The Devil in the Marshalsea

PROLOGUE

They came for him at midnight. There was no warning, no time to reach for the dagger hidden beneath his pillow. They had moved as silently as ghosts, crossing the prison yard and stealing up the dank, narrow staircase while he slept on, oblivious.

A guilty man should not sleep so soundly.

He woke to find a cold blade pressed to his throat. They gagged him and bound his wrists before he had the wit to cry out; dragged him so hard from the bed to his knees that the floorboards split and buckled with the force.

A lantern flared into life, illuminating his attackers. Now, at last, he knew them, and why they had come. He tore frantically at the heavy leather purse tied about his neck for safe-keeping and flung it at their feet, gold and silver coins scattering across the floor.

The man holding the lantern reached down and plucked half a guinea from the dirt, turning it slowly between his fingers. ‘D’you think this will save you?’ He gave a thin smile and tossed the coin back to the floor. Nodded to his accomplice.

Then they sent him to hell.

The watchman found the body the next morning, hanging from a beam in the Strong Room, too high for the rats seething and scrabbling in the shadows below. The turnkeys cut him down and laid him out in the yard, away from three Common Side prisoners taken by fever in the night. The captain may have fallen on hard times, but he was still a gentleman.

The chaplain pointed to the dead man’s battered face and broken body and insisted that the coroner be called at once to investigate. The governor, who’d been drinking with his cronies in the Crown for hours, spat in the dirt and called it suicide – and a pox on anyone who said otherwise. The coroner would rule the same; he’d make sure of it.

Up in the captain’s room, his friends gambled hastily for his scant belongings before the serjeant took them. Clothes, tobacco, a pound of bacon. A small cooking pot smeared with the remnants of last night’s supper. No money. But that was no surprise in a debtors’ gaol.

A young maidservant paused on the landing, arms laden with fresh linen. She stood for a while in the shadows, watching the game and the men who played it. She’d learned a long time ago to keep her eyes and ears open. A good secret was better than gold in the Marshalsea – and more deadly than a blade if you used it right. Her eyes flickered to the floor. Strange. Someone had swept the floor clean in the night. She tucked the thought away, like a stray lock of hair beneath her cap, and returned to her chores.

The killers had swept the floor, but they’d missed one small thing. A coin had skittered across the room in the struggle, coming to rest in a dark corner beneath the captain’s bed. And there it remained as the long months passed, hidden in the dust – a silver crown stained with blood. Waiting to tell its story.

Waiting for me to find it.