A Maiden Weeping Page 3

He hurried up Friday Street to West Cheap and went west as it became the Shambles. Farther it changed again to Newgate Market where the gate and prison stood, where the sheriffs could be found. He stopped at the tinker shop. His lodgings were above it up a rickety stair. Jack was up there.

  ‘Oi, Crispin,’ called out his landlord, Martin Kemp. He walked out of his shop and laid a polished cup on his outside table, hoping for business.

  ‘Er … good morning, Martin.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Just getting in, are you? For shame, Crispin.’ Though he smiled the whole time. Perhaps he envied Crispin his unmarried state.

  Crispin forgot him and stared down the Shambles toward Newgate Market again. The curve of the road hid Newgate, the prison.

  To Jack … or the sheriffs?

  He snorted at himself. He was no fool. He nodded to Martin, turned on his heel, and trotted up the outside stair to his lodgings. Once he fitted the key in the lock, he pushed through the door.

  ‘I was wondering when you’d get in,’ said Jack, busy at the fire. ‘First the Prime bells rung, and then Terce, and I thought to m’self, “Master Crispin must be having quite a night.”’ He chuckled. ‘Well, if you’re needing it, the porridge is ready. And I even have hot water for your shave if you haven’t had one already. Didn’t spend the night at the Boar’s Tusk, I’ll warrant. So who is she, if I might be so bold as to ask?’ He turned and nearly dropped the pot with the porridge. ‘God blind me, Master Crispin! You look terrible. What happened?’

  Crispin collapsed into the chair and slumped. ‘God’s blood, Jack. Something horrible. I am in very deep trouble.’

  Jack set the pot back on the hook over the fire. He wiped his hands on a rag and stood over his master. ‘Tell me, master. Tell me how I can help you?’

  ‘If only you were there last night. But no. I …’ He pushed his hood back and yanked his scrip open. Pulling out the coin pouch, he dumped it on the table. It broke open, spilling silver coins over the worn wood.

  ‘God’s blood!’ Jack swore. ‘Where’d you get that!’

  ‘It was payment … for murder.’

  ‘Murder? W-who’d you murder?’

  ‘I murdered no one, you fool. Last night at the Boar’s Tusk, I was mistaken for a paid assassin. A man, a strange man with a rasping voice, shoved this at me with instructions about a woman I was to murder.’

  ‘Wait. Why did he hire you to do it?’

  ‘He obviously mistook me for someone else. He did not know who I was.’

  ‘By my Lady. So what happened?’ Jack grabbed the stool and dragged it across the floor in front of Crispin and sat. He drew up his long legs beneath him.

  ‘I thought it best to warn the poor woman. So I went to the address on Watling, found her, and … well, told her.’

  ‘And what did she say? I’ll wager she was grateful.’

  Crispin raised an ironic brow. ‘You could say that.’

  Jack stared for a moment before he rocked back, grabbing at his hair. ‘You didn’t! God’s blood and bones, you didn’t! Master Crispin!’

  He gnarled his hands into fists. ‘I was drunk! She was beautiful. I … I … have no excuse.’

  Jack smoldered. ‘Well then. No harm done. And you’ve got this pouch of silver.’

  ‘No, no, Jack. Very much harm was done, for when I awoke this morning, I found her … dead. Murdered.’

  Jaw slack, Jack’s eyes widened to mazers. ‘M-murdered? Master Crispin … it wasn’t … you didn’t …’

  ‘No, thank God. It was not me.’

  Jack’s hand dropped to his heart and he blew out a noisy breath. ‘You gave me a fright.’

  ‘But Jack. I was the only one there. I am still in very great peril. I must go to the sheriffs.’

  ‘You mustn’t tell them you was there, sir. They’ll muddle it all up. Best make up a story.’

  ‘I can’t. I tried every which way to accommodate that, but I can’t. I can’t lie about it.’

  ‘But sir! Look at the position you are in. Someone gave you money to kill her. And there you were, with a dead body!’ He dropped to his knees before Crispin and grabbed his sleeves. ‘No one knows, Master Crispin. No one but you and me.’

  ‘And God.’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot lie. Too many lies I have known, Jack. Too many have brought me low. I cannot live with myself if I forswore my oaths before the King’s Bench.’

