Fire Catcher

by C. S. Quinn

  Something else seemed to occur to him and his eyes ranged the brewery. Panic surged in Sally.

  ‘You are a coward and a thief,’ she shouted. ‘You shall go to hell.’

  Blackstone’s gaze rested back on Sally.

  ‘Your witch will burn with you,’ she continued. ‘I know what you have done and what you are. The Sealed Knot will find you out.’

  Uncontrolled rage was animating Blackstone’s features.

  ‘Their revenge will be brutal,’ Sally said. ‘The marriage will be found out.’

  She gasped as he fastened his hands around her slim throat.

  ‘Your wife . . . wears the dark crown . . .’ she managed as her vision began to swim. She felt his hands tighten further, as though he meant to wring the curse out of her.

  ‘It is too great a risk to me to let the hangman carry out this duty,’ said Blackstone, as he watched her lips purple and her eyes bulge. ‘People may talk, though the words are of a thieving servant. And as you know, I can well conceal one extra body.’

  As the world darkened Sally thought she could see a shape, reflected in the shining copper, picked out in the widening gloom. A crown and a loop of knots. And then the world closed around her.

  It took Blackstone a moment to assure himself of her death and as the anger passed he realised his mistake. He should have kept her alive. Now he would have to find out her children in the slums. Cursing in frustration Blackstone shouldered Sally Oakley’s limp body and headed for the door. He could dispose of her and find out her sons before dawn. Then his papers would be back under lock and key.

  Inside their barrels the two boys sat quietly. The older was already whimpering but Charlie gripped his key tightly. It was only hours later that he too began to cry in a steady hopeless rhythm.

  Chapter 1

  London 1666

  The bitter smell of coffee hit Charlie like a slap. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. The leaded windows were tarnished by oily fumes. A cosy cauldron fire lit the thronging table of coffee drinkers.

  Charlie grasped the makeshift rope bannister and made the last few steps up the rickety wooden staircase into the coffee house. The babble of animated voices poured forth as he stooped through the narrow doorway.

  Reflexively Charlie drew in his bare feet and straightened his brown-leather coat. Close fitting with a flare to mid-thigh it hid patched breeches, an oft-mended shirt and all his worldly goods besides.

  ‘Coffee?’ A burly man at the cauldron was waving a ladle menacingly. He wore an inexpertly wrapped turban in an attempt to appear Turkish.

  Charlie peered at him through the array of curios which hung from the ceiling. There was an unidentified scaly creature, horns and tusks of varying lengths and a number of odd-shaped rocks. All were tinted brown and caked in dust.

  ‘Alchemy ingredients of the purest sort,’ grunted the cauldron ladler, following the direction of Charlie’s gaze. ‘We have your unicorn horn. Your salamander.’ He waved his hand at the chattering coffee drinkers. ‘And all the mysteries of the universe to discover.’

  Charlie eyed the tar liquid in the cauldron. It belched with ominous oily bubbles.

  ‘I’m here for the card maker,’ he said.

  The cauldron ladler’s eyes dropped to the key at Charlie’s neck. He eyed the shape at the head, a crown looped with knots.

  The cauldron ladler wiped sweat from his forehead. ‘You’re the thief taker?’

  Charlie hesitated. As a thief taker he caught criminals and stolen property for a fee. Not everyone in London welcomed his profession.

  ‘I thought you’d be taller,’ continued the coffee man. He frowned at Charlie’s brown eyes and dusty-blond hair through the fug. ‘I suppose I can see it. You have a certain poetry to your face. Despite the scar.’

  Charlie smiled in reply. In his youth a bucking horse had left him with a scarred lip, bent nose and permanent unease around riders. He turned away from the cauldron man and surveyed the coffee drinkers.

  Charlie spotted the card maker, a tidily bearded man with modest lace at his well-laundered cuffs. He was listening politely to a loud noble. Charlie began to make his way down the crowded table when another familiar face leapt out at him.

  Charlie squinted in disbelief. ‘Bitey?’

  The old man was a friend from the Bucket of Blood bare-knuckle tavern. Charlie couldn’t imagine what he was doing in a coffee house.

