The Tiger Catcher Page 29

  Julian stares calmly back. “But at the end of the play, the blind beggar becomes the King of Egypt, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, but only by corrupting innocent women!”

  The four of them start toward the house.

  “Mary has always been a willful child, madam, don’t mind her,” Cornelius says. “She takes after her father.”

  “Sir John was an honorable man,” Edna says. “The child is petulant and selfish. You want to know how to stop her, Aurora? You tell her she cannot have what she wants, that’s how.” Edna sounds like a drill sergeant.

  “Easy for you to say, sister, but she’s all I’ve got left.”

  “Then you have no one but yourself to blame.”

  Can Julian tell Edna to shut the hell up or would that be rude?

  Aurora pats his arm as if she can read his thoughts. “Master Cruz, I’m ever so sorry I’ve put you in the middle of our family squabble. Would you mind if Mr. Grysley showed you to your room? Ask Krea to prepare him a plate, Cornelius. And show him the chandlery. Oh, and get the wagon ready for him to go to Borough Market tomorrow. You can drive a horse, of course, can’t you?”

  “Most certainly, madam,” says Julian without a blink.

  “Thank you for giving me more to do, sire,” the steward hisses to Julian. “Because I’ve been so idle lately.”

  “You have been idle, Cornelius,” Aurora says, “but your indolence reminds me—how’s Cedric?”

  “No better.”

  Aurora tuts. “Such a shame. I hope you don’t mind taking the horse by yourself across London, Master Cruz.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Cedric is our hostler,” she says. “Normally he would drive you to the market, but he’s developed a terrible rash on his eyes. Pus is dripping out. We fear he’s near death. You wouldn’t happen to know something about pus, would you?”

  “Very little, madam.”

  “We’re close to the stables, shall we take a peek at our poor groom?”

  One glance, and Julian immediately sees what Cedric’s problem is. The hostler’s brain appears to be oozing out of his blood-red eyeballs. Cedric lies on a bed of straw in a vacant horse stall and moans. Julian doesn’t come too close in case (in case!) Cedric is contagious. He thought maybe he could improve Cedric’s condition with some saline solution, but there’s no remedy besides prayer for what ails the groom.

  “What do you think it is, Master Cruz?” Aurora asks anxiously.

  “I can’t say for certain, my lady.”

  “A barber surgeon came the other day and pulled out two of Cedric’s teeth,” Aurora says, “but that didn’t work.”

  “That didn’t work?”

  “Not at all. Would you like to taste his urine, to diagnose him more accurately?”

  “I—uh—no, that—that will not be necessary,” says Julian.

  “Are you sure? Our doctor is good but too expensive,” Aurora says. “It’s cheaper to replace Cedric with another hostler than to hire the best doctor. He frequently tastes the urine of the sick to diagnose illness.”

  “He’s clearly a more thorough medical man than I am,” Julian says.

  Cedric keeps moaning.

  Julian tells Lady Collins there’s one thing he can try. He can boil some common leaves in water with honey and wash out Cedric’s eyes once the tincture cools. There is boric acid in the plants, Julian says, which can help with some eye rashes. Honey is good for many things, including disinfecting wounds.

  Cornelius and Edna snort and balk, but Cedric nods vigorously. Try it, try it, he whispers. Aurora orders Cornelius to collect a barrow full of leaves from the nearby laurel bushes.

  Edna whispers something to Lady Collins, who looks Julian over and frowns. “My sister makes a good point,” she says, suspicion creeping into her voice. “Where are your things? You couldn’t have come all the way from Wales without any baggage.”

  Julian must think quick. “I had two large cases with me,” he says, “but would you believe it, at the last inn I was in, I was separated from them by a migrant victualist, who saw me put my head down on the tavern table and promptly relieved me of my belongings.”

  “Pray tell—what was the name of that infernal inn, Mr. Cruz?” says Edna. “Because that’s terribly inhospitable.”

  “The Star Tavern,” Julian replies. It’s the only pub in West London he knows. “A welcoming enough place but filled to the rafters with unsavory characters. I actually overheard some patrons planning what sounded like a great train robbery.” Julian says it to amuse himself. The great train robbery was planned at the Star Tavern, according to the eponymous film.

