The Wolves of Andover (5 page)

“You’ll not catch them by day,” Thomas said, wiping his hands over his shirt. “They’ll be hidin’ in a thorny lair. And if you did find them, you’d need to climb in face-first to kill ’em. No, a gun’s not the way to catch a wolf.” He looked significantly at the rusted barrel of the cradled matchlock, and the farmer bristled.

“Well, then,” the man said hotly, “if you’re too afraid to come, you only need say so.” Thomas shrugged and, wishing the men a good day, walked back into the fields. The lead farmer motioned for his men to follow away, and they walked in single file down the path like geese tied bill to tail feather.

Soon after, though, Martha saw Thomas returning to the house and, with a flash of irritation, thought he wanted his dinner before the appointed hour. But he gave her no notice and instead addressed himself to Patience.

“Missus, if you’d be willing to give over a hen, I can kill those wolves. I’ll buy you back a hen from the skinning bounty.”

Patience looked at him in surprise and said, “But you told Goodman Shed he could not kill the wolves.” Will, who had spoken of nothing else since the farmers took their leave, clapped his hands and tugged at his mother’s skirts, shouting, “Mamma, Mamma, Mamma, let me go. Let me go hunt the wolves with Thomas. I can help, I tell you I can!”

Thomas laughed and answered, “No, Goodman Shed could not kill a cow with that rusted pipe of his, little less a wolf. But I can.”

Patience pulled Will from her skirts and shushed him, but a calculating look had settled into her face. Martha looked from Patience to the Welshman and realized a deal was being struck; Thomas had sent the other men away so he could collect the bounty for himself. She looked with new eyes at his raw-boned figure; his face, cut by hard living, was well beyond comfortable middle years. But as he inclined his head to Patience, she saw ambition flare in his eyes, like a sudden sharp flame.

Martha, thinking a knotted cord the best way to plumb deep
water, clanged the spoon loud and long against the cook pot. “Well, then,” she countered. “You’re going to spend the night thrashing about after the wolves yourself, are you?”

His eyes shifted to Martha’s, and for the briefest moment, she felt the short hairs on her head bristle. He turned his attention back to Patience.

“I’ll build a pen, missus. They’ll come for the hen. Once they’re inside, I’ll spring the gate behind them, and shoot ’em dead.”

After some pointed haggling, it was agreed upon that the bounty would be split three ways, John getting the third equal share for helping build the pen. She felt hostile eyes on her and turned to see Will regarding her with a jutting lower lip. He was a sweet child, she knew, but a handful at times and rebellious.

“What is it?” she asked crossly.

“You shouldn’t look so at Thomas. He’s been a soldier in England,” he said defensively. “Haven’t ya, Thomas?”

Thomas nodded briefly, but there was a sudden guardedness about his posture, a wariness that made Martha think there was a good deal more to the story. The angling scar dividing one brow neatly into two halves took on a more interesting history than a careless fall onto a harvesting blade, or a village brawl. Her father used to say that eight parts of speech came into the world at Creation and that women made off with seven of them. The eighth part held by men was the language of war, conquest, and bragging. The Welshman, like most men, had a tongue for boasting; and she was sure, with the right abuse to his pride, those secrets could be tipped into revelation.

“And what kind of aimless fables have you been throwing the boy?” she asked dismissively. “You’re too long in the tooth to
have served the king as soldier. More like stable boy or muck-about…” Her voice trailed off as she watched his jaws working together, knotting the skin at his cheeks. There was a slight lowering of the chin, but nothing was said, no gestures made nor distracted shuffling of feet. He merely stood, hatless and calm, and in that moment all other action in the room ceased. And settling over every motionless figure, like gilt over wood, was a lingering, brittle tension.

T
IERNAN
B
LOOD STOOD
quietly in a small alley off Pudding Lane and watched the night-soil men carting their refuse noisily over the stones. It was only just past midnight, but from the bawdy laughter and the unsteady stopping and starting of the handcart, Blood knew the refuse men were well on their way to being insensible with drink. It was dark, with no moon, and he could hear more than see the watchman in the alley opposite him stir with the noise. He had been waiting for three hours for the watchman to fall asleep, and he cursed, resolving himself to waiting another quarter hour for the man to nod off again.

