Veil of Lies (10 page)

6

Crispin awoke in his own bed and wondered if he dreamed it, though when he tried to move his head, the pain told him otherwise. Only one eye worked and he hazily recalled why. “Jack?”

“Beside you, Master.” Jack put his cool hand on Crispin’s forehead. “Are you feeling better, sir?”

“I do not know if ‘better’ is the word for it. Conscious, perhaps, but little more.” He tried to rise, but it felt healthier not to. Jack agreed by pushing him gently back.

“You was thrashed right good. You done it to protect me.” He sniffed. His eyes were wet.

“Pull yourself together, Jack.”

Jack ran his finger under his wet nose and took it the length of his sleeve. “I’m right grateful, I am. And as for her. You must truly think she’s innocent to try to protect her from the sheriff. No one blames you for telling him after all.”

Crispin stared up at the ceiling. Jack’s words jabbed at a place in his hollow insides. He had to admit that he didn’t know what he thought of Philippa Walcote. In fact, he hadn’t wished to consider her guilty at all, and that was not like him.

He glanced at Jack’s hopeful expression. Since Crispin was incapable by his rank of striking back at the sheriff, though he dearly wanted to and replayed in his head exactly how it would be done, he couldn’t allow Wynchecombe to hurt the boy. Not on his account.

“Jack, would you do me a favor?”

Jack knelt by the bed and rested his clasped hands on the straw-stuffed mattress in a prayerful posture. “Anything!”

“I want you to go to the Thistle and see if our friend is still lodged in that room.”

“The innkeeper will not say. You heard him.”

“And so did you. Did you believe him?”

“Not when I seen the man with me own eyes.”

“Then do not ask the innkeeper. Look for yourself. Ask the servants. Perhaps they will be more willing to speak of that room to you.”

“I’ll need a bribe.”

Crispin looked down for his belt but Jack had removed it. He saw it and his purse on the table. “Take a few small coins from my purse. There’s a good lad.”

Jack turned to stare at the pouch but did not move to fetch it. He pressed his teeth into his lower lip. “You want
me
to get money from
your
purse.”

Crispin chuckled through his aching face. “Yes. No stealing this time. I’m actually giving you permission.”

Jack licked his lips, swathing his tongue several times over his slick mouth. Finally he rose and approached the purse as if it were a wild animal. He opened the flap with only two fingers and reached in.

“Good heavens, boy!” cried Crispin, laughing. “You’re not gutting a fish. Just take it!”

Jack nodded and quickly withdrew a few halpens. He put them in one of the many secret hiding places in his shoulder cape and looked back at Crispin uncertainly.

It was then that Crispin was struck once more by how young the lad was. Jack must have had the devil’s own time surviving as long as he did on his own. The boy was resilient. Clever. He reminded Crispin of…well, long ago.

He watched Jack shrug on his cloak with a feeling of empathy. A man’s life was not easy. And life on the Shambles was harder than most. Was his staying with Crispin only prolonging the inevitable?

Jack looked back at him again and gave him a wary smile. He lifted the latch, yanked on the door ring, and pulled the door open. A misty draft blew in before he slipped out and shut the door behind him.

Alone again, Crispin rose carefully from his cot and swallowed a wave of dizziness. He staggered to the mirror nailed to a timber and stared at his reflection in the small rectangle of polished brass. His left eye looked like two plums pressed together. A gash where Wynchecombe’s ring cut him ran unevenly in a rusted brown line down one cheek while the other sported a mottled blue bruise. He knew he could not go out like this even if he could walk. How was he to ask his questions looking like the loser in a cockfight? He took the rag Jack used to wipe the blood from his face and dunked it in the cold water of the bucket and pressed it to the eye. It was going to be a few days before he was presentable again. By then, he hoped to have more answers he could offer to the sheriff and satisfy himself.

The next morning, Jack had not yet returned. Crispin found he could not simply convalesce, so he busied himself poking the fire and eating the rest of the hen Jack had cooked the night before and left for him. He cracked the bones and sucked out the marrow and tossed the waste into the fire, watching it spit while the bones blackened. He leaned out the back courtyard window into the cold, crisp morning, trying to catch a glimpse of the street between two buildings. When that proved futile, he cast his glance instead across the row of courtyards peeking out from an undulating plain of rooftops. Housewives, plagued by children at their feet, hung laundry. Men sat on stools mending the tools of their livelihoods. And always, cats wandered, stalking the family geese.

He turned back to the room, his good eye scanning until it lighted on the stack of Walcote’s books. He pulled the chair from the table and sat. Dragging the first book toward him, he opened it. The tangy scent of leather blended with the musty aroma of parchment and ink, recalling to Crispin’s mind better days at his own accounting books when he had more than two pence to rub together. Settling down to the business of examining the page, he ran his finger down each column, searching for anything amiss.

For hours he read the entries and tabulations. Only one hand made each entry. He surmised it was that of Nicholas Walcote. No embezzlements, then. No false entries to suggest it, in any event.

He set the book aside and picked up the customs ledger. Many different hands had worked on this book, which dated from two years ago. The entries were full of the minutiae of shipping and exporting; sacks of raw wool and bolts of cloth and the names of ships making for the staple port in France.
The Starling
headed for Calais with 1,152 sacks for the king’s export tax of eighty pounds in the early spring of 1382. The
St. George
sailed also to Calais where the taxes were collected for two hundred bolts of dyed cloth. And so it went month after month, entry after entry.

