The Blackthorn Key (8 page)

Sally's egg hit him right in the neck, spraying all over his ruffled collar. The three boys followed. One missed entirely, hitting an already irritated sheep. The other two were square on, arm and hip.

The rest of the crowd joined in then, pelting Stubb with whatever they had. The most impressive was Tom. He'd slunk back so far I wasn't even sure his egg would make the distance, but it sailed past the fleeing Stubb's raised hands and pegged him right on the crown.

I laughed like I'd gone mad. Even Tom looked pleased. I shouted a joyful whoop as we fled. “Long live the king!”

•  •  •

We pushed through the crowd, running from the chaos. Fun was fun, but now that justice had been meted out, I really didn't want to get caught. Oak Apple Day or not, Stubb was a master of the Guild and I was just an apprentice. If it came to a matter of words, I wasn't going to be on the winning end. Still, there was something especially satisfying about the fact that the eggs that had plastered him had come from a shilling earned by my master's work.

“This is the best day ever,” I said.

Tom scanned the crowd, looking for signs of pursuit. “What now?”

“I don't know.” I leaned against the shutters of a glassblower's shop and panted, trying to catch my breath. “We're out of money. Maybe there's sparring in the park. Or we could go to the Tower and see the king's zoo again. No. Wait.”

I realized our flight had taken us just outside the borders of our parish. Hugh's home was nearby. “He left with Master Benedict last night,” I told Tom. “Maybe Master Hugh knows who attacked him.”

“Traitors!” a ragged voice cried out from behind.

I whirled, terrified that Stubb had tracked us down. Instead of the waddling apothecary, however, I saw a
madman, his face cracked and weathered, his hair wigless and wild. His torn and tattered clothes barely covered his scabby limbs.

He stared goggle eyed at me. “Traitors!” he said again.

The man lunged forward and grabbed my arms. The stink of rotting meat came from between his blackened teeth. “There are traitors in our midst!”

I felt the crowd's eyes on me. I tried to pull away, but the man's grip was like iron. “Get off!” I said.

“Do you know them? Do you see?” The man shook me. “The Cult of the Archangel hunts. Who is its prey?”

Tom tried to push between us, but even his strong hands on my captor's stained jacket couldn't pry the man off. The lunatic leaned in farther. I thought I might throw up from the stench.

“They are not who you think,” he whispered, sending furtive glances at the curious crowd. “Those are not their faces.”

Tom finally managed to shove the man away. He sprawled across the cobbles, the mud adding more stains to his filthy, threadbare breeches.

“Guard yourself,” the man said beseechingly. “Change is coming. God's wrath will burn us all. Look! His general rides!”

He pointed behind us, but Tom had had enough. He pulled me protectively into the shelter of the crowd, which had begun to jeer at the madman on the ground.

“Thanks,” I said. I rubbed my arms. They still hurt where the man had gripped me.

Tom glanced over his shoulder to see if the man was coming back. “Are you all right?”

In honesty, I was rattled. “What was that about?”

“What do you mean? The man was mad.”

“Didn't you hear what he said?”

The Cult of the Archangel
. Though the day had turned warm, I shivered. I thought of my master's burnt shoulder, and of Stubb's visit to our shop last night.

Change is coming
. The apothecary had said exactly the same thing.

Tom scoffed. “So what? I'm surprised he didn't warn us the Moon was made of cheese.”

A buzz passed through the crowd around us. At first, I thought it was because of the madman, but it seemed like it came from the opposite direction. Tom craned his neck, peering over everyone's heads. Suddenly, he grabbed my elbow. “Look!”

I stepped onto a nearby crate and spied what Tom was
seeing. It was a pair of soldiers. They were armored in padded leather, broadswords on one side, flintlock pistols on the other. Their beige tabards were emblazoned in the center of their chests with the king's coat of arms. Though the press of the crowd was heavy, they pushed through roughly, opening a space for the man who followed them.

