Sword and Song (18 page)

Alyson stirred. “The last time I had such fun was years ago.” He cast me a mischievous smile which was somehow half-ashamed. “I regret to say I had a very misspent
youth.” And he launched into a surprisingly honest account of his life as the younger son of a younger son who’d never anticipated he would inherit an estate with coal under its fields,
and a couple of ships on the Tyne, and stocks and shares in the South Sea.

“I tell you frankly,” he said as we came out of woodland on to a stretch of the road that lay between moon-silvered open fields, “there have been episodes in my past of which
I’m not proud. Gambling,” he said. He grinned. “But I’m respectable now. Positively elderly and much more sensible. I shall remain so. But damn it all!” He gathered up
his horse’s reins. “It’s damned dull and I’m glad to be getting some excitement at last!”

And he let his horse have free rein and galloped off ahead of us.

The town was almost silent as we rode down Northumberland Street towards the Key. It was just after two in the morning. We detoured to the Golden Fleece where we left the
horses in the care of a yawning ostler and from there walked across the open expanse of the Sandhill, round the dark hulk of the Guildhall, and out on to the Key. On our right, the dark waters of
the Tyne lapped – the tide was in. Across the river, lights glimmered on the bank around St Mary’s church in Gateshead.

The long deserted stretch of the Key was dotted here and there with heaps of coal and coils of rope. Two keels were moored in darkness; one or two houses along the Key showed faint lights.

“The lodging house is down towards the Printing Office,” Hugh said. “It’s on the corner of the Key and the chare, evidently. The main door’s on the Key but the
chapman says access to the apprentice’s lodgings is by a passage and stair from the chare.”

We passed the chandler’s shop, shuttered and dark, and the Old Man Inn.

“Here,” Hugh whispered.

I paused to look down the narrow chare. Not a light, not a sign of movement.

“Do we go up?” Alyson asked.

“Which floor?”

“Third,” Hugh said. We were all whispering.

“I hope to God he’s not got wind of the chapman’s enquiries.”

“He might be lying in wait!” Alyson said, with delighted ghoulishness.

“It’s so damned quiet!”

“Are we going to look or not?” Hugh said irritably. “Damn it, Charles, you can’t come all this way just to say it’s a bit too dark and you don’t fancy
it.” He was searching in his pockets; he pulled out a candle stub and a tinder box. “Hold that.”

I held the stub while he struck a spark and lit it.

“Someone should stay here on the Key,” Alyson said. “In case the lad makes a run for it.”

“Good idea,” I said. I thought he was going to volunteer for the task, that he was having second thoughts about the expedition. Perhaps he was thinking that excitement could be
carried too far.

But he said brightly, “Good. Dobson, you stay here. Come on, Pattinson, let’s see if we can catch ourselves a murderer.”

And he was halfway into the chare before I could stop him.

I caught Alyson up few yards down the chare – the alley was moonlit and not a soul moved in it.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I whispered. Meaning – leave it to Hugh and me.

Alyson was grinning.

“He could be dangerous.”

“Oh, I certainly hope so,” Alyson said. He plucked the candle stub from my fingers and strode on ahead.

A broken-down gate led into a yard next to the lodging house; beside it an open doorway gave access on to uneven stairs. Alyson started up with some energy but almost immediately had to grab at
the wall as the slope of the stairs threw him sideways. A white dust sprinkled over the shoulder of his coat where he brushed against the lime mortar; fragments of it crumbled around his feet. The
stairs creaked loudly; I cursed. The whole place looked as if it would fall down any minute.

I heard Alyson mutter but he went on, shielding the candle stub with his hand, climbing to a turn in the stairs. Once we were round that and out of sight of the door there was almost no light at
all; there were no windows in the stair. This had probably been an outside stair, I thought, walled in at some point to keep out the worst of the weather. The work looked shoddy.

Alyson stopped. In the pitch blackness, I walked into him. “This must be the place,” he whispered.

“Are you sure?” I couldn’t see a damned thing.

The candle went out suddenly. Alyson yelled. A door crashed open and Alyson fell back against me. “Get him!”

