CHAPTER TWELVE

ONE AFTERNOON WHILE Black Jack was away Amber sought out Mother Red-Cap. When she was home, which was not often, she was almost always employed in working on her ledger, entering long columns, filling out bills and receipts by the dozen, and she did not like to be interrupted. Now, as Amber approached, she made her a signal to be silent and continued running her pen up a line of neatly written figures, her lips moving as she did so, and then finally she set down the total and turned to Amber.

“What is it, my dear? Can I do something for you?”

Amber had prepared and rehearsed her speech, but now she cried impulsively: “Yes! Lend me four hundred pound so I can get away from here! Oh, please, Mother Red-Cap! I’ll pay it back, I promise you!”

Mother Red-Cap observed her coolly for a moment, and then she smiled. “Four hundred pound, Mrs. Channell, is a large sum of money. What do you offer for security?”

“Why—I’ll give you a promise, on paper, or anything you like. And I’ll pay it back with interest,” she added, for she had learned by now that Interest was both God and Sovereign to Mother Red-Cap. “I’ll do anything. But I’ve got to have it!”

“I don’t believe you understand the business of pawn-brokerage, my dear. It may seem to you that four hundred pound is an insignificant sum to borrow. It is, however, a very large sum to lend upon no better security than the promise of a young girl to repay. I don’t doubt your intentions, but I think you would find it more difficult to come by four hundred pound than you imagine now.”

Surprised, disappointed, Amber was angry. “Why!” she cried. “You said yourself you could have got a hundred pound for me!”

“And so I probably could. More than half that hundred, however, would have been mine for arranging the match, not yours. But to be frank with you, it was merely an idle thought. Black Jack’s told me very flatly he intends keeping you for himself and I believe, my dear, you should feel some gratitude toward him. It cost him three hundred pound to get you out of Newgate.”

“Three hundred—Why, he never told me that!”

“And so I think that while Black Jack’s here we won’t be using you that way.”

“While he’s here? Is he going somewhere?”

“Not very soon, I hope. But someday he’ll ride up Tyburn Hill in a cart—and he won’t come down again.”

Amber stared at her, horror-struck. She knew that he had been burnt on the left thumb, which meant he was to hang for the next offense. But he had escaped again in spite of that and he had a reckless audacity which made her think of him as almost indestructible. Now, however, she was thinking not of him but of herself.

“That’s what’s going to happen to all of us! I know it is! We’re all going to hang!”

Mother Red-Cap lifted her brows. “We might, I suppose. But we’re far more likely to die of consumption here in Alsatia.” She turned away and picked up her pen and though Amber lingered a few moments she knew that she had been dismissed, and went to climb the stairs back up to her bedroom.

She was discouraged but not beaten. She still intended to escape somehow, and comforted herself with the reminder that she had made the far more difficult escape from Newgate.

Alsatia lay just east of the Temple Gardens and could be reached from them by going down a narrow broken flight of steps. Low as it was and close to the river it was perpetually invaded by a thick dingy-yellow fog that hung to the very pavements, seeped into the bones, stuck in the nostrils and made it difficult even to breathe. Ram Alley, where Mother Red-Cap’s house was, smelt of stinking cook-shops and the lye-soap used by the laundresses who made that street a headquarters.

Its courts and alleys were crowded with beggars and thieves, murderers and whores and debtors, a wild desperate rabble who lived in a constant internecine warfare but who invariably banded together to beat off any attempted intrusion by constable or bailiff. Children swarmed everywhere—almost as numerous as the dogs and pigs—starving little dwarfs with sunken eyes and husky high-pitched voices. Amber shuddered at the sight of them and looked swiftly away for fear her own baby would be marked before birth because she had seen them. She felt that living here she had left the world—the only world that mattered to her, the world where she might see Lord Carlton again.

It was Michael Godfrey, hired by Mother Red-Cap to teach her to speak as a London lady of quality should, who gave her glimpses back into that life toward which her heart yearned.

