by Barbara Kyle
“Aye, sir. Master Willingham.”
“Good. The sergeant will be escorting a gentleman prisoner out of Newgate first thing in the morning. That prisoner is your target.”
Shivering, Thornleigh was replacing Honor’s letter inside his shirt when he noticed the black spots on the back of his hand. Only a few. In the light of the corpse-cart party’s torch they looked like gnats. Irrationally, he brushed at them with his other hand as if to flick them away.
That was when he saw the first child arrive. A girl, perhaps eight years old. She squatted about ten feet from him in front of the alcove, her elbows on her knees, her hands cupped under her chin. She was very thin and dirty. She did not move, but simply stared at him. She had just squatted down when another child, a boy much younger, crept up beside her and squatted, too, watching Thornleigh. Then the rest came, singly or in pairs, until there were nine of them, all hunkered in a ragged semicircle, watching him.
Thornleigh tried to hide his shivering. He knew that the children were waiting for him to fall asleep or die, whichever should come first. He glanced around the crowded ward. There was nowhere to go to escape them. He must stay where he was and weather this. He picked the girl, the eldest—the leader—and he stared back at her. Her eyes, dark and lifeless, were two huge smudges overpowering her thin white face.
The corpse-cart work party left, taking away the dead and taking away the light. The children in front of Thornleigh became shadowy mounds. The other prisoners settled down into the hushed and feeble motions of night. And Thornleighsat shivering and staring into the girl’s eyes—eyes so deep, empty, and merciless.
Carlos shouldered his way through the pedestrians and carts clogging the market on Newgate Street. His eyes were fixed ahead on Newgate prison. He walked quickly, alarmed to realize that the afternoon light was fading fast. He’d spent the whole day searching for Thornleigh. Working alone, unencumbered by the girl, he had moved methodically through the Marshalsea prison and King’s Bench jail in Southwark, all with no luck. Newgate was the only prison left. Thornleigh had to be there. But Carlos knew he must hurry if he was to get inside before they locked visitors out for the evening.
He skirted the stalls of the Shambles, the flesh market in the middle of Newgate Street. Housewives and servants hastened to finish their purchases, even as the butchers and tripe-sellers were packing away for the day. Paupers picked at the refuse on the ground. Beyond the sheds, the bleating of sheep and the bellowing of steers rose from the slaughterhouses and cattle pens.
A flock of children swarmed into the street, boys and girls alike wearing identical yellow kerseys and red hats. Carlos judged they were from the foundlings hospital next door. He had to halt as the orphans dashed around him, screeching with laughter in some private game. He hated stopping like this in the open; the guards from Colchester must still be out looking for him, guards from the Fleet prison too. But the children pinned him inside the swirl of their bodies and he had to wait. He looked up at the prison that lay dead ahead.
It rose up from London Wall, built over the arch of the gate, its flat roof notched with battlements. Carlos made out four upper stories, and the grates at street level indicated at least one lower ward. The stench from the grates reached him even with the competing smells from the Shambles. The open gate itself was wide enough to admit four horsemen riding abreast under the arch, and the traffic of farmers, housewives, gentlemen, and priests flowed both ways, on foot, donkey, wagon, and horseback. Several people had congregated around a whipping post just inside the gate where a boy of about twelve, stripped to the waist, was being flogged. As the orphan children zigzagged around Carlos he looked for the prison porter’s door. A small gang of shackled prisoners was being herded back inside by a turnkey: probably the jailer had farmed them out for their labor for the day. That door would be the porter’s lodge.
He glanced southward. Less than a quarter mile that way lay Ludgate jail, also built over a gateway arch in London Wall, but Carlos knew Thornleigh would not be in there. He’d learned from talkative prisoners that Ludgate was reserved for wealthy London citizens accused of larceny, fraud, and the like—gentlemen’s crimes—while the Marshalsea’s inmate population were mostly debtors. Newgate was for the harder cases: the murderers, rapists, and violent thieves from all of Middlesex County.