His clothes were finely made, obviously the work of a master tailor. Yet the tightly fitting satin seemed out of place on him, as if someone had tried to dress up a panther. Like the King's Men before him, he carried his own pair of weapons, a heavy, battle-worn sword and a pearl-handled pistol. But it was the dark black wells of his eyes that made the crowd fall silent as he passed. His left cheek was a mess of scars, a gnarled trail of flesh from nose to neck.

“That's him!” Tom whispered. “That's Lord Ashcombe.” He pulled my arm. “Come on.”

We followed in his wake, Tom's bulk pushing our own path through the crowd. The soldiers guided Lord Ashcombe to an alley that wound behind a row of enormous houses and opened into a long, airy space. Most of the clearing was blocked by a tall, ornate wrought-iron fence. Behind it was a private garden, well tended.

Five men waited on the stone path beside a dug-up
flower bed, under the drooping branches of a willow tree, in front of a large statue of an angel. One of the men held a shovel. Another paced. A third gripped the leash of a hunting dog, its paws and muzzle covered with mud. The dog barked madly at the ground. It looked like it had discovered something.

When Lord Ashcombe reached the gate, a man wearing the sash of the parish constable straightened himself in salute.

“Open it,” Lord Ashcombe said. His voice grated, like a demon's whisper.

The constable turned the key in the padlock that held the gate closed. Lord Ashcombe went inside. The constable locked the gate behind him as the trailing throng pressed against the fence. I squeezed through to the front and grabbed a railing. Tom managed to make it behind me, his hands gripping my shoulders, holding himself in place against the jostling crowd.

Lord Ashcombe moved to where the others waited. The flower bed had turned to mud in the morning's rain. The man with the shovel had finished what the dog had started, digging a long hole in the dirt. The stone angel behind it looked down, wings folded, an expression of sorrow on his face. The King's
Warden stared with him, then crouched down and reached inside.

He came up with what looked like a muddy club. It wasn't.

Lord Ashcombe brushed off the dirt. The men beside him backed away. The crowd gasped. Lord Ashcombe's expression stayed as still as the angel's.

It was an arm. A man's arm, torn from his body, mangled, blackened, and burnt.

TOM AND I BURST INTO
the shop, tumbling over ourselves.

“Master!” I said. “There's been another mur—”

I broke off. Master Benedict was kneeling beside the counter, trying to gather cream-covered pieces of pottery from a shattered jar with his bandaged hands. A second, smaller jar, fallen beside the first, had cracked a chunk off at the bottom and was pumping out the last of the boar's blood. The scarlet liquid ran in rivulets down the seams of the floorboards and stained the knees of his breeches.

I went to him. “Are you all right?”

He held up his hands, fingertips poking through bulky
cloth. “These bandages are decidedly inconvenient.”

I knelt beside him. “I'll take care of this, Master. You should be resting.”

“I'm fine.” He continued to collect the slippery shards until I placed my hands on his. He sighed, then nodded. “We'll need more burn cream.”

“I'll make it tonight,” I said.

I began to collect pieces of the broken jars. Tom came to help, dodging the boar's blood that tracked across the floor as if it hunted his shoes.

“I'll get some sand,” Tom said.

“Bring the sawdust instead,” I said. “It's in a tub next to the oven in the workshop.”

Tom hauled the heavy tub from the back a lot more easily than I could have. We scooped up handfuls of sawdust and dumped them on the floor. The sawdust clumped, turning red, soaking the blood up quickly.

Master Benedict watched us, curious. “This is why you collect sawdust?”

I nodded. “The masters at the orphanage used it. It's better for spills than sand. Gets rid of the smell, too,” which was a blessing when fifty sick children were squirting fluids from every end.

It was funny how fascinated Master Benedict seemed by the sawdust. Cleaning spills was the apprentice's job, so it's not something he'd given any thought to since I'd joined him. Still, using sawdust instead of sand was so ordinary; it hardly seemed to deserve my master's interest. It was just a simple technique I'd grown up with. And I thought he knew everything.

He stared out the window, lost in thought. Then his eyes widened. He grabbed my shoulders.

“Master?” I said, startled.

He shook me. “Magnificent, boy. Well done. So very well done.”