  Bitey grinned back a greeting, revealing the hand-carved wooden teeth which had earned him his nickname. His squat frame was armoured with its usual grime-toughened layers. Charlie’s gaze dropped, looking for Bitey’s pet pig, which had a tendency to ram the unwary at knee height.

  ‘Where’s Juniper?’ asked Charlie, failing to spot the animal among the legs of the seated drinkers.

  Bitey scratched the narrow portion of face between beard and eyebrow.

  ‘She swam away, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Up river. I took her for a dip in the Thames and she scented something on the wind. Lifted her head and took off west.’

  Charlie raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know pigs could swim.’

  ‘They are not good swimmers, Charlie,’ agreed Bitey sagely. ‘But they can make a distance if they set their mind to it. And Juniper was always determined.’

  ‘What brings you to the coffee house?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘I hoped the alchemists could return my piggy,’ said Bitey. ‘The best minds gather here to talk. That which is lost shall be found. That’s their creed is it not? Besides,’ he added with another wood-filled grin, ‘coffee houses are a secret thing. They make a man feel dangerous.’ Bitey pulled his battered tricorn hat lower, making his fury of eyebrows and beard more pronounced.

  ‘They’re hard to find,’ conceded Charlie, remembering the grace and favour he’d deployed to track this one. ‘Upstairs rooms. Narrow staircases.’

  ‘Our Merry Monarch would shut them all down if he could,’ agreed Bitey. ‘He fears plots.’ The old man scratched his beard. ‘Civil War was years back,’ he said, ‘but there’s plenty men who’d have kept Cromwell’s Republic. ’Stead of bringing back a King with his jewels and whores.’

  Bitey adjusted his hat.

  ‘I heard about Maria,’ he said.

  ‘That was a long time ago now,’ said Charlie. ‘She left back in spring.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s a chance you’ll mend things?’ said Bitey.

  Charlie shook his head. ‘She wanted something I couldn’t give her.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Peace of mind,’ said Charlie distractedly. He was looking towards the card maker.

  ‘Shame,’ said Bitey. ‘I liked her best of any of ’em.’

  Charlie’s gaze flicked again to the card maker, whose companion was now jabbing an enthusiastic finger at the heavens. The card maker looked up and noticed Charlie. His eyes went to the sack on Charlie’s shoulder and lit with hope.

  ‘Charlie Tuesday!’ he replied, raising his reedy voice with difficulty above the throng. ‘I expected to see you in my premises. How did you find me here?’

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ admitted Charlie, moving closer. ‘Even for a thief taker.’

  The card maker was looking eagerly at the sack. With a heave, Charlie laid it on the floor.

  ‘Your missing print plates,’ he said, as the contents hit the wooden boards with a clang. The bag fell open, revealing an array of playing-card faces etched into brass.

  The card maker’s face split into a huge smile.

  ‘I can hardly believe it!’ His hands fell on the contents. He eased out a Jack of Spades and Ace of Clubs, turning them this way and that. ‘I thought they were lost forever. However did you find them?’

  Charlie shrugged. ‘Mud from St Giles. A few questions.’

  ‘I can begin work again,’ said the card maker happily. ‘I’ll finish two packs today. Who was the thief?’ he asked, still smiling down at his returned print plates.

  ‘Two young
girls from the St Giles slums,’ said Charlie. ‘Desperate types. Not yet twenty and barely a tooth left between them. Skin and bone.’

  ‘What explanation did they make when you caught them?’

  ‘The usual,’ said Charlie. ‘They’d been gifted the plates. Couldn’t remember who by.’

  ‘Gifted playing-card plates?’ snorted the card maker in disbelief.

  ‘Any lie is worth trying when the noose hangs near,’ said Charlie.

  ‘They’re on their way to Tyburn then,’ said the card maker with satisfaction. ‘I will go watch them swing.’

  ‘They went yesterday,’ lied Charlie. ‘Hanged with the religious sect who plotted to assassinate the King.’

  ‘A shame,’ said the card maker. ‘But I am glad enough to have my plates back. You are a man of your word.’ He reached for his hanging pocket and then paused.

  ‘But I’m forgetting,’ said the card maker. ‘What would you say to a trade? Information for pay.’

