The Maiden's Hand (10 page)

“Safety?” Snipes peered about skeptically.

“What signal?” Lark asked. She heard the droning monotone of a chanted prayer.

“I suppose the signal isn’t necessary. Simply wait for the hue and cry to begin, and then run.”

“What makes you so certain there will be a hue and cry?”

“I assure you, there will. Ah. I knew they would come.”
Oliver pointed at a brightly painted wagon lumbering down the field. It creaked to a halt, blocking the narrow way at Pie Corner and St. Sepulchre’s Alley. A canvas flap gaped open, and a group of rag-clad Gypsies swarmed out, sinking into the crowd. “There,” said Oliver. “Take him there and keep low.”

“To a Gypsy wagon?”

“Trust me.” Oliver gave her that look. The one that was filled with lust and tenderness. The one that caused her to feel as if her feet had left the ground.

“Trust you,” she repeated, her tone heavy with irony.

“I knew you would.” He gave her a swift kiss that made her head swim and Dr. Snipes’s jaw slacken, and then he was gone, shouting and waving at the Gypsies as if they were old friends.

“We’d best do as he says.” Lark took Dr. Snipes by the sleeve. “It’s better than no chance at all.”

“He’ll land us all in prison.” Snipes shuddered, and the color dropped from his cheeks.

“Perhaps.” She refused to dwell on the possibility.

“They’ll torture us.” His arm trembled beneath her hand. “I could not stand torture. I consider myself a man of deep, abiding and unshakable faith, but I am also a coward.”

She tightened her grip on his arm. “You’re no more a coward than the next man.” Her gaze caught Oliver’s receding form. He was taller by a handspan than anyone else in the crowd, his blond hair spilling from beneath his dark velvet cap. “Less so than some others,” she added, speaking too low for Dr. Snipes to hear.

It seemed to take an eternity to wend their way through the noisy throng. Lark recoiled from the avid stares trained on the stake. Normally they executed people in groups, but Speed was special. Richard Speed
was to die alone. The queen’s ministers meant to make an example of him.

She and Snipes passed St. Bartholomew’s, an Augustinian priory church that fronted the square. Beside the church stood a reviewing platform with plank seating for the dignitaries. She glanced up, saw an impression of dark velvet robes, gleaming chains of office and loathsome self-righteousness. The lord mayor and aldermen would be there, along with the bishop of London’s chancellor, a member of the queen’s council and attendant clerics. The officials were as ugly as the stone deities carved into the walls of the church.

The hunger in the eyes of the spectators sickened Lark. It was the same hunger she’d seen in bettors at a bearbaiting or a cockfight. True, she did notice tears streaming from the eyes of some. But not many. Not enough.

The arrogant officials inadvertently aided Lark and Snipes. They prolonged the spectacle with prayers and repeated readings of the charges. A gray-robed cleric was shouting threats of fire and brimstone when Lark reached the front of the crowd.

Here, men-at-arms leaned indolently on a stout wooden rail surrounding the pit. The chanting monks, mindlessly and brutally pious, lifted their faces to the February sky.

The railing groaned as the busy, babbling mob pressed against it. Lark felt panicky as she imagined herself squeezed to death against the rail.

Then her gaze found Richard Speed, and she forgot her own discomfort. Barefoot, dressed in a tattered shirt, he stood in the circular pit, anchored to the stake by a thick chain around his chest.

A chancery official read a list of Speed’s heresies and proclaimed the sentence—death by burning.

Speed held his head proudly aloft and listened. He was a young man, but his gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes made him look ancient. His legs had been stretched, the joints grossly swollen. His ripped shirt flapped against the skeletal frame, and his chin jutted forth in a final gesture of defiance.

Lark placed one foot on the lower bar of the fence and boosted herself up. Twisting around, she spied Oliver, his head bent as he laughed and flirted with a Gypsy girl.

Her heart sank. She had been right about Oliver de Lacey. He was true only as long as the work was amusing. Once the challenge became too great, he fell back into his old ways.

The Gypsy girl spoke to others nearby, who in turn whispered to their neighbors. And so it went, no doubt bawdy talk and gossip. Lark turned away in disgust and stepped up another rung.

Richard Speed raised his bound hands. “Good people of London, today I preach my last.”

Lark’s mouth dropped open. Near her, the jostling ceased and people shushed each other. Never had Lark heard such a voice. This broken man, half-dead already, snared the attention of thousands. It was like hearing a lion’s roar come from the mouth of a kitten.

“I have been told that I am a heretic,” Speed shouted.

“No!” people called. “Never that!”

“I have been told that I have no reverence for the sacraments. And that is true.”

Horrified gasps seemed to suck the air from the field.

With fire in his eye, Speed leaned forward. “I have no reverence for the sacraments because the scriptures do not command me to.”

“Thief!” The shout came from somewhere behind Lark.

