Wicked Women

by Gaie Sebold

  We were back in the housekeeper’s room when we heard the main door to the street below crash open, hobnailed boots screeching on the flagstones of the entrance hall on the floor below. Sorgrad smashed the window to get to the shutters and flung them open, heedless of a cut on his hand. We were out onto the low roof beyond as whoever was in pursuit came thundering up the stairs, their yells and threats indistinct. The voices in the alley beyond the back yard were all too clear.

  ‘Stop where you are!’ ‘There’s no use in running!’ ‘Hold for the Watch!’

  Sorgrad looked one way, down into the yard next door. ‘Gren considered the herb garden on the other side. It was no use. Candle lanterns swinging crazily on watchmen’s poles threw light into every corner as they poured through the houses on either side. Barazon’s neighbours’ voices followed them with querulous questions and complaints.

  The Watch had a key to Barazon’s back gate. It swung open on dutifully greased hinges and a whole detachment of bully boys in their heavy coats and broad brimmed hats came flooding through. There was no escape. Sorgrad sat down on the roof and unobtrusively slid his scabbarded dagger inside his breeches while ostensibly ripping a length from his shirt tail to swaddle his cut hand. Halice pushed me down beside him, her hand on my shoulder inexorable. Then she spread her hands wide in the moonlight, in apparent surrender. ‘Gren stood on the ridge of the roof, hands on his hips, defiance in every bone of him.

  ‘You come on down and let’s be having no nonsense.’ A watchman with a white cockade in his hat peered up at us, quarter staff gripped purposefully in hands that could cover a dinner plate.

  ‘Cry,’ Sorgrad murmured beside me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Weep, snivel, tell them how you never meant-’

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ shouted the man with the white cockade, his tone hardening.

  He might have said more but uproar in the house interrupted him. The rest of his little army had found the body in Cordainer’s room.

  ‘All right, captain, we’ll come quietly.’ Sorgrad got to his feet and as he did so, quite deliberately trod on my hand. That was enough to startle tears to my eyes and by the time my turn came to clamber down to the waiting watchman and their manacles, I was grizzling quite convincingly. Not that it saved me from the same chains as Halice. I traded a swift glance with her. Her stolid face was unreadable but I could see apprehension in her eyes as well as her warning. Then she was shoved on towards the gate by guards who held their quarter staffs ready, just in case this woman who topped most of them by a head should try something unexpected.

  ‘Gren was the last one down from the roof, jumping lithe as a cat to land beside his brother.

  ‘Give us your hands,’ barked the watch captain.

  ‘Make me,’ ‘Gren challenged.

  Sorgrad said something in what must have been the Mountain tongue and looking mutinous, ‘Gren held out his wrist for the irons.

  ‘Where are you taking us?’ I wailed as we were ushered towards the gate, a solid wall of brown coated watchmen surrounding us.

  ‘Lock-up, copper top,’ said one behind me, with an unpleasant relish in his voice.

  It wasn’t the first lock-up I’d been in. There had been selfish market towns here and there on the road where being caught without the price of a bed for the night made you a vagrant.Such refuse wasn’t allowed to clutter up their doorsteps or ginnels. Some would simply send you on your way whatever the chime of day or night, with a kicked arse if necessary. Others would throw you in a cell till morning, one deliberately filthy and cramped enough to be no kind of welcome lodging.

  The Selerima lock-up was comparatively clean by contrast; a large cellar in the watch house divided up with walls of lath and plaster, each pen with a door of iron bars. A watchman dozed on a stool by the door we’d been dragged through earlier, oblivious to the drunken maunderings of some other inmate.

  I ignored him as well, all my attention on the stairs beyond the outer door.‘Where do you suppose they’ve taken him?’ At least the rambling drunk’s lament covered my words.

  ‘Somewhere where they can wash the blood away easier.’ Halice was lying on one of the two palliasses we’d had tossed in to us. The sackcloth was grubby and stained and the straw within was crushed and rank. ‘Can you see ‘Gren?’

  ‘He’s still just lying there.’ I couldn’t keep the anxiety out of my voice.

  ‘He’s tough as old boots,’ Halice assured me.

  ‘He’s covered in blood,’ I retorted, uncomforted.

