Roberta Gellis (19 page)

“He will do nothing. That was more than two weeks ago, and other outrages have overlaid his first fine fury. Besides, I soothed his loss and hurt with five shillings, so Diot need not look over her shoulder when she walks abroad. She will pay it back out of her earnings as she can—although I think Mainard will be glad to make up the sum and maybe gift her, too, because what I paid greased’s Stav’s tongue so well that he told me where we can lay hands upon the man who collected the payments Bertrild demanded.”

Bell’s mouth had been open, perhaps to continue the argument. It snapped shut as she spoke the last words, and his eyes widened instead as he asked, “However did you learn that?”

“Never say God, or perhaps Merciful Mary, abhors a whore, for it is through being whores—and a series of coincidences so long that they must have been meant—that we learned,” she began and told him about de Genlis’s man Borc, Diot’s remembering the name Bertrild because of her proud Saxon neighbor, and Borc confiding where his money came from to Stav.

“The direction will be worthless,” Bell said, biting his lip in chagrin. “Those kind of people do not stay in one place. Of course, I will go tomorrow and see if anyone there knows where he is likely to have gone.”

“No need. This is not that kind of direction. Stav knows Borc and his kind too well to hope he will sleep more than a few nights in any one place, but he learned that Borc always eats his dinner in one cookshop in the East Chepe. It seems that Bertrild could not afford, or did not wish, to pay Borc to serve her, but she did pay the cookshop a weekly sum to serve the man one meal a day. I suppose to keep him from starving because he had been her father’s man, but it does seem out of character for her to have done so.”

“It was not to keep him from starving,” Bell said, grinning tightly. “It was so she could reach him to give him orders without ever allowing him to come to the Lime Street house. I am not quite certain whether that was because she did not wish her neighbors to see Borc or did not want Borc to know where she lived.”

“Both, I suspect,” Magdalene said, “considering what Diot said about how he looks and what I know about what he was, even in better times.”

“I hope he has not yet heard of Bertrild’s death,” Bell said next. “I will have my men waiting for him at the cookshop tomorrow.”

“Not your men. They are too obviously what they are, and I think it likely that Borc can smell a soldier from the end of the street. Let me send the watchman, Tom, who does odd jobs and runs messages for me. I suspect it is just the kind of cookshop in which Tom would eat, so he will not look out of place and Borc will not be warned. Diot can describe how Borc last looked to him. If Tom sees the man, he can signal your men when he leaves or, if Borc leaves first, Tom can follow him out.

“Good enough,” Bell agreed. He hesitated, looking past her, pursing his lips. “Borc is a good lead, but not enough, even if we can lay hands on him. Besides, I doubt he knows more than from whom he collected. Bertrild would not have told him anything significant. I think I will go and see those five tomorrow morning.”

Magdalene nodded agreement. “I think you should. You have reason enough in their being, with him, members of his Bridge Guild and having all come to visit him on Friday morning. Will you tell them about Codi’s knife?”

“I am not sure. I may say a leather working knife was used to stab Bertrild and ask if any of them saw one of that description.” He sighed and got to his feet. “I should be free in good time if my men take Borc. I will have a man watching from a candlemark before Sext until a candlemark before Nones. If Borc does not come in that time, Tom can try again on Wednesday.”

Magdalene had also risen. “You will not stay and have the evening meal with us?”

Bell shook his head. It was far too dangerous to stay. With Sabina in the bed he usually occupied when he spent a night at the Old Priory Guesthouse, there would be no place for him but in Magdalene’s bed if he stayed very late. And it always seemed to happen that he did stay late, talking and playing silly games with Magdalene and her women. He had the five pence for her charges—these days he always had five pence tucked into a recess in his belt—but he was not ready to yield; he was afraid he would be angry, hate her, if she made him accept her on those terms.

“Perhaps it is just as well,” she went on with a sigh. “I doubt we could avoid talking of the murder, and Ella has been paying attention because she remembers Bertrild.”

