Cup of Blood: A Medieval Noir: A Crispin Guest Medieval Noir Prequel

by Jeri Westerson

  Jack cleared his throat and Crispin looked up.

  “Pardon, sir,” said Jack, crumpling the hem of his tunic in dirty fingers. “But what is that?” He pointed to the paper in Crispin’s hand.

  “This is a cross of the Knights Templar.”

  “I see. And what, sir, is a Knight Templar?”

  “What’s the matter with you, boy? Born under a rock? Has not all the world heard of the Knights Templar?”

  “Maybe all the world, Master Crispin…but not me.”

  Crispin looked at him before chuckling. “Well, Master Tucker. Perhaps you are too young. Come here. Sit down.” He offered him the stool. Jack moved closer and gingerly took the stool, drawing it into the light. He slid atop it smoothly. His legs dangled. Crispin leaned on the table toward Jack and Jack leaned forward to match him. “They were an order of warrior monks who guarded travelers in the Holy Land. But then they took to warfare. They chiefly fought in the Holy Land during the Crusades. You have heard of the Crusades, have you not?”

  “Oh aye,” he said with a casual sweep of his hand. “So them monks went off fighting, did they?” He took a swing at the air. “I like a good melee m’self.”

  “Yes. Well. These Templars were more knight than monk, so it is said. And they were supposed to have a cache of treasure hidden somewhere in France. But that is long past. The order was suppressed by the pope seventy years ago.”

  Jack pointed to the paper on the table. “Then what’s that for?”

  “The dead man in the tavern was a Knight Templar.”

  “God blind me! I thought you just said they was no more.”

  “So they were. Or so it was thought. And now this.”

  “Oh!” Jack shot to his feet. “Them men what grabbed you! They’re them Templars!”

  “I was just thinking that. And yet how can that be? And why torture me? Why this missive?”

  Jack slowly sat again. “It seems plain enough to me, sir,” said Jack. He dropped his voice to a soft whisper. “They don’t want you poking around no murders. If I was you, I’d take that counsel.”

  “Then it is a very good thing I am not you.” Crispin rose, tied the laces of his chemise, and gingerly buttoned up his cotehardie. Retrieving his belt from a peg, he buckled it around his waist and pressed his hand to the dagger hilt. He headed for the door when Jack scrambled from his seat and yanked on Crispin’s sleeve. He looked down at Jack’s hand clenched about his wrist.

  “Master! Are you well enough to go out? Them men. They’re still out there. And besides, you didn’t know the dead man. What’s this man’s murder to you?”

  “If you think I’m going to allow these scoundrels to put me to torture without penalty, you are mistaken.” He eyed Jack’s hand on him and Jack quickly released his grip.

  “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I will stay here.”

  Crispin opened his mouth to tell the boy to be off when he thought better of it. Those men were still out there. They probably were none too happy with Jack either. Might it be safer for the boy if he stayed locked inside?

  “If stay you will—and only temporarily, mind—then it is best you lock yourself within.” He grabbed the door handle but Jack leaned against the door.

  He dropped his gaze and fidgeted with his tunic hem. “So you’re this Tracker they talk about, eh? Isn’t it the sheriff’s job to catch thieves and murderers?”

  “And you’ve seen for yourself the fine job the sheriff’s done of it.”

  Jack flicked a grin. “The king appointed him. He’s just an armorer, after all. But you. It isn’t worth getting y’self killed now, is it?”

  “What do you care? What is your investment? I told you I cannot pay you. I do not need a servant.”

  Jack’s eyes took in the room, the hearth, the table. “It’s shelter, isn’t it? And food.”

  “And it’s dangerous. You saw what those men did to me. You could be next.”

  Jack crossed his arms tightly over his chest and tucked his chin down. “I’ve seen danger before. Never you fear.”

  Jack’s face might have been comical in its sincerity if it had not pressed a nerve somewhere in Crispin’s heart. At thirty, he still had no sons…well, none that he was aware of. He fostered no children, mentored no squires or pages. Looking at Jack, then looking at the empty room caused a hard knot to tighten in the center of his belly. “There’s truly no place for you here, you know. For anyone.” He raised his arms in a gesture of futility and dropped them to his sides. “No matter what tales you have heard, you do not know my situation. You do not know me!” He rubbed his head but it only roused an ache on the bruised lump.

