The Changeling Murders (The Thief Taker Series Book 4)

by C. S. Quinn

  The dead face was swinging back into view.

  Charlie saw the eyes first. The whites were stained a shocking yellow. The dark wig concealed most of the face, but he’d seen enough.

  It wasn’t Maria.

  The relief was so intense it seemed to knock him sideways. But he’d paused long enough for the aristocrats to collect themselves. They closed in, staggering, murderous, swords drawn. Charlie made a quick assessment. Five armed men, all young and inexperienced enough to have something to prove, wealthy, privileged and drunk. He reckoned them the most dangerous kind of men to offend in London.

  ‘Look at this barefoot rogue,’ said one, advancing. ‘Thinks to command his betters.’

  There was a creak of rope above.

  For a moment the hanging corpse twirled on a single strand, then it broke, and she plummeted to the stage in a heap of lifeless limbs. Groans and cheers came from the crowd.

  Charlie and the drunk lords stood stupidly, the body between them. Then one of them spoke. ‘Thief,’ he slurred, pointing his sword at Charlie. ‘He holds my pistol!’

  Charlie swallowed, realising the gun wouldn’t be enough to deter them. He made a quick assessment of the stage and judged his chances of escape poor.

  Suddenly Percy was at his side. Charlie saw him take in the face of the dead girl, then turn to the aristocrats.

  ‘This man broke no law,’ he said. Charlie blinked. Percy spoke with deep authority. ‘He is a thief taker. I saw you all attack him as he attempted to bring order.’ Percy’s mouth was puckered in contempt. ‘I am a lawyer of Temple Bar and would swear to it,’ he added. ‘He only took the pistol in self-defence.’ Percy nodded that Charlie should return the gun. He slid it across the floor.

  One of the men picked it up. There was a pause as they stood, undecided.

  Charlie nodded towards the crowd. ‘People are helping themselves to your barrel of wine,’ he said. It was enough to galvanise their thoughts. The aristocrats left the stage, jostling to reclaim their drink.

  Percy took a step closer to the dead girl. ‘It’s not her,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ agreed Charlie.

  They looked at one another and, just for a moment, Charlie liked Percy better than he had before.

  Now the body was no longer displayed above the stage, the atmosphere in the theatre had calmed a little.

  ‘Get ’em out of here!’ Lynette had recovered herself and was shouting. ‘The show’s over!’ Playhouse employees began herding people away from the macabre spectacle.

  ‘He stays,’ she added, pointing to Charlie. ‘Seems like someone’s playin’ dirty tricks to shut us down. Charlie might be the only person who can keep us open.’

  Chapter 11

  Maria’s mouth was dry. It was dark. The floor beneath her felt cold and damp. She began to sit up, wincing at the throbbing in her head. A bolt of panic sliced through her. Heavy iron manacles had been locked around her wrists. They dragged loudly on the floor as she tried to move her arms. A dreadful surge of nausea threatened to overwhelm her. She closed her eyes and took a breath.

  Keep calm. What would Charlie do?

  The sudden, safe memory of him brought a welling sob to her throat.

  No self-pity, she told herself sternly. That won’t help you. Only think.

  She began testing for the restrictions of her manacles. They gave her about two feet, she thought, feeling on the floor. At the very widest edge of her range her damp fingertips touched on something grainy. Like sand or dirt. She raised the substance to her face and found it had melted away. Maria put her fingers tentatively to her mouth.

  Salt.

  She reached back into the gloom, making sense of it.

  Her captor had placed her in a salt circle.

  Memories of her countryside childhood bloomed. Salt circles were to ward away evil, banish the devil, repel pixies and sprites and . . . fairies.

  She remembered something her mother had told her, as a little girl.

  The Green Man puts his green thumb in the earth and the harvest comes. He is the sun, the earth, all things. When the first kings came, the Green Man split in two. He became a man and a woman. A fairy lord and lady to ordain the King.

  The realisation brought a rush of memories.

  The Lord and Lady.

  As the thought swirled in her mind, her fingertips touched something else in the dark. A basket. The rough-wicker kind that women took to market. She could feel a handkerchief laid over the contents.

