I paused to lock the door. Gurdyman and I rarely bothered under normal circumstances, but what was happening now was far from normal. I hoped Gurdyman had a key, too. Would he have remembered to take it with him?
I couldn’t think about that now. I said some silent words in my mind with the aim of keeping the house and its many secrets safe. Then I followed Jack away up the alley.
We went first to Mistress Judith’s house, for I was concerned about Adela and feeling guilty that I’d left her on her own. As we approached, keeping out of sight as best we could, I saw that the door was open. Voices were coming from within, and then two sturdy young men appeared in the doorway, supporting Adela between them.
I hurried up to them. ‘How is she?’
Adela herself answered. ‘My head hurts like the very devil but I’ll live, and there’s no need to talk about me as if I’m not here,’ she said with spirit. One of the young men caught my eye and grinned.
‘We’re her sister’s grandsons,’ the other one said, ‘and we’re taking her to our mother’s.’
‘Good,’ I said, already rummaging in my satchel. Taking out a remedy in a twist of cloth, I gave it to Adela. ‘This will help the headache. As much as will cover your thumbnail, in warm water, no more than three times a day.’
She took it and tucked it away in her bosom. Then, with an imperious command to the young men, she let them lead her off.
Jack and I melted back into the maze of alleys, taking a curving route to return to the marketplace some distance away. He stopped on the edge of the square and we leaned forward to peer out. I had heard a mutter of voices as we approached and now I saw that all at once the square was thronging with people, and that most of them seemed possessed of the sort of anger that is a thin disguise for fear. There appeared to have been a spontaneous mass revolt against Sheriff Picot’s order for people to stay indoors, and although a huge force of the sheriff’s men were doing their best to push people out of the square and into the many alleys opening on to it, the people were fighting back. The townsfolk seemed only just to have discovered that if enough of them joined in the protest, there wasn’t much the sheriff could do to make them obey the curfew. He simply didn’t have enough men.
Sheriff Picot himself stood over on the far side of the square, up on a low wall. A gang of armed men was ranged around him in a protective circle and his nephew Gaspard stood beside him, frowning down at the crowd and managing to look both threatening and disdainful.
‘He’s arrested the storyteller!’ a woman standing next to us said, eyes wide with horrified fascination. ‘Sheriff Picot, that is. Gave him a beating, too, or his men did. Said he’d been encouraging rumours and making us all scared. As if we weren’t scared enough anyway, what with all these murders and the sheriff’s total failure to do anything to stop them!’ she added recklessly.
Clearly, she hadn’t recognized Jack.
I took hold of her arm. ‘Be careful!’ I muttered in her ear. ‘I shouldn’t think Sheriff Picot is a man who likes being criticized, and you never know who’s listening.’
But she was brave, this woman; either that or foolhardy. ‘I’ll speak my mind if I want to,’ she said crossly. ‘And it’s no more than the truth, and what everyone’s saying.’
I felt Jack edge close. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell,’ he murmured. I sensed he was smiling.
Sheriff Picot’s voice rang out over the crowd. ‘Be quiet!’ he thundered. One of his men banged a cudgel against the ground. After a moment, the crowd fell silent.
‘What are you going to do about all the killings?’ someone shouted from over on our left. ‘We’re decent, honest folk, and we go in fear of being the next to die!’
‘Why aren’t you and your men protecting us?’ another voice yelled from further back. Others joined in, demanding reassurance, wanting explanations. The man with the cudgel banged it again, several times, there was a brief scuffle behind where the sheriff stood, and somebody yelled in pain.
‘Silence!’ roared the sheriff. Slowly, the hubbub died away.
‘I have already issued an order that you are all to remain in your homes unless you have permission to go out,’ Sheriff Picot went on, ‘in which case one of my men will escort you, and otherwise-’
‘But we ain’t safe in our homes!’ a woman’s shrill voice screeched. ‘Mistress Judith only poked her nose outside and someone did for her, and that poor young priest was inside the church!’ Her voice rose into an alarmingly piercing screech on the last word, and people standing close covered their ears.
Many others now joined in, all muttering and mumbling the same thing. They had a point. What was the purpose of restricting people to their houses when it now seemed that their homes, and even the church, could offer no sanctuary? Whoever this killer was, he was no respecter of tradition. Then a voice from the thickest part of the throng, in the middle of the square, rang out clear above the rest: ‘It’s the Night Wanderer, that’s who’s doing it! You can beat up and arrest all the storytellers you like, it won’t alter the truth!’
There was a great roar from the crowd. There were shouts of, ‘Yes!’ ‘Hear, hear!’ and ‘That’s the truth, indeed it is!’ People were nodding, turning to their neighbours in encouragement, and now the level of sound in the square from those massed voices rose to a frightened, angry crescendo.
Sheriff Picot yelled again and again for quiet, and finally got it. ‘I’ll have no more talk of the Night Wanderer, or there’ll be trouble!’ he bawled. ‘You’ll all do as you’re told and go home, or else risk arrest!’
‘You’ve not got the room in your cells for us all!’ a man’s deep voice shouted back.
Sheriff Picot spun round, looking for the source of the provocative remark. ‘Oh, I’ll find room, don’t you worry about that!’ he said coldly. ‘And there’ll be fines and floggings for those who incite disobedience, have no fear.’
We all knew Sheriff Picot. We all knew he meant what he said. He liked a good flogging and didn’t need much excuse to order one.
The mood in the crowd had already altered. People were starting to drift away, and Jack pulled me back into the shadows of the alley. I was just wondering what we were going to do next – shouldn’t he join his fellow lawmen in enforcing the sheriff’s orders? – when he said, ‘There’s someone I need to find. He’s one of the sheriff’s men, but he’s not like most of them. He’s one of mine, and he has a good, loyal team.’
‘Where will we find him?’ I asked, already vastly relieved to learn that Jack and I weren’t on our own.
‘I’m not sure, but I have a few ideas,’ Jack replied. He took my hand again and we hurried off, deeper and deeper into the maze of lanes, alleys and little streets around the market square.
Our search for Jack’s man took us the remainder of the morning. We found him in a tavern on the quayside, close to Margery’s whorehouse, where he and a small group of five other men were wolfing down a hasty dinner. The man – he was slim and elegant, with watchful dark eyes in a high-cheekboned face – rose smoothly to his feet when he saw Jack, chewing and hastily swallowing his mouthful.
‘Sorry, master,’ he said when he had emptied his mouth. ‘Only I didn’t reckon the men and me could have gone on much longer without victuals.’
‘It’s all right, Walter,’ Jack said. ‘All of you, finish your food.’ He pulled up a bench and we joined the men at their board. ‘This is Lassair. Lassair, this is Walter.’ Walter and I exchanged glances and nodded at each other.
‘She’s the healer girl,’ another of the men muttered to the others, not quite quietly enough. ‘She tended my old mother when her heart was bad.’