Thief of Hearts

by Leda Swann

  A rustle of papers caught her ear. She patted his greatcoat and his jacket, finding no pocket.

  They must be sewn inside his lining. She felt around on the ground around her until her fingers found a sharp stone. With the tip of the stone she ripped the lining of his jacket, put her hands inside, and drew out a packet of papers tied with ribbon and a couple of loose sheets.

  He had been murdered for his papers. They must be even more valuable than the money she had tucked away. She pulled out all the papers she could find and transferred them from his coat to her own.

  Just then, the body gave a feeble groan and stirred slightly. Miriame gave a start. She’d thought he was dead and gone already.

  She bent her head towards his chest and felt a faint stirring of his chest as he labored to draw his last breaths. He was still alive. Not very alive, and not likely to live for long, but still alive for now.

  “Can you hear me?” she said into his ear? “Can you understand what I am saying?”

  He gave the tiniest nod, so small she didn’t know whether or not she was imagining it. His eyes flickered open for a brief moment, and then shut again, and he groaned again. He was definitely alive.

  She sat back on her heels wondering what to do. She’d had no qualms about robbing a corpse – she was just taking things that were of no use to their owner any more. But to rob a dying man and leave him to breath his last in the mud of the roadway? Living on the streets as she did, she couldn’t afford many morals, but somehow that didn’t sit quite right with her.

  Besides, the man she hated from the very depths of her soul wanted the man dead. That was reason enough for her to want to save his life.

  She touched her hand lightly to the wound on his chest and drew it away again sticky with blood. With a grunt she tore a strip of wool from one of the rags she wore and bound it tightly around his chest to stop the bleeding. She had taken enough wealth from him to replace her garments with better ones twenty times over, but even so she sacrificed it with some unwillingness. She hadn’t survived on the street for this long by giving her clothes to strangers.

  “What the hell,” she muttered to herself, as she heaved him to his feet with all the muscles in her strong, wiry body. “You’ve done me a good turn by donating me your wallet. The least I can do is help you to die in your bed, not die a dog in the gutter.”

  His brief moment of lucidity had not lasted for long. He was quite insensible now, flopping against her shoulder as weak and spineless as the rag doll her mother had once made for her, long, long ago when times had not been so bad. He did not even groan when she accidentally knocked against the wound in his chest, making it bleed anew.

  The stranger’s horse was still standing nearby, nosing around the cobblestones in the vain hope of a blade of grass. Miriame nickered softly to it. “Come on my pretty girl, come over here a moment,” she called, and it ambled over in her direction.

  Somehow she managed to wrestle the stranger on to his horse’s back, until he was lying face down over the saddle. His face bumped against the horse’s flanks on one side, while his knees bumped against the other side. He could hardly be very comfortable, but they only had a short way to go. She knew of an inn not far away where he would be well-looked after. The landlady there was kind enough and more honest than most. She’d take good enough care of him if she were paid well to do so. She’d not take his money and throw him out on the streets again to die, as some others she knew of would.

  More worryingly, the wound in his chest had begun to seep blood again. The horse flared its nostrils and sidestepped uncomfortably down the street with its strange burden, but Miriame held tight to its reins and forced it to follow along behind her. “Come on now,” she murmured to the horse, “easy does it.” The horse snorted uneasily, but did not panic or throw off its burden.

  The dark of the night was starting to lighten slowly into the gray of a new day when the lights of the inn flickered in front of her. Miriame banged on the door and a sleepy-eyed scullery maid opened it a crack. Her eyes went wide when she saw the horse with its burden, and she opened her mouth to scream.

  Miriame had no patience for her hysterics. “He’s alive, you fool,” she said shortly, “but he won’t be for much longer if you don’t get a move on. Fetch your mistress, and right smartly too, or it’ll be the worse for you.”

  The girl stuffed her apron in her mouth to stifle her sobs and scurried away as if the devil was after her.

