The King's Daughter (31 page)

Impassively, Thornleigh shook his head.

“Ah, a new recruit. In that case, your stay at Whit’s Palace will commence in earnest once you have expressed to our jailer-host your preference regarding accommodation.”

Thornleigh did not follow this.

The man’s fleshy lips curved into a sardonic smile. “Put simply, sir,
I
am being hanged,
you
are not.”

Thornleigh slumped against the wall. He had hoped it
was
going to be all over today at the gallows. He had no wish to spend weeks awaiting death. But apparently he was not to be so mercifully dispatched. There would be a trial. He could only hope it would come quickly.

The man held up his splinter like a pedagogue with a pointer. “At least—let me be precise here, sir—you are not to be hanged
today,”
he clarified. “This condemned hold does double duty, you see, as first resting place and last resting place. But in both instances it is merely an ante-chamber to the whipping post or the gallows, after a short stop inside. And the anguish I read in your face—pardon my liberty, sir—but the anguish I see there tells me that it is an act of a felonious nature that has brought you to Whit’s Palace, and no mere misdemeanor for which society would be satisfied you could make amends with a mere whipping. Am I correct?”

Thornleigh nodded bleakly.

“Thank you, sir. I do dislike being proved wrong in my judgment of a man’s character. And, I am proud to say, I make such errors rarely.” He whisked a trace of dirt off the shoulder of his threadbare and faded red doublet.
“Ergo,
the gallows await you, too. But not today.”

Thornleigh rubbed the back of his stiff neck.

“You may well ask why I make a habit of studying character,” the man went on, evidently wishing that Thornleigh
had
asked. “Well, sir, I will tell you. It is my business. I am an actor. Jack Ives is the name.” He proudly lifted his craggy profile. “Some in my position might demure at this pregnant juncture and say, ‘I
was
an actor.’ But the audience at the Tyburn gallows is always a substantial one, and a discriminating one, and as I find myself at this penultimate hour sound of wind and strong of voice I see no reason to deprive them of a final, notable performance.
Ergo,
sir, I repeat, I
am
an actor.”

Thornleigh almost smiled. If this was bravado in the face of doom it was a fine display. They were both going to be hanged, and he wished again that he could accompany Jack Ives to the gallows now, no waiting. Then a thought struck. He knew Newgate’s reputation as the most vicious of London’s prisons; perhaps he would meet death quickly here, after all. Good. The quicker the better. Yet something jarred: was he really in Newgate Prison? What had Ives called the place? “What’s Whit’s Palace?” he asked.

“Our affectionate name for Newgate Jail, sir, after a famous former mayor of London, one Richard Whittington. He left money in his will for a new prison to be built, like a triumphal arch, in Newgate. Was that not a fine gesture? After all, he could have left his money to the widows and orphans or to the destitute. But not our Dick. No, he knew that what the people really wanted was a prison!” Ives flicked the wood splinter to the floor as if it were Dick Whittington’s reputation. “May the bugger rot in hell till all Newgate’s inmates join him to plague him with petitions of their innocence. Prison, indeed!” he growled—a formidable, prolonged rumble of disgust. Thornleigh did not doubt that anyone who had dropped a penny in the hat at an inn yard to hear Ives wail out King Priam’s woes had got their money’s worth.

A muffled sound from the boy made Thornleigh turn. The boy was waking up and he blinked, disoriented, as Thornleigh had done. His face was very flushed. He glanced at Thornleigh and Ives and suddenly seemed to recall where he was. “Oh God,” he moaned. His head dropped between his legs. He vomited onto the platform.

Ives snorted. “The Earl of Devon reacted that way to a new play I once presented. An apt response, in truth. The piece was foul.”

Thornleigh watched the boy. “He’s in bad shape.”

“He’s being hanged today, too,” Ives explained. “Just as well. He wouldn’t last much longer. Jail fever.”

Thornleigh noticed that the boy’s flushed face was, indeed, damp with sweat. And tiny black spots speckled his hands, his nose, and his ears. The boy hunched back into the corner and sat dazed, shivering in terror in his own mess. Thornleigh looked away. There was nothing he could do for the lad.

