The King of Thieves

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Thursday after the Feast of the Archangel Michael^*

Louvre

Baldwin was still considering the sad tale of the cook the next morning when the summons came for him to hurry to the Bishop’s chamber.

‘What ails him now?’ he muttered.

‘He is prey to fears of a natural kind,’ Simon said more graciously.

‘Aye, well, if he is that keen to see us, we would be churlish indeed not to go. And then, on the return, the bar may be open,’ Sir Richard said hopefully.

They found the Bishop sitting on a large chair facing them as they walked into his room. There was a clerk at his side holding a slate board, while two others sat at a desk behind.

‘Sir Baldwin, Sir Richard, Simon, I am very grateful that you could come so swiftly.’

‘It was our pleasure, my Lord Bishop. The Duke is being entertained by his tutor for a little, and then will go to his mother. Sir Henry is with him, so we have our morning free,’ Baldwin said.

‘That is good,’ the Bishop said. He then stood and paced before turning and facing them. ‘I am very anxious,’ he blurted out. ‘I fear an attempt may be made upon my life.’

‘My Lord Bishop, I am sure you need have no such alarms. There is no one here who could wish you harm,’ Baldwin said, and he felt irritation that the Bishop had called them to him for such a foolish reason.

‘Look at this, Sir Baldwin,’ the Bishop said, and drew down the collar of his robe.

There, at his thin neck, the flesh somewhat pale, rather like a plucked chicken, there were four large bruises on his right side, one on the left.

‘Dear Jesus!’ Baldwin hissed. ‘Sir Richard?’

The Coroner joined him. ‘A goodly-sized fist, that man’ll have, if I’m any judge. A good, great paw to mangle you in that manner, me Lord. Who was it?’

‘I have no idea,’ the Bishop said. ‘I was attacked in the dark. And yet there was something familiar about the man’s voice. He was English, I think.’

‘Has anyone else tried to warn you away from here?’ Baldwin asked.

Almost everyone, the Bishop thought to himself sadly. ‘No one for certain, no. But I think that all would prefer to see me gone. I am an embarrassment to the Duke, an irritant to the Queen, and a shameful beggar in the eyes of King Charles. No one wishes me here, and yet I may not go home. All I want is to return to Exeter and rest my weary bones, but I must remain here until the Queen concedes that her place is with her husband. What may I do?’

‘First, you should be better guarded,’ Baldwin said firmly. ‘We do not want you harmed, my Lord Bishop. Second, I think that King Charles should be informed that your life has been threatened. The King has accepted you as his guest, and safe-conducts have been issued. If you are harmed here, it will reflect most disastrously upon the French King.’

‘That is true,’ the Bishop murmured.

‘But that fact alone makes me wonder who’d be stupid enough to try to threaten Bishop Walter,’ Sir Richard said.

Simon shrugged. ‘There are any number of Frenchmen who dislike the Bishop for his diplomatic efforts.’

‘Aye, and some English, too,’ the knight grunted.

Baldwin smiled. ‘We know where the threat may lie, but the important thing just now is to make sure that the Bishop is protected. We will have to mount guard ourselves, and also see whomsoever else we may enlist to help us.’

Paris, near the River Seine

Vital shrugged his cloak around his shoulders. Here in the alleyway, no sun could reach them, and it felt as though they were living in a perpetual chill.

‘I hope he’s not just testing our cupidity.’

‘More likely he is looking to see how to get himself out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d thought we’d bring him along without chains, and he’d try to run for it,’ Pons said.

Vital gave him a sidelong look. His companion was dressed all in shabby brown, like a worker along the shores. It was only the sword which made him stand out, and that was mostly hidden under his cloak.

‘Bring him up here!’ Pons suddenly barked behind him.

There was a small force of five-and-twenty men, all armed with good polearms and long knives, all picked carefully for the task ahead. In their midst was Le Boeuf, and now he was manhandled up to meet Pons and Vital. ‘These chains, can’t you-’

‘No,’ Pons said. ‘If this is the genuine place, and your work brings this matter to an end, then I personally will release you. If there’s nothing there, you will go back to the cell, and I will tell all that you tried to sell me the King, but failed.’

‘But they’d flay me, if they thought I’d done that!’

‘Then you had best hope that he is in there and that we capture him, eh?’

Le Boeuf stared at him with his one good eye, and then peered over his shoulder. ‘It’s that one, the third door, the one that looks like it’s only got one hinge. That’s where he lives.’

‘Good,’ Pons said, and issued his instructions quickly. The men separated, with one smaller force of eight running off to the rear of the building, at the river’s edge. Meanwhile, Pons and Vital waited, watching and muttering, Pons counting to four thousand, which was the amount of time the second force would need to get into position.

