The Gilded Lily

by Deborah Swift

‘Have you seen them recently?’ he said.

  Silence.

  ‘Do any of you know where they live?’

  The girls shook their heads. His manner was one of a chastising schoolteacher. It made Corey reluctant to speak, even if she knew the answer.

  ‘Not one of you? No?’

  He marched round the bench looking into their faces as if he wanted to read the contents of their minds.

  ‘There is a reward,’ he said, ‘for information that will lead me to them.’ He peered at Alyson, who, embarrassed, dropped her chin to her chest. ‘A substantial reward.’ He drew the words out as if to emphasize them.

  Mercy smiled politely at him. Madame Lefevre frowned.

  ‘Do you know where they live?’ Sensing Mercy’s interest he addressed her directly.

  ‘Oh no,’ Mercy said, tossing her blonde curls, ‘I’m afraid not. My brother and I caught sight of Sadie Appleby just up the street. We tried to catch her, but she ran like her heels were on fire and we couldn’t catch up with her. We’d heard about the notices at church, someone told us they were looking for a girl like her.’

  Corey glared at her.

  ‘When?’ Madame Lefevre asked.

  ‘More than a week ago. But she’s never been near us since, has she?’

  Mr Ibbetson narrowed his eyes and closed his mouth until it was a tiny hole, sucking in his breath. ‘If I find out that any one of you is concealing information as to their whereabouts, then I will have you clapped in irons for assisting a known felon.’

  Mercy turned and whispered, in a voice clearly intended to be heard, ‘Told you so. Told you there was a notice out for that Sadie and her sister, but you’d none of it. Marked by the Devil, she is, didn’t I say so?’

  Corey was impatient with Mercy, but she bit her lip.

  ‘Yes, Mercy said Sadie put a hex on us,’ said Betsy.

  Mercy scowled at her, and Betsy blushed and closed her mouth.

  ‘What have they done, sir?’ asked Alyson.

  ‘Don’t be impertinent,’ Madame Lefevre said.

  Mr Ibbetson answered. ‘Suffocated a man to death.’ Although nobody spoke or moved, the words hung in the air. ‘Then they took every last penny from the house. Can you imagine? Even his watch out of his pocket. What sort of a person would do that?’

  Mercy nodded her head up and down. Corey took in the words, but somehow could not make them sit sensibly with the girls she had known. She stared at Mr Ibbetson trying to weigh him up.

  ‘What about the reward?’ Mercy interrupted. ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Fletcher!’ Madame Lefevre said.

  Mr Ibbetson turned to Madame Lefevre and almost put his hand on her arm before withdrawing it. ‘He was my brother. My twin brother.’ His mouth twitched with emotion. ‘Have any of you got brothers at home?’ But then he clenched his fist, sweat had broken out on his forehead. ‘Nobody seems to be doing anything. The Netherbarrow constable sent me an urgent message last week to say he had some news of them, so off I went, haring up there. What a waste of time. He was only telling me what I already knew, that they had been sighted at a tavern here in London somewhere. Bloody useless. And now, all this snow . . .’

  He sat down heavily on one of the stools and wiped his mouth with a kerchief drawn from his breeches. ‘I’ll see justice done and those two on the gibbet if it’s the last thing I do.’ He mopped his face again. ‘I caught a glimpse of them near to here in Bread Street, but they ran off. For anyone who can lead me to them, the reward is fifty pounds.’

  The girls gasped.

  Corey looked at Alyson. The gibbet. It was serious, someone was going to hang. Whatever Ella and Sadie were supposed to have done, she did not fancy their chances against this man if he was wealthy enough to offer such a reward. Fifty pounds! It was a fortune. And he already knew they used to lodge in Bread Street. Madame Lefevre was staring at her. Corey lowered her head.

  ‘I am residing temporarily at the Blue Ball on Aldergate,’ Ibbetson said. ‘I am sure that there must be some kind soul who can find out their whereabouts for me.’ He looked round the room. ‘In the daytime, I will be pursuing various lines of inquiry, but I can be found at the Blue Ball after dusk, should any of you think further and wish to lay claim to that reward.’

  ‘The Blue Ball, did you hear that, girls?’ Madame Lefevre said.

  ‘Yes, Madame Lefevre,’ they chorused. She showed him out, but was back moments later, her eyes sharp.

