Treachery (2019 Edition) by S J Parris

Treachery (2019 Edition) by S J Parris

Author:S J Parris [Parris, S J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781643132990
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-07-13T00:00:00+00:00


FIFTEEN

Sidney is not in the tap-room. Instead I find him in our chamber, writing a letter to his wife.

‘Where the Devil have you been?’ he cries, leaping up from the table. ‘Your little friend has been up here looking for you.’

‘Sam?’

‘Who’s Sam?’ He casts around for his pipe. ‘The fisherman’s boy? No, I mean the pudgy maid who likes to get into everyone’s business. She seemed particularly anxious to find you. I’m afraid I was rather short with her.’ He packs tobacco leaf into the bowl and presses it down. ‘Lady Drake has been quite chilly with me today. I’d wager anything that maid told her where we went last night. Women don’t take it kindly, you know – the idea that a gentleman might pass up their company for that of a whore. They don’t like the idea of whores in general. For the sake of propriety, we are all supposed to collude in the pretence that the business doesn’t exist.’

‘I don’t know what they are so exercised about. We are all selling ourselves one way or another.’

He sighs, and sparks a tinder-box into life. ‘Isn’t that the truth. Well then, tell me what progress you have made today.’

So, while he leans back in his chair, stretching out his long limbs and puffing small gusts of blue smoke into the air, I recount for him my first sight of Robert Dunne and what I learned from Sara and Eve.

‘She sells babies?’ Sidney looks aghast.

I shrug. ‘That is hardly a new trade. Children are a commodity like anything else, for as long as there are some with too many and others without. The point is, if Mistress Grace seriously believed Dunne meant to run off with the girl, that would give her reason to get rid of him. And she is obviously connected to John Doughty.’

Sidney takes his pipe out of his mouth and studies the end of it, considering. ‘What man would be such a fool as to believe a whore who tells him she is carrying his child? He can’t seriously have planned to elope with her. Not with his wife about to come into her inheritance.’

‘He probably said it to keep her sweet. But the girl evidently believed it – perhaps sincerely enough to persuade Mistress Grace it was a danger.’

‘So we stumble again on this problem of who actually strung him up.’

I cross to the window and lean both elbows on the sill, pushing my hands through my hair. ‘I think I should speak to the watchmen on the Elizabeth. I know they have sworn to Drake that no one boarded that night, but of course they would say that if they had been bribed.’ Below me in the inn yard, I see a stable boy loading saddle bags on to a horse. The sky is still banked with cloud, though lanced in places with spears of gold light. ‘Everything points back to John Doughty having an accomplice on board.’

Sidney rises and taps his pipe out in the fireplace.



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