She glanced at the ferryman, reluctance and eagerness flickering across her face like the reflections of the water skimming beneath them. Stephen lowered his head. “Whisper to me,” he said.
“Or pay me double to keep quiet and shout it,” said the waterman with a grin.
Doubtful as a hind approaching a baited trap, Isabella leaned away from both of them.
“You need help,” Stephen said steadily. From all his time spent in the forge and the armories he sensed that this was the moment of decision between them. Isabella would share her truth fully with him now or they would not truly meld together. He tipped up her chin. Her face was as gray as the weather was bright. “I want to help you.”
She leaned into him, against his shoulder. “We do not know each other,” she whispered.
“We know enough of each other.”
“We met only a few days past, not even a month ago.”
She argued even while she was pressed up against him and unconsciously sought comfort and counsel. Her wariness was one of habit, not desire, Stephen guessed. He put his arm about her. “Does that matter?” he asked. “You are a woman of London and the world. I am sure you understand my character most clearly.”
Isabella said nothing but Stephen felt her settle into the crook of his arm. Her body trusts me so that is a start. The ferryman was occupied with navigating their wherry through the arches of London Bridge, a tricky, dangerous maneuver, especially for a single waterman, and one to which he bent all his attention. Isabella watched him and closed her eyes, her limbs becoming as taut as harp strings.
Tense, and not only because of getting past the bridge. The stakes are high here and I believe I know why. Nothing else makes sense.
“Shall I say what I think?” said Stephen softly, keeping his eyes on her. “Richard Martinton’s family keep your son. I know he does not live with you in London. You speak of him with such longing.”
Isabella screwed up her eyes and made a small choking sound.
“You asked after places and householders in Kent. Martinton’s kin have property in Kent. I know because the family is notorious in those parts. They are not well-liked.”
Isabella looked at him. “What can I say?”
“Your keepers are not with you here. You need not fear my telling them anything. I want to help.”
She continued to watch him, the question why now urgent in her face. “I may lose even what I have,” she said, cautious still.
“But what is that, really? Do they keep promising that your son will be with you and reneging on that promise?” A new suspicion flared in his mind. “What do they want you to do, Isabella?”
She stared beyond him, her pinched, gray face blooming into a brighter crimson, like a molten rod of iron. Shame, he surmised, and anger.
“Your kin see me as a means to win favor at court?” He asked the question very quietly, tempering his own rage.
“Yes,” whispered Isabella. “But they guessed I liked you, too.”
“And that changed things?” he asked gently, reining in his temper again.
The shadow of the arches of London Bridge hid her face but he felt Isabella give a small nod. “For me it changed everything,” she admitted. She hunched into a tighter ball beside him, misery pouring off her like smoke from a furnace. “They wanted more. They always want more. I was told to flirt with others, to draw the attentions of other men.” Her voice dropped lower still. “To become mistress to many men.”
And Isabella had said no, Stephen thought, recalling her stalwart protests in the gardens of the Savoy palace.
“Or I lose Matthew forever.” She was as pale as a corpse, her eyes distant mirrors and memories of pain. “Now you can destroy me, if you choose,” she continued, in the same dull, dead voice.
I always knew Richard Martinton and his clan deserved to burn in hell. Let me send a few of them there, though I swing for it. The burst of anger was cleansing but the disgust that followed was as dark as slag. To abuse a mother so… this family is beyond contempt.
He plunged a fist into the cold river, quenching his rage as their bobbing little boat burst through shadows into sunlight again and the ferryman relaxed on his sculls. He did not waste his time on being offended by Isabella’s confession that she had sought him out. Thoughts on that score were luxuries now that their waterman was sculling swiftly to the nearest wharf. In another moment they would be running again. “Yet why should we run?” he asked aloud.
“I must be there to put my side, to defend myself.”
He shook his head. “Has it made any difference in the past? Ignore them, Isabella, be free of them. Take their dungeon out of your head.”
She stared at him, a stunned blankness in her eyes. He did not know if he was reaching her or not but he knew he had to keep trying. This is the moment.
“Can we speak freely at your friend’s house?”
“At Amice’s? Yes, but I must return before John and Mary—”
He cut across her. “Your kin will believe whatever that greasy pair tell them, so why the haste? We can do more out of doors. Once you are back you will be spied on and stopped. You will be in their power again.”
“I am always in their grip,” Isabella spat. “You cannot understand, you are a man. You have nothing to lose.”
That stung Stephen. “You are wrong. My wife is dead.”
“But you have your daughter!” Isabella struck her breastbone with her fingers. “Joanna is yours. My son is not mine. Can you not understand? I do not even know where he is!”
Tearing herself from his embrace she stood up in the wherry and in another instant would have hurled herself onto the nearest quayside. Stephen snatched her back, holding her wrists with such force that he could feel the narrow, fragile bones grind beneath his fingers as she struggled. Her sudden fierceness surprised him, but only for a moment.
If she is an angel, can she not be an avenger also? She has been badly wronged.
Still, however much her furious beauty stirred him he dared not release her.
“Lively one there,” the waterman chortled, as Stephen man-handled Isabella ashore and paid their fare. “Mind how you go.”
