A Beggar's Kingdom Read online

  In the corner of the tavern, Father Anselmo stands, loudly pleading to the men present. “My fallen angels, have you already forgotten that pestilence was retribution for your wicked ways?” he cries. “It was punishment for your wrongdoing. I beseech you, good gentlemen and a lady—turn from your stinking and horrible sin of lechery! Which grows daily in this stew by your continual employment of strumpets, all to the one misguided and idle women. How long can this continue—until you’re all dead of syphilis or the plague? A conflagration will not be enough to punish you for your sins. How long do you intend to dwell in your odious wickedness? Until there is more death? Don’t you know that wanton lust, divorced from civilizing forces, leads to errors in judgment, to compromised honor, to blackmail, to murder! All the deadly sins are boiling under your roof, and you call yourselves reputable men. Repent! Repent before it’s too late.”

  The Baroness, her face unpainted, perspiring, aggravated, folds her hands together in a frantic plea to Julian. She looks as Julian feels. “I’m going to throw myself into the River Thames if that miserable wretch doesn’t shut his gob this instant!” she exclaims about Anselmo. “Where have you been all day, Julian? Why do you look as if you’ve been swimming in mud? Why aren’t you dressed for the evening? It’s Saturday night. You know how busy we get. We have no flowers, and Room Two still smells of corpse. The girls are ripping each other’s hair out—and I mean that in the most literal sense. Ilbert is more insolent than ever, you’re nowhere to be found, and look like a leper. Please—go change into your evening attire. Blimey, one little death, and everything’s gone to pot!” The woman fans herself wildly, raising her eyes to the ceiling. “Bloody helpers, it’s hot! I’m praying for a little rain and for that beastly man to lose his tongue. Is that really so much to ask, O Lord?”

  Julian pats Tilly’s arm. On the outside, he remains composed. “I think some of your prayers may already be answered,” he says. “There was a strong east wind as I was returning. Rain is around the corner. About everything else, Baroness, don’t worry. I’ll take care of the constable and the girls and the smell. Give me an hour. I’ll take care of it all.” Calmly he starts up the stairs. “Which girls are fighting?”

  “All of them. But mainly Margrave and Mallory. Tell them to stop hollering or they can leave right now and go work at the Haymarket. They beat their girls there, soundly, like gongs.”

  “Mallory is fighting?” Julian hurries.

  On the second floor, thirteen girls are yelling in the corridor. Margrave is soaked from head to chest as she and Mallory scream at each other. Julian’s first instinct is to defend Mallory, but a more careful listen tells him that Mallory is the attacker. Apparently, she threw a bucket of putrid water into Margrave’s face. It’s gone into the girl’s eyes and nose and mouth and is burning her. Instead of apologizing, Mallory stands and shouts. Julian has never seen Mallory this red-faced and enraged.

  Julian steps between the two women, separating them and pulling Mallory away. She doesn’t want to hear it, not even from him. But he’s had enough. He raises his voice to show the girls he means business. “Stop it, you two. Margrave, go clean yourself up. Mallory, you too, downstairs. You look a fright. You’re scaring off the customers.” He frowns. “What’s the matter with you?” he says to her quietly. “Go.” And louder, “Carling, Ivy, come with me—the rest of you, get back to work. Show’s over.”

  The Baroness is right. Fabian’s room still smells awful. Death must have seeped into the floorboards.

  “We tried, sire!” Carling and Ivy cry. “We used up all the vinegar you gave us and all the lye.”

  Julian sighs. “Let’s declare this room occupied for the rest of the night. Put a sign on the door. We’ll work with nine rooms tonight, nothing we can do.” The Baroness won’t be happy with the loss of earnings. And tomorrow is Sunday, and all the markets will be closed. Nowhere to buy more lye. Exasperated, Julian follows the maids downstairs. He hasn’t gotten himself cleaned up as he had promised the Baroness, but he needs to speak to Mallory. He finds her in the servants’ kitchen, still irate. “Mallory?”

  “Go away.”

  “Why are you upset? What has Margrave done?”

  “She’s a thief.”

  “I thought she was your friend?”

  “She hates me. She’s always hated me.”

  “What could she possibly steal from you? You have nothing. You barely have a change of clothes.”

