The Thief Taker (3 page)

Chapter Three

‘Is she Dutch?’ asked Charlie. This was the most likely explanation. Another unsolved mystery of Charlie’s orphan past, was that he and his brother both spoke Dutch, though neither knew how or where they’d learned the language.

People occasionally sought Charlie out to translate, or bargain a case with a sail boat.

But the landlord shook his head.

‘She is English, Charlie, and a right nice accent she has too. I’d say her family has some money.’

Charlie took a seat a safe distance from Bitey and watched transfixed as the girl made her way over. Now that she was facing him he could see she had fine-set features – handsome in their neatness, with a straight Roman nose and large blue eyes. Something about the arrangement suggested instant respectability. As if she were of a class which belied her simple clothes.

‘Are you the Thief Taker?’ The words were out before she’d got to the table. Charlie was glad his customer was studying the Health Certificate in another part of the tavern. He had a hunch a girl of this sort wouldn’t look favourably on his current side operation.

‘That I am,’ he said, leaning back in his chair so that the front legs left the ground. Charlie had become well-known as a private thief taker, and his reputation meant victims often sought him out in the Bucket.

‘What can I do for you my lovely? Have you a purse or a pocket taken?’

The girl narrowed her eyes. ‘I want it known that it is not usual for me to come to a person of your kind.’ She said. It was not clear what she meant by ‘your kind’ but Charlie rolled a little more upright.

‘You could always call on the services of The Watch,’ he said. ‘If respectability is so important to you.’ As a thief taker Charlie operated somewhat outside the law, solving theft cases for a fee.

‘You know as well as I that The Watch cannot be expected to stop serious crimes,’ said the girl. ‘Not a man of them is under fifty years of age, and for a shilling a week they will not risk their old limbs beyond lighting the streets at night.’

‘And so,’ she concluded with an angry sigh. ‘I have come seeking your services.’ Suddenly all the annoyance seemed to rush out of her, and her face sagged for a moment in an exhausted, broken look.

‘What is it I can do for you?’ Charlie was intrigued now. Clearly she had lost something of great personal value. Perhaps some expensive keepsake from a sweetheart or husband.

‘My sister,’ she began, but her face reddened and her eyes filled before she could finish the sentence. She coughed, driving the emotions down by dint of willpower.

‘My sister has been killed,’ she concluded.

The front legs of Charlie’s chair came back to the wooden floor with a thump, and his hand smacked onto the table to steady
himself
.

‘You have me wrong, indeed,’ he said. ‘I track thieves and cut-purses mistress. For this crime you must see the magistrate.’

She shook her head violently.

‘He does nothing. The magistrate attends only to removing himself and his family from the danger of the plague. Everyone fears for their own lives and looks to their own skin. There is . . . there is no law at all.’

She sat down heavily in the nearest unoccupied chair, looking straight past him. Then to Charlie’s great alarm she began to sob in unselfconscious wracking gasps.

He looked about for a way to end the spectacle and for want of a better plan stood to urge her outside.

Moving beside her, Charlie put an uncertain arm around the girl’s waist and nudged her gently away from the table. To his great relief she stood and allowed him to lead her out.

‘Come on,’ he muttered as they passed the motley assortment of staring drinkers. ‘This place is not proper for your sort in any case. I will take you somewhere better.’

They stepped out onto the street. A large carriage rolled past, the gold leaf on its doors glinting in the sunlight. Charlie was momentarily distracted from the girl, who was now calming herself and rubbing away the tears.

He let his eyes follow the huge wheels, imagining, as he always did, what it would be like to sit inside on the plush seats, screened from view.

His hand drifted to his key. And he wondered, as he often did, what past he had come from, before the orphanage. Charlie and his brother had the scantest of memories before they were orphaned. Snatches involved a grand house, and a finely dressed lady, who hid herself away in a private room.

The girl was watching him now, and he looked away from the coach. His gaze settled on the tailor next door to the pub. He was hammering heavy planks over his shop windows.

‘Sure the plague is not in this part of town?’ asked Charlie.

‘Not yet so far as I know,’ said the tailor, wiping a line of sweat from his brow. ‘But with this weather and the godlessness of
Londoners
, it will be. There will be an Armageddon of pestilence come August. I had it from a trusted astrologer and I will not wait to be among the dead.’

He put down the hammer to admire his handiwork. ‘Yesterday I went to a plague district to collect a debt and decided in that moment I would stop no more in the City,’ he added. ‘Never in my life have I seen such horrors. All diseased and the very streets rot on their foundations.’

A cart stood ready and loaded with what appeared to be his life’s possessions, and he turned away to secure them.

Charlie felt himself shudder despite the cloying heat of the day. If the shopkeepers were vacating it meant only one thing. The plague was spreading.

He crossed himself and turned back to the girl, who had now collected herself and was standing with a faraway look in her eyes.

