The Misbegotten (6 page)

Starling made her way to the Moor’s Head, to see her friend Sadie and to keep a tryst with Dick Weekes. She would need more of his doctored wine before long, but she was eager to see him anyway, however jealously she guarded all evidence of her favour. It would not do for Dick to know that she liked him overly well. He was devilishly easy on the eye, and never short of followers; dopey-eyed girls without a thought to share between them, who giggled and pouted at him wherever he went, all too keen to part their lips for whatever he cared to put into their mouths. But Dick Weekes was the type that needed something sharp to temper the sweet; that needed something off-kilter to keep his attention.
And I am just the right amount of sharp and off-kilter
, Starling thought, with a smile. The inn was crowded with drinkers and players, travellers and doxies. The heat and stink and press of bodies always cheered Starling after a humdrum day of work, and she smiled a crooked smile at Sadie as she reached the barrels and taps.

‘All the usuals to keep you busy,’ she said to her friend, as Sadie poured her a cup of frothy beer.

‘And some unusuals too – see that man there, the tall one with only one eye? You ever seen him before?’ She pointed out an ill-favoured man with a gaunt, sour face and a leather patch over his missing eye. His greasy hair was salt and pepper, and hadn’t been combed in a while.

‘No, I never saw him. He’s wearing a fine enough pair of boots, though. Why do you point him out?’

‘He says he’s loved me a long time, and watched me from afar. He says if I meet him in the yard afterwards, he’ll make me an offer I can’t refuse.’ Sadie chuckled, and Starling rolled her eyes.

‘He’ll make you his whore, and thrash you if you refuse.’

‘Aye, most likely. Perhaps I’ll meet him though.’ The plump girl shrugged. ‘He might be as good as his word. Those are fine boots . . . maybe he’s rich, and soft-hearted, and will marry me and give me a life of idleness.’

‘Maybe. And maybe I shall marry King George next Wednesday at noon. If you meet with him have Jonah watch you, for heaven’s sake. And keep your wits about you.’ Jonah was the stable boy at the Moor’s Head, a hulking lad of sixteen years, quite in love with Sadie. ‘Is Dick about?’

‘Dick Weekes? Not yet. Stay and talk a while, till he gets here.’

Richard Weekes came in not long afterwards, looking as dandy as he ever did, all loose hair and smiles. Sadie nudged Starling and nodded towards him, and Starling took her leave, planting a kiss on Sadie’s fat cheek. She waited until Richard had shrugged off his coat in the heat of the inn, then pressed a brimming tankard into his right hand as she clasped his left and pressed it to her chest. She smiled a wicked smile at him, the way he liked.

‘How do you do, Mr Weekes?’ she said.

‘Dying of thirst, but otherwise well. Leave off a moment, then, and let me drink.’ He smiled.

‘Leave off, he says! Why, you will break my heart, talking that way,’ she said mockingly.

‘Your heart?’ Richard laughed. ‘A thousand men with a thousand cudgels couldn’t break your heart, Starling no-name.’ Starling leaned closer to his ear, standing on her toes.

‘Not a thousand but just one, and just one cudgel too.’ She let her hand brush over his crotch, and felt his prick stir in response.

‘You’re eager tonight, aren’t you?’

‘I can’t stay out for long. Dorcas has taken to getting up after midnight to drink milk. She says she has nightmares – comes clattering around the pantry like a blind heifer. She’d love to find me out, and run to tell Mrs Hatton. How my dissipation would scandalise.’ Starling shook her head in irritation. ‘So, come, Mr Weekes. Take me somewhere quieter, if you please.’

‘It would be my pleasure. Just let me drink this at least. I meant it when I said I was dying of thirst.’

‘Can’t we go to your rooms?’ Starling suggested. Dick had brought her out through the back door, to the yard behind the pub, and was trying to usher her up the ladder into the hay loft above the stables.

‘No. Not any more.’ Dick put his arm around her shoulders, and squeezed her left breast too hard. Starling twisted away and slapped his cheek. ‘Tease,’ he scolded her.

‘Clumsy joskins,’ she retorted. ‘That hurt. What do you mean, not any more?’

‘In two days’ time I shall be married. I can hardly bring my new bride to a bed that’s ripe with your stink, can I?’ he said lightly.

‘I’m surprised to hear you’d take a wife so squeamish,’ said Starling. She swallowed against a sudden tightness in her throat. Somehow, she’d thought all Dick’s talk of marriage would come to nothing this time, as it had several times before. He usually backed away in the end, finding some fault in the girl; tiring of her, or declaring that he could do better. ‘Don’t you think she might smell me elsewhere – on your flesh, perhaps?’

