Читать книгу A Burnable Book - Bruce Holsinger - Страница 22

The knife landed in muscle with a wet spit. A second blade quickly followed, nearly touching the first. The carcass swayed, and Gerald Rykener clapped his hands roughly on his tunic. ‘Have that, Tom.’

The other apprentice stepped up to the line, a blade pressed between his fingers. His wrist bent, his arm rose, and with a flash of metal the knife was buried in the flank just inches from Gerald’s. The second landed a half foot higher on the beef, missing its target. ‘Damn it to queynting hell,’ he said, then with a scowl handed Gerald a coin.

Eleanor watched her brother pocket it, and for a moment the simple joy of victory on his face turned him back into the sweet boy she remembered. Then Gerald saw her.

‘Ah, by St George. Swerving again,’ he muttered to his companion, his contempt for her undisguised.

The other apprentice looked over to where she stood by the fence. ‘What do you think, Gerald? Your brother a mare or a gelding?’

‘A mare with a cock?’ Gerald taunted. ‘A gelding with a queynt?’

‘Either way she-he’s got enough riders to keep him-her filled with oats ’n’ mash till the trumpet sounds, from what I hear.’

‘Aye that,’ said Gerald, ignoring her as his fellow turned for the barn. Gerald wiped a long crimson smear across his cheek, then from beneath the carcass removed a bucket of blood. He took it to a heated cauldron at the far end of the yard. Gerald was fourteen, yet already moved with a tradesman’s confidence that would have been endearing if he hadn’t turned so foul. His apron was cut small in the style of the craft. We butchers pride ourselves on leaving our aprons white, he’d explained in those days when he cared. Now it was stained a brownish red, his loose breeches slimed with gore.

When he returned to the fence she saw the latest bruises had faded. His lip, too, had mostly healed. He was close so she went for his neck, the line of faded scar tissue running from his jaw to his nape. He knocked her hand back but she reached for his head and felt a new knot. Size of a peach pit. ‘What’s that about?’

He ducked away. ‘He swings the mallet around, you know, got those teeth on it. It’s wood, though, so. But Grimes’d never hit me with the metal one. Not ever.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘And when he does you’ll be dead as that beef side hanging behind you.’ Why Gerald took his master’s part so often she couldn’t reckon, though Nathan Grimes had been his effective father for going on three years, and children could develop peculiar loyalties.

He looked at her purse. She handed him the coins she’d come to deliver. ‘It’s hardly much. A shilling and five. Keep it somewhere, use it only in your most needful moments. Not for candied gingers on the bridge, now.’ She half-turned to go, but something in his eyes held her back. ‘What is it?’ Trying to sound impatient: she needed to be tough with him, tough as he was with her, or he’d never make it to his majority. ‘What is it, Gerald?’

He snarled and spat in the filthy straw. ‘No matter. Go away, Edgar.’

As her brother returned to his work Eleanor watched him sadly, marvelling at how much the boy had changed. They had been separated since their mother’s death, when Gerald was seven, Eleanor thirteen and starting to discover her second life. A man in body, but in soul a man and a woman both, a predicament that made her wardship a domestic hell: a wife who tormented her with the hardest household labour, a husband who wouldn’t leave her alone once he found out what she was. She had taken to the streets at sixteen. Gerald, though, had seemed to be getting by, floating from guardian to guardian, some good, some bad, yet all carefully regulated by the city, with appearances before the mayor himself once a year. Eleanor managed to see him nearly every month as they grew up. Finally, at his eleventh birthday, the office of the common serjeant arranged for his apprenticeship to a freeman of London and master butcher, and all appeared set.

Then, not six months after his apprenticeship began, the city passed the butchery laws, and Gerald’s master moved his shop across the river to Southwark to avoid the fines and fees. There not only butchers but guardians operated on their own authority, with little legal oversight from the town, and no common serjeant to take the orphans’ part. ‘Never heard no law against a butcher moving shop to Southwark,’ Grimes had said when Eleanor confronted him. He turned instantly cruel upon the move across the Thames: Gerald was on his own there, surrounded by meat yet starved for bread, beaten regularly and with no recourse. Eleanor had tried to intervene, but the laws of London, it was said, have no house in Southwark.