  “The great what robbery?”

  “Grain robbery,” Julian hurriedly amends. He must stop joking or it’ll get him into real trouble. “But I was in my cups and could’ve misheard.”

  “Poor man!” Aurora says. “Cornelius, have Gregory help Mr. Cruz choose some items he can wear from the wardrobe of the departed. Without delay, sire, let’s get you out of these, whatever they are, and into some trunkhose. We’ll all feel better once you’re in trunkhose. Oh, and Cornelius, tell Gremaine to bring some fresh water from the well. Gremaine is our ewerer. But ask him to rinse out the bucket first—after all, Master Cruz is our guest.” Aurora chuckles. “Sometimes Gremaine forgets to rinse out the water bucket for weeks at a time.”

  38

  Chandlery

  JULIAN DOESN’T SEE MARY ANYWHERE INSIDE THE WELL-APPOINTED house, all stone slab floors, thick plaster walls covered with wood paneling, and large tapestries. He is introduced to Gregory, the keeper of the wardrobe, and to Catrain, his wife, who is the seamstress, the housemaid, and Lady Mary’s lady-in-waiting.

  “Are you also the matchmaker?” Julian smiles.

  The nearby Cornelius, who is possessed of something called a reverse sense of humor, reacts poorly to Julian’s question. “The reason Catrain fulfills several positions in the household, sire,” he says through his teeth, “is because our housemaid and lady-in-waiting have recently died. Our acater has also recently died. Because of that, Farfelee, our cook, has no food. Does that also amuse you? I don’t remember Lady Collins hiring you for the position of a jester.”

  If Devi were here, he’d tell Cornelius it’s because Julian isn’t funny. Devi might also explain to Julian what an acater is.

  The narrow room Cornelius gives to Julian is off the kitchen. In the buttery, next door, a half-dozen vats of odorous grease stand on the floor around a long wooden work table. Gremaine twitches non-stop, not the best trait for a man who carries murky water in a drought. Looking at the ewerer, Julian wonders if this is how he himself appeared to people in his previous life. He suspects Gremaine did not heed Lady Collins’s instruction to wash the bucket.

  In an upstairs room filled with organized piles of discarded clothes, Gregory allows Julian to pick out a few things to wear. Gregory is a slow-moving gentleman with an unseemly amount of facial hair like a Russian monk. (Oh, yes. The men sport copious facial hair in this old new world. Everyone but Julian. No wonder they mistrust him, him with his zippers and his infernal clean-shaven face!)

  “The clothes in this room belong to members of our household who have died,” Gregory tells Julian. There is nothing funny about that, especially after what Devi had told Julian about clothes carrying the spirits of the dead. The man finds Julian some breeches, trunkhose, an itchy tunic which Gregory calls a skirt, a coarse white shirt, a capotain black hat, and torn black gloves. The one decent thing Gregory shows Julian is a short silk cloak, offering it to him with pride. The cloak is red satin on the inside and pink linen on the outside. It’s embroidered with gold and silver stitching and has tassels and a silk fringe. Julian doesn’t know what to do. To not accept would be a mortal insult, but to accept means he might have to wear it.

  He accepts.

  “Don’t you feel fortunate,” Gregory says, handing it over. “Thank the good Lord for the dead, wouldn’t you agree?”

>   A few minutes later, dressed in itchy but more appropriate attire, an exhausted Julian sinks on a bench at the kitchen table, and Farfelee, an exceedingly large cook, orders Krea, his exceedingly small scullery maid, to bring Julian some household loaf and sausage with onions. Krea whispers to Julian that she is also the baker since the baker has died.

  “Thank the good Lord for the dead,” Julian says, mimicking Gregory.

  “Oh, I thank God for the dead every morning and night, sire,” Krea tells him. “I only wish there was more of them.”

  Julian suppresses a laugh. “Krea,” he says, looking the maid over. “Does it rhyme with Medea?”

  “I don’t know what that is, sire.”

  “Medea, the Greek sorceress who takes revenge on her faithless lover by killing her own children?”