  ‘Corey Johnson. You walked home with Ella and Sadie some nights. Where do they lodge?’

  ‘Don’t know, madame. Ella said their father was after them to take them back to Westmorland, so they left their lodging house and moved on. I don’t know where to.’

  ‘Their father? More like the yeoman constable. Where did they used to live?’

  ‘Somewhere round Bread Street, like he said. But I only ever walked to the end of the road with them, and that’s as much as I know.’

  Madame Lefevre gave Corey a withering look, as if to indicate the useless nature of her answers before retiring into her office.

  Madame Lefevre rummaged in her drawer searching for something. She was sure she still had it somewhere. She pulled the whole drawer out and sat with it on her knee, riffling through it in her black lace fingerless gloves. Ah, yes. She extracted a printed piece of paper from underneath a greasy felt pincushion and a yellowing sheaf of bills. She smiled to herself and held it up in front of her spectacles to read the small print.

  Whitgift and Son, Purveyors of Goods to the Gentry, Goods valued and Charitable Loans offered. Jewellery a Speciality.

  There was a cramped-up signature made with a scratchy nib, Josiah Whitgift. The ‘i’s had the dots very precisely aligned. She looked at the bottom corner: Friargate, London.

  Moments later she had her cloak and bonnet on and was out of the front door, trudging eastwards through the snow, leaving the girls unsupervised in the shop.

  Corey and the rest of the girls heard the bell go and felt the draught from the door, and for a couple of minutes they thought it must be another customer coming in for a fitting. But strangely they heard no voices from the front shop, not a sound. After a few moments Mercy stood up and tentatively hooked open the calico curtain with her finger. The shop was empty. There was no sign of Madame Lefevre.

  ‘She’s gone out.’

  ‘Out?’ Alyson whispered. ‘She can’t have gone out.’

  ‘Well, she’s not here, so she must have.’

  ‘What, and just left us here?’ Betsy said.

  ‘Let’s have a ganders,’ Corey said, getting up to look through the doorway. ‘It’s true – she has gone out.’

  ‘Why?’ Alyson said.

  ‘She must know something,’ Mercy said, ‘about the Appleby girls. There’s notices out all over London. We nearly caught her, me and Jacob. It’s our bounden duty to clamp down on sinners.’

  Betsy nodded.

  ‘Fiddlesticks. I don’t believe it. I don’t think they did it. Who else agrees with me?’ Corey said.

  ‘Course they did. They’re on the run. Why else did they walk out like that, one after the other?’ Mercy said.

  ‘By all the saints, that’s right,’ Pegeen said.

  Mercy looked smug. ‘And anyway, a gentleman like that wouldn’t put out a reward unless their guilt was certain.’

  ‘Well, they might have been in trouble, but they wouldn’t have done for anyone. You never met Ella. She left before you came. She liked to play a part, and she could be a vain little madam, she might even have done a bit of thievery, like the rest of us when we’re short, but I can’t believe she’s killed a man.’

  ‘How dare you. I’ve never stolen anything in my life,’ Mercy said.

  ‘Ella was a bit above herself, but not Sadie. Sadie’d never hurt a fly,’ Alyson said.

  ‘I’m telling you, my thumbs are pricking, I can tell evil from a hundred paces,’ said Mercy in a pulpit voice, ‘and Sadie Appleby is the Devil’s chil
d.’

  ‘At least she would never browbeat another girl to do her knotting.’ Corey looked directly at Mercy.

  A pause.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know well enough.’

  ‘Are you calling me a bully?’

  The girls looked down at their work stations, sensing trouble in the air.

  ‘Well, you are, aren’t you?’ Corey said. ‘I saw little Betsy coming in this morning and handing over a night’s worth of horsehair knotting.’ She turned to Betsy. ‘You do her knotting for her, don’t you?’

  Betsy quailed, and stammered, ‘No, well, I . . .’ She looked helplessly at Mercy.

  Mercy took hold of Betsy’s arm and said, ‘She doesn’t. You don’t, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Betsy said in a small voice.

  ‘Let go of her arm,’ Corey said.

  Mercy held tight.

  ‘Let go, you vixen, or I’ll make you.’

  Mercy made a face and waggled her head. Corey lunged for Mercy and grabbed her hair.