He thought of his own son, then his daughter—and the anchor of sorrow dragged at him again. On the ride to London with the guards he had tried to steer away from the memory of Isabel violated by Mosse as he would steer away from a reef in a storm. Remembering would capsize him into the madness of rage. Instead, he’d thought of her caring for Honor, and of how far across the Channel—how far away from all of this—they would be by now, on their way to safety. He’d assured himself that Honor, so strong, so full of life, would soon recover from her wound, nursed by Isabel and by their Antwerp friends. As for Isabel herself, it had taken all his will to suppress his fury at what Mosse had done to her, but she too was healthy, she too would recover. But this effort had exhausted him. He was drained by his rage and misery of heart. Only the death that was surely coming to him would put an end to it. Death would stop the pain.

“I will tell you something, sir,” the actor said with sudden vigor. “I see death as a blessed end.”

Thornleigh looked at him. Had the man been reading his thoughts?

Ives chuckled humorlessly. “On that point, at least, the cretinous judge agreed with me. But on little else. ‘Retribution for a monstrous homicide’ was his proclamation in sentencing me. Oaf. I ask you, sir, what red-blooded man would not be driven to kill, coming home to find his wife in the arms of a villain?”

“You killed your wife?”

Ives looked horrified. “Never, sir! My Joan is the light of my life. Not a moment’s wrangling did we have before that seducing villain made his entrance. A loathsome haberdasher, he was. Joan is young, you see, and has a taste for fripperies. I never minded that. A pretty woman must preen and primp as the nightingale must sing. But these things do cost a pretty penny. And, sadly, an actor’s riches are mostly the laughter and tears his audiences bestow. His purse is usually a sad and shriveled thing. I have a partner whose skill does help alleviate this chronic problem somewhat, however … well, ‘Heaven ‘tis, the actor’s life / But hell on earth for the actor’s wife.'”

Thornleigh understood. “You killed the man you found her with.”

“I drove a pitchfork through his throat, sir. And a moment of sweet satisfaction it was.” He sighed heavily. “But, apparently, only for me. Joan shrieked and locked herself in the dovecote and would not come out for two days. Would not eat. Would not speak. When I could bear it no longer I broke down the door. I was aghast to see the husk she had become. Joan was always a fiery one, but there was no fire left in her. I begged her to come down, to live with me again in sweet harmony. But she screamed that she had never loved me, never would forgive me. She scrambled to the dovecote roof and promised to dash herself to death below if I did not leave her. That’s when the constable came. A puny fellow. I could have knocked the fool down and been halfway to France by the time he had my scent. But I let him lead me away. I knew that if the fire had gone out of Joan, it was I who’d put it out.”

He looked up toward the shaft of sunlight. “I’ll leave behind a trunk of costumes, a fine brass horn, and a little bay gelding, and all of it shall be Joan’s. She will sell the lot, of course, and find another man. And I pray she will be happy. As for me, I have no wish to cheat the hangman. For, truly, I have not the heart to live without my Joan.” He cast an uncertain glance at Thornleigh and asked in a surprisingly timid voice. “Can you understand?”

Thornleigh thought of Honor’s festering wound, imagined her dying on the ship bound for Antwerp. “Yes,” he said.

Ives closed his eyes and murmured, “I thank you, sir, for that.”

The door swung open and a bulky, disheveled official stepped inside. He beckoned to people in the corridor. “Come in, ladies,” he said, “and do not be afeared. The villains are securely chained. They’ll not be harming you.” He stood at the door, wiping his nose on his sleeve, while people filed in past him. There were about twenty men and women, and they shuffled into a tight semicircle in front of the prisoners.

“Oh, Lord, not again,” Ives groaned to Thornleigh above the sound of scuffling feet. “Our inquisitive public. And that turd there,” he said, nodding at the official collecting coins from each person as they entered, “is Master Andrew Alexander, our jailer. These ladies and gentlemen are paying him for a gawp at us before we die. A different batch came to the chapel yesterday to watch the boy and me stand by our coffins and be preached at. The boy puked then, too. On the priest’s boots.”

“Look your fill, ladies and gentlemen,” Alexander was declaring in the bored tone of one repeating a set speech. “The depraved faces before you belong to the wickedest blackguards as ever stalked the God-fearing streets of London. Notice, if you will—”

“Bless my soul, if it isn’t Rob!” Ives said in an astonished whisper as the jailer loudly carried on. Ives nudged Thornleigh, with a twinkle in his eye. “Rob’s my partner, sir. That young scamp in the green cap.” Thornleigh followed Ives’s gaze and spotted the young man, a pin-eyed fellow with a stringy mustache.