  “Oh, that most certainly sounds like some people I know.” Krea is minute and homely, a skeletal antlike bird. Her face is ruined with smallpox scars. Along with the bread, Krea brings him a half-gallon jug of ale to drink. Julian gulps from it thirstily. Thank goodness, the ale is weak.

  “Have you got a fork for me, please?” he says, pointing to his sausage. The maid has given him a pewter spoon.

  “I don’t know what that is,” Krea replies.

  “You don’t know what a fork is? What do you eat your meat with?”

  “The spoon.”

  Julian looks deep into the sausage and picks up the spoon. The sausage is shoe-leather dry, but on the plus side it’s unconscionably salty.

  “People from foreign parts make everyone nervous,” Krea tells him after Cornelius steps out for a moment. “That’s why Master Cornelius is like that. We never know who is carrying the pestilence or is about to rob us.”

  “Well, robbing I don’t know about,” Julian says, “but as far as the plague, you need to look inward for causes of that, not outward.” When Krea stares at him obtusely, he changes the subject. Do they still not know what causes the plague? “Krea,” he says, “it seems an awfully big staff to take care of just two women.”

  “We had more but they died. The pestilence came last year, real bad. It spared some. It spared Lady’s daughter,” Krea says, in the tone of someone who’s critical of the pestilence for its value judgments. “It spared Lady’s spinster sister, Lady Edna.” The tone is only slightly warmer. “Also the useless Gremaine. He is Lady’s nephew, which is why she refuses to let me put a pillow over his head. I’ve offered to do it—but Lady is kind and says no.”

  This Krea is quite a character, Julian decides, just as Cornelius returns. “Have you finished eating and yapping? I need to show you the chandlery before I hurry to prepare your horses.”

  In the room with vats of grease, Julian gags, the little food he’s eaten and the gallon of ale repeating in his throat.

  “What’s wrong?” the steward asks.

  Julian breathes through his mouth. “What is that putrid smell?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Cornelius says. “I smell nothing untoward.”

  “What’s in those buckets?”

  “That,” Cornelius replies, “is the suet from which you will be making tallow for your candles.” The steward eyes him. “As a chandler, you are familiar with the process of candle-making, are you not?”

  “Of course.” Julian sifts through his brain for anything he knows about candles. “I usually make them with—beeswax.”

  “You come from a part of Wales where they’re ignorant of the law, sire?” says Cornelius. “Because all beeswax production and sale in London is controlled by the Guild on behalf of the Church and Crown.”

  “There’s a candle-making Guild?” Julian thinks he’s being funny.

  “That is precisely the case.” Cornelius can barely contain his contempt. “The Wax Chandler’s Company, established by Royal Decree two hundred years ago. Is this, perhaps, news to you as a chandler?”

  Julian can’t continue to converse because he is retching. The meaty gristly buckets of fat stink so bad. It smells like an animal dying.

  “How many candles do you think we’ll need, Grizzly?” Julian asks, as Krea carries in another vat of fresh grease, not fully solidified. The bucket is heavy, yet she carries it and sets it down without trouble. Krea is strong despite her size. In many ways, she is insect-like.

  “A thousand candles,” Cornelius replies. “Of varying thicknesses and lengths to fit our candlesticks.”

  Julian balks. He will be stuck in this rancid room for eternity, while out there in the sunlight, Lady Mary will be sewn into her wedding dress and have daffodils from Holland placed in her ringlet hair.

  “Can’t we just buy the candles?” Julian asks. He can load a wagonful tomorrow.

  “Have you any idea how much candles cost?” Cornelius says. “Lady Collins has a wedding to pay for. We have seven vats of suet for you—the chandler—to make into candles. And pardon me, sire, but what would be the point of you if we could just buy the candles?”

  Why does everyone keep asking what the point of him is? Graham there, Cornelius here. Julian is sick of it, frankly. “But Grizzly, if we’re making tallow candles, why can’t we also make some beeswax candles?”