Chapter 5
He remembered where her friend had looked from the upper window on The Street and soon found her shop without any directions from his companion. Hand in hand, hurrying beside him, Isabella was silent but he did not make the mistake of believing she was resigned. “How are you?” he asked, as they sped along the alleyways to the spice seller’s.
“Thinking,” she answered.
****
All my life I have been taught to obey. I obeyed my parents when they told me to marry Richard. I did everything my husband’s kin asked of me. Richard beat me, but not because I rebelled against him. He did so because he wanted to see me broken and sniveling. It amused him to watch me cringe.
Stephen is not like that.
I obeyed my father and he cast me off. I obeyed my husband and he beat me. I obeyed my husband’s family and they took my son. They hide him and speak most carefully in my hearing so I cannot work out where he is. They take away my money and jewels so I have no means, no power of discovery. They consider my opinions and wishes worthless.
Stephen is not like that.
“You are a woman of London and the world,” he had said, and “You need not cringe from me.” Best of all, “I never liked your waste of a husband or his kin,” and “I want to help you.”
He was right, too. When had her arguments or pleas made any difference? She had obeyed and had never been granted a single wish. What is the point of my being a good daughter, wife, or daughter-in-law when it makes no difference? When I do not get what I want?
She was alone. She had always been alone, apart from when she had Matthew. Yesterday, even an hour ago she had considered her solitude a curse and a weakness. Now she looked at the world with new eyes and saw her singularity as strength.
I do not have to obey any of them. Th
ey truly have no power over me.
What had Stephen said? “Has it made any difference in the past?” No it had not, of course it had not. She had groveled to win any glimpse of Matthew, she had sold everything she owned to be given time with her son and she had not even been granted that, only a brief sight of him from the back, not even his face.
Be free of them, Stephen had said. Take their dungeon out of your head.
It was a revelation.
For all that I must hurry. I do not want my son beaten or hurt. We must hurry…
****
Isabella’s friend Amice unbarred the back door to her shop and bustled them inside. The beautiful, dark-skinned woman asked no questions but swept them past her wide-eyed apprentice and up into a narrow upstairs chamber, closing the downstairs shutters on her spices and telling her ‘prentice to check stores instead.
“We are losing you customers,” Stephen remarked when the spice-seller returned in a swirl of red, rustling silks and a savor of vanilla and cinnamon.
“Not important.” Amice handed him a steaming cup of raspberry tisane and knelt beside the chair where he had guided Isabella to sit. “Has she had bad news of Matthew?” Amice demanded, looking closely at the small, still figure.
Isabella stirred at her scrutiny. “No news, never any news.” She smiled and stroked Amice’s dark hair. “But I am thinking, beloved. Finally I am thinking.”
Amice pressed a cup of tisane into Isabella’s unresisting hand and motioned with her eyes to the threshold. Stephen put his cup on the window ledge and cleared his throat. “I must seek your privy.”
“I will show you,” said Amice.
“I dare not leave Issa for long,” she added at once, as she and Stephen clattered down the stairs again. “What has happened?”
He told what he knew in a few choice words. Lingering in her tiny back yard, constantly glancing up the stairs, Amice snorted when he explained what Isabella had admitted.
“She has not told a peppercorn’s worth of it! Issa has been bullied for years, starved, beaten, left to rot in the heart of this city during the pestilence and her son forcibly taken from her. Richard Martinton was a pig. I wanted to stick a blade in him myself.”
Stand in line, Stephen thought. Anger made him light-headed, with a dragging thirst. “Her parents? Can they do nothing?”
Amice curled her lower lip. “More useless sacks of offal. Issa’s father is a vintner, did she tell you that?”
Stephen nodded but got no chance to reply.
“Did she say that her own father sent her to that pig Martinton when she was twelve? Aged twelve!”
“Yes, she told me.”
“Did she? You must have won some of her confidence for Issa to admit anything. Did she also tell you that she was the bride meant to stop a blood feud? Last year when Martinton lurched from her bed and clubbed down one of her father’s men it was Issa who was blamed and beaten. Beaten by his family and blamed by her own, I might add. Her parents now ignore her in the street. Even if the Martintons allowed it, they would not have Issa back with them.”
“A brawl last year? How can they blame Isabella for that?” Stephen stared at the roof-tops of London, trying to bar from his mind the image of his gold-haired, falling angel being struck, of being rejected and ignored by her parents, the very people who should have loved her. He failed, the dark knowledge an evil to him. “Married off at twelve,” he repeated, and shook his head in disbelief, shocked afresh. He thought only the nobility worked that kind of carelessness with girls. His Cecilia was eighteen, almost nineteen when they were married. Amice’s Issa, his Isabella, had been a child herself.
“Made to marry. Wedded, bedded, beaten and discarded.”
“We must find her son, get him back to her.” Stephen was aware of far more that was due to Isabella but this was the first.
“And then?” Amice challenged, her fine eyes as bright as a bird’s. “The law of this land makes the boy Martinton’s, or his kin’s. They may have shipped him to France for all we know.”