‘Rachel Crofton is sweet, and innocent. She suspects nothing of the kind.’

‘Not yet, perhaps . . .’

‘Not ever. And if she discovers anything from you, I will have your teeth out. Do you hear me?’ Dick’s voice was hard; he took her upper arm in a bruising grip. Starling grinned in the half-light.

‘You mean to say, she believes you to be sweet and innocent, too?’ she said. Dick released his grip and gently rubbed away his fingermarks.

‘Yes, just so. Apologies, Starling. I am on edge. I want . . . I want everything to go well. With the wedding, and for my new wife. She is a fine creature, clever, and accomplished . . . with her by my side, my fortune and position can only improve,’ he said.
Not clever enough to spot Dick Weekes for the tomcat he is
, Starling thought, contemptuously.

‘My soul is consumed with jealous rage, sir. For it does sound as though you love this sweet and innocent and clever and educated Miss Rachel.’

‘Aye.’ He smiled, somewhat foolishly. ‘I believe I do.’ Starling stared at him, and for a minute found nothing to say. He was a dark shape, his face outlined by second-hand light from the pub. Starling stepped back into the deep shadows in case her dismay was plain.

‘Then perhaps, after she is home, you won’t come to meet me any more?’ She tried to say it lightly, as if she barely cared. Dick hesitated, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

‘Perhaps not, Starling. Perhaps not.’ His words, so careless, stabbed at Starling. She had a sensation like falling, like things being taken from her control. She smiled, as she always did to conceal such feelings.

‘We’ll see. Perhaps this milk-white angel of yours will keep the hunger sated for a while, but variety is the spice of life, as Sol Bradbury likes to say. Come then, let me give you something to remember me by.’

She led him up the ladder into the hayloft, and there teased and coaxed and mocked him until his face was ruddy and his teeth clenched in a seizure of utter lust and frustration, and then she straddled him and rode him hard, feeling her own pleasure spread up her spine like a warm tide rising. Afterwards, she laced her small breasts back into her bodice and watched Dick angrily as he caught his breath. Her senses always seemed heightened at such times, and suddenly she could smell the reek of horse piss from the stables, and the cloying scent of Dick’s sweat and seed. She wrinkled her nose, and wiped herself with a switch of hay. Dick ground his fingertips into his eyes, where dust from the hay was irritating them, then blinked at her and grinned.

‘Oh, I shall miss you, Starling,’ he said.

‘We’ll see,’ she replied, shortly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say. Now, I ask a privilege of you, since we are to part.’

‘What?’ He was instantly suspicious. ‘I already said I will not lace the wine any stronger. If Mr Alleyn should keel over dead . . .’

‘Nothing to do with him. I want to meet your new bride. I want to meet Mrs Rachel Weekes, and understand why I am so suddenly set aside.’
And perhaps I will spill some blood-red wine on her pure white gown while I’m at it.

‘You can’t,’ he said at once. ‘I wish to . . . draw a line. Between this old life, and the new one starting.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ said Starling, annoyed. ‘A new wife cannot make you a new man. You’ll still be Dick Weekes, son of Duncan Weekes . . . nothing will change that.’

‘Shut your mouth, Starling. I mean to start anew, and you won’t stop me. I won’t let you stop me.’ He caught her wrist and held it tightly, not letting go when she struggled.

‘Leave off!’

‘Not until you swear to be discreet.’

‘If you let me meet her, I will swear it.’ They struggled a few seconds more, then Dick released her arm.

‘Very well. Two nights hence, I shall bring her here for our wedding feast. You can play the serving wench for a time, or something. Or merely watch from a quiet place. But you will not speak to her. Understand?’

‘A wedding feast at the Moor’s Head? Ah, lucky Miss Rachel. Truly, she is bringing you up in the world . . .’

‘
Understand?
’ he pressed.

‘I won’t give you away. You have my word.’
You will do that yourself
, she thought, defiantly,
when you come running back to me
.

To Rachel’s relief, there was more to the house on Abbeygate Street than she’d first realised. Steps led down from street level to the main area of the shop, which had its own door, and a sign painted onto the wall above it:
Richard Weekes & Co. Fine Wine & Spirits Merchants.
The room on this lower level was cool and clammy, the brick floor slightly damp. Barrels were stacked in wooden racks from floor to shadowed ceiling, and glass bottles of all shapes and sizes filled shelves against one wall. It was a dark and crowded space, and the air had a ripe tang to it, a pungent mix of wood and fruit, mould and alcohol. Through a door in the rear wall Richard had his tiny office, containing a desk with a simple stool pulled up to it, and a shelf laden with ledgers and receipt books. The desk was scatted with pen shavings, spent candle stubs and spots of ink.

