A Murder of Crows: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (22 page)

He could see there were special arrangements to make sure none of the games were crooked. For a start the floormats were clean and white and obviously changed often, while the light from the banks of candles made the room quite bright if very warm. There were no handy shadows where you could hide things or drop inconvenient cards. Young men in tight jerkins with tight sleeves moved about, picking up packs of cards and dice between games and inspecting them. One player had his cards taken and then he was grabbed by three of the burly men standing near the door. Two of them upended him while the other searched him and pulled out several high-ranking cards. He was removed, squawking, down the stairs and some of the gamers peered out the window to wait for the splash as he was thrown in the Thames. There were cheers and catcalls and Pickering leaned out of a window.

“Don’t come back. If you do, I’ll give you to my brother-in-law.”

Much obsequious clapping from the young men in jerkins and the women in very low-cut bodices. That was when Dodd spotted him. He frowned. What was Enys doing here—he didn’t gamble? Or he said he didn’t. As casually as he could, Dodd got up and sauntered over to the table where he had seen the heavily pock-marked lawyer.

They were playing primero, the play tense and close and the pot large. Dodd couldn’t quite make out Enys’s face because he was sitting well back in a corner so he waited until the man had lost and got up to get a drink.

“Mr. Enys,” said Dodd as breezy as he could, “fancy meeting you here…”

The man seemed to jump, but then bowed shallowly. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “I fear you mistake me, my name is Vent, not Enys.” Dodd blinked at him, puzzled. Certainly the voice was different, but the face…The face was definitely familiar though not really Enys’s.

“Ay?” said Dodd, “ye’re nocht ma lawyer?”

“Er…no,” said the man, Vent, “though I have heard I have a double practising law in the Temple at the moment.” He coughed or perhaps hid a laugh. “Possibly I should sue him for defamation of character.”

“Good Lord, Ah’m sorry, sir, I was sure it was ye.”

“No matter,” said Vent, “Perhaps you would give your lawyer my compliments, and tell him I would be delighted to meet him over a hand of cards.”

“I will,” Dodd answered, now feeling awkward. After all, he never liked it when people thought he was the legal type of Serjeant as opposed to a Land-Sergeant. They bowed to each other and Dodd turned back to watch Carey at his game. Several others were watching the game, including Pickering and three of his bully-boys.

Carey nodded and laid his cards down. “Prime,” he said. The boy in cramoisie and tangerine stared fixedly and then laid his own cards facedown without another word. Carey smiled sweetly at the lad and pulled the pot towards him. As he pocketed his haul, two of Pickering’s men came and stood behind him, one murmured in his ear. Carey looked surprised and then stood up, headed for the door at the back of the room.

After a moment of concern, Dodd quietly followed them and into a small parlour with a bright fireplace where Laurence Pickering was standing blinking at the flames.

“Well, Sir Robert?”

Carey smiled. “Well, Mr. Pickering?”

“How’s ‘e doing it? Young Mr. Newton?”

“He’s not cheating in any way I can see,” said Carey thoughtfully, “although he’s not as good a player as he thinks he is.”

“So why does he win?”

“I’m not sure,” said Carey spreading his hands. “He might simply be lucky.”

“Or ‘e’s got a magic ring.”

Carey’s eyebrows went up. “Hm. I’ve heard of them and a number of astrologers and magicians and whatnot have tried to sell them to me but I’ve never heard of one that actually worked. It’s like alchemy. It’s always going to work, or it would have worked if you hadn’t scratched your nose at that particular moment, or tomorrow when the stars are conjunct with Jupiter it will work, but today, right now, when you want them to, in my experience, they never work.”

Pickering had his head on one side, exactly like a blackbird eyeing up a worm. He looked sceptical. Carey smiled his sunny, lazy smile. “Besides, if you had a ring like that which actually did work, would you sell it?”

Pickering hesitated and then burst into laughter, slapping his knee. He poured Carey brandywine and offered some to Dodd who shook his head. He wanted to keep a clear head for whatever was going on here. That was why he hadn’t had another pipe since the first one he had shared with Pickering.

