IT was two hours before Cig’s men found him and unlashed him. He was seething with anger, battered, and missing all the coin he’d had on him for negotiations.
“Send word to the king,” he snarled when his men freed him. He clambered to his feet, rubbing his wrists, and glared up the street. “Jamie has turned.”
Forty-five
Jamie strode back to Eva’s side as the world of the living raced home around her. She stood like only a hunted thing could, somehow managing to blend in with rock and wicker, and looking as if she were about to bolt.
But for her pale face and dark hair, she was brightness. She might be tromping through this shit field as deeply as he, but she did not stink of it. She was clean and clear and better than all this.
Jamie had not met many people who were better than the things they were doing. People’s sunken lives generally reflected sunken hearts. But Eva was bright and clear, like a little star.
“I was not sure if you would try to run,” he said as he drew near. They started walking.
She sniffed. “You may yet prove passing helpful in retrieving Father Peter.”
He snorted. “You vastly underestimate your use of the word may. And passing. And helpful.”
“If we must indeed assail people with swords and other sharp things,” she explained stiffly, “you shall prove passing useful. If, however, we must sidle up like stealthy things, perhaps your big and bold arrogance will bedevil us all, Jamie.”
He was walking half a step behind her and bent by her ear as he steered her toward a doorway on the right.
“You forget, Eva, I sidled up on you in an alley in London.” She inhaled slowly. “I sidled up on the last man I killed, as I will likely do the next. Shall we compare our sidling skills? Stealth is how I live my life, woman, and I do it in the cities, under the king’s eye, not hiding in the woods like you and the last wolves.”
He straightened and saw Ry coming out of the shadows, as agreed. Ry stepped up behind Eva as Jamie rapped sharply on the door. She started slightly at Ry’s unexpected appearance, and how closely he crowded in behind her.
“Roger?” Jamie murmured to Ry. Eva looked between them sharply.
“Stabling the horses at an inn, the White Heart.”
“Good. I had a visitor.”
Ry glanced over. “Who?”
“Cig.”
Ry’s brows went up. Heavy footsteps thudded inside, and the door swung open.
Eva’s face paled as she looked up a foot into the eyes of the huge, one-eyed Scotsman standing in the doorway. She took a reflexive step back and hit the wall of Ry. His arms went up, cupping her sides. Jamie stood to her right.
Realization swept over her features like a rainstorm, transforming them from confusion to fear to fury. She turned to glare at Jamie. For what seemed like the hundredth time, he closed his hand around her elbow to keep her from running away.
The Scotsman took swift appraisal of them, starting with Jamie, then ending on him as well. “Jamie Lost,” he muttered. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I need something.”
The Scotsman gave a bark of unfriendly laughter. “Ye need a whole mess o’ things, far as I can see, boyo.”
“You’ve never seen far, Angus. Let us in.”
He glanced at Ry, barely registering Eva, then back to Jamie. “Why?”
“Because I will make you sorry, once again, that you ever crossed me.”
He scowled, but swung the door wide. “I do it for the debt. Quick, now.”
Jamie didn’t say anything, just pushed Eva past him into the small apartment. Ry followed.
“I have changed my mind,” she spat, pushing dark hair out of her face as they bustled inside.
Her mind?
Jamie maneuvered her by the elbow to the center of the room just as Angus swung the door shut. For a moment, they were plunged into silence and darkness. Slowly their eyes adjusted, and the pale glow from a window on the far north side of the hut illuminated the room enough so they were all shadowy figures standing in a jagged semicircle in the center of the room.
“I can never be your friend,” she announced, looking straight at Ry.
Jamie looked at Ry too. Ry looked at him. Angus looked confused.
“Never,” she repeated firmly.
Ry? Never be Ry’s friend? When had she considered being his friend? And not Jamie’s?
He turned to Angus. “We need to talk.”