“Now, this young ‘prentice here,” Alexander intoned, pointing out the miserable boy chained in the corner, “he robbed his master’s strongbox while the trusting gentleman sat at supper.”

The spectators murmured their disapproval of such a gross violation of the natural order. One man, to impress the girl he was with, leaned close to the condemned boy and mimed a noose jerking his head to one side while his tongue lolled. The boy blanched and urinated in his breeches. Some of the spectators laughed, some made faces of revulsion. Alexander claimed back their attention by launching into a detailed description of the procedure of the imminent hangings. The spectators stared, or crossed themselves, or chattered. Alexander’s lecture droned on.

“Oh, Rob’s coming here is a treat!” Ives whispered with a wicked grin. “Come, let’s have some sport.”

In a sudden, explosive movement Ives jumped to a crouched stance on the platform and let out a bellow like a wounded ox. “Woe to Rome!” he cried. With his chained wrist he banged his temple like a man in despair. He wailed:

“Oh, woe betide th’asassin’s bloody hand,
That ever dared take up the traitor’s stand!
And Brutus will not live to see the day
That Rome will blink this faithlessness away!”

The spectators stood in amazement at Ives’s outburst. Thornleigh, too, stared up at the actor. Ives carried on declaiming, and it soon became clear that he had transformed himself into the Roman, Brutus, overcome with guilt after murdering Caesar, and about to take his own life with his imaginary sword. As Ives moaned and ranted his way through a suicide soliloquy, the spectators watched, rapt. Thornleigh caught sight of the green-capped young man, Rob, slipping beside a gentleman wearing a voluminous robe. Just then, Ives thudded to his knees to deliver a booming plea to the Roman gods and raised high his invisible sword, ready to plunge it into his breast. His hands quivered. Tears streamed from his eyes. The people craned their necks and shuffled closer to catch the extraordinary performance. Thornleigh saw Rob’s hand flash from the gentleman’s robe to the inside of Rob’s doublet.
An enterprising partnership, indeed,
he thought with a flicker of amusement.
The actor draws the crowd and the pickpocket collects the price of admission.

Ives, now wavering on his knees in Brutus’s death throes, swung up his tear-stained face to cry out a last request of the gods that all his worldly goods be divided between his wife and Rome. Then he looked straight out at his young partner, fixing him with a menacing glare, and wailed with all the intensity of the foregoing lament:

“ ‘Yes, half of all these riches shall be Joan’s,
Or God will see that Satan fries your bones!’ ”

There were a few puzzled looks at these words, but Ives concluded with a resounding quatrain of such wrenching pathos that every eye was again riveted on Brutus’s desperate last gasp. Ives pitched over on his back, lifted his head with a final guilt-choked, “Caesar!” froze wide-eyed as if he had seen the face of God, and then collapsed.

There was silence. Then the jailer himself murmured appreciatively, “Bravely done, old Jack.” The spectators burst into a warm chatter of praise. Ives rose and smiled with studied humility. Some of the people came forward to compliment him. Others, more interested in the actual deaths about to be enacted, sneaked in for a closer look at the pitiful young apprentice.

The jailer, Alexander, came and stood over Thornleigh. “You’re the felon just in from Essex? Thornleigh, is it?”

Thornleigh, reclaimed to reality, said nothing.

“It’s two and six for easement of the chain,” Alexander said. “Can you pay?”

Thornleigh dug inside his tunic, brought out the purse Isabel had given him in Colchester, and opened it. Alexander peered down at the abundant contents. Listlessly, Thornleigh counted out the coins.

Alexander dropped his brusque manner and smiled as he pocketed the fee. He took up his keys to unlock Thornleigh’s chain. “You will be wanting to bide on the masters’ side, I warrant, Master Thornleigh?” he asked.

Thornleigh shrugged. He didn’t care where he was put.

“The masters’ side it is, then,” Alexander confirmed with a smile. “Tell me, sir, do you play an instrument?”

Thornleigh looked up in mild surprise.

“I take it you do not,” Alexander said. “Well, it’s no matter, sir.” He let the chain swing loose and pocketed his keys. “I hope you’ll do me the honor of joining me and my good wife at dinner, sir?” he asked. “We’d be glad of your company, so we would.”