The Emperor of all Things Read online

  ‘That’s to keep the brats off, love. A girl can’t be too careful.’

  Nor a man, he thought; he had been lucky in his amorous pursuits, never having contracted the pox, but he had witnessed enough of its effects never to enter the lists of love unarmoured. To say nothing of his determination to bring no more bastards into the world.

  Clara straddled him and guided him inside her. ‘I had a knife from the kitchen ,’ she went on breathlessly, ‘but they had swords. Young noblemen, by the looks of them. Out for a bit of fun.’

  ‘You’re’ – he gasped as she rocked above him – ‘saying I stopped them somehow?’

  ‘And Tom, yes. Came to my rescue like knights in shining armour.’ She grunted and ground. ‘He took one through the back before they even knew you were there.’

  ‘What? Killed him, you mean?’

  ‘All I know is that the villain went down and didn’t get up again.’

  ‘The damned fool!’ He squirmed to get out from under Clara, but she redoubled her efforts, perhaps mistaking his panic for passion, or just not caring. Nor did his erection wilt along with his spirits, deciding, not for the first time, to go its own way regardless of his wishes. Quare’s groan had more than just frustration in it. But his mind, walled away from his body, worked with the precision of a timepiece. A commoner drawing a blade against a nobleman was serious business. To wound one, or God forbid kill one, even in self-defence, was a death sentence. The Worshipful Company couldn’t protect them from that. What had Aylesford done?

  ‘After that, it come fast and furious,’ Clara continued meanwhile, suiting her actions to her words. ‘I wanted to run, but I was terrified. I couldn’t hardly bring myself to look. I thought you and Tom was finished, outnumbered two to one. Then it would be my turn.’ Clara gave a little scream, her breasts smacking against her chest as she climaxed, and he felt his own climax rise up in answer. Clara clung to him. But even then, her stream of words did not slow. ‘Turned out to be the other way round. Your friend mightn’t look like much, but he’s a demon with a sword. Two clockmen plucking those feathered popinjays: it did my heart good to see!’ She laughed, then at last took notice of his struggles. ‘Why, what’s the matter, love? Crushing you, am I?’

  ‘Nothing personal.’ Quare pushed her away and sat up. He pulled the sheath from his drooping member and let it fall to the dirty floor. He must have been drunk indeed to have drawn his sword against nobility, regardless of the provocation. No doubt the hot-headed Aylesford had acted first, and he’d followed suit, swept up in the excitement. But that wouldn’t save him from punishment. That he remembered none of it only added to his anxiety. He wondered what had happened to Mansfield, Farthingale and Pickens. ‘It was just the two of us, you say? No others?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He rubbed his throbbing temples and groaned. ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Why, you cut down one man, and Tom took care of two.’ Clara, sitting cross-legged beside him, pantomimed two quick sword thrusts to his chest. ‘The last man tried to run, but the two of you got him before he’d taken half a step.’ A third thrust illustrated the man’s fate.

  Clammy horror settled over Quare. ‘We killed them all?’

  ‘Nobody stopped to check the bodies,’ she said with a shrug. ‘The three of us beat it out the back door before the Charleys or the redbreasts could show up.’

  Quare groaned again. If any of the men had survived, no doubt they’d already provided descriptions of their attackers. If, on the other hand, he and Aylesford had killed them all, it was possible that the Charleys – the city watch – didn’t have any leads. But that wouldn’t be the case for long. The watch – or, more likely, Sir John Fielding’s red-waistcoated Bow Street Runners – would want to interview all those present at the Pig and Rooster last night, and the table of journeymen hadn’t exactly been inconspicuous. With the exception of Aylesford, a stranger (who would have attracted notice for that reason alone), they were all regulars at the tavern, known by name. Sooner or later, the Charleys would hear of them and come looking. And when, inevitably, someone – perhaps Mansfield or one of the others – spilled the beans about Aylesford’s penchant for duelling, the prickly redhead would find himself a wanted man. And if, as seemed likely, the two of them had been seen together during the fracas, so would Quare. He felt the remorseless logic of the situation closing around him like the bars of a Newgate prison cell.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Clara mused meanwhile. ‘The fight sobered Tom right up, but it made you even drunker. You could barely walk. The two of us practically had to carry you through the streets. I was afraid you’d been wounded, stabbed; there was blood on your coat and hands. But you swore you was fine. I didn’t like to send you off in such a state, so I brought you here instead, both of you. My heroes.’