  The landlady came down the stairs shortly afterwards, a clean apron stretched over her ample hips and her mouth stretched in a yawn. She cursed loudly when she saw Miriame in her rags, but there was no malice in her words. “What do you think you’re on about, waking me out of my bed at this ungodly hour, you young scamp,” she grumbled. “Go on, be off with you or I’ll give you a clip around the ear to learn you better manners.”

  Miriame hushed her and gestured to the horse and its grisly burden. “We need a room.”

  The landlady stopped in mid tirade. She waddled over the threshold of the inn and looked more closely at the stranger. “He’s dressed fine enough. What’s the matter with him? Drunk or sick?”

  “Not drunk anyways. Someone tried to murder him in the street. He needs nursing.”

  The landlady’s eyes narrowed. “And who’ll pay for that? I’m no charity, to be paying out for the nursing of murdered strangers who pass by my door in the middle of the night.”

  Miriame sighed at the thought of parting with any of her new-found wealth. “We can pay you well enough.”

  She still looked suspicious. “So you say. Until you’ve eaten my food and slept in my bed and had the best nursing there is until your master there breathes his last, and then you claim you’ve been robbed and don’t have a sou to pay your debts. Aye, I know all your tricks.”

  Miriame drew a small coin from the bag hidden in her shirt and handed it over. “Does this look like a trick to you?”

  The landlady grabbed it eagerly, sniffed at it, gave it a bite with one of the few teeth she had left, and now satisfied that it was genuine enough, tucked it into her large bosom. “Well, mebbe you’re one of the honest ones,” she admitted grudgingly. “But you can’t blame a poor woman for looking after her own.” She turned back towards the inn and raised her voice into a bellow. “Luc, Mathieu, come shift your lazy carcasses out here and give me a hand to get this young gentleman up to bed.”

  The two men who appeared at her call lifted the stranger as if he were a featherweight. Miriame took the saddlebags off the horse, gave it into the hands of a stableboy for a feed and a brush, and then followed the men up the stairs and into a chamber with a large bed in it.

  The landlady drew back the counterpane and spread out some old rags on top of the sheet. The men deposited their burden roughly on top of the rags and shouldered their way out of the room again.

  “No sense in getting the sheets all bloody,” the landlady remarked to no one in particular, as she lighted a tallow candle and bent to her work, stripping off the stranger’s boots and breeches, and baring the wound in his chest. She poured a bowl of water from the pitcher on the washstand and began to sponge off the blood around the edges of the cut.

  For the first time that night Miriame got a good look at the man she had rescued from the streets. He was young enough by his looks – barely two or three and twenty she would guess. His cheeks were pale from loss of blood and his face was drawn with pain, but even this could not hide the beauty of his features. His eyes were framed with long eyelashes, dark brown to the very tip. His mouth was full and red, despite the paleness of his face, and his teeth, when he grimaced slightly in pain, were white and straight. His hair, once they had got his hat off, fell across the bolster in brown-blond ringlets, streaked golden with the sun.

  The landlady seemed equally struck by his handsome features. “He’s a right looker, isn’t he?” she said, as she wiped a lock off hair off his face with a clean corner of her washcloth.

  “P
rettiest face I’ve seen in a long time,” Miriame agreed. It wasn’t just his face, either, that held her attention. His legs in his silk stockings were long and straight and his thighs and calves firm with muscle.

  Slowly she raised her eyes from his legs again. His belly was flat and his chest as broad as any woman could want, but his chest was disfigured with a nasty wound. A pity. She doubted that he would live until the morrow with such a gaping cut.

  Even half-dead as he was, she couldn’t help but stare at him. No wonder a gang of thugs had set on him in the street – no doubt some slighted lover had ordered them to get rid of his rival. He was as beautiful as an angel in Heaven – enough to inspire desire in any woman - or murderous jealousy in any man.

