Eleanor was now inches from Millicent’s nose. Millicent pushed her roughly, then stepped in, ready to strike. Agnes sprang up. She wedged herself between them, a hand on each chest.
‘Shut it, you trulls,’ said Agnes. ‘You want the ward-watch on us?’ She gestured to the window. London parishes were small, everyone knew everyone’s business, and it would not do to have theirs known by their temporary neighbours. ‘If we’re not together on this all shall be lost.’
Eleanor turned away, her eyes screwed shut. Millicent’s loud breaths slowed.
‘Now,’ said Agnes, ‘let’s talk it out. Mill, clamp it for a half-bell and let Eleanor speak her thing. It’s the least the girl deserves after what we put her through.’
Millicent shrugged.
‘Eleanor, say what you want to say,’ said Agnes.
Eleanor calmed herself and spoke. ‘There are men we can trust in the city, at the Guildhall. The common serjeant, say. He’s helping Gerald, and I don’t doubt he’d help us with this matter of the book.’ She thought of Ralph Strode, wondering if he had learned of Tewburn’s death. ‘We can take it to him. Lay out the whole matter as it’s pulled us in.’
‘Turn ourselves in, then?’ said Millicent incredulously. ‘Hand the book over, and our bodies with it?’
Millicent’s rebuttal began another round of argument that stilled with a sudden noise from the alley.
‘Jonah’s cock it be a hellish walk, and me joints faring poorly.’
A familiar voice, the suck of shoes in mud. The three of them froze, then scrambled about for weapons.
‘Bear up, Joannie, bear up,’ another voice replied. Equally familiar; more reassuring.
Eleanor walked to the door and opened it a crack. Bess Waller, and behind her trudged Joan Rugg, panting heavily, her great dress half-soaked with her exertion. She stopped when she saw Millicent.
‘Ah Lord, Bess, you didn’t’ – she paused to catch her breath, pushing her hands against her lower back – ‘didn’t tell me to expect her ladyship’d be about.’ Once inside she looked around in the candlelight, then chose a stool against the inner wall. ‘What finds a grand lady like Millicent Fonteyn dallying with two common women, albeit one her sister?’
‘No whore be commoner than yourself, Joan Rugg,’ said Millicent.
‘Won’t give you a sed contra to that, my dear.’ Here she looked at Bess. ‘I’d suppose between the two of us we’ve sold half the queynt of London over the years, hey, Bessie?’ She shifted her bulk on the stool, allowing a slow fart to escape her mounded form.
Eleanor wrinkled her nose.
‘There’s no body fouler than your own, Joan Rugg,’ said Bess.
‘Nor no mouth shaped so like a privy,’ Eleanor murmured.
Joan showed her suburban rival a charming smile and farted again. ‘A verse for you, my dear:
We swyve with pride in Londontown,
Those Sou’ark men be thine;
For city pricks be long and thick
Yet Sou’ark’s thin as twine.
My invention, I’ll have you know,’ she said with considerable pride. ‘There be other lines too, if you fancy a hearing on ’em. Now,’ she said, turning to her basket, ‘how about some supper?’
As Joan Rugg dug out a quantity of bread, cheese, and dried meats, she told the others of the dark events on Gropecunt Lane over the last week. Eleanor listened carefully, as Joan’s story explained a lot. A raid, Joan said, the street broken up, every one of her girls hauled in for questioning – though not by the constables or the beadle’s men.
‘It weren’t king’s or mayor’s men, I’ll be bound,’ Joan said, lipping a stale crust. ‘Maybe Lancaster’s, maybe Oxford’s, or Warwick’s for all I know. Four men I never seen before. They hauled us up to Cripplegate jail, cleared out a room for themselves to assay us one by one. Wore no badges, nor said a word about their affinity or allegiance. Kept us for three days they did, all packed in a cell like a barrel of Bristol herring.’
Eleanor recalled the broken lanterns on Gropecunt Lane, the unraked piles of dung.
‘Then, the very day we’re back at swyving,’ Joan continued, ‘the constables find a body down Pancras. A clerk of the Guildhall, murdered like that poor thing in the Moorfields.’ She looked at Eleanor, her voice lowering. ‘That’s when I knew, girls. When I seen the coroner down in the churchyard, a crowd of the beadle’s men around him – and then the alderman himself shows up.’
‘Maryns?’ Eleanor asked in surprise.