  Unsurprisingly Sorgren’s uncrushed cockiness made him the watch captain’s first choice for questioning. He’d swaggered out as if the men flanking him were some escort rather than guards. They’d carried him back in between them a while later, his fair hair plastered to his forehead with blood, his lip split and bruised, one eye swollen shut. His jerkin was gone and there were boot marks plain as day on his soiled shirt.

  Then they’d taken Halice, who’d come back unbloodied but walking stiffly and dropping down to lie on her palliasse without speaking, not even turning her head as they dragged the limply unresisting Sorgrad away.

  At least they’d taken the punishingly heavy manacles off us in here, along with every blade we’d carried between us, including the one tucked down Sorgrad’s breeches. I rubbed at my sore wrists and wondered what chime of the night it might be. We’d let the five bells of midnight come and go before we’d set out for Barazon’s house. It had to be getting on for dawn. How long had they been trying to beat some answers out of Sorgrad? When was it going to be my turn?

  With what felt like sickening promptness the lock to the cellar turned with a deliberate clunk. The dozing guard sprang from his stool as the door opened to reveal a pair of broad shoulders in a watchman’s leather coat. There were two of them, carrying Sorgrad between them. He looked as badly beaten as ‘Gren. The drunk fell silent for a moment then resumed his meaningless litany in a low mumble.

  ‘Open up.’ The one carrying Sorgrad’s feet nodded at the cell where ‘Gren still lay motionless.

  The guard from the stool fished at his belt for a ring of keys and unlocked the metal door. They threw Sorgrad inside and he landed on the stained palliasse with the dull thump of a sack of turnips hitting a barn floor.

  ‘And her.’ The guard jerked his head at me.

  I stepped back as the watchman with the keys unlocked the door. Waiting on the threshold, he reached inside but I was too far away.

  He looked at me patiently. ‘Come on love, don’t make it worse than it already is.’

  I took a hesitant pace forward and he gripped me around the upper arm, not cruelly but firmly all the same. The two men waiting to escort me to whatever fate awaited me watched. One was impassive, the other openly anticipatory, greedy eyes on my breeched legs, lingering on my chest before he turned to lead the way up the stairs.

  ‘Up you go,’ ordered the impassive one.

  I obeyed. There was nothing else I could do. Weary to my bones after a day and a night without sleep, it took remarkably little effort to summon the tears that Sorgrad and Halice had both advised in the brief deliberation we’d managed under cover of the drunk’s riotous singing. That was without acknowledging the gnawing fear that we weren’t going to find a way out this.

  The watch house was dull white plaster walls in sore need of a new coat of lime wash. Candles in sconces caked in wax were adding to the soot stains already reaching up the wall to join the scorch marks on the ceiling. The wainscoting was the same brown oak as the stairs which were wide and dusty and hadn’t seen a coat of polish since I’d discarded my housemaid’s apron. They took me to a room on the second floor and took up station either side of the door once they’d closed it behind us all.

  The man inside wore a coat of brown velvet and sat behind a broad table stacked high with parchments and ledgers. He nodded to a single stool set in the empty expanse of a threadbare carpet in the middle of the room. ‘Sit down.’

 
; I did as I was told, an abject picture of misery.

  He got up from his round backed chair and came to offer me a handkerchief. ‘Dry your eyes.’

  His tone made that paradoxically harder to achieve; stern but not cruel, regretful rather than wrathful. I mopped and wiped and drew a shuddering breath.

  ‘I’m willing to believe you had little enough to do with this,’ the man in velvet said calmly as he returned to his chair. ‘Mountain Men like those two always have glib tongues to go with their light fingers. Forest maiden are you? Not really used to all the deceits and counterfeits of the city? I’m willing to believe you were talked into what you thought was just to be simple housebreaking. I don’t imagine you ever thought it would end in murder. That should be enough to save you from the gallows if we can recover Master Barazon’s diamonds for him.’

  ‘I don’t know where they are,’ I stammered.

  The man in velvet shook his head and continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘We’ve searched the house and the yard. You didn’t get far, any of you, so where could you have hidden them? Or was there another one of you, someone who got away before we arrived? Was it him who killed Master Cordainer? Tell us where he is and where he’s got the diamonds and it’ll be him on the gallows tree instead of you.’