Newgate, with its grim barred windows and battlemented roof, looked impossible to escape from. Carlos thought of Isabel, of her naïve dream to get her father out. And then he wished he hadn’t thought of her. The guards were hunting here in London, and there were search parties after him to the north, and he had no means of getting away. No money, no time, and no choice. He had to do this thing, get paid, and get out. He clenched his jaw and shoved aside the last of the children.
He strode toward the porter’s door and was reaching for the latch when the door opened. A stack of corpses was moving toward him. He suddenly realized what it was: a cart loaded with the prison dead.
“Mind where you tread!” a sweating man pushing the cart growled.
Carlos lurched back. The cart joggled out, its cargo with dangling arms and legs jerking as if in some death throe. Two more carts followed. Carlos took several steps away to distance himself. The black-speckled corpses were diseased. Nausea wormed inside his gut.
The carts crunched out into the street and were swallowed by the crowd.
The porter’s door was still open. Carlos took a deep breath and strode back toward it. The white-haired porter inside was sorting through a huge ring of keys, about to lock up. Carlos knew this was his last chance. He would not be locked out. His foot stomped down on the threshold. The porter looked up—old and rheumy-eyed. Weak. The two of them were alone in the room.
Carlos only had to get inside.
21
Nightmares
“Lord, it’s the Spaniard’s night, to be sure!” the Anchor’s chambermaid crowed to the card players. The card game had been going on all evening since Carlos’s return from Newgate. “Pay up, you lot!” She cocked a greedy eye at the losers as though she herself had won the victory.
The common room was packed with royalist soldiers eating and drinking around the blazing hearth, and the landlord’s children scurried about serving beef and bread fetched from their mother in the kitchen and ale fetched from their father in the cellar. On the communal tables the soldiers who’d already eaten had left a litter of half-empty tankards and wooden trenchers scraped clean but for streaks of gravy.
The disgruntled losers at the card table reluctantly shoved coins across to Carlos, to the loud delight of the maid. She stood at Carlos’s back, and after every round he’d won herhands had squeezed his shoulders a little more tightly, and her breasts had nudged the back of his head a trifle more insistently. He found the pillow pleasant enough, though her squeals of delight were beginning to grate.
Still, nothing could dull his vast feeling of well-being. He grabbed his tankard and downed his ale, then crossed his arms and watched with satisfaction as the coins piled up before him. Everything was coming to him now. And more would come soon. Money, freedom, land—everything he needed. Yet it had happened so suddenly, and so unaccountably. He still could hardly believe how, in one stroke, his crisis had been … not solved, exactly, but … transformed.
Yet, for a moment, back at Newgate, he had thought he was lost.
He had been on the threshold of the porter’s lodge. “Lock-up time,” the old man had grunted. “Out with you.” Carlos had stood still, feeling strangely impotent. The old man suddenly whisked him out like a housewife shooing a child from her clean floor. Carlos backed out, stumbling, and the porter shut the door in his face and bolted it.
He had been trudging down Thames Street besieged by thoughts of his failure to get to Thornleigh, when, approaching the Anchor, he saw a flurry of activity in front of the inn’s gate. Horses, soldiers, baggage mules, a fletcher’s cart stacked with bundles of arrows—all jostling to enter the inn’s small courtyar
d.
Taking no chances, Carlos tugged up the hood of his sheepskin coat to partially hide his face, and pushed through the crowd.
“Valverde!”
Carlos whipped around to the voice.
“Good lord, it really is you!” The speaker was a lean-faced man, about forty, with bright, amused eyes. “Don’t you remember me? Norwich, back in forty-nine? That rabble the Duke sent us to settle down?”
Carlos remembered him. A lieutenant in those days when they had both been working for the Duke of Northumberland. Not particularly capable, but well liked by his men. Gentry-bred but not a first son, so he’d been forced to seek his fortune as a soldier. “Andrews?”
“That’s right.” Andrews grinned. “Good Lord, Valverde, what the devil are you still doing in England?”
They sat down over tankards of ale as the soldiers continued to tromp through the Anchor and up and down the stairs, settling in. Andrews explained. They were a troop of the Earl of Arundel’s men—his retainers and yeoman tenants—just mustered for the Queen, and billeted at the Anchor for the time being. Equipped at the Earl’s expense, most of them were archers, but many had brought swords and pikes besides their longbows.