Soon enough Gerald was turning into one of them, these Southwark meaters, a nasty bunch of Cutter Lane thugs without guild or code, sneaking rotten flesh into the markets and shops across the river. The Worshipful Company of Butchers, London’s legitimate craft, had been trying for years to quash the flow of bad flesh into the city to no avail, and now that Gerald had been caught up in their illegal trade he, too, was slipping down the path to a hanging. It often seemed to Eleanor that Gerald’s entire self had changed, as if the Holy Ghost had sucked out his soul and the devil had blown in another.

‘Best be off,’ she said. He shrugged indifferently. From behind her, a whisper of straw. A pig, she thought. Gerald’s back was to her as he scraped at a pile of hardened dung. ‘May be a stretch before I can get out here again.’ She recalled the beadle’s questions, the threats, and thought of Agnes. Two sparrows perched on the side of the stall flitted off. Gerald started to turn. ‘There’s been some trouble on the lane, and I might have to be—’ He faced her now. His eyes widened.

Eleanor’s neck snapped back, her hood wrenched violently downward by an unseen hand. She was spun around into the face of Nathan Grimes, taking in his ale-breath. ‘Trouble on Gropecunt Lane? For a lovely boy-princess like yourself?’

‘You let my brother go, now!’ Gerald screamed, backing away. ‘You just let him go, Master Grimes!’

Grimes was a stout, boar-like man, with well-muscled arms that flexed as he held her. ‘I’ll let it go all right.’ With a hard push against her head, he shoved Eleanor to the stall floor. She backed up against the boards, then came to her feet, her breath shallow.

Grimes gestured toward Gerald. ‘Get inside, boy.’ Gerald stayed where he was. Grimes raised a hand. ‘Inside, boy.’ Gerald looked at Eleanor. She gave him a reassuring nod. He backed away, pushed open the pen gate, and walked reluctantly toward the house. The butcher leaned over Eleanor, toying with Gerald’s knives.

‘I know what you be, Edgar Rykener,’ said Grimes, with a small lift of his chin. ‘No place for swervers in a respectable butcher’s shop, now. Let your brother learn his craft in peace.’

‘Peace?’ said Eleanor under her breath; then, more loudly, ‘He getting any peace by your hand?’

‘Getting fed, isn’t he?’ Grimes retorted. ‘Getting schooled in hogs and calves, learning the way of the blade, got some thatch over his head. More’n you can say for lots of boys his age, in London or not.’

‘And getting a mallet to the skull in the bargain.’

Grimes spat in the dirt. ‘Boy needs to learn respect he wants to be a freeman like me.’

‘You took an oath, Master Grimes,’ she seethed. ‘In the mayor’s presence himself you swore to God you’d protect my brother, keep him from harm. Now you’d as lief kill him.’

Grimes lifted a cleaver, fingered its edge. ‘Never cut up a maudlyn in all my day.’ He looked over at the beef carcass. ‘Can’t imagine there’s much trouble to it, though.’ He smiled. ‘Now get back to London, sweetmeats.’

She edged out of the stall with a final glance at Gerald. He stood in the doorway to the apprentices’ shack, his face so much older than it should have looked. Once she was gone Grimes would paint it good. The burden of it all settled on her: a murder, a missing friend, a brother liable to be brained at any moment and clearly troubled by something he wouldn’t reveal.

Yet there was one man who might be capable of putting things right for Gerald, Eleanor speculated as she walked up toward the bridge, get him out of all of this. A kind man, from all she’d heard. A man with the authority to remove her brother from his Southwark dungeon and put him with a kinder master in London. As she passed back over the bridge she thought about this man, knowing, at least, where to find him; trusting, for she had to, in his kindness.