  Maria started to draw it away, then hesitated. What if something terrible was inside? But she thought she could smell food. Bread or cake, or something fresh baked. Her stomach growled, and she realised she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten.

  Steeling herself, Maria dug her hands under the handkerchief. Nestled inside the basket she made out three perfectly round little cakes, still warm from the oven. Laid alongside them was a corked bottle.

  Maria hesitated, wondering if it was some kind of trick. What if the food was poisoned or drugged? If the alternative was starving to death, she reasoned, it hardly mattered.

  She sat back, considering. If the food wasn’t adulterated, then it meant her captor wanted her to eat. Not cheap food either. What did it mean?

  Maria toyed with the idea of refusing the food, but her hunger got the better of her. She reached out again and this time the moment her fingers touched the warm cakes an animal instinct took over. She stuffed her mouth full, chewing.

  They were honey cakes, she realised, swallowing her final mouthful. And as far as she could tell there was nothing bitter or unusual about them. She lifted the bottle from the basket. Maria eased out the cork and sniffed the contents. It was sickly sweet. A smell she recognised from the countryside. Mead. She’d not drunk it in years. Not since coming to London, where wine and beer were the common drinks.

  Maria weighed the bottle in her hand. ‘Mead,’ she said. ‘Honey cakes and a honey drink.’ She tried to consider what significance that might have but none came to mind. ‘Charlie Tuesday,’ she whispered to herself. ‘If only you were here.’

  The memory of him brought a rush of emotion and, in a bid to quell it, Maria lifted the bottle to take a sip. For some reason she stopped. She suddenly saw Charlie in front of her, his bent nose and scarred lip.

  ‘Why would he give you mead?’ pressed Charlie. ‘Why honey cakes?’

  Maria hesitated. ‘You’re not here,’ she reminded Charlie. ‘You didn’t come.’

  She raised the bottle and sipped. It was good, and the sparkle of alcohol and sugar brought an immediate rush of warmth.

  ‘Not too much,’ she warned herself. ‘Keep your wits.’

  Maria took a deeper swig. Drugged? Poisoned? But she felt no ill effects.

  Then suddenly a story bloomed in her mind. A tale from her childhood about salt circles and honey cakes. What had the fairy king said?

  My little changeling. If you drink or eat in the fairy kingdom you must stay forever.

  As she set the wine down, Maria noticed she wasn’t wearing her own clothes. Her hands followed the line of an unfamiliar dress, stiff and strange. It was heavy. She could smell the musty fabric and guessed it to be old. There was fraying lace at the collar in the style of the royal court, from before the war.

  Where were her own clothes?

  She was slowly putting things together. There had been a corpse. A yellow-eyed dead girl who Tom had described as her changeling. Then she remembered the mystery she’d been trying to solve, the clue in the old confession.

  A dress in a brothel to summon the Lord and Lady. Maria shook her head at her own foolishness. What better person to discover the hidden dress than a thief taker raised in a brothel?

  Not only was she trapped, but Charlie Tuesday was in danger too.

  Chapter 12

  The playhouse had been cleared. Lynette had persuaded the manager to let Charlie and Percy remain.

  ‘It’s a trick, s’what it is,’ Lynette was raging.
‘Them high-ups in the Duke’s Theatre. They can’t stand us illegal playhouses. They’ve done this to ruin us!’

  Charlie was silent, examining the body of the girl. He stooped closer and Lynette drew her handkerchief to her mouth.

  ‘Don’t get so close, Charlie,’ she begged. ‘There’s vapours in dead folk.’

  ‘It’s a pity the noose was cut,’ said Charlie thoughtfully. ‘Makes it more difficult to tell how she died.’ He was looking at a small puddle of dark blood, where the body had hit.

  He glanced at the rope. Something about the knot had been unusual, he thought. But now it lay unravelled.

  ‘Not an executioner’s rope,’ said Charlie, picking up the two ends. ‘This is double-twisted hemp. Hangings use triple.’ He held the rope in his hands, studying it. ‘Might tell us something,’ Charlie decided, cutting away a small blood-stained piece and putting it in his pocket.

  He switched his attention to the corpse, taking a wooden sword that had been discarded on the stage and carefully moving the body. The girl flopped onto her back, staring upwards. She was smiling.

