‘At fourpence a day, and only when unskilled labour is needed,’ Edward added bitterly. ‘While prices rise by the week. When I began I was good at the job, they hinted they might move me up the ranks to labourer’s mate, but then a piece of stone fell on my finger and broke it, so that was that. Since April the city has started collecting money through the parishes for the poor, but as we have work we do not qualify. We only manage by dipping into the rent. Then our landlord sends his men to threaten us. But we are all standing together in this yard, we’ve seen them off twice.’
‘Your neighbour said your landlord was a Master Reynolds. Gawen Reynolds?’
‘Ay, whose daughter was murdered a few weeks back. And good riddance, if she was anything like him.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Do you know him?’
‘I’ve met him,’ I said. ‘A nasty old man.’
‘That he is.’
I said, ‘You should have asked me for some more money. Jack is right, I have been worried.’
Josephine turned to her husband. ‘Please, Edward, let go your pride. At least for Mousy’s sake.’
I looked at the baby. ‘That is her name?’
‘It’s Mary.’ Josephine looked fondly at the sleeping baby. ‘But we call her Mousy.’
‘Ay,’ Edward’s tone was more civil now. ‘After Mousehold Heath. Jo and I had gone for a little walk there, back in March, to get some air, then suddenly her waters broke. A hard job to get back, wasn’t it, my love?’
‘It was.’ Josephine sighed. ‘I always wanted a child, to give it the love my father never gave me. But I cannot grow too fond. Half the children in this yard die before they are two.’
I said emphatically, ‘Then let me help Mousy to live.’
Josephine looked at her husband. He bit his lip. Pride was all Edward had left. There was an awkward silence. Josephine looked at Barak. ‘Your poor hand,’ she said gently. ‘Does it still hurt?’
‘I get by.’
‘And your hair, Master Shardlake. It is quite white.’
‘Ay, I grow older.’
Josephine turned to Nicholas. ‘And you?’ He was looking around the hovel with horror. He coughed and ran a hand through his untidy red hair. ‘I fare well. I hope to be called to the bar, perhaps next year.’
‘Then you will need a wife,’ Josephine said teasingly.
‘Ay, and I may have found one.’
Edward said, ‘I fear we have no beer to offer you.’
‘No matter. Perhaps we could take you to a tavern?’ I offered.
He smiled grimly. ‘You would raise eyebrows in the taverns we know. But –’ he took a deep breath – ‘I thank you for your offer to help us. Josephine is right, we must think of the child. We have three months’ rent due. If we could borrow that, it would ease our burdens.’
‘I will give it to you.’
Josephine’s eye strayed to the pile of wool and the spindle on the table. ‘We would ask you to stay. But I must get on with my spinning, Sunday though it is. The woman will be calling for the spun wool tomorrow. But please,’ she said eagerly, ‘come again.’
Edward said, ‘But not wearing those rich clothes. Our neighbours have only just accepted us, Londoners are foreigners to them.’
Nicholas and Barak waited outside, watched by the people of the yard, while I settled the matter of the rent. I said goodbye to the baby, touching her tiny hand. She looked round at me, and smiled. Josephine said, ‘She likes you. She’s just beginning to take an interest in the world. Some people she likes, some she doesn’t.’ It moved me strangely.
WE WALKED BACK to the Maid’s Head in sober mood, saying little. Nicholas said, ‘That honest people should live so. I thought it was only lazy bibbers that came to this.’
‘Grow up, Nick lad,’ Barak said impatiently. ‘How many such yards have you seen in London?’
‘Many. But I have never been inside one.’
I said, ‘I have arranged for us to meet them on Tuesday evening, at the Blue Boar Inn. They should be acceptable there,’ I added bitterly.
‘Ay,’ Barak agreed. ‘But you two should dress down.’
‘Edward said we shouldn’t come back to the yard after dark. It’s not safe.’
‘I could have told you that.’
Back in Tombland, the sound of singing was audible from the cathedral. In the alcove by the Maid’s Head the man in the ragged blanket still lay unmoving. On impulse I bent down and shook his shoulder. He did not stir. Carefully, I removed the blanket. I almost gagged at the smell. A young man in his early twenties lay there, his cheeks sunken, his hair alive with lice. His eyes were half open, unseeing. He was quite dead.
‘Looks as though he starved,’ Barak said.
‘Ay.’ I looked over at the cathedral. ‘So much for Christian charity.’
Chapter Twenty
The next morning, Toby came to the Maid’s Head at seven. Barak would be busy with Assizes work all week. It was Monday, the seventeenth of June, three days until Boleyn’s trial. The judges would be arriving that evening, and the Maid’s Head was busier than ever.
I laid out what we needed to do that day to Toby and Nicholas over breakfast. ‘First, we see Boleyn, ask him about this Snockstobe, and whether he used any other locksmiths. And after what Reynolds’s steward told me, I need to press him about his relations with his wife. And there is that lack of an alibi. I am sure Boleyn wasn’t telling the truth.’
‘Maybe the prospect of being hanged on Friday will have made him think again,’ Toby said.
‘I hope to God it has. We’ll see. Afterwards, we’ll visit the locksmith, and if he made no copy of the keys, we’ll visit every other locksmith in Norwich. Nicholas and I will do that. If we find the twins took the key from Scambler and made a copy, it throws a whole new light on the case.’
‘Could the twins have been working for someone else?’ Nicholas asked. He turned to Toby. ‘Didn’t you say they and some other young gentlemen did dirty work for Richard Southwell?’
‘So it is said,’ Toby replied.
‘After we’ve seen Boleyn, Toby, I want you to try and trace the brother of this Grace Bone.’
‘That will not be easy, if he’s poor, with no link to a trade guild or someone of rank. There’re thousands like your friend Josephine, living in slums around Norwich, with no reason to advertise themselves to the authorities.’
‘Do what you can. You found Josephine, after all.’ My tone was snappish, for I was conscious how near to trial we were, and the face of the dead man from the night before still haunted my mind. I went on, ‘Where was Edith during those nine years? If this Grace Bone is still alive and in Norwich, perhaps she could tell us something. If we could find where Edith went, maybe we could solve this case.’
Nicholas said, ‘If Edith was not in her wits, she would have needed a protector.’
‘Or a guard.’
I bit my lip. ‘Then either her protector gave up on her, or she escaped from her guard. And made her way to Elizabeth as a last hope. But we’ve no idea.’
‘And we’ve still somehow got to get the twins on their own,’ Nicholas added.
Just then, a shadow fell over our table. I looked up to find a tall, thin man in his late forties, dressed identically to me in the robe, coif and cap of a serjeant-at-law, smiling down at me tightly. He bowed and doffed his cap. ‘God give you good morrow, sir. I did not know any other serjeants were attending the Assizes.’