Angus gave a twisted grin. “Ye’ve confused me with yer confessor. The rebels have renounced their fealty. I hear they’ve even taken the City. What is your bloody king going ta do now?”
“Dismember you, should you not cooperate.”
Angus turned and strode to a back room. Jamie dropped Eva’s elbow. He hesitated, made as if to speak.
Her hand shot up, warding off the words. “I care not what you have to say. You are leaving me here, with him? And what will you tell Gog? A lie. You are a lie. I wish for nothing more from you. Not even—”
She stopped. Simply stopped talking, her words falling like pebbles off a cliff, into silence, leaving a quietly burning fire and far too many ways to finish the sentence.
She stared at the wall, her slim, curving figure in a tattered blue gown. Her profile was all pale lines of sculpted jaw and those sensuous, crooked lips. Around her shoulders, thick dark hair streamed down to the perfect curve that was the small of her back. He needed more time with her, more touching, more of her pale skin and dark hair and devoted attention and—
“Jamie,” Ry said quietly. “I’ll stay with her.”
Eva didn’t move. Jamie jerked away and without a word followed Angus into the back room.
“I need you to keep her here.”
“Her?” Angus glanced at the door. “The girl?”
“Aye.”
Angus hesitated, then gave a clipped nod. “How long?”
“Not long a’tall. Ry and I have some business this night. Keep her a few days, until”—Jamie hesitated—“things calm down. After that, she can leave.”
“Simple enough.”
“Don’t let her fool you.”
“Fool me?”
Jamie looked at him coldly. “Trick you.”
“That was a long time ago, Jamie.”
“Seems like yesterday. She is . . . clever.” An understatement akin to it is cold in winter.
“Clever how?”
“She might ask for a drink, and when you return with it, she’ll be gone. Clever like that.”
Angus shrugged. “I’ll not offer her so much as a drop of water.”
Jamie’s face hardened. “Give her water. Food. Wine. Do not touch her.”
Angus’s face flooded red, his fists clenched at his sides. “I will no’ touch her. You know that.”
Jamie pushed to his feet. “And do not let her escape, at least before the morrow.”
Angus’s voice dropped into an octave heard usually from chanters, low and reverberating. “I owe a debt, Lost. If holding her is the repayment, I’ll hold her till Michaelmas. But this is me, paying it, right now. I’m squared after this. Do ye hear me?”
“I hear you. Now you hear me: do not be fooled.”
He looked outraged. “She’ll no’ escape! Why do ye keep sayin’ she’ll escape?”
“Because she will. Just not before tomorrow night, when we’re far gone.” He turned for the door, then paused at its threshold. “And, Angus?”
“Aye?” he snarled.
Jamie looked over his shoulder. “The debt is paid when I say ’tis. If anything so much as scars her little finger, I will hunt you down for the rest of your days. Then I will end them.”
He shut the door behind him.
Forty-six
Eva listened to Jamie’s boots tromp away, without so much as a good-bye. Not the boots, the man.
So this is what she’d been reduced to. She ought to be thinking about what would happen next, how she would get away. She ought to
be angry, planning how to find Roger, how to make Jamie pay.
Instead, at the realization he was leaving her behind, it felt as if her heart started breaking into translucent bits, like crystallized honey, thrown to the ground and stomped upon. Far more force than required. Smashed, when all it had needed was to be melted down.
“YOU did not take your leave of her,” Ry said as they strode down the mostly uncobbled streets.
“My leave?” Jamie ducked below a low-hanging sign thrust above the doorway of a home-cum-alehouse. “You cannot mean say good-bye?”
Ry shrugged. “These are words you know, concepts familiar to many. ’Tis a courtesy.”
“I am not chivalrous, I am not courteous. Nor is she.” Jamie scowled at a woman closing up a shop of sewing needles. “She is a hellion. Mayhap you recall she tried to stick me with a blade? And she started a quayside brawl, and—”
“I know what she did to you, Jamie,” Ry interrupted in the quiet voice that harkened to unnecessary things, such as conversations about what Eva did to Jamie. Which, he reminded himself, was naught.