  Mercy aimed a boot tip at Corey’s ankle but she dodged it neatly, still clinging to Mercy’s hair. Mercy pushed Betsy roughly away and scratched her fingernails in a long stripe down Corey’s cheek.

  ‘Devil fetch you,’ Corey said, putting one hand up to her face, while with the other she wound her fingers into Mercy’s hair, pulling her forwards.

  By this time the girls had formed an unruly circle around them and were shouting, ‘Clubs out,’ and stamping their clogged feet. Mercy shoved Corey hard so that she fell back with a crack against the bench, her spine bent backwards, but Mercy overbalanced and fell with her, and the two scrabbled to get away to get enough space to hit each other.

  ‘Let go, you beggar.’ Mercy bit hard into Corey’s hand, but Corey held tight.

  Mercy brought her fist down hard onto Corey’s nose. Corey yelped, as blood oozed from her nostril. Corey reached out behind her on the bench. Her hands closed around a pair of scissors.

  There was a flash of metal and the girls fell away in shock.

  Corey backed away and wiped her nose, holding the yellow hank of Mercy’s hair in her hand. She let it drop, astonished to see it there. It was one of Mercy’s bunches. The curls lay on the wooden floor like a heap of wood shavings. Mercy stared at it a moment, before pressing her hands to her head in horror.

  ‘My hair.’ Her voice was thin and small. She stooped to gather it up, her face screwed up and white. The other girls parted silently as she made her way to the door. Corey’s nose dripped blood through her fingers.

  ‘Betsy?’ called Mercy, from the door. But Betsy did not move.

  Chapter 21

  Jay was outside the gate again in the thinning snow, turning away carriages. Wednesdays were particularly bad, and this one was no exception, even in this weather. As he strode back towards the gate he saw a crowd of louts hanging round.

  ‘Clear off,’ he said.

  One of the larger lads came forward. He was filthy and had a nose bent to one side with fighting. He wore a tattered man’s coat that was turned back at the sleeves, and his hands looked red raw with cold where he clutched the neck of a heavy sack.

  ‘You work at Whitgift’s, mister?’ he said.

  Jay ignored him and set off towards the nearest carriage.

  ‘Begging pardon, sir, you want to see some trinkets?’

  Jay paused, but then shook his head and carried on walking.

  ‘Nice little fan, silver thimbles, an’ a ruby seal . . .’

  Now Jay was interested and when he slowed the lads gathered round.

  ‘Is it chored?’ Jay asked, knowing the answer by the look of them.

  ‘Niver. It’s my granddam’s. She died an’ left it to me.’

  ‘And my eye’s a pie. Let’s look, then.’ Jay positioned his back to the wall, his hand on his sword. You could never be too careful.

  The lad held out the grubby oat-sack and rummaged inside. It looked weighty, and clinked as the lad brought out a pretty fan, mounted in silver and mother-of-pearl.

  ‘How much?’ Jay said.

  ‘Sice for that,’ the lad said.

  ‘A penny, and no more. What else?’

  ‘A few bits and pieces.’ The lad pulled out a gold and ruby seal. Jay tried not to let them see he was interested. ‘Oh, another of those,’ he said. ‘I’ve got similar ones already. I could take it off your hands for –’ he thought a moment – ‘a shilling, a shilling for the lot.’

  ‘But I bet it’s gold,’ the lad said, holding it out in front of him. ‘And there’s a load more spoons and plate and that in here.’

  ‘Look, it’s got a moniker on it. They don’t sell. A shilling’s my final offer.’

  ‘Give it over then.’

  ‘The goods first.’

  The boy dropped the seal into the sack, put it on the ground and stepped away. ‘My shilling,’ he said.

  ‘Here,’ Jay tossed the coin over their heads so they had to chase after it down the street. Then he swept up the bag and loped back inside the yard, grinning to himself. The coin he had tossed had been thrupence.

  He went up to his chambers and tipped the sack onto his desk.

  The beggars. The sack contained only the fan and the seal, his desk was littered with sticks and cobbles.

  He picked out the seal from the debris on his desk. It was not something he would keep, he decided. He knew he must be hard on himself, sell a few things on. This one was finely made, but he had others much finer in the drawers. He looked at the letters chased into the ruby, T.W.I., wondered if he knew of anyone with those initials he could sell it to. The edge of the design was blurred, worn from use. He wanted only perfection. It could go down into the yard. He’d maybe get six or seven pounds for it.