“So that’s a relief,” said Pickering. “None of my boys could understand it. We actually let him win a night wiv Desiree de Paris so we could check his clothes properly, but nothing. ‘E’s just lucky and one day ‘is luck will run out.”

“I expect so,” said Carey easily. “Comes to us all, I’m afraid.”

“’Course the only ovver one I’ve known win so often wivvout cheating, is you, Sir Robert.”

Carey bowed a little. “Since my love-life is a catastrophe, this is only to be expected.”

Pickering smiled shortly. “All right, then, you’ve done what I asked. Now. How can I help you, Sir Robert? Or your worshipful father, of course?”

“Both really. Firstly information about Heneage.”

“Hmf.” Pickering was rubbing his lower lip. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything you feel may be of interest, Mr. Pickering.”

“He’s short of money,”

Carey’s eyes went up. “You’d think with all his loot from catching Catholics and so on that he’d be rich.”

“Well, he’s short enough that he’s wanting me to pay him rental for him leaving me and my people alone.”

“Oh really?”

Dodd was surprised. Heneage claiming blackmail money from someone like Pickering? Was the man mad?

Pickering’s lips thinned. “Yes, really.”

“You had an arrangement with Mr. Secretary Walsingham…”

“Yes I did, Sir Robert. He left me in peace. I made sure that there was reasonable peace in London and if he needed to know anything, he knew it, no questions asked.”

“And Heneage…?”

“Wants paying.”

Carey tutted quietly.

“And sends Topcliffe to collect.” Pickering spat deliberately into the fire.

“Dear oh dear. He certainly seems in a hurry at the moment, Mr. Pickering. Are you aware of the problems my father and brother had with him a week or two ago.”

“I’d ‘eard somefing,” said Pickering cautiously. “You was in a good stand-off in the Fleet’s Beggar’s Ward, I ‘eard all about that.”

“Mm. And you’ll be aware that Sergeant Dodd here has been trying to bring Heneage to court over his maltreatment.”

Pickering snorted quietly at this, an opinion Dodd shared.

“Now there’s something afoot over Cornish land,” Carey said. “I asked your brother-in-law about the hanging, drawing, and quartering of a purported priest named Fr. Jackson.” Pickering’s small bright eyes narrowed and sharpened at that. “The man whose head ended up on London Bridge was in fact a Mr. Richard Tregian, a respected Cornish gentleman and a…an acquaintance of my mother’s.”

Pickering nodded.

“He had been involved in the selling of Cornish lands that had gold in them, working with a surveyor and assayer, who was the priest Fr. Jackson under whose name Tregian ended being executed—if that was actually the man’s name. In fact my mother came up to town herself to talk to him—although I don’t yet know why. His daughter is in my mother’s service and came with her—bringing a copy of a survey of the areas in question.”

Carey paused to take a drink of brandywine. “She had it in her purse under her kirtle—she’s a Cornish girl and nobody there would steal it from her so she had no idea…Anyway, she comes up to town with my mother in the
Judith of Penryn
, she cannot find her father where he is supposed to be lodging, she goes with my mother shopping on London Bridge, and there she sees her father’s head on a spike.”

Now it was Pickering’s turn to tut.

“Understandably she screamed the place down, spooked her horse and gave Sergeant Dodd here some trouble to control the nag. In the flurry she thinks her purse with the survey in it was stolen, or at any rate, she didn’t have it any more when she got home and the cord had been cut.”

Pickering nodded. “If it was any of my people wot nipped that bung, I’ll have the survey back in your hands by tomorrow, Sir Robert,” he said in measured tones. “There’s no chance she might of sold the survey and then…”

Carey smiled and shook his head.

“Who would she sell it to? She knows no one in London, she’s only a country maid. Besides she has been with my mother the whole time she’s spent in London.”

“Hm.”

