Part 23 (1/2)

'Where did they take him?' I asked. 'Marshalsea?'

He shook his head. 'Newgate, was what they said.'

Fresh shoes, a quick supper on my feet. It was well past curfew. I bought my way across the bridge.

Newgate. Tom Tugg, roused from sleep, had wrapped himself in a surcoat when informed of my arrival, and now stood yawning at the gatehouse door.

'What is this, Tugg?' I demanded. 'Treason?'

He looked at me strangely. 'You know the rub, Gower. Imagining and purposing falsely and traitorously t'destroy the Royal Person of the king, and therewith t'destroy his Realm.'

'I can quote the Statute of Treasons as well as you. But what are the charges? Is there a writ you can show me, something more specific?'

Tugg gave a slow shrug. 'I am a jailer, not a judge.'

'Yes, but-' I stopped pressing him, realizing I would get nowhere with pleas alone. I reached for my purse. 'How much will it take, Tugg?'

'Take?'

'To see my son.'

The keeper stepped back, his head shaking. 'None a' your s.h.i.+llings now, Gower, not a king's ransom for a mote a' time with a traitor.'

'It's counterfeiting, Tugg, not exactly an attack on His Highness's person. I'll credit you a full pound.'

Tugg frowned at me, intrigued but ignoring the offer. 'Heard nothing about counterfeiting, Gower.'

I instantly realized my mistake an inexcusable one, for I'd just revealed to the keeper of Newgate prison the secret crime that could still hang Simon at Tyburn, and exposed my own role in covering up the evidence. Trying to recover from my error, I made a more exorbitant offer. 'Ten n.o.bles, Tugg.'

He stared at me, now looking worried for my sanity, then plucked the heavy purse out of my palm. 'That'll do.'

'Good. Now take me to my son.' I tried to push past him.

Tugg wedged himself into the opening. A guard stepped up behind him. 'Can't.'

'What are you talking about?'

'He's not here.'

'What? You told me-'

'I told you nothing. You're the one bellowing about treason, counterfeiting, your son. Newgate hasn't swallowed a new morsel since last week.'

I stared, and it struck me almost violently how far my poise and skill had plummeted over the last weeks. And how pathetic it must have appeared that John Gower, who fas.h.i.+oned himself the great trafficker in men's secrets, had freely handed three of his own to the keeper of Newgate. Then Tugg slammed the door in my face, leaving me to imagine the worst. Flaying, whipping, a cruel surgeon with a dull knife. With these and other tortures pressing my thoughts, I walked home through a city dark with night, knowing my son was somewhere in its foul grip.

THIRTY-SIX.

Spitalfields, outside Bishopsgate The three of them stood in the May drizzle as Agnes's grave was carved in the earth. The strikes of shovel in soil were comforting in their way, though the digger's glossing didn't help. 'Pull a skull out the pit every day, it seems,' he said during one of his breaks. 'Reckon half of h.e.l.l be filled with Spitalfields souls.'

Eleanor, s.h.i.+vering, could sense them there, waiting for the resurrection, when G.o.d would call them up, so the preachers said, when all the decayed flesh and old bones would rejoin their souls like some meat puppet in heaven.

They owed their presence at Agnes's burial to Joan Rugg. In the commotion following the murder, Eleanor and Millicent had slipped out of the Aldgate neighbourhood and back to the Bishop before the questions started, avoiding the gathering of the jury and the coroner's inquest. A beadle recognized Agnes as one of Joan's crew and, after summoning the bawd to the inquest, released the body for a pauper's burial at the Spitalfields, where Joan's cuz, Sam Varney, worked as underdigger. Joan sent word to Bess about the timing, and the three of them came across that morning. They bound Agnes in a rough shroud and loaded her on to the digger's cart for the haul out to the burial yard.