  The landlady was looking curiously at her, and she snapped her mouth shut again. She had been caught gawping at him like any girl. The women would be suspecting her disguise, or suspecting her of worse than that, if she were not more careful about where her eyes wandered.

  “Shall I make a pallet up on the floor for you?” the landlady asked, satisfied that she had done what she could for now. “You can watch over your master until the doctor comes. I’ll send a boy for him as soon as it gets light.”

  Miriame shook her head vehemently. No way was she staying around a man with a death warrant marked on his very face. She was only too used to be blamed for anything that went wrong, whether it was her fault or no. Still, if the landlady thought she was the stranger’s servant, her robbery would be all the easier. “I gotta get away,” she muttered hastily. “He give me a job to do afore the thugs got him. Says I gotta do it for him or he’ll feed me liver to his pet stoat, so he will.”

  “I can’t stay with him till the doctor gets here,” the landlady grumbled. “It’s not yet dawn and I’ve got other guests besides him to look after.”

  “I’ll stay with him till then,” Miriame offered with some reluctance. She was itching to get clean away with her loot. Besides, she had little intention of staying long. Let her just satisfy herself that she had taken everything she could, and she would be off. The poor stranger was going to die for sure, whether she waited and wept over his soul or no.

  “I’ll leave you with him then,” the landlady said as she backed out of the door before Miriame could change her mind, the basin of bloody water in her hands. “I’ll send the doctor up when he comes.” She nudged the door shut with the back of her shoulder and Miriame could hear her plodding down the stairs to the kitchen once again.

  Saddlebags first, Miriame thought as soon as she was alone with the stranger again. If the stuff in it was worth stealing, she would take it gladly. If not, the heavy bags would only slow her down and she would leave them behind and have to content herself just with the more portable bit of the loot.

  She thrust her hand in the first one and drew out a large packet of food wrapped in a coarse cloth. She wouldn’t bother to take that with her – she’d eat it there and then. The bread was white and sweet and still soft, the cheese was ripe and moist, and the meat was thickly sliced. She wolfed it all down in less than a minute and finished it off with a sweet, wizened apple. She sat back and patted her stomach with satisfaction. She hadn’t fed so well in a long time. Her robbery was going well so far.

  Apart from the food, that saddlebag was empty. She thrust her hand around it to make sure that she wasn’t missing anything, but there was nothing else there.

  She thrust her hand into the second saddlebag, smacking her lips in anticipation. She wouldn’t say no to some more food like that she’d just eaten. If she could eat like that every day, she’d soon be even fatter than the landlady.

  No food in this saddlebag, but clothes instead. She drew them out with a wondering hand. Half a dozen shirts of white linen, softer than silk. A pair of waistcoats covered in lace. More silk stockings than she could count. A pair of breeches the twin to what the stranger wore. Even a tortoiseshell comb and brush, and a pretty jeweled knife, more like an ornament than a weapon despite the sharpness of the blade. She sighed in wonderment over such riches, wishing she could wear them instead of taking them off to Conard to be sold.

  She shook her head at her foolishness. In the slums she lived, people would knife her in the back for the lace on one of the sleeves. She could never wear them. She’d get a good price for them, and buy herself a coat to keep the winter cold from her back instead.

  Her curiosity about the saddlebags satisfied, she drew out the papers she had taken from the stranger earlier. She pulled the ribbon from the packet of papers and a bundle of letters spilled out on to her lap.

  A noise outside in the corridor startled her and she leaped up in a sudden fright to bolt the door, cursing her greed that she had forgotten to do it before now. The stranger had been knifed for his papers. Those who had knifed him might have found out by now that they hadn’t got all of what they came for and be on the hunt for him again. At any rate, she oughtn’t be taking any chances.

  The door once safely bolted, she sat down cross-legged on the floor to puzzle over the letters. Her mother had taught both her and her sister Rebecca their letters when they were small, but since their mother had died, she had had precious little chance of reading anything. What use were her letters to her when all she wanted to do was to protect her sister and to feed them both? Since Rebecca had been taken from her up into Heaven, she had even less desire to make out her letters. Her life had been one long struggle to survive.