Bracing a hand on Dr. Snipes’s shoulder, she turned. Two portly men glared at each other. From her high perch, Lark saw a Gypsy youth slinking away, head low.

“I believe no more and no less than I read in the scripture, which is the word of God,” Speed roared.

“My purse!” a lady shrieked. She shook a fist at the startled boy next to her. “You stole my purse, you thieving little herring.”

But he hadn’t. From her elevated perch, Lark could see a Gypsy girl sidling away, dropping a fat purse into her laced bodice.

“He
pinched
me,” wailed a plump matron. Her husband grabbed the man beside her and proceeded to shake him. Meanwhile, a dark-bearded Gypsy looked skyward, his face the picture of innocence while his victim blamed her neighbor. People nearby swore and jostled one another.

“I
am
guilty!” Richard Speed shouted. “Guilty of believing in God as He is revealed to us in the scripture.”

“
Fiat justitia
!” The shout came from the reviewing stand. “Let justice be done!”

The hooded executioner lowered a hissing torch to the straw and kindling, which lay in heaps at the foot of the stake. His assistant set out bladders of gunpowder, as well. They would use the explosives to speed the burning, for roasting a person alive was an inexact science that sometimes required an extra charge.

“Stop, thief!” Yet another robbery occurred in a different part of the crowd. “Stop that bilking cull!”

The executioner and his assistant hesitated, torches hovering over the firewood and gunpowder. They looked at each other for guidance. The assistant reached under his hood and scratched his head.

“If this be heresy, then I am a heretic!” Speed’s sermon, moving as it was, began to drown in a sea of angry shouts.

The Gypsies were gifted thieves. They made their cut and slipped away—and managed to implicate a bystander in the process.

A movement caught Lark’s eye. Oliver had climbed up on the Gypsy wagon wedged in the mews and was gesturing to her. He wore an insolent grin, looking more fit than he should after rowing down the Thames all night.

The burgeoning riot was clearly his doing. Lark should have trusted him. Riots and mayhem were his specialty, after all.

“Dr. Snipes,” she said, climbing down from the rail, “I do believe—”

A cursing man plowed into her. He was pressed from behind by the angry crowd. Losing money was the only thing more important than watching a man being burned alive.

Lark reached for Dr. Snipes, but in the blink of an eye a half-dozen people filled in the breach between them. She heard an ominous creaking sound. The wooden rail bowed out, groaning with the strain of the throng. Seconds later the rail snapped.

A mere step from being crushed, Lark lurched forward. To her astonishment and dread, she found herself at the very edge of the sandpit, staring in horror at the condemned man.

M
en-at-arms fanned out to enclose the burgeoning mob. Spectators tumbled, crushing and cursing one another. Barriers around the pit collapsed beneath the rush of the crowd.

The executioner, bellowing oaths beneath his half mask, stumbled back. A sun-browned Gypsy hand plucked the flaming torch from his grasp. A cart piled with straw took fire, spooking the mule. The squealing animal reared and plunged into the throng.

Someone shoved Lark from behind, pushing her to her knees in the sand. The bundles of kindling scratched her. A rotten egg odor of sulfur wafted from the bladders of gunpowder piled nearby.

Gasping in fear, Lark dragged herself to her feet.

She came face-to-face with the rebel minister, Richard Speed.

“Reverend sir!” she cried.

“God be with you,” he replied, looking as calm and holy as an angel in marble.

“I—we’ve come to save you.” She whipped a glance
around and saw the seething, screaming mob closing in on them. With a sick feeling in her stomach, she teetered on the brink of failure. Oliver and Dr. Snipes had vanished. She was but a woman who had spent her life locked in a grim battle against sinful impulses. How could she ever have thought she possessed the fortitude to rescue Richard Speed?

A woman who thinketh alone thinketh evil.
Spencer had drummed the proverb into her head. She should have heeded him.

Reverend Speed glanced up at the groaning plank stands. From that lofty vantage point, the captain of the guard gesticulated furiously and shouted orders. The soldiers had been trampled in the stampede of angry people. A few attempted to use their pikestaffs to clear a path, but the staffs were broken or snatched away by the rushing crowd. A pall of smoke from the burning cart shrouded the field.

“I am much obliged,” Speed said. “And I mean no lack of gratitude, but perhaps you could hurry.”

Lark looked helplessly at the thick chain around his chest, mooring him to the stake. “I know not what to do,” she said, almost sobbing. “The soldiers will be upon us soon, and—”

A great screeching, splintering sound stopped her. She looked back at the reviewing platform. Beneath the straining planks, Oliver was using a pikestaff to dislodge the supports.

For the first time, Lark let herself hope for success.

The chain was not locked but looped around a long nail in the back of the stake. Sometimes, to show mercy, the executioner drove the nail into the victim’s neck to hasten his death.