‘Grocer and alderman, the very one,’ Joan said with a sage nod. ‘Now what, I asks myself, has the alderman of Cheap Ward got to do with it all? Where did my Agnes get herself to, and what about that Eleanor Rykener? And who killed that girl, and that Guildhall clerk? A chain of strange happenings, Joan Rugg. Must be more to the matter than it appears.’ She raised her chin, proud of her deductive skills. ‘That’s when I decided it might be well on time to pay a visit to Dame Bess Waller here. Figure we queen bees need to consort when numbers of us start disappearing and folks start getting themselves killed. Parliament of whores is what we need. So I step across the river, find me in Rose Alley for the first time in, oh, must be ten year. And there she is, the cheeky little virgin: Bess Waller, in the incarnate flesh of her, and St Cath as well, fresh as the dew on the fleece!’ It was at the Pricking Bishop that Joan learned the same company of dark-cloaked men had also paid a midnight visit to the Southwark stews.
‘But the Guildhall usually keeps its hands off your lot,’ Bess observed. ‘So the question is, what’s that clerk’s killing got to do with all this trouble for us? What’s the damned connection?’
Eleanor took a deep breath. ‘I am.’
They all turned to her. She told them about her first visit to the Guildhall, how Strode had put her with Tewburn, who promised to get Gerald moved back to London. Then, during his subsequent visits, the intransigence of the Southwark authorities, and Tewburn’s troubles with the butchers. ‘Tewburn was set to meet with the Guildable justices the very day he was killed. And Gerald thinks Grimes and his boys are up to something. They want the Rising to start again, and this time to kill the king. You should hear the way Gerald went on about it. Butchers, biding by a bishop’s bank, then springing out with their knives.’
Millicent’s head whipped around, her eyes wide. She looked about to speak when Joan intervened.
‘That explains the little lurker on Gropecunt Lane, then,’ she said.
‘What lurker?’ asked Maud.
‘This one’s brother,’ said Joan, nodding at Eleanor. ‘Didn’t recognize him at first. He shows up that first day back, mean as you could like. Asks about for Edgar the swerver. ‘The swerver’ he calls our Eleanor, and his own brother! I told him she hasn’t been about, he’ll have to come back he wants some of that weird queynt. Guess that wasn’t what he was after, though by the—’
‘Hold it!’ said Millicent, springing up and coming to Eleanor’s side. ‘What did Gerald say?’
‘Said that Grimes and his boys—’
‘Not that. The part about the bishop’s bank.’
‘Just what I said,’ said Eleanor, taken aback by Millicent’s intensity. ‘Buncha butchers, biding by a bishop’s bank, springing forth with knives.’
Millicent looked sharply at Agnes. ‘That’s it, then.’
‘Sounds like,’ Agnes agreed.
‘What are you on about now?’ Bess demanded.
Millicent went to the low shelf by the door where she had placed the manuscript. Tearing off the cloth, she paged quickly to the final folio and read.
‘By bank of a bishop shall butchers abide,
To nest, by God’s name, with knives in hand,
Then springen in service at spiritus sung.’
She looked at Eleanor, whose eyes widened with the realization.
Agnes said, ‘Seems what your brother’s on about is bigger than a lot of talk, Ellie. What do you want to do?’
Eleanor looked at Joa
n Rugg. ‘Did Gerald say where to find him?’
She gave a broad shrug. ‘In the Shambles, he tells me. Didn’t think much of it at the time. Why would one of my mauds go looking for a little jake like that in the Shambles, of all places? But he says you’ll know where to find him if you want him. He’ll be there on Saturday morning. Says he can get off of Cutter Lane and over the bridge for a while. Says you’ll know the spot.’
She did, and Saturday was the day after tomorrow – though would it be safe? She moved again to the doorway, the fear biting at her. She peered out at the gathering night. ‘There’s no safe place now, not for any of us been privy to the matter. And I keep seeing Tewburn’s eyes pecked out, and that man on Gropecunt Lane.’
‘What man’s that?’ Joan asked.
‘The man she saw near St Pancras, the night she found Tewburn,’ said Millicent.
‘A hook-shaped scar on his chin,’ said Eleanor, repeating the description she’d given the others. ‘Name is Sir Stephen.’ Millicent had sworn she’d seen such a chin before, though she couldn’t place the man, or so she had claimed.
