Michael Jecks - The King of Thieves

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘I want to speak to you, master.’

It was the youngster with the white eye, he saw. The lad had his face to the grating in the wooden door, like a man trying to escape by forcing his way through the ironwork. His lips were outside the cell. Perhaps that was it, he wanted to be free so desperately that merely pushing his lips to the free air outside was enough.

In the glittering torchlight, the man’s one good eye rolled with anguish. Of course, Pons thought, the others in the cell would be interested to know what the boy thought he could sell … and if he was to betray another, his life would not be worth a brass sou.

In the last few days, many of the prisoners gathered up by the Watch, were already so desperate to escape their cells that they were calling Vital and Pons to relate any snippet. So far, none of it had been of any use whatever. If there had been much chance of a breakthrough, he would have woken Vital, but now, seeing this man’s yearning to be free of the cell, he was glad he had not done so. This was another useless dead-end, if he knew anything.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘They call me Le Boeuf.’

‘Well, Boeuf, if you get out of that cell because you tell me you know something, and then I learn you don’t, you’ll be straight back inside — and next time you ask to see me, it’ll be a week before I come down here. Got that? I dislike having my time wasted, and looking at you, I have to ask myself: “What can this piece of shit know that can possibly help me?”’

‘Please!’

Pons studied him a moment longer, wearing his ‘dicing’ face. An expressionless face was particularly useful when gambling with some of the sailors at the riverside, but now Pons was using it to intimidate. Making a decision, he span on his heel and was off up the stairs, the guard hurrying behind him, while Le Boeuf screamed after them.

‘That man, you know him?’ Pons asked the guard as they reached the street level.

‘He’s just a low-life. I suspect him of cutting a few purses, pocketing a few trinkets, perhaps. But mostly he’s just a nuisance because of his attempts at begging. I’ve seen him before now, with a patch over his good eye, pretending to be blind, grabbing at any matron who passed.’

‘So it’s hardly likely he has anything of use,’ Pons said.

‘I doubt it,’ the guard agreed. He was a large, broad man with swarthy features and a face that had been scarred badly by a sword or dagger blow many years before. The scar tissue had marred his face, a great horizontal mark that reached from one cheek almost across to the other, breaking his nose on the way. His face was enough to scare Pons, let alone the men downstairs.

‘Have you had any deaths in that cell yet?’

‘No. But there’s a couple who’re coughing badly. Could be they’re getting the prisoners’ disease.’

Pons reflected. ‘Ach, we had them all taken so that we could listen to their tales. I may as well learn what I may. Bring him up here to me.’

‘ Sieur .’

The man called Le Boeuf had been punished before, Pons saw. His right ear had been heavily clipped. The entire lobe and much of the rear of the ear was gone. That was good. He knew what he might suffer, then.

Pons said nothing for some moments, considering the man. Le Boeuf had great manacles on his wrists, and the heavy chain dangled almost to his groin. At his ankles were more chains, hobbling him most effectively. The blood was staining his bare feet where the metal bands chafed his flesh.

Apart from that, he had only terror in his eyes. It was there in the way that his eye avoided Pons’s own, the way that he kept looking longingly over Pons’s shoulder towards the daylight outside, but also in the wideness of his eye and his panting. This was no ordinary terror. Perhaps he suffered from that fear of small, dark spaces which afflicted so many?

‘Well?’ Pons said sternly. ‘You said you had something to tell me.’

‘Will you release me from that cell if I tell you all?’

‘If you can tell me who killed the Procureur, I will have you freed and see that you are well rewarded too.’

The young man glanced over his shoulder as though stiffening his resolve by reminding himself what the alternative was.

‘Then I will tell you. There is a group in Paris which runs all the crimes.’

Pons lifted an eyebrow.

‘It is true, Master. The man in charge, he is called the King, and he has many men at his command. Those who cut purses or rob, or the others who break into houses, they all have to pay him. He takes what they steal and sells it for them, and they receive a part for themselves. If they steal money, they must pay him. If they have whores, they must pay one-fifth of their takings to him. All the crimes in Paris are to his profit.’

‘You tell me that the thieves of Paris have a King?’ Pons said cynically. ‘Guard! Put this man back with the others!’

‘No! He lives in rooms near to the eastern wall, down by the river. The thieves go to him at night. Those who disappoint him are taken to a warehouse at the river itself, and their bodies thrown in.’

‘I suppose he kills them himself?’

‘No. He has his own executioner, just like our King Charles. It was that executioner who slew the Procureur.’

Pons felt his breath stilled in his breast. ‘This executioner killed the Procureur? How do you know?’

‘I saw him. I was in the alley when it happened.’

Louvre

Baldwin was relieved to be told that Richard of Bury had the Duke fettered that morning. Instead of the usual chase about the King’s parks hunting deer, or the apparently endless round of engagements and feasts in his honour, the Duke of Aquitaine was to be left with his tutor to learn more about the position of France in Christendom, and the politics of his new estates.

‘It is time he learned what his new responsibilities are,’ Bury had said, overruling the arguments of Sir Richard, Sir Henry de Beaumont and the Duke himself. Fixing Duke Edward with a steely eye, he continued, ‘Because Princes who do not study their realms with due diligence and care may find that they lose them!’

Baldwin would have smiled, but for the expression on the Duke’s face, which consisted of a mix of resentment and shock, from the idea that his hold on Guyenne and the other parts of his territory could be as precarious as his father’s had been.

‘Come. You had better teach me all you may, then,’ Duke Edward said at last. And as he walked from the room in Richard of Bury’s wake, Baldwin heard him add, ‘And mind you teach well, Master Bury, for if I lose my lands because of a failing on your part, I will have my payment from you directly!’

It made Baldwin grin to hear it. The Duke was far too young for such an awesome responsibility, but he did have the intelligence to keep himself from arrogance, and the humour to win friends.

‘What you grinnin’ about?’ Sir Richard asked.

‘Just reflecting on our Duke.’

Simon snorted and gazed quizzically at the door through which the Duke had left. ‘Was Bury serious when he said the Duke could lose the lot?’

‘His father did,’ Sir Richard pointed out.

‘But I think the young Duke is stronger in temperament,’ Baldwin said. ‘I can recall listening to tales of the King with his father, Edward the First. The two Edwards were often at loggerheads, I heard. And at one time, the old King grasped his son by the head and tried to pull his hair out, he was so frustrated. King Edward the First was a long-lived King. It must have been a sore trial to his son, our present King, to have waited so long in his father’s shadow.