ‘Surely a murder is not so different from a theft?’

  Charlie opened his hands in explanation. ‘It is very different,’ he said, wondering how best to explain the complex network of fencing and favours which comprised thief taking.

  ‘And they say that you often let the thieves escape the gallows, once property is returned,’ added Maria. ‘So I know you have a soft heart.’

  Her hand closed around her purse.

  ‘I will pay you three guineas,’ she added evenly.

  Charlie was a better bargainer than to let the involuntary gasp slip out. But she had just offered to pay his rent for three months. The sum was considerably more than he had been paid even by his most noble of clients.

  The impulse to accept sprung up, and he drove it back down with some effort.

  ‘It would not be right or fair,’ he said, realising he had probably brought this temptation on himself by admitting his recent rent increase was troubling him.

  ‘Four guineas.’

  ‘I . . . It is not the money. I do not find murderers where there is no property taken.’ He folded out his hands helplessly.

  ‘I will pay you a guinea just to come to the house and see the situation there,’ said Anna-Maria. ‘It is a fair price to risk your life in a plague place. I know that well enough. If you decide you can help I will pay you three more.’

  Charlie swallowed. He had experienced similar feelings only a few times in his life, but always with the same inexorable conclusion. Something inside him was going to accept her offer, and when it did a knowing voice told him he would be drawn into a whole hornet’s nest of trouble. It was like watching a ship slowly ground itself without having the slightest power to turn its course.

  ‘Very well,’ he heard himself say. ‘Take me to the house then. But likely as not I will not be able to find this murderer for you.’

  Anna-Maria nodded, but she didn’t smile.

  ‘And I am given permission to call you Maria,’ he said, thinking he had nothing to lose. She waved her hand in dismissive acceptance, as if disgusted but too well bred to show it. Charlie had already decided he would take only one guinea from her and leave the residence as soon as possible. Her father must be well off, he thought suddenly, to have a whole house.

  Families he knew considered themselves lucky to have a single room. But that was the way it was in London. Land was expensive and life was cheap.

  Chapter Five

  Charlie had thought that Maria would want to purchase some kind of protection against the plague before returning to her house. But a lethargy descended on her once they’d made an agreement. As though she’d held her grief at bay only long enough to secure his services and now despondency had swept back in.

  She must have loved her sister, he thought, feeling a flash of pain at the thought of his own brother. They had been orphaned together but were not close. Charlie always felt his elder sibling Rowan resented his mysterious key.

  Charlie managed to buy a little bunch of lavender from a street vendor to hold in front of his nose, though he would rather a vial of vinegar to sip on. His stomach had begun to twist in on itself at the idea of what he was doing, and he sent up yet another silent prayer that he might escape with his guinea and his life.

  ‘What ma
de you become a thief taker?’ asked Maria, as they passed the squawking mayhem of Cockspur Street. Under King Charles cock-fighting was no longer banned and Londoners had returned to the sport in earnest.

  ‘Mother Mitchell,’ said Charlie unthinkingly, distracted by the sparring cockerels.

  ‘I helped one of her girls retrieve a locket and she saw some profit in me,’ he added, seeing Maria’s confusion. ‘Said she would put aristocratic clients my way for a cut. That was how I begun making money from finding out thieves.’

  Maria sniffed disapprovingly.

  ‘I did not find Mother Mitchell out for her girls,’ said Charlie quickly. ‘Indeed I should not have the coin even if I wished it. Her house is now so expensive the suitors need credit to take a glass of wine there.’

  ‘Then how did you meet a woman of that kind?’

  ‘I met her many years ago,’ explained Charlie. ‘When I was but a little foundling. She began to employ me in servant’s work for a few pennies and then took me as an apprentice when I came of age.’

  ‘Sure but the nuns who care for London’s orphans are not so mindful with their charges,’ said Maria, ‘if they cannot protect them from the company of notorious harlots.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘They are careful enough. The nuns make visits to London’s less fortunate women. To try and save them from syphilis or hard labour at Bridewell prison. Some of the boys wanted to see what a fallen woman looked like. We followed a nun on her missions. Hid and watched. That is when I first saw Mother Mitchell.’

