by C. S. Quinn
PRAISE FOR THE THIEF TAKER:
‘Captivating, vivid writing. Descriptions come straight off the pages and permeate deep into your senses, and a truly electrifying pace. Quinn is a brilliant new talent!’
— Peter James, international bestselling author
‘A fast and dangerous ride through Restoration London where plague stalks every street and death is hidden behind the iron-beaked mask of a plague doctor. Sharp, atmospheric and sumptuous.’
— Simon Toyne, author of Sanctus
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 C.S. Quinn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477824931
ISBN-10: 1477824936
Cover design by bürosüdo München, www.buerosued.de
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936220
To
Professor Vivien Jones and Dr Robert Jones. Thanks for all the history.
Contents
London, 1665
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Three months later
Hungry for more Thief Taker intrigue?
Acknowledgments
About the Author
London, 1665
In the year of the Black Death London is a city of half-timbered houses and dark towers. In the narrow backstreets, astrologists predict the future, and alchemists conjure wonders. Traitors’ heads line London Bridge, where witches sell potions, and gamesters turn cards. The river flowing beneath lands a daily cargo of smuggler gangs and pirates.
England has a new King, a monarch of the blood. But since his arrival, plague sweeps into the city like a deadly judgement. And already, there is talk amongst Londoners that blood has become dangerous currency.
Prologue
No one said it out loud. But there had been signs. Tokens. On her body.
At one time the family had considered themselves fortunate. Their half-timbered house set them proudly apart from the tenement-dwellers who were crammed three generations to a single room. Now they sat blank and scared in the dwindling twilight.
A fire had been lit to clean the air, making the summer heat stifling. Cleansing spices wound a sickly smoke into the shadowy room. The cauldron holding yesterday’s pottage sat desolate on the dirt floor.
Anna-Maria, the second-eldest daughter, sat on a three-legged stool with her sisters arranged at her feet. She was sewing, but the needle kept slipping from her sweat-slicked fingers.
There was a heavy knock at the door. Anna-Maria laid down her work on the worn wooden table and made to rise. But her younger sister was already on her feet, gait little more assured than a toddle. The tiny hand lifted the latch and with difficulty drew back the heavy door. Her mouth dropped open in terror.
The monster was shrouded from head to toe in heavy oilcloth. An iron mask covered his features, jutting forward into a foot-long beak. Two eye-holes had been reduced to blank black spaces by a pair of thick crystal goggles – a grotesque bird peering curiously into the house.
She took a step back and collided with the reassuring warmth of her father.
‘It is only the plague doctor,’ he said, as a thin wail of horror began to emit from the child. ‘Come,’ he beckoned the guest, looking uneasily at the unseeing figure which appeared to have cocked its head to one side so as to better hear the girl’s wail.
‘I am sorry for the warmth of the house,’ he added.
‘The girl is of twenty-two years?’ A guttural voice came from somewhere within the dark shape. Now that the doctor had been ushered by the hearthside his eye coverings glinted in the firelight.
‘She . . . she is twenty-two,’ agreed the father.
‘And strong?’
‘She is . . . was a healthy girl,’ said the father, his face tightening at the thought of his daughter helpless with the sickness.
The doctor opened the dark oilcloth and drew out a large pouch. Then he unrolled a length of leather. Strapped pitilessly inside, its eyes bulging in pain, was a live toad. Anna-Maria’s face twisted in sympathy, but her father took her hand. ‘It is a necessary remedy,’ he said. ‘The creature will not suffer.’
The doctor’s black cloth gloves grasped the toad firmly, causing it to writhe and croak in his grip. The tapered fingers of the gloves looked like talons, thought Anna-Maria. Not like a human person at all. She had a sudden image of a deformed fiend hunched inside the dark canvas coat.
‘Keep it alive,’ explained the doctor, handing the toad to the father. ‘It will purify the air and save the young ones from harm.’
The man gulped, nodded and handed the toad to Anna-Maria who recoiled from the slimy skin. She moved to the collection of
clay crockery and wooden utensils arranged around the wooden fireplace and dropped the wriggling animal into a long jug.
‘The daughter is upstairs?’ The doctor was pointing to the ladder.
‘I will take you to her.’
The doctor put up a warning hand.