Behind the house was a small yard, closed in by high walls furred with moss and slime. The yard had a stone sink built against one wall, the necessary house against another, and a shallow gully that ran into the sewer. It was poorly ventilated, and smelled accordingly rank. Rachel peered around it, and her heart sank. When Richard had told her there was a courtyard, she’d pictured a small garden where she might plant some herbs or flowers, and sit to read in either the morning sun or the evening, depending on which way the house faced. This yard was more like the damp inside of a cave. Within moments Rachel felt the walls begin to loom over her, and she stepped hurriedly back indoors, keen to conceal her dismay.

‘I have always sent the laundry out, and it’s probably best you continue to do so, rather than trying to dry it out here,’ said Richard, apologetically.

Upstairs, at raised ground level, was a kitchen-cum-parlour, a good sized and better-lit room divided into two halves – one half of simple utility: the stove, a work table, shelves holding a few pieces of pewter plate, candlesticks and cooking pots. The other half was more formal, with an upholstered armchair, settle and ottoman that had finely turned – if battered – legs. They’d been positioned with their backs to the kitchen, as if not wishing to be associated with it.

‘The parlour furniture came from Admiral Stanton’s widow, when she was forced to sell up. I had it at a very fair price at auction,’ Richard told her proudly. ‘Do you approve?’ He ran his hand along the back of the settle. Rachel nodded, feeling a pull of sympathy towards the faceless Widow Stanton, for her sad decline in life. She knew exactly how it felt to see people perusing and haggling over the things you owned and loved. Richard was watching her, expectantly.

‘They will do very well, Mr Weekes,’ she assured him.

‘In a similar manner, I mean to gradually work towards furnishing the place in a better fashion for you, my dear.’ He took her hand, and kissed her fingers.

The room had two large windows, one overlooking the yard, the other facing north onto the parade of shops, inns and accommodation on the opposite side of Abbeygate Street. By looking north-east from this one, Rachel could see the roof of the abbey. On the top floor of the house was the bedchamber where, the night before, Rachel had ceased to be a maid. Its beamed ceiling sloped to either side of the bed, and its window was smaller, tucked into the eaves of the roof. Rachel realised that the body of the house was hundreds of years older than its updated façade hoped to suggest. She ignored the smell of damp plaster, and turned to smile at her husband.

‘I shall be very comfortable here. And I’ll help make it even more cosy for us,’ she said.

Past the jumbled rooftops and chimney pots of their near neighbours, the sweeping curves of Bath’s smarter streets and crescents were visible, on the hills to the north. Rachel could make out the elegant march of Camden Crescent, high above the rest of the city; its tall façades uniform, pale, and immaculate. There, when she was fifteen, she’d spent three months one autumn and winter season with her parents and her little brother, Christopher. Her memories of it were a blur of tea invitations, card parties, outings and dances in the assembly rooms. Now Rachel wished she’d paid more attention, and cemented such happiness more firmly in her mind – as if she could have fashioned it into something she could keep for ever. But she remembered standing at one of the front windows in their apartment and looking down on the tangle of older, poorer streets around the abbey and wharves, and wondering about all the many lives that went on there, of which she would have no knowledge, and take no part. She smiled at the thought, with an odd mixture of wistful irony, and determination.

‘What is it? What makes you smile?’ Richard asked her, brushing a lock of her hair away from her face.

‘I am beginning to feel at home already,’ she said, deciding to make it true. She felt Richard’s arms encircle her, and in truth the sensation was already less peculiar, less alarming.

There was no food in the house, so Richard fetched fresh bread, cheese and a slice of ham pie for their breakfast. Then he took her on a tour of the street, introducing her to the neighbours she needed to know – Mrs Digweed, who took in the laundry, a woman vastly fat and startlingly ugly, with hands like a man’s and a broad smile for the world; Thomas Snook, who owned the stables around the corner, on Amery Lane, and hired out his horse and cart to Richard for deliveries. The horse was a squat, piebald thing, with feathery feet and sleepy eyes; Rachel remembered it from the times Richard had delivered barrels to Hartford Hall. Richard rubbed the horse’s forehead cheerfully, and said: ‘This is Trooper, and never was a horse less aptly named. “Dawdler” would be more like it, but he’s a serviceable chap. In a year or so I hope to be able to buy a smarter cart than Tom’s, one with my sign painted along the side, rather than carried with me on a board. And for that cart I shall need a smarter animal, I fear, Trooper. Something with less hair, and more spirit.’ He patted the animal’s sturdy neck, and Trooper sighed, as only a bored horse can sigh.