The Changeling Murders (The Thief Taker Series Book 4)

by C. S. Quinn

  She led them into the captain’s cabin, which was filled with untidily arranged trunks.

  ‘There,’ she said proudly. ‘All the dresses of my house. Maria looked in there,’ she added, moving to a trunk near the back. ‘Plain things inherited from Mrs Jenks’s house,’ she said dismissively. ‘Quite out of fashion.’

  ‘Inherited?’ Charlie raised an eyebrow.

  ‘In fair compensation for business of mine she took,’ said Mother Mitchell.

  ‘You mean to stay you stole dresses from a rival?’ Percy was shaking his head in disapproval.

  ‘Mrs Jenks is more than a rival,’ said Charlie. ‘She’s the doxy queen. Laid claim to Covent Garden and runs half the brothels there.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen her parading in her carriage,’ said Percy. ‘An elderly woman with a lot of false hair and make-up.’

  ‘I’ll never hire south of the river again,’ opined Mother Mitchell bitterly. ‘Those stupid boys took the wrong trunk,’ she added, throwing back the lid. ‘As I say, they’re all worthless old things.’

  Charlie held up a few dresses. They were cheaply made and badly stitched. He took them out and examined them. But to his disappointment he found nothing unusual.

  ‘Only old dresses,’ he said.

  Percy was frowning deeply, fists clenched. ‘It’s not like her,’ he said. ‘Why should Maria have been interested in a fairy tale? Some ancient mystery?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ replied Mother Mitchell, looking at Charlie.

  ‘Enlighten us,’ he said.

  Mother Mitchell laughed throatily. ‘Perhaps Maria was searching for something about you, Charlie. Your past. What if she thinks this lost lord and lady are relations of yours?’

  Charlie was surprised at the ricochet of emotions this suggestion awakened.

  ‘You?’ Percy was staring at Charlie, eyes roaming his bare feet and shabby leather coat. ‘Why should you have noble relations?’

  ‘I never knew my father,’ said Charlie. ‘He died at sea. My mother was murdered, leaving me this key.’ He lifted the unusual key he carried around his neck. ‘It led to some documents relating to the King.’

  ‘Seems your family was born under a dark star,’ said Percy with a sniff. ‘And all kinds of people handle royal documents, myself included. It doesn’t make me noble. Although my family has gentry claims,’ he added hastily.

  ‘It drove you apart, did it not?’ asked Mother Mitchell, adjusting her bosom under its thick whalebone. ‘Your mysterious lost family. Do you ever wonder why you feel compelled to help anyone who asks you? The little orphan boy who watched his mother die,’ she added poetically, ‘grows up to save all the poor victims of London’s crime. Only you can never save them all, can you?’

  Charlie felt a wave of terrible guilt. What if Maria had put herself in danger trying to discover the truth of his lost past?

  ‘I don’t think Maria was looking for something involving me,’ he said, trying to sound more convincing than he felt. ‘She knows how much I can deduce from clothing, even old clothing. Most likely she wanted to find the dress and have me track this lord and lady.’

  ‘I don’t think Maria found the dress she was searching for,’ said Mother Mitchell grandly. ‘She left to go looking elsewhere. Maria asked about one of your old flames, Charlie. A little gypsy thief named Lily Boswell.’

  Chapter 18

  Maria thought she might have been asleep. The world felt strange, slow-moving and thick. She’d been in the dark so long it was difficult to know.

  Was there something in that mead?

  Maria was seized with a sudden wild need to be free. She yanked at her restraints, heaving at the manacles. When the chains held firm, a guttural scream burst from her lungs and she kicked furiously. The scream turned to shaking sobs. And then she was suddenly, eerily calm. Her brain seemed to bob gently in her head, like a ship on a quiet sea.

  Keep calm, Maria urged herself. Be logical.

  She spread her bound hands, feeling for clues, trying to act methodically. There were floorboards beneath her, she was sure of it. Maria closed her eyes, listening. Charlie always said that the strangest thing to hear in London would be silence. He could identify any district by sound. The rag sellers along Cheapside, the paper-presses at St Pauls, the animal herds of Smithfield. But Maria could hear nothing but a faint ringing in her ears.

  She shook her head in annoyance and the ringing grew louder.