With frantic fingers, she worked at the chain. Soot blackened the iron, reminding her that other martyrs had not escaped the flames.

She scraped the link off the nail, and the chain fell free. Richard Speed started to collapse onto the piled kindling. She hauled him up by the wrist and shouted, “Make haste!”

Ducking her head, she led him into the raging crowd, following the fright-maddened mule. Squinting through the pall of smoke, mothers separated from their children screamed in panic. People injured in the stampede moaned and cried for help. Officials shrieked out orders that went unheeded.

Oliver flung away his pikestaff and darted out from beneath the reviewing stand. The platform holding all the dignitaries of London collapsed in a heap of broken boards and bellowing men.

And in the midst of it all, Lark and Richard Speed made their exit.

“What is this place?” the reverend asked, blinking in the dimness. His pale skin pulled taut over the bones of his face, and his eyes peered out from purpled sockets. Still, he retained a misty air of majesty that made Lark proud to be in his presence.

She felt a suspicious crawling in the blanket beneath her. Bedbugs or lice…or worse. She shuddered. Outside the painted canvas covering of the vehicle, the crowd still rioted.

“It is a Gypsy caravan,” she explained. “I was told to come here. Perhaps we had best conceal you in some way.” After rummaging in a heap of soiled clothing, she found a length of cloth, which she draped over his head. As she tucked it around his shoulders and arranged the ends to hide the manacles on his wrists, she felt him tremble.

Her heart went out to him. “You’ll be all right now,” she whispered. “Truly, you have many friends who will protect you.”

He let out a shaky breath. “It is a blessed miracle.”

“No. It is our Christian duty.” She found a moth-eaten shawl and layered it over the dull cloth.

“Who are you, mistress?”

“My name is Lark.”

“You have risked much for me this day.”

She looked up at him, her hands upon his knees and her throat suddenly tight. Despite the odd, womanish disguise, she noted a certain masculine beauty in his face—it was nicely sculpted, and his eyes were deep and kind. He lacked the loud, lavish, golden handsomeness of Oliver de Lacey. Speed’s was a quiet appeal, one that did not shout but beckoned.

“God will reward you for your courage,” he promised.

It was a far more appropriate remark than asking her to have his child, she decided.

She squeezed the reverend’s hands. The noise of the crowd seemed to fade for a moment. Richard Speed’s face was close—close enough for her to see the thick fringe of lashes around his rich brown eyes and to see the weariness and pain in the creases of his pallid cheeks.

“I fear I possess little courage,” she admitted. “But I have been taught to do my duty.”

The caravan lurched. Lark tumbled against Richard Speed, and he grasped her shoulders, cradling her cheek to his chest.

At that very instant, Oliver de Lacey climbed into the caravan.

For a moment he simply stared at them. Then a self-deprecating and humorless grin slashed his mouth. “I
know just how you feel, old man,” he said to Speed. “And in truth, I wish you better luck with her than I have had.”

It was dusk by the time the train of caravans stopped. Tired of the uncomfortable closeness of the covered van, Oliver leaped out through the back. They were north of London, and the high ridge of the Chilterns rose in the distance. Long purple shadows painted the flanks of the hills, and a mist, fine as a fairy’s whispers, softened edges and deepened hues, turning Oliver’s mood reflective and melancholy.

It had been an eventful day indeed. No doubt the authorities were going mad searching for the escaped prisoner. Even as the caravan had pulled way from Smithfield, Oliver had heard people muttering that a miracle had occurred, that the hand of God had swept Reverend Speed up to heaven.

He glanced around him, watching the other caravans lurching up to the broad green clearing near a russet beech-wood grove. The clearing, beside a rushing stream, would be their camp for the night.

He started to stalk away from the vehicle, then turned and walked back. The ugly truth jabbed at him. He was humiliatingly jealous of the tender regard in which Lark held Richard Speed. But he would die before he would let her know that.

Parting the curtain of leather strips that formed the doorway, he scowled into the shadowed van. “We’ll stay the night here. Reverend, let me help you out. We’ll get Rodion to strike your manacles.”

“I would be much obliged.” The reverend rose slowly, laboriously. Oliver envisioned the torture the man must have endured, and suddenly he did not feel so angry.

“It’s all right to whine or curse if you like,” he suggested, studying the tormented look on Speed’s face.

“Why would I whine or curse?” Speed asked in genuine confusion. “Being among Gypsies is better than being burned alive.”

“Such high praise! You cannot help but love him,” said Rodion, grinning and putting down a step stool. The Gypsy held out his hands to help Speed down. The preacher half fell into Rodion’s arms, and Rodion carried him away to a pallet on the ground, where some of the women were building a fire.

“Ah, mind the poor man’s wounds,” called a brusque, familiar voice.

