A Murder at Rosamund's Gate (8 page)

Adam appeared to pull away slightly. “Yes, I’m well aware of what your father thinks.”

“Oh, Adam,” Judith continued. “You can do anything you want. Father doesn’t think lawyers really are too important.”

Hearing her brittle little laugh, Lucy shuddered.

“Indeed?” Adam asked idly, lazily.

This time, Judith seemed to sense that she had gone too far. “Oh, dear,” Judith said soothingly, caressing his arm. “I’ve made you angry, Adam. Come, let’s have a kiss and make up.”

Lucy watched as Adam regarded Judith. She could not tell what he was thinking. She wondered if he liked what he saw. He paused. “Why not?” she heard him say.

Averting her gaze, Lucy crept away, a deep dismay rising up inside her.
Adam deserves better than her,
she thought. As if on cue, her nose began to throb, painfully reminding her of the odd encounter with Adam on the stairs.

Suddenly desperate to go home, she stumbled away, only to quickly become disoriented as the fog grew heavier. Without a lantern, she could not find the path. A hand on her arm made her jump.

It was Richard. “Are you lost, my sweet?” he asked, smiling. “I know that I lost you, and I came out here to see if I could find you.”

“I was on my way home.”

“Home? Nonsense! The evening is still young! No one goes home until the morning chores are to be done! ’Tis the night for servants to frolic and play as lords! Come, be my lady, and sit with me a bit.”

Still smiling, Richard began to pull her toward the Embrys’ stable. She did not object when he put his arm firmly around her waist. When she stumbled over a root and his grip around her tightened, she heard him laugh, a deep sound that rumbled from his chest. She laughed, too, suddenly giddy. Richard opened the stable door, kicking aside some straw as they entered. Lucy halted in confusion, but he deftly maneuvered them inside.

For the second time that day, a man held her face in his hands. This time, however, his eyes did not meet hers, and he planted his lips hungrily on her mouth. He pulled the door shut behind them, and she heard the latch click. At that, something inside her began to sound an alarm, like church bells proclaiming fire.

Fear making her stomach lurch, Lucy tried to pull away, but Richard pressed her tightly against the stable wall with his body, his hands fumbling at the strings on her bodice. Lucy began to fight in earnest, her hands flailing, trying to push at his chest. The ale that had emboldened him had sapped her strength. He pinned her arms back, pressing his body against hers. His mouth, impatiently tasting hers, muffled her cries, even as the flavors of mutton and stale ale made her want to retch. The horses in nearby stalls began to stamp, catching wind of her distress.

Weaker, she tried in vain to bat at the hand seeking to hike up her skirts. Wrenching her head to one side, she managed to scream once but was again cut off by Richard striking her across the face.

“Shut up, you whore,” he hissed. “You asked for this, with all your simpering and prancing about. I’m just giving you what you want.”

Her head spinning from the drink and the blow she had been dealt, Lucy thought distantly that she had heard someone shout. The next moment Richard abruptly released her, and she slumped to the ground. There she lay, quivering in relief and terror, barely taking in the angry voices from the door.

“The lass and I were just talking!” she heard Richard say. “’Tis no business of yours—” The sound of a fist hitting flesh stopped him midsentence.

“She is my business,” came the improbable reply. “Now remove yourself before I get you sacked.”

She heard Richard swear angrily and then stalk off. Lucy sagged back into the hay, still whirling from drink and fear.

A quiet voice came from the stable doors. “Lucy?”

She looked up, barely stifling a groan. She could see Adam standing there, his figure a shadow. He was half turned away, looking at the dancing lights of the Embrys’ mansion and rubbing his knuckles. She felt a hot flush of shame pass through her body, mortified that he would see her this way.

“Are you all right?” he asked, still not looking at her.

Lucy nodded shakily and stood up. “I think so.” Her dress was torn a bit, but she hoped in the dark he could not see anything. She wiped her face.

“Come on, then. I’ll see you home. I’ve had enough of this affair anyway.” His voice was curt, expressionless.

They started off down the path. She tripped a little, and he grabbed her elbow to steady her. She recoiled, still feeling Richard’s touch on her body. Adam did not move to touch her again.