As the hole deepened they gathered bluebells from the far corners of the churchyard and carried them to the edge of the pit, with stems of thyme to give Agnes safe pa.s.sage to the world beyond, and some separation from the other bodies in the partially exposed pit. The gravedigger made quick work of lining the floor, the bluebell stems in the direction of her feet, the thyme a cus.h.i.+on for her head. Finally he coaxed his nag around to the top of the grave and pulled Agnes out by her feet, sending her shrouded form through the air. It landed on the bluebells with a muted finality. He shovelled dirt on top of her. Soon she was gone.

Bess Waller fell to the ground, smudging her dress in the morbid soil. 'Oh, the beautiful little dear! Oh, the most precious body what ever lived!'

Eleanor, silent in her own desolation, watched Millicent. Her face was blank, though Eleanor could feel her fury at her mother as a living thing.

'Stop it, Bess,' Millicent finally said. 'Just stop it.'

Bess's voice hitched. 'Stop it, you say?'

'Your sorrow is feigned,' Millicent said, the last word shot at her mother as an arrow of contempt. 'Where was your concern for this ”most precious body” when Ag was a girl? Your ”beautiful little dear”, her a.r.s.e split open by half the friars of London.' Millicent's voice shook with hatred. 'Agnes was nothing to you but pennies for her queynt.'

Bess pushed herself off the ground. The digger paused in his shovelling.

'Was you who killed her.' Bess shook a finger. 'You who took the book away to sell to Pinchbeak's man, leaving her in those rooms with nothing to bargain for her life. And for what? Bag of lead plugs, and a cold grave in the Spitalfields. So don't you talk to me about concern for my Agnes. By St Agnes herself, don't you say a word. You're the one put her in the ground.'

Millicent raised a hand, then turned away, clutched her stomach, and vomited on the soil. All her reserve left her then, her face losing its frozen pride in a bare moment. Eleanor stepped forward, but Millicent waved her off, shaking her head wildly, retching between words.

'She be she be right, an't she? Bess Waller be as be as right as the cursed cursed rain, don't she? I killed me Agnes, right as if I bladed her meself.'

Eleanor stared at her in wonder. From the refined diction of a knight's courtesan Millicent's speech had lowered itself to the rough patter of the stews. She sounds like me now, Eleanor thought; no, like Agnes.

'That's not true, Mil,' she said, but Millicent backed away, arms held before her face. She fled from the churchyard and disappeared beyond a distant garden.

Bess Waller turned back to the grave, ignoring her. After a final look at the soil covering Agnes, Eleanor made her way out of the Spitalfields yard. All her thoughts were on Gerald, now her one intimate in all the world.

She went through the city walls at Bishopsgate, then westward, to the Shambles. To her left were slaughterstalls once the largest in London, now diminished by Parliament and the city, though still redolent with mingled breaths of s.h.i.+t and death, halved cows hooked four to a beam, gutters spattered with new blood aglisten in the full sun. A few sheep, cows, and goats occupied the far stalls, while the walls of the abattoir were lined with the knives and cleavers for killing time.

Finally she reached the church. St Nicholas Shambles, the stenchiest in all London, and the only one that was ever hers. Her parents had been steadfast paris.h.i.+oners all their lives, and their parents, and probably theirs for all she knew. Eleanor knew its crumbling stairs, its skewed porch, its plain rood screen like she knew her own teeth. After their mother's death she and Gerald had come every day for alms, along with the rest of the parish's poor, until the parson realized they were orphans and turned them over to the city.

Inside the church was silent, the air familiar despite her long absence from its damp and smell. Her brother stepped from a dark recess near one of the side chapels. He'd lost a bit of his sneer, and let Eleanor grasp his arm and lead him to a bench near the west door.

'That fellow from the Guildhall you sent around,' Gerald began. 'Grimes didn't like it much, when he got wind of the transfer, and all the questions.'

'Grimes killed him, then?'

'Not Grimes.' He looked off. She grabbed his chin, turned him toward her.

'Who then?'