  ‘But … Master Crispin. You do realize that they’ll arrest you for the murder.’

  ‘I’m … rather hoping they won’t.’

  Jack scrambled to his feet, and his face became nearly as red as his hair. ‘But you know they will!’ He began to pace across the little room. ‘What are you thinking? That they’ll be fair to you? That they will find you innocent? They’re just looking for an excuse to rid themselves of you once and for all. And the king! Blind me, he’d be happy to hang you. What are you thinking, Master Crispin?’ He stopped. ‘Wait. You can seek sanctuary. Go to St Paul’s.’

  ‘Only guilty people seek sanctuary, Jack.’

  ‘Then … escape to Southwark. That’s out of their jurisdiction. They can’t arrest you there.’

  ‘I cannot run from the truth.’

  ‘It won’t matter if they hang you just the same. Oh, master! Why? Why did you lay with that woman?’

  ‘I was drunk,’ he muttered feebly.

  ‘You’re always drunk!’

  Crispin’s head snapped up and he narrowed his bloodshot eyes at the boy.

  He had always thought of him as ‘the boy’ but surely that was no longer the case. Jack was seventeen and certainly no boy. He had the makings of a fine ginger beard running along his jaw and a moderate mustache under his nose. As tall as Crispin, perhaps someday he’d be as broad-shouldered, but for now, he was angular and slender, though it belied a strength and agility unmatched by his betters … of which there were many.

  And Jack glared with a bearing he seemed to have gleaned from Crispin. At least it was suspiciously familiar.

  ‘Aye, I know I’m speaking out of turn,’ Jack went on, ‘but who else will tell you? Oh the Langtons have been telling you for years and you’ve ignored it for just as long. But now you’re hearing it from me. So. Maybe it’s time you stop getting drunk. Look at you. You were once a great man. Aye, we all know it. And you’ve made yourself into a great man again. You don’t need drink, Master Crispin.’

  ‘Jack …’ He lowered his face. How many times had he gotten himself into mischief because of drink? He had thought of it as his only means of comfort, yet now there was Jack … and a chess set, and even a book or two, these days. Yes, he still mourned for the losses of his former life, but the boy – the young man – made sense more often than not, as he always seemed to do.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ he said gruffly. Embarrassed to raise his head to his own apprentice, Crispin contemplated his fate by staring at the fire. If he turned himself in to the sheriffs it would be the perfect opportunity for them to arrest and try him for the crime. ‘The only solution would appear to be that we must solve this murder before they hang me for it.’

  ‘But Master Crispin! Haven’t you been listening to me? They won’t give you the chance to try. They’ll hang you and be happy.’

  ‘I won’t hide from this, Tucker. I’m surprised you think so little of me.’

  ‘It’s not that, master, you know it isn’t. I don’t want no harm to come to you.’

  When Crispin looked up, Jack wore the saddest expression he’d yet seen on him. He reached out to grasp the boy’s wrist. ‘I know. But knowing me as you have for these past six years, I would think you would understand.’

  Jack swallowed a few times. His eyes were suspiciously bright. ‘I … I do understand, sir. I understand more than you know.’

  He nodded. ‘Very well. I came first to you so that we could make a plan. Investigate a bit before we go to Newgate.’

  ‘Oh. Then … what are we standing around here for? Let’s go!’ He grabbed Crispin�
��s arm and dragged him toward the door. Jack grabbed his cloak from the peg and whipped it over his shoulders. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Back to Watling Street.’

  Crispin hung back in the shadows. The working day was in the peak of activity, with apprentices and women carrying bundles of their purchases. Cries from the merchants cast up, one after the other in a chant to compete with the best of any monk’s quire.

  The roper, wrapped warm in his fur-trimmed cloak, wandered in and out of his shop, positioning coils of rope, and the eel monger was at his barrels. He sported a red hood, with its long liripipe wrapped around his neck this morning to ward off the chill.

  Crispin sent Jack alone up the woman’s stairwell when no one was looking.

  He called on all the patience he had to stand without moving, waiting for Jack to return. His usual stoic nature made no issue of such waiting, but this was decidedly different. He couldn’t help but stare at the door to the stairwell until his eyes burned. Hurry, Jack, was all he could think.