“So the Queen is fighting,” Carlos said quietly, watching the activity. He knew of Wyatt’s revolt, of course, but in the maelstrom of his effort to stay alive the insurrection had held little interest for him. Now, its significance dawned. And a bold idea took hold of him.
“She is,” Andrews replied. “It took Her Majesty a few days to rally. After all, rather shocking news for a monarch, isn’t it?—rebellion just before her wedding. But we’ll trounce these upstarts. No fear of that.”
“Who is your captain?”
“Ross. A Lancashire man. Over there.” Andrews nodded toward a squat but burly man parsimoniously doling out coins to the landlady for the billet. His scuffed leather brigandine was so worn that the iron plates sewn onto its canvas lining made impressions right through to the leather surface. His face was red and badly pocked above a thick, ginger beard. Carlos did not know him. Andrews leaned toward Carlos and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Bit of an oaf, Ross is, but a bulldog on the field. He’ll do.”
Carlos looked around at the familiar signs of martial encampment. The soldiers’ bows and pikes and bedrolls were being strewn around the common room as the company settled down. The inn’s odors of stale ale and musty floor rushes were overpowered by those of horses and leather, and the biteof metallic smells—swords and harness and armor. The idea that had glinted in Carlos’s mind began to glow like a polished breastplate in the sun. He felt freedom beckoning—the freedom of action. No more of this skulking around, of hiding and sneaking and lying. No more waiting to kill or be captured. The new idea warmed him like a delivery from the gallows, like a pardon.
He had tested the notion on Andrews, who’d thought it a fine idea. Carlos had relaxed for the first time in weeks, and the evening at the Anchor had stretched out, mellowed by ale, easygoing gambling, and comradeship.
Now, at the card table, Andrews counted out the coins he owed Carlos and grumbled good-naturedly to the chambermaid, “Aye, lass, it’s the Spaniard’s night, to be sure.”
Carlos raked in his winnings and laughed. It felt good to laugh again, too. The maid whipped out her kerchief for him to dump the money into.
Andrews, shoving the last of his debt across the table, glanced at his superior. “Well, Captain?”
Captain Ross had lost heavily in the game and sat hunched over the meager remainder of his coins, staring sullenly at Carlos. He said nothing, and made no move to hand over the money he owed.
Andrews laughed lightly at his own loss. “Valverde, once we’ve put this trouble down so the Prince of the Spaniards can have his night—with the Queen, that is—I’ll try you for some of that back.”
“Anytime,” Carlos said, scooping coins into the maid’s kerchief. She rushed around and settled on his knee to finish the task of collecting. He let her.
“Another game?” Andrews suggested, drawing out another small purse from his doublet.
Carlos smiled. “Why not.”
“Captain?” Andrews asked. “Are you in?”
Captain Ross’s eyes, fixed on Carlos, flicked to the chambermaid who was helpfully testing one of the coins between her teeth. Carlos caught the glimmer of longing in Ross’s eyes. He had noticed Ross stealing looks at the girl all evening, his pocked face growing darker whenever she smiled at Carlos or touched him. He’d also noticed the fine Damascene blade of Ross’s sword, and the way his hand fidgeted on its hilt every time the girl snuggled closer. That combination of honed weapon and honed resentment, Carlos knew, could lead to something he’d rather avoid. Besides, for his plan to work, he needed the captain’s friendship.
“Different stakes, Captain?” he asked suddenly. “You wager a crown, I will wager the girl.”
The captain blinked, startled.
The chambermaid’s mouth fell open. She stared at Carlos. “What’s that?” she cried. She jumped up off his lap, her face flushed with fury. “Bastard!” Her hand flew out and smacked his cheek.
Carlos bounded up from his chair. His hand grappled the girl’s throat. She staggered back a step, choking.
Ross leapt up, his sword scraping from its scabbard. “Let her go!” he yelled.
Carlos blinked at the captain’s bright blade and allowed worry to crease his face. All the soldiers in the room were watching now. Ross glowered at Carlos, his sword raised, his lip curled back, breaths snorting from his nose.