  “Yes, by all means, demean me.”

  “I’m not demeaning you,” Julian says, chastised, “I’m trying to understand.”

  “Please, sire, can you leave so I can do my job?” She won’t look at him.

  As he’s about to head upstairs, he hears the Baroness sharply calling his name from the ground floor of the tavern. She’s still in her pink velvet robe, but now Constable Parker stands by her side. Julian’s mood worsens. He wasn’t expecting to face Parker so soon. He can’t deal with the constable at the moment, not least of all because he is so disheveled.

  Usually Parker is delightfully apathetic. He comes every week, Julian gives him a drink, a meal, and a cut of the week’s earnings. For this, Parker looks the other way if a fight breaks out, or if there’s some petty theft. But tonight Parker says he can’t really look the other way because there’s chatter all over Westminster that a well-born man has been found dead in a brothel.

  “Who says a man’s been found dead?” Julian asks.

  “The one-humped bloke with a shovel.”

  “Ilbert?” The Baroness laughs. “No, no, constable. Ilbert was born in an insane asylum. Born to a leper who died at childbirth. He is half-blind because of his mother’s leprosy. It ate away his brain. He once told me,” the Baroness says, “that two men died of spotted fever on Drury Lane!”

  “That’s probably correct, madam.”

  “He’s never been to Drury Lane. How would he know? The other day he was whispering to Father Anselmo that English aristocrats and Members of Parliament were conducting a sado-masochistic orgy in this very house until daybreak. Don’t you think I’d know if this was happening under my own roof? Orgy! What is this, the Haymarket? Besides, we don’t have rooms big enough for an orgy even if we wanted one. So you see, Ilbert often makes things up, all cock and bull stories from him. Pay him no mind, constable, no mind at all.”

  The constable almost buys the Baroness’s own cock and bull story. “Here’s my pickle,” Parker says. “Ilbert keeps muttering that some fat man has died. I wondered if he could’ve meant Lord Fabian, so I took a stroll over to the honorable gentleman’s home in Belgravia, to make sure he was all right. The gentleman is widowed and childless. And wouldn’t you know it, his butler informed me that Lord Fabian is missing! He hasn’t been home since early Friday morning. That’s never happened before, apparently. The household is frantic.”

  Julian and the Baroness shrug. “Maybe he’s at work,” the Baroness says.

  “Great minds think alike, madam,” Parker says. “That was my thinking. So I took a ride over to the Tower this afternoon, and guess what?”

  “I can’t fathom.”

  “The Tower?” says Julian. “Like the Tower of London?”

  “Yes, sir,” Parker says. “That’s where the honorable gentleman works. Unfortunately, no one was there to answer my queries at the weekend. I was told to come back on Monday.”

  Julian and the Baroness both exhale with relief as the constable shakes Julian’s hand and feigns to go. Then, almost as an aside, he asks to speak to the cleaning girl.

  “Which cleaning girl? We got three.”

  “Ilbert mentioned that one of them was always hanging around the gentleman,” Parker said. “Maybe she can tell us something—like the last time she saw him.”

  “I assure you, constable, he hasn’t been here.” The Baroness waves her little book of hours in the air. “No one goes upstairs without me knowing. No orgies. No Lord Fabian.”

  “Just a quick word with the girl, Barones
s.”

  “She’s my niece, constable. She’s the only daughter of my youngest sister, may God rest her soul. I can vouch for Mallory on the Bible.”

  Parker raises his hand to assure her. “It’s just routine, Baroness, please don’t worry.” He coughs. “Though one other small thing…Ilbert says that a week ago he saw this Mallory girl in the main kitchen, where she has no business being, crushing something with a mortar into a pestle. When he confronted her, she scraped out the pestle and hurried off.”

  “Probably grinding some nuts,” the Baroness says. “Is that also against the law?”

  “By also, do you mean grinding some nuts and also murder?” Parker says. “One of them is against the law, madam, yes. And Ilbert may be a more enterprising fellow than he lets on because he ran his finger through the pestle she left behind and tasted the grindings.”

  “And?”

  “Ilbert says he damn near died. Says he was sick for three days. The bitter thing that touched his tongue burned a hole in it, singed his throat and gave him terrible digestive upset. He started vomiting up blood, which may be the only thing that saved him, since he believes he vomited up whatever was poisoning him.”

