Plague (23 page)

“You know I do. I am the Lord’s soldier ever.”

“You are. And all his soldiers are needed now, yea, now more than ever.” Simeon released Garnthorpe and picked up his chocolate to sip again. “I asked you, before the tragedy of Hezekiah intervened, how is our old comrade Brother Strong?”

“Busy at his butchery, I believe.”

“Is he?” Simeon studied the man before him, then nodded. “Because we have need of him.” Three merchants entered and sat down nearby. Simeon lowered his voice. “We have a Judas among us. Hezekiah had found him out and was going to tell us his name this very day. He died before he could.” He glanced at the merchants. “I would like you to take over this good work. Find out this traitor.”

His gaze still on the table, Garnthorpe replied, “Why me, Brother? I do not move so easily among the Saints. Some resent that I am of the nobility.”

“They do not matter. For will we not all be Christ’s nobles when he returns to rule over us? I ask you to do this for two reasons. The first is that with Hezekiah’s death there is an empty place now among the Six of the Council of the Great Ones. You could fill that place if you prove yourself worthy.”

“You do me much honour.”

“The second is that once this Judas is found out, our friend Strong will be needed to
converse
with him. We must discover if the
traitor works alone. Then after he must be punished.” He nodded. “Strong has the sapphire still, does he not?”

Garnthorpe met Simeon’s gaze. “No.”

“No?” Simeon frowned. “How can he not have—” He broke off. There was no point questioning. Only Strong would know the answer. And the butcher of Harrow Alley was not there. “Then he will need this, though it was meant for another.” Simeon held out something on his palm. “Do you know what this is?”

The amber showed strongly within the copper. “It is a tiger’s eye.”

“Also called?”

“Chalcedony.”

The pale man ran a finger across the scar that bisected his nose like a cut of light. “Should not this traitor carry this gemstone in his mouth?” he said.

For a long moment, Garnthorpe stared at the small stone in Simeon’s palm. Then he took it up, put it in his pocket and replied, “If that is the Lord’s will.”

“Oh, it is, Brother Roland. Doubt not but it is.”

“Off out, Pitman?”

“Off out, my love.”

“Will you take Josiah?”

His son looked up, hope in his eyes.

“I will not, love. I need him to be with you, in case you fall to labour. He knows where I am bound and will run to fetch me then.”

“I’ve told you, it is not going to happen till after the Sabbath. At the earliest.” Bettina came to the doorway, wiping her hands with a cloth. “I have had enough of them to know.”

She gestured back onto the room, where the whole tribe was busy—Josiah, Grace, Faith, even little Imogen had a cloth in hand and was scrubbing. Since the house four along from theirs had been shut up the previous Sunday, each day they cleaned every surface with vinegar in which Bettina had steeped rue, valerian and clove. Every part of their bodies had a soaked cloth passed across it daily. Any coin brought into the house they dropped in a bucket
of vinegar to steep—though there had been few enough of those since he and the captain had taken Maclean three days earlier, the Irishman proving hard to find in the stews of Alsatia.

The five guineas had gone fast for rent, food—and the ingredients in the pot now steaming on the hob. “And I still need those last items for my mother’s plague water,” Bettina said. “You can never remember them.”

“Nay, sweet chuck, but I can. Angelica, bay, campana roots. Uh, juniper. Mace?”

“Pitman, you lump! I made you learn them by letter because you don’t like reading my notes. You’ve jumped from
c
to
j
and skipped such essentials as gentian, hyssop.” She slapped his arm. “And that’s why you shall take Josiah with you. He will be your memory. Will you not, boy?”

“I will, Ma,” their son replied, leaping up. “After mace there’s myrrh, penny-royal—”

“There’s a bright lad. But don’t tell me—tell your father when he is at the apothecary’s. Fetch your coat.”

As Josiah scurried away, Pitman bent to speak softer. “My love, it might not be suitable for the boy to accompany me.”

“Why?” Her eyes narrowed in concern. “Do you go to take another thief?”

“No. At least, I do not think so.” He dropped his voice still lower. “I am going to the theatre.”

“The
theatre
?” The word
whorehouse
would not have received more disdain. “We have not enough coin to buy unguents for Imogen’s rash and you are going to spend what little we do have on depravity?”

