Kitabı oku: «A Beggar’s Kingdom», sayfa 6

7
Dead Queen, Revisited

AT THE END OF AUGUST ONE OF THE PATRONS OF THE SILVER Cross dies in the night.

A panting, irritated Baroness Tilly bangs on Julian’s door. She was woken up by the one-eyed Ilbert, who said the dead man’s blood dripped through the floorboards into his cubby below. “It’s the last thing we need,” the Baroness says to Julian. “Today is a Saturday, our busiest night of the week. Nothing could be worse for business than death. Julian, let’s hurry and take care of it before the stench takes hold.”

It’s Lord Fabian.

In his velvet robes, the man lies face down on the floor. He has collapsed, hit the iron leg of the table, and smashed his head open. He may have bled to death, but it’s hard to tell. Why would he fall in the first place? Julian and the Baroness stand in shock.

“His heart must’ve finally gave out, the poor fat bugger,” the Baroness says. She is probably right. Nothing is out of place, except the overturned table, the silver decanter on its side, the broken crystal glasses, and the enormous corpse.

“This is the kind of thing that closes down establishments!” the Baroness says. “People are so superstitious about death. And this is one of our best rooms. Bugger it. Bugger it all to hell.”

Fabian’s head is turned to the side. His eyes bulge out of their sockets, as if he had suffocated before he died, not simply lost consciousness after a fall and a blow to the head. The suffocation seems odd for a cardiac event. Blood spills out of his filled-up mouth. There’s foam around his lips—as if he’d been gasping for breath before dying. From the disturbance around the armchair and the knocked-over table, it looks to Julian that the man could’ve gone into convulsions. The foul mess under his swollen body suggests a severe gastric disturbance.

To keep from retching, Julian and the Baroness breathe into their velvet sleeves. He opens the windows to let in some air. It’s already miserably hot, though it’s barely sunrise.

Lord Fabian is a nobleman, a temporal lord, a peer in Parliament. He is a well-known figure around London, and there’s going to be an outcry if his desiccated, exsanguinated corpse is found in a brothel. Someone will get charged with murder. Not may. Will. Someone will get quartered. In 1666, they disembowel first and ask questions later.

While the Baroness wrings her hands, Julian looks around. Usually Fabian keeps a small purse on the table by the wine. From the black pouch, the lord pulled out shillings and half-crowns and stacked them in phallic towers for him and Mallory. It takes Julian a moment to find it, but there it is; it’s fallen off the table and under the bed. At least Fabian wasn’t robbed, that’s something.

“These things happen, Baroness,” Julian says. “The man fell and hit his head. As you said, he probably had a heart attack. Let’s call for Parker. He’s a reasonable chap. He’ll see this for what it is, a terrible accident.”

“This is the City of Westminster!” she hisses. “Good God, man, do you know nothing? Lords of His Majesty’s Government don’t drop dead in brothels.”

“This one did.”

“Who was the lord with, do you know?” The Baroness trembles. “Please tell me it wasn’t Mallory!”

“No, madam,” Julian says. “It wasn’t Mallory.”

“How do you know? How do you know for certain?”

Julian knows because Mallory was with him last night. He can’t admit it to the Baroness. He goes on the attack instead. “Baroness, who did you assign Lord Fabian to?” he asks, turning Tilly’s own words against her, since the woman is constantly bragging about how no man can walk up the stairs without her knowledge.

The whoremonger grows reticent. “I may have overlooked writing his name in my book,” she confesses. And then, “Truth is, I didn’t see him come in.” She hesitates. “It’s not unusual. He often enters the back way, to avoid being seen. He’s too recognizable. But enough claptrap,” she says with a forceful air. “He’s not getting any fresher while we stand here shooting our mouths off. What does it matter who was with him and which way he came?”

“You asked me who was with him, madam.”

“The man is dead! Isn’t that what’s most important? We must get him out of here before anyone else wakes up. Isn’t that what’s most important?”

Julian is tasked with removing Fabian’s corpse from the premises, dumping it in a nearby canal, and cleaning up the room as if the death never happened. It’s a stifling end-summer morning in Westminster, where no smell, no matter how faint, cannot be made worse by the wretched heat. A man dead and decomposing in the swelter of August is not what Julian would call a faint smell. The Baroness insists Ilbert help Julian. She calls the eel-like servant a humpbacked tomb of discretion. “Oh, and Julian,” the Baroness says before she leaves, “have Carling and Ivy wash down the room. Keep my niece out of it. She and Lord Fabian were close. I don’t want her getting upset. As soon as you’ve cleared him out, let me know, and I’ll take Mal to the market while the other girls mop up.”