He heard what sounded like a woman’s shriek, in anger or in pain, he didn’t know, but it was brief and soon the street emptied into relative quiet again. He thought about where he had dined earlier that evening, a fine tavern in Covent Garden, and smiled thinly to think that he should now be waiting on the main pathway populated with the night-soil men; the midden men, taking the worst of London’s droppings to the barges moored on the Thames. A solid river of shite, he thought, the overarching smell
giving proof that even the leavings of privilege stank as highly as any laboring ’prentice’s.

Blood’s dinner companion that night, among some ladies of rank, minor nobility, rakes, and assorted whores, was Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who had recited to them all a new poem he had composed specially in the Irishman’s honor. “Since loyalty does no man good, let’s steal King and outdo Blood.” The fact that Rochester had already pulled down his breeches in preparation for mounting his dinner companion, a fair-haired whore improbably named Honour, when he was overcome with his muse gave the recitation boundless hilarity. From the time of Blood’s release two years earlier for trying to steal the royal jewels from the Tower of London, and his subsequent pardon from King Charles II, he was the most sought-after rogue in court society. The fact that he had blackmailed the king into a full pardon by threatening to reveal state secrets was known to no one else, except perhaps for Henry Bennet, the Earl of Arlington. If nothing else, Tiernan Blood, the son of an Irish blacksmith, with his nose in every backroom dealing, knew how to keep secrets, if it benefited his person. And he knew many secrets, from chambermaids’ to the highest offices’ in England.

He felt under his cloak for the cudgel and the hooked latch lift he kept tucked into his waistband and peered cautiously into the street. Gentle snoring sounds came from the watchman, and Blood quickly crossed over to the house opposite in the middle of the lane. It was an old house, one wall leaning against the neighboring house, and the door was made of heavy oak, although the portal was split and spongy from rot. Built in the time of the Great Queen, the house walls, half-timbered with wattle and
daub, were dark and spotted from a hundred years of fire, rebellion, and neglect. The great fire of 1666 had begun on Pudding Lane, but somehow this row of houses had escaped the worst of the flames. Pulling the hooked lift from his waistband, he passed the thin piece of metal through the gap between the crumbling wall and the door and deftly raised the latch.

Blood passed into the house at the moment he heard another cart rumbling down the lane, but it didn’t concern him; he was inside and the watchman had seen nothing. He paused for a moment, listening for any sounds coming from the common room.

From his stance at the threshold, he imagined the stairs roughly ten or twelve paces from the door. He walked carefully forward until he felt with the toe of his shoe the first riser to the stairs. Placing his feet as close to the wall as he could to prevent the boards from creaking, he lifted his weight from stair to stair. He took his time, allowing his eyes to better focus in the dark, and when his head passed above the second-floor landing, he saw a faint glimmer of candlelight leaking through the gap beneath the large, iron-banded door of the bedchamber. A segment of the lime-washed wall under his fingers crumbled and showered the steps in a brittle cascade. He froze and listened for steps approaching from the other side of the door, but there were no footfalls, and he climbed the last few stairs to the landing.

He reached for his cudgel and pulled it from his waistband and, with a few gliding steps, positioned himself in front of the chamber door. He lowered his head, placing his ear next to the splits in the wood. He heard nothing; no movement, yet no sounds of deep sleep either. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought the room completely empty.

Raising his cudgel, he pulled down on the rope latch and threw his weight against the door, which swung freely open on its hinges. Blood counted on the sudden violence of his forced entry to surprise the man he knew to be in the room, and it was the total astonishment on his target’s face that gave him the greatest satisfaction.

The man, of course, had no pistol; he never carried a pistol, relying rather on the weapons of those who guarded him. He had been reading by candlelight, and he dropped his book to the floor as he clutched the arms of the chair, awkwardly rising to his feet, his mouth open in alarm. The small sea-coal fire had burned down close to ashes, too weak to illuminate the intruder’s face.