  Charlie smiled at the memory. Mother Mitchell had been the most terrifying and wonderful thing he had ever seen. A great gaudy butterfly spread imperiously across her doorstep. She’d not been so stout back then, but already lines had settled around her eyes and mouth. The enormous bosom jutted from beneath swathes of purple silk.

  What business have you? she’d asked the nun. To tell my girls they should work to death in some hard employment, rather than join me and prosper?

  ‘And then what happened?’ asked Maria. ‘She invited you in?’

  ‘No, she caught hold of me. The other boys ran away. Then my shirt rode up and she saw some stolen ship’s biscuits hidden in my waist band.’

  ‘Ship biscuits? Surely you did not mean to eat them?’ asked Maria, revealing once again her comfortable upbringing. Naval rations were inedible to well-fed landlubbers, but to hungry sailors and starving orphans they were as good a food as any.

  ‘When Pudding Lane ovens are at their hottest the bakers do not guard their baking, and the windows are small enough for a child for slip through,’ answered Charlie. ‘My hand was well-blistered for it, but those half-cooked biscuits likely kept me from starving. Foundling soup is thin,’ he added.

  ‘So what then? This harlot would have reported you for stealing?’

  Charlie shook his head. When she had seen the biscuits Mother Mitchell’s hold had lessened slightly.

  Oh ho! she’d said. So the little foundling has learned to survive in the big City.

  She had looked at him with something like admiration as he writhed and struggled to get free from her grip.

  Where is your tongue boy? I am not about to hand you to the constable. Why do you not eat the biscuits straightaway? The crown stamped on them shows your crime. It is foolish to carry them around.

  He had told her he saved biscuits for his older brother and Mother Mitchell cocked her head, amused. She had asked why the elder could not feed himself and Charlie’s youthful innocence had unwittingly returned the only honest answer.

  ‘He has given up.’

  Mother Mitchell’s face gave the smallest flicker of emotion which had confused the younger Charlie. It had not occurred to him that there was anything untoward in the dynamic between him and his sibling. If he did not supply food Rowan would starve. It was how life was and that was that.

  ‘So what did she want you for?’ asked Maria, interrupting his thoughts.

  ‘She said she had work for a bright boy.’

  ‘And you went?’

  ‘She offered me money.’

  Mother Mitchell had looked thoughtful for a moment before producing a shining penny. It was more money than Charlie had known how to spend. Come inside then boy. I do not wait on ceremony for foundlings.

  ‘What did she wish you to do?’

  ‘She wanted to start up a fine sort of house. Where the high-born of men would come. But it was hard for her to get servants. This was during Cromwell’s Republic and Puritan feelings ran high. Women risked being publicly whipped for being seen with her. She employed me to plant out cuttings for trees, such as grew outside the wealthiest houses.’

  Look at this sapling, Mother Mitchell had said, handing him the slim branch. You cut off all its roots and still it will find a way to grow. That is not so different from us now, is it boy?

  They stopped suddenly. A set of new guards had been posted on Shaftesbury Circus. Plague security was certainly stepping up, thought Charlie.

  His fingers traced the forged certificates inside his coat, searching for the one with his name on it.

  Maria stuck her certificate out close to the guard’s face, as if daring him to find fault with it.

  Charlie slipped out his own certificate and presented it with practised nonchalance, rubbing the back of his neck and looking down at the ground. His eyes slid to Maria’s papers, noting the practised neatness of her signature. By the number at the top, she’d been one of the first in London to get one.

  ‘Why is there a new checkpoint here?’ Maria demanded, as the guard studied their certificates. ‘Isn’t it enough we must queue to go along the Strand and into Westminster?’

  The guard eyed her, as if deciding if she might be a trouble-maker. Charlie silently prayed that Maria’s accusation would not submit his forgery to greater scrutiny.