  “You were kind…and fair to me, sir. That is all I know. That is all I care about. Isn’t that enough?”

  His gaze tracked over the boy’s hopeful expression. He grabbed his cloak. “I do not need a servant.” He pushed Jack away from the door, and left through it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Crispin retraced his steps of that morning and stole back to the alley where they had abducted him. Like a hunting dog, he followed the trail along the edges of the buildings, searching for anything that might yield him clues. But there was nothing.

  He stood at the mouth of the dank alley and listened to dripping water and creaking eaves. His gaze glided over the dew-slick rooftops, and he pulled his cloak over his sore chest before striding toward the storeroom where he was imprisoned. Its mews emptied onto a dark and colorless alley. The shutters that first blocked the daylight from the windows now hung wide from the efforts of his rescuers.

  When he crossed the threshold and stood in the center of the room, coldness numbed the pit of his belly. With a scowl he surveyed the broken chair, discarded ropes, and spattered droplets of blood. His blood. A candle stub sat on an upright firkin, but there was nothing else.

  Crispin looked at the remains of the ropes and shivered. Though the room was empty, he could not help but feel the evil that once inhabited it, charring its plaster and stone walls with unseen malevolence.

  He left the room with relief and sought out the owner of the building, a man who owned a number of similar mews along the same lane. He told Crispin that these particular stores were unoccupied for the last six months and that he was unaware of anyone using them. He promised with all solemnity to board them up.

  Crispin made his way to the Boar’s Tusk and sat in his usual place close to the fire with his back to the wall, the best place to observe anyone entering or leaving.

  At that early hour few patrons occupied the benches and stools under a familiar haze of candle and hearth smoke. He glanced at the table where he had found the dead man. The place was conspicuously unoccupied. Word traveled fast on Gutter Lane.

  Crispin settled on the bench and drank. His elbow sat in something wet but he didn’t care to move it. A shadow paused over the table and when he looked up he saw Gilbert’s wife, Eleanor, above him. She brushed off the table with a rag before glancing at the jug of wine. “Crispin,” she said softly. Her friendly but careworn face, lined at her brown eyes, seldom wore a sour expression, though her clientele often gave her cause. Her hair was a dull blonde or possibly gray, but Crispin rarely saw it, for she kept it tucked under a white linen headdress.

  “What is it, Nell?” He waited for her usual rebuke; ordering the more expensive wine instead of ale. Wine reminded him of better days and he felt it was the one luxury he could not afford to do without.

  “There’s a sadness about you today, Crispin,” she said instead. She sat opposite him and slid the wine jug aside. “Usually you’re just cross. But today, it’s sadness.”

  Sadness? Nothing particularly saddened him today. There was the usual poverty, but that made him more angry than sad. So, too, his treatment at the hands of those mysterious men. He rubbed his chest, thinking of it. Yet, in a small way, Jack Tucker made him sad, he supposed. Here was a boy who had nothing. Far less than Crispin, no prospects, no shelter, no hope. Yet he was as cheerful a soul as
he had ever met. What made him so damned happy?

  Crispin shrugged. “Maybe so.”

  “Care to say?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, pouring more wine into his clay bowl, “when a body feels sad and he tells his troubles, he feels better. It’s like confession. It’s cleansing.”

  “And sometimes a body likes to be left alone.”

  She smiled, wrinkling the bridge of her nose. “Well now. If I thought that for a moment, I’d leave you be.” She set aside the wine jug and laid both arms on the table, leaning toward him. “Have some wine. It seems to be from a better cask today. Those who drink it are in a merry mood.”

  After a moment he sighed and reached for the bowl.

  “It must be a woman,” she said, ticking her head.

  Crispin swallowed the harsh wine and grimaced. If this was the good wine he didn’t want to sample the bad. “How do you reason that?”

