by Barbara Kyle
And stopped. Down the corridor stood Albert the giant. He had somehow circumvented the taproom and he was now flanked by two other men. One held a loop of heavy chain. And Albert had found a cudgel. Catching sight of his prey, he hoisted his weapon. He started toward the taproom slowly, stalking. His two recruits moved with him.
Isabel and the mercenary backed up around the corner. They stood still in the middle of the taproom. They knew there were only three ways out. In the one to their left, the small mob from the beggars’ ward was closing in. In the one around the corner, Albert and his helpers were approaching. That left the third, the brick-lined passage in the middle. But neither Isabel nor the mercenary knew where it led. It looked very dark, as if unused. It might take them only to another bolted door. And then their pursuers would fall on them. And there was little doubt that the feathered-hatted leader, mad for vengeance, would butcher them. They glanced at one another. They were trapped.
Even the mercenary stood still. Isabel looked at her hands holding her balled cloak and saw that they were shaking.
She heard a crash. The mercenary had exploded into action. He was kicking over benches, smashing crockery, rolling barrels, apparently trying to put as many obstacles as possible between them and their pursuers. Above all the noise he called to Isabel to do as he was doing. Hopeless though it seemed to her, it was better than standing and waiting for death. Dropping her cloak, she threw over a stool, swept mugs off tables, overturned a large crock of ale. The room was darkening. Isabel looked around and saw why: the mercenary was slashing at candles with his sword, lopping off the tops to extinguish the flames. In the increasing dimness she saw the leader with the feather bolt in from the corridor … she saw a bare-chested man emerge from the nook with a startled face … she saw Albert and his friends turn the corner. Then, the room went black. Isabel stood still, but her muscles continued to tremble as she listened to the pursuers at both ends crashing into the overturned litter and shouting:
“Where are they?”
“Can’t see!”
“Albert, fetch a torch!”
“Where from?”
“The tuppenny ward!”
“Right!”
“And hurry!”
A deep male voice at the nook’s entrance said, “What in hell is going on?”
“Only a brawl, lover,” a woman said in a drunken slur. “They won’t bother us. C’mon back.”
Someone grabbed Isabel tightly around the waist. Before she could even gasp, a large hand clamped over her mouth. She was half-lifted, half-pulled several yards backward. A bristly chin brushed her ear and a voice whispered harshly, “Lie on your back, spread your legs, and do not make a sound!”
Isabel understood. With muscles still quivering with fear, she did as she was told, even hiking up her skirt, though only to her knees. Near her, the couples on the floor were rustling around in the dark. The deep-voiced man muttered an indignant oath, but the other couples only snuffled drunken laughter and carelessly resumed their lovemaking as the thudding and cursing continued beyond the nook.
Isabel lay motionless on the stone floor. One stubborn candle far across the room sparked maddeningly back to life, destroying the shield of darkness. Its light made it just possible for Isabel to see the dusky form of the mercenary’s head and shoulders looming over her. He was unbuckling his sword. He knelt down by her, merging into the floor’s darkness, and she heard a faint scrape as he set down his weapon by her head. Then he quietly wrenched his arms out of his sheepskin coat. She smelled its pungent leather waft over her as he dropped it to hide his sword. His weight came down on top of her. His breath was warm on her cheek, and quickened like a lover’s. They lay together, still and silent, their heartbeats thudding as one.
“Forget the torch!” a man in the room cried. “Grab that candle!”
“But which way did they go?”
“Not past us!”
“Not our way either!”
“They must have bolted down the passage to the kitchens,” the girl, Nan, said.
The kitchens! Isabel ground her teeth at the agony of knowing she and the mercenary had rejected that chance to flee.
“Should we run after them?” a man asked.
“Let’s have a look round here first.” Isabel recognized the leader’s voice.
She held her breath. The mercenary had hunched his back over her, and his right arm was crooked around her head, supporting some of his weight, so that his shoulder shielded her face. She could see nothing. But she could hear. The footsteps were coming into the nook!
