Part 12 (2/2)

'Yes, sire I mean no, sire-'

'Enough,' said Hawkwood, quietly this time, and in English. 'Enough.' He turned and his gaze found Scarlett, who gave his master the slightest of shrugs. A what-did-you-expect? sort of shrug. The condottiero widened his eyes in agreement, his irises white flecks on brown, hues of frosted mud, of winter campaigns and Yule sieges.

Hawkwood reached down to his side for the stick. La Asta, the Rod, a notorious forearm's length of hard elm, its core drilled out and filled with a pour of lead. He palmed it gently, looking from his hands to the tenente, now a whimpering dog waiting for a boot. With one movement Hawkwood brought the stick up, across, and the man's head whipped to the side with a hard crack of bone. Wretched moans, lots of blood, and when he brought his head back to centre Scarlett could see the ruined jaw hanging by a slab of torn skin and ripped muscle. Hawkwood leaned forward and cupped the broken bones, shoving them back into place with an excruciating thrust. Scarlett winced for the tenente.

'Keep this shut for a while, Antonio,' he said, back in Italian. 'Take the silence I've imposed on you as an opportunity, hmm? To think about virtue, about service, about loyalty and the consequence of what you've done. We'll talk again next year, when your mouth works again.' He jerked the loose bone to the side, and the tenente fell to the floor, writhing in pain.

Later, after Hawkwood had sorted through the day's correspondence with Pietrasanta, his chancellor, they walked through the gardens, looking at the week ahead. Scarlett was procrastinating, and badly. He listened to his master going on about the Perugia situation.

'I've grown sick of these southern men, Adam. The heat makes them lazy, and now all this conjuring with the Jews. Really, I've taken all I can take. Give me an Englishman over these rude peninsulars any day. Or even a Scot.' He paused to look across the ravine to the north. 'It will be good to see London, won't it? And after so many years.'

Scarlett took a breath, another, then said it. 'The book has disappeared.'

Hawkwood froze. 'When?'

'Five weeks ago Monday, my lord. Our messengers have just brought the news from Westminster.'

Scarlett told him the rest of it: the incident at La Neyte, the pursuit in the Moorfields, the fear spreading like fire among the English gentry. The messenger had been sent on his way within a few days of the theft, with instructions to spare no expense in bringing the news to the great condottiero in Florence with all due speed.

'I shudder for the poor horses,' Hawkwood said absently. He turned and looked at Scarlett. 'You're telling me, Adam, that a French spy has stolen the book from under our beak, and Lancaster's?'

'All we know is that it was pilfered by an unidentified woman,' said Scarlett, letting the implication sink in. 'Now she's dead.'

'A woman.' Hawkwood's eyes widened. 'Could it be-'

'That is my a.s.sumption, sire.'

Hawkwood considered this for a while. 'Resourceful little thing, isn't she?'

'Wasn't she.'

Hawkwood smiled thinly. 'And the others?'

'That's not known,' said Scarlett. 'Yet.'

Hawkwood continued walking. 'The last dispatch spoke of the work's popularity among these Lollers.'

Scarlett paced behind, watching his master's face. 'The late Wycliffe's disciples, and friends of Lancaster. Some of them have it by rote, and by the time of its disappearance it had become the most notorious writing in England. A book of ghostly prophecies, with dark portent for the fate of the realm! But now no one can find the original ma.n.u.script, nor the cloth. And I worry well ...'

'Tell me, Adam.'

'I worry that this may be Il Critto's doing.'

'Oh?'

'I do not like coincidences. First Il Critto takes a leave, suddenly, and without warning. Then this young woman, who was nearly betrothed to him, disappears without a trace from her father's house. Next your slinky poetical friend comes back from Rome. You know the gossip, sire. He was seducing her. Then he leaves us quite distraught, from the servants' reports. And all of this just a few weeks after the book leaves our hands. A book now missing.' They took a few more steps. Scarlett was the one who stopped this time. 'I don't like it, John. I don't like it at all.'

Hawkwood's face was hard to read at that moment, though it soon broke into a serene smile. 'Well, there's little we can do about it now, eh? And in some ways the theft may be the best thing that could have happened.'

'Oh?'

'This will only draw more attention to the book. Soon enough every man and woman in London will be singing these prophecies from the towers. Then what will our long castle have to say for himself? This changes nothing, Adam.'

Scarlett could see Hawkwood's point about the theft, though he did not share the condottiero's confidence that all would be well. With the book on the loose and the prophecies bandied abroad, there was no telling where all of this might end up.