“So why did you take her to Angus?”
Jamie looked up at the windows above. A few shutters were pushed wide for the evening spring air, candlelight reflecting off the walls inside. From a distant church, the sound of monks singing evensong floated through the streets. “Is there a reason we are speaking about this?”
“Since you just left her imprisoned with someone who despises you, aye, I thought it warranted a bit of attention.”
“You’d do better attending the chamber pot about to be dumped on your head.”
Ry leapt to the side of the street just as the arc of piss water came raining down into the gutter of the street.
“To get her out of the way. The risk of her disrupting our mission is too great.”
Jamie did not admit this was because of himself. Himself, with her self. Her vivid, unforeseen, remarkable self.
“Not to protect her?”
Jamie snapped his gaze over, all traces of strained tolerance gone. “I do not protect.”
“You protect the king.”
“I guard the king, with an end in mind.”
“And have you no intent for Eva?”
“I intend never to see her again.”
“I see.” Ry spoke again, but mercifully, it was not of Eva. “What did Cig want?”
“Much. Mouldin has returned to his old ways. He is auctioning off Peter of London to the highest bidder.”
Ry whistled, long and low.
“I’ve shocked you.”
“I’m reeling.”
A group of merchants and servants passed, lanterns held high to ward off the encroaching darkness. Ry waited until they’d passed to speak again, his voice low. “Cig must have been sore relieved to hear you already had the d’Endshire heir in your keeping.”
“I’m certain he would have been,” Jamie agreed.
“But you did not tell him.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I do not like him. And I do not trust him.”
Ry raised an eyebrow. “But you will tell the king?”
They stepped over a pile of refuse. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I wonder.”
Jamie shook his head. “Ry, I am distressed by your lack of faith in me. Young Roger has more faith in me than you.”
“He knows you less well.”
“Ah. That is so. Why would I not tell the king?”
“One might as easily ask, ‘Why would you?’”
Jamie glanced over. “I am bound suchly, am I not?”
Ry did not answer.
Their footsteps thudded out dully on the cobbles, and their capes blew out behind them as they climbed to the steep center of town. Revelry was breaking out within buildings, shouts and laughter and the tinkling of lutes and cymbals. The sky had darkened further during their walk, and everything was deep in shadow now, except where lanterns suspended outside building lit the cobbles in shifting puddles of light.
“And so now we go . . . ?” Ry said.
“To the doctor. To find the priest before Cig does.”
They were drawing near the wooden gates that marked the entrance to the Old Jewry. “I wonder what Cig will say to that if we meet at the negotiations.”
Jamie swept out his cape as they stepped around a pack of dogs fighting over entrails. “Cig can kiss my arse. In any event,” he added as they swept around another corner, “I beat him halfway to hell and left him in a tanner’s ditch.”
Ry’s groan carried them all the way to the doctor’s front door.
Forty-seven
The door to Jakob Doctor’s office was slammed in their faces. They looked at it, then each other.
“That was impolite,” Ry said.
“It makes me positively curious,” Jamie replied, looking up at the second- and third-floor windows. It was idle appraisal; he had no intention of scaling the outer wall. Much easier to kick down the door. The wood was strong; the lock was not.
But only if absolutely necessary.
“Do you know anyone here, Ry?”
“Here, where?”
Jamie looked down from the face of the expensive brick building. “Here, Gracious Hill.”
Ry gave him an even look. “Being raised a Jew should in no way imply that I know every Jew in England.”
Jamie returned the level look. “You might know a few, seeing as your mother’s family was from this town, and I happen to know you visited often as a child.”
Ry shook his head and stalked off, down the clean, cobbled streets of the Old Jewry, although there was no “new” Jewry. But there were pogroms every so often, and kings who sold “their” Jews, then ejected them, and years later made them pay for the privilege of coming back and having it happen all over again, sometime later, at the whim of some future king.
