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To Kathy Hedges
CHAPTER ONE
I would help you sleep. I have begun life over more than once, and perhaps I can ease your concern by narrating my own tale. So, come back to bed, my heart, and rest your head on my shoulder, and I will stroke your hair and tell you how I came to become what I am.
I fear that my life may reveal more folly than wisdom. I will begin with an act of folly, then, as I hang upside down three storeys above the street, and reflect on the workings of Fate. The wheel had come full circle, and all in a flash: naught but two minutes ago, I had been sharing a warm feather bed with Annabel Greyson, the surveyor’s daughter; and now I was outside the house, three storeys above the street, hanging near-naked in a brisk wind, while Annabel’s father raged within, seeking the villain who had debauched his child.
Who, of course, was me.
This is amusing now, and you laugh, but it was no laughing matter to be thus caught up in some moralist’s tale. I resolved to avoid the moralist’s last scene, which would almost certainly involve judgment, whips, and the pillory.
What is it about fathers, and brothers too, that sets them so firmly against the course of true love?
The Greyson house was like most houses in Ethlebight, narrow and deep, with the ground floor built of solid masonry, and the upper half-timber floors projecting over the street. From the topmost gable a roof beam extended, and on the end of the beam was a large black iron hook, used to help lift furniture or supplies to the upper storeys.
I hung from the beam with the iron hook a few inches from my face, and hoped I would not find myself hanging from the hook itself within the next twenty minutes.
The beam was slick with pigeon droppings. I tried to claw my fingers into the beam like a badger digging after a burrowing rabbit.
I made my exasperated-bailiff face. All because she asked me to adjust her Mermaid costume. I had complied out of a spirit of pure chivalry—I had complied with all Annabel’s requests—and now I found myself in this doleful condition, hanging above a shadowy abyss.
It has to be said that Annabel’s generous nature had surprised me. I had been paying more attention to Bethany Driver, another of the Mermaids, but Annabel had broken a lace and asked for aid, and my fate had lurched onto a new path.
Some hours earlier, I had entered the house via this same gable, to avoid the groom that slept by the door. Annabel had assured me that her father and his apprentices were away on a survey, her mother was visiting relatives in Amberstone, and the only servant besides the groom was the deaf old lady who lit the fires in the morning.
Perhaps the old lady wasn’t as deaf as she seemed. Someone, at any rate, had to have sent a message to Anthony Greyson the surveyor, who must have ridden half the night to show up at his own door just as the dawn was beginning to brighten the eastern sky. The city gates wouldn’t even have opened yet; Greyson must have bribed his way past the guards.
Hearing the pounding and roaring at the front door, I reacted in an instant—I must admit that I was not a complete stranger to these sorts of emergencies. I dashed up the stairs and left the house by the same route I’d entered, though without all my clothing. In the dash up the stairs, I’d been able to tug on only my shirt. My shoes hung around my neck by their laces, and I held my belt and leather purse in my teeth. On my head was the cap, black velvet with the red piping and the brim turned up all around, that marked me as an apprentice lawyer. My hose, doublet, and tunic were clutched in my hands or piled in a disorderly bundle on my chest.
My situation was made worse by the fact that two of Greyson’s apprentices sat on their horses directly below me. I did not wish to fumble my belongings and make the two men wonder why it had suddenly begun to rain clothing. Nor could I stay where I was: Greyson had only to look out the window to see me hanging there, presenting to the viewer the most unflattering view imaginable.
Carefully, I sorted through my possessions, and threw my loose clothes over the beam in hopes they would remain there for the next few minutes. I looked down and saw the broad hats of the apprentices below, then rolled myself, as silently as I could, atop the beam. Pigeon droppings smeared my front, and my hair, which I keep long because you ladies find it so pleasing, fell in my face. The coins in my purse rang, as loud as an alarm bell at such close range. I made my screaming-infant face, froze in place, and tried to look down without actually moving my head.
If anyone had heard the pennies sing, apparently they hadn’t thought to look up. Shuddering with cold—or possibly terror—I managed to rise to hands and knees.
My pulse crashed in my head like a bowling ball thundering into an array of pins. Father Greyson continued his roaring progress through his house, accompanied by the pleas of his daughter and the toothless jabbering of the old woman. I decided it was probably time to leave my perch, and looked around me.
The Greyson house had a tile roof. I had managed to cross it in reasonable quiet earlier, but if I accidentally kicked a tile to the street, I would alert the waiting apprentices.
The house across the street, however, was thatched, and since both houses had been built to jetty out over the street, the jump was perfectly possible. It wouldn’t be completely silent, but it would be quieter than a clattering tile, and once I landed, I’d be invisible to anyone below.
The difficulty would be that the opposite house was a bit taller than the Greyson place, and the jump would have to be made with great care and sure footing to avoid falling short.
Yet the leap was feasible. I am tall and big-framed and, after spending much of my youth on my father’s killing floor, strong even for my size.
I considered whether or not to draw on my clothing before making the leap, and decided at least to belt on my purse. I was finishing this task when I heard a bang behind me, and suddenly I was illuminated with pale light as a lantern moved into the gable room.