Fueled by anger and shame, she recalled the shadowy figures at the front of the house. “Why are you not with your lady? She will surely be missing you.”

Adam frowned. “I bid Judith good night. I’ve had enough of dancing and politics. I was on my way home when I saw my father’s silly little serving girl—” He broke off.

What?!
Lucy thought.
You saw your silly little serving girl get manhandled by a brute? Or show her brazen ways?
She wanted to defend herself, but she didn’t know of what exactly she was standing accused.

The silence hung heavily between them. Lucy bit her lip, feeling young and foolish. For the second time that evening, she realized that she did not have her wrap. She shivered. Adam shrugged out of his cloak and dumped it around her shoulders, without saying a word. Lucy did not look up to thank him but hugged it gratefully to her cold body.

As they walked and her head cleared, she grew calmer. The moon was gleaming through a soft haze, which fell around them like a blanket. She gazed upward. The stars numbered in the thousands, tiny pinpricks of light among a mat of darkness. She wished she were floating among them, keeping her far away from the pain she was feeling. Although she was still sniffing a little, her tears had stopped falling.

Adam appeared deep in thought. When he finally spoke, it was not to say what she was expecting. His voice was quiet, musing. “Two comets, they say, passed each other in the night sky. Directly over the city, just two weeks ago.”

Lucy remained quiet, trying to envision the spectacle. She was grateful he hadn’t said anything more about Richard.

He went on, waving his hand expansively toward the stars, looking like crystals affixed to a deep violet tapestry. “One comet was dull and languid, the other sparkling and furious, moving through the sky like a great flame. Some say it was a message from the Almighty.”

“A message?” Lucy asked. “To say what?”

“An omen, perhaps? That his judgment would be upon us? That a scourge is coming?” Adam looked down at her then, searching her face. “You choose.”

Lucy scratched her nose. He grinned in response, the tension between them spent. She smiled back. A scourge seemed very far away, not something to worry about, when she was walking beside the magistrate’s son in the moonlight, wearing his cloak. Unconsciously, she slowed her pace.

After a moment, he asked her another odd question. “Lucy, do you believe in free will?”

Though again this was not what she was expecting, she pondered the question carefully. “I believe my thoughts are my own, if that’s what you mean. I believe I can choose to do good or evil.”

“So, you believe we have control over our own actions, over our own fate?” He pulled a branch back from the path.

She stepped through, and he let the branch go. “Yes, perhaps, to a point,” she said. “Can I choose to go to market, or to the plays for that matter, whenever the whimsy strikes me? No, I may do such things only when your mother, or Cook, says that I may.”

He looked at her then, regarding her intently. She wondered for a second what a looking glass would reveal, since she could feel her hair was completely loose and she had no cap. Her face was probably smudged with dirt, her skirts in disarray. She would never look as poised and graceful as Judith Embry.

Yet she found she did not care as she went on. “I’m not sure I understand what scripture would say, but I suppose men, and women, must make their own destiny. We can, for example, decide who we love, even if the ability to act on that love is determined by others.” With a little snort Lucy added, “That’s if we understand
politics,
sir, which I’m sure I do not.”

Adam looked at her in surprise but stayed silent. They crossed the last field and walked down the street to their home.

When they approached the house, his mood seemed to change. “You’re a good lass, Lucy,” he said slowly. “Unusual, even.” He stopped, seeming to struggle with what he was about to say. Then he was once again a member of the gentry, scolding and arrogant and sure of himself. “Certainly you’re too young to touch the spirits in such immoderate measure. I may not be around next time to step in.”

Lucy’s face flamed. “I didn’t ask you to!” she cried, the calm the walk had brought her destroyed. “’Twas not your concern, it was my evening off. I’m not a child, I’m eighteen! I don’t need you to look after me!” Tearing off his cloak, she handed it to him with shaking fingers.

He scowled. “And just what do you think a man like that wanted with a foolish little girl like you, anyway?” Adam asked coldly. “You are a member of my father’s household. I would not have the reputation of his servants besmirched.”

His words stung her like a slap. The image of Richard’s leering face and roving hands on her body burned her. Ducking her head, Lucy ran inside to the solace of her little chamber at the top of the house.

