The Thief Taker

by C. S. Quinn

  ‘We will stay back here against the bars,’ said Charlie, putting an arm around her waist. ‘As far back from the others as possible.’

  He looked out at the dying man and the other prisoners, and then back at Maria.

  Her usually tidy hair was in disarray and her dress was ripped at the collar where the guards had dragged her into the prison. Charlie had never seen Maria look so utterly defeated.

  ‘Come,’ he said, moving his hand to the fabric. ‘Here is torn. Let me see if I can reattach it. There. Now you may face the guards in your usual style.’

  He looked up at her with a smile, but something in her sad face made his stop, with his hand rested on her collarbone.

  ‘It will be alright Maria,’ he said. ‘I will get you out of here.’

  Her lips were on his suddenly, and he was kissing her back, pushing against the weight of her feeling. Steadying himself he caught her up in his arms. And for a long moment they were lost in one another, their surroundings fading away.

  ‘I am sorry Charlie.’ Maria pulled back, staring into his eyes.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘I wanted you. Back in that field. And my foolish thoughts of marriage stopped me. Now we are doomed to die and I will regret my pride forever.’

  ‘Shhh,’ he kissed her mouth. ‘You must not talk that way. We will not die in here, I promise you.’

  She looked so sad that he could almost feel his heart breaking.

  ‘I swear it to you Maria,’ he repeated, making his voice hard with conviction.

  ‘They are going to burn us alive.’ Her voice was barely a whisper.

  ‘Look into my eyes.’ Charlie took her chin in his hand. ‘I will never let any harm come to you. Look at me. Do you believe it now?’

  She blinked, swallowed and then nodded slowly.

  ‘I do.’

  ‘We shall escape it, Maria. And when we do, I shall hold you to that guinea you owe me.’

  She laughed weakly, and Charlie smiled back. But in his heart he could think of no way they might evade the dreadful fate which awaited them.

  A jangle of keys alerted them to the sudden presence of the guard. He had returned with the constable.

  Reluctantly Charlie and Maria drew apart to face their fate.

  ‘We must try you one at a time,’ announced the constable as he drew back the bars. His eyes rested on Maria. ‘She was asking about spells and the like. Her guilt should be determined first.’

  Charlie’s arms went around Maria. ‘I shall go first,’ he said. ‘It is not right a woman should be tried,’ he added, releasing her reluctantly and stepping forward.

  ‘No Charlie!’ Maria’s eyes had filled with tears. She grabbed at his hand.

  ‘I will be back soon Maria,’ he said, with a half smile. ‘And when I return they will know my innocence and you will not need to be tried.’

  Maria’s hand gripped his tightly. Then the constable and the guard grabbed hold of Charlie and manhandled him out of the cell.

  ‘You are good men, I know it,’ he said, as they tugged him down further into the prison. ‘Let her go, I beg you. She is innocent and has money to pay for your kindness besides.’

  The constable gave Charlie a rough shove.

  ‘My Lilieth was murdered,’ he said. ‘And you will both burn.’

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  ‘We reserve a special cell for our trials,’ said the constable. ‘It is not so fancy as London courts, but we find it serves our purpose.’

  Charlie let the words buzz in his head, keeping his attention on the construction of the prison and possibilities of escape.

  The corridor was dark, narrow and damp. It wound around away from the other cells and ended in a single thick doorway.

  The constable moved ahead and unlocked the door with a thick set of keys. It opened an inch on ancient hinges, and the constable shouldered his weight against it.

  Slowly the room beyond was revealed. A single torch burned, flickering on stone walls glinting with slippery mould.

  In the centre of the room, like a monstrous metal bed, was the place where Charlie realised his trial would take place.

  A large metal plate had been roughly shaped into the limbs of a man. But the space where the head should rest was unfinished, leaving a hole.

  At the feet and wrists were thick metal manacles. And underneath the bed was a space for a brazier, already filled with fresh wood.

