Serpent in the Thorns

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. “You killed him?”

“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 dead courier. There was no possible good side to this.

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 mouth.

Crispin rose unsteadily. “Are you Livith?”

The woman clutched her sister’s head to her breast. The girl visibly calmed and nestled there. The woman’s mouth parted, but not in the dull-witted way of her sister. Her shiny lips were ruddy, almost as ruddy as the dark spots on her cheeks. Her angular face—not soft and round like her sister’s—played out in planes of shadows and highlights, touched by long, flailing strands of ash blond hair. And her eyes. Crispin liked those eyes, shaded with hazel instead of the watery gray of the younger woman. There was a cleverness gleaming from them, even with fear shining bright. “Who the hell are you? What have you done here?”

“My name is Crispin Guest. They call me the Tracker.”

The arch of her brows showed recognition.

He glanced back at the body. “I did not kill him. Your sister came to fetch me. She believes she killed this man.”

Livith stared at the crumpled body in the corner, the arrow shaft now gleaming with a passing ray of sun. “Jesus wept!” she hissed. She pushed her sister from her bosom and glared into her face. “You stupid girl! You couldn’t have killed him. You know it!”

“But I was the only one here, Livith, and you weren’t—” She choked on a sob and hiccupped.

“I’m here now.” Clutching the girl, she turned to Crispin. “How could she have possibly shot him?”

Crispin cast about the room halfheartedly. He didn’t expect to find a bow. “Your sister has somehow twisted the truth. But there is a truth here. And a serious one.”

Livith put the girl onto the bench and stood back. “Her name is Grayce.”

Crispin made an uneven bow. “I beg your pardon. She never introduced herself—”

“And you never bothered to ask.”

He didn’t dispute it. Instead he nodded and rubbed his heavy eyes with his knuckles.

“You’re drunk. Some sarding help you are.” She thrust her hand at her hip, chin high. Even a smudge of dirt on her nose did not diminish her appearance, though Crispin was not endeared by her rough speech.

He straightened his shoulder cape over his cloak. “I am not drunk, wench. Last night I was drunk. Today . . . I am suffering from its venomous aftereffects.”

She snorted. “The great ‘Tracker.’ ”

He sighed wearily. “Do you know this dead man?’

She hugged her arms and gave the dead man a cursory glance before shaking her head. “Never saw him before.”

“And yet drunk or no, I do know that this man is a French courier. Do you know how much trouble you are in for having such a dead man in your room?”

“I’m beginning to.” She bit her fingernail.

He thrust his thumbs into his belt and tapped the leather. “Your sister admitted to killing him.”

“But she didn’t! Christ!”

“So it would seem. But the sheriff will not be as understanding as I am.”

The defiance drained from her sharp features. “Then what are we to do?”

“I’m thinking.” He turned back toward the dead man, and then stared up at the window. “Why would he have cause to come down here?”

“He was drunk,” Livith offered.

“Or looking for someone, perhaps, and came to the wrong room.”

Livith followed his gaze to the window. She pointed. “The window. Someone could have shot him from there.”

Crispin examined the angle. “And yet it does not explain what he was doing in here.”

Livith turned to Grayce sitting in the bench. She knelt at her feet and placed her hands on Grayce’s knees. Her harsh voice gentled. “Now Grayce, you went and fetched this fine gentleman. You must tell us what happened.”

Grayce, who had calmed during Livith’s arrival, now arched forward with taut shoulders. Her hands curled into claws before her face. “I told him already.”

“No, love,” cooed Livith. “You didn’t tell him. You only made some cockeyed confession. Now you know you couldn’t have killed him. Ain’t that right?”

Grayce’s hands plunged into her hair. She matted it into a bird’s nest. “You’ve got me confused.”

“Now, now Grayce. Just tell the gentleman what happened.”

“Yes, Grayce.” Crispin tried to smile. “Just tell me.”

Grayce looked from one face to another. Her eyes rested at last on the body. “I killed him, that’s all. I killed him! Stop asking me!”

Livith grasped Grayce’s shoulders, opened her mouth, but said nothing. With an expelled breath of frustration, she released her and rose. “She can’t say nought. When she gets like this, there’s no getting through to her.”

Crispin stared at the girl. She clasped her arms and rocked herself, whimpering. Gracious Jesu. That wasn’t much to tell the sheriff, and Simon Wynchecombe was a man likely to hang them first and ask questions later. Unless he could manage to talk to the other sheriff, John More, first . . . No. The man deferred all unpleasant work to Wynchecombe. There was no getting around it. He sighed and looked at the dead man again. He knelt beside the body, grasped the courier pouch, and unbuckled its leather straps. Inside was a carved wooden box resembling a reliquary. He lifted it from the pouch and set it on the table.

Locked.

Crispin went back to the man and rummaged through his other pouches and purses. He found gold and silver coins, letters of passage in French, and a key. He scanned the letter, but it told him what he already surmised: the man, along with two others, was a courier for the French court and was to be given safe passage across France and England. Their intended destination was London. “Well,” he said to the corpse, “you’ve arrived.”