I told of the Aekoi attack, the looting of the city, the fires, the captives carried away, the corsairs still busy in the harbor, the injured being carried to the guild halls.
The baronet nodded. “And you are organizing things? Who are you again?”
“I am Quillifer, Sir Towsley.”
“Ah.” The mustache twitched. “The Butcher’s son.” The baronet’s tone was dismissive, and my assumed authority twisted and vanished like smoke in a breeze.
“I shall take command, then,” the baronet said. “I shall establish my post in the New Castle.” He turned to his sons. “Set these people in order, and have them do something useful.”
I tried to explain to the sons what had been done and what still needed doing, but they ignored me and did whatever suited them—and they rarely agreed about anything, so amid the fraternal anarchy only the loudest voice prevailed, and that temporarily.
I decided there was no reason to stay, and went to Princess Street in search of my family.
In the wan light of the rising sun, I found them all. My father and the apprentices had held the door with their pollaxes and killed at least three Aekoi, whose bodies still lay stretched on the pavement. The reivers then fired the thatch, and my father had known that to fly into the street would mean nothing but their execution at the hands of pirates angered by the loss of their mates; and so he had stayed at his post till the smoke overcame him. He and the apprentices were unwounded, and had died before the floor above collapsed. Their weapons were still in their hands.
My sisters and mother had locked themselves behind the stout door of the buttery, and lay with their arms about one another under a shelf, where they had probably crawled in search of fresher air. They had smothered, and were not burned at all, only covered with a fine silver layer of ash.
I knelt by the bodies in the cramped, ruined space, and I saw the fine ash tremble in the lashes of my sister Alice, and at the sight I felt my heart swell in my breast until there was no room left for breath. I staggered out of the house sobbing, and a few doors down the road crouched beneath the overturned cart of a tinsmith, and surrendered for a long black hour to despair.
When I next crawled into the light, the sun, behind a low listless blanket of cloud, had risen well over the ramparts of Ethlebight’s useless walls. Limping, muscles an agony, I returned to the ruins of my home, and I picked my mother and sisters from the ruin of the buttery and brought them out into the street, where I laid them as best as I could on the bricks. I dragged out my father and the apprentices and laid them out as well. The pale, waxen faces of my family gazed sightlessly into the sky, and suddenly I knew I couldn’t leave them like that.
I turned up the street and walked through a broken door into the shop of Mrs. Peake the dressmaker. All the expensive fabric had been looted, but I found a bolt of unbleached muslin, and there I made simple shrouds for my family, which I draped over them. I weighed the shrouds down with broken brick at each corner, then went back into the ruins and took my father’s pollaxe.
“I will come back to you,” I told them, then turned and limped away down Princess Street.
I turned into the broader lane that led to Scarcroft Square. Others walked in the same direction, and I looked to see if I knew them. I saw a grim-looking barber-surgeon named Moss, a frightened boy called Julian, and a stout, furious, red-faced woman with clenched fists, who looked ready to give the corsairs’ admiral a box on the ears.
And then I saw a man in faded, soiled blues and yellows, and my heart gave a leap.
“Kevin!”
My friend lurched into sight, fair hair uncombed and straggling over his unshaven face. He stared, slow to recognize me, but I rushed to Kevin and embraced him.
“I saw your father!” I said. “He’s taken but alive!”
“Praise Pastas,” Kevin said. His voice was a coarse whisper. He licked swollen lips, then said, “I need water.”
I took his arm and led him to Scarcroft Square and the fountain. Kevin drank greedily, then washed his face and blinked at me with reddened eyes.
“My mother?” he asked. “My sister and brother?”
“I didn’t see them,” I said. “They were probably taken.”
“I must go to the house.”
The Spellman house was one of the grandest on the square, with walls patterned with bricks of different colors, its chimneys carved with mythological beasts, and its many windows brilliant in the sun. The windows were less brilliant now: faceted glass panes built to dazzle in the sun’s rays had been knocked out, possibly under the impression they were gemstones. The door stood open, its lock smashed. Kevin walked into the hall and called out. There was no answer.
With heavy, reluctant feet, Kevin trudged up the steep, narrow stair. He turned his face away from a streak of blood on the upper step.
“This is where my father tried to fight them,” he said. “I came from my room to see what was causing the commotion, and he turned to me and told me to run.” He closed his eyes. “The Pilgrim help me, I obeyed.”
“You could not have fought them,” I said. “You would only have been caught or killed.”
“I should have tried to save my brother,” Kevin said. “Or my sister. But the pirates were right on my heels.” He looked down the upstairs hall. “I ran up to the servants’ floor, and bolted through the grooms’ room to the dormer, and out the window. I was shouting for everyone to run, but I don’t think they understood.” He turned to me. “I was the only one who got out. I heard more fighting in the house, and there was a swarm of pirates in the square in front, and some took shots at me.” He raised his hands. “I ran across the rooftops. And when I saw they were sending men up on the roofs, I hid. I burrowed beneath the topmost layer of thatch between two dormers, and stayed there until just a while ago.” He gave a forlorn look down the hall. Tears overfilled his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. “I should have stayed,” he said.
I took a step toward my friend and put a hand on his arm. “You did the right thing,” I said. “Someone must remain in Ethlebight and manage the business, and make up the ransom to save the rest.”
Kevin stood silent for a moment, and then his chin rose and a hard light caught his eyes. “The ransom!” he said.
He ran down the stairs past me and through the door into his father’s countinghouse, and there looked for the door, hidden in the carved paneling, where the ready money was kept. The door had been torn open and the contents looted, and many of the remaining panels had been torn from the walls in an attempt to find more hidden valuables. The heavy ledgers, with records of the Spellmans’ affairs, were scattered on the floor. Without a word Kevin turned, and knocked shoulders with me in his haste to dash again up the stair. From there he ran to his parents’ bedroom, where he beheld the strongbox torn from the window seat where it had been hidden. The strongbox was nearly three feet long, two broad, and a foot high, made of thick oaken panels strapped with iron, and with a complicated geared mechanism that, on the turning of a stout key, would shoot no less than eight steel bolts into place to secure the contents.
The reivers hadn’t tried to find the key: instead, they’d hacked the box to bits with a halberd or some other heavy weapon. With a groan, Kevin threw himself on the floor and searched the wreckage, and found nothing. He rose and turned to me. “The silver’s gone, of course,” he said. “But also the contracts! Loan agreements! The deed to the house! Deeds to other properties!” He looked at me. “Of what use would any of that be to pirates?”
The loans might be sold at a discount to brokers, I supposed, but the usefulness of the rest was obscure.
“They could not read or write,” I judged. “So, they took all.” I looked over the wreckage of the room, saw the drawers pulled from the bureau and emptied, the closets emptied of all fine clothes, the looking-glass smashed. The Aekoi had even carried away the feather mattress.