But King John was particularly protective, and in one of those odd bedmatings, at a time when ordinary citizens and rich barons were being pushed to their limits by John’s incursions into their rights and coffers, the Jews were safer under the oppressive lordship of King John than they’d been under any other English king.
Fifteen minutes later, Ry came striding out of the spring gloaming with a stoop-shouldered man wearing a skullcap. Ry looked grim, but the rabbi looked even more dour. He spent a long, silently scoldful minute examining Jamie, then turned back to Ry with a severe look.
“I dearly hope your mother knows what you’re doing.”
Ry’s eyes narrowed at the effort of resisting some obviously powerful urge—Jamie could only guess which—but Ry replied in a respectful, if chilly, tone of voice, “Mama died, one of the times they burned the Jewry.”
The rabbi shook his head, whether due to disgust or grief, and turned to the door. He rapped on it thrice.
After a moment, the door swung open. The same shaft of yellow light spilled out as had before. The same servant poked his head out as had before. But this time, the booming voice was given form as another, taller figure came up behind him, who in addition to looking distinguished, looked highly irritated. He also had a blackening eye.
“What is the meaning of this—,” he began, then saw the rabbi. “Mecham, what are you doing here?”
Ry’s scolding rabbi sighed and gestured. “Rebekka who married Yakov’s son Josef, in London, this is her son. Hayyim. He needs our help.”
“Ry,” he corrected curtly.
Jakob the doctor looked at them for a long time, then, shooing the servant aside, stepped back and silently waved them in. Mecham shook his head again, having mastered the same combination of guilt and grief Jamie recalled from Ry’s mother. The rabbi leaned in to clasp hands briefly with the doctor, then hurried away, back into the darkness of the ghetto.
Jamie and Ry stepped inside warily, scanning the rooms as they shut the door, pulled in the latch string, and followed the doctor into a large chamber.
Jakob Doctor went i
mmediately to a far wall, straightening ceramic pots. Ry stepped to the far side of the entry, and Jamie stood by the doorway. They looked at Jakob Doctor’s profile. He had a black eye.
“’Tis late,” the doctor said, not looking over. “I am weary. What do you want?”
“We are here with a simple inquiry, Doctor. Did you have any patients this day?”
He moved from shelving ceramic pots to shelving glass bottles. Mottled green, they looked like small, wet, misshapen frogs. “Every day, I have patients.”
“New ones.”
“New ones. Every day.”
Ry said quietly, “A priest.”
The doctor’s busy hands stilled, resting on the table in front of him. Then he started picking up jars and moving them up onto shelves bolted to the walls behind the table.
“Aye, I saw a priest.”
“He was here?”
“In this room.”
“And now?”
“He is no longer in this room.”
Jamie gave a faint smile. “Doctor, if you do not want us here—”
“Is it so obvious?”
“—you need but answer my questions, and we will be gone before anyone will know we were here. Asking questions.”
Jakob looked at him blandly.
“I can ensure that”—Jamie pointed to Jakob’s black eye—“will not happen again, if you talk to me.”
The doctor lifted his brows slightly, and Jamie sighed. He gestured to Ry, then made for the stairs. “Search the back rooms.”
Jamie made a quick search of the upper-level rooms, the long, narrow hall, the bedchamber separated behind a tapestry, and found nothing He could hear Ry downstairs, moving through the back rooms. A peek out the window a moment later showed Ry investigating the small outbuilding in the back that no doubt housed chickens and perhaps a small goat.
“This is why people slam the door in the faces of armed men who appear at their doors unannounced,” Jakob Doctor said when they returned downstairs.
“No doubt. Had you told us what we wanted to know, it might have been avoided.”
“No, it would not have been.”
They looked at each other, then Jamie smiled faintly. “No, it would not.”
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