“Mind your own business,” one of the lovers on the floor grumbled.
“Shut up,” the leader said.
Isabel heard the shuffling footsteps come closer. The mercenary’s left hand ripped down one side of her bodice, exposing her breast. She stifled a gasp of surprise. His hand moved down and roughly shoved up her skirt to bare one leg, then caught the crook of her knee and hitched her leg up over the back of his thigh. She heard the men poking around kegs at the other side of the nook—so near! And someone had apparently used the candle to ignite a rushlight on the wall, for the nook lightened a little. Isabel tightly shut her eyes, willing, like a child, that her own blindness would make her enemies blind.
“What’s he look like?” a man’s voice asked.
“He’s a big bugger.”
“And he got stuck with Kitt’s knife in the shoulder,” the girl piped up.
“That’s right, Nan!” the leader agreed with eager fierceness. “He’s got to be bleeding!”
Isabel saw the dark patch of blood soaking his jerkin right before her face. She threw her arm over his shoulder in a simulation of passion, her wide sleeve masking the blood. At this pressure on his wound he made a small groan of pain. His forehead involuntarily dropped to her breast. With another groan his mouth opened around her nipple. Her own mouth opened in shock at the sensation. His hand plowed into her hair, making it tumble over her face.
Through her hair she saw the moving candlelight brighten directly above her. It glowed around the mercenary as he lifted his head. His hand slid up her naked thigh almost to her hip. She buried her face under his right shoulder. His rough-bearded chin brushed her ear. The men’s feet crunched right beside them! They must see it was him!
“Bugger off,” one of the sprawled lovers growled.
“Aye,” a woman on the floor said. “Whoever you’re looking for, the bastard’s not here.”
“This is a waste of time,” Nan said. “I tell you they’ve scarpered down to the kitchens.”
Feet pounded into the far side of the room and there was a flare of light as a breathless voice called out, “Here’s a torch!”
“Right,” the leader said commandingly. “Off down the kitchen passage, all of you! Look for a man with a bloody arm!”
The searchers hurried away. The torchlight faded. The taproom was quiet. The single rushlight flickered. A woman on the floor in the corner giggled.
Isabel stirred beneath the mercenary. He was still half-propped up on his good, right arm but he did not move. But surely, she thought, it was safe now to leave. She started to draw back her leg wrapped on top of his. The motion brought his hand sliding down her bare thigh. She shivered involuntarily. His hand pressed her thigh. Was this a signal? Was he warning her that the danger was not yet past? She lay still.
She was aware—as she had not been during the terror moments ago—of his palm’s callused roughness, and its warmth. Aware of her taut nipple tingling, chafed by his jerkin. Aware, too, of the indisputable evidence of his arousal, even through her skirt stretched tight between them above her knees. And what trick was her own body playing on her, responding with such shameful pulses of heat? What wantonness was this in her, to feel such things? Only two days ago she had been brutally defiled by Mosse, yet now … Suddenly more ashamed than afraid, she started to push him off. But he remained heavy on top of her, unmoving. “Master Valverde,” she whispered severely, “the
y’ve gone!”
He did not budge. A new fear flared in her: was he too weak from his wound?
“Master Valverde!”
He raised his head. He looked down languidly at her candlelit skin.
She snatched up fabric to cover her breast. She shoved him off. She saw that his right hand on the floor by her head still held his sword. He had never let go of it.
Isabel stomped through the prison yard’s muddy slush toward Mistress Leveland’s chamber, wrenching her cloak around her. She flinched at the cold on her bare, scraped feet, but it only made her more incensed. The mercenary was behind her. At the jailer’s door he caught her arm. “Do not do this,” he said. “We should go. Now.”
“After what we’ve been through?” she cried. She barged through the door. The jailer and the porter turned in surprise. They were standing over a young man dressed like a clerk who was kneeling on the floor and whimpering in fright, his arms pinned behind him by a burly bailiff.