In a sudden urge to impress her, he decided to get them both a hot roll.

‘Wait here,’ he said, ‘I will be back in a moment.’

He took a quick sweep of the shops and headed towards a stall where he knew he could bargain for credit.

‘Charlie Tuesday,’ said the baker girl, eyeing him with a mix of flirtation and trepidation. ‘Do not think you can spend your forged coins here.’

‘I have something better,’ said Charlie, dropping his voice. ‘Hold out your hand.’

She looked uncertain for a moment and then squeezed her eyes tight shut.

Charlie brushed his fingers over hers. ‘You can open them
again now.
’

She opened her eyes in confusion.

‘Look at your hand.’

The baker girl’s gaze dropped to her hand, not understanding. Then she squealed with delight. ‘Charlie! You found it!’

She held out her fingers to admire a battered tin ring.

‘Did I not say I would?’

She seized his head in her hands and kissed him quickly.

‘Thank you Charlie. How did you get it back?’

‘Thief-taker’s hunch. I asked a few of the right people.’

His eyes slid to the basket of hot rolls. ‘Can you spare a few of those?’ he asked.

The baker girl beamed at him. ‘How many do you want?’

Chapter Four

Charlie discovered two things about the mystery girl in quick succession. First that her name was Anna-Maria and second that she was of a decidedly better-fed upbringing than his own. It had been a flash of chivalry to cash in his only credit with the bakery. But as they sat outside she let the gift rest uneaten in her lap. Charlie watched it with hungry annoyance. He’d dispensed with his in two short bites. The rolls were a half-penny a piece, and he pushed down his outrage as she began to turn it absentmindedly in her hands, picking at it and letting the crumbs fall.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Charlie hadn’t paid for the food, he would have considered snatching it back.

The second clue to Anna-Maria’s privileged upbringing was her reaction to his name. ‘Charlie Tuesday?’ she had retorted when they’d exchanged names. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

The kind of people who Charlie associated with were well-versed with Foundling Hospital names, where surnames were allocated to children based on what day of the week they’d been abandoned outside. Not a single acquaintance had ever found his name strange.

Clearly, he thought, she had never before had reason to associate with those who had fallen so low on the City’s charity as to be orphans.

‘We were frightened they would shut up our house,’ she was saying. ‘We hoped Eva had some other illness and not the plague. But you know how strict the rules are if any illness is reported.’

Parliament had ruled that heavy red crosses be scrawled across the doors of plague houses. As a result fewer Londoners than ever were willing to report an outbreak.

Charlie nodded. ‘I have moved to a different part of town,’ he said. ‘I had a penny bed in a lodging house on Drury Lane. Now I sleep on the floor of a butcher’s shop for five times the price. The walls are horse-hair and mud, and they take in the summer heat so it is stifling. But it is better than risk being shut-up in a plague district.’

‘That was wise.’ Anna-Maria for once seemed approving. ‘Father did not send for a plague doctor,’ she added. ‘We are a country family by origin, and though some might think us backward, we do not like the tricks of City physicians. Their leeches and toads and such seem strange to us. And besides, in their plague dress they look like monsters and we thought they would fright the younger children.’

Charlie summoned the image of a plague doctor to mind. In their dark capes, ghoulish masks and crystal eye-glasses they frightened adults as well as children. The long metal beaks were stuffed with camphor and vinegar to protect the wearer from the foul air, lending the doctors an acrid stench. And their treatments almost always involved blood-letting and lancing of plague buboils.
Certainly
he crossed over the road if he saw one.

Anna-Maria fiddled with the last few crumbs of bread roll in her hand.

‘But my sister asked for a plague doctor when she took to her bed. So there was nothing to do but let him inside, and in truth I was relieved that we may know whether she had the plague or no.’

She paused to take a great shuddering breath. ‘When we found her . . .’ A dead tone crept into her voice. ‘She was murdered, that is all. Most dreadfully.’

Charlie nodded in what he hoped was a respectful fashion, but he was wondering how he could best escape. Not only had he no intention of helping solve a mystery which was so vastly out of his usual jurisdiction, but the girl had self-confessedly had contact with a plague carrier. Following her to the jaws of death was not how he planned on spending the rest of his afternoon.

‘I will pay you handsomely,’ she said suddenly, sensing his desire to leave.

Charlie coughed in an embarrassed kind of way. ‘It is not the cost of engagement which prevents me,’ he explained in what he hoped was a gentle voice. ‘This is not a crime I can help you with. I catch thieves Maria.’

‘Anna-Maria.’

He ignored the correction. ‘I do not find out those who have made murders. That is for the coroner and the magistrate. My talent is in tracking property. With no stolen item to trace my skills are limited.’

‘I hear you are the best,’ challenged Anna-Maria. ‘Surely a murder is not so different from a theft?’

