Defiant (31 page)

“I intend never to see her again.”

“I see.” Ry spoke again, but mercifully, it was not of Eva. “What did Cig want?”

“Much. Mouldin has returned to his old ways. He is auctioning off Peter of London to the highest bidder.”

Ry whistled, long and low.

“I’ve shocked you.”

“I’m reeling.”

A group of merchants and servants passed, lanterns held high to ward off the encroaching darkness. Ry waited until they’d passed to speak again, his voice low. “Cig must have been sore relieved to hear you already
had
the d’Endshire heir in your keeping.”

“I’m certain he would have been,” Jamie agreed.

“But you did not tell him.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I do not like him. And I do not trust him.”

Ry raised an eyebrow. “But you will tell the king?”

They stepped over a pile of refuse. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I wonder.”

Jamie shook his head. “Ry, I am distressed by your lack of faith in me. Young Roger has more faith in me than you.”

“He knows you less well.”

“Ah. That is so. Why would I not tell the king?”

“One might as easily ask, ‘Why would you?’”

Jamie glanced over. “I am bound suchly, am I not?”

Ry did not answer.

Their footsteps thudded out dully on the cobbles, and their capes blew out behind them as they climbed to the steep center of town. Revelry was breaking out within buildings, shouts and laughter and the tinkling of lutes and cymbals. The sky had darkened further during their walk, and everything was deep in shadow now, except where lanterns suspended outside building lit the cobbles in shifting puddles of light.

“And so now we go . . . ?” Ry said.

“To the doctor. To find the priest before Cig does.”

They were drawing near the wooden gates that marked the
entrance to the Old Jewry. “I wonder what Cig will say to that if we meet at the negotiations.”

Jamie swept out his cape as they stepped around a pack of dogs fighting over entrails. “Cig can kiss my arse. In any event,” he added as they swept around another corner, “I beat him halfway to hell and left him in a tanner’s ditch.”

Ry’s groan carried them all the way to the doctor’s front door.

T
he door to Jakob Doctor’s office was slammed in their faces. They looked at it, then each other.

“That was impolite,” Ry said.

“It makes me positively curious,” Jamie replied, looking up at the second- and third-floor windows. It was idle appraisal; he had no intention of scaling the outer wall. Much easier to kick down the door. The wood was strong; the lock was not.

But only if absolutely necessary.

“Do you know anyone here, Ry?”

“Here, where?”

Jamie looked down from the face of the expensive brick building. “Here, Gracious Hill.”

Ry gave him an even look. “Being raised a Jew should in no way imply that I know every Jew in England.”

Jamie returned the level look. “You might know a few, seeing as your mother’s family was from this town, and I happen to know you visited often as a child.”

Ry shook his head and stalked off, down the clean, cobbled streets of the Old Jewry, although there was no “new” Jewry. But there were pogroms every so often, and kings who sold “their” Jews, then ejected them, and years later made them pay for the privilege of coming back and having it
happen all over again, sometime later, at the whim of some future king.

But King John was particularly protective, and in one of those odd bedmatings, at a time when ordinary citizens and rich barons were being pushed to their limits by John’s incursions into their rights and coffers, the Jews were safer under the oppressive lordship of King John than they’d been under any other English king.

Fifteen minutes later, Ry came striding out of the spring gloaming with a stoop-shouldered man wearing a skullcap. Ry looked grim, but the rabbi looked even more dour. He spent a long, silently scoldful minute examining Jamie, then turned back to Ry with a severe look.

“I dearly hope your mother knows what you’re doing.”

Ry’s eyes narrowed at the effort of resisting some obviously powerful urge—Jamie could only guess which—but Ry replied in a respectful, if chilly, tone of voice, “Mama died, one of the times they burned the Jewry.”

The rabbi shook his head, whether due to disgust or grief, and turned to the door. He rapped on it thrice.

After a moment, the door swung open. The same shaft of yellow light spilled out as had before. The same servant poked his head out as had before. But this time, the booming voice was given form as another, taller figure came up behind him, who in addition to looking distinguished, looked highly irritated. He also had a blackening eye.