‘If the tokens are already upon her then breathing her air is deadly. I shall treat the girl alone.’
The father looked to his other children and nodded. ‘Do whatever you can to save her,’ he said. ‘No matter the price I will find it.’
The mask waved slowly in agreement. And then the heavy figure began a lumbering ascent to the second floor.
It was over an hour later that he moved heavily back down the ladder, the oversized beak swaying with his step.
‘I have done what I can and she is resting now.’
‘She is . . . will she be well?’
The gloved hands folded themselves in a steeple gesture. ‘If she lasts this night then all may be well. But none must disturb her.’
He moved towards the low wooden door, his oilcloth shroud sweeping behind him. There was a line of blood on the hem, Anna-Maria noticed. He must have bled Eva to bring down her fever. She shuddered at the thought of the medical knives beneath the cloak. Her father closed the door gently behind the doctor.
The littlest girl took up a piece of cloth, her childish fingers fumbling with the simple needlework.
As the fire settled to a red smoulder, the atmosphere thickened with the smoke. On the mantle, the toad scrabbled pitifully in its warm confines. The heavy walls seemed to be closing in.
Several hours rolled away, and the small girl held up the finished fabric for inspection. Her father gave it a distracted half glance.
‘It is a fine stuff and will fetch a pretty penny,’ he said. But as he looked the white cloth took on a sudden red stain, which bloomed like a poppy amongst the other stitched flowers. Then another blossomed, and another. Something red was dripping from the ceiling. From the room in which Eva lay.
Anna-Maria looked up in alarm. But before she could find her voice her father had run past her and scaled the ladder. From the ground floor they heard his cries.
Anna-Maria was the first to reach him. Her father tried to push her away, but she had already seen it.
She gasped out a sob. The blood-soaked room blurred.
Through her tears the terrible remains began to shift and distort. There was a shape on the red-raised skin of the corpse. It was a crown. Above a loop of three knots. And two words.
‘He Returns.’
Chapter One
‘Are you the Thief Taker?’ The man’s voice was parched and a good deal too urgent.
The Bucket of Blood alehouse was lively with afternoon trade, and to Charlie’s practised ear the whispered voice spelled trouble. His fingers sought out the key around his neck, tracing the shape at its head – a crown above three loops of knots.
As a boy, Charlie had been found clutching the key. He regarded it as a lucky charm of sorts.
‘I have not taken a case for months,’ replied Charlie. ‘Plague times are not good for thief takers.’
The man’s face registered confusion. He wore clumsily-stitched trousers held up by a string belt – the uniform of London’s multitude of struggling commoners. And Charlie assumed he was in search of a lost wife or daughter.
‘I haven’t the heart, to take on all the missing person’s cases,’ Charlie clarified. ‘Hundreds have vanished into plague graves. Often they cannot be found.’
‘I don’t seek you to find a relative. Nor catch a thief,’ answered the man. He took a step closer, turning his head this way and that, assuring himself they weren’t overheard.
In the high babble of the alehouse, this was unlikely. The only table was crowded round, and the more dedicated drinkers had made a jostling huddle next to the Bucket of Blood’s single barrel.
A set of card players were sat on their haunches in the far corner, where the diamond-pane window illuminated their game in dusty shafts of sunlight. And between the laughing adults squeezed skinny barefoot boys, selling Hyde Park hazelnuts by the handful.
A jar of plague water was the only sign that disease was growing in parts of the City. Here in Covent Garden the summer heat had mingled with the march of death, to bring a strangely carnival atmosphere.
Charlie’s head still rang with the bruised ache of last night’s drinking, and the noisy regulars were louder than he would have liked.
The man’s voice was low. ‘I heard that you have certificates.’
Charlie’s frown lifted. In lieu of thief-taking, the plague certificates were proving a popular sale. Something which should probably disturb him more than it did. Since plague had tightened its grip, rich Londoners had insisted that only those with Health Certificates were allowed in the wealthy streets in the west. And forged copies were a valuable commodity.
His hand slipped nonchalantly inside his coat. The naval-style garment fitted close at the torso with a line of tiny buttons, flaring over his skinny thighs and looping in large cuffs at his finely-muscled forearms. Though it lacked the gold stitching of a naval officer’s uniform, it did everything a fashionable top-layer should and was only just beginning to fray at the edges, after years of daily wear.