Blood could have laughed out loud with delight, but instead he said to the man, “I’m here for my ruffian’s pay.”

A spark of recognition passed over the man’s face, and he fell back into the chair, his terror quickly replaced with anger; and just as rapidly, in a series of winking spasms and tics, a forced calm settled over his face as he bent to pick up his book and place it carefully on the table next to the chair. He said tightly, “These games of yours, Blood, are most tiring.”

Blood dropped his upraised arm still holding the cudgel, curling his lips unpleasantly. “Did I scare you, Sir Joseph? My apologies. It’s only to drive home the point that I can breach any hindrance you put in my way, find any place you care to hide, should I be played falsely or go unpaid. But more than this, Sir Joseph, I do it for my own amusement.”

Sir Joseph grunted impatiently. “You realize, of course, that if you’ve murdered the guard, it will come out of your wages.”

Dragging a small wooden stool closer to the coals, Blood said
coarsely, mimicking the lilting accent of London streets, “Sir Joseph, ya know I’d never hurt yer man. I left him sleepin’ th’ sleep of the innocent.” He straddled the stool and, placing the cudgel in his lap, rubbed his hands with exaggerated briskness over the small hearth. It gave him no small pleasure to give Sir Joseph Williamson his backside, and though he could feel the other man’s eyes on his neck, he took his time before speaking again.

“Your letter intrigued me,” Blood said, finally breaking the silence, all traces of street cant gone. “You intimated you had an offer for me, an offer that would pay quite well. And that it was a venture—how’d you put it?—that would bring to bear all of my multitudinous talents.” He smiled broadly at the older man and then shifted his attention back to the hearth.

“No,” Sir Joseph said, “I wrote you that it would bring to bear the talents of those you have in your employ. I’m not paying you to do the work. I’m paying you to find the men to do the work. And just so we’re very much of like mind, I’m
not
paying you to play the shuttlecock.”

Blood stood and stretched and then dragged the stool closer to Sir Joseph’s chair. He placed the cudgel on the table, setting it carefully over the book, and leaned in close, as though preparing to relate a confidence.

“I
am
a shuttlecock, Sir Joseph. A vainglorious shuttlecock of monstrous proportions. But it’s you who’ve made me so. I am, after all, only the creature of your designs.” He sighed and, reaching into one of the pockets in his greatcoat, pulled out a handful of singed chestnuts, which he placed on the table. They rattled and rolled together sharply to the lip of the slanted tabletop.
Picking up one of the nuts, Blood began to peel back the charred skin and said, “What is it you’d have me do?”

With his eyes on the cudgel, Sir Joseph distractedly brushed one hand up the length of his yellow silk vest as though searching for something. His fingers found a pocket and he extracted a small scrap of paper and handed it to Blood to read. He watched carefully as Blood first squinted against the darkness to decipher the amount of money written on the paper and then whistled softly. Sir Joseph took back the paper and folded it once more into his vest. “This, as you must have guessed by now from the size of the bounty, comes directly from our Catholic friend the Earl of Arlington.”

“Ah, yes,” said Blood, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, “our friend with the sinister yet obvious reminder of his service to the Crown. I’ve heard that black plaster bandage hides nothing but warts. It is a goodly amount. But considering the scope and size of the venture, Sir Joseph,… I’m afraid it won’t be enough.”

The startled look from the older man gave Blood another surge of satisfaction. “How could you possibly know what it is that you are to do?” Sir Joseph asked, a small bubble of spit forming at the corner of his mouth. He quickly wiped it away with the back of his hand, but Blood had seen him do it, and a look of distaste crossed the Irishman’s face.

Smiling thinly, Blood said, “I know everything, Sir Joseph. It’s what you pay me for. I can tell you how much and from whom you’ve bought this safe house, as well as the name of your tailor. I can even tell you”—and here he paused, resting one hand on the cudgel, fingering the long handle—“how many spies you have on your payroll. I can tell you the names of all of your
enemies in the ministry and the names of all of your friends, among whom I’d like to count myself. But, as you well know, you’re not the only one with a pair of ears… and a purse.”