The Thief Taker (20 page)

Chapter Forty-Two

Amesbury checked the information on his paper.

Shadwell harbour front, red door.

He turned to Blackstone.

‘We should find her in one of these brothels,’ he said.

‘And you can be sure this is the same Jenny that met with
Malvern
?’

Amesbury nodded. ‘She left the gambling club with him. Then she fled to her mother’s bawdy house. That is on this road.’

Blackstone wondered how Amesbury had gotten hold of this information. But since it was likely to be from his elaborate spy network, thought it politic not to ask.

The two men scanned the dilapidated array of bawdy houses and taverns which were crushed along the waterfront like bad teeth.

‘I remember this place from my seafaring days,’ said
Blackstone
. ‘Even after months fighting battles at sea, we avoided
brothels
he
re. The
y are for men too drunk to value their lives.’

‘It will not take long,’ said Amesbury, ‘and then you may return to your plague duties as promised.’

Blackstone nodded, not relishing the thought of returning to the Wapping Road. ‘That one,’ he said, pointing to a red door.

The two men approached the house. Amesbury raised his hand to knock and then, thinking better of it, pushed the rotting door and walked in with Blackstone following after.

Inside the house was gloomy, with dusty floorboards and a plain table with a half empty bottle of wine.

Three women sat a little apart from the table on a long bench. Each had their skirt hitched high to their waist and sat splay-legged in demonstration of what could be paid for.

One seemed slightly better off than the rest, Blackstone noted. Perhaps she had been a kept mistress recently abandoned by her suitor. Shadwell was for sailors, and every London prostitute with a choice in the matter avoided sailors.

The better-presented woman wore a pink silk bodice which had been cut to expose both her breasts. She had curled two tendrils of dark waxy hair to fall on either side of her cat-like eyes and looked to be in her mid-twenties.

The arrangement of her hair and features reminded Amesbury of Louise Keroulle, the King’s mistress. Amesbury had told Blackstone that he did not trust Louise. He had recently found her rummaging through the King’s private documents. And Amesbury was fast subscribing to the belief that she and her brother George may be French spies.

The prostitutes on either side of the better-kept woman looked ten years older. One had glued false eyebrows of mouse fur to her face, giving her an expression of permanent outrage.

The other had an enormous bosom, its ageing shape inexpertly bundled into her tight blue dress. A network of white stretch marks dappled her cleavage and, Blackstone guessed, ran to the corpulent belly bulging below.

The most attractive of the three moved to pour wine from the bottle, but Amesbury held up his hand. Blackstone guessed he had not brought enough ready money to risk the fees the house might try to extort for a glass of wine.

The woman sat back down, her eyes roaming his face with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance.

The door banged and an enormous man lumbered into the room. At first Blackstone assumed him to be a customer. Then he caught sight of the fear in the women’s faces and realised the man must be in charge.

The owner had a slick of greasy black and grey hair and a sad tug of skin where his left eye had once been. His shirt was dirty and hung loose, but his breeches were new, stitched in the longer style of sailors.

The man’s remaining eye flicked accusingly over the two men and then the women.

‘Why have our guests not been offered wine?’

‘They offered,’ said Amesbury. ‘I declined.’

Rage animated the bawdy-house owner’s features. He moved to the table and picked up the bottle.

‘A man does not come to a bawdy house and refuse a drink,’ he said, sloshing the thin red liquid into a tankard. He thrust the vessel at Amesbury.

‘Take it,’ he demanded, tipping out a second drink and foisting it on Blackstone.

Slowly Amesbury wrapped his calloused fingers around the tankard. Watching him, Blackstone did the same.

A little of the anger seemed to go out of the bawdy-house owner.

‘You came from the city?’ he asked suspiciously.

Amesbury nodded, taking a sip of the thin wine.

‘London is a foul place,’ opined the man, tipping a cup of wine for himself and drinking. ‘I was there only last week. To buy ointment,’ he added, cupping his testicles by way of explanation. ‘For sailors are a dirty breed, and it passes to me, by way of the women.’

He scratched his head, philosophical on this point, and took another swig of wine.