I was blind. The extinguishing of the candle had made the darkness more intense. Someone pushed past me. In the blackness, I grabbed out, caught hold of cloth. The skirts of that damned
waistcoat no doubt. Then the cloth was snatched out of my hand and I was shoved back against the wall. Fragments of plaster pattered around me.

The stair disappeared from under my feet as I stumbled. I tried to grab something, anything. There was a burning in my side. Alyson was still yelling, “Stop him! Stop him!” as he
clattered down the stairs.

I put my hand to my side, and felt stickiness and warmth.

I’d been stabbed.

I clung on to the wall. Fragments of mortar crumbled under my fingers. Shouting from the chare below. Alyson. Was he fighting with the apprentice?

He might need my help. Cautiously, I felt for the next stair down with my foot, found it, slid on to it. The next step, keeping my hands against the wall. This was ridiculous. The fellow could
kill Alyson before I got there. I abandoned caution, stumbled down the stair, missed a step, tripped, slammed into the opposite wall. Something creaked loudly.

I could see round the bend of the stairs now. The moonlight filtering in from the chare cast a dim light, over the lower stairs. I clattered down, wincing against the pain in my side. Out into
the chare.

The gate of the yard next to the house was swinging. I pushed it open and saw Edward Alyson staggering back to me with the heavy breathing of a man winded. “He got away,” he gasped,
and waved his arm wildly in the general direction of the far side of the yard. “Over – over – there!”

Hugh raced up from the direction of the street. “What happened! I heard yelling...”

“It’s my fault,” I said, pressing my hand to my right side. “I should have remembered he’d have a knife.”

Speechless for lack of breath, Alyson gestured. “Just a scratch,” I said.

Hugh flew into an alarm and would not be pacified until he’d examined the cut just under my ribs. Reluctantly, he agreed it was a mere graze and gave me his handkerchief to dab at the
blood.

We heard voices, froze in alarm.

“Residents?” Alyson whispered.

“I don’t want to meet anyone who lives here,” Hugh whispered back. “Let’s get back on the Key.”

But on the deserted Key we felt even more exposed in the bright moonlight.

“What now?” Hugh whispered.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Alyson said. “He might come back.” He looked flushed, still out of breath, and somewhere between the exultation of excitement and the
fear of new danger.

“He surely won’t attack us again!” Hugh said. “His whole aim’s to get away!”

My head throbbed with tiredness, my side burned.

“I need sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow I want to see the chapman – no, better still, James Williams. He actually saw the lad – maybe he can remember more than he
thinks.”

“Good idea,” Hugh said.

Tiredness, and the crossness that comes with it, suddenly took hold of Alyson. “Question a chandler? Devil take it, Pattinson, I’m not a lawyer!” He was breathing more easily.
“I’m going back to that inn where we left our horses – what was it – the Golden Lion.”

“Golden Fleece.”

“They’ll have a room. And then,” he said decisively, “we’re going back to Long End. What the devil’s the time now? Very well, we’ll set out at noon. If
you’re not at the Lion by then, Pattinson, you can consider your engagement at an end.”

We watched him stalk off along the Key. “Gentry,” Hugh said scornfully. “Always do the easy bits, and leave the dull stuff to others.”

We went back to Hugh’s lodgings which were a great deal closer than mine. But sleep was never going to come easily. I was too tired and Hugh snored too loudly. I lay
awake most of the time, staring at the dimly visible cracks in Hugh’s ceiling and trying to avoid the lumps in his mattress. As dawn crept into the room, I staggered up, wincing at the
stiffness in my side.

I pissed in Hugh’s chamberpot, splashed the cold water in his jug over my face and crept down his attic stairs. The town was just beginning to wake; some early travellers were already out:
women going to market, grimy-faced miners trudging back home. I cut across town to my lodgings, stuffed a few extra clothes into an old violin bag and retrieved some of my store of money from under
the mattress. Alyson’s servants were benefitting from this trip far more than I was.

My back prickled as I walked through town towards the Key. The apprentice would surely not be so foolish as to attack me in broad daylight but I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that
he was even now out and about, watching me.