The thick brown fabric housed Charlie’s money, weaponry, eating apparatus, snacks and various found objects, with admirable discretion. And the long coat also did a passable job of hiding his grubby linen shirt and cheap woollen hose, which hung in many-mended seams to his knees.
Charlie’s bare feet he could do nothing to disguise. After a lifetime of feeling the London mud beneath his toes, he couldn’t get along with shoes.
The man watched, hypnotised, as Charlie’s hand turned with a pick-pocket’s assurance and produced a roll of certificates from the dark depths of his coat.
‘Two shillings,’ said Charlie, his lips barely moving.
The man swallowed. His eyes swept the uppermost certificate.
‘This will assure them at Westminster I do not have plague?’ he asked. His voice was trembling. Charlie gave the slightest of nods.
‘It will carry you anywhere in the City,’ he said. ‘These copies bear the City seal. They are the best you will find.’
‘What of beyond the City?’ pressed the man. ‘We hear it now, that some towns are not letting Londoners travel out, without a certificate.’
Charlie nodded again. He unrolled the paper a fraction.
‘See you there?’ Charlie gestured with his little finger to a little circle of dark-red wax. ‘That is the official stamp. Made at City Hall.’
The man nodded. ‘They told me you know people. High-up people.’
Charlie held back a grin. ‘Let’s just say, I know a girl in Guildhall.’
The man was chewing his lip now, and Charlie’s heart sank, waiting for the inevitable.
‘I do not have two shillings,’ the man admitted.
The roll of paper vanished.
‘My daughter,’ said the man, his voice choking. ‘My daughter works in Westminster. She is a servant in a fine house. There is plague there. I must see her before . . . .’
His voice tightened, and trailed off. ‘Please,’ he managed.
Charlie sighed. His rent was due a week ago, and two shillings would only cover half of it. This was his last certificate, and he’d been hoping its sale would buy more time from his landlord.
‘How much do you have?’ he asked.
‘Tuppence.’
Charlie shook his head in exasperation. ‘Londoners are queued ten thick, along four streets to get these certificates. And you think to buy one, for less than the cost of a mutton chop?’
The man looked at the dusty floorboards and then back up again, pleadingly.
Charlie rubbed his forehead, wishing his thief-taking work hadn’t become so problematic. A single case could have paid off his rent threefold.
‘You live in Billingsgate?’ Charlie asked, afte
r a moment’s pause.
‘How did you know that?’
‘Your trousers are made of wharf sacking, and your finger has a fish-gutting callous.’
The man’s eyes widened, and Charlie mentally admonished himself. He still sometimes forgot that his talent for observing details unnerved people.
‘Take a good look at my face,’ said Charlie. ‘I want you to remember it.’
The man nodded uncertainly, staring back.
Charlie’s youthful face and round brown eyes gave him an air of innocence which though not strictly accurate, inspired trust. Now in his late twenties, the golden curls of his childhood had settled to a less angelic dark blonde. And a bucking horse had added a sliver of pearly scar on his lip and a slight kink to his nose.
The overall effect was of the kind of man who, when he wasn’t selling things illegally, wrote the odd poem. It was a look which came in handy in the delicate web of favours and debts, which was the second currency of poorer Londoners.
‘Remember it well,’ said Charlie. ‘I will count this as a favour owed.’
The certificate magically reappeared and insinuated itself into the man’s unresisting hand. He clutched it immediately, but his face showed he didn’t yet believe his good fortune.
‘There might come a time, when I need information from Billingsgate,’ continued Charlie. ‘If that time comes, I will trust you to tell me true.’
Suddenly comprehending, the man began nodding furiously. He beamed in wide gratitude.
‘Even if it is your friend I ask of,’ cautioned Charlie. ‘You will tell me honestly?’
‘You have my promise.’ The man’s words were garbled in his unexpected relief.
He fumbled with his hanging pocket and clumsily pressed two battered pennies into Charlie’s hand.
‘Thank you, thank you,’ he stammered. ‘You are an angel, truly. My daughter . . . I thank you, with all my heart.’
‘Do not tell anyone you got it from me for that price.’
The man shook his head violently. ‘I will take it to the grave.’