Gregory House - The Queen's Oranges

If it wasn’t for honour, duty and obligation, Ned would have stepped clear of this problem days ago. No chance of that. His daemon had conveniently reminded him of the large amount of his future payments invested in the vessel and cargo. Now if only his lords and masters understood the meaning of a sworn oath. According to usages of chivalry, it was supposed to be reciprocal, guaranteeing protection for service. That and the duty to the King, and God through his handmaiden the Church, was what bound the commonweal together. The greater part of what stoked his fury was the natural assumption that as a servant he could be used as a cats-paw without any consideration of his own honour. That was a vile corruption of the relationship.

It could have been understandable. It may even have been justified, but in no way was it sensible or prudent. Ned slammed the door of the shipmaster’s cabin hard against the wall as he entered. It sounded like the boom of a Great Gonne and startled Mistress Black and Albrecht. They both spun around in surprise dislodging the sorted pile of shipping bills, which fell onto the deck in a slow, fluttering cascade.

Meg Black took one look at the spreading carpet of words and numbers and turned to Ned. “You tottering, tickle-brained puttock! That took hours to work through. We just about had it done and you burst in without a care, like some ill bred, ham handed measle!”

Ned was not going to be put off by Meg’s ‘you’re a clumsy clot’ routine. He had his own claims on anger. He stood his ground and roared back. “Well damn you Meg Black for a meddling fool. What whispering serpent convinced you to seize those oranges risking us all!”

If he thought she was peeved at his interruption that was nothing. Mistress Black drew herself up to her full height of five foot with hands on hips and her eyes sparking fury fit to set a fire. “And damn yourself Ned Bedwell. I was there and nor do I need the say so of any of God’s creatures who need to scratch a codpiece before I act! Anyway who made you lord and master to command so?”

“It is my natural right by law and custom to be obeyed. After all I lead this company!” Well it was the truth as Ned perceived it then and there, and by the law framed in his musty tomes. He was sort of right and the Church did support the biblical fact that a woman was in second place to a man, her natural lord and master. However there was a great deal of distance between letters scribbled on crackling parchment and the daily realities of life. His proclamation, as he found, exposed the gaping flaws in this reasoning.

“Do you so?”

It was quietly said for Mistress Black had reached that calm plateau beyond mere anger. Her passion was furnace bright, fit for forging and casting the bolts of Jupiter. Ned may have had a flicker of apprehension and his better angel of caution and restraint tugged vainly at his shoulder. Alas though, it was all to no avail for the daemon of righteousness was firmly in the saddle and so ignored the first step over the precipice. Usually Ned would have noted, with a significant twitch of foreboding, her assumed stance with folded arms, but his choleric temper pushed him well past prudence.

“Well, Lord Bedwell, give a command and we’ll see if it is obeyed.” It was a simple and reasoned reply, so much so that Albrecht took one look at the two of them and shot out the open doorway as fast as he could.

Ned opened his mouth to frame a command, his second foot following the first in edging over the chasm. This was going to prove difficult. Her Hanse agent had just precipitously fled so that wasn’t an option, and although Ned apparently owned the vessel he now stood on, none knew it and the crew seemed to accept their orders from Mistress Margaret Black. Ned was finding himself suddenly short of followers. There were Gryne’s men-however half here were paid by Mistress Black and in any clash of wills could not be counted on. After all they owned fealty to Captaine Gryne and he had high regard for Dr Caerleon who in the twisted pattern of the city felt he still owed a debt of blood to the Blacks. Of course he could always call upon his friend Rob, or then once the rarefied pinnacle of command had cleared his head, perhaps not. Ned found himself plummeting down the trap of his own making. It would be prudent not to put his friend to the test of opposing his younger sister. The heights of command suddenly felt very exposed and chilly.

Ned knew defeat when he saw it and one thing he had learned at the Inns was the art of evasion. So he put on his most imperious stance and pointed to the disarray of papers. “Tell me what you’ve found!”

It was close-very, very close. He could see her eyes measuring him up for where the next blow was to land. He’d prefer if it was not the face. The last set of bruises had taken a week to fade. The hand slowly relaxed and Meg Black turned back to the table. It may have the appearance of a draw, but Ned had caught the distinct impression of a satisfied smile on her face. “Well, Lord Bedwell, Albrecht and I have gone through all the ship’s ledgers, both the official and secret ones, and we found nothing special or manifestly different from what we thought was being carried, so we’re no closer.”

Ned would’ve had to have been deaf not to hear the sneering start to her reply. Well his dignity could ignore that. The bills of lading were another matter. He took the few paces to the scattering of documents and stooped to pick some up, giving each a brief review as he sorted through them. Not that he could decipher much. Without an intricate knowledge of the merchant’s code, it might say ‘one gross barrels of stock fish and twenty ells of Flemish cloth’, but considering the true cargo it could, and probably did mean anything.

Without even turning his head he knew that Meg Black would be watching him with that every so satisfied smirk. Secretly he gave an inward stoic sigh. Such slights must be endured for the greater good. As camouflage Ned picked up a single sheet and perused its cramped script.

This situation was sliding from disaster into catastrophe. It seemed to Ned that Master Albrecht Hagan had once more chosen not to inform Meg as to the fullest nature of the cargo. Whereas some trade secrets are best kept close, the dire progress of this affair should have prompted a prudent merchant to confide a lot more than this obscure pile of scratchings. So why not? Where lay the honour of merchants and smuggling?

Now as in any business transaction it all came down to a matter of trust, who did you trust and with what? Meg trusted Albrecht and Joachim with the consignment of heretical works so that was fine. The shipmaster knew and trusted, to a degree, his crew for their petty customs evasions. However the real question in all this was who had Joachim trusted for the weapons and powder? For it certainly wasn’t Mistress Black. Reality dictated that such a large quantity of contraband couldn’t have been gathered by the shipmaster and his nephew alone. That activity required a detailed knowledge of the city and it’s customs, as well as the time, space and resources to cultivate the ‘arrangement’.

Of course it always came back to gold and silver in the end. Rob’s rough estimate was that the value of his discovered contraband was around five hundred pounds, and if the consignment was to go to the Irish then the profit would be three times that.

It seemed most perverse that the word of God was only worth a fifth of the value of the weapons of war. Truly they lived in evil times. So to Ned’s suspicious purview there must have been a partner, and it was either that person or the supplier who broke the trust of the deal. The result of that dereliction was of course-murder.

Ned stood there lost in a fog of suspicion as Meg Black tickled off the items of cargo and contraband. Through the swirling mist one figure kept on popping into dim view. For once Ned was circumspect enough not to blurt it out. He’d want a lot more information before he challenged the favoured agent and friend of the Black clan. To his thinking, it was definitely past time for a long conversation with the Hanse merchant and that thought led to another question. “Meg, do you have a new shipmaster yet?”