  “Well! Just look at you.”

  He studied her face and took another swallow. “It’s not always about a woman, you know.”

  “Well now!” She settled her rump and leaned closer. “Tell me about it. It’ll help.”

  “No. It won’t.”

  “Crispin.” Her hand covered his. “A woman is sometimes fickle. She does it to inspire her man to artful courting.”

  “It’s not a woman! It’s…” He searched for the words. “What purpose do I serve, Eleanor?” The words came out of his mouth, but they weren’t quite what he had wanted to say. But Jack Tucker’s insistence on serving him had crept into his mind and opened his thoughts from a place that should have been long buried. “I do not serve a lord. I do not serve the Church. I am…nothing.”

  She sighed and wrapped her fingers around her rag, winding the material into a twisted rope. “I’ve known you a long time, Crispin. Even before I knew your name or you knew mine, you and your friends would come here. And I remember thinking what a jolly lot they were. But looking at you now, you’re not the same man.”

  He scowled. “I’m not the same man.”

  “It’s despair you’re feeling. I tell you, Crispin. It’s as if you stopped living from that day. It seems to me that you cannot live on disappointments and hopes of revenge all your life.”

  He gulped his wine and stared at the table. “No? I seem to get on well enough.”

  “No,” she said in a firm voice and reached for him again. Her hand closed on his wrist. The fingers felt warm on his cool skin. “You don’t get on. And the more you dwell on it the more it shall devour you from the inside out.”

  He shook his head. “Nell—”

  “Tell me. How many friends have you, eh? True friends. Friends to tell your troubles to.”

  “There is you and Gilbert.”

  “Aye. And who else?”

  Crispin paused to think. His questing brow soon lowered into a scowl. Slowly he extricated his hand from hers.

  Eleanor sat back and folded her arms over her ample chest. “That’s what I thought. You make no friends, you meet no women—”

  Crispin hunched forward and surrounded his cup with both hands. “I am a solitary man.”

  “That is not how I remember it when you were a knight. You had many associates then. And many women before your betrothal. Now you live like a monk.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkled as he offered a slight smile. “Not quite as a monk.”

  “But even so. You have no cause to be so glum. It’s been seven years. You’re one of us now.”

  Crispin stiffened his shoulders and dug a fist into his temple, leaning into it.

  Eleanor scowled, no doubt reading his gesture for what it was. “I’m no fool, Crispin. I know you would rather hang than consider yourself one of us, poor lowly class that we are. The class that welcomes you, by the way. The class that hasn’t rejected you. The class that won’t. Maybe someday you’ll lose that stubborn pride of yours and realize that. What’s it gotten you anyway? Heartsore and humiliated, that’s what.”

  “I’m glad we had this talk, Eleanor” he sneered, raising the wine to his lips.

  “All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t hurt you to be merry; to find some friends. And for heaven’s sake to find a lovely girl. She’ll take that frown from your face.”

  “I can think of no woman save Rosamunde.” He stopped. He hadn’t spoken her name in years. Was it years? The sound of it jabbed his heart, brought back all the memories.

  “Rosamunde? Your betrothed?” He nodded. “Crispin Guest! That was seven years ago! She is wed. You told me so.”

  “Yes. Her dog of a brother betrayed his honor and broke his oath to me.” He lifted his bowl. “Here’s to Sir Stephen St Albans. I hope to God he is dead.”

  “Sir Stephen? Oh, he’s not dead. At least he wasn’t yesterday.”

  “Indeed. Too bad.”

  “Aye. He was arguing with that dead man…before he was dead, of course.”

  Crispin’s eyes snapped up. “What?”

  “He was here. And I haven’t seen him in years. Not since…well.” She took up her rag again and twisted it into a lumpy rope. “Oh, such a sad thing. Who would go and poison such a fine man as that?” She shook her head and pressed the rag to the corner of a glossy eye. “I tell you, Crispin. I do not know what this town is coming to.”

  Crispin edged forward and sat up. “Stephen was here, you say? What did they argue about?”