‘Time’s up,’ he announced quietly. ‘Good luck, boys — good luck, Vital. Mind your nice cloak, eh?’

‘You mind your moustaches, old friend,’ Vital murmured, and then the two gripped their scabbards in their left fists and ran lightly over the road.

There was no sign of life inside. Pons leaned down to peer in through a gap in the timbers of the door, but could see nothing. No lights, no people, just a mess of broken planks and refuse of all kinds. A rat scurried, suddenly alarmed.

Pons looked over, and Vital shrugged. ‘Doesn’t look very lived in, eh?’ and then he beckoned.

The men rushed over the road and ran at the door. There was a loud crack and splintering as the door gave way, and then they were all inside, pelting up the narrow corridor, up some rickety stairs, men fanning out in all directions, shouting and screaming at the tops of their voices, slamming weapons against closed doors, thundering about up in chambers overhead.

Vital looked down at his feet. ‘I think he was wrong about this place, don’t you?’

Pons was about to respond, when there came a shout from outside, at the rear of the building.

‘There’s a body here!’

The King swore and slammed a fist into his cupped hand. ‘Who betrayed us? Who dared to tell the officers about us, about our home?’

Amélie was still curled on the bed of furs, and now she stretched, lithe as a cat, curling her fingers over, and staring along the length of her arms and hands with satisfaction. ‘Perhaps it was the poor assassin you tried to double-cross? Or one of your men who deserves more money than you paid?’

‘Shut up whore! If I need the advice of a bitch like you, I’ll ask for it,’ the King spat. He returned to the window out over the Seine, watching as the men floundered through the thick river ooze to the figure which still lay out nearer the water.

‘It is the dry summer this year. Apart from the rains in the last couple of weeks, it’s been dry,’ his clerk said nervously.

The King made no comment, but stared silently at the work outside. ‘They should have carried him further out,’ he hissed. ‘The river was dropping already when they put the men out there.’

‘We didn’t know,’ said Peter the peasant. He wasn’t going to whine. He’d done all he could, sliding down the rope to kill that man on the flats to stop the officers being called.

‘You didn’t know?’

‘It wasn’t our fault if the bastard didn’t get washed away like all the other refuse from the city. Anyway, a man found out there could have come from anywhere. Didn’t have to have been thrown from here.’

‘There is much which is interesting about this. First is the stupidity of a man like you leaving a corpse out there for anyone to find. Then there’s the way you left it there for three days so the officers could come and find it. But worst of all, there’s the incredible dimness of a man like you who can’t see that these fellows were told where to go. They walked right in through the house we used to deposit the bodies in, didn’t they?’

Peter shrugged. ‘It was the nearest house to the body. Where else would they have gone?’

The King nodded and then, in a fluid movement, he turned, drew his knife and slashed it across Peter’s face. It left a fine red line that began at Peter’s right cheekbone, missed the hollow near his nose, then marked over the nose, to the left cheek, running right across it almost to the man’s ear. The line remained until Peter’s mouth opened in a shocked bawl, and then a fine spray burst from it.

Peter’s hands came up to his face, and his eyes stared down in horror at them as they were bedewed with his blood. He drew a breath to cry out, but by then the King had reversed his blade. His hand snaked out and gripped Peter’s neck, suddenly pulling his sergeant towards him. The sobbing man had no time to scream before the knife stabbed upwards three times, two to the lungs, the last to the heart. He was dead even as his body slumped on the blade.

‘Take that tub of lard away. I don’t want to see his face again,’ the King said with cold dispassion. He wiped his knife on his sleeve, unheeding, as two of his men pulled the twitching form out of the room. ‘We move from here tonight. We’ll go to the rooms near Saint Jacques.’

Amélie pouted. ‘But I don’t like it there. It stinks of dead animals all the time.’

‘You will get used to it or you’ll die,’ the King said matter-of-factly. He felt his broken teeth with his tongue.

This was the result of being slack. He had been enjoying his life too much. There were times to take leisure, but not when a man dared to defy you. The fool Jacquot had killed his men and brought this on to him, and he wouldn’t take it. Whether or not Jacquot had sent the men over there to try to catch the King and his men, he didn’t know. Probably not, because Jacquot would have directed them to this, his main residence, not the other house. In the past the King had called that chamber his ‘courthouse’, because it was where he had his men go when they were accused of some misdemeanour. If they were said to be keeping too much of their whores’ money, if they were not declaring the full contents of a purse they’d stolen, if they ‘forgot’ to mention a gambling game that had paid well, they were taken to the courthouse so that their case could be heard. And then justice was administered according to the King’s whim. Sometimes the accused was confirmed as guilty, sometimes the accuser was declared to be at fault, and more often than not, the two were forced to fight to the death to determine the outcome.

