The childish pitch of his voice carried through the roaring in Martha’s ears and she instinctively looked to Thomas, whose gaze was still bent to the now-glistening workings of the box trap he had been oiling. Without looking up, and with no great emphasis on the movement of his head, he turned his chin slowly, first to the left and then to the right, moving in a ponderous and stately manner; an arc so subtle that its meaning, an irrefutable no, would be discovered only after the motion had stopped.

She could sense John shifting nervously about in his chair, shushing Will, trying to placate him with a cat’s cradle made from an errant piece of string. John’s deft hands quickly made a Jacob’s ladder, and as Will’s two fingers climbed the rungs from bottom to top like pale, naked feet climbing a set of stairs, the image of fluttering hens and an unformed, but terrifying image at the periphery of her memory threatened to unseat her and set her to screaming once more.

“There is a tale of Gelert,” Thomas said abruptly, his few words rumbling through the common room, which had grown almost entirely dark from the lack of new wood to the fire. The one candle, set next to Patience, guttered and smoked, exaggerating the shading beneath every slanting surface and under every angled feature of noses, brows, and lips, so that even Will’s childish face was painted to a savage mask with the ink of shadows.

“I have the tale from my own country,” he began. “Gelert were a hound. Given to Llywelyn, a prince of Wales, by King John of England, Gelert were the best of hounds. He could hunt game and bring down a wolf, so large and fearless was he, and Llywelyn loved him beyond anything else but his own son.” He stopped for a moment to set down his trap and picked up another, larger one.

“One day, that prince goes hunting with his hounds and his men and his hawks. A deer were killed, but Gelert is not to be found, and the heart of the deer, by rights to be fed to Gelert, grows cold within the corpse. But no one can find him. So the prince goes himself to home with his hounds and his men and his hawks and is greeted at the door by Gelert, his muzzle blooded up to his eyes.”

He stopped for a moment and his long arms reached for the water urn and he upturned it, taking deep, unhurried drinks. Martha jumped to feel a soft hand creeping under her arm, and she turned to see Will trying to climb his way into her lap. She pursed her lips at him but pulled him onto her thighs and was grateful for his weight and warmth. She hugged him to her breast, her arms encircling him tightly.

“Seeing the gore, a terrible fear overcomes the prince and he runs to his son’s bed to find it o’erturned, bedclothes scattered and bloody, the boy nowhere to be found. A terrible rage builds within the prince and he takes from his belt his sword and pierces Gelert through the heart. Upon the dying howls of the hound, the prince hears a babe’s mewling, and throwing off the bedclothes, he finds his son, whole and unblemished. And next to his son is the body of the wolf Gelert has killed, keeping safe the boy. From that day, Llywelyn never smiles or laughs again and it’s said in Beddgelert, the place where the hound was laid, that you can of an evening hear his dyin’ howls.”

Martha turned her face from the remaining light of the hearth, carefully brushing away with her fingertips the water pooling at the corners of her eyes. She could hear Patience sniffling and sighing, giving full import to the sadness of the story, and she bit the inside of her cheek in aggravation that she would be so close to tearfulness over such a rustic, overworked tale, the kind of tale that would have sent her father into a spasm of ridicule.

She gently dislodged Will from her lap and directed his nodding form towards his mother. Patience stood awkwardly holding the sleeping Joanna and, gesturing for Will to come, carried the sole candle to her room. John stretched elaborately and, muttering and grimacing, followed his own feet to bed.

Slumped deeply into her chair, Martha let her chin fall sharply against the hollow of her chest and watched Thomas gathering up his traps, stringing them together as he would trout on a length of heavy string, his fingers finding the open hooks that his eyes could not see in the dark. The remnants of embers, briefly pulsating in orange and vermilion, lit only the most prominent features of his face and hands, leaving them to float, disembodied and massive like a statue buried to the neck and wrists in black tar.

The knot in her throat had finally dissolved, and though she granted dignity to the grave telling of the story, she resented her own response to it, as though he had deliberately sought to draw her out of her protecting reserve. An irrational play of thought rose up behind her eyes along with a sudden, embittered anger, and she remembered the brown hen passed over, not even worthy of sacrifice to beasts.

“D’ye think of yourself as the wolf?” she hissed, the words overdrawn and sibilant. “Or is it the wrongly accused dog that lives to serve and is trampled underfoot for it?”

He stood carefully to his full height, mindful of the beams above his head, and at that moment the last of the embers were extinguished. She listened for heavy footfalls as he fumbled his way to his room behind the hearth; but she heard nothing, as though he had disappeared along with the light.

A panicked nervousness began beneath her ribcage and she blurted out harshly, “Or do you imagine yourself a prince from Wales?” Her hands gripped the loosely jointed armrests, causing them to creak loudly. “Well…?” The room was an endless cave, the dark subsuming every familiar object, vanishing the floor beneath her until the chair in which she sat balanced solely on the points of its four slender legs. “Tell me, which are you?”

Against the river of noise in her head, she thought she could hear the cadence of his breathing, a slow and steady inhalation and exhalation, as though he had begun to slumber on his feet, and she strained to hear his advance or retreat.

“It’s not about me, missus.” His voice floated somewhere over her head, a bass counterpoint to the brittle rustling of the traps. “It’s about yourself.”

He moved expertly past her, not touching the chair, or any other thing in the room, causing only the boards on the floor to creak rhythmically, stirring the air briefly with the scent from his body.