  She sniffed and drew the rag into her lap, pulling on its errant strings. “I know not. They did it in whispers, if you know my meaning. But the other, the dead one, he would have none of it.”

  “And when was all this?”

  “Right before you came in. Sir Stephen saw you, put up his hood, and left.”

  “Did he?”

  “Sir Stephen tried to get something from the man. I did not see what it was. I thought it best to stay out of sight.”

  “I wish you had not done so.”

  “Aye. I see that now. I told as much to the Lord Sheriff.”

  Damn. “You spoke to the sheriff?”

  “He came back this morning and demanded I tell him what I knew.”

  “But Gilbert never said—”

  “He was not here at the time. He was below in the mews. I was here alone.”

  “Then what more did you say?”

  “Only that John the piper was here. A few other men who looked to be servants. And the monks.”

  “Monks?”

  “Aye. Two friars.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “I could not say. They wore their cowls the whole time. They each called for a cup of ale but never drank any of it.”

  “Were they here before or after Stephen?”

  “Before, I think. But I cannot be certain.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Only the woman.”

  Crispin squinted hard at her. “By all that is holy, Eleanor. Why did I not hear this before?”

  She straightened and lifted her chin. “No one asked me before.”

  With a puff of air he leaned in. “Yes. Well, then. What woman?”

  “I could not see her face.”

  “Naturally.”

  “She spoke to that dead man, too, for a brief time after Stephen left.”

  A busy fellow, this dead Templar. “How long did she stay?”

  “Not long at all. She was gone after I turned round again. She could not have exchanged more than a few words with him.”

  “A servant woman or higher?”

  “Oh, much higher. Fur-trimmed cloak and all.”

  He nodded. “You were correct on one account, Eleanor. It was good to talk.” He climbed from the bench and before Eleanor could speak again, he slipped out the door.

  A soft rain gentled the street, hazing its somber features. He pulled the leather hood over his head and clenched it over his chin. The chill still permeated the scuffed leather, and it suddenly reminded him of warmer capes and cloaks he once owned, fu
r-lined with fox or miniver. Some were sturdy weaves of wool while others were of velvet and brushed serge. His boots, too, had been sturdier and also lined with fur, except for the courtly slippers with their impossibly long, pointed toes.

  His fist tightened on the hood and he felt the raw skin stretch. He used to have gloves, too. Masculine things for the hunt or on the lists. He remembered the feel of his gloved hands curled around a sword hilt, or pulling back the strings of a hunting bow with the gloved fingers veed around a nocked arrow.

  One man took all these things away. Stephen.

  Crispin felt giddy. If Rosamunde’s brother was the last man to see the Templar alive—a man he had argued with—then there was a good possibility he could be the murderer. It was almost too good to be true.

  Crispin exhaled a laugh more like a bark. “Then you’ll hang,” he whispered into the hood. “I will make certain that you’ll stand in disgrace on the scaffold and hang for your crime. And I will be the one to bring you to justice. Thank you Jesu for this mercy!”

  It fit nicely into his plots of revenge. Stephen guilty of murder. Stephen hanging.

  Until his thoughts suddenly drew up short. What about the woman?

  He rubbed his face. Who was she and what did she discuss with the dead Templar? Did she have anything to do with the murder?

  “Perhaps not,” he reasoned. “Perhaps it is mere coincidence.”

  A crowd blocked the avenue and stopped his momentum and his musings. People seldom gathered in the rain. Most Londoners did their best to escape the muddy streets and raw wind. Why then should this mob gather here?

  Crispin peered through the throng and saw an ordinary man who smiled and waggled his arm. The crowd seemed to be excited by this.

  “What the devil is going on?” Crispin demanded to no one in particular.

  One of the men standing beside him pointed at the man in the center of all the attention. “Said his arm’s been healed.”

  “Healed? How?”

  “Miracle, I suppose. I don’t know the man. Don’t know what all this foolery is.”

  Crispin watched the man in the center of the crowd. The people guffawed or congratulated him on his good luck, but did not seem interested in dispersing. Crispin observed them for a moment more before he gave up with a shrug and pushed his way through.