The advantage of the courthouse was that it was far enough away from any freeman’s habitation. Those who lived down here at the side of the river were the poorest and meanest. They would not go to the Sergent to report a murder or screams. And that meant that his courts could be held in safety, and that the bodies afterwards could be usefully slipped into the Seine, to be taken downriver, far away from the place of their death.

If not Jacquot, someone else must have sent the men to the courthouse. In the last few days all had heard of the arrests and the numbers of men who’d been swept up from the streets. Any of them could have known of the King’s courthouse. It was a building of ill-repute because of the stories of screams which emanated from it late into the night.

He clenched his fist and set it on the wall, glowering as the men lifted the body from the mud and began to drag it laboriously towards the shoreline. He might never find out who had tried to inform on him. However, there was one man he could force to pay. He hadn’t even begun to think about Jacquot yet. Finding someone to destroy his best killer would be immensely hard. Ideally, it should be a man-at-arms who wore the tabard of the King of France. Someone like that would be able to command respect, and even the true King’s men could be attracted to money, the same as any other.

There was one man, of course. Up at the castle … Perhaps he could be persuaded, for a good fee.

And then killed, of course.

As an afterthought, he beckoned one of his men. ‘Follow them, Mal, and see where they go. I want to know where they came from — and where they take the body. Report to me at Saint Jacques.’

Pons and Vital eyed the mud-sodden body in silence. The wound at his throat proved that he had been killed in a professional manner.

‘Executed, certainly,’ Pons said.

‘Are there any other wounds? Was this the last of many, or the first?’ Vital wondered.

‘It shows that this building has been used for some killings,’ Pons said, looking about him again.

‘Likely, yes.’

They had seen that this body had been close to the trap-door which led to the river waters and then they had been called upstairs, where they found a large-sized room. There had been fights in here. Blood lay upon the rough-hewn planks in several places, but it was not fresh. The odour was that dull, dry smell which spoke of old death. A bench with a small trestle sat in one corner of the room, and there was a hook in the middle, while to one side stood a small chest. In that they had found some scraps of cloth, six red, one blue. They were baffled.

‘Have him cleaned,’ Vital said to the Sergent who stood guard over the dead man. ‘At least he has not been here for too long.’

‘And not in the water,’ Pons observed. ‘If he had, his hands would have turned to gloves.’

‘Yes. I have seen the bodies too.’

They both had. Murdered men often turned up in the river, where their flesh became so engorged with water that it could slip from the meat beneath. It was one of the more revolting kinds of death.

‘Can I go free? You see I wasn’t lying. They were here.’

The two turned back to their captive. His milky eye made him look still more beseeching, and he held out his wrists like a supplicant. ‘Please?’

Pons considered. ‘Very well, you can go free when we get back and can unshackle you. But first, what can you tell us about these cloth strips?’

The man looked wary, but then he nodded. Perhaps the thought of his imminent release gave him courage, Pons thought.

‘It is for the voting. When a man is accused of a crime against the King of Thieves, they hold a court here. When the jury votes, one of them is made executioner for the guilty. That is why there is one odd colour. The man who picks that is the one who must kill the guilty party. Not that they use the cloths much. Usually it’s a matter of letting the accuser meet the accused man, and they fight it out.’

‘You seem to know a lot about them?’

Le Boeuf gave a wry little grin. ‘There are few in Paris who don’t, other than those who work for the other King.’

‘How so?’

‘There is little that the King of Thieves doesn’t know about. If a man takes your purse, or sells you a woman, or if you buy a loaf of bread that is light, it is certain that the King will make money from you.’

‘In that case,’ Pons said, ‘I’d like you to have a bargain with me. You find out where he is now, and we’ll not only release you, we’ll pay you too.’

‘You can’t pay me enough. He would kill me.’

‘He is so powerful he can kill you without difficulty?’

‘If he heard I had taken you to him, my life would be worth nothing.’

‘In that case, you should stay in chains, Le Boeuf. Because it is sure that he will learn you brought us here today, if he is so powerful as you say. You had best ensure that we find him very quickly, before he finds you.’

Louvre

It was late in the afternoon that Hugues heard the knock at his door. ‘Yes?’

Amélie wandered in, a faint smile at her mouth. She crossed the floor to his table, and hitched a hip on to it.

‘I haven’t time, woman. Go and find another suitor,’ he muttered dismissively, but his eyes were fixed on her inner thigh. That glorious, soft sweep of perfect white flesh was so close to him, he could lean forward and lick it, bite it …

There was a rattle of coins, and he stared at the little leather purse she placed before him.

‘I’m here for the King,’ she said with amusement as he drew back from her and pulled at the drawstrings.

‘What is this for?’ Hugues demanded. ‘Twenty livres Parisis?’

‘There is a man he would like removed, Sieur Hugues,’ she replied, and began to explain.