“D’ye think of yourself as the wolf?” she hissed, the words overdrawn and sibilant. “Or is it the wrongly accused dog that lives to serve and is trampled underfoot for it?”

He stood carefully to his full height, mindful of the beams above his head, and at that moment the last of the embers were extinguished. She listened for heavy footfalls as he fumbled his way to his room behind the hearth; but she heard nothing, as though he had disappeared along with the light.

A panicked nervousness began beneath her ribcage and she blurted out harshly, “Or do you imagine yourself a prince from Wales?” Her hands gripped the loosely jointed armrests, causing them to creak loudly. “Well…?” The room was an endless cave, the dark subsuming every familiar object, vanishing the floor beneath her until the chair in which she sat balanced solely on the points of its four slender legs. “Tell me, which are you?”

Against the river of noise in her head, she thought she could hear the cadence of his breathing, a slow and steady inhalation and exhalation, as though he had begun to slumber on his feet, and she strained to hear his advance or retreat.

“It’s not about me, missus.” His voice floated somewhere over her head, a bass counterpoint to the brittle rustling of the traps. “It’s about yourself.”

He moved expertly past her, not touching the chair, or any other thing in the room, causing only the boards on the floor to creak rhythmically, stirring the air briefly with the scent from his body.

CHAPTER 8

ANNE CARTER STOOD at the groaning board, surveying with satisfaction the thirty or so men who sat in the tavern eating, but mostly drinking, their Thursday-night suppers. They were almost to a man dockworkers, off-loading bales and crates and barrels from wherries and barges bringing their loads direct from the large merchant vessels anchored farther down the Thames. They were, as dock laborers went, a quiet lot, there to drink their ale, eat their bread, and stagger off to their crannied bunks to sleep for a few hours before starting again in the morning, hours before dawn.

She had been keeping a careful watch on the man leaning comfortably against the far wall near the fire, and when he raised his chin to look about the room, she shook her head at him. He had been nursing the one cup of ale for more than an hour and she teasingly rubbed her fingers together to show him he should order another cupful and spend some coin or leave the premises. He grinned at her, tucking his neck further into his coat, but made no move to comply.

There was a feeble pounding at the door and she sighed, leaving her station at the table to go and open it. The men were quiet but not above stealing a pie or a few oysters when she wasn’t guarding the food. The main tavern door was heavy with iron cladding and, in moderate weather, left open during hours of business. But a cold and brutal wind, a Normandy blow, had raked its way from east to west, and Anne had closed and latched it earlier against the rain. She opened it to a boy straining to hold with both hands a bucket of eels, thrashing and boiling in dark coils.

“Oh, Georgie,” she said. “Sweetheart, come in.” She laughed as the buffeting wind blew them both back into the room, and as she struggled to shut the door again, she felt the man at the fire come up behind her. He pushed his hands against the door to help her, but his thighs pressed against the back of her legs. Giving him a warning glance, she expertly danced away and put her arm around the boy.

“Georgie,” she chattered, “did ya swim here with the eels? Look at ya. With a towelin’ ya’d still be drownin’.” He laughed with her and shook himself like a dog. He snuck a peek at her bare arm wound tight around his neck, and blushed to purple. She smiled at his discomfort and teasingly brought her wrist to his mouth, wetting his lips with the rain off her skin.

Anne looked into the bucket and clucked approvingly at the muscular slapping of the eels. “Ooh, sweetheart. Go now into the kitchen and tell Min to give ya some oysters and bread. And tell her I said ya’r to have ale and not the small beer, mind ya, but a proper cup with both legs and a head.”

She gave his ear a playful tug and he colored again up to the roots of his hair. He went into the kitchen, carrying the bucket, and she walked through the room, table to table, checking each man’s portion to see if all had been paid for. In the corner farthest from the hearth she passed a makeshift table with a dead rabbit, head and feet intact, lying starkly on the naked boards, a small pinprick of red staining the wood beneath its neck. She was pleased to see every man in the place had taken note of the warning and had steered well clear of that corner of the room. The dead rabbit was Tiernan Blood’s mark, and his little joke to the world. His trade name on the streets and alleyways of London was the Gaelic word raibead, pronounced like the English word “rabbit.” Translated, it meant a man greatly to be feared. But to those outsiders who did not know his reputation for violence, it often meant fatal misjudgments in their dealings with Tiernan Blood.