  Charlie let out a slow breath, taking it all in.

  The guard pushed him forward, and he stepped into the room.

  It stank of burned flesh.

  ‘Be quick about it,’ said the constable. ‘Get him in and the manacles on.’

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ he added, as they pulled Charlie onto the metal plate and began binding his wrists. ‘Usually they are all screaming and crying by now.’

  Charlie let his wrists feel out the manacles and angled his hands so they might be secured more loosely. But the guard tugged them so tight they cut away the circulation to his hands.

  The constable strapped down his feet. Charlie let them lie still, but he thought they might not be so firmly bound as his hands. He let the idea float like a little firefly of warmth in the cold tumult of his mind.

  ‘The wood begins to burn by your feet,’ explained the constable. ‘So you might start to say your prayers when you feel it warm there. Then the flames will catch along your body,’ he continued. ‘When they reach your head there is a hole there, as you can feel.’ The constable turned to include the guard in the conversation.

  ‘If you are guilty then the fire will quickly burn away all your hair. And then your brains will be slowly cooked in your skull.’

  He leaned closer to meet Charlie’s eyes. ‘If you killed my Lilieth then this is a merciful death for you. For you will be dead in a few hours or less. Though you will feel pain like none other on earth.’

  ‘And if I am innocent?’ asked Charlie, his voice steady.

  ‘Then God will intervene,’ said the constable. ‘And we will come back here and find you alive, with no burns upon your body.’

  The constable stood up and unhooked the burning torch from its holding. Then he bent and lowered it.

  There was a crackling sound as the wood caught, and flames plumed up with smoke. Charlie felt the first warmth at his feet.

  ‘We will return soon,’ said the constable.

  He stooped to dip his tankard in a barrel of plague water by the entrance to the cell and took a long sip. ‘And if you are guilty I hope to God you suffer with your trial.’

  The door creaked shut and Charlie was left alone with the growing heat.

  He twisted in the manacles and pressed all his strength into tugging his hands and feet free.

  He had already begun to lose sensation in his hands, and pulsing pain was juddering through his fingertips where the bonds had been made tight.

  His feet had been bound tighter than he initially hoped. He kicked and pulled, but they held firm.

  He could feel the fire building now. His face and body had broken out in a sweat, and the heat under his feet and calves had grown from a gentle warmth to a strong heat.

  Charlie turned his legs as far as they would move in the bonds, to move the heat to a different stretch of skin.

  The fire was building fast now, and it was only a few seconds before the newly exposed part of his leg became unbearably hot.

  His eyes swept the walls of the cell for some way to escape. The stone walls looked mercifully cool in their glinting damp. But there was nothing to help him get free.

  The fire had reached his middle torso now, and the pain was becoming unbearable. He felt a stretch of blisters bubble out along his spine and gritted his teeth to stop from shouting aloud.

  There was a scrabbling sound in the corner of the cell. Rats. Charlie felt himself wondering hazily whether they might eat his remains.

  He shook his head, trying to bring himself back to logical thoughts.

/>   The manacles were his only hope. Again he began twisting and pulling. But his hands were now burning in their own fire of blood loss, and the pain of pulling them was almost as bad as the fire beneath him.

  Ignoring the pain, he dug in and pulled. He thought he felt the skin drag a fraction and then it stopped hard against the metal restraints.

  Charlie felt a sweep of heat flare against his shoulder blades and knew it could not be long before the fire reached his head.

  His feet and legs were blazing in a world of agony. Moving them even fractionally wafted hot air over the screaming skin.

  The fire seared the plate under his neck.

  Charlie closed his eyes and pulled and kicked with his feet. The movement felt like boiling oil was being poured on his burning legs. And they were held fast. The heavy metal was unmoving.

  There was a fizzing sound and Charlie smelled the first burning hair at the nape of his neck.

  He knew it could be only moments before his head was consumed in a ball of fire.