Julian and Ilbert wrap Fabian’s body in burlap and tie him up with twine. A quick-thinking Ilbert first cleans up the mess around Fabian so they can work without getting soiled themselves. He then suggests lining the burlap with pieces of flagstone from the basement to help weigh the body down during final disposal.

It takes hours, but fortunately the girls work late and sleep past noon, so the house stays quiet. Just in case, the Baroness stands guard up in the attic with a tray of biscuits and marmalade to stop the girls from wandering downstairs.

Julian and Ilbert drag the heavy, unwieldy sack down the narrow back stairs into the alley, and heave the body into a cart, the very same pushcart Julian and Mallory line with flowers each morning. Julian orders Ilbert to take the cart to a canal or an estuary as far away as possible from Whitehall and the Silver Cross. Anywhere Ilbert wishes. But far from here. Ilbert nods as if he understands things.

“What do you think happened to him, Ilbert?”

“I know nothing about nothing, sire,” the tomb of discretion replies. “He could’ve died from many things.”

“Like what?”

“I have one eye and my hump prevents me from looking anywhere but down.” Ilbert’s cunning expression reads as if down is where it’s all at. It reminds Julian of what Mallory had once said in passing, why her gaze was always to the ground. Because that’s where the pennies and the berries were, she said.

After Ilbert leaves, Julian vomits in the alley that centuries later will become Craig’s Court.

He cleans himself up in the downstairs slop sink and, carrying buckets filled with vinegar and lye, goes upstairs to collect the last of the man’s belongings for burning before Carling and Ivy arrive to clean. The room reeks. It will take the maids hours to rid it of the smell of human waste and death. But they must do it, the room must be ready for business by nightfall. What a great room it was, Julian laments, now ruined.

After collecting Fabian’s clothes and righting the table, Julian surveys the floor for anything suspicious in case Constable Parker comes to call. Near the open window, where Fabian fell, Julian notices that one of the floorboards isn’t level. A short plank seems to have gotten loose. He pops it out, aligns it straight, and is about to bang it into place with his fist when underneath, resting on the subflooring, he sees a dark brown satchel.

Alarm pounds through Julian’s body.

The purse is brown leather with red velvet ribbons, stitched with gold and silver. As he lifts it out, he hears the sound of dull rolling marbles. Pulling open the strings, Julian finds inside not marbles but gold coin.

There are female voices in the corridor. Awkwardly, he stuffs the satchel down his belted breeches, a kangaroo pouch with a golden joey in it. He must calm down or he’ll have a heart attack himself, drop dead with a bag of gold in his pants. He replaces the short board, bangs it in until it lies evenly with the rest of the floor and takes one last glance around to make sure nothing else looks disturbed.

His bedroom door has no lock, as most rooms do not in a brothel. He drags an oak table to barricade the door and sits down on the bed with his back to the entrance as a precaution.

Trying to be as quiet as possible, Julian pours out the clanging gold onto his bedspread. Each the size of a half-dollar, the coins are gleaming, hefty, pristine. He’s never seen anything like them.

Except …

He’s seen something a little bit like them. The head of the coin is the imperious, fully robed body of a queen. He recognizes the queen because in 1603, her face was on all the silver shillings and farthings and pennies he took with him to Smythe Field market to buy flowers for Mary’s wedding. It’s Elizabeth I. Elizabeth Regina is stamped on the face. On the obverse side is the royal coat of arms.

Julian is confounded and troubled. Why is there a bag of freshly minted historic coin? Why was it hidden in the floorboards at the Silver Cross? Is it Fabian’s? Was he hiding sovereigns in a brothel and dropped dead? Was that why his face was on the floor, was that why he fell? Did he know he was dying and was trying to get to his money?

Julian counts it. There are 49 gold coins. He estimates each weighs about half an ounce. That’s about 25 ounces of gold he’s got on his bed. Breathing heavily, he sits, his hands running over the bullion. Why would a lord hide a treasure in the Silver Cross of all places? Didn’t he have a home where he could stash his ill-gotten gains? Was it blackmail money on the way to another destination? Or was Fabian the destination? Was it in transit or being delivered? Did Fabian steal the money and was killed for it, or was it his money and he was killed for it? Was it even his money? Is it even real gold? The weight of his intuition heavy in his hand tells him that it is.

Julian has a million questions and zero answers.