Charlie opened his hands in explanation. ‘It is very different,’ he said, wondering how best to explain the complex network of fencing and favours which comprised thief taking.

‘And they say that you often let the thieves escape the gallows, once property is returned,’ added Maria. ‘So I know you have a
soft heart.’

Her hand closed around her purse.

‘I will pay you three guineas,’ she added evenly.

Charlie was a better bargainer than to let the involuntary gasp slip out. But she had just offered to pay his rent for three months. The sum was considerably more than he had been paid even by his most noble of clients.

The impulse to accept sprung up, and he drove it back down with some effort.

‘It would not be right or fair,’ he said, realising he had probably brought this temptation on himself by admitting his recent rent increase was troubling him.

‘Four guineas.’

‘I . . . It is not the money. I do not find murderers where there is no property taken.’ He folded out his hands helplessly.

‘I will pay you a guinea just to come to the house and see the situation there,’ said Anna-Maria. ‘It is a fair price to risk your life in a plague place. I know that well enough. If you decide you can help I will pay you three more.’

Charlie swallowed. He had experienced similar feelings only a few times in his life, but always with the same inexorable conclusion. Something inside him was going to accept her offer, and when it did a knowing voice told him he would be drawn into a whole hornet’s nest of trouble. It was like watching a ship slowly ground itself without having the slightest power to turn its course.

‘Very well,’ he heard himself say. ‘Take me to the house then. But likely as not I will not be able to find this murderer for you.’

Anna-Maria nodded, but she didn’t smile.

‘And I am given permission to call you Maria,’ he said, thinking he had nothing to lose. She waved her hand in dismissive acceptance, as if disgusted but too well bred to show it. Charlie had already decided he would take only one guinea from her and leave the residence as soon as possible. Her father must be well off, he thought suddenly, to have a whole house.

Families he knew considered themselves lucky to have a single room. But that was the way it was in London. Land was expensive and life was cheap.

Chapter Five

Charlie had thought that Maria would want to purchase some kind of protection against the plague before returning to her house. But a lethargy descended on her once they’d made an agreement. As though she’d held her grief at bay only long enough to secure his services and now despondency had swept back in.

She must have loved her sister, he thought, feeling a flash of pain at the thought of his own brother. They had been orphaned together but were not close. Charlie always felt his elder sibling Rowan resented his mysterious key.

Charlie managed to buy a little bunch of lavender from a street vendor to hold in front of his nose, though he would rather a vial of vinegar to sip on. His stomach had begun to twist in on itself at the idea of what he was doing, and he sent up yet another silent prayer that he might escape with his guinea and his life.

‘What made you become a thief taker?’ asked Maria, as they passed the squawking mayhem of Cockspur Street. Under King Charles cock-fighting was no longer banned and Londoners had returned to the sport in earnest.

‘Mother Mitchell,’ said Charlie unthinkingly, distracted by the sparring cockerels.

‘I helped one of her girls retrieve a locket and she saw some profit in me,’ he added, seeing Maria’s confusion. ‘Said she would put aristocratic clients my way for a cut. That was how I begun making money from finding out thieves.’

Maria sniffed disapprovingly.

‘I did not find Mother Mitchell out for her girls,’ said Charlie quickly. ‘Indeed I should not have the coin even if I wished it. Her house is now so expensive the suitors need credit to take a glass of wine there.’

‘Then how did you meet a woman of that kind?’

‘I met her many years ago,’ explained Charlie. ‘When I was but a little foundling. She began to employ me in servant’s work for a few pennies and then took me as an apprentice when I came of age.’

‘Sure but the nuns who care for London’s orphans are not so mindful with their charges,’ said Maria, ‘if they cannot protect them from the company of notorious harlots.’

Charlie laughed. ‘They are careful enough. The nuns make visits to London’s less fortunate women. To try and save them from syphilis or hard labour at Bridewell prison. Some of the boys wanted to see what a fallen woman looked like. We followed a nun on her missions. Hid and watched. That is when I first saw Mother Mitchell.’

Charlie smiled at the memory. Mother Mitchell had been the most terrifying and wonderful thing he had ever seen. A great gaudy butterfly spread imperiously across her doorstep. She’d not been so stout back then, but already lines had settled around her eyes and mouth. The enormous bosom jutted from beneath swathes of
purple
silk.

What business have you?
she’d asked the nun.
To tell my girls they should work to death in some hard employment, rather than join me and prosper?

‘And then what happened?’ asked Maria. ‘She invited you in?’

‘No, she caught hold of me. The other boys ran away. Then my shirt rode up and she saw some stolen ship’s biscuits hidden in my waist band.’

‘Ship biscuits? Surely you did not mean to eat them?’ asked Maria, revealing once again her comfortable upbringing. Naval rations were inedible to well-fed landlubbers, but to hungry sailors and starving orphans they were as good a food as any.

