‘Then why are you going?’ Lettice wailed.
‘Just for a short time. Because …’ He sighed. He hardly knew himself. ‘Because I must. Because you will be safe and well cared for, and I am too old, and cannot rest, nor …’
It wasn’t working. Too complicated. The little girls’ eyes were filled with tears and resentment. He put it differently.
‘You saw all those children, walking through the market square in their warm woollen cloaks? You are going to stay with them, just for a while. And I–I am going away, to seek my fortune!’
Their sobs slowly subsided.
‘As a pirate?’
‘Well, no, not exactly. But I shall travel over the sea, and bring back chests and chests full of gold, and-’
‘We’ll come with you!’
‘You can’t,’ he said bluntly. Then, more subtly, ‘Our father wouldn’t want you to.’
They still looked miserable, but intrigued by the chests of gold.
‘Will you come back?’
‘Of course I will!’ he laughed. What a player he was. ‘Very soon, laden with treasure.’
‘And donkeys?’
‘And a whole train of donkeys.’
Little girls’ minds were so hard to fathom.
‘And monkeys,’ he added, ‘jewels, ostriches, and little blackamoor slaves, all sorts of things. But only if I go away first and seek my fortune. Then I will return, and find you, and we will all be happy as before.’
‘In the farmhouse?’
‘Yes. In the farmhouse.’
The girls wept and clung to him.
He was suddenly aware of Susan at his elbow. She still said not a word. She reached out and hugged her brother, one swift hug, and then took her little sisters by the hand, and led them away down the alley.
The boys followed at a distance.
They threaded through the old medieval streets of the city until at last they came to a low wooden door in a long wall. They knocked.
Nothing happened. They knocked again.
Eventually a bolt was shot, and a stern-faced woman appeared.
Susan tried to speak, they could tell from the heave of her shoulders, but not a word came out. The stern-faced woman looked her up and down without encouragement. Finally Agnes spoke, though they couldn’t hear her words. The woman questioned them for several minutes, not smiling once. At last she jerked her head and stood back in the doorway, and the three girls went in. The door was shut and bolted behind them.
There was long silence until Hodge said, ‘They will prosper there, master. Have no fear. They will be well enough.’
‘Till I return.’
‘Till we return,’ said Hodge. ‘You’d be lost without me.’
Nicholas looked at the stout servant lad and smiled faintly.
‘Come on, then. Let’s go and find that treasure.’
7
They walked south for days and weeks, begging and stealing. Still they grew thinner, the days shorter, the nights colder. Nicholas wondered if they would survive, even without the girls. Yet they must. They must make it to a port.
There was much to do before he died.
They survived through the winter, Christmas passing them by almost unnoticed. Thin and tough and cunning, they survived. It was early spring. And then they were caught stealing.
After a night in the pound, they were dragged aching and blinded by the weak daylight into a small cobbled market square.
Nicholas blinked and stared around, still feeling he might faint at any moment. If his wrists were not tied so painfully behind his back, he might reach up and touch the side of his head. His hair felt knotted, crusty with dried blood where the constable had clubbed him.
It was a grey morning, there was a light drizzle and it was bitter cold. Yet the market square was milling with people, as if for a fair. Some ate apples, keeping the cores in their pockets for throwing later. Children laughed and played with tops and hoops. A local butcher did a good trade selling hot roast pork. More people were leaning out from the upper windows of the handsome half-timbered houses that surrounded the square. Some of the finer womenfolk up there were already weeping and delicately touching handkerchiefs to the corners of their eyes. Others were sucking oranges.
A charcoal brazier smoked, an iron laid across it. A wooden wagon stood in the middle of the square, and nearby, a crude gallows.
Nicholas’s blood ran cold.
Here was the end of the noble name of Ingoldsby. Hanged in a town square in the rain for common thievery.
Someone banged a drum and the crowd fell silent. Nicholas and Hodge were dragged forward. Beside the gallows there stood the hangman in a crude cloth mask, two constables, and a local parson, looking both sorrowful and grave, a small New Testament in his hand. The local magistrate, his back to the boys, addressed the parson. The parson listened and nodded.
The magistrate turned.
It was Gervase Crake.
He smiled.
‘Bring forward the murderer!’
Another boy was dragged forward, filthy and in rags. They said he had murdered a little girl, drowned her in a ditch. They gave no reason. The boy said not a word. He might have been a deaf mute, or a dummerer, faking such. As he was dragged past them their eyes met, and Nicholas saw in those dead hollows a total indifference more terrifying than any savagery.
The parson stepped forward and asked the boy for his last confession of sins. The boy stood in sullen silence before him, saying nothing. Then he hawked and spat full in the parson’s face. The parson stepped back and wiped his face with a cloth and bowed his head and prayed.
The hangman checked the knot in the rope one last time, glancing at the boy. Then the noose went over his filthy neck and he was hauled up. He didn’t kick once. The beam creaked, the thin body twisted back and forth. The eyes still stared. He must have been about eleven.
Crake himself read out their crimes, in a voice that sounded like he was giving a sermon.
‘The two villains here apprehended are guilty of idle vagabondage and thievery, to the just anger of Almighty God. They are of that kind which currently infest our kingdom, called sturdy beggars, who lack nothing in the way of limbs or faculties, as customary beggars, upon whom Our Lord himself looked kindly; but rather lack only the will to work, favouring a life of thieving and dishonesty practised on decent townsfolk such as are here present.’
There was a general self-satisfied murmur.
‘Whereat it is decreed that these two shall be stripped and tied to a cart, and lashed through the streets of the parish until their backs be bloody, as the Law of England decrees. They shall then be branded on the chest with a V, to mark their chosen profession, in the hope that their souls be cleansed. And God have mercy upon them.’
Branded. Hence the brazier. They would be marked and shamed for life.
One of the constables drew out the lash. It was no schoolmaster’s cane for switching backsides. It was a length of oxhide furled into a whip, purposely made to take the skin off a man’s back, and more. Such a whip could cut through to ribs or backbone in only two or three lashes. It could tear the flesh away in chunks, like the jaws of a wolf. It could leave a man standing, or falling, in a puddle of his own blood. It could kill a man.
The two constables pulled their arms forward roughly and hooked the ropes over the stanchions at the back of the haycart and cinched them as tight as a tourniquet by twisting a strut of wood behind, until the two boys hung there, backs stretched, toes barely touching the ground.
‘Want a stick?’ one growled.
Nicholas shook his head.
‘Yes,’ said Hodge. ‘We both.’ He looked at Nicholas. ‘Believe me.’
One of the men produced two short sticks and held them in front of the boys’ faces. ‘Open your jaws. Now bite down.’
Nicholas worked his jaws again, and spat the stick out at the man’s feet. ‘Have it to kindle your fire.’