He also has zero time to reflect and ruminate. Coincidence or not, an esteemed member of the House of Lords was killed literally over gold. Before Julian can find out if it was by chance or design, he must get the treasure out of the brothel.

But get it out to where? He has no friends in London in 1666. No Devi to consult, no Ashton to help him. He’s friendly with the girls but knows no one else except Mallory, and until he finds out more, she can’t be endangered in any way. If it’s real gold as Julian suspects, she can’t be an accomplice to a theft of this magnitude. They cut you in half for stealing pewter bowls. She can’t help him anyway, she has no room of her own to hide the money. She keeps her dead mother’s Bill of Mortality in his desk for safety. Can Julian hide the money in his unlocked cupboard? What about in his floorboards? He investigates, but his floor is assiduously nailed down.

Afraid, exhilarated, his heart thumping, Julian returns the coins to their pouch, except for two. After he changes into fresh clothes, he binds the purse inside his trunk hose, pulling a pair of belted breeches over them. He tightens another belt around all three—the hose, the breeches and the purse—to keep the coins from jingling as he walks.

Julian needs to do two things. He must find a goldsmith on Cheapside who can appraise the coin. And he must hide the money somewhere safe until the investigation into Lord Fabian’s death is behind them, and then he and Mallory together can decide what to do.

Flattening out the bedspread where the weight of the coin has made a tell-tale depression, Julian throws on his coat to cover the awkward and conspicuous bulge in his groin and heads downstairs. After giving cleaning instructions to Carling and Ivy, he learns that the Baroness has taken “an extremely unhappy” Mallory and left for the afternoon. Relieved that he doesn’t have to explain to the Baroness why he’s wearing a coat in ninety-degree heat, Julian runs out to Parliament Street.

It’s brutally hot out. It has been a nearly rainless August. Why can’t it rain just once in London, just once! Stepping over the horse manure on the cobblestones, Julian hurries to the Strand where he hops on a hackney carriage that takes him through Temple Bar to Cheapside.

Cheapside, the queen of thoroughfares, is wide like a boulevard and sports fountains and water channels. It has dozens of taverns, merchants’ mansions, luxury shops, milliners and cobblers, silversmiths and blacksmiths. Cheapside has everything, including the most venerable gold dealers in the world. Everyone in London shops on Cheapside on Saturday afternoons. The jammed congestion around St. Paul’s is so bad, Julian must hop off the carriage and walk the rest of the way to Goldsmiths Row, sweating in his absurd overcoat.

The building he enters is dark inside, a grand space like a cave chamber, but no amount of dimness can hide its ostentatious wealth. It’s not just the gold trinkets in the glass cases and the gold display platters on the walls. Even the crown mouldings, the door latches, and the sills on the windows are plated gold. Plated gold, right, not cast in gold? The candlesticks are gold, and the beveled edges of the polished oak table behind which Julian sits are trimmed in gold. The hands of all the softly chiming clocks are gold. The man across from him has a gold pocket watch laid out on the table to remind Julian of the value of time.

“How can I be of service, sire?” the elegant man says. He’s impeccably dressed in gray velvet and white silk. His name is Arnold Bertie. He is in the employ of the great Earl of Lindsey who is one of the owners of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths.

His fingers shaking, Julian slides the gold coin across the table. “I was hoping you could tell me something about this coin.”

Bertie doesn’t pick it up. That’s how Julian instantly knows it’s not counterfeit. The gentleman, for whom gold is his livelihood, doesn’t touch the coin with his hands. “Sire, please,” he says to Julian. “Do not slide it across the desk. You could scratch the coin.” Bertie pulls out a silk white cloth, a magnifying glass, brings forth the burning lantern, pulls closer the candlesticks, and tenderly picks up the gold piece with a white-gloved hand, laying it on the white silk. Wordlessly he examines it for no less than ten minutes. He treats the coin like a holy relic. From his drawer, he produces a scale and eases the coin onto it. “Astounding!” he cries. “Wherever did you get this?”

“It was a small token of affection from a deceased uncle.”

“Oh, this is no small token, I can assure you. What you’ve got here is one of the most exquisite coins ever to be hammered by the Royal Mint. It’s called angel. It’s an Elizabethan fine gold sovereign. Nothing even close to it is being made today. Or for that matter is likely to be made again. It is simply too expensive to produce. It is 23-carat gold, and precisely one-half of a Troy ounce. The coin is 99% pure gold. It is a work of art. And judging by its condition, yours has never been used.”