“What is the meaning of this—,” he began, then saw the rabbi. “Mecham, what are you doing here?”

Ry’s scolding rabbi sighed and gestured. “Rebekka who married Yakov’s son Josef, in London, this is her son. Hayyim. He needs our help.”

“Ry,” he corrected curtly.

Jakob the doctor looked at them for a long time, then,
shooing the servant aside, stepped back and silently waved them in. Mecham shook his head again, having mastered the same combination of guilt and grief Jamie recalled from Ry’s mother. The rabbi leaned in to clasp hands briefly with the doctor, then hurried away, back into the darkness of the ghetto.

Jamie and Ry stepped inside warily, scanning the rooms as they shut the door, pulled in the latch string, and followed the doctor into a large chamber.

Jakob Doctor went immediately to a far wall, straightening ceramic pots. Ry stepped to the far side of the entry, and Jamie stood by the doorway. They looked at Jakob Doctor’s profile. He had a black eye.

“’Tis late,” the doctor said, not looking over. “I am weary. What do you want?”

“We are here with a simple inquiry, Doctor. Did you have any patients this day?”

He moved from shelving ceramic pots to shelving glass bottles. Mottled green, they looked like small, wet, misshapen frogs. “Every day, I have patients.”

“New ones.”

“New ones. Every day.”

Ry said quietly, “A priest.”

The doctor’s busy hands stilled, resting on the table in front of him. Then he started picking up jars and moving them up onto shelves bolted to the walls behind the table.

“Aye, I saw a priest.”

“He was here?”

“In this room.”

“And now?”

“He is no longer in this room.”

Jamie gave a faint smile. “Doctor, if you do not want us here—”

“Is it so obvious?”

“—you need but answer my questions, and we will be gone before anyone will know we were here. Asking questions.”

Jakob looked at him blandly.

“I can ensure that”—Jamie pointed to Jakob’s black eye—“will not happen again, if you talk to me.”

The doctor lifted his brows slightly, and Jamie sighed. He gestured to Ry, then made for the stairs. “Search the back rooms.”

Jamie made a quick search of the upper-level rooms, the long, narrow hall, the bedchamber separated behind a tapestry, and found nothing He could hear Ry downstairs, moving through the back rooms. A peek out the window a moment later showed Ry investigating the small outbuilding in the back that no doubt housed chickens and perhaps a small goat.

“This is why people slam the door in the faces of armed men who appear at their doors unannounced,” Jakob Doctor said when they returned downstairs.

“No doubt. Had you told us what we wanted to know, it might have been avoided.”

“No, it would not have been.”

They looked at each other, then Jamie smiled faintly. “No, it would not.”

The doctor sighed and leaned back against the table behind him, crossing his arms over his chest. His long, expensive tunic swayed around his ankles. He peered at Jamie for a long moment. “The priest was brought here with a cough. Sent by a midwife.”

“Magda,” Jamie said in a low voice.

Jakob Doctor’s eyebrow formed a stern line across his wrinkled brow. “Magda is a skillful midwife. Her knowledge should not be maligned.”

“I am hardly maligning her knowledge,” Jamie demurred.

“I examined him, gave a healing poultice for his chest. He is a
wise man, and we had a pleasant discussion. The priest reported that in the past, several Christian doctors have suggested the priest had a devil in his chest, and this was the cause of his rheumy cough.” The doctor lifted his brows, as if awaiting an opinion on this piece of idiocy.

“I assume you did not agree about the devil,” Jamie said drily.

Jakob moved his arms in a gesture of futile anger. “Fools.”

“In what state was the priest when he left?”

“Coughing. Pleasant.” Jakob paused. “Familiar.”

Jamie nodded slowly. “You would do best to forget that last.”

Jakob nodded, glancing at Ry. “I forget many things.”

Ry’s face rippled. “I forget nothing.”

“And such men suffer.”

Ry gave a bark of harsh laughter and turned to Jamie. “Are we done here?”

Jamie ran his fingertips over the papers on the table, touching them lightly. “Did he say anything else?”