  ‘The rich folk on Warwick Lane have banded together,’ said the guard eventually. ‘They want to be sure no plague travels heir way.’

  ‘The fools should realise that plague travels everywhere,’ fumed Maria. ‘Inconveniencing innocent citizens will not halt it.’

  The guard shrugged.

  ‘It is the rich who make the laws,’ he replied. ‘There is to be another check on Cornhill by the end of tomorrow.’

  Charlie mentally added the new checkpoint to his map of London. The city was closing up. Soon there would be few places it was possible to travel without a certificate.

  The guard took in the official stamps of both certificates and waved them through.

  ‘This way,’ Charlie steered Maria away from Holbourne, pleased to have passed the guard.

  ‘That way is longer,’ protested Maria.

  ‘There are some gaming houses near Fleet Street I should rather avoid,’ admitted Charlie.

  ‘You owe money?’ Maria’s mouth drew in tightly.

  ‘No,’ said Charlie, pulling her into a tight warren of alleyways, ‘but some do not like my luck at cards.’

  ‘How do you get your customers?’ asked Maria, as Charlie wove them through the labyrinthine back streets. ‘Surely commoners cannot afford a thief taker.’ She was looking at his bare feet.

  Charlie ignored the slight. ‘During Cromwell’s reign I ran secret masked balls for the aristocracy in Covent Garden,’ he said. ‘They were very popular and I made good money for a time. All else around was grey and Puritan. I made good enough noble acquaintances to be trusted as a thief taker.’

  He felt a sudden pang of sadness, remembering how his wife had loved the masked balls.

  ‘Here,’ said Maria, turning a sudden corner. ‘The house is just ahead.’

  Charlie was relieved to see it looked to be a good sort of street, with none of the ominous red crosses which peppered the east of the city.

  Then he saw the slogan, written up in chalk.

  ‘REPENT,’ read the letters. ‘THE END IS NIGH.’

  Chapter Six

  Maria’s house had leaded diamonds of real glass for windows.
It was made in the half-timbered style, with an overhanging to counterweight the second storey floorboards and prevent them from bouncing underfoot. Bonfire smoke and mud stained the once-white walls, but besides these unavoidable scars of city living it was a clean residence.

  Charlie eyed the exterior. Usually his thief taker clients numbered the common sort, who lived in backrooms and squats. Or aristocrats, who met with him in the nicer sort of ale-houses and taverns. The idea of entering a domestic home was a novelty.

  He had often tried to imagine what it was like inside walls built for no other purpose than living in.

  There was no red cross to show it was a plague house. And Charlie felt a stirring of unease. Something about the situation didn’t add up.

  ‘Why is there no plague cross?’ he asked.

  ‘Good fortune,’ said Maria. ‘We were sure they would find us out and shut us up in the house. But the constable never did.’

  She used her hip to give the wooden door an extra shove.

  ‘We have been burning hops and brimstone to fumigate the house, and the heat warped the wood,’ she added, nodding to the door.

  Charlie felt his lungs spasm in a quick succession of sneezes as they entered. The smoke seemed to have got into the very walls and the air smelt of dry bonfire.

  A kitchen made up almost all of the downstairs storey with hanging fabric dividing a further portion which Charlie guessed to be a small larder. Probably the house did not extend to a garden and so they bought their meat and vegetables from stalls and used the Thames as a washroom and toilet.

  There was no body here, and they stood for a moment.

  ‘The scene is upstairs,’ supplied Maria.

  Charlie had a sudden feeling of the entire second storey bearing down on them both. With difficulty, he stopped himself from staring towards the ladder which led to the upper rooms.

  Instead he let his gaze sweep around the room in which they stood. A large cauldron hung from the hearth, shining in a manner which suggested it was proudly cared for, with vegetable and pudding nets hung above it. The kind of rooms Charlie rented wouldn’t have housed a cauldron even if he could have afforded one, and he mostly lived on bread and cheese when money was tight and pies and baked potatoes from street-stalls when he had the means.