He thought again of Il Critto, as they had dubbed him soon after his arrival in Hawkwood's circles. Young, ambitious, sizzlingly brilliant. A charmer, but Scarlett had distrusted him from the first instant. Il Critto had distrusted Scarlett as well, especially after that unfortunate misunderstanding over the faked dispatch from London. It was merely a loyalty test, and the young man had pa.s.sed it admirably, though he had taken the whole thing as a personal affront, an a.s.sault on his honour. Scarlett had tried to make peace, but Il Critto would hear none of it, and the young man had spent the next two years in Florence despising the sight of him.

It had been weeks since Scarlett had given Il Critto more than a pa.s.sing thought. Now he was concerned. Non tenet anguillam, per caudam qui tenet illam. A bit of wisdom ground in by long experience among these venomous communes. 'He who holds a snake by the tail doesn't have it under control.' And at the moment, Scarlett worried, we don't hold even the tail.

Hawkwood, feeling none of this, gave his most faithful man a fond smile. 'And now, Adam, you will join your kingmaker in a game of cards.'

TWENTY.

St Paul's churchyard, Ward of Farringdon 'Will he recognize you?' Agnes Fonteyn asked her sister.

Millicent ignored the question as she gazed across the expanse of the great churchyard, where swift clouds bowled shadows among the hucksters, pilgrims, guildsmen, and idlers. With her gut tightened in fear, every sight and sound reached her with an acuity that cast the peril of their situation in sharp relief. The line of swearers spilling out the south door, clutching contracts as they awaited their turn at the altar to sign or make their mark. Construction at the south end on a line of dwellings for canons: the pounding of hammers, the loud claps of boards, carpenters' swears. The banter from the steps, bakers' daughters and fishwives hawking from their leased stations around the broken cross, and every word bounced off the stone.

River mallard, roast bittern, five roast larks for two, here here, sir.

Cristina Walwayn's pigeons're putrid, sir, hardly fit for pasties.

Don't y'purchase from that station, good sir. That's Evota there, Our Lady of the Stale Buns.

Fish, sir, roast fish? Henry Holdernesse be my master, trustiest monger in town, sure. Not like Tilda Cooke over there, she'll sell you a flat a' pigs.h.i.+t and call it a herring-cake. Mine goes down easy, sir, and sells easy as well.

Though selling a book, Millicent had discovered, was more difficult. Over the last week she and Agnes had become industrious fishers of men, posing as middling singlewomen of Cornhull, their hook baited with the only worm they possessed. This book, Millicent firmly believed, would bring a high price from the right man a man ambitious enough to use it for the unique sort of personal gain its contents promised. A few whispered conversations at service gates, furtive proffers at tavern doors, a handsome profit.

Yet none of these men had taken the bait. Not a one of them had even understood the significance of what she was offering them, nor the grave threat the book represented to the realm. That morning Millicent had made a decision. Their next prospect would be a greater man. Not a lord, but something like a lord: a man belonging to the Order of the Coif, a serjeant-at-law with deep connections in the king's affinity.

Thomas Pinchbeak had once been close with Sir Humphrey ap-Roger, who had relied on him for a number of legal matters. She had met the lawman at a mummers play along the embankment, Sir Humphrey showing her off on a Midsummer Eve, the sh.o.r.e fires painting the river with a devilish sheen. That was nearly three years ago. Pinchbeak might recall her face, though surely not her name, as she hadn't encountered him again since well before Sir Humphrey's death. What would he think of her, she wondered, approaching him with such a peculiar offer or, depending how he received it, such an unsettling threat?

With the book concealed in her coat lining, Agnes turned to wait at the top of the south stairs while Millicent approached the gate. Pinchbeak stood with two of his fellow serjeants-at-law within the parvis, a low-walled area before the portico enclosed as a small courtyard. The lawmen were engaged in a light-hearted dispute of some kind, with Pinchbeak the wry observer and mediator, two of the younger serjeants more animated. On the stone benches that lined the sides of the parvis sat several other lawmen conferring with visitors two wealthy burgesses and a knight. To the side of the gate stood a young man of perhaps seventeen, gangly, tall, puffed with his minor station.

'A word with Master Pinchbeak, please,' Millicent said, giving him her most winning smile.

He spat in a gutter. 'The serjeants have little time for hucksters or women, nor women hucksters. Be off with you.'

Millicent looked down at her dress, now shabbier than any garment she had worn since St Leonard's. 'But it's known that the serjeants-at-law gather in the parvis to serve all the citizens of London. You'd deny a freewoman of the city such privilege?' Her raised voice attracted the attention of the lawmen. Pinchbeak approached the low gate, then leaned out to address the young man.

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