Alchemy and Meggy Swann (14 page)

"Belike you deserved that, Master Ninny," said Meggy, handing him the remains of her own pie.

"We can do no more." He reached a hand to her. "Let us leave this—"

"Ye toads and vipers, Oldmeat!" Meggy hissed. "Now my father will do murder, and he will be seized, and the baron will be dead, and I will be alone. I want—"

"You want! You want! Mistress Margret Swann, you are the most selfish, ungrateful wench I ever did know." Roger shook his head, and the feather in his cap wobbled sadly. "You think only of yourself and your own concerns. I would I ne'er had met you and wish ne'er to meet you again." He hastened away, leaving Meggy there.

She sat and watched the birds. "Fie on him, the mewling moldwarp," she said, but the birds said nothing.

Finally Meggy made her way back to the baron's. She approached the gatehouse once more.

"Be it you again?" the gatekeeper asked. He sneezed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Get you gone."

"Master Gatekeeper," Meggy said, "I know you will not allow that I see the baron, but if it please you, will you take a message to him? 'Pon my honor, he is in grave danger, for—"

The gatekeeper stepped toward Meggy and waved his hands at her. "Go, I said! Clear the way. The baron has no interest in the fancies of a crippled ragamuffin. Go!"

"But—"

"But no! Go away." He sneezed and turned his back to her.

Ye toads and vipers, thought Meggy, but this saving of someone's life takes a goodly amount of effort.

She turned and walked back toward Crooked Lane. Fish Street Hill was teeming with folk. Peddlers, costermongers, and chimney sweeps milled about, crying their wares to passing merchants, sailors, and fine folk in cart-wheel ruffs and feathered hats.

A ballad seller climbed on an overturned crate and called, "Gentlemen, ladies, pay heed. Hear of treason in our city." Treason? Meggy stopped, fearing to hear her father's name. "Hear a new ballad," he continued, "recounting the dangerous shooting of a gun at court." A gun? And he began:

Weep, weep, still I weep,
And shall do till I die
To think upon the gun that shot
At court so dangerously.

As the ballad seller described the events of July, when a stray bullet had narrowly missed the queen in her barge on the river, those gathered to listen muttered and grumbled. "Hang 'im!" shouted a man in a blue padded doublet. "God save the queen!" added others.

And then Meggy had an idea. People stopped to listen to ballad sellers and paid heed to their words. So she would write a ballad about the baron and the ginger-haired lout and sing it outside the baron's house. Someone would hear and warn the baron. The lout would be imprisoned and her father free. It was an inspired idea, Meggy thought, and she did not need Roger anywise.

Her father did not return at all that night, which Meggy knew, for she lay long awake, planning her ballad. "The Ballad of a Red-Headed, Black-Hearted, Pig-Eyed Lout," she would call it. She must be sly, use stealth and hugger-mugger, and not just blurt out the plot. It must be a real ballad with poetry and rhyme, but yet a clear enough warning so that when the right person heard, he would understand. And she must not reveal her father's hand in the plot. Could she do all that?

She lay on her pallet, rhyming and unrhyming, trying this word and that. "You lack-witted oaf," she said to herself, flopping over and back again, "a sausage could be a better poet than you." And, "No, no, no one will understand and I will be shamed." Her face grew moist, not so much from the labor of composing the ballad as from the mighty swings she took from despair to hope and back again. Finally, long after midnight, she repeated her song to herself once more. It would serve. But how to make certain it reached the ears of the right person? She pondered for a moment, and then—of course, she would have it printed! Aye, she would have it printed and sell it to every man going through the baron's gate. Certes someone would make sure it got to the man himself.

Should she tell her father what she was about? Or was it better if he did not know until after she had succeeded? What would he think? Would he be grateful or accuse her once again of meddling? She had no answers, so she pulled her cloak over her and nestled into the pallet. She dreamed of herring and dead birds and Louise's head on London Bridge.

In the morning she went again to Master Allyn. "I be here to make a bargain with you," she told him. "I have writ a ballad I would have printed. I will pay for it by selling other ballads and broadsides for you." She motioned to a printed stack on the table. "If those do sit unsold any longer, they will be old and stale and good for naught but plugging the holes in your shoes. Let me sell them."

The printer thought a moment and then said, "It seems a fair bargain. So you are a poet?"

She hesitated. Should she tell him the truth? Fearing he might be reluctant to be involved in her scheme, she said only, "Aye, sometimes I am a poet."

"Well, little poet, give me your ballad and I will set it in type."

"I know what I wish to say, I know my letters and read some, but I have no writing."

"Sing it to me then, and I shall write it." She did, using a tune that her granny had taught her.

"'Tis a most interesting ballad," he said when they had finished. "How did you come by it?"

Meggy answered, "I have a fine imagination," which was true. But she added nothing about the plot she had overheard or her father's part in it.

The printer began to pull metal letters from a box and arrange them into words on a composing stick. Though the letters were backwards, he pulled them with a speed that astonished Meggy. Then he moved the letters a line at a time onto a rack. He finished the sheet with the legend he used on all his broadsides, "Imprinted at the shop of John Allyn off Paul's Chain, near Ludgate," then wiped his hands on his apron.

This matter was taking a goodly long time, so Meggy said, "Mayhap I can assist you in some way." Taking one of the leather balls, the printer showed her how to smear ink on it and then rub it against the letters until they, too, were inked.

The man watched her carefully. "From all your years with the walking sticks," he said, "your hands and arms be right strong and nimble." She looked down at her hands, surprised. She had never thought they might have value, just that her legs did not.

He put the rack of inky letters onto the press and laid a piece of paper over it, grasped the lever, and pressed forward, so that the top of the press sank down against the paper. "How many copies are you wishing?" he asked Meggy.