CHAPTER 8

ANNE CARTER STOOD at the groaning board, surveying with satisfaction the thirty or so men who sat in the tavern eating, but mostly drinking, their Thursday-night suppers. They were almost to a man dockworkers, off-loading bales and crates and barrels from wherries and barges bringing their loads direct from the large merchant vessels anchored farther down the Thames. They were, as dock laborers went, a quiet lot, there to drink their ale, eat their bread, and stagger off to their crannied bunks to sleep for a few hours before starting again in the morning, hours before dawn.

She had been keeping a careful watch on the man leaning comfortably against the far wall near the fire, and when he raised his chin to look about the room, she shook her head at him. He had been nursing the one cup of ale for more than an hour and she teasingly rubbed her fingers together to show him he should order another cupful and spend some coin or leave the premises. He grinned at her, tucking his neck further into his coat, but made no move to comply.

There was a feeble pounding at the door and she sighed, leaving her station at the table to go and open it. The men were quiet but not above stealing a pie or a few oysters when she wasn’t guarding the food. The main tavern door was heavy with iron cladding and, in moderate weather, left open during hours of business. But a cold and brutal wind, a Normandy blow, had raked its way from east to west, and Anne had closed and latched it earlier against the rain. She opened it to a boy straining to hold with both hands a bucket of eels, thrashing and boiling in dark coils.

“Oh, Georgie,” she said. “Sweetheart, come in.” She laughed as the buffeting wind blew them both back into the room, and as she struggled to shut the door again, she felt the man at the fire come up behind her. He pushed his hands against the door to help her, but his thighs pressed against the back of her legs. Giving him a warning glance, she expertly danced away and put her arm around the boy.

“Georgie,” she chattered, “did ya swim here with the eels? Look at ya. With a towelin’ ya’d still be drownin’.” He laughed with her and shook himself like a dog. He snuck a peek at her bare arm wound tight around his neck, and blushed to purple. She smiled at his discomfort and teasingly brought her wrist to his mouth, wetting his lips with the rain off her skin.

Anne looked into the bucket and clucked approvingly at the muscular slapping of the eels. “Ooh, sweetheart. Go now into the kitchen and tell Min to give ya some oysters and bread. And tell her I said ya’r to have ale and not the small beer, mind ya, but a proper cup with both legs and a head.”

She gave his ear a playful tug and he colored again up to the roots of his hair. He went into the kitchen, carrying the bucket, and she walked through the room, table to table, checking each man’s portion to see if all had been paid for. In the corner farthest from the hearth she passed a makeshift table with a dead rabbit, head and feet intact, lying starkly on the naked boards, a small pinprick of red staining the wood beneath its neck. She was pleased to see every man in the place had taken note of the warning and had steered well clear of that corner of the room. The dead rabbit was Tiernan Blood’s mark, and his little joke to the world. His trade name on the streets and alleyways of London was the Gaelic word raibead, pronounced like the English word “rabbit.” Translated, it meant a man greatly to be feared. But to those outsiders who did not know his reputation for violence, it often meant fatal misjudgments in their dealings with Tiernan Blood.

A wind at her back caused her to turn, and she saw a cluster of men come into the tavern, unwrapping themselves from layers of cloaks and hats, carelessly spraying the laborers around them with drops of frigid rainwater. They walked without hesitation towards the table where she stood, and she hurried to the kitchen to bring them cups of ale, warmed earlier with a heated poker. They settled themselves onto chairs and stools and once seated began to look about the room, studying every downturned face, noting the sudden quiet. The man at the fire had turned away, but his head was tilted in an attitude of cautious readiness, as though listening for sudden footsteps from behind.

When Anne returned with the cups, she startled to see the fifth seat empty and whispered to the man at her elbow, “Here now, Brudloe, who’s missin’?”

He snaked his arm around her hips, pulling her closer, and said, “Poor Sam Crouch. He’s lost his last argument.”

“What d’ya mean?” she hissed. Brudloe had begun to pull her onto his lap, but she grabbed his thumb and, pulling it back painfully in its socket, said carefully, “This won’t play. Ya know Blood asked for five men, five ready men, and unless ya can increase yar number as quick as a whore’s plague, ya’ll have to answer for it.”

Brudloe freed his hand and shook it with elaborate hurt, laughing. “Annie, d’ye reckon there’s not bullies and bravos enough in London to replace Sam Crouch? Or d’ye think we can’t take care ourselves to advance Blood’s scheme?” His smile was suddenly gone and she regarded his small frame and balding head, cross-hatched with scars from a knife fight that had separated his scalp down to the skull. He had, after finishing the fight, pulled the shredded skin back over his head, paying a seamstress to sew the wounds together with silken thread. She knew that his greatest asset was his surprising strength and agility, far beyond most men twice his size. His weapon was a short-bladed knife because he preferred plying his trade up close, but his true pleasure lay in tying intricate knots; some for immobilizing his victims and some for garroting. She looked at his forearms and knew he could strangle a cow if he needed to.

Anne turned to the others in quick succession and had to admit the four men together could be formidable against all but a heavily armed group of mercenaries. Baker, seated next to Brudloe, was unremarkable in either size or appearance, although he was rather tall, and he sat alternately studying his nails and observing the room in affable silence. He was a professional torturer, sometimes taking his victims north to Scotland, where the rack and the wheel were still tolerated, if not readily accepted. She also knew he had a wife and five children in a house on St. Mary-at-Hill, only a few streets from the tavern which stood on Lower Thames Street, within the shadow of the Tower of London, where he sometimes worked late of an evening.