  ‘There wasn’t any one else,’ I said slowly. ‘Apart from Cordainer. It was him found us and told us about the diamonds. Find him and you’ll find them.’

  ‘We found him, didn’t we? With his face smashed in and your yellow haired friend with blood on his cuffs,’ said the watch commander with faint impatience.

  I shook my head stubbornly. ‘That can’t be him.’

  The watch commander rested his forearms on his table and steepled his fingers together. ‘I could just about believe Cordainer got greedy for those diamonds himself, if they’re as fine as everyone says. Did they look like a lord’s ransom to you?’

  ‘They weren’t there.’ I realised I was explaining this badly. ‘When we got to the coffer, they were already gone.’

  ‘You saw the empty box?’ asked the commander.

  ‘That’s what Sorgrad told me.’ I heard the hard note of defiance in my words and wondered if I should start crying again.

  ‘Who could have had the gems in his pocket all along and been lying to your face,’ commented the commander. ‘While that brother of his found Cordainer had repented of some folly or loose words to a tavern whore. He told the other servants he was leaving the shrine dedication early just to make sure the house was secure.’

  ‘Who roused the Watch?’ I asked, trying for a sob in my voice.

  ‘Cordainer told one of the footmen to come looking for him at the end of the prayers and to go and find a watchman if the house was still dark,’ the commander explained obligingly.

  I slumped on the stool and studied the toes of my boots as I thought about that. The footman can’t have been too pleased. When the prayers were done was when the ale donated by local brewsters would be sold to fill the new shrine’s poor chest for the first time. We’d been counting on that keeping the servants carousing long enough to let us get clean away. We’d discussed the timing with Cordainer in detail.

  ‘I’ve been fair with you,’ the commander said, stern now. ‘Told you exactly where you stand. We’ll be searching that house, the yard and the ones on each side again at first light. Tell me where your thieving friend threw those diamonds and I’ll make sure it’s to your credit. You need to understand, my lass, that keeping faith with those Mountain Men will just see you hanged alongside them.’

  I nodded dumbly, still studying my boots. The watch commander waited for me to say something more. I swear I could hear the chains and gears grating inside the time piece on the wall, as its finger measured out my silence down the long length of its graduated scale.

  ‘Take her back down,’ he finally ordered with disgust.

  I followed the guards meek and mute down to the depths below. The lecherous one unlocked the cellar door and the stolid one followed me inside. There was neither sound nor movement from Sorgrad or ‘Gren. The drunk had finally fallen silent and the one noise was the slow rhythm of Halice’s snores.

  ‘You’d better go and get some sleep in a real bed,’ he told the guard now dozing again on the stool with some exasperation.

  As the yawning watchman departed, handing over his keys so the stolid one could return me to my cell, I found I was holding my breath. Was my luck going to take even a faint turn for the better this disastrous night?

  As he locked the iron bars behind me, the stolid one turned his head to address the lecher with curt disapproval that I guessed must stem from some earlier incident. ‘You can see out the night here. Come and get me when tenth chime sounds.’

  The stolid one stumped off up the stairs. I unbuttoned the front of my jerkin and tugged at the laces of my shirt before turning round to press myself against the iron bars. ‘Please, you have to believe me, I don’t know where those diamonds are,’ I hissed at the guard with wide eyed desperation. ‘Please, I never meant to be any part of this. You’ve got to get me out of here. I’ll do anything.’ The neck of my shirt just revealed the creamy flesh that the sun never saw. ‘Please. You’ve got a kind face.’ I managed to summon a few tears to turn my eyes to glistening emeralds.

  His greedy eyes fastened on the as yet concealed delights beneath my shirt. ‘Now then, lass, you heard what the captain said.’

  ‘But I don’t have anything to tell him,’ I lowered my voice, glancing back into my cell with apprehension for a moment. Halice snored on. ‘I only went along with them because it sounded a better way of filling my purse than lifting my heels. I only want to get back to my people.’ I ran a distracted hand through my tousled auburn hair.

  ‘I might be able to put in a word for you.’ The lecherous guard licked his lips and rubbed a grimy hand over his stubbly chin. ‘If you make it worth my while.’

