of timber and stone.
So too with the jail at Newgate: a stink in the air, a coating on the tongue. I had come over the bridge that leaden morning to speak with Mark Blythe, jailed on the death of his apprentice. I had come, too, as a small favour to the prior of St Mary Overey, the Southwark parish that Blythe once served as head mason. For years I had let a house along the priory’s south wall, and knew Blythe’s family well.
We had been chewing for a while on the subject of the coming trial, and whether I might help him avoid it. No fire in the musty side-chamber. I was losing my patience, and more of my vision than usual. ‘You have no choice, unless you want to hang, or worse,’ I told him. ‘And there is worse, Mark. I’ve seen it. I’ve smelled it.’
‘It was an accident, Master Gower.’
‘So you’ve said, Mark. How could you have known the axle would break?’ Despite the prison chill a bead of moisture, thick as wheel oil, cleared a path down his cheek. Blythe had lost three fingers, two from his left hand as well as his right thumb, his body marked with the perils of his craft, and Newgate’s heavy irons had scored his forearms. I softened my voice. ‘But the axle did break. The stones, half a ton of them, did spill out and crush that boy’s legs. Your apprentice did die, Mark. And the soundness of that cart was your responsibility.’
‘Not’s how I saw it, and as for the axle …’ His voice trailed off.
I heard a sigh, realized it was my own. ‘The problem, Mark, is that the law sees different kinds of accidents. You can’t claim accidental injury when your own negligence – when your carelessness has been taken as the cause of death.’
Blythe’s hands dropped to the table.
‘Please don’t make me tell your wife you’ve just put your life in the hands of a petty jury.’
His eyes widened. ‘But you’d stand for me, wouldn’t you then, Master Gower?’
‘I’m not an advocate, Mark. What I have are connections. And money. I can put those at your service. But not before a jury.’ Poor timing, I didn’t say. Before the crackdown last year I could have bribed any jury in the realm.
His shoulders slumped. ‘No trial, then. How quick to get me out?’
I hesitated. ‘You’ll be here until next delivery. June, I would think.’
‘More time, sir? In here?’ He shook his head. ‘They’ll send me down, sir, down to the Bocardo. They press them down there, it’s said. Sticks them with nails like Jesu himself, do abominations each to the other. Don’t want the Bocardo, Master Gower, not by the blood.’
My hands settled on Blythe’s mangled fingers, stilling them against the wood. Mutilated, cracked, darkened with years of stonework, these fingers had shaped their share of useful beauty over the years: a lintel, a buttress, the pearled spans of a bishop’s palace, the mortaring so precise you would never know from beyond a few feet that what you saw was not a single stone. ‘Mark, I will do what I can to—’
‘Have an end!’
I flinched at the yawn of old hinges and half-turned to the door. Tom Tugg, keeper of Newgate, a cock in the yard. He swung a ring of keys, each a gnarled foot of iron. ‘Fees to be tallied and collected presently,’ he crooned, and two turnkeys did their work. Blythe moaned, the irons biting his swollen wrists.
It took a moment, but finally Tugg saw my face. Even in the scant light of three candles I caught his gape.
‘Whatsit – who let this fiend speak to my prisoner?’ He spun on his men. ‘Who put them in here?’
Your deputy. A small threat for a small thing. The turnkeys just shrugged.
‘Take him back,’ Tugg ordered, a spit of disgust. He looked at me, and got my heartiest smile. He licked his lips. ‘Come along, then.’
I gave Blythe’s broad back a pat before he was pulled in the opposite direction. Tugg led me along the passage to the outer gatehouse. A fight had broken out in the women’s chamber, a crowd cheering the crunch of bone on the stone floor. At the gatehouse door Tugg turned on me. ‘Well?’ His chin was pocked, unshaved.
‘I would like Blythe transferred to Ludgate until delivery.’
Tugg wrinkled his heavy brow. ‘Ludgate, you say?’ The new prison, recently completed at the western gate and now under the custody of the city chamber, housed those accused only of civil offences. So pleasant were its conditions that stories were circulating of inmates striking deals to remain jailed. ‘You’ve got to understand my situation here, Gower,’ he said with a slight twinge of his jaw. ‘Newgate’s abrim with spies.’
‘So I’ve heard,’ I said, prepared for this. ‘Secret alliances with the Scots, French agents lurking behind every door.’
‘Twenty of them at last count, held without surety.’
‘All the more reason to move Mark Blythe, then, for he’s no spy,’ I said. ‘Relieve the overcrowding, put a petty criminal out of your mind.’ Almost there. ‘You can say it was your idea, sound leader that you are.’
He blew out a breath. ‘A pound, Gower. It’ll take a pound to move him, what with that touchy keeper they got, dealings with the Guildhall—’
‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘We’ll deduct it from your balance.’ Tugg was still down to me many pounds; another handful of shillings would make little difference.
‘See here, Gower—’
‘Nothing to see, Tugg. I have your debt, I have your note. And I have the most horrendous bit of—’
‘Ludgate, then,’ he said, with another thick sigh. ‘He’ll be there till delivery.’
I gave him a hard look. ‘Live delivery.’ He nodded.
Outside Newgate I retrieved my pattens, then trudged through the walls and up the muddy way to Holbourne, breathing shallowly on the bridge as I neared the outer reaches of the ward. Before the churchyard at St Andrew a wild-haired man preached to the drizzle, his only parishioners a crescent of nosing goats. I caught a snatch of verse as I ducked into the narrow alley just east of Thavie’s Inn.
‘Full long shall he lead us, full rich shall he rule,
Through pain of pestilence, through wounds of long war.
Yet morire is matter all sovereigns must suffer.’
All kings must die. True enough, and the lines were well wrought, though the preacher soon lapsed into the usual fare. Corruption, gluttony, lust, the coming holocaust of the unfaithful. I wondered how long the poor man would last before joining Blythe in his cell.
At street level Monksblood’s stood open to the weather, a brick wedged beneath the alley door. I leaned in and gave a nod to the keeper. He tossed me a jar. At the foot of the stairs sat his daughter, a slight thing of about eight. With her foot resting on the next cask, she angled my jar beneath the tap and carefully turned the bronze spigot. I dropped a few pennies in her little palm. A wan smile, tired eyes bright for a moment beneath her shining brow, then she looked past me and up the stairs, waiting for her father’s next fish.
With the sour ale on my tongue I surveyed the undercroft tavern, lit weakly by a row of lanterns dangling from heavy beams. The tables were nearly empty, just two groups of men clustered along the hearth. Masons, fresh from work on the bridge. I got a few sullen looks. Steam rising from damp clothes, the muffled clatter of boots overhead.
In the far corner my friend sat alone, frowning into his jar as his finger traced a slow arc around its mouth. He seemed coiled on the bench, his brow knit, his eyes narrowed in concentration, the whole of him tensed against some unspoken thought.
‘Geoffrey,’ I said, and moved forward.
Half-turning with a start, he rose, his face blossoming into a smile. ‘Mon ami.’