  “Poisoning?” Julian opens his hands with a chuckle. “Constable Parker, Ilbert touches his mouth and face after handling the filthiest things. Has the man ever had a bath? He could’ve eaten a spoiled pig snout, old fish, bad eggs. In any case, it clearly wasn’t poison since Ilbert’s still walking around, alive as all that.”

  “As opposed to who?” Parker says. “As opposed to an esteemed Member of Parliament, a Lord Temporal, who has vanished and can’t be found?”

  “Do you always assume the worst when a man can’t be found for a day?”

  The constable eyes Julian, then the Baroness. “Not any man. Lord Fabian. Many powerful people are going to notice the lord’s conspicuous absence. Among them His Majesty Charles II, your king.”

  Julian and the Baroness stand motionless. Julian’s leg itches with anxiety.

  “I don’t need to remind you both,” Parker says, “that murder by poison is a heinous crime. The punishment for it is being boiled in oil. Now will you two let me talk to the girl so we can clear her of any wrongdoing?”

  They look for her, but Mallory can’t be found. Night is falling and the tavern is getting busy. The Baroness manages to charm Parker into returning on Monday morning, when he can have all day with Mallory if he likes. “And perhaps the honorable Lord Fabian will turn up by then, and this confusion will be put behind us.”

  As soon as Parker leaves, Julian turns to the Baroness. “Ilbert’s not to be trusted.”

  “What could Mallory have been grinding up in that pestle? Damn that girl!”

  “Nuts, Baroness! But this isn’t about Mallory. It’s about Ilbert. You do remember, don’t you, how just this morning he and I dragged Fabian’s body down the stairs?”

  “Shh!”

  “On your orders, he helped me bind the man,” Julian says. “He carted him away. Ilbert knows for a fact there’s a body, for an absolute fact. What’s stopping him from leading the constable right to it?”

  “Why would he do that?” The madam sounds offended. “We’ve had a death here before, some years ago. Ilbert was exemplary. Took care of everything. He’s been working for me for twelve years. He’s like a loyal son.”

  “You’re sure about that? Because if he squeals, we’ll all be boiled in oil for murder and for conspiracy to conceal it. You, me, Mallory, and half your girls.”

  “Murder! What are you on about? The lord had a heart attack! You said so yourself.”

  “Who will believe you,” Julian says, “when his body is found bound and dumped in a canal?”

  ∞

  That Saturday night, from September 1 to September 2, 1666, is one of the worst Julian has at the Silver Cross. It’s one crisis after another. He barely has enough time to wash and change before Room Two is demanded by a contingent of celebrants who are willing to overlook the smell. They pay handsomely for a flow of wine and meat and girls to be brought up at regular intervals throughout the night. Carling stokes the fire, Mallory lights the candles and Ivy carries the ale and the steins. But the other nine rooms also need tending. At one point, Julian is reduced to changing the enseamed sheets himself. A fight breaks out between Brynhilda and a customer over the difference between services provided and price paid. Brynhilda, twice the size of the weasely john, punches him in the face, sending him tumbling down the stairs. For this Julian must negotiate a peace and restitution. One of the girls is sick in the night, vomiting violently in the middle of working, and the Baroness herself must haggle for a reduced fee instead of a refund. The night refuses to end.

  It’s after five in the morning when the business of the house finally dies down, the patrons leave, the Baroness goes to bed, and an exhausted Julian locks up and returns to his room. It’s dark blue outside. Dawn is near. After taking off his jacket and puffy shirt, he gets the quill and dips it in ink. How many dots? Six columns of seven plus one; 43 dots in all. His forearm burns as the quill pierces the skin. He wipes up the drop of blood and wonders how many days he’s missed, four, a week, more?

  A voice from a corner says, “Julian.”

  He drops the quill, nearly falls himself. He thought he was alone.

  Mallory is crammed between the dormered wall and the side of the cupboard, huddled on the floor, her knees drawn up. How did he not see her?

  “Don’t scare me like that,” Julian says. “What are you doing?” He scans the room. It looks as if his things have been gone through. The journal is not where he left it, the shirts have been refolded. “Why are you on the floor?”

  “Shh,” she says.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She rocks back and forth.

