tightly. “That was my landlord . . . and his wife.” He said the last with bared teeth. He gestured uselessly toward the closed window. “And the boy was Jack Tucker. He insists on calling himself my servant but I’m afraid he is more suited to the vocation of a cutpurse.”
The girl did not change expression. She merely lifted her upswept nose. Her eyes were gray like Crispin’s but more watery than his slate, and for all her steady gaze, there seemed little sense behind those eyes.
He gave up.
“We were speaking of a dead man,” he said quietly. “And his killer. You say you know who it is.”
“Livith wasn’t there,” she repeated.
“No, she wasn’t there. You said that.” He groaned and slowly blinked. This was going to take all day. “Does anyone else know this man is in your room?”
She shook her head. “I wanted
“You have it. Who killed him?”
“I shouldn’t say—”
“Are you protecting someone?”
“It ain’t like that.” She sucked on her dirty index finger.
“If you know who did it then you must tell me.”
Her face crumpled and tears spilled down her apple cheeks. She pulled her finger from her mouth and dropped her hand to her lap. In a small voice she said, “
2
CRISPIN DID HIS BEST to settle his expression into something bland and unthreatening. He looked her slight frame up and down. She was a hand span shorter than Jack Tucker, who was another hand span shorter than Crispin. “
“Aye. I must have, mustn’t I? I was the only one there.” She wiped her moist nose with her fingers.
He sat on the chair and pulled it up to her, looking her in the eye. “It doesn’t necessarily follow that you killed him.”
“But I did!” Her wide eyes darted, lighting here and there in the room, never finding a resting place. “I must have.”
“Did he attack you?”
“No.”
He watched her lip tremble, and a tear rolled with ferocity down her cheek, dragging a dirty trail with it. “I think it best we go to your lodgings and discover what we can. Maybe your sister has returned.”
“Aye!” She jumped to her feet and pushed him out of the way to get to the door. “Maybe she’s back.”
She unbolted the door and scurried over the threshold. Crispin watched her descend the stairs. He settled his cloak over his shoulders, locked the door, and tromped down the steps after her.
The midmorning shadows hatched the lane, leaving some puddles to catch the blue-tinted sky while others reflected a dull gray. A man with a pushcart of bundled sticks heaved his charge over the muddy ruts, swearing colorfully to the saints as he did so. A dog sniffed at his heel at first and then trotted onward to lift his leg at the first rung of Crispin’s stair.
“Make haste!” The girl danced near a frost-edged puddle outside the tinker shop. “Livith might be back and she’ll be awful cross with me.”
“Leaving a dead man in her room,” Crispin muttered. “I should think so.”
He followed her along the Shambles over muddy lanes and dark alleys stinking of mold. The clouds, so recently parted above, closed in again and made the way dark and threatening with rain. Crispin knew the King’s Head, an inn little better than his favorite haunt, the Boar’s Tusk on Gutter Lane. Though he considered the latter no fine tavern, his friends Gilbert and Eleanor Langton owned it and made it homey. The King’s Head was a rougher place, an inn near the wharves, less inviting except to drown a man’s sorrows in watered wine and even smaller beer.
They traveled south. Men with fine garb and fur-trimmed mantles became fewer, replaced by anonymous gray men frowning under rough hoods made of cat skins. Even the horses looked different the closer they came to the Thames. The lustrous coats of good mounts gave way to frail stotts, pulling carts with shuffling gaits, their ribs clearly visible on their dull flanks. The rats, on the other hand, were healthy and sleek and, in some instances, as big as piglets. They shambled along the foundations, foraging unabated.
Once Crispin and the girl passed through a narrow close, the inn slowly emerged out of the gloom of London’s choking smoke and the brackish mist rising from the nearby Thames. A big, square building, the inn’s dark half- timbers looked like frown lines and its drooping roof tiles like brows. A boy no older than Jack was sweeping the threshold of the inn’s entrance with a mended broom in a lazy back and forth motion. The girl did not greet him nor did the boy look up. Instead, the girl took Crispin across the courtyard and behind the building into the stable yard. The air was pungent with its aroma of sweaty horses, moldy hay, and dung. A rat eyed Crispin with a twist of its whiskers, turned, and scurried up the wall before it disappeared beneath a roof tile.
The girl looked back once at Crispin to make sure he still followed, stepped down a short staircase to a lower croft, and opened a door.
The passage lay in darkness except for the slightly brighter outline of a door ahead. The girl opened it and stepped aside. Crispin inhaled old smoke and mildew. The stone walls were streaked brown with moisture. A small half-round window studded with iron bars squinted from above their heads, letting in only strands of blue-tinted light and sprinkling rain. The window sat at street level, and all he could see was the slick street and striding feet.
One lit candle and the hearth—if the small collection of stones and sticks in the center of the floor could be called a hearth—burned halfheartedly. The smoke rose to the low arched ceiling, whirled in eddies between the beams, and meandered toward the open window.
The storeroom, with its stacked barrels and plump sacks, offered barely enough space for a pallet with a pile of straw, a chipped chamber pot, a table, a bench, two bowls, two wooden spoons.
And a dead man in the corner.
No signs of a scuffle or a break-in. Nothing out of place or out of the ordinary. The man simply seemed to have dropped where he was shot. He lay with his back propped against the wall, legs out before him, head lolled to one side. The wooden shaft of an arrow protruded from his chest, just the right place for his heart. A direct hit. Only six inches of shaft and hawk fletching rose out of a houppelande coat soaked with blood. Crispin knelt and touched the man’s throat, but the ashen skin and dry staring eyes told him he would find no pulse. Except for the rusty smell of blood, the man was fragrant with lavender water. Crispin picked up his limp hand and examined it in the sparse light. The nails were clean and trimmed. By his side rested a large bag containing a wooden box.
Not a ruffian out for a bit of fun. His garb of a quartered houppelande with its blue and gold fields of fleur-de- lis made Crispin’s skin crawl. This man was not merely a Frenchman, but his livery indicated he came from the French court.
Crispin glanced over his shoulder to look back at the girl. “Did you open this bag?”
She shook her head.
He rubbed sweat from his upper lip. A courier, perhaps. A
He heard a gasp and turned. A woman stood silhouetted against the open doorway. “What by Saint Cuthbert’s bollocks goes on here?” she cried.
The simpleton girl rushed into the woman’s arms and fell to loud weeping. The woman’s square face twisted into a look of shock, and she dragged the girl into the room trying to shush her. Her shaking hands covered the girl’s