‘Best to lay low,’ said Bess Waller, ‘give it another week or two, and this whole thing’s like to pass by. Forget about the book. Look to yourselves.’
It was Agnes who saw the great moral flaw in their talk. ‘Wait, now,’ she said. Eleanor watched the beautiful girl as she stepped to the middle of the room, her face aglow with her sincerity. ‘We’re all thinking about profit, about coin, about Lady Meed and what she’ll do for us if we sell the book to the right man,’ said Agnes. ‘Thinking on our own lives, as if our bodies be the only bodies worth keeping from the grave. Yet here we sit with a book and a cloth speaking the murder of our very king two weeks hence, and what are we not thinking about?’
Eleanor nodded slowly, ashamed of herself but with a surge of love and admiration for her friend. ‘About King Richard.’
‘And our having the means in hand to save him!’ said Agnes.
Millicent snorted. ‘It’s not our lot to save his neck. This whole matter is far above our heads, and has been from the beginning. With the book we can buy our lives back, and wealth for ourselves. That should be our aim, and no other. Let someone else look to the king’s sorry life.’
‘That’s not right, Mil,’ said Agnes, shaking her beautiful head. ‘Just not right.’
‘You’d throw away our one chance at new fortune?’ Millicent demanded. ‘To what purpose, Agnes?’
Agnes tossed her head, her loose hair a noble bonnet of gold. ‘To save our king.’
Joan Rugg threw back her head, cackling incautiously. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ The bawd smoothed her dress over her generous thighs, her chins aglow in the lamplight: a bullfrog’s throat on a moonlit pond. ‘The very King of England, by the cross, and his life in the hands of five whores!’
THIRTY-FOUR
Ditch Street, near Aldgate
Lifting the blanket as gently as she could, Millicent moved to the edge of the bed and set her feet on the floor. Agnes stirred beside her; Eleanor lay motionless against the wall. Millicent reached for her shoes. The book rested in its nook, hidden by a dirty cloth. She’d oiled the garnets the night before, telling the others she was doing it for their protection: if the watch were about and they needed to flee, better to have the advantage of silence. Before cock-crow, she stole out of the small tenement.
She moved through the city in the pre-dawn darkness, her destination the landmark described on the note she’d sent to Thomas Pinchbeak yesterday. With a stub of coal, Millicent had scribbled the note on to one of the book’s blank flyleaves, sliced from the manuscript with a dull knife and folded into a small square, a stableboy on Leadenhall and a farthing enough to get the note to Pinchbeak, who, she felt sure, would show himself at the appointed time and place – or, more likely, send one of his minions.
Reaching the cross above the Puddle-wharf, she peered down upper Thames Street into the rising dawn. A narrow slice of river glistened in a thin, red line. A heavy breeze from the waterfront pushed her skirts hard against her legs. The bells of St Andrew-by-Wardrobe rang Prime. Few Londoners moved along the broad, unpaved expanse wending down to the water.
She heard a shuffled foot on the pavers, then the roll of a kicked pebble, ticking against the base of the cross. At last, she thought. She took a last turn around the cross and lifted her head with a ready smile.
Eleanor Rykener, her arms folded on her narrow chest, wide eyes flashing in the dawn. ‘What’s this, then?’
‘I’ll have none of your suspicion, Eleanor Rykener,’ Millicent shot back. ‘Look at yourself, why don’t you? Taken to following me, tracing my every step.’
‘Only when your steps lead the rest of us under the wagon,’ Eleanor retorted. She looked her up and down. ‘Where is it?’
‘Where is what?’ Millicent said, not meeting her eyes.
‘The book, you cold slut.’ Eleanor took a step toward her. ‘Where is it? Brought it here to sell, did you?’
‘And if I did?’ said Millicent defiantly.
‘Then we’ll have it back, sure,’ said Eleanor. Another step. ‘And now.’
From around the corner of St Andrew’s came a loud flock of sheep, bound for the Friday markets at Smithfield. A river of wool flowed around them as a boy slapped at flanks, his dog skirting the flow in a wide semicircle, nipping with the confidence of an earl. ‘Cumbiday, cumbiday,’ the boy called to a few lingerers. In the wake of the sheep walked a man Millicent recognized immediately.
‘Watch, now,’ she warned Eleanor. The man followed the sheep to the top of St Andrew’s Hill, making directly for the cross.