‘I will go no more,’ he continued, ‘for I hear dread things. A thousand corpses turned up overnight in Fen Church graveyard. No one knows from where. The locals are in terror, for the devil must have a hand in it.’

‘The locals exaggerate,’ said Amesbury with a dismissive wave of his wine. ‘Plague makes them as giddy as women.’

‘I saw it myself,’ glowered the bawdy-house owner, ‘a great pauper’s grave. Empty one day. Filled to the brim the next.’

‘Such a thing is not possible,’ Blackstone reassured him. ‘Even if half the city had died overnight . . .’

‘I tell you I saw it!’ shouted the man, wine sloshing from his cup. ‘And a great beaked monster visits the church at night. That is what the people say. The devil himself is filling London’s graves.’

Amesbury glanced at Blackstone.

‘Perhaps something worth investigating,’ he said finally.

Blackstone nodded. ‘I shall visit the graveyard on my return.’

The bawdy house owner appeared to be wrestling with this information.

After a moment he nodded at the women, evidently deciding the conversation to be concluded. They sat up a little in their seats.

‘Do not be fooled that she looks a little older,’ the bawdy-house owner said conversationally, gesturing at the face with the mouse-brows. ‘She will do anything you ask. Anything.’

He turned to Blackstone. ‘You seem a proper sort,’ he assessed. ‘She will do for you. Very good proportions you will find on her. I know them personally.’

A barking sound which could have been a laugh came from the owner’s mouth.

‘We have come looking for a different girl,’ said Amesbury carefully. ‘Someone who I was told worked here.’

‘A man does not come into my house, drink my wine and ask for a different girl,’ said the bawdy-house owner. His anger was
rising
again.

‘A girl named Jenny,’ said Amesbury.

The owner’s face tightened, and the name brought a jolt of recognition from the woman with the mouse eyebrows.

‘You want to know about Jenny you ask one of the whores,’ said the owner. He snatched up the bottle again and filled Amesbury’s already full tankard to the brim.

‘Two guineas for the wine,’ he added, thrusting out his palm, ‘unless you want to add a bloody nose to your bill.’

Amesbury dug in his purse, and Blackstone was relieved to see it heavy with coins.

‘One guinea,’ said Amesbury evenly, dropping a coin into the man’s grubby palm.

The brothel owner gave a grunt of acceptance. The coin was
enough to buy several cases of the wine he served, Blackstone judged.

‘You want to ask them something you have to pay for their company,’ the owner said, glowering.

Amesbury turned to the women. They looked frightened.

His eyes rested on the mouse-brows.

‘Her then,’ he said.

‘And you?’ the brothel-keeper turned on Blackstone.

‘I will keep them both company.’

‘Very well,’ the owner’s face made some complicated expressions. ‘As I said, she will do anything you ask of her. But you must pay a tax for heavy usage.’

Amesbury dug in his purse and dropped more coins on the table.

The women’s eyes grew large. Hurriedly, the owner swept the money into his hand.

‘Leave your swords,’ he added.

Blackstone shook his head, with a little smile.

‘It will be safe,’ said the owner. ‘There are no thieves here.’

‘We have drunk your wine,’ said Blackstone. ‘We will not leave our swords. We are not young sailors of sixteen.’

Amesbury smiled approvingly. He had suspected there was some
thing steelier in Blackstone than was obvious as the chubby Mayor’s overworked aide. The man had a soldier’s fearlessness beneath his black robes of office. Amesbury could always see courage in a man.

The owner twisted his mouth in annoyance, but seemed to accept this. It was common practice to steal swords, guns and anything of value left downstairs in a bawdy house.

‘In there.’ He pointed to a door leading to the back.

The woman rose from her chair, spitting on her hand and rubbing between her legs. Then she ambled ahead of the men keeping her skirt held high above her naked bottom half.

They followed behind. Blackstone’s gaze dropped to her naked buttocks, which bore a deep red impression from where she’d been sitting.

She led them into a room with two sagging hemp sacks filled with straw and an open box of pig-bladder condoms. Several still held the contents of previous visitors.