  ‘I’m a thief taker,’ said Charlie, holding out his hand for payment. ‘If it’s a rigged dog fight or a boxer with the pox, trust me, I know it.’

  ‘No,’ the card maker licked his lips. ‘It is something else.’ He pointed. ‘About your key.’

  Charlie hesitated. The secret of the key still haunted him. He’d tracked his mother’s killer last year. But Blackstone had died of plague before answers were found. The locked chest had vanished with him.

  Charlie was London’s best thief taker, but this was the one mystery he hadn’t yet solved.

  ‘What kind of information?’ he asked.

  ‘Somebody was in here,’ replied the card maker, ‘asking about the symbol on your key.’

  Charlie considered. You didn’t say ‘somebody’ if a man had come looking. And no respectable woman came to a coffee house. Which meant she was a whore. Or a spy.

  The card maker waited hopefully, fingering his hanging pocket.

  ‘I’m listening,’ Charlie decided, withdrawing his outstretched hand.

  ‘There was a girl here,’ said the card maker. ‘Dressed fine, but whorish. Like those who hope to be the King’s mistress. She was asking about the symbol on your key. Drew it with chalk,’ he added.

  Charlie cocked his head thoughtfully.

  ‘Why was she looking for the symbol?’

  ‘I only overheard part,’ admitted the card maker. ‘She was asking about the Magnus Opus. Then she drew your key. Said she was looking for information.’

  ‘The Magnus Opus?’

  ‘It’s an alchemist’s idea,’ said the card maker. ‘Latin. They argue over what it means. An elixir of life, gold from lead.’ He shrugged. ‘Many men are obsessed with its discovery. But she was the first woman I’d heard asking.’

  ‘Pay me half,’ Charlie decided, ‘and tell me where she went.’

  The card maker hesitated. ‘I lost some business with my missing plates. I was hoping . . .’

  ‘Half,’ said Charlie, flexing his fingers meaningfully. He watched as the card maker counted out coins into his hand. Then he looked up expectantly.

  ‘She left with a man,’ said the card maker, as Charlie dropped the coins into his coat.

  ‘She found a man who knew about the symbol?’

  The card maker shook his head.

  ‘He was just some drunk lord. He offered to pay for her . . . her company,’ continued the card maker, making an obscene gesture with his hands.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She accepted. Bartered for a sum that made us whistle. The man suggested they go to Fetter Lane. He said there were rooms there. Rooms where men can . . .’

  ‘I know them,’ interrupted Charlie.

  ‘They might be there still,’ said the card maker. ‘If the man wants his money’s worth.’

  Charlie nodded his thanks and made to leave.

  ‘He paid enough,’ the card maker called after him, ‘to keep her all week.’

  But Charlie didn’t hear. He was already heading back down the stairs.

  Chapter 2

  Fetter Lane was an oppressive jumble of chaotic wooden buildings. Charlie knew it well. There were three possible buildings where the girl might be. His attention fastened on a flame deep behind a dirty window. The steady amber of a fine wax candle. The kind a wealthy man might buy.

  The window was too grimed to see through. Charlie moved to the badly built wood wall and fixed his eye to a gap between the boards. His heart missed a beat. There she was. Red silk. The girl was undressing. Charlie watched transfixed as the red silk moved lower and lower, revealing two buds of white breast against the sun-browned collarbones.

  A stray calf barged Charlie, knocking his eye from the crack in the wooden wall. For a moment he was back in the oppressive filth of Fetter Lane. The calf stumbled away, re-joining its herd on their switch-driven journey to Smithfield Market. He refastened his eye to the crack in the wall.

  The girl had paused to take a deep drink from a cup of wine, making a smiling toast to someone out of Charlie’s eye line. Then she resumed her sashaying undress.

  Suddenly her gaze locked with his. Charlie stared back, unable to break the contact. Then she stepped across the room suddenly and out of sight. Charlie tried to swallow but his mouth was dry. He strained to see further into the darkness. She was sitting astride something. A chair or a lap. On her naked back was a crescent scar. It dipped in and out of view like a livid crimson moon rising and falling.