“I will speak to the prince, to my lord,” Stephen said, with a growing certainty. He had influence and access and Isabella would finally have protection. I will protect her.
“My husband’s kindred wanted more than they assumed you would be able to get them,” said Isabella, standing perilous at the top of the stairs, as slender as a candle flame. “When you showed yourself willing to court me they instantly decided to be more ambitious. They are goldsmiths after all and their guild is notorious for its pride.”
Amice hissed in a long breath and opened her arms, as if afraid her friend would tumble down the steps. “Issa, why not go sit down again?”
“I will not fall, Amice.” She smiled at her friend and looked at him. “They call you a blacksmith, Stephen, and they do not mean it well, but to me smiths are the heart of every place there is.”
Her generous words made him catch his breath but only for an instant. “I began as a smith, and am proud to be so.” Stephen was more but he gladly claimed the title… the heart of every place there is. Humbled, inspired, he walked to the head of the staircase, wishing Isabella would return to the upper chamber, longing to sweep her safe into his arms. He took a step up on the stair.
“Do not be troubled, Stephen. I shall not fall again.”
“I believe you.” He did, for she looked as steady as an angel.
“I have thought, Stephen. For years I could not, because of fear and constant trouble. You showed me the space and the way to free myself. Because of those things I have thought. Blacksmiths have a guild, have they not?”
Stephen blinked at the question, wondering where this strange conversation was going. “I am in the guild of armorers,” he began, “and I know many smiths.”
“And blacksmiths are in every village. Places of gossip and news, places where the comings and goings of strangers and worthies are discussed.”
“I agree.” What she said made sense. “Yet I am sorry to say that I do not know every blacksmith in Kent.”
Isabella swayed and alarmed, he took another step upward toward her.
“Do not be concerned,” she said, recovering, gripping the door jamb. “I am quite clear-headed, for the first time in years, I might add.”
“For God, Issa, sit down on the steps,” pleaded Amice.
“Let us all sit,” said Stephen and he did so, settling on the narrow treads, another step closer to Isabella. “I do know a great many smiths, including several of Kent,” he went on, to hearten her. “I can get word out to ask after your boy.”
His cantering heartbeat slowed when Isabella copied him and sat down on the top step. Amice came alongside him. “That might work,” she said softly. “The fellowship of craftsmen and all. Will they be discreet?”
“They will if I ask them to be.” Stephen said. He turned again to Isabella. “I will begin today,” he promised. “It should not take long.”
“Are you certain you wish to begin this, my lord?”
Isabella’s formal question startled him and he frowned, considering the matter settled. “What do you mean?”
Her steady gaze on him faltered and she glanced down at her knees. “I mean that Richard’s family… they like to have a hostage to use.” She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on the step. “You and your daughter lodge with your sister, do you not? And you mentioned that her husband is away at sea?”
It fitted, Stephen thought, while he heard Amice softly cursing in some exotic tongue. Isabella is right. I need them away from the house now, or Bedelia and Joanna will be used as hostages.
His heart clenched at the thought and he suddenly understood far more clearly the oppression Isabella had been enduring. This cannot go on.
He twisted about to Amice. “Your apprentice, is he reliable?”
“He is slow and a touch idle, plays on his limp at times, but I would say yes.”
“Then he can take a message and a token of mine to my sister’s.” Bed
elia might be bossy but she had sense. He would write the note in the secret script they had made up between them as youngsters, so she understood the urgency and danger. “Bedelia knows to go to Thomas Smith’s house in case of trouble. He is a fellow armorer.”
“Send the message now,” said Isabella, chewing on her lower lip. “I would have no one else threatened because of me and mine.” Her voice cracked. “I could not, cannot bear that.”
“As soon as we are done here,” Stephen replied, with a steadiness he did not quite feel. “Get my sister and daughter safe, yes, but we need some idea of where to search for Matthew before we go rushing off. Anything, Isabella, any clue.”
“I must hurry.” Isabella inclined her head. Her eyes still gleamed but she looked less haunted. “I have thought of something else,” she said. “Richard’s family never told me anything but as I served and cleared up after them I overheard a great deal.” Her voice caught. “ Soon after… soon, when Matthew and I were parted, Sir William spoke of a place of devilry, an orchard where Satan had left his footprint.”
Amice crossed herself. Stephen leaned closer.
“I think Sir William knew I was listening,” Isabella went on, “for he jested that my son would not find the fruit there to his liking.”
“Pig!” Amice muttered.
Stephen agreed but for him anger was overwhelmed by exultation. “Well-remembered, Isabella, and more than enough for a Kentish man like me,” he said, with a grim smile.
He watched her stop breathing and lean forward, willing him to say more, her face bright, her eyes like living flames. He was most happy to do so. “There is no need for me to send word to the blacksmiths. I already know where your son is being held. Satan’s footprint is an old story in Kent.”
“So where?” demanded Amice.
“The village of Newington, close to the old Roman road.” Stephen rose to his feet. “I can have us there in less than a day.” He grinned, some of the tension falling off his shoulders. “The farriers and smiths will loan us good horses along the way, if need be, as part of that fellowship of blacksmiths Amice mentioned.”
Lindsay Townsend Page 5