  Charlie let the pain roll over him.

  There was a sudden pressure on his wrists. The heat, he assumed, was now scorching on the manacles which held him.

  Then the pain lessened, and he suddenly found his wrists had sprung free.

  Without pausing to think he sprang up, away from the bed. A jet of fire pulsed suddenly behind him, where his head had been moments before.

  His legs still burned, and he saw the shape of a person by his feet, opening up the manacles at his ankles.

  Charlie rolled himself free of the burning metal bed and fell heavily into the dirt of the cell floor, panting in relief.

  His eyes scanned for who or what had allowed his freedom. The person was hunched over where he’d been lying, half visible in the flickering torch light and the glow of heat from under the bed.

  Charlie tried to stand, but his feet gave way.

  Then the person straightened, and Charlie saw female features. It was a woman, perhaps forty years old.

  ‘Goid I nooit! Weinig Charlie Oakley,’ came her low voice in Dutch.

  In his head the Dutch words reformed themselves into English.

  I cannot believe it. Little Charlie Oakley.

  Chapter Sixty

  Another light blazed in the cell, and Charlie saw the woman was holding a little stub of candle. The flame fluttered and then grew to a warm orb.

  ‘Little Charlie Oakley,’ she repeated in Dutch. ‘After all these years.’

  Charlie stood in the semi-dark, shocked into silence.

  ‘I was frightened when they brought you in,’ explained the woman. ‘No one is supposed to come in this room. It is mine alone. So I hid.’

  The blonde hair had turned partially white and the large blue eyes were a little duller with age. But he remembered the lovely face so well.

  ‘It is you,’ Charlie breathed, speaking in Dutch.

  Some faint details were coming back, that this woman had taught him and his brother Dutch. She was the mistress of a great house, where his mother had worked.

  He fought for more memories, but there were none.

  ‘Then I became braver and I looked and saw it was you,’ continued the woman. ‘And I recognised you from all those years ago.’

  Charlie clung to this sudden revelation. His mother had worked in a large house. That was something.

  And now he had a name. Charlie Oakley. He tried to feel something for the surname, but there was nothing.

  This lady, he remembered, had lived in the cellar.

  She raised the candle to consider his face.

  ‘So Sally Oakley put you safe as she said she would,’ she said, wonderingly.

  His mind was churning at the strange familiarity of it all. Hearing the name was an electric shock of recognition. Sally Oakley. That must be his mother’s name.

  ‘Where is my mother now?’ said Charlie, unable to keep his orphan abandonment from rising to the fore.

  ‘Why she took you to put you safe,’ said the woman. The musical voice brought with it a feeling rather than a memory. That as a boy he had sometimes been frightened of her.

  ‘But where did she go?’

  ‘My husband sent her away Charlie,’ she shook her head. ‘I did not want him to for it was a fine thing having a lady’s maid.’

  ‘Where? Where did she go?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  Charlie’s mind was reeling, trying to think through what it meant.

  ‘Why?’ he insisted, unable to keep the desperation from his voice. ‘Why did he send her away?’

  ‘Your mother found his secrets and hid them,’ she said. ‘Secrets about my husband and the King. That no one can know.’

  Charlie remembered the key. What if his mother had hidden these special papers away and given him the means to find them?

  His gaze settled back on the woman. Teresa. Her name announced itself in his head from a long buried remembrance.

  ‘How did you get here?’ asked Charlie, his thoughts turning to escape and the returning guard and constable.

  ‘My husband brought me here,’ she said, ‘I do not like to be near men I have not met before. So he keeps me here safe and alone.’

  ‘But how did you get past the guards? Is he known to them?’

  ‘My husband helped build this prison,’ she said. ‘They dug a secret way in. Only he knows of it now.’

  Hopes for news of his mother kept forking into Charlie’s thoughts and he drove them down with effort.

  The guard and the constable must be planning to return soon. He needed to escape.

