“Oh. Beg pardon.” Jack looked contrite for only a moment … right before Avelyn kicked him in the shin.
He swore and let her loose. Hopping about, he grabbed his leg. “Sarding woman!”
“Yes, I should have warned you,” said Crispin. He gave her a stern look and she quieted immediately, crossing her arms over her chest. She turned a glare on Tucker, daring him to approach. He wisely kept his distance.
“Pray, sir,” said the alchemist, while frowning at Avelyn, “what brings you here? How can I help you?”
“I am assisting Master Flamel with a … well, a discreet task.”
The alchemist’s smug smile seemed to indicate that this was expected.
“I am Crispin Guest. And this servant led me here to-”
“Crispin Guest? No! No, no, no. You must leave at once, do you hear? Leave my property!” He raised the broom once more, but this time he looked reluctant to approach.
“But sir!”
“Out with you! Or I shall call in the law.”
Irritated, Crispin stiffened. “Very well. There will be no need for that.” Though many in London had heard of him and were anxious to assist his course, he knew there were many more that were wary of having anything to do with a traitor to the crown.
He swung toward the door and cast it open, minding not at all as it slammed against the wall. He heard glass breaking behind him with a satisfied smirk.
9
Crispin heaved a frustrated sigh at the closed door of the alchemist’s shop. Avelyn waited beside him, bouncing on her heels. “This was a useless venture,” he told her. “He would not talk to me.”
She clenched her eyes and shook her head. She kicked the door and bent down, scooped up snow from the porch, and hurled uneven snowballs at it.
He took her arm and pulled her away. “There’s no use in doing that. Take us back to your master.”
With a lilt to her shoulders, she pointed at yet another set of symbols scrawled on a post, hastily scratched out.
He shook his head. “Take us back to your master.”
She kicked the mud with her damp shoe and stomped up the lane, furiously scuffing the dirty snow as she went.
He certainly empathized with her frustration. Perhaps Flamel could translate her petulance. Though he wondered why she had not taken him to Flamel in the first place. Was she trying to hide something from him? And what about Flamel’s supposed fame? Even this fellow, this alchemist, seemed to have heard of the Frenchman. Yet when it was mentioned, she had tried to silence him on the matter. Perhaps she had not wished the man to know she was the servant of Nicholas Flamel. If only he could ask her and get an answer.
They reached the Tun and were stopped by a procession. The three of them backed up against a wall out of the way. The procession took up the width of the road, and it was plainly that of a funeral. A young boy in clerical robes, no more than ten or eleven, swung a smoking censer back and forth before him, filling the street with the aroma of musky incense. He was followed by a priest in a dark cassock, reading aloud in Latin from a small Psalter clutched in his gloved hands. Behind him, a man led a horse pulling a cart decorated in black drapery on which lay a shrouded child, dried rose petals sprinkled on her chest. Behind it, people cried softly, and a man comforted a woman wailing openly, stumbling through the snowy lane. The parents.
Children died in London all the time, this he knew. Its streets were treacherous to the young. Women and children drowned in its waterways. A rushing horse might knock over a wayward child with nary a look back.
He couldn’t help but glance at Jack. The boy had survived against the odds. Orphaned at eight, so he had said, Jack had been on his own for three years before he’d forced his stubborn way into Crispin’s life. He could easily have been just another dead child in the city, another fallen to poverty, to starvation. Crispin shuddered at the thought that such a quick and nimble mind could have been snuffed out, lost to the despair of the streets.
The wail of the mother howled like a wind through the narrow lanes, rising and falling, even as they moved farther on. He supposed this child had succumbed to illness or accident. The occasional eruption of the plague caused panic and fear, though the plague was more likely in the spring, not the dead cold of winter. A terrible waste. A child was always needed to do the work of the household, to learn his father’s business, to be married off to cement alliances. But such was the whim of the Almighty. One never knew when He would send His Angel of Death to his task.
Crispin and Jack crossed themselves and lowered their heads, each offering a silent prayer for the soul rising to Heaven. They watched as the procession passed them.
“I hate death,” Jack whispered. He sounded more like the uncertain boy Crispin had first encountered nearly four years ago.
“Yes,” Crispin agreed. “And yet death is part of our peddler’s goods.”
“So it would seem. But I never get used to it.”
“I pray that you never do.”
Avelyn stood at the far crown of the road, clapping at them impatiently.
“Don’t she have no respect for the dead?” Jack grumbled.
Crispin set out again, folding his cloak over his chest as the last vestiges of the incense dispersed and the sharp smell of dung and cooking fires returned to fill the lane. “Perhaps she has seen too much of it herself. We all have our pasts.”
Jack said nothing more, and they continued on, even as the snowfall grew heavier. When they arrived at Flamel’s shop, Avelyn sprinted ahead and disappeared through the door. Crispin and Jack walked through just as Flamel was admonishing her to “slow down, fille. I cannot understand.”
“Master Flamel,” said Crispin. The man spun. His exasperation with his servant fled and he almost fell into Crispin’s arms.
“Where have you been? Have you word of my Perenelle?”
“No. I take it you have not heard from our abductor.”
“No. Alas.” He sank to a chair. Avelyn was nearly vibrating with the need to speak.
“Your servant seems to wish to convey information to us. I cannot understand her well. Not as well as you. Please. Could you translate?”
He beckoned the girl to him and she knelt at his feet, still a bundle of unspent energy. He signaled his question to her and she began to gesture furiously. Flamel took it all in. Crispin tried to follow with what little knowledge of her language he had acquired. He saw words hurl by: “apprentice,” “parchment,” “stone,” “signs,” and many more he could not assimilate.
Once or twice during her fluttering fingers, Flamel turned toward Crispin with a narrowed gaze, especially when she signed the word “kiss.” Crispin felt heat rise on his neck, before Avelyn gently touched the alchemist’s face to turn him back to her so she could continue with her tale.
At last she seemed to slow. Her movements looked more like questions than explanations, and Flamel waved them off, face turned away from her.
“Master Flamel. What did she say?”
“Mostly nonsense. She is like to say things that are meaningless. You’d best be aware of that, Maître, if you intend more congress with her.” A whisper of a warning flickered in his eyes. “It is not that she lies, but that the truth is … quelque peu différente pour elle … as you would say, not quite the same to her.”
“Indeed. Perhaps it is a trait of your vocation, for I do not think you value truth quite as I do either.”
He chewed his lip. “My English may not be as good as I thought it. Please forgive any errors.”
Crispin leaned down, pressing his hands to the chair arms and trapping Flamel in place. “Your English is perfectly serviceable. It is the content that is not. Why do you lie to me? Why do you leave out valuable information that I can use to find your wife? I have learned that you are well-known, Master Flamel, even here in England. Why is that so?”