Julian doesn’t know what to say.

“Are you all right, sire? You look unwell.”

“I’m fine,” Julian says, his voice unsteady. “Please—continue.”

Bertie gazes upon the coin with reverence. “During the Elizabethan era, all our coin was hand-hammered like this one, but you can imagine how much labor that entailed, melting the gold ingots, softening them, casting them into blanks, hammering and softening them again. The hammering and annealing happened another twelve times before the edges were deemed sufficiently rounded, and that was just to make the blank, sire. Then it had to be coined in a hand-held die, coined with the precision of a master craftsman. These coins haven’t been minted for over a hundred years, at least not to my knowledge. Is it the only one you’ve got? Such a shame. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in selling this piece to us? Would you like me to see what we can give you for it today?”

“Well, I suppose there’s no harm in that,” Julian says evenly.

Clutching the coin inside a silk handkerchief, Bertie disappears. Julian, his nerves electrified, waits impatiently.

In a few minutes, Bertie returns. “Here’s what I can offer. The Charles II guinea, weighing barely half of this coin, and not comparable to it in either quality or gold content, is worth twenty-two shillings, so a little more than one pound sterling. For this coin, I can offer you three hundred shillings.”

Three hundred shillings. Julian is speechless. That’s fifteen pounds! Mallory would have to work six years to make that. As a keeper of a brothel, Julian would have to work three.

And there’s another 48 where it came from.

Julian knocks over the chair as he stands, dropping his hat on the floor. “I’m sorry, Bertie,” he says, clutching his groin where the coins warmly reside. “I’m in a terrible rush. Simply maddening hurry. I accept your offer, if you would be so kind.”

“Oh! Very good, sire. I am delighted. How would you like your money?”

“Three dimes, a hundred-dollar bill and eighty-seven ones,” Julian mutters in a daze. “I mean—ten guineas, fifteen crowns, and twenty-five shillings.”

With money in hand and coins in his crotch, he bows and backs out. Lost and breathless, Julian stands on Cheapside, trying to think, think! To the left of him is Poultry, to the right St. Paul’s. The river is up ahead, all around him is the London Wall. Where does he go? He’s boxed in.

He has stolen an unconscionable amount of gold. Julian is certain he and the dead lord can’t be the only ones who know about the fortune in the floorboards. For all Julian knows, Ilbert may know about it. If Fabian didn’t drop dead by accident, which seems less and less likely, he was probably killed for this money. Greater men have been murdered for far less. Now the killer will be coming to get what’s his, and he won’t stop until Julian is dead, and all the cullies are dead, and the Silver Cross is burned to the ground.

Is this Julian’s way of protecting Mallory?

Nearly fifty gold coins at fifteen pounds each. That is £735 in 1666. Motionless he stands, watching the slow carriages, the hurrying people, the cantering horses. He’s euphoric, but in trouble.

It’s impossibly hot out and he’s wearing a long wool coat to disguise his thievery. He looks like a criminal, looks guilty and sweaty, his face red and wet. Lowering his head, Julian hurries away from Cheapside, up St. Martin’s Le Grand to Cripplegate on the way to the familiar and haunted Clerkenwell. It’s all he knows. In the courtyard gardens of the church of St. Giles by Cripplegate, just outside the City gates, Julian finds a bench between the side of the church and the Roman wall and drops down. He needs a prayer. But how does one pray for help in a situation like this? He needs to hide the money is what he needs to do, and then he must persuade Mallory to run away with him. He was able to persuade Josephine to marry him, almost against her will, and he was able to persuade Mary—when it was too late. This time, he must do better, try harder. That’s why he’s been given a second chance! Where is it safe for him to stash it? He gazes around the empty garden, the quiet alley. The stone church stands silently, its grounds wilting with heavy, end-August browning leaves, the London Wall a few yards away. The last time, Julian wanted to take Mary to Italy. This time, with £700, they can go anywhere. They’ve been offered a new life. They can travel like the Pilgrims across the sea, to Massachusetts Bay Colony. But run they must; they can’t stay where they are, that’s for sure. He’s been lulled into a false sense of immortality, he knows that now, the bathwater in the brothel too warm, the girl too addicting. Now he must act.

Julian stares into the distance a few more seconds—and then shoots up and bolts, the crowns and guineas jingling in his pocket. He knows what to do. He needs to find a mason; he needs a hammer, a chisel, a trowel, some lime-based mortar. He has figured out where to hide the money. All will be well. He will fix it. He will fix everything.