He was no less than a barn’s width from the cross when Millicent remembered who he was. Not Pinchbeak but the rude young man from the porch of St Paul’s: that gutter spitter who’d tried to bar her entry from the parvis. He stopped ten feet in front of them, hands at his sides, and gave a mocking bow as the last of the flock passed by. ‘Fair ladies,’ he said, his contempt undisguised.
‘Your name,’ said Millicent. ‘Say it.’ He had come alone, it appeared.
‘Robert Dawson,’ the man said with a pompous air. ‘Steward to Master Thomas Pinchbeak, serjeant-at-law in the service of King Richard. You have the book?’
‘You have the coin?’ Millicent shot back.
Dawson reached into a pocket and withdrew a small sack. He jangled it before her, the coins within mixing dully. He tossed it on the pavers between them. ‘Direct from Master Pinchbeak himself. Forty marks, all in gold nobles and halfs.’
Forty marks. Not a fortune, but easily enough to lease a house in Cornhull or anywhere else for a long while, keep them all in food and clothing, purchase their way into a craft of some kind – as seamstresses, embroideresses, or what have you – and take on their own apprentices. Enough to buy a new life.
Millicent felt her shoulders relax for the first time in months. Such a sum was unimaginable for a book, no matter its content. There must be great and wide belief in these prophecies, she reasoned, or a man like Thomas Pinchbeak would never offer such an exorbitant price. ‘What do you think?’ she said, turning to her still-hostile companion. ‘Forty marks – a suitable sum for our effort, and our prize?’
Eleanor glared at her. ‘Though if forty, why not a hundred?’
‘A good question,’ said Millicent, turning on Dawson, feeling giddy. ‘Why not a hundred marks, Robert Dawson?’
‘Forty marks, says the serjeant, nor a penny more, my lovely ladies.’ He leered at them in a manner that stretched his face to look like one of those stone monsters on St Paul’s.
‘Very well.’ Millicent reached into a side pocket and pulled out the book. The embroidered covering was smooth in her hand, and as she palmed it she realized neither she nor Dawson had mentioned it as part of the exchange. As casually as she could she untied the thong and stuffed the cloth back into her pocket. She took a step toward the man and held out the manuscript.
Daws
on flipped through the book, then slipped it into a pouch at his side. He said nothing about the cloth. Dawson looked at Millicent for a moment, his eyes narrowing in amusement. With a nod, he turned from them and made his way past the cross and up Thames Street, soon disappearing along the ward’s dim byway.
‘Well, pillory me,’ said Eleanor, shaking her head as she looked after him. She turned to Millicent with a look of bewilderment. ‘Forty marks.’
‘Forty marks,’ Millicent repeated, squatting for the parse. With the coin in hand, she allowed herself to feel some affection for her sister’s wily companion, and of regret for endangering her life. For Eleanor had come through her own hell: forced out of her livelihood, pursued through the streets of London half-starving, she’d stolen a book from a brothel and found a corpse in a churchyard – and yet here she was, still standing, about to receive a small fortune. Feeling generous, Millicent shook the purse. ‘And a third yours, Eleanor Rykener. Thirteen marks and change? That’s a lot of cock, if memory serves.’
Eleanor smiled grudgingly, and together they walked back toward the precincts of Aldgate. ‘You were right all along, I suppose,’ said Eleanor. ‘What do we do with all that coin, now we got it?’
‘We’ll buy us some finery, purchase our way out of this pottage,’ said Millicent. ‘I’ll teach you and Agnes to speak like ladies instead of mauds, find you a squire to share between you. Agnes will have him on even days, you on odds, and you’ll hump him together at the Nativity, Easter, and All Saints. How’s that?’
They stepped up Fenchurch toward the walls, neither of them giving mind to the moral charge Agnes had placed on them. To save our king. Yet in the presence of all that gold, now clutched in Millicent’s hands and filling their minds with heady visions of new lives, it was all too easy to forget the dark prophecies whose writing and sale had put the heavy purse in their possession. Millicent listened with a new contentment as Eleanor spoke of a future that now seemed miraculously possible. ‘Maybe I’ll become a chandler, and Gerald’ll cut me out the fat – sheep fat, cow fat, pig fat, goose fat, goat fat – and our candles’ll be purchased up and down Cheap and Cornhull, maybe even Calais, why not, and by priors and canons and merchant taylors and all of them.’
A Burnable Book Page 24