The woman fished around in the box for the cleanest and laid it over her forearm.

‘Front or back I do not mind. I charge the same for both,’ she said, addressing Amesbury. ‘You may put your mouth where you like. But I cannot have you in mine, for I have an ulcer.’ She dragged down her lip at the side to show them both an open sore at the side of her cheek.

Having finished the explanation she settled herself with her legs apart on the crackling hemp sacks.

‘We are looking for a girl named Jenny,’ said Amesbury.

‘You do not want business first? He will not like it if you do not,’ she added, jabbing a finger towards the front of the house.

Amesbury shook his head. ‘She ran away from a gaming house where she worked,’ he explained.

The mouse brows drew together.

‘She owed no money,’ added Amesbury. ‘But the man she was last seen with, we are trying to know a little more about him.’

The woman huffed out a long breath, and Amesbury tossed a handful of coins onto the sacking.

The woman regarded them, but didn’t scoop them up.

‘We mean her no harm. Truly. We are to catch a murderer,’ said Blackstone. The woman stared at him for a moment, as if assessing his sincerity.

‘What kind of murderer?’ she asked.

‘A murderer of innocent girls,’ said Amesbury. ‘A butcher.’

The woman’s eyes flicked back and forth, between the men.

‘She was here,’ she said finally, ‘for a little time. That man she met at the gaming house. He greatly frightened her. She said he meant to kill her.’

‘Did she say anything else?’ asked Blackstone.

‘She said he took her to a church filled with rotting food.’

‘Did she say which church?’

London had over fifty churches of all sizes.

The woman shook her head slowly.

‘Where is she now?’ asked Amesbury.

‘She’s gone,’ said the woman. ‘The plague is coming to these parts. She went where she might stay safe.’

‘Where?’ Amesbury pressed.

‘She boarded one of those ships,’ said the woman. ‘The ones that float out on the Thames and wait for the plague to pass.’

Blackstone felt the hope of finding Jenny vanish. Tens of boats had taken to the water and all fiercely deterred boarders. Finding her aboard would be impossible.

‘You will give her a message if you see her?’ the woman was saying.

‘I will if I can,’ said Amesbury.

‘Tell her to stay safe and away from those dangerous clubs in west London,’ said the woman. ‘I am her mother, you see,’ she added.

‘Then that man is your husband?’ asked Amesbury, gesturing out beyond the room, towards the thickset man who had harassed him to drink the house wine.

‘My third,’ said the woman. ‘He is not Jenny’s father. But I am fortunate for he takes good care of me. Before he came and we were married I was beaten black and blue. Sailors you see,’ she added with an explanatory shrug at the docks beyond the house. ‘After months at sea they have more enthusiasm than they do money. And they do not take kindly to a refusal.’

She gave them both a plaintive look.

‘I hope you catch this man,’ she said. ‘I thank God daily my Jenny escaped. It breaks my heart to think some other mother might not have my fortune.’

Chapter Forty-Three

Charlie and Maria wove deeper into the marshland, with the terrified horses sinking and splashing at almost every step.

Aside from their movements the marsh was silent. Eerie. The occasional squawking cry of a bird and the buzzing hum of insects were the only sound.

In London Charlie had thought to be free from the constant bell tolling and dead-carts, the splatters of red crosses, choking bonfire smoke and cries of mountebanks would be a relief.

But he would rather the din of the ailing city to the ghostly whispers of the marsh.

The rotting ground beneath them belched up a bog stench, and Charlie wondered how many bodies had been sunk forever here, during the Civil War.

The grasses formed a passage of sorts through the marsh. But there were still swathes of land where they had to risk passing over water-logged areas of indeterminate depth.

They came to the end of a grassed section and stopped to look out at the festering pond-land ahead.

‘Over there,’ said Charlie, uncertainly. ‘I think I can see the bottom, and it is not so deep.’

He shielded his gaze from the sun.

‘It is only this last stretch of water Maria. I can see the road from here.’

Maria nodded, her face slicked with sweat. It was hard work trudging through the boggy ground and she made each laboured step in pale silence.

