‘Oi, who’s swiped that?’
Jen hurried along the streets with her coat gripped tightly about her to protect her from the cold. At the Fissand Gate she entered the Cathedral precinct and stared about her. There were still some people milling around, but what with the freezing weather and temptations available in taverns and alehouses all over the city, most had gone. Even the clerics were mostly indoors.
She chewed at her lip. The only consolation was that if he had been found here, there would be bound to be more men, all chattering and laughing at the capture of the famed outlaw. Even if they hadn’t caught him, people would be standing around discussing how they had just missed him.
Turning, she fled through the gates and sought out his favourite taverns. There was a hot, stinging sensation at her eyes as she ran. The fear that Sir Thomas might be in danger was enough to set a panicky urgency thrilling through her veins. Since Hamond’s death he seemed to have lost his fear of capture.
She had got to know him so long ago, soon after her mother had died so horribly, fainting over her fire and burning to death. Father was wasting away to nothing, as were all the other people in the vill. Afterwards Jen promised herself she would never again suffer from a lack of food. To be without money was one thing, but to die the lingering death of starvation was hideous. Jen could feel herself fading away, sinking into a lassitude like her mother, with bleeding gums and loose teeth as scurvy attacked her undernourished body.
It was Sir Thomas who had fed her. He had come across her one day before her father died, when she was desperately looking for bird’s eggs in the soggy hedge just as another downpour drenched her. Past caring, she scarcely noticed that a rider was approaching, but when she heard the hooves, she glanced over her shoulder at him.
It was enough. Within a day she was sleeping in his bed, a fifteen-year-old girl with a knight who had been entranced by her. When her father died, she had begged room for herself and her brother, and Sir Thomas had agreed. He didn’t need to. She owed him a large debt for that reason. When he lost his manor he offered her freedom, but she refused it. Where else could she go? She had remained his lover and he had repaid her by feeding and protecting her and Hob.
She had to protect him now, in her turn.
It would not be easy. He had a great sense of debt to the men who had remained with him after he lost his manor, and Hamond was one of his longest-serving men. The dead clerk and Karvinel had confirmed that Hamond had been in the gang that attacked them south of Exeter on their way back from Topsham. The knowledge that Hamond had been killed on the man’s word had sent Sir Thomas into a cold rage at first, swearing that he would avenge his man, but then, later, he had taken Jen to his bed filled with a languishing sadness.
‘He’s gone; my lad is dead, hanging from a gibbet, for all the citizens of Exeter to point and laugh while he swings. It’s terrible. And he was nowhere near the robbery.’
She had soothed him, rocking him as he lay upon her breast, gentling him as she might their child one day if she ever conceived, and at last he succumbed to sleep, but he wouldn’t be able to forget that his man had died in that demeaning manner. He could never forgive the city, and especially not the merchant who had condemned Hamond. He wanted his vengeance, and he would have it.
That was Jen’s greatest fear as she hurried along the streets. She was convinced that she would hear that the merchant had been struck down in the streets, stabbed and left dying, but fully able to point his finger at his assassin, the leader of the gang he said had attacked him and robbed him.
But her anxiety was misplaced. In the fifth tavern she entered, the Cock, she found Sir Thomas sitting at the back of a gloomy hall filled with smoke from the damp logs that the host had optimistically set in the central hearth.
He sat on a stool, a slumped, rather sad figure huddled in his cloak and gulping wine from a pint pot. Seeing her shadow, he started, then gave her a lopsided grin. ‘So, little lark. You’ve come to fetch me home, have you?’
‘I thought you had been killed. I thought you had stuck your dagger in him and been caught. Why didn’t you come straight back with Hob? You could have sent a message with him to stop me worrying.’
He took her hand and gently tugged her towards him, then pulled her onto his lap and rested his head upon her breast. ‘Because I saw this Karvinel in the crowd. Your brother pointed him out to me and I followed him home. I know where he lives. Then he went to an alehouse and I followed him again. I could have killed him there, Jen, if I’d wanted to. I could have slipped my blade between his shoulders and left him dead in the gutter. Easy. But before I kill him, I want to know why he did it.’
‘You left him and came here?’ she asked sarcastically.
‘No. After the tavern, he returned to his house where he collected his wife, and they went off to another house where there was a Christmas feast; I ate from the alms dish at the door to find out whose house it was. It is owned by Vincent le Berwe, the steward told me. He’s the City’s Receiver.’
‘Does that tell you something about Karvinel?’
‘No, nothing. I still don’t know why he had Hamond killed,’ Sir Thomas said. ‘But I will!’
Why had the bastard sent his fellow to the gallows? All that day, Sir Thomas had been with Hamond in the city. Hamond had walked with Sir Thomas to the city gate and waved him off only a half hour or so before Karvinel ran up to the city’s gate and pointed out Hamond as being a felon.
Not knowing was dreadful, but Sir Thomas would find out. A firm resolution filled him with the warm satisfaction of revenge to come. Yes. Sir Thomas would not let Karvinel get away with his crime. Sir Thomas was a knight and he demanded satisfaction from the mere merchant who had murdered his servant. That was what it was: murder by proxy. Karvinel was too cowardly to kill Hamond in a fair fight, so he sought Hamond’s death by deceit, telling people Hamond had robbed him. And then had Hamond executed by the city.
‘You could have been seen – been captured,’ Jen said fearfully.
‘Not today,’ he said. ‘No one is looking today.’ But his attention had already returned to Karvinel. As soon as he could, he would catch the shit and beat the truth out of him. Before killing him.
Adam saw Luke at the corner of the chorister’s block as he left the Cathedral, his box of candles in his hand.
It was chilly out in the open air again, and now, with the dusk giving way to full night, Adam was tired and cold. He gripped his box of candles to his chest as he hurried over the grass towards his chamber.
But the boy walking ahead of him was too tempting.
Adam had never liked Luke. Truth to tell, he hated the cocky little shite. He hated the way Luke always contrived to be smart and clean, the way he was always being commended for his efforts, the way the little brat accepted the compliments of Canons and clerks for the purity of his singing, like a little male whore with that smug, smarmy smile on his fat face.
It wasn’t so easy for the men about the place, Adam knew. He’d done everything in his power to learn the lessons he’d been given from the first day he entered the Choristers, but he’d failed. The letters moved on the page before his eyes, he couldn’t make head nor tail of them, and the pictures were as bad. What was a man supposed to do when the reed in his hand just didn’t work? He couldn’t help the fact that his sketches and drawings were smudged and out of proportion. And try as he might, he couldn’t make the scenes he drew look neat. Where others formed pretty little pictures with balance and elegance, his ended up as the worst of cartoons, with men and women looking sharp-faced, bestial.