Isabel burst out to the jailer an indignant account of the outrage she had suffered. “ … a gang of them led by a vicious little man with a yellow feather in his cap!” she finished, catching her breath.
Mistress Leveland came forward with a frown and pursed lips. She eyed Isabel’s mucky feet, her filth-stained skirt, her disheveled hair. “Everything taken?” she asked. “No jewelry, even, to make good the fee?”
“What are you talking about? What fee?”
“For my time in escorting you, of course. And my patience, mistress, which is running thin. Have you not even a ring?”
“Madam, have you not heard me? I have just been assaulted! And this man has been wounded in my defense! He needs bandages and—” She looked around. The mercenary had not come in. She saw him hanging back outside the door. She suddenly realized the folly of her impetuous action; she was putting him in jeopardy. He had killed theyouth down in the commons’ passage, and he was already a hunted felon. She saw her terrible error at barging in here.
“No one forced you to go wandering below,” the jailer said darkly, “and without a proper escort.” She crossed her arms over her small bosom. “You have created havoc in my prison, mistress. I had no such trouble before you came. I suggest you leave. But first, how do you propose to pay me what you owe?”
“I tell you I have been robbed! I have nothing to give!”
The jailer gave a snort of resignation. “I’m the one who’s robbed,” she huffed. She strode back to the whimpering clerk, saying over her shoulder to Isabel, “You are lucky this happens to be a very busy day for me.” Looking at her porter she jerked her chin toward Isabel. “Tipton, throw this riffraff out.”
17
Disclosures
The landlord told me I’d find you here,” Isabel said. She stood in the open stable door at the Anchor Inn, a loose bundle in her hands. “You needn’t tend Woodbine yourself, you know. The landlord’s groom would do it.”
The mercenary looked at her across the mare’s broad back but kept brushing the glossy flank as the horse munched hay. “Better if I do,” he said.
Isabel heard the erratic evening wind behind her blowing snow around the courtyard. The snow had begun to fall soon after she and the mercenary had been thrown out of the Fleet. She had shivered under the drifting flakes as she sat in the tanner’s stinking ox-cart that the mercenary had hailed to bring them back. Her feet had been cut and almost numb by the time they had reached the inn, and she’d had to spendmore of her small store of cash on new boots from a cobbler around the corner.
“Shut the door,” he said.
Isabel did so and came into the lantern-lit stable. A black gelding and a dappled pony—the only other horses besides Woodbine—swung their heads up from the hay they were munching to glance around at her. She held out the bundle to the mercenary. It was his jerkin and coat, tied up by the chambermaid with twine. The maid had been on her way out of the inn to take these to the stable, but Isabel had stopped her and taken the bundle. “She stitched up the shoulders in both,” Isabel told him. She blushed as the memory flared of him last night with the maid. “But I’m afraid,” she added, “that the blood stains won’t come out.”
He put down the brush and took the bundle from her and unwrapped it. He tossed the coat onto an upended barrel, but he kept hold of the jerkin and thrust his hand inside it, apparently searching for something.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Papers.” He drew out a grimy wad of paper, only far enough to satisfy himself that all was well, then shoved it back inside. He slung the jerkin over the low wall of the stall and picked up the horse brush again.
“Do you make it a policy not to trust anyone?” Isabel asked.
“Trust is … un lujo …"—he searched for the English word—"a luxury.”
He turned back to his work.
Isabel sat on the barrel, taking the coat onto her lap. There was much she wanted to say to him, but she didn’t know how to begin. She watched him. He was working in breeches and shirt—the clean linen shirt from her saddlebag that she’d brought for her father. Earlier, she had told the maid to take it up to his room to replace his blood-soaked one, and she saw now, at its open neck, the edge of a bandage over his shoulder wound. The maid had probably stayed in his room to help him wind it on, she thought. She looked away.
