Gregory House - The Queen's Oranges

With good grace he emptied his purse onto the table. If he fell tonight he wasn’t going to need it and debts were debts. One collection of coins refused to spill out like the rest, rather landing in a soggy splodge. Damn those children and the oranges at the Boars Head. It’d be just like Emma’s foundlings to pull such a trick-slipping a squashed orange into his purse! Damn the little scurriers. He’d tried to be friendly, even generous, and now his coin was covered in this sticky residue.

Ned pulled out his eating blade and tried to pry the coins apart. It was not a success. The juices had set into a dark, sticky goo, refusing to yield to persuasion, and to add to the frustration, his hands were now covered in the dark excretion. Gryne watched the performance with mounting amusement, and made the odd comment about a how he’d known a few gentleman who’s hands could stick to gold but usually someone else’s.

Resolutely Ned held on to his temper. It wouldn’t do to let a child’s cozening enrage him so, and continued with the messy task. That was until he freed several coins. Then he slammed his hands down and cried out in shock and surprise.

Damn him for a measle brained dullard. He wasn’t fit to be an apprentice village idiot. How could he have been so blind! The golden coins stuck together by the black orange excrescence weren’t his! Well they were, sort of, but not really. They were part of Belsom’s bribe!

Yesterday, before he hid the gold he was so providentially given, Ned had grabbed a handful. Just to defray expenses of course. The mass of glued coins proved to be gold sovereigns still stuck to a compressed remnant of orange.

So that was one connection. Don Juan Sebastian was paying Belsom.

…But actually it wasn’t.

Why was the Spaniard handing over masses of coin to the pursuivant of the Lord Chancellor? The action defied logic. Why pay the horse’s arse when you could more easily pay the rider? Sure, Belsom commanded a hefty troop of men, but so did a dozen or more other lords, each more reliable than that fat buffoon. If you were organising some sort of affray, Belsom couldn’t, by any stretch, be classed as a natural leader who commanded compliance or respect. So why did he have the gold and so much to ready hand?

Ned, to Gryne’s continued amusement, pried further at the orange conglomeration. This still didn’t make any sense. The pulp shouldn’t be so black. His time spent in Meg’s company at the apothecaries hadn’t been wasted. When oranges were as dark as this one, the rot was so far advanced that you could smell them for yards. So why were these smelling sickly sweet, but only slightly pungent?

Cautiously he dipped his finger into the ooze and then on into his mouth. The taste elicited another cry of surprise. Ned shot to his feet and walked briskly towards the door. A call from a startled Gryne had him half turn and call over his shoulder. “Keep as much of that as you need and send the four men over. If there are any more, I’ll pay triple so long as they arrive before Vespers chimes.”

Ned had to get back to the Ruyter as soon as possible. He had too much to organise before tonight. The delay and distraction of the Black siblings for one!

As Ned paced rapidly through the crowded street, he couldn’t help but growl out a string of curses. What an act of red handed ruthlessness. Typical. He should have put the clues together before this. It had been staring him in the face for the past week and he’d been too stupid and narrow focused to step back and see it.

One of his masters at the college once had come up with a surprisingly wise axiom. A man is only the sum of his experiences, and how a man acts is the result of what he is taught and what he sees.

Sir Thomas More saw the successful suppression of the Evil May Day Riots catapult him into Royal service and prominence. This time it could do it again, but with a callous twist. It was the cannons in the tower that quelled the last disturbance. Now, with a savage irony, they would start the next one. More was planning a bombardment of the city tonight or tomorrow to pre-empt the signing of the King’s Great Petition. That levelling of the city was paid for by Imperial gold, orchestrated by a bitter queen and the family of an executed traitor.

And just how did he know all this from just a single taste? It was Rob really who he had to thank for that lesson. The tang wasn’t that of a tart orange. It was of saltpetre with an overlay of sulphur, while the black of the pulp was from charcoal. As Ned had found in the last week, the only place in London with oranges, all the ingredient of Gonne powder and a hefty, iron shod strong box was the office of Sir Welkin Blackford, Master of the King’s Ordinance at the Tower of London, aficionado of oranges and a relation to Lady Stafford

And the man who controlled all the great city smashing Gonnes in the country!

***

The echo of the blow ricocheted off the wooden walls of the flanking warehouses. Ned would have collapsed in a crumpled heap however his captors had thoughtfully supplied him with three hefty men in monk’s robes. If they’d ever been in Holy Orders, then his bet would be on something violent and bloody like the Knights of St John, who hacked off the heads of Moors and Turks as a devout avocation. He’d gone through this sort of questioning the other day, and less than an hour ago it was going so well. This whole situation was so damn unfair. Lady Fortuna, so gracious with her gifts earlier in the day, and now? She was often described as capricious, whimsical, as flighty as a will-o’-the-whisp… Muzzily Ned tried to recall the, oh so recent, past, and sort out just where that fickle hearted lady had deserted him.

Ned had planned for all foreseeable eventualities. He’d even gone over his preparations with Tam Bourke, and if any man in London understood the vagaries of traps and ambushes, it was the second in command of Gryne’s men. It should have been perfect, gliding elegantly through each stage like the ticking of the great clock at St Paul’s, as one part of the scheme set the next into play.

It had begun smoothly. He had convinced Rob that the two punks, Lizzie and Mary, knew the whereabouts of the powder sorters lair, and that it was crucial to organise a raid as soon as darkness fell. He had leant upon the suggestion that Meg Black should be as far away as possible, looking after the remnants of the Orange Watch. Since the fracas this morning such provocation was going to be easy. He reckoned he’d figured out the motivations of Meg Black, well was much as any man could. The lass couldn’t resist the temptation to flout another of his commands.

Ned had considered the problems of having both Meg and Mary in the same location again. Flame and powder was a good comparison-well, one just had to take some chances. For this part, Ned felt he had hit upon a cunning lure. He’d quietly told Rob that he believed Ben Robinson was being held captive there. That lie, or prevarication as his daemon insisted on naming it, made him feel rather like a base traitor, but it was, at least, a good possibility. Those two so-called powder sorters needed someone to organise the cutting of the illicit powder, a skill Ned was sure that they didn’t possess. In all of London, Master Robinson was the only one apart from the Doutch Gonne artificers, who knew how to do it without expiring suddenly and dramatically.

That was not the real reason for the raid or the deliberate misdirection of the rest of the company. That owed inspiration from a darker motive. Since his meeting with Dr Caerleon Ned now believed he knew what chaos the Queen’s Oranges were set to unleash. Nothing short of the destruction of London’s east!