  There was a familiar dry smell on the air. She let images drift through her mind, trying to seize on where she’d encountered it before. Thoughts seemed to come and go like feathers on the wind, soft and rolling away.

  The answer flowered slowly. It was hemp she could smell. Maria remembered it from a trip to Bridewell Prison, where convicted prostitutes were forced to beat hemp. She’d been bringing food to the women prisoners. Percy hadn’t approved.

  For a moment, Maria thought she might be incarcerated in an isolated cell. Then she remembered. Bridewell had burned down during the Great Fire.

  Now she heard approaching footsteps. Her stomach lurched.

  Maria drew to mind what she knew of her captor. The pale skin and strange eyes. If he meant to kill her, she reasoned, why leave food?

  The footsteps grew louder. Tramping over floorboards. Then a hatch opened, and she heard someone ascend a ladder.

  I’m up high, she decided. In some kind of attic.

  A blaze of light flared in the dark and she caught a sudden flash of her prison. Had she imagined it? The floor appeared to have been completely covered in snakes. Like some terrible portal of hell. She blinked, trying to call back the image of where she was, but her mind wasn’t assisting. Thoughts kept sliding free.

  A flame grew closer, bobbing at the end of a thin wax taper. It revealed him by degrees. The jet-black hair and strangely old eyes. She’d remembered him as passably attractive, but the thought was shocking to her now. Up close his skin was thin and waxen, as though the muscles beneath it had wasted away. The blue-green eyes were pale-rimmed, with clumps of the dark eyelashes missing. Up close he looked shocking.

  ‘You are very interesting to watch,’ he said eventually. There was a silence as he peered at her. ‘I forget myself,’ he said. ‘You must be introduced. I am Tom Black.’

  Maria said nothing.

  ‘You don’t want me to know you are afraid,’ he decided. ‘You give yourself away, of course. Fear and pain are two of the easiest.’

  ‘Why do you keep me here?’ she demanded.

  ‘I need Charlie Tuesday’s services,’ said Tom. ‘You are a means to keep him engaged.’

  ‘You think he’ll find you the Lord and Lady?’ asked Maria. ‘He won’t. Charlie would never help you bring down England . . .’ She stopped.

  Tom was blinking at her in confusion. ‘You think I mean to use the Lord and Lady to dispossess the King?’

  ‘What other motive could a man like you have?’

  He shook his head. ‘My plans are far . . . humbler.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I am a changeling,’ said Tom. ‘A fairy. My own kind swapped me for a human child. I was raised as a cuckoo in the nest. Only my mother knew the truth.’ His face darkened. ‘The Lord and Lady can send me back,’ said Tom. ‘They have the power to let me go home.’ The idea of this seemed beautiful to him.

  ‘Old magic,’ said Maria, suddenly understanding. ‘They can open the door to the fairy place.’

  He nodded. ‘It would only take a touch of the Lady’s magic girdle,’ he said, ‘a nod of the Lord’s sacred head. Think of their powers.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’ve dreamed of it. The fairy kingdom. I have no place here. I’ve tried so hard to become one of you, but it does not stick. I’ve learned every nuance of your strange emotions and still they make no sense to me. You are so . . . confusing.’ He closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘Such an unpredictable species. One moment rational, the next letting your feelings run you into unspeakable foolishness.’ His e
yes opened. ‘Consider our situation,’ he added. ‘If Charlie Tuesday does not bring me the Lord and Lady before Good Friday, my chance to return will have passed.’ He blinked. ‘I would take no pleasure in killing you. But it would be a necessity.’

  Chapter 19

  On the luxurious ship, Mother Mitchell was eyeing Percy triumphantly. The deck beneath them rolled slightly on the swell.

  ‘I wondered why might Maria have been asking after one of Charlie’s women,’ she said archly, ‘if she didn’t have wedding fears?’

  Percy had turned deep red.

  ‘Lily Boswell is not an old flame,’ corrected Charlie. ‘She’s a spy for the King and I found her services valuable. We worked together once upon a time. And she’s long gone. I last saw her aboard a ship set for the high seas.’

  ‘Yet I hear she’s back in London,’ said Mother Mitchell. ‘Sunk her ship, came back with her tail between her legs,’ she added with obvious satisfaction. Lily had once worked at Mother Mitchell’s house and had run away with a valuable suitor – a crime for which the old madam held a lifelong animosity. ‘She’s working in Ozinda’s, in St James’s,’ concluded Mother Mitchell. ‘How the mighty have fallen.’