  “Do you want us all to hang?” the steward says. “And even if this was a good idea, we have no bees, because we have no flowers. So where are you going to harvest this beeswax from?” Cornelius tuts derisively. “Oh, and one more thing,” he adds. “I don’t know about the unknown forest, but here in Clerkenwell, if you steal anything over a fivepence, it’s the gallows for you. Newgate is a mile away as the crow flies. You are familiar with Newgate prison, aren’t you, sire?” He turns to go. “You have much to do, jack of all trades. Best get started.”

  39

  Medea

  “KREA, WHAT IS THIS NASTY POTTAGE MADE FROM?” SIDE BY side she and Julian stand, staring into the vats.

  “Cow drippings, lamb drippings, pig drippings,” Krea replies. The grease from the things she and Farfelee cook for the house. The buckets have stood for weeks, the fat waiting to be made into tallow.

  “Did the last chandler die of disgust?” Julian asks.

  “No, sire.”

  He has no choice but to confess his incompetence and beg the scullery maid for help. “Can you teach me how to fish, Krea?”

  She shakes her head. “I do not know how to fish, sire.”

  “Please call me Julian,” he says. “I mean, can you show me how to make tallow?”

  “Of course,” she says. “But why did you say fish if you meant tallow?”

  He makes a mental note to only be literal from now on. “We don’t have time for this, Krea. The wedding is in—I mean, how long do we have before the wedding exactly?” If only he knew the date Elizabeth I had died.

  “Less than two moons, sire. Seven Sundays.” Krea smiles as if pleased with herself. “That’s how I measure all things,” she says. “By the day of rest. I got seven of them before Lady Mary is married and gone from this house.”

  Julian squints. “Do you want Lady Mary to be gone from this house?”

  “No, sire. I’m just counting the Sundays until she is. All things come to those who wait.”

  “That is true. But . . . Lady Mary doesn’t seem happy about the upcoming marriage.”

  “Lady Mary,” says Krea, “is never happy about anything. No time for idle chit chat. We have work to do.”

  They drag two of the vats into the side yard by the kitchen and heat up the coals. Krea says it’s easier to cook the suet outside over low heat coals. Julian doesn’t understand. Hasn’t it already been cooked?

  “You got meat in the suet,” Krea replies, “pieces of gristle and bone. You’re not making meat candles, are you?”

  Oh, so not completely humorless. The gnome makes the wry comment into her shoes. “I suppose not,” Julian says. “Krea, look at me.”

  The little woman lifts her eyes. She is an aviary creature, beaten down and plain and pocked of face, but there is fire behind those pale gray
eyes, and smarts.

  And something else Julian can’t quite put a finger on.

  Something unkind.

  “I’m not Lady Edna,” Julian says. “You may look at me when we speak.”

  Krea’s hard face softens. “Let’s render the fat before the sun goes down. I need to hurry. I must make pandemain for the morrow.”

  Julian nods. He will not ask what in the devil’s name is pandemain.

  “Lord’s bread,” Krea says.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “You didn’t look as if you knew.”

  Krea pours some grease over the spread-out coals, throws on a little tinder, and brings a lighted wick from inside the kitchen while Julian stands and watches. When were matches invented? God, how is it possible that one man can know so little.

  “Krea, how did you light that?”

  She looks at him as if he’s touched in the head. “From the fire in the kitchen.”

  “What if the fire in the kitchen goes out?”

  “It’s everyone’s job to make sure one of the fires is always on in the house. Or it’s the old-fashioned method, I suppose. Flint and steel. It’s only happened once in the twelve years I been here.”

  She’s known Mary since the girl was six. “Flint?”

  “Like a piece of quartz.”

  Julian flinches at the word quartz. Of course. Fire was discovered by the first men from striking quartz, the most abundant element on earth, an element with electro-conductive properties. Fire transformed mankind, made civilization, made life possible. And the first spark came from quartz—the thing Julian holds in the palm of his hand when he ignites the sun to make love possible. He trembles.

  Krea instructs him to simmer the pots of suet, stirring frequently and adding more coal as needed. “It’s called rendering,” she says. After the oil is separated from the solid matter, Julian must strain it into a clean pot, over a fine metal grate lined with cheesecloth.