  In the office on the other side of the yard, Walt Whitgift leaned over the chart on the desk in front of him, his nose barely a foot from its surface. Though he had wanted an education for his son, he had little book-learning himself, and the chart was covered in tiny spider-like ciphers that filled him with bafflement. He watched carefully though, as Tindall’s bony finger continued to point out figures and squiggly lines as he talked.

  ‘Here we have a conjunction of Venus and Saturn – a sure harbinger of dissent. I’m afraid the influence will last for several months, but then again, see that square to the trine? We can see foreshadowed here the fire of Mars, which would seem to indicate rapid growth and expansion. Of course I cannot discount the effect of the comet – as cited in Lilly’s Almanac.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘Well, last time it passed, we went to war with the French, so no, I would think not. But see here.’ Again he stabbed a cracked and yellowing nail onto the parchment. ‘There is fame coming, that’s the influence of Leo . . .’

  ‘Fame, you say? That’s good.’ He stood up and shook another shovel of coal into the fireplace, where it hissed damply and belched smoke.

  ‘Well, it could be good, but look at this, there’s a shadow over Venus.’

  ‘Look, Tindall, I’m not much of a one for map-reading.’ He patted Tindall on the shoulder. ‘My eyesight’s not what it was, and it tires me. Tell me plainly, will my son’s new business be a success?’

  ‘Oh, undoubtedly.’

  ‘Will it make money?’

  ‘The stars are favourable.’

  ‘Then that’s all I need to know. I don’t want to fall out with my son.’ He sat back down.

  ‘But, Walter, I’ve said already, there’s a shadow over this chart somehow, and a death. It doesn’t add up. At the end of this month there’s a conflagration of planets. Look at Saturn again.’

  Walt sighed. He did not want to know if it was going to be bad.

  Tindall began explaining again. ‘There are elements which seem to show—’

  The bell on the back of the door jangled loudly. Walt breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Ah, sorry, Tindall, looks like I’m needed in the warehouse. We’ll talk further
later, shall we?’

  Walt stood up again and limped to the door. These days his legs seized if he sat still for too long. He opened it warily.

  A pinch-faced woman dressed entirely in black was standing there stamping the snow off her boots.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, opening the door wide. She was obviously in mourning. Perhaps she needed money for the funeral. She marched in, and refused a chair with a vigorous shake of the head. She did not look as if she was grieving. She peered at him over wire spectacles.

  ‘Where can I find Josiah Whitgift?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, it’s Jay you’re after seeing? He’s over at the Gilded Lily, the ladies’ chambers at the other side of the yard. I’ll get the boy to show you.’

  ‘No need. I’ll find it,’ she said, and turned smartly on her heel. The door shuddered in its frame as she shut it.

  ‘A Puritan killjoy,’ said Tindall. ‘I’ve seen the likes before. These griping widows, always wanting to stir up trouble where there’s none. Probably come to make a fuss, accuse your son of popery and such.’

  ‘Don’t fret, Tindall. Jay’ll not have any trouble with her. He can handle it, can my Jay. He can sweet-talk the sourest lady. They all come round in the end.’

  ‘Would you like me to escort her, check what she’s about?’

  ‘Would you, Nat, save my legs?’

  ‘I’ll come back later, tell you what she was after.’ And Tindall hurried out through the door into the slippery yard.

  Ella was looking out of the window, watching the men scraping the snow to clear a space for the carriages to turn, when Madame Lefevre crossed the yard. She recognized her stark black silhouette straight away and instinctively stepped back to the edge of the window. Maybe she had come to pawn something. But when she stopped to talk to Meg, and Meg pointed in her direction, her heart sank. She was looking for her.

  She had to hide. The old crow must have seen the notices. She was lettered enough to read them for herself and would be chasing that reward. Without a thought for the customers she rushed upstairs and into the storeroom and shut the door behind her. To her surprise Jay Whitgift was up there. There were a lot of blocks of soap all lined up in rows on the table. He dropped the bundle he was holding up to his nose and looked embarrassed. ‘Just sorting these soaps,’ he said. ‘Is anything the matter?’