  ‘Please, I’ll do anything,’ I repeated, trying to look like the kind of half-wit who’d believe a lowly turnkey could have any influence on her fate.

  He rose from his stool, adjusting his breeches as he did so, eyes fixed on my breasts as I pressed against the bars. ‘Kneel down then.’

  ‘No, what if she wakes,’ I threw a terrified glance in the direction of Halice’s palliasse.

  Lust had her claws deep in him now and he fumbled for the keys as he hurried over. I took a pace back as he unlocked the door, hands at the neck of my shirt to keep all his attention on me.

  As the iron bars swung open, he reached for me and Halice grabbed him by the collar, dragging him into the cell, her other hand clamped mercilessly over his mouth. She smiled, finally abandoning the feigned snoring. ‘I thought he was never going to take the bait.’

  ‘I thought I was going to have to strip naked for him,’ I agreed.

  He struggled in Halice’s grip as she twisted his collar tight around his neck. A button pinged away to be lost in the scraps of straw littering the flagstones. His struggles didn’t last long, his face suffused with red, outrage vanishing behind screwed tight eyelids, tears mingling with the sweat from his forehead.

  Halice held his limp body up against her own, one hand still over his mouth. ‘Get his coat off, quick.’

  I struggled to pull it free, tugging the heavy leather down over his shoulders and arms. ‘He isn’t dead, is he?’ We were in enough trouble over the body we weren’t responsible for. We’d definitely hang if there was another one added to our tally.

  ‘No. Rip his sleeves off.’

  As I did so, releasing a rank sourness, Halice seized the grimy linen and gagged the watchman. He was already beginning to stir as we laid him down on the palliasse, using the other sleeve from his shirt to bind his wrists behind his back.

  ‘Come on.’ ‘Gren rattled the bars of his cell door impatiently.

  ‘Tie his bootlaces together.’ Halice shrugged on the watchman’s leather coat and the leather protested as it stretched across her sh
oulders. She pulled the keys free from the lock and went to release Sorgrad and ‘Gren as I did so.

  As I left the cell, I realised the drunk was awake and watching us, eyes bright in an unkempt tangle of grey beard and hair. He grinned, showing me stained and rotten teeth. ‘Didn’t see a thing, my girl, nor hear nothing neither.’

  ‘Livak.’ Sorgrad was already at the top of the steps. ‘They’ve been locking this from the outside. You’ll have to open it.’ When I opened my mouth to demur, he held up his hands. The watchmen must have stamped on his fingers to leave them so bruised and swollen.

  ‘They took my picks.’ I looked at him aghast.

  ‘Use the loop from the keys,’ Sorgrad ordered tersely. ‘It’s a piss poor lock.’

  I untwisted the thick wire that bound the keys together with shaking fingers. With our second turn of good fortune that night, Sorgrad was right. It was a crude and clumsy lock easily tripped.

  Halice licked finger and thumb and snuffed the candle in its sconce by the door. ‘Ready.’

  ‘What if there’s some one out there?’ I couldn’t help but ask.

  ‘Then we’ll be hanging on the nevergreen tree before sunset,’ shrugged ‘Gren.

  It was hard to tell, given the bruises staining his face but I fancied there was a hint of uncertainty in his bloodshot eyes. Perversely that put new heart into me.

  ‘We’ve just got to chance it, my lass,’ Sorgrad said calmly. ‘Remember what I told you?’

  I nodded briefly. It had sounded like madness then and it felt like madness now.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’ We moved to let Halice open the door and did our best to hide behind her, the skirts of the watchman’s coat adding to her bulk. The corridor beyond the cellar stairs was empty and Halice hurried to snuff the candle burning out here.

  Wordlessly, she halted at the bottom of the stairs, so the rest of us could slip up with her at the rear, hopefully no more than a watchman come in from the streets to any casual glance from below. She took the stairs two at a time, footfalls still soft all the same. Sorgrad and ‘Gren were hurrying on ahead, pinching out candles as they went. Every bone, every muscle must have been screaming with pain after the beatings they’d taken. Still, better this agony than the slow choking death of the hangman’s noose.