Her eyes ranged over the feeding horses, the empty swallow’s nest on a rafter, the small stable boy curled asleep in the corner straw … and again the mercenary. She abstractedly picked bits of dirt off the sleeve of his coat on her lap.
He glanced over at her as he brushed. “Better now?”
“Oh, quite,” she said quickly. “The bath was wonderful. And the hot pigeon pie.”
Arriving back at the inn she had lost no time in stripping off her filthy clothes and bathing—the child, Lizzy, had brought her a cake of lilac-scented soap to wash her hair—and she had changed into the fresh clothes she had brought from home, a rose-colored wool skirt and bodice. She now noticed that he had washed, too. And he was cleanly shaven. It was the first time she had seen his face so clearly. “Does your wound pain you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Just a lot of blood.”
He looked at her and added stiffly, “Gracias. For the shirt.”
“It is I who must thank you. If you hadn’t made me leave most of my money here before we went to the Fleet, we’d be huddling tonight in some church porch.” She added quietly, “Thank you, in fact, for saving my life.” She smiled tentatively. “A shirt is small recompense.”
He said nothing.
“Of course,” she added quickly, “it will not be your only recompense. Though my money is running low, my father will pay what I promised you, once we find him.” During her bath she had thought about this. And about the risks the mercenary was enduring to help her. It was true that he did owe it to her, since she had unlocked his chains in Colchester jail. Yet the dangers he had already suffered for her sake were extreme, and she was grateful. And something else. She was curious. Clearly, he was not the barbarian she had at first taken him for. It took integrity to honor his pledge to her. And today he had showed not only courage, but quicknessand cleverness, too, in hiding her and himself among the lovers. She felt a furious blush, remembering his weight on her, his hands on her, his mouth … She looked down.
She picked again at the coat sleeve. “That’s actually what I came to talk to you about. My father. I’m not at all sure I’m doing the right thing.”
He stopped brushing. “You are not giving up?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that I’m … not much good at this. And you are. I mean, it’s obvious you know what you’re doing. You understand those places. Those people.”
“Criminals?” he asked with a small smile.
She realized her unintentional insult. “I mean,” she said, flustered, “well, I only succeeded in getting myself almost killed. And you, too.”
“You warned me of the knife. You hid my wound. Yo
u stayed calm. That was good.”
She felt an unexpected flutter of pleasure at his praise. “There’s something else,” she went on. “Tomorrow I have … other business to attend to. Urgent business, outside the city.” Urgent indeed, she thought; she must report de Noailles’ news to Wyatt in Rochester. “So, in the morning I’d like you to carry on the search for my father on your own. There’s still the Marshalsea prison and Newgate prison and Ludgate jail. I suggest you try the Marshalsea first and—” She stopped, all too aware of her own incompetence at dictating the agenda, and added softly, “Do whatever you feel is necessary. All right?”
He looked at her, resting his arm on the mare’s back. “I will need money,” he said. “Entry fees. Bribes.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll leave you some.”
“Will you be back tomorrow? After your business?”
“Yes. Probably quite late. If you do find my father—and I pray you will—come right back here. Then we can discuss how to get him free.” She paused, unsure. “Is that a reasonable plan?”
He nodded.
“Good,” she said.
He tossed down the brush and took up a hoof pick. “Will you take the mare in the morning?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I will tell the boy to give her grain.”
“Thank you.”
He came behind the horse, turned his back to its rear, lifted its hoof between his legs, and began to clean it with the pick. The horse, tethered by a long rope, lazily shifted its weight to allow his ministrations, and continued to feed. Isabel, directly across from him, watched him work. She was surprised at how lightened she felt by this quick agreement they had struck. It was a relief to have someone to rely on. It was good to have a friend.
But a friend should have a name. The mercenary was how she had thought of him until now. That did not seem right anymore. “What is your Christian name?” she asked.
He looked up, surprised. “Carlos.”
“May I call you that?”