Until a year ago. He read an entry for 1,008 sacks of wool for seventy pounds sailing from the customs port of Sandwich to Calais. Crispin looked at the entry and turned the pages back until he spotted the previous shipments. Clearly they were for 1,152 sacks—eight gross—almost every time for a levied tax of eighty pounds. Page upon page of it.

He studied the new entry. Fewer sacks. And ever after, 1,008 instead of 1,152. Why suddenly were all ships carrying some 144 sacks less? Certainly there would not be less room for them on the ships. He could not tell from the sparse entry, but the same hand seemed to have written only those entries with the 1,008 sacks. He compared it to the entries in Walcote’s ledgers. They didn’t match. So at least Walcote was not the one recording this customs information, and perhaps he wasn’t the one collecting the taxes. Who was it? Only the initials BV were scrawled at the end of the columns. Who was BV? Usually some member of the guild was responsible for such duties, so BV must belong either to the woolman’s guild, the weavers, or the mercers.

“Someone is skimming the cream off the milk,” he muttered. He had no doubt that the wool suppliers presented eight gross worth of wool in good faith and paid the standard eighty pounds of tax, but someone was making good money collecting the payment, secreting ten pounds of it, and then reporting only seven gross of wool. But who?

Crispin tapped his finger on the hard edge of the leather binding. He was willing to wager that there was another set of books somewhere that showed the proper eight gross sacks for eighty pounds of taxation—just as in the earlier entries. Perhaps Walcote discovered who this knave was. But alas. He would take that information to his grave.

The sun shone weakly from his window and the bells of St. Paul’s pealed Terce when there was a knock on his door. Crispin turned. A knock could mean anything: a new client or an old enemy. He crept toward the door and called, “Who goes there?”

“It’s me. John Hoode!”

Crispin unbarred the door and opened it. “Master Hoode. How did you find me?”

Hoode ducked his head. “I reckon everyone knows where to find the Tracker.”

“I see. What is it?”

When the man lifted his face from his hood he gave a little cry. “Bless my soul! What happened to you?”

Crispin straightened. “The usual encounter with the Lord Sheriff.”

“Pardon me for saying, but next time you encounter him, perhaps you should duck.”

“Good advice. And so. The reason you are here…?”

“I just thought I should tell you that there was a strange man loitering about outside the Walcote manor last night, just beyond the wall. He didn’t do nought. Only stared at the place. The footman at the gatehouse finally shooed him off, but it weren’t more than an hour hence that he was back.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Naw. It was too dim. But he was about your height and all dark in a cloak. Thought you should know.”

Crispin walked to the fire and stared into it. “I thank you for that, John. This is the sort of thing I feared.”

“Who is it, Master Crispin? Is it someone who threatens my mistress?”

“Yes. Do continue to watch and alert me as you have done. You are a good man to your new household, John. It will not be forgotten.”

“I am glad to hear it. A word from you might put me in good stead. I fear I’ve gotten on the wrong side of that Becton. He has a hard look in his eye that I do not like.”

“Yes. Nor I.”

Hoode stood beside Crispin and watched the flames. Crispin turned to him. “Forgive me. May I offer you wine? Or food?”

“Oh, no, Master Crispin. But I thank you. I just wonder…” His eyes wandered about the sparse room. “That a man like you must live on the Shambles and do the odd job for the wealthy. It don’t seem right.”

“I have made my own fate, Master Hoode. And I must live it out until the Final Judgment. God grant that I am better judged then.”

“Aye,” he answered vaguely, for he surely could not know what Crispin was talking about. “Well then. I must return before I am missed. I will take my leave. God keep you, sir.”

“And you.”

Hoode opened the door just as Jack returned. They stared at one another and Jack refused to move. Hoode finally took the initiative and decidedly stepped past him, rumbling down the stairs with a mumbled oath.

Jack stayed on the landing and glared after him until his steps had dispersed. It was only then that he turned a warmer expression on Crispin. Under his arm he carried a round loaf of bread with several sausage links dangling precariously from his fingers while the other arm had a small wheel of cheese tucked against a wineskin. A meat pie bulged from his scrip.

“I don’t like that fellow. There’s a way about him I don’t trust.”

“He’s a good spy. And I must trust him for now.” Crispin pushed the candle and books aside and helped Jack with the victuals. “Well? You were gone all night. What of your task?”

Jack placed the food with care on the table and smiled up at Crispin. “Your eye’s looking better. Can you see out of it yet?”

“To hell with that. Did you find him?”

“Aye. He was still there, or at least his things were. I did not bother talking to the innkeeper, like you said.” He took a long iron fork and skewered two sausages on each prong and propped it over the fire. He withdrew his knife and sliced through the cheese’s rind and stacked several thick slivers on the table.

Crispin slammed his hand down over Jack’s wrist and glared almost nose to nose with him.
“What did you find?”

Jack withdrew his hand, shook out the tenderness, and sheathed his dirty knife. “Well now. I went and talked to the chambermaid and she said that the master told her not to speak of the man in the room. She knew nought of the man except that he is a foreigner and keeps odd hours, coming in quite late and leaving early. She said she didn’t know why the master would not let anyone speak of him or let on that anyone was in that room.” Jack grimaced and blushed. “I didn’t have to bribe her. She chucked me chin, told me I was a sweet pup, and to be on me way. I ain’t no pup!”