  She puzzled over the symbols, making them out with some difficulty. They were obviously letters – from some woman to the stranger lying on the bed, she had no doubt, judging by all the ‘darlings’ and ‘sweethearts’ that lay sprinkled over the pages. They were signed ‘Francine’, every one of them, with an ornately curved F at the beginning. She riffled through them, and then tossed them aside with a snort of disgust. What a sentimental young fool the stranger was, carrying them in the lining of his cloak, as if they were more precious than the jewels he wore in plain sight on his fingers.

  Only the two single pages were left. She picked them up, hoping they were worth rather more than the letters she had tossed aside. No one would kill a stranger for a passel of old love letters, to be sure. The thugs in the street must have stolen the right papers after all.

  The two loose sheets seemed to be written in the same hand, but they were rather more difficult to make out. The words were writ smaller, and they were much longer and more complicated. At least, Miriame saw with a shrug of satisfaction as she quickly scanned the sheets, there were no `darlings’ or `sweethearts’ on these pages. They were filled with serious words – words, she hoped, that might mean money.

  With a grunt, she settled down to painstakingly read through the pages, her finger pointing to each word in turn as she spelled them out one by one.

  The dawn was beginning to break in earnest by the time she had finished reading them through. They had given her an idea – a wild idea, an unthinkable idea, an impossible idea – but an idea nonetheless.

  She stood up and stretched, her legs stiff from sitting cross-legged on the floor for so long. The man on the bed was still lying there with his eyes closed. His chest labored up and down with each faint breath he took. He was still hanging on to life, but only by a thread.

  Young and beautiful though he was, he could not expect to live. His Maker was even now preparing him a bed in Heaven, where he would be the most beautiful of all the angels, she had no doubt. Except for Rebecca – she would always be the most beautiful angel of all with her dark eyes, her long curling hair the color of a raven’s wing, and her sweet sweet smile. A pity that Death had found him so young, in the first bloom of his strength and beauty, just as it had found Rebecca...

  She shook her head. She had no leisure to think about Rebecca now. Her sister would have cautioned her to keep her mind on the task in front of her and not to let herself be distracted. She would do so still, for the memory of Rebecca, if nothing else.

  The man on the bed, Jean-Paul
Metin of the South of France according to the letters he carried, was like to die. His letters could not serve him now. He was a stranger to Paris from the provinces. He knew no one and no one knew him, save for the mysterious Francine of the letters. There was no one but Francine to know if she were to take his place. No one but Francine to suspect that Jean-Paul Metin was not the person he claimed to be.

  If she were like other women, this Francine would be sure to lose interest in poor, murdered Metin if he never replied to her letters. Indeed, Miriame could not answer them in his name even if she would. They were not furnished with an address. Poor Francine would have to live disconsolate without her `sweet cherub’ beside her.

  With legs that shook with wonder that she dared to carry off such as trick as she was contemplating, she ran down to the kitchen. “Have the maid bring me a tub of water, as warm as you can make it,” she instructed the landlady, who was standing at the bench, her arms covered to the elbow in flour. “I need a bath.”

  The landlady snorted at her impudence, but Miriame pressed another small coin into her hand. The landlady took it with her grimy paw, dropped it in her bosom and went back to kneading the dough. “One tub of water coming right up.”

  The water arrived quickly, but not quickly enough for Miriame. She had been pacing up and down in the chamber, one eye on the door and the other on the wounded stranger. Jean-Paul Metin. The name had a nice ring to it. She wouldn’t mind being known by such a name.

  His brow was white and covered in perspiration. He looked in terrible pain. She hoped for his sake that he died quickly - she didn’t hold with making a man suffer when his time had come. It crossed her mind to give him a quick tap on the head to ease him gently into the afterlife, but something stayed her hand. He had done her no wrong. She would not be his murderer.