A wind at her back caused her to turn, and she saw a cluster of men come into the tavern, unwrapping themselves from layers of cloaks and hats, carelessly spraying the laborers around them with drops of frigid rainwater. They walked without hesitation towards the table where she stood, and she hurried to the kitchen to bring them cups of ale, warmed earlier with a heated poker. They settled themselves onto chairs and stools and once seated began to look about the room, studying every downturned face, noting the sudden quiet. The man at the fire had turned away, but his head was tilted in an attitude of cautious readiness, as though listening for sudden footsteps from behind.

When Anne returned with the cups, she startled to see the fifth seat empty and whispered to the man at her elbow, “Here now, Brudloe, who’s missin’?”

He snaked his arm around her hips, pulling her closer, and said, “Poor Sam Crouch. He’s lost his last argument.”

“What d’ya mean?” she hissed. Brudloe had begun to pull her onto his lap, but she grabbed his thumb and, pulling it back painfully in its socket, said carefully, “This won’t play. Ya know Blood asked for five men, five ready men, and unless ya can increase yar number as quick as a whore’s plague, ya’ll have to answer for it.”

Brudloe freed his hand and shook it with elaborate hurt, laughing. “Annie, d’ye reckon there’s not bullies and bravos enough in London to replace Sam Crouch? Or d’ye think we can’t take care ourselves to advance Blood’s scheme?” His smile was suddenly gone and she regarded his small frame and balding head, cross-hatched with scars from a knife fight that had separated his scalp down to the skull. He had, after finishing the fight, pulled the shredded skin back over his head, paying a seamstress to sew the wounds together with silken thread. She knew that his greatest asset was his surprising strength and agility, far beyond most men twice his size. His weapon was a short-bladed knife because he preferred plying his trade up close, but his true pleasure lay in tying intricate knots; some for immobilizing his victims and some for garroting. She looked at his forearms and knew he could strangle a cow if he needed to.

Anne turned to the others in quick succession and had to admit the four men together could be formidable against all but a heavily armed group of mercenaries. Baker, seated next to Brudloe, was unremarkable in either size or appearance, although he was rather tall, and he sat alternately studying his nails and observing the room in affable silence. He was a professional torturer, sometimes taking his victims north to Scotland, where the rack and the wheel were still tolerated, if not readily accepted. She also knew he had a wife and five children in a house on St. Mary-at-Hill, only a few streets from the tavern which stood on Lower Thames Street, within the shadow of the Tower of London, where he sometimes worked late of an evening.

Next to him was seated Hammett Cornwall, named after his place of birth, though past infancy he’d never traveled beyond the walls of London, and so massive that his coat was made from two cloaks stitched together. He never asked questions, never lost in a throw-down, and had been in with Tiernan Blood when he planned and executed the robbery of the Crown jewels from the Tower. He was the only one of the men who had seen Blood’s true face, and he had been known to break an opponent’s neck without beading a sweat.

When Hammett felt Anne’s eyes studying him, he said suddenly, “Enough talk, yeh? Sausage.”

The fourth man, the youngest, dressed in the elaborate sword and scabbard of wealth, said, “And bring something other than this piss. Rhenish or, better yet, Canary.” He had the weak good looks of any young titled man she had lifted her skirts to because they paid in ready coin, although of late she had had to do her business in light enough to see that the coins weren’t Dutch stivers or a French sou picked up in some foreign war.

“Who’s this?” Anne asked Brudloe, jerking her thumb over her shoulder towards the young rake, ignoring his demand for costly drink.

“Edward Thornton, late of the Dutch wars,” Brudloe answered, leaning in closer to Anne. “Though, to my mind, the most action he’d seen in the Low Countries was in turning over his shaving razor.” He smiled at Thornton, who stiffened but said nothing. “All in all, though, Annie, he is a man for us.” When she still looked doubtful, he whispered loudly. “Edward here turned out Sam.”

“Samuel Crouch was a trimmer,” Thornton said, frowning distastefully into his cup of cooling ale.