‘Please, Will,’ said Chaloner quietly. ‘Do not let them-’
‘Ignore Heyden,’ ordered Mary. ‘He is a coward, afraid to fight for what is right. You are brave.’
Chaloner could easily have disarmed his friend, but he did not want to humiliate him by exposing his ineptitude. And he certainly did not want anyone thinking L’Estrange had won the encounter.
‘Walk away, Will,’ he urged. ‘You cannot afford to let L’Estrange kill you. You have a wife to consider. What would Mary do without you?’
Mary’s expression hardened. ‘Actually, I would rather have a man who-’
‘He is right, William,’ called Joanna from behind Brome. ‘Think of Mary, and put up your sword.’
Mary was furious when Leybourn’s blade began to droop, but her rage was the cold kind, and she kept her temper admirably. ‘Perhaps you should fight Heyden instead, sir,’ she said prettily to L’Estrange. ‘William is no phanatique, but Heyden is.’
L’Estrange moved his head in a way that made his earrings sparkle, while his teeth flashed in an appreciative leer as he looked her up and down; Chaloner thought he looked like the Devil. ‘Heyden is a phanatique, is he? Would you care to tell me how you come by such information, dear lady?’
She smiled back, fluttering her eyelashes. ‘He was in the New Model Army, fighting Royalists — such as yourself — during the civil wars. And more recently, he was spying in Spain and Portugal.’
L’Estrange regarded Chaloner appraisingly. ‘I thought you had the look of a Roundhead about you. It is all to do with the boots. Was it you who made the Walbrook burst its banks?’
‘He is not a phanatique,’ shouted Joanna defiantly. When L’Estrange whipped around to glare at her again, she managed to hold her ground, although her voice trembled as she spoke. ‘And no one made the Walbrook flood. It is just something that happens when there is a lot of rain.’
‘We should be about our work,’ said Brome, boldly grabbing L’Estrange’s arm in an attempt to pull him away. ‘We have a lot to do, if Monday’s Intelligencer is to be ready in time.’
‘True,’ agreed L’Estrange, sheathing his sword with a flourish. ‘My time is too valuable to waste on skirmishing with old Roundheads. I can harm their cause much more deeply with my pen than a sword, anyway.’
Seeing the situation defused, Allestry tried to seize Leybourn’s weapon, although Nott looked disappointed the fuss was over. When Chaloner saw Mrs Nott nearby, eyes fixed longingly on L’Estrange, he understood exactly why the bookseller had wanted a brawl. Predictably, Mary made no attempt to help Allestry; her attention was gripped by the smouldering invitations L’Estrange was sending with his eyes. Chaloner sincerely hoped Leybourn would not notice, or no one would be able to disarm him and there would be blood spilled for certain. He turned to find Joanna at his side.
‘I see a solution,’ she said. Her face was pale, and Chaloner suspected the set-to had taken a heavy toll on the timid rabbit. ‘We shall arrange for L’Estrange to entice Mary away from William, and that is how we shall save him. I cannot think of a more deserving candidate for her affections. Can you?’
Chaloner had spotted Kirby, Treen and Ireton at the fringes of the dissipating crowd, and did not want a confrontation with them, especially in Smithfield, where they had access to reinforcements. He tried to take refuge in the costermongery, but it was still closed, and a notice on the door said it had suffered a flood, but would be back in business the following day. Inside, Yeo laboured furiously with a mop. Chaloner stepped into a butcher’s shop instead, a bloody little emporium of glistening entrails, smelly meat and vats of grease. He was not alone for long, because Joanna and Brome followed him, having abandoned L’Estrange to the various Angels who clustered around him. Mrs Nott was among them.
‘Why are you hiding?’ asked Brome. ‘L’Estrange will not fight you now, not while he has all those woman fussing over him.’
‘Actually, I am hiding from Hectors. I have aggravated rather too many of them.’
Brome was appalled. ‘That was rash! They are not just louts, you know — most are skilled fighters, and not all of them are stupid. And I hate to sound selfish, but we enjoyed your company the other day, and were hoping you might dine with us again.’
Joanna gazed at Chaloner with her huge brown eyes. ‘I hope you have not done anything to annoy Crisp; his Hectors are one thing, but he is another entirely. I would not like you on the wrong side of the Butcher.’ She shuddered involuntarily.
‘I doubt I am important enough to attract his attention,’ replied Chaloner.
‘Do you think Crisp was responsible for attracting that crowd?’ asked Brome of Joanna. ‘I saw him when we first arrived, but now he is gone. Do you think he dispensed one of his “lessons”? Perhaps on a shopkeeper who declined to pay the safety tax?’
Joanna shuddered again. ‘Lord! I knew we should have refused when L’Estrange suggested we come here to talk to Hodgkinson. I have never liked Smithfield, and it is a dreadful place now Crisp has accrued all that power. Perhaps we should all go home, before anything else nasty happens.’
‘We had a crisis with the newsbooks,’ Brome explained to Chaloner. ‘The Thames Street print-house is knee-deep in water, so Hodgkinson cannot produce Monday’s Intelligencer there. And this morning, blocked gutters flooded his Smithfield print-house, too. The situation was looking bleak, and we have all been sitting in St Bartholomew the Less, discussing solutions.’
‘Fortunately, Hodgkinson’s nephew has offered to print it instead, which is a relief,’ said Joanna. ‘We were just leaving, when L’Estrange saw the crowd and decided to investigate. He was hoping it might be a newsworthy incident, because we are short of material for the last page.’
They talked until Joanna said they should be getting back to the bookshop. Chaloner was sorry, because spending time in their company was infinitely more preferable to the other grim matters that beckoned to him that day. He waited until they had gone, then left the butcher’s stall, pulling up his hood against the rain. Within moments, he realised that Brome and Joanna were being followed. It was by Muddiman, so he moved quickly to intercept the man.
The newsmonger did not seem at all concerned that he had just been caught doing something rather insalubrious. ‘There is some sort of problem at the newsbook office,’ he said breezily. ‘So I have been spying on Brome in an attempt to find out what it is. Of course, we have a bit of a hiccup ourselves, thanks to you preventing Dury from reading those parliamentary summaries.’
‘My apologies,’ replied Chaloner. ‘But it cannot be the first time your plans have been foiled. I do not imagine L’Estrange jumps into bed with someone else’s wife every Saturday.’
‘Well, you would be wrong, because he does. I suspect he will have Leybourn’s before the day is out, too, despite the fact that he has already enjoyed Dorcus and her maid. He made a play for my wife once. He asked her to proofread the newsbooks, if you can credit his audacity. But he left disappointed, because she rejected his offer of work and his affections.’
So, Leybourn was not the only man to be blind in affairs of the heart, thought Chaloner. ‘He does seem unstoppable where women are concerned. I overheard what you said to those drovers earlier, by the way. You have started a rumour that L’Estrange is responsible for the Walbrook flood.’
Muddiman’s laugh was unpleasant. ‘We shall see how he likes being regarded as a phanatique.’
‘This is not the first time you have used your skill as a newsmonger — a gossip, in essence — to teach someone a lesson, is it?’ said Chaloner, giving voice to the conclusions he had drawn before Leybourn’s predicament had claimed his attention. ‘You invented tales about Newburne, too.’