“So says Holy Scriptures.”
“Then they aught not to be in England. The law was made ages ago.”
“You will find, Jack, that laws and kings are rarely to be met within the same sentence.”
“Eh?”
Crispin snorted. “Whatever King Richard desires, he gets. The man is a physician to the queen. I’ve no doubt he is here to discover why she has not gotten with child.”
“Oh.” Jack looked out the window thoughtfully. “But you’re to be at the palace gate at nightfall.”
“Yes. Have you objections to that?”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Why?”
Jack shrugged. “I just don’t. He loses papers he says are not important yet he won’t go to the sheriff. What are those papers about, then?”
“I was wondering that myself. He called them parchments of Hebrew texts. I was trying to think what might be important about that.”
“Scriptures?”
“If so, why did he not say so? Perhaps they are for his physician’s art. Yet he did not admit that either. It makes no matter. I will find them, and I will make a pretty penny from it.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You are not required to like it,” he snapped. “I must take employment where it comes!” He didn’t like to bark at Jack but the boy had little concept of his place. Yet when he turned to Jack and studied the boy’s threadbare coat and hood, he suddenly remembered that Jack did know it. Hadn’t the boy spent the best years of his childhood on his own in the streets as a cutpurse? Jack was lucky to have survived at all.
Reluctantly, Crispin softened. “Do you wish to accompany me?”
Jack’s head snapped up. His brown eyes rounded, catching the firelight. “Me?”
“You are my apprentice. How are you to learn anything hiding out here? And I can keep a sharp eye on you. Keep you out of mischief.”
“I don’t get in no mischief,” he grumbled. And as if to prove it, he grabbed a broom from the corner and began furiously sweeping the clean floor.
The sun bled in streaks of faded color between slashes of heavy gray clouds. Crispin and Jack set out and walked for nearly half an hour down long, snowy lanes toward the city of Westminster and the palace. As they entered each parish, they heard the echoing timbre of church bells even above the howl of wind, each tower with its own characteristic sound. The deep tones of St. Paul’s, whose shadow hovered over the Shambles, soon dispersed and they entered into the domain of the tinny jangling of St. Bride. A few more streets and then St. Clement Danes’ urgent claxon gave way to St. Martin-in-the-Fields’ timid pealing before even that sound was finally overshadowed by the rich resonance of the bells of Westminster Abbey.
Charing Cross stood rigid in the icy cold of the crossroads. Its cross and steps were snowcapped and solemn. Jack’s admonishment kept preying on Crispin’s mind: You’re taking money from a Jew? Was he that desperate? The answer came swiftly. His rent was due in a few days and he had no money with which to pay it. Martin Kemp, his landlord, was kind to him and often did not demand the rents on time, unlike his shrewish wife, Alice, who enjoyed constantly harrying Crispin on that very point.
Money. It had never been an issue before. Not before his ill-fated decision to join with those conspirators seven years ago, at any rate. There was money aplenty then. Shameless amounts of it. Wasted on trinkets for foolish women and wine with dubious friends. Where were those friends now? And where the women? He had tossed coins so carelessly to bards and beggars. He sunk sackfuls of it on gardeners for his estates in Sheen. His former manor was not far from the royal residence and appearances had to be maintained. If the king wished to stay at the Guest Manor, then it must be as well appointed as the king’s own. He recalled one year when he harassed the tenants for their rents early in order to supply his kitchens for the king and his retinue. There was many a time he had nearly paupered his own household in order to feed and house all of court. But he had not complained, for this had been for the old king, Edward of Windsor, King Richard’s grandfather. For the old king, he would have done anything. Even commit treason so that his son John of Gaunt and not his grandson Richard could sit on the throne.
Alas. Those days were long, long gone. His lands had been taken along with his knighthood, and the loyal tenants on the Guest estates called another man their lord. Crispin knew not who, nor did he care to know.
He glanced down at his own seedy coat and the sturdy cloak that hid its shabby appearance from view. Yes, that was a long time ago.
Flurries arrived with the waning sun and Crispin quickened his step to keep warm. They followed the Strand now, heading out of London toward the palace. The shops and houses did not seem as crowded and the street opened onto a wider avenue where the spindly trees of gardens could be spied beyond the rooftops.
Crispin set his mind to the task at hand. What papers could a Jew value so much that he would seek him out? He must be desperate to venture from court, knowing that he would not be welcomed outside of it. He almost laughed. And to seek a man who was not allowed into court! A fine pair they were.
It was a simple theft, no doubt. Someone inquisitive about the Jew. Perhaps it was stolen as a simple prank. That made one of two possibilities: The papers were long gone, destroyed. Or someone thought them valuable enough to try to sell to a third party. If the latter was the case then they still might yet be recovered. If the former, well, he’d take his money from this Jew and be troubled by him and court no more.
The freezing wind was angry, whipping off the white-capped river, and shrieking down the alleys, whirling through the lanes and taking with it the last brown leaves of an autumn that was just a memory. Ice pelted Crispin’s face like tiny shards of glass. He squinted into the weather, head ducked down and encased in a hood that he wished for the thousandth time had been lined with fur.
But even above the baying wind and the churning foam of the river hissing against the stony embankment, Jack and Crispin heard it at the same time. A plaintive cry from the direction of the Thames. Crispin paused, wondering about it when the sound lifted up into the cold afternoon a second time. People on the street near the embankment stopped and moved toward the edge. Crispin watched as some men scurried down the bank and disappeared from view. Others took up the cry and Crispin found himself running.
Men with poles were trying to pull something in. The Thames wrestled with them, spitting icy water up into their faces, dampening their stockings and boots with freezing water. It wasn’t until Crispin pushed some onlookers out of the way that he saw what it was the men were heaving onto the shore.
Hurrying down the embankment, Crispin helped pull up the small form.
A boy. About Jack’s age.
Naked. Bruised. Dead.
2
They laid the boy on the rocky shore. Men with wet stockings knelt beside him. Everyone crossed themselves. Women wept and many went running. Crispin knelt and looked over the boy’s body. “Has someone gone and fetched the sheriff?” he inquired, his voice hoarse.
“Aye,” said a man beside him, shivering. His shoes were soaked through. He was one of the men who had plunged into the freezing Thames to bring forth the body. “My boy went to get him. Was it an accident, you think?”
The body had not been long dead, Crispin decided. No bloating, no nibbling from fish. It was recent. There were bruises on his arms and wrists and a deep bruise around his neck, so deep that whatever had strangled him left a profound indentation. A slice up his abdomen was done neatly with a knife. It was deep. “This was no accident,” said Crispin.
“Shall I call the hue and cry?” asked the man.
Crispin nodded, his gaze never leaving the wide-open eyes of the boy. Eyes that had been blue, their cloudy whites webbed with broken blood vessels. Eyes that would see no more.