The comfort of sleep did not come quickly. When she did finally drift off, she dreamed that someone was lightly holding her face and moving in to kiss her lips. Somehow, though, Adam’s concerned face was replaced by Richard’s angry countenance, causing her to awake, her heart pounding in fear, excitement, and something else.

6

Lucy found her cloak in the kitchen the next morning. She wondered if Adam had returned for it, or more likely Bessie had recognized it and fetched it back. She didn’t know if she was happy or angry as she went out on the stoop to await the raker.

Standing away from two huge basket tubs that held the week’s rotting foodstuffs, slops, and bodily excretions, Lucy held a linen cloth scented with rosemary over her face, trying to ward off the unbearable stench. A few months ago, the city government had mandated that all household refuse be carted away, which meant that servants like Lucy had to wrestle with heaping buckets of waste, instead of throwing everything out the window as servants had been doing for many centuries.

As she waited, Lucy gazed into the dirty fog. The Fumifugium. She rolled the word around on her tongue, tasting its full acridity. John Evelyn’s word, she heard the master say the other night at supper. The word could only begin to evoke the disgusting cloud of smoke that ever rose from the city’s chimneys and became mired in London’s ever-present fog. All she knew was that the putrid smoke felt like a murderer, stealing among the Londoners, clouding their lungs, taking their breath, and pilfering lives. Or at least that’s what Evelyn had said.

Finally Bessie came out, her face paling as she caught a whiff of the stench. She plopped down heavily on the stoop, without a word of greeting. Lucy could see sweat beading across her forehead, and her face seemed unnaturally pale and waxy, despite two blotches of red on either cheek. She looked ill.

Lucy’s mind flashed to something Missus Gray had gossiped about the other day. “Something troublesome is going on, down by Drury Lane. A strange sickness, ‘distemper’ they’re calling it. Bah. Whoever died from distemper?” At the other women’s encouraging clucks, Missus Gray added, “I ask you this: Would that explain the bodies being carted out at night? Would it explain the dogs’ howling?”

“What say the magistrate, Mary?” Mistress Vane had pressed Cook. “Do you know?”

Cook and Lucy had exchanged glances. They knew what the magistrate thought, but neither spoke. Several houses in Drury Lane, a few miles away from their home, had been quarantined by a fellow magistrate, but according to Master Hargrave, probably not nearly the number that should have been.

Indeed, Lucy had heard him tell the mistress, “The Bills of Mortality have been reporting an unprecedented number of deaths in Drury Lane, but there may be many more. The problem is, families are trying to hide their marks of infection from the law and may be dumping bodies in other parts of the city.” Here he had looked sternly around the family, his gaze taking in the servants. “There may well be plague upon us, but it is
our duty
not to start a panic.”

Without thinking, Lucy felt Bessie’s head anxiously for fever, but it was cool. “I guess you don’t have the plague.”

“Plague? What? No. I’m all right.” Bessie wiped her mouth. Glancing down the street, she pointed at a man slowly bringing a cart up the street. “Look, here’s the raker. I’ll be back.”

Bessie did not come back outside, though. Lucy had to heave the filth from the tubs into the cart by herself. She noted with disgust that the cart was leaking excrement onto the street. “So much for improved city cleanliness,” Lucy commented to no one.

Returning inside, she found Bessie drinking some water from the kitchen pail. Sweat had drenched the back of her muslin dress. Without saying anything, Bessie left to attend to Mistress Hargrave. Sighing, Lucy poured sand across the stone floor of the kitchen, for Cook had asked her to scour the floor after breakfast.

*   *   *

Lucy had finished the floor and started on preparing dinner when Lucas came into the kitchen a short time later, whistling a catchy tune. He plopped himself at the other end of the bench, watching as Lucy pared potatoes with a knife. Peering hopefully into one of the iron bowls cooling on the table, he spoke.

“Dear Lucy, will you give a poor lad something to eat? Just a small bite?”

Lucy tossed him a carrot from one of the wood baskets lining the kitchen’s ample shelves. “Here, eat this.”

Making a face, Lucas nonetheless bit down on the carrot. “I thought you had a heart. I’m beginning to believe you don’t care about me at all. I’ve not had a bite to eat all day.”