  An unusual movement drew Charlie’s attention to the girl’s hand. It was dancing over the man’s fingers in a familiar technique. So she was a jewellery thief. A good one. Charlie watched as she extricated a ruby ring from the unwitting wearer. Then the girl’s hand came out with a deliberate carelessness, knocking over one candlestick and then another. Charlie shook himself back to reality as the flames danced against the dry wood of the house. He looked right and left along the tiny street, and then back in at the little scene, where the candles smouldered threateningly and then leapt into life.

  ‘Fire!’ A shout came hoarsely from inside the house. There was a hammering on the inside wall. ‘Fire!’

  In the alleyway the people froze in their morning business. Laundry women, hod carriers and pie men stood wide-eyed in panic. Charlie looked back to the crack in the wall. The girl had seized her opportunity to pickpocket a weighty purse and in a little jump she ran from the room, grabbing a silver candlestick as she fled.

  A man stumbled into view, his fashionable breeches and shirt undone, face slack with confusion as the flames crackled around him. An expensive wig was perched atop his greying hair.

  Beside Charlie a door banged and the girl tripped past light as a bird, with one hand holding her shift over her breasts. The other clutched her dress, and the stolen goods, to her body.

  The girl turned a quick glance behind her and then halted suddenly. She was staring at him open-mouthed. For a brief moment Charlie was taken aback. His soulful brown eyes and fair hair appealed to certain women. Particularly in the context of candlelight and strong drink. But the kinked nose and scarred upper lip lent a bandit quality. And Charlie’s frame, whilst passably tall and muscular, was of a wiry configuration best suited to running and street-fighting. He was nowhere near handsome enough to stop a woman in her tracks.

  Then he realised. The girl wasn’t staring at his face. Her attention was fixed on the key he wore around his neck.

  Her expression was of pure terror. Slowly her lips mouthed two words.

  ‘The Brotherhood.’

  Chapter 3

  The boy stumbled in the dark cellar. Fasting had left him weakened. Starved.

  Rough hands pushed him onwards.

  A red shape grew out from the dark. A demon. Then the boy’s eyes made it out.

  A hooded figure. Master Blackstone was wearing the red cloak of the Brotherhood. His bulky form made him monstrous. Candlelight winked behind Blackstone, casting his face in shadow.

  Fear pulsed through the boy. He’d drunk n
othing but the bitter initiation wine and his stomach boiled. Shadows in the dark seemed to shift and bloom. There was a smell too. Like a butcher’s alley.

  Blackstone’s icy blue eyes seared out. There was a deadness to them. The boy had heard whispers from higher initiates. It was said Blackstone had made a secret marriage. That his wife wore black on their wedding day. They’d heard Blackstone scream in his sleep of a sister killed by death magic.

  The boy clutched an offering in white knuckles. His feet butted against a soft mound on the packed-earth floor. Dread flooded through him. A body beneath his feet. But when he looked there was nothing there and confusion tore at him. Then Blackstone’s eyes were on his. A chill ran through his soul.

  ‘Kneel,’ said Blackstone. ‘And tell us why you come.’

  The boy hesitated. He couldn’t trust his legs to kneel. Then hands were at his shoulders, forcing him down. His knees hit the cold earth and he trembled.

  ‘Parliament sent men,’ began the boy. Words felt thick and unfamiliar in his mouth. ‘They tried to make us attend the Protestant church,’ he continued. ‘We could not pay the fine. They took my brother to the Clink prison.’

  Quite unexpectedly, hot tears rushed forth. He was a long way from his warm, safe home now.

  Blackstone nodded at the familiar tale. Everyone knew what happened to Catholics in the Clink. Parliament’s heavy-handedness was pushing young Catholic men into rebel factions across the city.

  Blackstone threw back his hood. The boy flinched. It was true then. Blackstone was a living ghost. A man who couldn’t be killed. Plague had left him a fearsome sight. Bubo scars ate their way across half his scalp, leaving a mess of shiny bald wheals in their wake. His remaining clumps of thick black hair were a livid contrast to the purple and red contours.

  ‘Make your offering,’ said Blackstone. He held out a jewelled chalice in which a dark liquid swirled.