  “Is it about Margrave?”

  She won’t say.

  He perches on the bed. Seeing her distraught makes him distraught. Outside the sun is not up yet, the air is blue-gray with a tinge of amber. The east wind is strong. On this wind, Julian can smell burning wood. What fools build fires in this crazy hot weather?

  “You have to help me,” she says in a low cold voice. “This is all your fault.”

  What is she talking about?

  “Marg robbed me,” Mallory says from the floor.

  “Peanut, don’t get offended again, but what could she take from you?”

  She doesn’t answer. “You have to silence Ilbert,” Mallory says at last. “Do you know anyone in this town who can do it? Or can you do it?” She says the last part as if she doesn’t expect Julian can silence a mosquito.

  “What do you mean, silence him? Like tell him to shut his trap? I can do it.”

  “Well, perhaps before you beg him politely to quiet down, you can ask him what he’s done with the lord’s body.”

  So she knows. The Baroness tried to shield her from it, Julian didn’t want to tell her, but she’s found out anyway. There are no secrets in a brothel.

  “Mal, I’m really sorry—”

  She cuts him off. “I heard you tell the imp to take the body far from here, and instead, Ilbert threw it into a canal a few streets away, a canal with barely six inches of standing water. The body isn’t even submerged. It’s what some might call hiding evidence in plain sight.”

  Julian pales. “How do you know this?”

  “Ah, it’s a funny story. I know this,” Mallory says, “because Ilbert told me.”

  “Why would Ilbert tell you that?”

  “Oh, no, dear one. You misunderstand. He didn’t confess to me because he wanted to get it off his skeletal chest. He told me, you see, because he wanted me to pay him to keep quiet.”

  “Pay him? Why would you pay him?”

  Mallory doesn’t answer. “But I can’t pay him because Margrave has stolen my money.”

  “What money? The money we’ve been earning for you on the side? I thought you always keep it on your person? Isn’t that what you told me
? Keep your valuables on you?”

  “That little game Ilbert was playing with the constable about the mortar and pestle,” Mallory continues, as if Julian hasn’t spoken, “that was just him letting me and the Baroness know that we’ll all hang unless he gets what he wants.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Half,” Mallory says.

  Julian fumbles inside his waistcoat pocket for the purse with the guineas in it. “Half of what?” he asks dully.

  “Don’t you get it? If Margrave didn’t rob me, then Ilbert must’ve robbed me, in which case, he’s just toying with us. Tormenting us before the slaughter. It wouldn’t surprise me about him, wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

  She puts her face in her hands.

  “Half of what?” Julian repeats in a whisper.

  “Half a bag of fucking gold,” says Mallory.

  Julian stops being mild or consoling. He gets off the bed, stands in front of her. He doesn’t speak because he can’t speak. He tries to put together his next thought, his next word. The sun drifts up over the gray slate rooftops of Whitehall. The wind is strong and dry. It still smells of burning wood. He crouches in front of her, sinks to the floor next to her. Their feet could touch, but they don’t.

  “Lord Fabian hid it in the floorboards in Room Two,” Mallory says. “It’s not there anymore. I didn’t take it. You’re saying Margrave didn’t take it. So if it wasn’t Ilbert, who could’ve taken it, Julian?”

  She doesn’t look at him as she speaks, doesn’t see the shock on his face. This can’t be. It simply can’t be. “Why would Fabian hide gold in the floorboards of a brothel?” Julian asks.

  “It was ill-gotten gold,” Mallory says. “The lord was Master of the Royal Mint up in the Tower of London. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yes. That’s what he was. These days they use a machine press, but a hundred years ago they hammered the coin in dies. Two years ago, I found one of those hand-made coins on him as I was undressing him. That’s when he told me he was a lifelong coin collector. He said that a few years earlier, in the chaos after Cromwell fell from power, he swiped one of the discarded dies they used to cast the commemorative Elizabethan sovereigns. He said the die had been retired prematurely. It needed a little sharpening on the face side, a little etching. He said the coat of arms side was perfect. After he fixed the die, he started staying late and hammering his own coin. He told his boss, the Warden of the Mint, that he was working overtime on commemorative metal for our new king, Charles II. And he was. But he was also minting coin for himself, using the purloined die.”