Charlie put a tentative foot into the stinking water. It sank up to his thigh, and he staggered and almost fell into the cloying mud.

Twisting backwards he grabbed hold of the tall grasses and wrenched himself back onto firmer ground.

His heart was pounding.

‘You have hurt yourself.’

Maria was kneeling at his side. Charlie realised that blood was running from his mud-slathered leg.

He looked down in surprise. It was straight slash, like a sword or a knife wound.

‘Perhaps there is some sharp stick sunk deep in there,’ he said, shrugging. The wound was not bad, and he held a hand to it for a moment, testing it.

‘Better hope this mud does not infect it,’ murmured Maria. Then her eyes settled on something further out in the water.

‘That is what wounded your leg,’ she said, pointing. ‘Look. You must have dislodged it when you stepped in, and now it rises to
the top
.’

Floating face down in the marsh was the tattered dun-coloured remains of a corpse.

It held a rusting sword which now pointed straight up through the water. But the body was badly decomposed, and only a few ragged pieces of fabric still clung to what was mostly skeleton.

‘It must be an old Civil War soldier,’ said Charlie. ‘Perhaps he meant to escape out here and drowned.’

But Maria was shaking her head, looking at the water. ‘I think there was a battle near here,’ she said.

The first rising body had set off a chain reaction, and one by one, body after body rumbled up from the stinking depths. An entire troop bubbled slowly to the surface.

Charlie swallowed.

‘We must think at which point we should turn back,’ he said.

‘Turn back?’ Maria looked at him in disbelief.

‘This is swampland Maria. I know little about horses and how far they may travel through it, but if they drown we must go on foot. And with no provision to eat or drink that would be very hard. We could die on the road, of starvation or worse, and people would not come to our aid,’ he added.

‘You may go back whenever you wish,’ said Maria. ‘I mean to carry out what I started.’ She choked out an involuntary cough and looked annoyed with herself. ‘My family might not be so wealthy now, but we deserve justice as well as when we were a rich sort. It will
not
be forgotten, her death.’ She glared ahead at the corpse-filled pool.

‘Those that are in poverty they allow themselves to be crushed by it. They lie down and accept the law will not defend them. But I will not accept it. Do you hear? I need only three men. One man to read the rites, another to tie the noose and a third to loose the trapdoor. And
I will see justice done
.’ She was glaring furiously at him.

Charlie looked at Maria for a moment. He had made her a promise. His hand slid to the key around his neck.

‘I think they would take our weight,’ he said, finally, pointing to the floating remains of the dead soldiers.

Maria said nothing, but her eyes registered silent assent.

Charlie stuck out a foot and kicked the nearest body. It moved only a little. He stepped on to it, waving wildly off balance for a moment, and then finding his footing. He felt some delicate bones crack beneath his bare feet. But the body held firm.

‘They will hold us,’ he said. ‘But I am not so sure about the horses.’

‘Let me worry about the horses,’ said Maria, and she led them behind her, clicking her tongue.

Charlie put out his hand and helped Maria stumble onto the first floating body. She fell forwards into his arms, and for a moment he could smell the perfume of her hair and skin. Then she righted herself.

‘They are firm enough,’ she agreed. ‘I think the horses can m
ake it.’

They stumbled forward, a few feet at a time, into the wide pool. Beneath them the bodies shifted and twisted in the water. But they formed a firm enough structure to walk on.

The terrified horses plunged and whinnied, but Maria managed to calm them sufficiently to follow behind.

Charlie pointed to a fresh water stream leading into the pool they were wading through.

‘The bodies must have floated in from there,’ he said. ‘Likely there is a river where the bodies were dumped.’

He shook his head. ‘So many dreadful deaths in the name of war. God knows how these poor men died.’

As he spoke he saw a dark shape, near the mouth of the stream.

It was another dead man. But unlike the others, this had a trail of bright red drifting out accusingly from where the body had washed up.

‘Look,’ said Charlie. ‘That is not an old corpse. The blood
is fresh
.’

Maria stared. ‘Do you think it is another vigilante murder?’