She frowned, not knowing. One would be sufficient, were it to get to the right body. But to be safe, she said, "Twenty?"

"As you will, mistress." The printer pulled a printed sheet from the press and laid it on the table to dry. This he did until he had a stack of twenty. He handed one to Meggy.

She held the broadside in her two hands with a tingle of pride and delight. She had done this—she had bethought it, she had written it, she had helped to print it. And then a quiver of fear stirred her. What had she done and what would it bring her?

With a shake of her head and a sharp inhale, Meggy took the broadsides with her ballad and a great many others to sell for a ha'penny each, and she put them in her sack. She slipped her arms through the handles and the sack hung down her back. Slowly she wabbled to the door. "Mistress Meggy, I fear this is too much for you," the printer said. He put his hand on her arm.

"Leave off, Master Printer. I will do this." She stopped, and added, "I thank you, Master Printer, for your service and your trust."

Down Watling Street to Budge Row and thence to Candlewick she went. Master Allyn was right—the heavy sack made her going difficult, and a cold wind was rising, but her mind was set upon this deed, and her stubbornness was as persistent as her pain. She turned south toward the river and Dowgate.

Before the baron's great residence, she put down her sticks and leaned against the wall. Pulling broadsides and ballads from her sack, she called, "Come and buy. Come and buy," as she had heard the ballad sellers calling. "Come and buy"—she looked at the broadsides in her hand—"'The Ballad of Lady Margery and the Cook.' Or perhaps 'The True and Last Confession of Richard Dowling, Murderer and Thief.' 'Tis a sorrowful lamentation with woodcut illustrations, sung to the tune of 'All in a Garden Green.'"

People came and went past the baron's gate. Some avoided her, casting suspicious or pitying glances at her walking sticks, but some stopped to listen, and others even paid a ha'penny for a copy of a ballad. Whenever a man or men came or went through the gate, she sang her own ballad.

I am a man of high renown
Attendant to a lord.
I am a man of villainous heart
And poison is my sword.

No one paid heed.

She moved closer to the gate. The lardy gatekeeper peered out his window at her but did not chase her away. She sang of a murder in Wiltshire and a sea serpent off Dungeness and of Robin Hood rescuing Will Stutly from the sheriff. She sold not a few copies and dropped the coins into the sack. Emboldened by her success, she sang louder, and people stopped to listen. So she tried her own ballad again.

My flaming hair, my piggish eyes
Mark me as a fiend.
And I will dispatch my goodly lord,
Although he serves the queen.
He is a traitor, listen well,
I tell you verily.
He plots against his honest lord
And there will murder be.

Her voice grew tired, her hair tangled in the wind, and her legs ached. Many times she thought to leave and find her pallet, but she sang on. Finally as midday turned to late afternoon, several gentlemen passed, talking and laughing, making for the baron's gate. Meggy stopped singing. The ginger-haired man was among them. Were they all in the plot? Would they hear and understand and throw her into the river with the fishes? Or might one of them be the baron's true friend and warn him?

She took a chance and a deep breath and sang.

So eat, my lord, and drink the wine,
You will not fall down sick
Until the fatal time has come
For the dose of the arsenic.

He is a traitor, listen well,
I tell you verily
He plots against his honest lord
And there will murder be.

So barons all, both west and east,
I cannot tell you more.
But there is a traitor in this land
As I have said afore.

Yes, barons all, both west and
east,
I cannot tell you
more.
But there is a traitor in this
land...

One of the men making their way in turned to her. "Where found you that, girl?" he asked Meggy quietly. "Who gave you that?"

A lump the size of Master Grimm sat in her throat. "'Tis the newest ballad. Everyone be singing it. Will you buy?" she asked, and then swallowed a mighty swallow.

The man gave her a ha'penny, took a copy of the ballad, and stood by the gatehouse to read. His brow furrowed as he looked at the ballad sheet and then at the men passing into the baron's yard. With determined step he followed them.

Meggy let her breath out with a great whoosh. She took her sticks and her sack and wabbled slowly back to Master Allyn's printing house. She could not be certain the baron was warned, but she had done all she could. And without Roger.

Master Allyn took the money she brought him and counted out eight ha'pennies, which he gave back to Meggy for her very own.

Fourpence! Enough for a chicken pie. And apples and a wedge of cheese. Or a fruit tart with cream. Heading home with visions of a table laden with food, she passed a glove maker's stall. Hungry as she was, her hands pained her worse than her belly. Fourpence would not buy fine leather gloves, but belike she could find a pair of thick woolen mittens to protect her hands.

In a neighboring stall Meggy saw a small toy horse, carved of a fine dark wood with a tail of creamy wool. She left the gloves and the fruit tart and bought instead salve for her sore hands, half a loaf of fresh bread, and the horse.

The sky was growing darker as she turned onto Crooked Lane. She entered the cooper's shop and greeted the cooper. "Might I have speech with Master Nicholas?" she asked.

The boy came down from the room above. He smiled a watery smile when he saw Meggy and asked, "Have you come with another story for me?"

"Nay, not today, but see who has climbed into my sack and now nickers furiously to escape," she said as she pulled out the horse.

"Go to!" Nicholas said. "'Tis most fine. Be it yours?"

"Nay," said Meggy, "'tis yours." She felt her gran smile on her and heard her say, You gladden me, wee Meggy, and make me proud. Meggy's heart warmed.

She let herself into the house at the Sign of the Sun. Belike she should tell her father what she had done. No light showed from the laboratorium nor from his chamber. Had he not yet come home? Or was he already abed? Her travels of the day had left her weary and sore, so she lay down on her pallet, stomach full of bread and heart full of Nicholas's joy. And she had no dreams at all.