“Missus, if you’d be willing to give over a hen, I can kill those wolves. I’ll buy you back a hen from the skinning bounty.”
Patience looked at him in surprise and said, “But you told Goodman Shed he could not kill the wolves.” Will, who had spoken of nothing else since the farmers took their leave, clapped his hands and tugged at his mother’s skirts, shouting, “Mamma, Mamma, Mamma, let me go. Let me go hunt the wolves with Thomas. I can help, I tell you I can!”
Thomas laughed and answered, “No, Goodman Shed could not kill a cow with that rusted pipe of his, little less a wolf. But I can.”
Patience pulled Will from her skirts and shushed him, but a calculating look had settled into her face. Martha looked from Patience to the Welshman and realized a deal was being struck; Thomas had sent the other men away so he could collect the bounty for himself. She looked with new eyes at his raw-boned figure; his face, cut by hard living, was well beyond comfortable middle years. But as he inclined his head to Patience, she saw ambition flare in his eyes, like a sudden sharp flame.
Martha, thinking a knotted cord the best way to plumb deep water, clanged the spoon loud and long against the cook pot. “Well, then,” she countered. “You’re going to spend the night thrashing about after the wolves yourself, are you?”
His eyes shifted to Martha’s, and for the briefest moment, she felt the short hairs on her head bristle. He turned his attention back to Patience.
“I’ll build a pen, missus. They’ll come for the hen. Once they’re inside, I’ll spring the gate behind them, and shoot ’em dead.”
After some pointed haggling, it was agreed upon that the bounty would be split three ways, John getting the third equal share for helping build the pen. She felt hostile eyes on her and turned to see Will regarding her with a jutting lower lip. He was a sweet child, she knew, but a handful at times and rebellious.
“What is it?” she asked crossly.
“You shouldn’t look so at Thomas. He’s been a soldier in England,” he said defensively. “Haven’t ya, Thomas?”
Thomas nodded briefly, but there was a sudden guardedness about his posture, a wariness that made Martha think there was a good deal more to the story. The angling scar dividing one brow neatly into two halves took on a more interesting history than a careless fall onto a harvesting blade, or a village brawl. Her father used to say that eight parts of speech came into the world at Creation and that women made off with seven of them. The eighth part held by men was the language of war, conquest, and bragging. The Welshman, like most men, had a tongue for boasting; and she was sure, with the right abuse to his pride, those secrets could be tipped into revelation.
“And what kind of aimless fables have you been throwing the boy?” she asked dismissively. “You’re too long in the tooth to have served the king as soldier. More like stable boy or muck-about…” Her voice trailed off as she watched his jaws working together, knotting the skin at his cheeks. There was a slight lowering of the chin, but nothing was said, no gestures made nor distracted shuffling of feet. He merely stood, hatless and calm, and in that moment all other action in the room ceased. And settling over every motionless figure, like gilt over wood, was a lingering, brittle tension.
CHAPTER 4
TIERNAN BLOOD STOOD quietly in a small alley off Pudding Lane and watched the night-soil men carting their refuse noisily over the stones. It was only just past midnight, but from the bawdy laughter and the unsteady stopping and starting of the handcart, Blood knew the refuse men were well on their way to being insensible with drink. It was dark, with no moon, and he could hear more than see the watchman in the alley opposite him stir with the noise. He had been waiting for three hours for the watchman to fall asleep, and he cursed, resolving himself to waiting another quarter hour for the man to nod off again.
He heard what sounded like a woman’s shriek, in anger or in pain, he didn’t know, but it was brief and soon the street emptied into relative quiet again. He thought about where he had dined earlier that evening, a fine tavern in Covent Garden, and smiled thinly to think that he should now be waiting on the main pathway populated with the night-soil men; the midden men, taking the worst of London’s droppings to the barges moored on the Thames. A solid river of shite, he thought, the overarching smell giving proof that even the leavings of privilege stank as highly as any laboring ’prentice’s.
Blood’s dinner companion that night, among some ladies of rank, minor nobility, rakes, and assorted whores, was Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who had recited to them all a new poem he had composed specially in the Irishman’s honor. “Since loyalty does no man good, let’s steal King and outdo Blood.” The fact that Rochester had already pulled down his breeches in preparation for mounting his dinner companion, a fair-haired whore improbably named Honour, when he was overcome with his muse gave the recitation boundless hilarity. From the time of Blood’s release two years earlier for trying to steal the royal jewels from the Tower of London, and his subsequent pardon from King Charles II, he was the most sought-after rogue in court society. The fact that he had blackmailed the king into a full pardon by threatening to reveal state secrets was known to no one else, except perhaps for Henry Bennet, the Earl of Arlington. If nothing else, Tiernan Blood, the son of an Irish blacksmith, with his nose in every backroom dealing, knew how to keep secrets, if it benefited his person. And he knew many secrets, from chambermaids’ to the highest offices’ in England.
He felt under his cloak for the cudgel and the hooked latch lift he kept tucked into his waistband and peered cautiously into the street. Gentle snoring sounds came from the watchman, and Blood quickly crossed over to the house opposite in the middle of the lane. It was an old house, one wall leaning against the neighboring house, and the door was made of heavy oak, although the portal was split and spongy from rot. Built in the time of the Great Queen, the house walls, half-timbered with wattle and daub, were dark and spotted from a hundred years of fire, rebellion, and neglect. The great fire of 1666 had begun on Pudding Lane, but somehow this row of houses had escaped the worst of the flames. Pulling the hooked lift from his waistband, he passed the thin piece of metal through the gap between the crumbling wall and the door and deftly raised the latch.
Blood passed into the house at the moment he heard another cart rumbling down the lane, but it didn’t concern him; he was inside and the watchman had seen nothing. He paused for a moment, listening for any sounds coming from the common room.
From his stance at the threshold, he imagined the stairs roughly ten or twelve paces from the door. He walked carefully forward until he felt with the toe of his shoe the first riser to the stairs. Placing his feet as close to the wall as he could to prevent the boards from creaking, he lifted his weight from stair to stair. He took his time, allowing his eyes to better focus in the dark, and when his head passed above the second-floor landing, he saw a faint glimmer of candlelight leaking through the gap beneath the large, iron-banded door of the bedchamber. A segment of the lime-washed wall under his fingers crumbled and showered the steps in a brittle cascade. He froze and listened for steps approaching from the other side of the door, but there were no footfalls, and he climbed the last few stairs to the landing.
He reached for his cudgel and pulled it from his waistband and, with a few gliding steps, positioned himself in front of the chamber door. He lowered his head, placing his ear next to the splits in the wood. He heard nothing; no movement, yet no sounds of deep sleep either. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the room completely empty.