Charlie shook his head. ‘Look at how he is dressed. He is a turnpike.’

They looked at one another.

‘The men talked of Malvern having murdered a turnpike,’ s
aid Maria.

Charlie nodded. He began wading over to where the body had washed up.

‘Be careful,’ called Maria, staying where she was. ‘The ground looks more boggy where you step.’

Charlie approached the dead man.

The turnpike’s white face was twisted in surprise. Most of him was sunk deep below the surface. But his clenched fist was peeking out of the water. Charlie moved a little closer. He caught a flash of silver in between the fingers.

‘There is something in his hand,’ muttered Charlie. ‘It looks as though it could be a coin.’

He peered closer.

‘I am sure of it. He has money still clutched in his grip,’ he called to Maria.

Stooping carefully Charlie inched apart the cold dead hand.

‘What are you doing?’ called Maria in horror, as he extracted the coin. ‘Surely you do not take money from a dead man?’

‘All London coins are made in token houses,’ said Charlie, straightening up and bouncing the coin in his palm. ‘Each token house makes its own mark.’

‘What good does that do us?’ asked Maria. ‘There are over a hundred places in the city that make coins.’

‘And I know them all,’ said Charlie. ‘I am a thief taker Maria.’

He splashed back over to where she was standing.

‘And where were these coins made?’ she asked.

‘Not around these parts,’ said Charlie. ‘I think these must have been Thomas Malvern’s last payment to that poor turnpike.’

He held up a shilling. ‘But they are not made in a London coin house either.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘These coins are forgeries.’

He thought for a moment. ‘A man high up in the city, but poor enough to be paying in forged coins,’ he said. ‘Something doesn’t feel right.’

There was a sudden splash of water, and Maria’s horse gave a blood-curdling scream.

Its hindquarters sunk fast into the bog.

Charlie and Maria lunged for the rein simultaneously. But the horse was already up to its belly in the mud.

‘Come forward!’ shouted Maria, dragging at the reins with all her strength. ‘Kick yourself free!’

They both pulled, but the terrified horse twisted its head and fought against the reins.

It sunk another foot.

‘Get the other horse!’ shouted Maria. ‘It will panic and run itself into mud too!’

Charlie grabbed at the reins of his horse and attempted a soothing pat on its neck.

Maria was struggling with the sinking horse, shouting and pleading with it. But inch by inch the animal was disappearing into the marsh.

She turned to Charlie, tears streaming down her face.

‘We can’t leave her to drown,’ she sobbed. ‘She will sink piece by piece and all the time in terror.’

‘Is there any way to get her out?’ asked Charlie, scanning his memory for what little he knew of horses.

Maria shook her head. ‘No. Not even if we had a wagon and other horses to drag her. We are too far into the marsh.’

Maria stopped pulling at the reins and knelt by the frightened, drowning horse. She rested her cheek on its nose.

The horse stopped tossing its head and stared at her through sad eyes.

‘She knows,’ whispered Maria. ‘She knows she is going to die.’

Charlie swallowed. He took a few steps closer, with one hand still holding his own horse.

‘What about the gun Maria?’

She turned to look at him through tear-filled eyes. After a moment she nodded and fumbled in her dress for the heavy pistol the wise woman had given them.

‘Here,’ she held it out to him.

Charlie was about to protest, and then he saw the helpless look on her face.

‘Come away then,’ he said. ‘Look to this horse and I will do it.’

He felt the cold metal press into his hand as she dragged herself over to the second horse.

Then he knelt by the sinking animal and stroked its nose.

‘It is for the best,’ he whispered. ‘You will suffer less this way.’

Maria gave a sob and turned away.

As Charlie pulled the trigger the explosion drove every marsh bird for a mile shrieking into the air.

The horse Maria was holding tried to rear up, but she tugged at the reins expertly, bringing her back down.

‘We’d best move quickly,’ said Charlie, as the horse’s eyes slowly drooped shut and the surrounding water pooled red.

‘That gunshot will have alerted every vigilante for miles around. And now we only have one horse to take us both. And no bullets.’