‘I’m sure he’s not,’ said Quare. ‘He’s gone to report back to his masters, just as I must do.’
‘No,’ she shrieked, grabbing hold of his arm. ‘You can’t leave me! He’ll kill me, he will! Just as he did those poor young men!’
‘Mrs Puddinge,’ Quare said as forcefully and yet calmly as he could, ‘Aylesford has no interest in harming you, I assure you.’
‘Oh, aye, like you assured me I would be perfectly safe when you went gallivanting off after him!’
Quare felt his cheeks flush. Damn it, the woman was right. He had left her in danger. Once again, as in his confrontation with Grimalkin, he was forced to admit that he was ill-prepared for this game in which he suddenly found himself immersed right up to his eyeballs. He knew that he was lucky to have survived this long. And, no thanks to him, so was Mrs Puddinge. Nevertheless, he felt certain that Aylesford was long gone, and that Mrs Puddinge was in no further danger. ‘It’s me that he’s after,’ he told her now. ‘But if it will set your mind at ease, I’ll look for other lodgings as soon as I’ve spoken to my masters.’
‘What, so that you can put some other innocent at risk? But even if you were to move out, Mr Quare, he still knows that I know he’s a French spy,’ Mrs Puddinge pointed out, not unreasonably. ‘He’ll still have cause enough to want me dead!’
‘Once I’ve exposed him, the whole guild will know – and my masters will see that the news reaches the ear of Mr Pitt himself. Will Aylesford kill us all, then? Don’t you see, Mrs P? The more people who know, the safer we are. Your surest protection lies in my getting to the guild hall!’
She pondered this for a moment, then nodded, a look of steely determination on her face, where, just a moment ago, he had seen only terror. ‘I’m going, too, Mr Quare.’ And, before he could object: ‘I won’t sit here all alone, waiting patiently for my throat to be cut. Say what you will, but you can’t know for certain that he’s not lurking about somewhere close by, watching and waiting like a cat at a mouse hole. As long as he sees that we’re together, he’ll not dare to strike. And if he sees us both go to the guild hall, he’ll know the jig is up, and that it will avail him nothing to creep back here in the dead of night and silence me.’
Quare could not fault the woman’s logic. ‘Very well, but we must make haste. Give me a moment to clean myself up and finish dressing, and we’ll go together.’
‘I’m not letting you out of my sight,’ she declared.
In the end, he prevailed upon her to allow him a modicum of privacy, standing with her arms crossed and her back to him just outside his cracked-open door. After dumping the bloody water out of the window and refilling the wash basin with the last of the fresh water from the pitcher, he undressed and hurriedly wiped the worst of the blood, grime, and sweat from his skin, shivering all the while. Then he dressed more quickly still, pulling fresh linen and clothes from the floor. He drew his hair back in a tight queue. His coat, if it were even salvageable, which he doubted, required more time and attention than he could spare just now, and so he wore only a waistcoat, once blue but now so threadbare and faded that it merely aspired to that colour. He tucked his spare hat, a battered tricorn, under one arm.
‘Well?’ he demanded of Mrs Puddinge at last. ‘How do I look?’ He did not want to draw unnecessary attention on the streets.
She opened the door fully and regarded him with a critical eye. ‘I shouldn’t care to present you to His Majesty,’ she said at last, ‘but I suppose it could be worse. Have you no spare coat?’
‘Such luxuries are beyond a journeyman’s purse, Mrs P.’
‘Why, ’tis no luxury! Here, now, I’ve still got my husband’s second-best coat – I buried him in his best, God bless his bones. I believe it will fit you very well indeed. Come along while I fetch it.’
So saying, she started off down the landing; her own rooms were on the ground floor of the house. Quare closed and locked the door to his room and followed her. At the top of the stairs, she paused and waited for him to catch up. ‘I’ll feel safer if you go first, Mr Quare.’
He nodded and slipped past her, descending with caution, his hand on the pommel of his sword. But, as before, he encountered no one. Mrs Puddinge unlocked the door to her private chambers, and again Quare preceded her inside, checking to make sure Aylesford was not hiding there. Only when he had searched every inch, including under the bed, did she deign to enter. Then, brisk about her business, she bustled to a trunk, threw it open, rummaged inside and drew forth a drab brownish grey monstrosity of a coat. This relic of a bygone age she unfolded and let hang from one hand while beating the dust from it with the other. Quare found it difficult to believe this garment had been anyone’s second-best anything. He would have been embarrassed to see another person wearing it, let alone himself. It seemed to have been stitched together from the skins of dried mushrooms. He sneezed, then sneezed again more violently, as an odour reached him, redolent of the ground if not the grave.
‘Here you go, Mr Quare,’ said Mrs Puddinge, advancing towards him with the mouldering coat extended before her like a weapon. ‘Not the height of fashion, I know, but sufficient unto the day, eh?’
He eyed the thing with something like horror. ‘Er, I can see how much the coat means to you, Mrs P. As a keepsake of your late husband, that is. I couldn’t possibly take it.’
‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she insisted. ‘I won’t have one of my young men walking about the streets without a coat. What will people think?’ She pressed it upon him again, and, after setting his tricorn upon his head, he reluctantly took it.
‘Got a bit of a smell,’ he suggested, holding his breath.
‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Mr Quare,’ she responded, as if offended by his observation.
Quare bowed to the inevitable with a sigh. He advanced his arms through the sleeves, half expecting to encounter a mouse or spider. Perhaps a colony of moths. The coat proved to be a trifle large, even roomy. It settled heavily across his shoulders, and the stench of it was like a further weight. He didn’t think he could bear it. Yet before he could say another word, there came a sharp rapping at the front door of the house.
Mrs Puddinge shot him a fearful look.
‘That must be the watch or, worse, the redbreasts,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Quick, Mrs P – you delay them, and I’ll go out through the window. You can stay here; you’ll be safe with these men.’
‘I’ll do no such thing!’ Even as she spoke, she was crossing the room to a casement window looking out on the same alley as the window in his room above. She quickly threw it open, then turned to him as another round of hammering began at the front door. ‘We’ve no time to argue, Mr Quare. Are you coming or not?’
Again he seemed to have no choice but to accede. Beneath her matronly exterior, Mrs Puddinge was a force to be reckoned with. Quare helped her over the sill and out of the window, then followed, pushing the glass-paned wings closed again behind him.
It was a chill, grey day, with more than a taste of encroaching autumn. Despite the lateness of the hour – nearly eleven by his watch – tendrils of fog snaked through the air, obscuring the sun and congealing in pockets along the cobbled pavement of the alley.
‘What now, Mr Quare?’ Mrs Puddinge asked, eyes shining beneath her bonnet, for all the world like a girl swept up in a childhood game.
‘Now we make for the guild hall,’ he said in a low voice. ‘We’ll go this way, up the alley, away from your house. Once we reach Cheapside, we’ll blend in with the flow. Just act naturally, Mrs P. Don’t hurry or do anything that might draw unwanted attention.’