“Nay, chuck. I have been vouchsafed the ticket. By an actress.”

He wanted the word back as soon as he said it. But it was too late.

“An
actress
?” His wife grabbed his arm and pinched it hard. “Have you turned lunatic, man? Next you’ll be dancing naked down the street, save for the bells on your ankles, crying, ‘Once a Ranter, always a Ranter!’ What are you about?”

Pitman looked over her head at their offspring, who looked back with fascination at the comet rarity of their parents fighting. Discomfited, he lifted Bettina as if she were a doll, not a woman about to put forth twins, and placed her behind him in the hallway, then closed the door on the amazed faces of their children. “Hush, love,” he said, “I didn’t tell you before because you are so near your time.” Impatience was colouring her face a red to match her hair, so he hurried on. “I am on the trail of something big. Thirty guineas big.”

“Captain Cock? I thought he was lost.”

“He may not be the one I seek. I have a possibility. Otherwise I would never venture into such a temple of Sodom as a playhouse.”

“Though there was a time …”

“A time for both of us, aye.”

“Shh!” Bettina glanced at the door, from just the other side of which came children’s whispers. “We do not speak of that time now, Pitman.”

“I know.” He pulled her into his arms. “Though sometimes I dream of that summer and the camp by the Great Ouse. Of the whole Ranter crew. The singing. The drinking. The moonlight on your naked skin after you left Arise Evans and gave yourself only to me.”

“Hush,” she said, “you daft ha’porth.” But she did not pull away, and when he bent to kiss her, she opened her mouth to him, her whole self, as she had always done, moonlight or none. After a few moments she stepped from his arms, laughing. “Get on with you,
then. But listen. I assume the thirty guineas depend on the taking of this pigeon, and it’s not yet netted, nor will not be tonight?”

“You assume right, my love. I have confederates—”

“Does this mean a shared purse?”

“Nay, love.” He thought of Mrs. Chalker and Coke. The actress sought only vengeance for her husband’s murder. The highwayman? A strange fellow, whose company and skills he’d appreciated in the hunt for Maclean. The man had enjoyed the chase, the capture—and was morose afterwards, as if all his joy was in action alone. Both Mrs. Chalker and the captain had sent him notes, which he had labouriously pieced together, being unable to ask Bettina for her usual help in deciphering. Both had said they would rendezvous at the playhouse to discuss the greater hunt. “These others aid me only, sweet. They desire no part of the reward.”

“Citizens about their duty, then? Good. Then you’ll take Josiah—” she raised her voice against his interruption “—as far as the apothecary’s. He’ll bring back the ingredients I require for the plague water. I can bottle and be selling by noon tomorrow. We’re likely to need the cash—” she winced, placed a hand on her swollen belly “—by the Sabbath indeed, if their blows are anything to go by.”

He placed his own hand there. “Hard kickers, eh? Boys, you think?”

“Arise Evans would give you short odds.” She slapped his hand away. “Now be off, you great simpleton, and I’ll send Josiah.” She stood on tiptoes and pecked his cheek. “Go take us a thief.”

I’ll try, my love, he thought, watching her waddle away. Though it’s not a thief I am after but someone much worse.

His son found him staring at the front door, his brow creased. “Off out, Father,” he called.

“Off out, Son.”

They emerged to a mad carillon of bells. These did not sound with the solemnity of the toll for the dead, near continuous this past week.

“What mean these bells, Father?”

“ ’Tis said that the English fleet has sunk some scores of Dutchmen off Lowestoft. To hear the talk, it is a victory near as famous as Old Bess’s over the Great Armada.”

“Is that not good for us, Father? For the realm?”

Pitman sniffed. “Perhaps. I care little for the realm these days. My parish, my neighbours, my family are realm enough for me.”

Coke looked slowly around the seven faces that floated over the green baize. Though they were in the back room of Lockett’s, with a clientele that professed to the genteel, he didn’t think he’d seen a scurvier crew of sharpers in the lowest den in Alsatia. They were better lit—the establishment had cut-glass chandeliers suspended above the tables, studded with candles. Yet better lighting only more clearly revealed the smallpox scars, no matter how painted or patched the face; revealed too those who had suffered from the other pox, the great one, and had attended the mercury baths to cure it—though whether the disease or its attempted remedy had ravaged them so, Coke did not know. All he could see were several men with only half their teeth their own, the other half a gleaming, false white, some below nostrils as mangled as if gnawed by a rodent.