  ‘Her eyes, Charlie!’ Lynette was covering her mouth. The whites of the dead girl’s eyes had been stained a livid yellow.

  ‘Iodine would give that colour.’ The suggestion came from Percy, who’d been standing silently.

  Charlie shook his head. ‘It’s not a dye,’ he said. ‘A dye would have pooled at the edges of her eyes. The shade is the same all across.’ He pointed to the ghoulish pigment. ‘I think this came from within,’ he decided.

  ‘You think she was poisoned?’ asked Lynette.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Charlie frowned at the corpse. ‘She wasn’t hanged,’ he added. ‘No rope burn on the neck. And look at her expression. Hanged men and women don’t die like that.’

  They all stared at the girl’s placid face.

  ‘Do you recognise her?’ he asked Lynette.

  She shook her head. ‘Should I?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Charlie. ‘I think she was an actress. Not a good one,’ he added.

  ‘I’ve never seen her on stage,’ said Lynette. ‘What makes you think she acted?’

  ‘Look at the suntan on her calves.’ Charlie nodded to where the dishevelled skirts exposed the bottom of the girl’s legs. ‘She wore dresses too short to be a decent kind of woman. But’ – Charlie pointed at her lips – ‘there’s a residue of dark lip paint. You can’t get that depth of red without cochineal. Expensive for your average whore.’

  ‘She might ’a been high class,’ said Lynette. ‘I wore cochineal in my day,’ she added with a saucy wink at Percy. He blinked in alarm and straightened his smart coat.

  ‘But she’s too thin to have been earning a good living,’ said Charlie. ‘Expensive whores are well fed. And she has candle wax blisters and rope calluses on her hands. I think she was given the occasional background role, but was mostly delegated to more menial theatre tasks. Raising the curtains, trimming the candles.’ He thought. ‘She wears Maria’s clothes,’ he said. ‘Someone means to leave a message in that, surely. It’s like a changeling, isn’t it? From the fairy tales. Someone vanishes into the fairy realm. Another takes their place.’

  ‘Fairies crave Christian children,’ agreed Lynette. ‘They steal them and replace babies with a weak member of their own kind.’

  ‘Could someone mean us to know Maria is alive?’

  ‘Changelings are usually alive,’ Percy pointed out. ‘Someone might mean us to know Maria is dead.’ He was twisting his hands together, the knuckles white.

  Charlie noticed something in the hand of the dead girl. A paper was clutched in her fingers. He tugged it free. It was old, inked in careful writing. Charlie started to decipher the letters, his poor reading making the process painstaking. Percy began reading in a loud clear voice:

  Deep and dark the old ones sleep,

  Crowned Lord and girdled Lady of the Keep,

  They at first and last will come,

  And false earthly Kings will be undone.

  It was written in a sloping script. And underneath, in a newer hand, was scrawled:

  I’ve taken your Maria. Find the Lord and Lady before the end of Lent and she will live. The Lady will tell you where to find me. Come for me without them and she will die.

  It was signed: ‘Tom Black’.

  Chapter 13

  On Ratcliffe Highway, the sound of alarm bells rang out up and down the street. Women scattered, screaming as an army of blue-aproned boys rampaged. Drunk sailors were making for the docks. Parrots and monkeys fled in all directions.

  In the Gilded Lock, Damaris Page was loading her blunderbuss as the door of her whorehouse splintered and cracked. Behind her, terrified women and children were escaping down a rope ladder slung from the window. Viola was halfway down, cursing in Italian. Clancy was handing children to her, a determined expression on her pointed features.

  There was a loud shriek of splitting wood and an axe blade appeared through the door. Then a torrent of blue-aproned boys and men broke through.

  Damaris arranged her large body in front of the women, gun held easily.

  A stocky man moved to the front. His hair was cropped in the Roundhead style and he moved with the easy authority of a military leader.

  ‘You’re not an apprentice,’ she said.

  The man was dressed like a soldier, with a thick brown coat, canvas breeches and square-cut tan shoes.

  ‘No. My name is Praise-God Barebones.’ He gave the short bow of a soldier. ‘And you need no introduction,’ he continued. ‘Tall as a man and black as the devil. Slave brand on your pretty shoulder. You’re the talk of London. Damaris Page, the sailor’s bawd. I hear you’ve been press-ganging your customers.’