‘When Pudding Lane ovens are at their hottest the bakers do not guard their baking, and the windows are small enough for a child for slip through,’ answered Charlie. ‘My hand was well-blistered for it, but those half-cooked biscuits likely kept me from starving. Foundling soup is thin,’ he added.

‘So what then? This harlot would have reported you for
stealing
?’

Charlie shook his head. When she had seen the biscuits Mother Mitchell’s hold had lessened slightly.

Oh ho!
she’d said.
So the little foundling has learned to survive in the big City.

She had looked at him with something like admiration as he writhed and struggled to get free from her grip.

Where is your tongue boy? I am not about to hand you to the constable
.
Why do you not eat the biscuits straightaway? The crown stamped on them shows your crime. It is foolish to carry them around.

He had told her he saved biscuits for his older brother and Mother Mitchell cocked her head, amused. She had asked why the elder could not feed himself and Charlie’s youthful innocence had unwittingly returned the only honest answer.

‘He has given up.’

Mother Mitchell’s face gave the smallest flicker of emotion which had confused the younger Charlie. It had not occurred to him that there was anything untoward in the dynamic between him and his sibling. If he did not supply food Rowan would starve. It was how life was and that was that.

‘So what did she want you for?’ asked Maria, interrupting his thoughts.

‘She said she had work for a bright boy.’

‘And you went?’

‘She offered me money.’

Mother Mitchell had looked thoughtful for a moment before producing a shining penny. It was more money than Charlie had known how to spend.
Come inside then boy. I do not wait on ceremony for foundlings.

‘What did she wish you to do?’

‘She wanted to start up a fine sort of house. Where the high-born of men would come. But it was hard for her to get servants. This was during Cromwell’s Republic and Puritan feelings ran high. Women risked being publicly whipped for being seen with her. She employed me to plant out cuttings for trees, such as grew outside the wealthiest houses.’

Look at this sapling,
Mother Mitchell had said, handing him the slim branch.
You cut off all its roots and still it will find a way to grow. That is not so different from us now, is it boy?

They stopped suddenly. A set of new guards had been posted on Shaftesbury Circus. Plague security was certainly stepping up, thought Charlie.

His fingers traced the forged certificates inside his coat, searching for the one with his name on it.

Maria stuck her certificate out close to the guard’s face, as if daring him to find fault with it.

Charlie slipped out his own certificate and presented it with practised nonchalance, rubbing the back of his neck and looking down at the ground. His eyes slid to Maria’s papers, noting the practised neatness of her signature. By the number at the top, she’d been one of the first in London to get one.

‘Why is there a new checkpoint here?’ Maria demanded, as the guard studied their certificates. ‘Isn’t it enough we must queue to go along the Strand and into Westminster?’

The guard eyed her, as if deciding if she might be a trouble-maker. Charlie silently prayed that Maria’s accusation would not submit his forgery to greater scrutiny.

‘The rich folk on Warwick Lane have banded together,’ said
the guard eventually. ‘They want to be sure no plague travels
heir way.’

‘The fools should realise that plague travels everywhere,’ fumed Maria. ‘Inconveniencing innocent citizens will not halt it.’

The guard shrugged.

‘It is the rich who make the laws,’ he replied. ‘There is to be another check on Cornhill by the end of tomorrow.’

Charlie mentally added the new checkpoint to his map of
London
. The city was closing up. Soon there would be few places it was possible to travel without a certificate.

The guard took in the official stamps of both certificates and waved them through.

‘This way,’ Charlie steered Maria away from Holbourne, pleased to have passed the guard.

‘That way is longer,’ protested Maria.

‘There are some gaming houses near Fleet Street I should rather avoid,’ admitted Charlie.

‘You owe money?’ Maria’s mouth drew in tightly.

‘No,’ said Charlie, pulling her into a tight warren of alleyways, ‘but some do not like my luck at cards.’

‘How do you get your customers?’ asked Maria, as Charlie wove them through the labyrinthine back streets. ‘Surely commoners cannot afford a thief taker.’ She was looking at his bare feet.

Charlie ignored the slight. ‘During Cromwell’s reign I ran secret masked balls for the aristocracy in Covent Garden,’ he said. ‘They were very popular and I made good money for a time. All else around was grey and Puritan. I made good enough noble acquaintances to be trusted as a thief taker.’

He felt a sudden pang of sadness, remembering how his wife had loved the masked balls.

‘Here,’ said Maria, turning a sudden corner. ‘The house is just ahead.’

Charlie was relieved to see it looked to be a good sort of street, with none of the ominous red crosses which peppered the east of the city.

Then he saw the slogan, written up in chalk.

‘REPENT,’ read the letters. ‘THE END IS NIGH.’