  Finally, the boy emerged and stealthily made his way to Crispin in the gloom.

  ‘Well?’ he asked softly.

  Jack crossed himself. ‘She’s dead, that’s a certainty.’

  ‘What of the room?’

  He shook his head. His sharp eyes darted here and there along the street, making certain there was no one close enough to overhear them. ‘As you said it. She did not bar the door after you came in?’

  ‘No. At least I don’t recall her doing so.’

  ‘He could have come in that way. Just as easily as I did just now. I saw naught that could indicate who the whoreson was. But naught that implicates you either, master.’

  ‘I must find the man who hired me.’

  ‘How will you ever do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And what about …’ He thumbed upward toward the stair, hiding his gesture into his chest. ‘Won’t she begin to, well … stink?’ he whispered.

  Crispin blanched. His stomach was still on the delicate side, and the fact that he had been intimate with her – not that he could remember much – soured his belly. ‘You’re right, of course. Something must be done.’

  Crispin grew silent as he tried to figure out just what could be done. By law, he should have called the hue and cry. But he feared to be arrested.

  He had recognized nothing of the man who had accosted him at the Boar’s Tusk. There was no clue as to how to even begin to find him. Unless someone at the tavern recognized him. But he had had his hood up. And Crispin would wager all in that pouch of silver that the stranger had chosen the Boar’s Tusk in which to meet because no one would know him there.

  But Jack was still worrying about the body. He offered various schemes to let the sheriffs know, including writing an anonymous missive and slipping it somehow to the sheriffs in Newgate.

  And while he talked, Crispin’s gaze followed a young boy, bucket in hand, marching up to the stairwell door and casting it open. Whistling, the boy tromped up the stairs.

  Crispin patted Jack’s shoulder and pointed. Tucker stopped talking and turned. ‘Blind me, master. Should we stop him?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid he’s going to do the job we are both too cowardly to do.’

  It was a measure of how serious the situation was that Jack didn’t bristle at the remark. Instead, they both watched with anxious anticipation the door that had been left open. Even amid the bustle of the street, they could still hear the boy’s merry whistling and then his knock upon her lodgings door. ‘Mistress le Por-ter!’ the boy called and then opened the door. A shriek sounded a heartbeat later, and then the bucket with its water, tumbled, clattered, and sloshed down the stairs. The boy came running after it, bounding onto the street, looking both ways with wide, terrified eyes. He ran first to the eel monger, grabbing his arm and sputtering his news. The eel monger in turn ran next door and yelled at the top of his lungs to the floor above. A woman opened the shutters and leaned down. Her hand flew to her mouth and she retreated inside.

  Crispin looked at Jack. ‘And so it begins.’

  Crispin waited with Jack in the shadows. He mulled over his own inactions, trying to reconcile what to do with what had already transpired. When the sheriffs arrived on their horses and their men-at-arms on foot, he straightened, and Jack anxiously scoured Crispin’s face for any clues as to what he was going to do.

  ‘These are the newly elected sheriffs, are they not?’ whispered Jack.

  ‘Yes. The ginger-haired fellow on the white stallion is John Walcote …’

  ‘Oi! Is he any relation to … to …’

  ‘No. He is unrelated to … Philippa Walcote’s husband Clarence.’ Just saying her name caused the bruise in his heart to ache again. He had met her some six years ago, had fallen in love, and had let her go. The pain of it had never left him, though Jack would be the first to tell him he had never tried. He harbored that small portrait of her under his mattress. It was partly the reason he had overindulged last night. And every time he saw the sheriff it only opened the wound again.

  ‘And the other sheriff?’

  Crispin’s eyes rose to the dark-haired man, whose sallow face was drawn longer and more solemn with its black beard. ‘John Loveney.’

  ‘Have you met them yet, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jack didn’t probe for more. The boy knew better than to do so.

  The sheriffs dismounted and looked up at the building. They instructed their men to await them on the street while the two of them trudged up the stairs.

  Crispin hated waiting, but he and Jack did so, both sets of eyes glued to the window above, watching the shadows pass by the slit in the shutters.