The doctor turned back to his table and began laying strips of clean cotton into a wooden box. “About?”

Jamie looked at the papers for a while. About what, indeed. “About . . . anything. Anything at all. Anything you recall might be of use.”

Jakob looked over his shoulder, pausing in putting the strips into their container. “I was told I might expect a visitor, and he would settle the bill. A Jamie Lost.” Jamie felt Ry’s gaze on the side of his face. “I do not know who that is,” the doctor said. “I do not think I shall see payment, do you?” He regarded them with haughty, cold dignity.

Jamie looked up from the papers. “Why did you do it, then? Render service?”

“I am a Jew. I am a doctor. I render.”

“Is there anything else?”

A small ripple disturbed the refined, composed face of the
best doctor west of London and south of Chester. “Robert fitzWalter is here.”

“Robert FitzWalter is in town?” Jamie held himself motionless, but inside, his blood was heating, churning.

Ry muttered some curse.

The doctor turned back to his straightening. “You did not hear that here.”

After that, it was a matter of another swift minute, a few more queries, and they were done. Ry turned and walked out. Jamie nodded his thanks and rapped his knuckles lightly on the desk. The doctor looked down and saw a small felt pouch resting under Jamie’s curled fingers.

“What is that?”

Jamie turned for the door. “Payment. I am Jamie Lost.”

They left not ten minutes after they’d arrived, silent as darkness.

I
N
a cellar below, an armed guard stood at the base of the stairs, his head tilted, his ear aimed at the dirt ceiling above.

He was waiting for a message from his commander, Mouldin, and then he would deliver the priest. Hoped he’d make it that long. He glanced over his shoulder. The priest was lying, sleeping lightly, on the ground.

A moment later a beam of light shot down, then widened as the door above was swung wide.

“Come up,” said the doctor.

The guard carried the priest up; it was not difficult, as the old man was light as a feather. He felt a twinge of discomfort at treating a man of God in this manner, but consoled himself with the thought it would only be for a short time. Mouldin would sell the priest to someone who wanted him very much and would probably treat him well.

As the guard crested the stairs, the physic regarded him
coldly and pointed to the back room. “Lay him on the bed. Be gentle. And do not touch him again.”

“If someone else comes—”

The doctor drew himself up. “You will move him again over my dead body.”

The soldier felt uneasy, but for the moment it didn’t matter. He was simply waiting for Mouldin’s signal, and instructions on whom to deliver the priest to, the rebels or the king.

J
AMIE
and Ry entered the inn’s enclosed stableyard, talking softly, making plans. Soft sounds of snuffling horses chomping hay eddied through the dark. “All I want is a drink,” Jamie muttered. “To sit in a moment of silence, and think. With a drink.”

Roger stepped out of the shadows. “I ordered your bath, sir, and...” He drew nearer, took one look between them, and said, “Where is Eva?”

E
va turned to the Scotsman as the echo of Jamie’s bootheels faded. She looked way up to his eyes, which were set above a wild, hedgerow-thick brush of beard. She cleared her throat.

“Sir?”

He glared at her. “Not me. I’m no’ a knight.”

She nodded agreeably. “This is a common condition in England, is it? I have been surrounded by many men who insist they are not knights.”

His narrowed eyes narrowed slightly more.

“I think the fewer knights we have, the better. Do you not agree?”

“Aye,” he agreed slowly. Keeping a confused and suspicious eye on her, he sat at the table and reached for a tankard sitting there.

“They are naught but intrigue and politics,” she elaborated helpfully.

“Mucking things up,” he muttered in agreement.

She nodded, feeling as she went for chinks in this man’s no-doubt-impressive armor. He would not be swayed by tears, that was certain—not that she had any to give; Jamie was not worth the salt in them—nor would he be weakened by feminine wiles.

Not that she had any of those either, she reflected.

No, he was a straight-on sort of man, albeit one who’d been terribly hurt, and it had not yet healed. Now, what sort of thing cut so deep and healed so slowly?

Betrayal, of course.

He watched her suspiciously, but it was less suspiciously than before, and so she deemed it progress. In this way, one maintained hope in the face of great odds.