  ‘I was sold as a slave,’ said Damaris, her voice lilting with its African accent. ‘You think I do wrong? Sending them to sea for a shilling? You’d better believe they did worse to me.’

  Barebones eyed the inside of the house, its threadbare fixtures and cheap décor.

  ‘You’re not here to riot,’ said Damaris. ‘You’re looking for something.’

  ‘The Lord and Lady rise, Mrs Page,’ said Barebones. ‘We feel their evil influence. I think you whores have been hiding them all these years.’

  Damaris’s jaw tightened. She levelled the gun at him. ‘There’s nothing here for you,’ she said. Her eyes flicked to the rope ladder.

  Clancy was passing the last little boy to Viola, who lowered him to the ground.

  ‘I fought for the Republic,’ said Barebones. ‘All men equal. Women dressed cleanly. Not for whores to frig themselves on the street.’

  Damaris’s eyes fell on a boy with beard-shaped smallpox scars and flecks of premature grey in his greasy hair. He was transfixed by Viola, escaping down the ladder, her dark hair swinging. Damaris tightened her trigger finger.

  Barebones followed her gaze and his brow knitted. ‘Repent,’ he said sharply. ‘Remember what we spoke of. Temptation.’

  ‘They’re only whores,’ said Repent, licking his lower lip. He hadn’t taken his eyes from Viola. ‘That one’s foreign, I reckon,’ he added hungrily. ‘Not even English.’

  ‘We do not gratify desires of the flesh,’ said Barebones.

  Repent turned away from the Italian girl petulantly.

  Damaris looked from the apprentice to Barebones. ‘Your son?’ she guessed, marking the resemblance. ‘I see him afore, ’round Wapping. Takin’ things he’s not paid for.’ She nodded meaningfully at the escaping women.

  Rage flared deep in Barebones’s lined features. ‘You women,’ he said in a soft, dangerous voice. ‘You get above yourselves under this new king. Forget your proper place.’

  He looked at the women, still trying to escape through the window by the swinging rope ladder. Clancy was at the rear, moving slowly.

  ‘Search the women and children,’ he decided, raising his voice. ‘Lay hands on them.’

  Damaris took a quick step forward, positioning herself in front
of the escaping women, aiming the blunderbuss.

  Barebones moved suddenly, grabbing the muzzle of the large gun. There was a deafening explosion. A cloud of gunpowder smoke filled the room and horsehair plaster and shattered roof timbers rained down. Barebones punched Damaris in the stomach. She doubled over in pain, dropping the gun. He pushed her to the ground and put a heavy foot on her chest.

  ‘Stay down,’ he warned, ‘and you won’t get hurt.’

  Barebones looked at the assembled trunks and chests, then at the ceiling. Dusty daylight now beamed through a ragged hole in the roof. A concealed attic floor had been revealed in the wreckage. Barebones’s gaze rested on his son, deliberating.

  ‘Bolly,’ said Barebones eventually, shifting his attention to a golden-haired boy with a handsome face, ‘look in the attic. Repent, take your boys and search the chests.’

  Repent’s sour expression grew furious.

  Damaris watched as Repent beckoned a little pack of boys to fall on her scant possessions, ransacking, tearing open chests, upending trunks and smashing apart desks and wardrobes. Her dark skin was shining with sweat.

  Barebones was watching Damaris, who lay prone on the ground.

  ‘It doesn’t concern you?’ he asked. ‘The destruction of your property?’

  ‘I came to England with nothing,’ said Damaris. ‘I can make it all again. Men who cheat and steal, it is you who will always be poor.’

  ‘Nothing here,’ called Repent. ‘Only trinkets. Whores’ things.’ He dropped a string of glass beads on the floor and shattered them underfoot.

  ‘Tear it up,’ commanded Barebones. ‘Rip the dresses, throw everything from the window.’

  ‘Master Barebones.’ He was interrupted by Bolly, who had emerged from the smoking wreckage of the attic and was pointing. ‘There’s two hidden beds up here.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Barebones, looking down at Damaris. ‘It seems you weren’t being quite truthful, Mrs Page.’