He was a student at the Middle Temple where sons of many of England’s wealthy families were to be found, supposedly acquiring a liberal education and learning how to manage their estates and preside at the sessions when they came into their property. Most of them, however, spent more time in taverns than they did in the class-room and more money on women than on books. Like many of the others, Michael had sometimes ventured into the Friars, impelled by curiosity and a desire to see how the wicked lived and looked. And also like many others, when his mode of living had far outrun his allowance and he found himself embarrassed with debts, he had come to borrow and thus he had made the acquaintance of Mother Red-Cap, the fabled witch-woman of the Sanctuary. Within a fortnight after Amber’s arrival he had been engaged as her tutor.

He was just twenty years old, of medium height and size, with light-brown curling hair and blue eyes. His father was a knight with property in Kent and money enough to give his son all the customary advantages of his class: Michael had gone to Westminster School to learn Latin and Greek. At sixteen, the usual age for entering college, he had been sent to Oxford to master Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy, and mathematics. That was supposed to be accomplished in three years, for too much education was not considered good for a gentleman, and a year ago he had enrolled in the Middle Temple. Two years or so there and he would go on his tour abroad.

While the rain dripped unceasingly—for the mild winter had been followed by weeks of wet—he and Amber would sit beside the fireplace in the parlour drinking hot-spiced buttered ale and talking. She was an eager and enthusiastic listener, appreciative of his jests, fascinated by the things he did and saw and heard.

She would laugh delightedly to hear of how he and his friends, “somewhat disguised” as the gallants liked to say when they had been drunk, had knocked over a watchman’s stand where the old man sat sleeping, serenaded a bawdy-house in Whetstone Park and broken all the windows, and finally stripped naked a woman they met returning home late with her husband. Bands of young aristocrats scoured about the town every night, boisterous and destructive, the terror of all quiet peaceable citizens, who would as soon have been set upon by cut-throats or thieves. But Michael recounted his exploits with a zestful freshness and relish which made them seem the most harmless innocent childish pranks.

He told her that for the past three or four months women had been appearing on the London stage and were now in every play, overpainted, daringly-dressed young sluts, some of them already taken by the nobles as mistresses. He told her of seeing the rotten bodies of Cromwell and Ireton and Bradshaw pulled out of their graves and hanged in chains at Tyburn, and of how their pickled heads were now stuck atop poles on Westminster Hall and chunks of their carcasses exposed on pikes over the seven City gates. And he told her about the plans for his Majesty’s Coronation which was to take place in April and was to be the most magnificent in the history of the British throne; he promised to describe for her every robe, every jewel, every word spoken and gesture made, after he had seen it.

Meanwhile she was losing the remnants of her country accent. Her ear was alert and her memory retentive, mimicry was natural to her and she had a passionate eagerness to learn. She stopped pronouncing power as pawer and you as yeow. She gave up both Gemini and Uds Lud and learned some more fashionable oaths. He taught her all the correct ways of making and receiving introductions, a few French phrases and words, that it was the mode to pronounce certain as sartin and servant as sarvant. Vulgarity was high-fashion at Whitehall and pungent words of one syllable interlarded the conversation of most lords and ladies. Amber absorbed all of it, and with it the cant of Alsatia.

Michael Godfrey, who was already sure he loved her, wanted to know her real name, who she was, and where she came from. She refused to tell him the truth but she embroidered upon her story to Sally Goodman and he accepted her for what she said she was: a country heiress run away from home with a man her family disliked, and now deserted by him. He was very sympathetic, indignant that a woman of her gentle breeding should have to live in such surroundings, and offered to get in touch with her family. But Amber shied away from that and assured him that they would never come to her aid in such a place as Whitefriars.

“Then come with me,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Thanks, Michael, I wish I could. But I can’t—not till I’ve laid-in, anyway. Lord, wouldn’t it be a pretty fetch if I fell into labour in your quarters! You’d be turned out in a trice!”

They both laughed. “They’ve threatened me a dozen times. Mend your ways, sirrah, or out you go!” He drew down his brows and bellowed dramatically. Then all at once he leaned forward and took her hand. “But please—afterward—will you go with me then?”