“Not she, too?” Bell exclaimed, grinning. “Is there no person in England who did not want to kill that woman? I thought Ella, at least, would be exempt. Do you know where she was on Sunday between Nones and Vespers?”

Magdalene laughed heartily over the idea of Ella killing anyone, particularly with a knife, which she feared so much to handle that someone else had to cut up her food. Smiling, she walked with him to the door, lifting her face to the afternoon sunlight when they reached it. Although he knew he should not, Bell bent and kissed her lips. She permitted the caress, even encouraged it, allowing her mouth to open. Bell’s tongue darted forward in response—but only once. He jerked back to pull away. Magdalene laughed again, leaned toward him before he could get any distance between them, and kissed him on the nose.

Face flaming, Bell went down the path and slammed the gate behind him. He turned right in the direction that would take him to the bishop of Winchester’s house, then shook his head, crossed the road, and headed down the street that went eventually to the priory of St. Saviour at Bermondsey. He was in no temper to go back to the bishop’s residence where doubtless several clerks would each have thought of ten more questions to ask about the business he had completed after dinner that day.

“That woman!” he muttered to himself. “Between tormenting me and blithely going her own way without even asking me for an easier road, she’ll drive me crazy.”

Fury lent energy to his stride, and he soon reached his goal. Just far enough down the street to protect it from casual intrusion, but near enough for men-at-arms to get to the main focus of trouble near the docks, was the house of the sheriff of Southwark. Bell was received without question. As the sword arm of the bishop of Winchester, who was responsible for large properties in the area, Bell and the sheriff were well acquainted.

“Do you remember,” he asked, after having explained that he was trying to get to the bottom of a murder that had nothing
to do with either the bishop or Southwark, “that some four or five years ago there was a stew where they sold more forged parchments than women?”

“More than one, I fear,” the sheriff replied, “but I suspect you mean the really infamous one run by Goden. It was before my time,” he added, and then raised a hand to stop Bell from moving. “But I know about it because my predecessor was so furious at not being able to lay Goden by the heels that he left me the records of the case and begged me to go forward with it if I could.”

“Likely that solves my problem,” Bell said, “unless this Goden is dead?”

“Only the good die young,” the sheriff said wryly. “Goden thrives, but I can assure you he no longer plies a trade in forgery. The women went elsewhere, but he kept his bully boys and now rents them out and is a beggarmaster.”

The sheriff’s smile was a show of teeth without humor. “I hope you do not need a forged document?”

Bell ignored that pleasantry. “I think that the woman Bertrild, who I told you was murdered, was extorting money from one or more men. Only five had the chance to take a particular knife that was used to stab her. I want to know whether any of those five obtained false documents from that whoremaster.”

“I will give you the direction of where he does business. He lives elsewhere but shifts lodging so often it is not worthwhile to trace him each time.” The sheriff smiled grimly. “And you have my permission to wring what you can out of him any way you want, but would it not be a great coincidence that Goden should be the one to provide the false documents? There are others who do such work, probably more in London than in Southwark.”

Bell grinned broadly. Idiot woman. She was always saying she whored because she needed money, but she had wasted several pence, he was sure, in trying to bribe Goden’s direction out of the current whoremistress of that house when he had obtained the information in a few moments at no cost at all. He would rub her nose in
that.

“No,” he said. “Actually it is likely they chose that place because four of the five were regularly in this neighborhood for other purposes and for them—wealthy men and well known in London—such a stew might be more private. It would be their word against Goden’s if he tried to betray them, and Goden would not even be able to identify which document he was claiming was forged because he is, I assume, illiterate.”

“I do not think so. I think he is a defrocked priest, but we could never prove it.” The sheriff shrugged.

He then gave Bell directions to where the man dealt with the beggars, and after a civil farewell, Bell set out to find Goden. As he progressed east and north through dark and narrow alleys, he loosened both sword and knife in their sheaths and glanced up, to be sure no one was about to leap down upon him from beams stretched from roof to roof, and from side to side at the fetid doorways more than he watched ahead. When he arrived, he almost regretted not being set upon, which might have diverted him from his goal.