He continued his study, and finally halted his gaze on the man opposite him, the spokesman for the group, the one in the eye patch. This was not the customary sober black item but emerald green, and studded with sparkling stones in the oval of the missing eye beneath. “Well, sir, do you call?” drawled this fellow, resting his
hands upon the raised soft cushion that edged the table. “Really, sir, call your main or pass the dice. You have left, what? Five guineas of your original stake? It has been an enjoyable hour, has it not? But truly, sir, would it not be wise for you now to pass?”

Each “sir” he uttered with the same tinge of derision. Coke did not wear the clothes that these men did, the latest fashion displayed in colour and cut. When he’d ordered wine, someone had laughed at his Somerset lilt, someone not brave enough to emerge from the dark beyond the candle spill. Now they were all silent, waiting for the captain to pass and walk away.

He never walked away. “Seven,” Coke said, and picked up the ivory dice.

Eye Patch smiled. “Again? Your number of fortune, eh. Well, it has failed you so often tonight it must come good soon, what? And how much of your remaining five would you wager, sir?”

Coke smiled back. “All of it.”

“Very good. We shall take that wager, shall we not, gentlemen?”

A murmur of assent came from the other six who made up “the bank.”

“Then roll, sir. Roll. And may the devil dance in your dice.”

Coke opened his hand, spat on the dice, then flung them across the table, thinking hard as they tumbled: seven or eleven, seven or eleven, seven—

“Five,” called Eye Patch. “The gentleman rolls chance.”

Two, three or twelve and he’d have lost. Seven or eleven, won. Five gave him the chance to roll again, at least—though now he must not hit his main. Seven and he would lose. Five and he would win, and stay in the game.

He reached for the dice, but Eye Patch picked them up first and held them out with that same smirk on his face. Coke took them,
staring into the one eye. There were as many sharpers at Lockett’s as upon any dirt floor in the slums. Perhaps more.

The weight felt the same. Palming one die, he passed the other lightly between his forefinger and thumb, rubbing each surface. During the wars, he’d had a soldier in his company who’d worked in a shop that made false dice. A tiny end of boar’s bristle, wedged in, sticking out, imperceptible to the eye but not to the touch, could give the result desired, the opposite of what Coke wished for. The maroon velvet doublet of the one-eyed man could conceal a multitude of pockets, each with a pair of dice to give any result required. Yet as Coke rubbed the first and then the second die, he did not feel the telltale prickle. Eye Patch, knowing what Coke did, simply kept smiling.

The captain lifted the dice into the light. He’d noted something on one of the treys—there! The slightest fleck of blue on the ivory, like a tick to the dot. It recalled to him the exact blue of Mrs. Chalker’s eyes. The dice were good, and the same ones he’d used for the past hour; won a little, lost much with. He raised them. Five, not seven. Five. Coke saw it, and her eyes again, just before he rolled.

The first die stopped on a trey. Two, he thought, two, watching the other spin on a tip for what seemed an age. At last it halted.

“Four,” called out Eye Patch. “There’s your lucky seven. Just when you didn’t want it.” He leaned across the baize, snatched up the five gold guineas. “Is that indeed your last? Do you pass? Or do you have perhaps one final coin about you to give us?”

There was a faint buzzing. Around him. Within him. He had heard it every day for the three days since the taking of Maclean and he’d had nothing else to focus on. He could not rob again for he could not in all good conscience continue the hunt with Pitman—a hunt that would begin today after the rendezvous at the
playhouse—and be a thief under the thief-taker’s gaze. So he had sought to reduce the buzzing in customary ways. At the cockpits. At the prizefights. At dice. And he had marvelled at how swiftly the profit from a rich necklace could be disposed of.

An impatient hum. “Come! Do you cede the table,
sir
?”

He focused again. Not on the true eye. On the false one that glittered beside it. “I do not,” he declared, then looked to the back of the room. “Dickon!” he called.

The boy was perched on two legs of a chair, leaning precariously against a wall. He looked up from his latest pamphlet, his mouth agape, the shell of a sunflower seed clinging to his lower lip. “Bring me my money, boy.”