‘But how many villains knew him as intimate as you, eh, Blessop? Answer me that.’
‘I don’t rightly know,’ Borin glared. ‘I only know I ain’t one of them.’
‘My boy’s no villain,’ his mother objected loudly. ‘He’s a good boy.’
Mister Webb looked over to the younger woman standing silently in the far corner. ‘Can you swear your husband spent the whole night beside you in his bed? Or was he out doing his cursed wickedness in the dark hours?’
Tyballis paused and took a deep breath. ‘I have no idea,’ she said.
After Borin was hauled away, her mother-in-law slapped Tyballis for the fourth time. ‘You’ve the nerve to say that, slut, just to get a good honest man into a trouble he surely don’t deserve.’
‘It was the truth. You know it was. I wasn’t here, so I don’t know what Borin was up to.’
‘And what has the truth to do with the law?’ demanded Margery. ‘I shall go straight down to the sheriff’s chambers and inform him you were lying, spiteful wretch that you are. And you’d best back me up if they come asking, or you’ll answer for it to me and Borin both. As for now, you stay here and get on with dinner.’
Outside, Mother Blessop could be heard arguing with the neighbours and relating the scandals of an unjust world. Tyballis wiped her hands on her apron, retrieved the stranger’s cloak from the shadows and hugged it around her. Then she sat again on the stool by the hearth and gazed into the crackle of the flames. The cloak was felted wool, matted with age and waxed against the inclemency of English weather. Thickly impermeable, it now kept out the draughts while the fire scorched her face. The cloak still smelled of its owner. Once, she thought, it had been a deep forest green but now it was mostly black and stained with the residue of long-forgotten stories. Tyballis sighed, picked up her knife and bowl, and went back to peeling turnips.
The fresh tang of peelings tickled her nose. Her arms ached. But reared to a woman’s work, an insistence on cleanliness and the simple safety of familiar routine, the only semblance of control she might claim was the maintenance of a respectable home. Working – pondering – and as she worked, she wondered if it was finally time to run away for good. Borin, however, remained both as motive and impediment, for since she was quite sure he had never murdered anyone, let alone his poppy-headed beetle-brained idiot of an employer, her loving husband might soon be set free. He would then search for her, having convinced the sheriff that her recent denials were wicked lies and that he could no more slay a nobleman than be elected Lord Mayor of London. It was true, after all, that Borin could not even bring himself to wring the neck of a chicken for their supper and instead left his mother to do it. But he had knocked his wife down the stairs on their wedding night and often beat her until she sobbed for mercy. Murder can take many forms.
The pottage was still simmering, and the house had warmed when Margery Blessop returned. Outside, the alleys steamed as the puddles dried. ‘He’ll be in Newgate by suppertime,’ she said, briskly folding her cape and reaching for her apron. ‘And it won’t just be a day in the stocks this time, not being no simple theft nor the loading of dice. In all this filthy mire of a city, it’s Newgate is the very worst. Hellfire makes a better bed, they say, and the devil a better bedfellow. But my boy’ll be there till his trial, and it’s there you’ll visit the poor mite tomorrow morning. You’ll take him a pie for his dinner and beg his forgiveness.’
‘We’ve no money for pies,’ Tyballis said. ‘You can’t buy a pie for less than four pence these days, and that’s if you’re lucky. Last wage Borin brought home was two shillings and tuppence, and that to feed three of us. We live on nothing but pottage and turnips as it is.’
‘And there’ll be less of that from now on,’ nodded her mother-in-law. ‘Borin’ll not be working, not now nor when he gets out, what with Throckmorton dead and gone and his worthless brother waiting to snatch the title. That bully Harold won’t keep my Borin on, not after this, innocent proved nor otherwise.’
Tyballis smiled. ‘Borin hates him.’
‘And don’t you go repeating that to the sheriff, neither,’ muttered Margery. ‘You’re a troublemaker, Tyballis Blessop, as I’ve said for nigh on five years now, and you’ve never shown the respect you ought. Go sell that cape you say you found last night and buy your man a decent dinner. Keep his poor guts full while he rots in the Limboes.’
Newgate spilled its debris and its stink for some distance beyond its confines. Borin was accustomed to spending a night or two in the Marshalsea or The Fleet and had once seen out a week in The Clink before being chained in the stocks with his feet in the rain and rotten eggs in his hair. Newgate, however, had as yet been unknown to him, so Tyballis had not passed there, either to visit the prison or to leave London through its western gate. But she knew before she reached the walls that she was close.
A small crowd, unaffronted by the smell, bustled and milled beneath the barred window slits, calling to those held within. A thin-faced child, kicking at the remains of a dead kitten in the gutter, turned, saw Tyballis thrust back her long uncombed hair and stuck out her hand. Two of her fingers were missing above the lower knuckle. She wore only a man’s shirt, torn, dirty and frayed around her ankles.
Tyballis said, ‘I’ve no money, child, and nothing to give you.’
The child sidled close and sniffed. ‘You got pies. I can smell ’em.’
A pippin pie, four pence ha’penny and still hot. ‘Only one pie. I can smell it, too, but it’s for my husband.’ Tyballis sighed. ‘Not for you and not for me either, much as I’d like it.’
‘Forget the bugger in there. Half for you, missus? An’ half for me?’
Tyballis looked down at the top of the child’s bright yellow curls and the lice crawling there. ‘Sorry. I mustn’t.’
The child sniffed again. ‘Mustn’t? I reckon growed-ups can do what they likes. No point to all that effort growing old if you still can’t get no ’vantages.’
Tyballis hesitated. She stood for a moment beneath the raised iron portcullis and felt the sudden chill of utter hopelessness which gathered there. One of the gaolers was cursing a woman who, basket carefully covered, had come to see her son.
‘Only dinner your boy’ll be getting, missus,’ yelled the warden, ‘is likely the pains o’ purgatory. Gone to the gibbet this morning two hours past, he did.’
‘I brought my Bertram his favourite dinner,’ wailed the old woman. ‘A man needs a hearty meal afore facing the swing.’
‘What you want me to do then, missus?’ demanded the gaoler. ‘Call him back? You’d do best to leave that basket with me, what’ll appreciate it, while you get yourself up to Tyburn.’
‘I’d not give you the snot from my nose for your dinner, Jimmy Hale,’ the woman shouted and turned, trudging off. Tyballis stared across the short stretch of cobbles, and the small girl stared back. Hanging loose around her, the man’s shirt, streaked in dirt, had worn thin and the girl’s bones showed through. Tyballis said suddenly, ‘When did you last eat, child?’
The girl shook her head. Her curls bobbed but the lice clung on. ‘Dunno. Two days pr’haps. Drew give me cheat and bacon scraps for supper night before last.’
Tyballis exhaled on a sigh. She said, ‘Come with me.’
They sat together on the old church wall and licked the meat juices from their lips. Tyballis pointed to the drip of gravy on her companion’s chin. The little girl nodded, wiped it off and licked it from her hand. Tyballis licked her own fingers, increasingly aware that a few bites of pastry had divided her past from her future and that a decision had somehow been made without her own conscious intention. She said, ‘You’d better go home now, child. I have – quite a lot to think about.’