Without even stopping to clean the cream off his shirt, he grabbed his coat from its hook and threw it on. Then he ran into the street.

“Wait! Master! I need to change your dressing!” I shouted after him, but he'd already darted behind a rattling carriage and vanished into the holiday crowd. He hadn't even taken his sash of ingredients with him; it still hung on the hook behind the counter.

Tom gave me a sidelong glance. “Madmen everywhere today,” he muttered. For once, I couldn't disagree.

I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO
do.

After cleaning up the spill, I'd made a new batch of Blackthorn's Soothing Burn Cream as promised. Then Tom and I went up to the roof, where we sat, legs dangling over the edge, with fistfuls of corn. Half of it we fed to Bridget, who hopped between our shoulders. The rest we dropped over the side, trying to catch the kernels in the wigs of gentlemen passing below. When Tom finally had to go home, I curled up by the fire in the shop with Master Galileo's book, waiting for my own master to return.

I must have drifted off, because I awoke with the cry of six, still in the chair. The fire long dead, the chill had settled
into my bones, and my back ached like I'd spent the night shackled to the Tower of London's least comfortable rack.

I prepared the shop for opening, sweeping the floors of yesterday's now-dried mud. I checked the stocks and made a note of what we needed from Monday's market. Then I went up to the roof to feed the pigeons. While coming back down, it struck me: With all of London outside for yesterday's holiday, the cobblestone streets had been thick with mud. But there were no new tracks on the stairs.

The door to Master Benedict's quarters was closed. “Master?” I called.

No answer.

I knocked, lightly. “Master? It's morning.”

Still no answer.

Normally, I would have left him alone. But there was nothing normal about Master Benedict sleeping in on a workday. I went inside. His room was empty, his bed still made.

He hadn't returned.

I knocked next door, at Sinclair the confectioner's, and on the other side, at Grobham the tailor's, but neither master nor apprentice had seen him. The servers in the Missing Finger, the tavern across the street, where we sometimes ate supper, hadn't seen him either.

Worry fluttered in my stomach. I thought about the body Tom and I had seen yesterday, burned and buried beneath the angel in the private garden, and it wasn't until I got hold of myself that I remembered I'd seen my master well after that poor man had been murdered.

A voice pulled me from terrible thoughts. “Boy. Boy!”

Outside our shuttered shop, a pudgy woman in a faded green dress waved a ceramic jar at me. I recognized her: Margaret Wills, one of Baron Cobley's servants.

“I need a refill,” she hollered.

Syrup of ipecac, an emetic. I crossed the street, grumbling inside. I had bigger worries than Baron Cobley's vomit.

I let her into the shop, then donned my blue apron and refilled her jar. I made a note of it in the ledger, adding the cost to the baron's tab, which was already the size of a whale. I'd planned to lock up and go look for my master again, but as Margaret left, Francis the publican came in with a nasty bottom rash. I took care of him—the prescription, anyway; he'd have to put the ointment on himself—and then Jonathan Tanner arrived, and before I knew it the shop was packed.

And then finally, finally, finally, Master Benedict stepped in from the workshop.

I felt like a sack of lead had been lifted from my back. He was all right. In fact, other than the bags under his eyes, he looked very pleased indeed. I didn't get the chance to speak to him; he barely got a pace inside before he was swarmed. He sent a weary smile in my direction and got to work.

By lunchtime, we'd whittled the horde down to five; me with William Fitz and his seeping earlobe, Master Benedict with Lady Brent's swollen hand, and three more waiting before we could break. I'd just finished writing up Mr. Fitz's account in the ledger when Lady Brent said, “Are you listening to me, Mr. Blackthorn?”

My master, standing behind the counter, stared past her out the front of the shop. I tried to see what he was looking at, but there was a customer blocking the window: a stocky boy of around sixteen, wearing his own blue apron, smirking at the still-unrepaired bear in the corner.

“Mr. Blackthorn?” she said again.

He blinked. “One moment, madam. I need to check our stock.”

When he returned, a minute later, he looked pale.

“Well?” Lady Brent said. “Can you make it?”