  If there was a secret tunnel out he could hide in it and rescue Maria when she was put in the cell.

  ‘Can you show me?’ he asked, ‘show me the way out?’

  Teresa shook her head. But there was something disingenuous about the gesture. As though she was frightened of being left alone.

  ‘Only my husband knows it,’ she said. Charlie caught the tiniest flicker. Her eyes had moved just slightly to the wall behind him.

  ‘Perhaps we could find it together,’ he said carefully, watching her face and moving to the back wall.

  Her features tightened. And he realised she didn’t want him to get out.

  Charlie considered Teresa carefully. She was tall and heavily made. But he could overpower her if necessary.

  Perhaps she only wanted his company, he reasoned, trapped all alone in here, in the dark. He tried to remember what else he knew of her. A few Dutch words came.

  The-lady-in-the-hidden-room.

  He and Rowan still spoke of her. But she had faded to conversational currency, the origins of which were no longer solid.

  Faced with the reality Charlie’s memory of a lonely enchanted thing was superseded by something darker.

  He tried to push the rising tumult of fractured memories away and concentrate on the necessity of escape. Maria. He had to save Maria.

  Charlie let his eyes scan the wall. The heavy stones looked similar, and if there was a door he guessed the hinges must be hidden away in the dark mortar.

  With only a small torch it was impossible to see where a door might start and end. It would take him too long to scan each section of stone inch by laborious inch.

  The realisation brought with it a plan. He moved to the barrel of plague water in the corner of the cell and tilted it carefully into the light.

  Plague water was made with iron filings.

  A plan was forming. A plan of escape.

  ‘What is it you do?’ asked Teresa. There was a hint of fear in her voice.

  Charlie lifted the barrel.

  Iron filings. Iron was magnetic. It would stick to other iron.

  If there were iron hinges or a handle hidden in the stone wall, the filings would find it out far quicker than the naked eye.

  Taking careful aim he sloshed an arc of water towards a portion of the far wall.

  Then taking the torch he swept it over the heavy stone.

  At first he tho
ught there was nothing. Then the flame glittered on a few fragments of iron, which clung to the dark iron embedded in the stone.

  Scooping a denser hand of iron filings from the bottom of the barrel, Charlie spread them near where the first few had remained.

  The shape of a hinge. He traced it down, spreading more filings, until the second was revealed. The hinges were only a few feet apart. A small door then, large enough to crawl through.

  Taking the final part of the plague water, Charlie flung it towards where he hoped the opening might be. And there it was suddenly, framed by glittering iron filings. A tiny dark hole that had been indiscernible moments before.

  An opening.

  Taking one of the unburned sticks from the fire, Charlie prised it into where the door began. It resisted at first and then began to swing open in a dusty shower of mortar.

  ‘Wait!’ called Teresa. ‘You must not open it!’

  She caught his arm.

  Charlie turned, pulling himself free and sent her staggering back a few steps.

  His eye was drawn to a sudden flash of white at her chest. Something tumbled out of her dress.

  At first Charlie thought it must be a handkerchief or little posy. Then his gaze settled on what had fallen. A flash of white and red. It was a little clutch of blood-stained ribbons.

  White ribbons.

  Charlie stared, his thoughts moving into place. The bloodied ribbons were wrapped around a doll made of sackcloth.

  For a long moment they both stood staring. Then Teresa snatched them back and stuffed them deep into her clothing. But not before Charlie realised what he had seen.

  White ribbons. Blood. A witch’s spell.

  Charlie remembered what the wise woman had said. That whoever performed the spell on Maria’s sister would carry part of the magic.

  The woman carried ribbons, like those found on the corpses.

  A tangle of thoughts balled themselves into one.

  ‘It was you,’ he whispered.

  Teresa stared back at him. A single hand self-consciously tried to push the blood-stained fabrics deeper.

  ‘It was you who cast the spells,’ said Charlie.