“And one other matter. A corpse fetched up against the Queen’s Privy Stair a few days ago, but in a state that showed it had been in the water considerably longer. The man had been stabbed but died of drowning—perhaps because he was wearing leg-irons at the time he fell in the Thames. It fell into my father’s jurisdiction, and at the inquest today a woman turned up calling herself Mrs. Sophia Merry, claimed the body as Mr. Jackson, and then almost held an illegal Requiem Mass for him this same afternoon. I want to know if any of the watermen saw him going into the water? He had the top joint missing from his left index finger.”

Pickering nodded again. “They might know. I’ll ask around, Sir Robert. Now. If…ah…if any of these Cornish lands was to be offered to me, just for argument’s sake, what would you advise?”

“Mr. Pickering,” said Carey with a shrewd look, “I would advise you not to touch it with a boathook.”

“Not even as an investment? In case…ahem…there was gold?”

“And what if there were? It’s Crown prerogative in any case. You would have to dig it up, refine it, and then share anything you made with the Queen’s Majesty. Or do it in secret and risk having the whole thing confiscated. And the land is in Cornwall, for the Lord’s sake, Mr. Pickering. What do you know about Cornwall? You wouldn’t even be able to understand what they said to you, nor they you. It’s at five day’s ride from London and there are no posthouses beyond Plymouth.”

“I could take ship…”

“Mr. Pickering, if you have bought any of these lands, I advise you to sell as soon as you can and buy any land at all you can lay hands on around the Blackfriars.”

“Oh yes?” Pickering’s beady little eyes were wide open. “I fort your father owned the lot.”

“Not all of it. And he’s not selling. Nor can I tell you what his plans are with my elder brother, however…At least if it’s in London you can go and look at the place.” Carey smiled confidingly. “Please don’t tell my father I mentioned it, though.”

Pickering nodded, eyes shrewd. “Well, that’s interesting. Thank you, Sir Robert. Can I offer you gennlemen any…ah…further entertainment?”

Carey hesitated and then regretfully shook his head. “I think I should return to Somerset House, Mr. Pickering, especially as my lady mother is in town and has…er…sources of her own.”

Dodd had to hide a smile at this one, as did Pickering from the slight clamping of his teeth. Both Carey and he stood to leave.

“I’ll send a couple of my boys wiv you, Sir Robert,” said Pickering with a wink. “We don’t want no more veneys in Fleet Street, now do we?”

“Indeed not,” said Carey primly. “Thank you.”

In fact, they took a boat, which turned up the minute Mr. Briscoe roared “Oars!” from the wharf, and got out at Somerset House steps, a highly convenient way of travelling. On the way, Carey seemed thoughtful.

“How is it that ye’re sae friendly wi’ the King o’ the London thieves?” Dodd asked for pure nosiness. “Ah wouldnae have thought…”

“Oh, it’s a long story, Sergeant. Long time ago too. When I was first at Court, before I went to Scotland, I…ah…somewhat over-reached myself at a London primero game…”

“Ay?”

Carey’s expression was rueful. “Yes. Lost my shirt, actually. Literally.”

Dodd’s mouth turned down. “Ay?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to let that bother me so I was heading for my lodgings as I…ah…was…”

“Wi’out yer shirt?”

“Nothing but my underbreeches, I’m afraid. It gave a couple of punks a terrible turn, I think. Anyway, Mr. Pickering caught up with me and gave me back my cloak which was kind of him. He said he liked the way I’d carried it off and as he had suspicions about the cards, he would take it as a compliment if I would allow him to buy me some temporary duds at a pawnshop he knew on a loan so as not to…er…frighten anybody.”

Dodd was enchanted at this picture. “Ay.”

“Of course, he wasn’t the King then, he was working for the man who was. We got talking over a few quarts of beer and I told him if he wanted to draw in the courtiers with money, he should set up a game which was absolutely clean, no cheating at all, guarantee it and charge for entrance. And make sure it was somewhere comfortable.”

Carey took his hat off to a lady wearing a velvet mask as she went past in another boat. She turned away haughtily.

“And whit was it about that boy in the terrible get up?” Dodd asked.

“Occasionally, if Mr. Pickering has a player in who wins too much but he can’t work out how, he asks me to check up on him,” Carey said casually.