  ‘What’s taking so long?’ he muttered.

  ‘Wait, master. Look.’

  The two sheriffs emerged from the covered stair and looked around. The eel monger was nearby, running anxious hands over his apron when they approached him. They conferred for some time, with the sheriff’s clerk, Hamo Eckington, writing furiously on his portable desk balanced by straps on his shoulders.

  Sheriff Walcote had moved on to an older woman in a fine gown and fur-trimmed cloak. She brushed Crispin with just a whiff of familiarity, but nothing more. Sheriff Loveney had moved on to another man in a dark mud-spattered mantle who was nodding as he spoke.

  The poor clerk jumped from one conversation to another, writing down his notes as quickly as he could. But when Sheriff Walcote ticked a finger on his lip in thought and stepped away from the woman who seemed to be correcting Hamo the clerk by pointing at his parchment, Walcote looked up suddenly and spotted Crispin in the shadows.

  Crispin straightened as the sheriff threw back his cloak and strode across the muddy way directly for Crispin. Jack straightened too, chin high.

  ‘The vultures gather,’ said Walcote, sweeping Crispin and Jack with his gaze. ‘What do you hope to do here, Guest? Get yourself hired by the corpse?’

  ‘I might be of help yet, Lord Sheriff.’

  ‘If you think we are going to hire you, think again. I know too much about you.’

  ‘Then surely you know I solve most of my cases.’

  Walcote snorted and pointedly turned away.

  Crispin tensed. He needed to speak with the sheriffs but perhaps not on the streets. After they had gathered their information, then he would go to Newgate and relate his own facts. That seemed the safest and most logical arrangement. Oh, they’d fine him, of course, for he had technically been the First Finder and failed to report it and post his surety. He already decided that he would confess to spending the night there and finding her in the morning. After all, it was the truth, and one need stay as close to the truth as one could when dealing with the law.

  He signaled to Jack for them to go and it was when he moved out of the shadows that the man shouted. He turned. The eel monger was pointing at him. ‘That’s the man I saw!’ he cried.

  And then the woman turned. ‘Yes,’ she said, adding her voi
ce to it. ‘He bumped me yesterday just before he approached that door.’

  Crispin froze. He heard Jack swear beside him.

  Walcote turned back and glared. ‘Guest. It looks like I’ll be talking to you after all.’ His lips peeled back into a smile. ‘Care to come with us?’

  THREE

  Thursday, 15 October

  ‘Three witnesses identified you, Guest,’ said Walcote. He sat at the table in the sheriff’s chamber in Newgate, toying with his dagger. Sheriff Loveney stood beside Hamo at the clerk’s writing desk, glancing at Eckington’s swift spiky writing.

  Crispin stood before them, resignation slumping his shoulders. Jack stood somewhat behind, but Crispin could feel the lad’s tension peeling off him in waves.

  ‘The eel monger remembered talking to you as you went into the private stair the evening before. And the woman also remembered you bumping into her …’

  ‘Because you were drunk,’ Loveney gleefully pointed out, apparently reading it from Hamo’s notes.

  ‘And the other man also identified you from the street,’ Walcote went on. ‘What have you to say for yourself?’

  ‘My lords,’ Crispin said with a deep sigh. ‘Though it was true that I was … intoxicated … I was in my full faculties. It was all a series of very odd events.’

  He stepped forward and, pulling the pouch of silver from his own scrip, he laid it on the table. The sheriffs’ eyes widened. ‘I was in the Boar’s Tusk quite late last night when I was approached by a man who gave me this silver. He told me I was to kill a woman.’

  Walcote slowly rose. ‘Master Guest, what … what …?’

  ‘Precisely, Lord Sheriff. Even as inebriated as I was, I could still tell right from wrong. The man escaped me before he could clarify or I could identify him. I thought it most prudent to see the lady and warn her of impending disaster.’

  Loveney moved closer, crossing his arms over his chest. ‘A fantastical tale.’ He flicked a glance at Jack. God knows what he saw there, but he quickly fastened his gaze back to Crispin’s face. ‘One can scarce believe it. Do go on, Master Guest.’

  Crispin licked his lips. ‘Well … I told her. And then …’