The Cobbler's Boy by Elizabeth Bear & Katherine Addison

Author:Elizabeth Bear & Katherine Addison [Bear, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sobbing Squonk Press
Published: 2018-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

There wasn’t a chance of coming close to the Magistrate’s house unobserved, and after several long hours of skulking about the garden and the side streets Ginger and I were forced to admit it. “God’s wounds,” he swore. “I know he’s away from home, as he was meeting my father for supper, but the house is acrawl with wife and servants—”

I nodded. “I honestly do not know where to begin. I’d ask Tom, but he’d forbid us to have anything to do with it.”

We stared a while longer, sticking to the shadows, and he nudged me. “Kit, where wilt thou sleep?” he asked, as we leaned against the garden wall.

I shrugged, too giddy with freedom to care. “I’ll sleep rough in the orchard if I have to,” I said. “If Mog will smuggle me my boots and clothes—and the book thou did’st give me—perhaps I’ll go to London. I don’t know.”

“There’s plague in London,” he said. “Thou’lt starve—”

“I’ll find work as a player lad and soon be as famous as Richard Tarleton,” I countered. “Put me in a dress; I’ll play a woman’s part as well as any man.” And then I blushed at the sly sideways look he gave me. “And if not, I can hold horses, or I can find a job at the bear pits, or cleaning stables, or—” Anything, I told myself. Anything, in a city where no-one knows or cares that I am the drunkard John Marlowe’s son.

“What about the scholarship?”

His voice went small, and it hurt me to hear it. “Father never would have let me sit for it anyway—”

“Thou could’st still. If thou wert in Canterbury.”

“If I stay in Canterbury, I will starve.” The alley we stood in was cool, and haunted by scratching hens. I kicked a pebble at one; far from being alarmed, she pecked at it and then offered me a disgruntled glance that it was but a rock, and not a crust of bread.

“What about thy friend Tom? Will he help thee?” Ginger took my elbow and squeezed, and then I understood. Of course I couldn’t go to London, because Ginger couldn’t go to London.

I had been such a fool. “I’ll find a way,” I answered, leaning back against the rough half-timbered wall of the house we hid behind. “I’ll talk to Tom. We’ll talk to Tom. And perhaps I’ll win the scholarship after all—”

And we can be together.

The cathedral bell tolled just then, and Ginger almost hopped in place. “Oh, Mother’s going to skin me—” He trotted a step and then glanced back. “Meet me tonight by the tree. I’ll see you get somewhat to eat.”

It would work. It could be made to work. Ginger would take care of me, and I would take care of him.

It just simply had to work.

#

I sat with Tom that afternoon, though I did not trouble him with talk of Arnell, or of my father. Though clearly better, he was feverish, fretful. It worried him almost to pain that he could

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