A comfortable warmth seeped through Oliver, and he turned to smile at her—a woman he had loved since he had learned the meaning of the word.

“Jillie, my dove! Come give us a kiss!” He barely had time to call her name before her embrace engulfed him.

The speed with which Lark appeared was gratifying. Like a hedgehog emerging from its hole, she popped out the back of the van. No doubt she wished to see just whom Oliver would address with such affection.

Jillie of the yellow hair, cornflower-blue eyes, and arms the size of a blacksmith’s. Jillie, the West Country maid who had been swept into adventure by her Romany husband—Rodion, chief of the Gypsies.

Pity she had been married a score of years and had borne a half-dozen children, for Oliver adored all eighteen stone of her.

She had an embrace like that of a mother bear and a grin as big as her generous heart.

Smiling back just as broadly, Oliver stepped away. “That hug, dearest Jillie, was worth waiting for.”

She cuffed him on the side of the head. “Two years it’s been, you cozening rogue.”

“And your beauty has grown in bounty with each passing season.”

She cuffed him harder. “Listen to the unlicked little whelp, thinking to flatter me. I’m big as a barge, and proud of it.” Beaming, she turned to Lark. “And who might this be?” Oliver had forgotten how loudly Jillie’s voice boomed. “Is she your current tup?”

Lark had the most extraordinary way of blushing. She seemed to color like a glass jar filled with wine—from chin to scalp, quite visibly. Yet even as she flushed a deep, attractive pink, she managed to find the poise to step down from the caravan and curtsy to Jillie.

“Mistress, I am not his tup, nor ever shall be.”

Jillie looked Lark up and down, her pale eyebrows lifting at Lark’s plain black mockado gown. “Pity. I trow he’d make you happy as a milkmaid tumbled off her stool.”

Lark’s flush deepened a shade. “He has indeed made me happy.” She grasped his hand and pressed it to her bosom.

He could feel the beating of her heart, and the sensation made his head spin. He disliked the response intensely. She made him feel like a green and callow youth, enslaved by the first stirrings of manly desire.

Her expression glowed with ill-aimed worship. “My lord, you saved a godly man today. I can think of no way to express the depths of my gratitude.”

He could have suggested a few ways, but none of them involved hero worship.

Damn it to hell and back, he wanted her to
want
him.

“Aye, well.” He extracted his hand from hers. “It seemed a fair thing to do at the time.”

Jillie lumbered off, bellowing orders. The Gypsies drew
their wagons into a half circle in the wood-fringed clearing. Men went off to survey the roadstead to make certain no one had followed them. Others hobbled the horses and set them to graze in the sere grass.

Women built a great cookfire and set a big pot to boil. Children hauled water up from the stream, and a few musicians tuned their guitars and harps and shawms for music.

Old Maida, the healer, had laid Richard Speed upon a pallet and busied herself doctoring his wounds. She fed him a draft of anise and rosewater, thickened with honeyed wine, and soon the good reverend had sunk into a deep, healing sleep.

“I love the Gypsies,” Oliver said, loosening the laces of his doublet and happily surveying the activity.

Beside him, Lark raised her eyebrows. “Why?”

“Why not?” He shrugged out of the doublet and dropped it carelessly to the ground. Within seconds a lad happened by, snatched up the garment and walked away, rolling his eyes and whistling to make certain Oliver noticed him.

With a growl of mock outrage, Oliver bent low and chased the boy, tumbling with him to the ground and tickling him until he surrendered the doublet. The lad’s peals of laughter were the sweetest music Oliver had heard in weeks.

He sent the boy on his way with a pat on the backside. Shaking out his doublet, he returned to Lark.

“They seem pagan, homeless wanderers,” she observed.

He suspected she was mouthing nonsense drummed into her by the redoubtable Spencer.

“Spencer once said their race comes from the tinkers who made the nails used to crucify Jesus Christ,” she added.

Now Oliver was certain he’d guessed the source of the
nonsense, but he was in no mood for arguing. With his lawn shirt flapping loose, he took her hand and led her toward a group sitting round the fire.

The flames bathed the Gypsies’ faces in warm hues of amber and gold. Their smiles were broad, their gestures easy—a man smoothing his hand down his wife’s curling hair, a mother gathering a babe to her breast, a young boy bringing an old woman a slice of bread slathered with lard.

“Pagan?” Oliver asked with a hint of exasperation. “Homeless? Look at them, Lark. They love their children. They inflict pain on no one. And just because they don’t own a sad little patch of tillage means naught. In truth they are free, unfettered by greed and ambition. Can you say as much for Christian Englishmen?”

“No.” She shivered, hunching her shoulders, and Oliver wondered if she was thinking of Wynter. “No, I cannot.”

He sat cross-legged on the ground amid the group of people and drew her down beside him. Lark accepted a clay bowl of soup and a bit of bread, sipping daintily from the rim of the bowl.