  ‘The chocolate house?’ asked Charlie. ‘A brothel by any other name?’

  Mother Mitchell nodded. ‘Think themselves exotic,’ she said. ‘They imagine Lily a dark-skinned beauty. They’ll soon find out when she steals their best silks.’ She smiled smugly. ‘Once a gypsy, always a gypsy.’

  ‘So Lily’s working in a bawdy house, of sorts,’ said Charlie. He called to mind the ludicrously priced Ozinda’s, with its decorated tables full of actresses and beautiful women.

  ‘Girls for talking to only,’ snorted Mother Mitchell. ‘As if an actress would not lift her skirts for a farthing.’

  Percy was blinking hard, trying to follow the conversation. ‘Who is Lily Boswell?’ he demanded.

  ‘An old friend,’ said Charlie, keeping his tone neutral.

  Mother Mitchell made a noise that could have been ‘bollocks’.

  Percy’s eyes bulged. ‘You’ve . . . fornicated with this woman? And she’s the only person who can help us?’

  ‘She doesn’t hold grudges,’ said Charlie untruthfully.

  Percy was shaking his head in disgust. ‘Is there any woman in London you don’t have carnal knowledge of?’

  ‘A disappointingly large number.’ Charlie’s scarred lip twisted in concentration. ‘Maria reads about a lost dress in an old confession she’s transcribing,’ he said, sifting what he knew methodically. ‘First she comes to Mother Mitchell. Then she asks for Lily. Both high-end whorehouses.’

  Percy curled his lip, disgusted any distinction had been made. ‘A whorehouse is a whorehouse,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe in Bumpkinville,’ said Mother Mitchell, running a disdainful eye over Percy’s provincial suit. ‘In London we divide it up.’ She listed on her ringed fingers. ‘Damaris Page takes the sailors and dockers in the east. Mrs Jenks has the theatregoers in Covent Garden. And I have the west,’ she concluded proudly. ‘The nobs and the royalty.’

  ‘Ozinda’s doesn’t open until nightfall,’ said Charlie. ‘That’s hours away.’ He took out the paper again and stared at it, willing an answer to present itself.

  ‘You said,’ said Charlie, turning to Mother Mitchell, ‘that the story of the Lord and Lady might involve a butcher or a baker’s son?’

  She nodded.

  He thought for a moment. Facts were sliding together but as yet nothing was making sense.

  A lord and lady.

  The double-twist noose.

  ‘The noose,’ said Charlie with sudden certainty. ‘I remember where I’ve seen it before. It’s a butcher’s truss. A rope for hanging carcasses.’ He thought a moment more. ‘You only find rope like that in the Shambles.’

  ‘The slaughtering district?’ supplied Percy.

  Charlie nodded. ‘Behind Cow Lane. Where Cromwell got his best soldiers. Almost all fought against the King.’ He extracted the bloodied piece of rope from his pocket. ‘I’ll go to the Shambles first,’ he decided. ‘Ask some questions. Maybe someone knows something.’

  Percy was bristling. ‘You can’t think of visiting the Shambles. It’s a hotbed of men who want to overthrow the King.’

  ‘Can you blame them?’ said Charlie. ‘They work twelve hours a day to stop their children starving. They never wanted the King back. Now they pay hearth tax so Lady Castlemaine might buy more jewels.’

  ‘You want to question blood-soaked Republicans with meat cleavers? I will not step one foot—’ began Percy.

  Charlie held up his hands. ‘I wouldn’t suggest you do,’ he said. ‘A lawyer would hardly live to tell the tale. Go back to Temple Bar. I’ll come find you when I have something worth telling.’

  Percy snorted derisively. ‘If you come out of the Shambles at all,’ he replied. ‘It’s a fool’s errand.’

  ‘I must take action,’ said Charlie. ‘Whoever took Maria demanded the Lord and Lady by Good Friday. That’s three days away. I have three days to find two people who are probably long dead if they ever existed at all.’

  Mother Mitchell put a ringed hand on his shoulder. ‘If anyone can do it, it’s you.’

  Chapter 20

  Women streamed from the building screaming, sobbing, clutching at ripped clothing. A great pyre of broken possessions was amassing from items hurled from windows.

