She was still wiping Marrott’s blood from her mouth when Throckmorton returned. ‘Come here, slut,’ he ordered her. ‘We’re leaving this place at once. You’re coming with me.’
Tyballis glowered. ‘I made an agreement with the others. I’ll keep my word if you let me go.’
He sneered, grabbing at her. ‘Your agreement’s worth nothing now. Everything’s changed and there’s twice the danger, so you’ll do exactly as I tell you or I’ll carry you off in a flour sack.’
She stared down at herself. ‘But my gown is torn so I need my cloak.’ Throckmorton looked her over and nodded. He was gone less than a minute but Tyballis made good use of it. She raced frantically around the grubby little room, discovered no prospective weapon, but finally snatched up an old wooden candlestick, hiding it within the folds of her skirts. When Throckmorton returned, she was meekly waiting. He wrapped an old brown cape around her shoulders, pulled the hood low over her face and thrust her out and down the stairs.
The mild spring sunshine had turned to rain and a hazy shimmering drizzle hung like gossamer over the lane. Half-pushed, half-dragged, Tyballis kept pace with her captor. Around her others were quickly leaving the house and heading in different directions, twenty men or more disappearing into the shadows. Tyballis looked for Marrott, but did not see him. She looked for the unexpected messenger whom she had been so astonished to recognise, but did not see him either. Then, as the last shadows dispersed, she saw someone else. Twisting to see better, she thought – but could not be sure – that she surely recognised him as well. With a sigh of frustration she dragged her feet as Throckmorton forced her from the house and into the rain.
He did not take her back to Throckmorton Hall, and she guessed he would not risk being seen forcing a young woman through London’s streets. They headed north and east, further out into the countryside. The lanes were empty, but the sun peeped from behind the scatter of dark clouds, spangling the last raindrops into a fine golden mesh. A rainbow flickered and arched, half-formed and pale across the treetops ahead, then fragmented as the sun blinked out. Tyballis breathed in the rose and soft violet, feeling that she trudged through dissolving hope.
She thought she had seen Ralph, just a momentary glimpse as she was pushed away. But Ralph had been otherwise engaged and had not noticed her at all. His concentration was now entirely focused as he grabbed the kitchen boy while the skinny child gaped in horror at the frantic scramble around him. He was promptly hauled from the squash of running men at the front door. ‘You’ll come with me,’ Ralph hissed, ‘and quiet, now.’ No one else saw. No one else cared. They were too eager to get away. The boy had been dragged halfway across the muddy slurp of the Cock and Pie Fields when the rainbow broke through. ‘That,’ Ralph muttered, ‘is a sign of hope, they say. Well, my lad, you’d better hope his lordship takes pity on you when he sees you, or he’ll have you turning on your own spit.’
‘I ain’t done nuffing, mister,’ the boy whimpered. ‘I said I’d be good, I said I’d tell as to what I seen, and I will.’
‘Not that there’s enough flesh on your miserable bones to be worth spit-roasting,’ Ralph said. ‘So, you’ll speak up to his lordship and you’ll keep nothing back, do you hear? He’s not a merciful man, is our Lord Feayton. But the more you tell, the kinder he’ll be inclined.’
‘I’s a spit-boy,’ objected the child with a plaintive sniff. ‘What went on in that draughty old place, well, it weren’t naught to me. Get this, do that. Stoke the fire, grease the rod, keep turning that nasty hot handle and stop sucking them burned fingers! That’s all I ever heard, mister. Not no secrets. Not no plots.’
Ralph cuffed the boy’s ear. ‘Stupid little bugger. I’m no country yokel. I know full well who hears the first rumours in any grand house, and where the gossip is loudest. There’s not a lord’s kitchen in the land doesn’t know every detail of their lord’s business and sometimes before he knows it himself.’
‘Weren’t hardly no grand lord’s house,’ sniffed the boy, his heels collecting mud as he was dragged along.
‘Maybe. But there were lords aplenty in it,’ Ralph said. ‘And I’m betting you knew a fair bit of what each one said, and of what each one did. There’s not a spit-boy in the land doesn’t listen to gossip, with both his ears to his master’s door.’
As Ralph and the boy headed southeast towards the city, so Baron Throckmorton dragged Tyballis along the northerly road beyond London. There were few who enjoyed walking in the rain. Those citizens who had been caught out, now hurried without attending to their neighbours, and those few who saw, said nothing and thought nothing. A man had every right to admonish his servant. The baron was grandly dressed, clearly a man of substance, while the girl he pushed and pulled wore ragged clothes beneath her cheap cape. His grip on her neck troubled no one. What they did not see was the point of the knife held threateningly close beneath her arm. Tyballis preserved her anger for when she might gain some benefit from it.
From High Oldbourne into Low Oldbourne, Baron Throckmorton marched his captive over the short bridge that crossed The Fleet. But avoiding the right turn towards Newgate, they turned left into Gilt Spur Street at Pie Corner, and knocked on the door of a small house. They were let in at once by an elderly woman in a greasy apron, wiping her hands on her skirts, bobbing and bowing, and bidding her lord welcome with a toothless grin. Throckmorton pushed Tyballis inside and immediately up the dark and rickety staircase. He then flung her into a dingy chamber, pulled the door shut behind him and locked it. Left alone, Tyballis caught her breath and began to look around.
Not far away, Ralph finally took a northern turn, bringing the kitchen-boy into London, following the shadows of the great Roman Wall until turning sharp left into Stinking Lane. Then he also knocked on the door of a small house, which swung open at once. There was no old crone beckoning them in, but a very tall man, broad-shouldered and imperious, dressed in the flowing grandeur of grey velvets.
‘Bring him in here,’ said Mister Cobham, ‘and let’s see what the child has to say.’
Chapter Sixty-Nine
It was glum with damp. A low ceiling beam trailed cobwebs. Although without window, some light leaked in around the ramshackle doorframe, and just above the visible rafters a crack in the roof allowed entrance to both a slice of daylight and a steady trickle of rain. The bed had neither posts nor curtains, but a semblance of tattered tester hung over the headboard collecting some of the drifting debris from above. The dribbling rain missed the mattress by a whisker and collected in a puddle on the floorboards amongst the dust. Tyballis had thought the house at St Giles sadly ill-kempt but this building was far smaller, little more than a slum, yet the bed, for all its dirt and discomfort, was unusually large. Tyballis took off her cape and quickly transferred the candlestick she had previously grabbed, to a new hiding place beneath the bed’s stuffed bolster. The constant weight of fear and the heartbeat of terror slunk beneath the practicalities. She was alert for any possibility of escape.
This latest claimant to the title of Throckmorton had come unexpectedly into his inheritance. The systematic deaths of his two cousins had interested him, but since they had been no friends of his, had troubled him very little. But now, having risen to such lofty status himself, he was discovering that the family business – smuggled drugs and poisons – was lost to him and the line of ultimate power had changed. He had inherited only debts and a manor in poor repair. He promptly set out to repair more than flaking plaster. It was of him, even more than dreaming of Andrew that Tyballis was thinking as, remaining fully dressed, she eventually curled on the bed with a blanket pulled resolutely up to her chin, and sleep restlessly through the night.