P. Chisholm - A Murder of Crows

Dodd thought it showed there was some sense amongst the servingmen of London.

“Or at least, none of them want to work for me in Carlisle,” Carey amended, proving that Londoners were idiots.

Carey was now hurrying out of the main door and heading north across the city. Dodd hurried after him and noted that despite the rebuff of the servingmen, Carey was wearing an expression as smug as a bridegroom. On general principles, he loosened his sword.

They came to a very small lane not far from London Wall. It was one of the poorer places and was full of houses that seemed to have been patched together from pieces of something larger, some of them still clinging to the foundations made of large granite blocks.

People were passing up and down the street, and occasionally one of them would turn seemingly on impulse and head down an alleyway. Carey watched for a while and then headed for the alleyway himself. On the corner a crowing cockerel was chalked on the wall.

Dodd followed him full of forboding. The alleyway seemed to end, but in one corner were steps leading down and a boy sitting there. Carey smiled at him, spoke for a moment, and then beckoned Dodd to go down the steps with him.

It was a small crypt with an arched ceiling and thick plain pillars. At one end was a table laid with linens and six black candles about the coffin and a large number of people were standing about, talking quietly. In an alcove was a worn chipped figure of a man fighting what looked like a bull-perhaps some Papistical saint? Carey looked about him and took his hat off, so Dodd did the same.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” Carey said quietly to him. “I was expecting something quieter.”

Dodd didn’t like it either. He hated being in a place that only had one exit and he certainly was not planning to listen to a Papist mass which would be in solid foreign from start to finish and even more boring than a proper church service. Besides being treason outright. He saw that there was a door in the side of the opposite wall which was some comfort but…

There were some young men near the front with worryingly holy expressions, praying hard for something. Dodd didn’t like the looks of that either. He threaded through the crowd, some of whom were praying rosaries of all dangerous treasonable things, and squinted at the door. Was it clear? He tested it gently but it didn’t move.

Shaking his head, he went back up the steps and hurried round the corner to where he calculated the door should come out. It too was down some steps, but when he went to look at it, he realised it had been nailed shut and the nailheads were still shiny.

Dodd spine froze. Carey was in a stopped earth and so were all the other people. He looked about the street. He couldn’t actually see Heneage’s men but he knew they were there. If they had nailed this exit, probably they wouldn’t be very interested in it, although there would be someone checking it soon to make sure. Somebody must have been following the grey-haired woman when she collected the body.

He leaned against the wall by the entrance and felt for his pipe, started filling the bowl with fingers that shook slightly. How Carey had found himself a secret Papist requiem mass he wasn’t quite sure, but he was certain that it would be raided once it had properly got going and Carey would be the biggest prize.

Of course there was one possible option for Dodd. He could simply walk away, head for the Great North Road, and keep going until he got to his own tower where, by God, he would stay.

He puffed angrily. He wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. Any more than he could have given Heneage the name he had wanted so badly the week before. Damn it, there was something wrong with his brains, that was sure.

He leaned against the door and looked about him at suspiciously little activity for a London alley and there were no plague-marked houses hereabouts to provide an excuse. Any minute now Heneage or Topcliffe and their human terriers would arrive and go into the stopped earth and…

Dodd smiled toothily, tapped out his pipe which was a pity because he hadn’t finished it, spat in the bowl to cool it, and put it away in his belt pouch. He looked about casually again; nothing, not even someone visible at a window across the street. Ay well, no help for it then.

He hammered with his fist on the nailed-shut door in the slow, fear-inspiring way he had seen Lowther use on farmers who hadn’t paid up their blackmail money.

“Open up,” he roared, imitating a London voice as well as he could. “Open in the name of the Queen.”

He banged again, roared again, and waited. There was absolute silence inside. As he sauntered around to the front alley again, he saw a couple of men in travelling cloaks, then a group of women talking merrily, then the young men who had been praying, then a mother with children. Everybody was walking as calmly and normally as if they had not just been about to commit treason.

“What the hell are you doing still here, Dodd,” hissed a voice at his elbow. Dodd turned and saw Carey emerging from amongst the women with a pale and anxious-faced Letty Tregian clinging to his arm. Her brown hair was trailing from under her hat and she seemed to be on the point of collapse. “Heneage and his…”

“Ay well,” said Dodd. “That were me.”

Carey’s eyes turned to points of ice. “If that was your idea of a joke…”

“Nay sir, I saw the escape door had been nailed shut and I thocht I’d get ahead of them a bit.”

Carey frowned for a moment before his face split in a broad grin. He cupped his hand over Letty’s confiding paw, slowed and backed under an awning so he could turn to look over his shoulder. A large contingent of buff-coated men were heading for the steps down to the crypt, at the back of them Topcliffe with his matt black hair and jerky gestures. Dodd allowed a brief smile at the heart-warming sight before hurrying on in Carey’s wake.

“They certainly know what to do in a crisis, these Papists,” said Carey as they sat down again in yet another boozing ken where Carey had already called for brandy to restore some colour to Letty’s cheeks. “Never seen anything like it. You banging on the door and shouting the way you did, everybody stops what they’re doing-the priest had just arrived and was setting out his Papist trash on the altar. Next thing, everything on the altar is cleared away, the priest has disappeared, the candles are gone, the altar has turned into a mere table, and the people are nearly gone as well. Nothing but the coffin and a bad smell. Only Letty here was upset and some women were helping her and when I told them I was a son of her mistress, they insisted on bringing us both out amongst them. A most delightful escape.”

He laughed with the kind of boyish delight that particularly annoyed Dodd. “Best of all I got to see Topcliffe and his men going in to roust out an empty earth. Wonderful.”

He turned to Letty and smiled at her. “And I managed to fish you out of a muddy puddle that would have been a difficulty even for my redoubtable lady mother. So, my dear, what were you doing in there?”

Letty started trembling again, cupped her hands around her mouth, and as the tears spilled out of her brown eyes, Carey whipped out a large white hankerchief from his padded sleeve’s pocket and handed it over to her. She buried her face in it, sobbing.

Carey leaned back, crossed his ankles, lifted one finger to the potboy and ordered more booze by no more than a nod, then sighed tolerantly. Dodd, who was not at all accustomed to maidens who wept so openly and freely, being bred amongst much less delicate women, was staring at Letty with pure horror.

“It’s all right, Sergeant, no point hurrying her,” said Carey. “Doctor Nunez explained it to me once. Something about a maiden’s womb being not so securely fixed as a woman’s and apt to rise and wander up to her head, causing hysterics, fits of tears and fainting, and so on. They really can’t help it. Best you can do is wait for the storm to pass.”