Bell was not delicate. He had served as a man-at-arms for over fifteen years, some of that time aboard ships where the crew was packed tighter together than the animals they carried, and he had searched battlefields days after the battle was over for friends and enemies among the dead. However, the stench that surrounded the hovel of rotten boards and stinking mud stopped him in his tracks.

The house on one side had collapsed completely; on the other the building was in the process of falling in, leaning away from Goden’s lair. Bell eyed the heaps that littered the area around the building and what had once been a small court in which a counter could be set. Most were a mixture of rags, decaying straw and leaves, rotting offal, mud, and from the smell, probably turds. A few, however, were men or women—under the debris that covered them it was hard to tell.

First, Bell drew his sword. Then, picking his way carefully through the filth, he prodded one of the heaps that held a body. The pile of dirty straw stirred, fell apart, and from it emerged a tall, skeletally thin creature, who shouted something at him.

“Go in and tell your master to come out,” Bell said in English. “I want information, I will pay for it, but if he does not come out, I will have his house down around his ears.”

As he spoke, he swung around, his sword cutting hard an arms’ length behind him. Something screamed and fell, a clatter betraying a dropped weapon. Bright red made a shocking contrast with the brown-black filth encrusting what he had struck. Without examining what he had brought down, he swung back toward the thin creature he had bidden to fetch his master. He did not turn all the way, however; with his back now to the building, he slammed his boot heel into a cracked board. A satisfying sound of splintering wood followed. The tall creature turned and ran.

Bell occupied the delay that followed by pounding away at the weak spot in the wall. From the corner of his eye he noticed that whatever he had wounded had managed to crawl away. He grimaced, sorry the blow had not been fatal. Not that he was sorry he had struck it—whoever was creeping up behind him had not intended him any good—but death from the sword blow would have been merciful compared with the death from slow rotting the creature would now face.

His next kick was almost one too many, as his foot went through the wall. Had anyone noticed, he would have been at a dangerous disadvantage, but he was not deeply caught and managed to free his foot and be standing on both when two mismatched forms rounded the building. One was the tall, thin beggar; the other was wider than he was tall, but at least he was not encrusted with filth.

“Stop!” the fat man blustered. “Why are you damaging my house?”

“Because I wanted you out of it. I did not fancy going in after you.” Bell laughed. “Tastes differ, of course, but the aroma was not to my liking, even outside. I did not think a stronger dose would agree with me.”

“You are one man. I could set ten against you!”

Bell laughed again and gestured with his bloody sword. “I hope you will not. Twelve dead bodies will not improve the smell or appearance of this place, and yours would be the first, as you are closest. Now stop acting a fool, which I know you are not because you have warded off hanging for so long. I want information and I will pay for it.”

“What information?” Goden’s tone changed from bluster to whine. “You want to know who begs on what corner? That is the kind of information I have.”

Suddenly Bell took three swift strides, thrust away the tall beggar with his sword, and pressed the knife he now held in his left hand into the fat man’s belly. “You would not wish to die of a gut wound, I am sure,” he said. “Let us walk to the end of the street, where I hope the air is cleaner, and—”

Goden jumped backward with surprising agility, but he was not quick enough. Bell thrust hard, heard the thin man cry out, and instantly drew the sword back, pressing outward. The edge caught Goden on the arm and ran across his chest. He screamed. Bell drew his arm back and set the point of the sword where his dagger had been.

“Walk!” he ordered. “Yes, backward. Your belly is a softer place to thrust than your back. If you try to run again or if any of your creatures tries to attack me, I will open your belly and let your guts run out. Walk!”

They did not progress very fast, but no one interfered. In that area, the few in the street melted quickly away when they saw the quality of Bell’s clothes and the drawn sword. Eventually Bell and his captive came to a more open street where an old wall provided a place for Bell to put his back. Swiftly, he pulled the sword back and struck Goden on the head with the flat of the blade. The man folded to the street. Bell pulled a leather thong from his pouch and tied the old whoremaster’s thumbs together. Then he sat down, took three pennies from his purse, and waited for Goden to recover his senses.