Carlos let go of the girl’s neck. For a moment his hand hovered over his own sword hilt. Then, abruptly, he dropped to his knees in front of the captain and threw his arms wide in a gesture of total surrender to Ross’s superior prowess.
The maid rushed over to Ross, clutching her reddened throat, gasping in relief. She threw her arms around Ross’s neck and looked at Carlos with furious contempt. “Who do you think you are, Master High-and-Mighty Spaniard, offering to trade me like some filly at the fair! I’ll be friends with who I want, so I will!” She glared around the room at the men who had sat there while she’d been almost murdered, then gazed back at Ross, her rescuer. She hooked her arm in his and nestled close. “Captain, you’re the nearest thing to a gentleman among this sorry lot.”
Ross reddened with pleasure. He looked down at Carlos. Carlos returned the look with a small smile.
Ross frowned at him as if unsure of what he’d just seen. But Carlos saw a surprised gleam of thanks steal into the man’s eyes. Ross understood that Carlos had just delivered the maid to him. “Get up, Spaniard,” he said gruffly. “Let’s play. Same stakes as before, three shillings.” They sat, and the maid stood close behind Ross, still sniffing in wounded indignation.
Music fluted through the room as a young soldier at one of the tables began tweedling a tune on his wooden pipe. Another man jumped up and danced an energetic jig. Others slapped the table in time. They laughed as the children’s terrier yapped at the dancer’s heels, making him cavort in increasingly wild antics.
“Valverde!” Andrews called above the noise. “Show us that Cossack caper. Like you did in Norwich.” He looked around at his mates. “A Tartar taught him this, watch. Go on, Valverde. Get up.”
Amid the calls of Andrews and the others, Carlos stood to oblige. He quaffed down the last of his ale with exaggerated gusto, as if needing it for fortitude, which brought a wave of laughter. He stepped out into the center of the room. The piper improvised an exotic, almost oriental tune reminiscent of snow-swept steppes. The soldiers gathered around Carlos. The landlord’s children peeped between the men’s legs to watch. Carlos held his arms straight out at his sides. He began with slow, controlled steps on the spot, alternately crouching and standing, and then, when in the crouch, his feet shot out in the straight-legged kicks of the Cossacks. The soldiers whooped in approval. Gradually the piper picked up the pace. Carlos’s steps matched it, his arms now folded ov
er his chest. Soon, the music was as furious as galloping Mongols, and Carlos, locked in a crouch and grinning, kicked frenetically in time. The soldiers in the circle whistled and stomped and clapped. The ones still sitting banged their tankards on the tables in time with the wild rhythm. The children gaped and giggled.
The front door swung open. Isabel stepped in. Cold wind whistled into the room. The soldiers turned to her. Carlos stopped dancing.
“Iss-bel!” the landlord’s little girl cried, running to her. Isabel stared in astonishment at the crowd of soldiers. “Iss-bel, there’s dancing!” the child cried. She pulled Isabel forward into the circle and pushed her in front of Carlos. Many of the soldiers had kept on clapping despite the interruption, and when the piper saw the lady he maneuvered his tune into a genteel but lively galliard. The clapping picked up the new tempo, and the soldiers loudly egged on the couple to dance.
Carlos and Isabel stood awkwardly face to face. He did not know how to dance with a lady. And she looked almost too exhausted to stand.
She fixed him with an intense, private question in her eyes: Did you find him? Carlos shook his head: No. Her shoulders slumped. She turned away.
The clapping dwindled. The laughter and chatter quieted. The circle drifted apart. The soldiers went back to their tables, to eating and playing dice and calling the children to fetch more ale. Andrews, at the card table, cleaned his teeth with his own silver toothpick. Captain Ross picked up his tankard and followed the maid to a far corner where the two of them stood talking quietly.
Isabel sat on a fireside stool that a soldier had vacated for her, and unfastened her snow-dusted cloak. The little buck-toothed girl stuck by her side. She always did, Carlos had noted; followed Isabel like a puppy. He sat at the card table beside Isabel and watched her. Where had she been all day? What had she been doing?
“Lizzy, who are all these men?” Isabel quietly asked the child.