  ‘No!’ a woman’s voice was shouting. ‘Not the basin! It doesn’t belong to me!’

  Two apprentices were holding the brothel-keeper as she struggled. Her hair was dishevelled and the thick circles of rouge on her cheeks were sliced with tears. She blinked in disbelief as a blue-aproned boy brought a flaming torch and set light to the broken things. A savage cheer went up from the apprentices. The brothel-keeper gave a wail of despair.

  Repent was watching the women, lips slightly parted, his breathing a little too hard. One of the apprentices was dragging a prostitute from the house by her hair. Her dress was open at the front, bare breasts swaying loose. Repent tilted his head, the ghost of a smile playing on his thin lips. He walked towards the house.

  At the window, a group of wild-eyed youths were hurling beautiful furnishings. An ornately carved chair exploded into pieces on the hard cobbles. A decorated porcelain wash-basin smashed beside it, and then a matching hand-painted jug.

  ‘Do you regret it now?’ grinned a boy. ‘This life of sin?’

  The brothel-keeper said nothing, staring blankly at what had once been her property.

  From the top floor two men were hurling dress after heavy silken dress. They flopped like ghostly suicides onto the muddy street below.

  Barebones watched the dresses. Then his eyes roamed the apprentices and stilled.

  Repent had a woman pinned to the wall, a knife at her throat. One of his thin hands was under her skirts.

  ‘Repent!’ Barebones was next to him in a few short strides.

  ‘I was teaching this harlot the price of her sin,’ he said, but his hands fell back all the same and the girl fled, crying.

  Barebones put his hands on Repent’s shoulders. The boy looked up at him, his young frame tall and thin to his father’s soldier’s muscle.

  ‘I did no wrong,’ muttered Repent, toying with the cross at his neck.

  Barebones looked carefully into his son’s face. ‘Good,’ he said after a moment. ‘Good. We will uproot the evil at the heart of it.’ He fingered the iron sword at his hip. ‘We will kill the Lord and Lady. Together.’

  Barebones strolled to the front of the mounting pile and turned to the brothel-keeper. ‘Perhaps you have something to tell us?’ he said. ‘We know you hid the Lord and Lady during the civil war. We know they came through your house.’

  The brothel-keeper shook her head. ‘Cromwell’s men came already,’ she said. ‘Years ago, many times. I told them then. We never hid them here. We’re no Royalists.’

  ‘You are every inch a Roya
list,’ said Barebones with thick contempt. ‘Cromwell’s rule was a time of safety and sobriety. No acting. No parties. No gaudy clothing. It was . . .’ He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. ‘A good time. We made laws for the good of the people, not to feather a mad king’s army, or dress a selfish queen in pearls and gold.’ Barebones held up a silk dress and dropped it onto the pyre, eyes blazing. ‘Women like you,’ he said, ‘broke the Republic.’

  ‘No!’ she shouted. ‘That’s my business you burn!’

  ‘You send your girls in their finery, flaunting themselves,’ said Barebones. ‘You condemn men to hell.’ He looked around at the destruction. ‘But you may keep a few things. I could persuade the boys. If you tell me what I want to know.’

  She watched as a box shattered open on the ground, spilling marzipan sweets. Apprentices fell on it, stuffing their mouths hungrily.

  ‘I don’t know nothing!’ gabbled the brothel-keeper. ‘I swear it . . . I . . .’

  Barebones nodded at the boys. More dresses were hurled onto the pyre. There was a strange hissing shriek as the silk caught light.

  The brothel-keeper sagged. ‘There was a dress,’ she admitted. ‘An old one. Like you said.’

  Barebones gripped her tightly.

  ‘It looked like a fairy thing,’ continued the brothel-keeper. ‘All green stitched leaves, hanging ribbons and gossamer-fine.’

  ‘What else?’ growled Barebones.

  ‘I don’t well remember,’ stuttered the brothel-keeper. ‘Only it was old. Very old. It was supposed to lead to the Lord and Lady. Or summon them. That’s all I know, I swear. I thought it nothing but a story.’

  Barebones frowned. ‘Where?’

  ‘In one of the high-ups,’ said the brothel-keeper. ‘Mrs Jenks’s on Chiswell Street. But it was years ago. It will be long gone . . .’

  Barebones moved closer. ‘Chiswell Street. You’re certain?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Barebones. He turned to the apprentices.