  Quare still remembered none of it. She might have been talking about someone else entirely. It gave him an eerie feeling, as if his body had a life of its own, separate from his mind, and though he’d just had a vivid illustration of that very fact here in bed with Clara, what she was relating to him now went well beyond that momentary estrangement.

  ‘I offered to take you on free of charge, however you wanted, one at a time or both together,’ Clara went on, blushing like the innocent girl she must have been once upon a time. ‘Tom was shy, said he was saving himself, but you were willing enough. He went out onto the landing to give us a bit of privacy, but we’d barely started before you jumped up, ran to the window and … Well, you can guess the rest, I’m sure, love, even if you don’t remember. A blessing there. Afterwards, you came back to bed and passed out, like. That left Tom and me. I wanted to do something for him – to show my appreciation – but he brushed me off again, told me he couldn’t even if he’d wanted to, that he was too tired to think of anything but sleep. I said he was welcome to share the bed with us, and so he did.’

  ‘I wish he had woken me before he left,’ Quare said. ‘We could be in big trouble. We need to get our stories straight.’

  At which Clara blushed more deeply than ever.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s just’ – she shifted, averting her eyes, then looking at him again – ‘I did wake up once last night and saw the two of you …’

  ‘Yes?’ he prompted.

  ‘Mind you, I’ve nothing against it. Live and let live, I always say.’

  ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t breathe a word to anyone.’

  Comprehension dawned. ‘You think …?’ He burst into laughter.

  ‘I know what I saw.’

  ‘And just what was that?’

  ‘Tom was cleaving to you from behind, one hand clapped over your mouth. He saw me looking and winked at me over your shoulder, hissed at me to go back to sleep.’

  ‘You were already asleep,’ Quare said, disconcerted by the image. ‘You dreamed the whole thing.’

  She shook her head and repeated, ‘I know what I saw.’

  ‘And I suppose I slept right through everything?’

  ‘Slept through it?’ She gave a disbelieving laugh. ‘Why, bless me, you were grunting like a pig the whole time!’

  Quare’s amusement had soured altogether. He got out of bed and began to dress. ‘I think I’d remember if anything like that had happened.’

  ‘Like you remember killing them men in the Pig and Rooster?’

  That gave him pause. After all, what did he really know about Aylesford? The man was a stranger. Perhaps he had attacked him in the dark. But it strained credulity to think that he would have slept through such an assault as Clara had described. Quare considered himself a man of the world; his life as a journeyman had brought him into contact with men who loved other men, or who sought out both sexes. Though sodomy was a crime punishable by death, his philosophy, like Clara’s, had always been live and let live. There had been furtive gropings in his boyhood with others his a
ge, but those games had stopped even before his seduction, at the age of thirteen, by Emma Halsted, the wife of his master. But the whole thing was ridiculous. Surely there would be physical evidence of such an assault, and while his body bore its litany of cuts and scratches, aches and bruises, there was nothing to suggest he’d been raped. Either Clara had been dreaming, or, more likely, she’d misinterpreted what she’d seen. But what, then, had she seen? ‘And afterwards? What did I do then?’

  ‘Why, slept like a baby. But here’s a laugh! Maybe you was done in, but Tom was just getting warmed up, like. Took me twice before he left, he did!’

  ‘And I slept through that as well, I suppose.’

  ‘Like a lamb,’ she said.

  ‘I never knew I was such a heavy sleeper.’

  ‘A good rogering will do that. I’m feeling a mite sleepy myself,’ she added with a giggle.

  He sighed. ‘Believe what you like, Clara. I’ll not argue with you.’

  ‘Why, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, love. Don’t I like it that way myself sometimes?’ She turned onto her knees and waggled her fleshy backside at him, though whether in mockery or invitation he couldn’t tell. ‘No need to go rushing off,’ she said, gazing over her shoulder with a wicked grin that seemed to settle the question.

  But Clara’s abundant charms were not as enticing as they’d been a moment ago. There was too much he didn’t know about what had happened last night and what might be awaiting him this morning. Aylesford might have been taken already; the Scottish journeyman could have spilled his guts by now, blaming everything on Quare. He didn’t think it likely, but it was certainly possible, and growing more so with every moment. There was no time to lose. He had to find Aylesford, and fast. If only he hadn’t drunk so much last night … That had been his undoing. He pulled on his coat, searched the floor for his shoes. ‘I’ve got to go, Clara. I need to find Aylesford before he’s picked up. No doubt they’ll question you as well. Don’t tell them anything.’

  She flounced on the bed. ‘What kind of rat do you take me for?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said with an apologetic smile. ‘I know you’re no rat.’