At the Cale Cross, at the foot of Butcher Bank, I bought and ate some buttered barley, then went on to the chandler’s shop. Jas Williams was outside his store, fingering some candles in a
box as if exasperated with their quality. He looked up, saw me, grimaced. He gave his son into my care as an apprentice last year and the son died – and the fact that Williams disliked his
son, despised him even, is neither here nor there. He was short with me, answering my questions as if he thought them an imposition.

“How often have you seen the apprentice in here?”

“The shop’s always full of customers. How the devil can I keep my eyes on all of them?”

“What exactly did he steal?”

“Half a dozen things. I told that chapman.”

“A hammer.”

“Yes.”

“A saw?”

“Yes.”

“Nails?”

“No doubt.”

“A tinderbox.”

“Yes. Now if you don’t mind – ” He moved to go back in.

“Did you ever see the streetgirl?”

He snorted. “I don’t allow her sort in my shop.”

“But if you can’t keep your eye on every customer,” I said, moved by an ignoble annoyance to get my own back, “how can you be sure?”

He went back inside.

Well, that had been profitable.

I hesitated on the Key. There were several hours yet before I needed to be at the Golden Fleece. Alyson was probably still deep in untroubled slumber. I could talk to the chapman but what more
could he tell me than he’d already told Hugh? And I was very close to the murderer’s lodgings...

The chare was busier than it had been; a few ruffians leant against walls, smoking and conversing in a desultory fashion. A sailor stepped in from the Key to piss against a
wall. I hesitated, wondering if anything I might find in the apprentice’s lodgings would be worth the risk.

A spirit said: “You’re the fellow was stabbed here last night.”

I glanced up at the wall of the lodging house; a bright spark of light hovered on a window sill.

“This morning,” I said. “Very early.” I yawned. “Too early. Are you the spirit who talked to the chapman?”

“Never liked the fellow,” the spirit said, sliding down the wall to my eye-level. “The lad, I mean.”

I was suddenly more alert. Offended spirits often have a lot to say. “Nasty piece of work?” I suggested.

“Sharp tongue on him.”

I tut-tutted.

“If you’ve got secrets you should live in an unspirited house.” The gleam shifted. The voice had an edge of humour in it. “And if you live in a house with a friendly
spirit, you ought to be friendly yourself.”

“But he wasn’t?”

“Banished me from his room. Said he wouldn’t have me in there.” The spirit had been a local man but he sounded as if he’d been respectable in life.

“That’s what makes you suspect he has secrets?”

“I
know
he has secrets,” the spirit said. “I was the landlord of the Old Man Inn in life and I listened to plenty of confidences in my time. I know the signs. They also
say he’s a murderer.”

“He is,” I said.

“Then I might be able to help you. Come up to his room and have a chat.”

“I don’t mind if I do,” I returned cordially.

The spirit kept me company, sliding round the walls of the house as I went into the chare. Two ruffians looked at me sourly, but did not challenge me – perhaps they were wary of the
spirit. I reached the side door to the house safely, went stiffly up the uneven steps, supporting myself against the walls. White lime mortar dusted my hands and sleeves.

I turned the bend in the stairs and saw the door to the apprentice’s room standing open – I remembered it thudding back. I stood on the threshold, catching my breath, looked round at
bare boards, a straw mattress thrown on the floor, a chamberpot in a corner and an empty shelf tilting against the wall. On the far side of the room, a blocked-up doorway had probably once given
access to the rest of the house. The room looked barely lived in. But the apprentice had had it to himself, which is unusual in these chares, where two or three families can crowd into a single
room.

“Did you see what happened here last night?”

“Alas, no,” said the spirit, glimmering on the door jamb. “I was chatting to my old friend the carpenter. Front of house, ground floor right. He can’t sleep and
appreciates company in the small hours. I heard the shouting but I thought it was drunks. We get a lot of drunks round here.”

“How long has the lad been lodging here?”

The spirit hummed and haahed a moment. “Three years at least, I’d say.”

“And you knew him well – this apprentice?”

“Apprentice?” the spirit said scornfully. “You’ll not find a master admitting to his ownership, sir. I daresay he was once. But he doesn’t do a stroke of work. He
comes here for two or three days then goes away for a month or more. Where does he go then, eh? Nowhere respectable, for sure!”