  ‘Hmph.’ She tossed her head. ‘Under the bed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your shoes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sure enough, there they were … splashed with blood and other stains he preferred not to examine too closely. Quare sat down on the bed and pulled the shoes on over his stockings, then stood.

  Clara leaned forward. ‘Give us a kiss before you go, love.’

  He obliged. ‘You won’t be seeing me at the Pig and Rooster for a while.’

  ‘You know where I live. Stop by sometime.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ he said; he did not bother to inform her that he had no idea where he was at present – he would discover that soon enough. He paused at the door to belt on his sword. Then, drawing the blade halfway from its scabbard, he noted with a sinking heart that brown streaks of dried blood were clinging to the steel; he would have to clean and oil the weapon as soon as he got back to his lodgings. ‘Have you seen my hat?’ he asked, looking for his black tricorn.

  ‘Another casualty of the night, I suppose,’ Clara said from the bed. ‘Here , take my cloak, love. You can’t step out like that – you look as if you’ve just come from a murder.’

  ‘I’m obliged to you.’ He took the dark brown cloak that hung from the back of the door. Though short on him, it covered the worst of the previous night’s leavings. He waved a last goodbye to Clara and hurried out into the morning.

  As eager as Quare was to get to the guild hall, where Master Magnus was waiting, no doubt impatiently, to resume their conversation of the day before, and where he hoped as well to hear news of Aylesford and the others, he knew he needed to clean up and change into fresh clothes first. Wrapped in Clara’s cloak, he kept to back streets and alleys as he made his way from her lodgings in Clerkenwell to his own in Cheapside; it made for a longer journey, but he met fewer people along the way, and those he did encounter seemed as shy of attention as he, keeping their heads down and their steps hurried, as if upon urgent business of their own.

  It occurred to him that he was not the only one with secrets to hide; it was a peculiar sensation to imagine that everyone he encountered, young and old, rich and poor, had committed some crime or harboured some guilt that, if it were publicly known, would take them to the pillory or to Tyburn. He had often felt himself part of the London mob – known that joyful if also thrillingly perilous sense of belonging to something greater than himself, which buoyed him up and swept him along: a vigorous, industrious, prosperous, high-spirited throng. This was the obverse of that, furtive, skulking, mistrustful … yet still, he realized, a true if heretofore unsuspected aspect of the city, the experience of which he would have gladly forgone. But London was always revealing fresh aspects of itself. He could live here a hundred years, he thought, and still not scrape the bottom of it.

  He kept a wary eye out but saw no evidence of undue interest or pursuit from any quarter. So far, his luck was holding.

  Guild masters and apprentices alike enjoyed free room and board at the guild hall in Bishopsgate Street, but journeymen were expected to fend for themselves. For the past year, Quare had taken lodgings at a comfortable if somewhat run-down house in Basing Lane, near Cheapside , that catered to journeymen of the Worshipful Company.

  Quare surveyed the approach to this establishment from the shadows of an alley across the way. He watched carriages and wagons move along to the cracking of whips and curses as pedlars afoot sang out their wares, everything from candles to flowers to lemons and limes; saw ragged urchins darting quick as starlings up and down the walks, ignored by one and all, while overhead, like flags of battle displayed by a victorious army, ponderous painted wooden signs creaked as they swung, as if stirred by no other wind than that which arose from below, and higher still, from open windows along the street, women leaned out to shout down orders for whatever was needful: in short, all the normal colourful caterwauling that constituted life on Basing Lane or indeed any other London street.

  The bells of St Mary-le-Bow began to ring out. Quare started then fished out his pocket watch, which displayed a time of nine minutes to ten. He wound the watch and adjusted the hands, gratified to see that the timepiece was still, as it were, within striking distance of the correct hour. Not that the bells of St Mary’s were to be trusted, exactly, but for the moment they were no doubt a more accurate indication of the proper time than his own neglected watch. He wouldn’t encounter a truly trustworthy timepiece until he reached the guild hall. But this would do for now. Amidst all the irregularities of the morning, and indeed the previous night, this small measure of certainty, however imperfect, was most welcome. Though the reminder that he was late and growing later for his meeting with Master Magnus was not.

  Meanwhile, other bells had begun to chime in, adding their disparate voices to the hour. The monumental clocks of London, resident in cathedrals and churches, or presiding over public squares, did not keep a common time. They struck askew, filling the air, as now, with a cacophony made worse by the fact that, while the bells of each clock were tuned to produce a pleasant melody, no thought had been given to the effect of a number of pleasant melodies ringing out on top of each other – which, as it turned out, proved neither pleasant nor melodious. A clockcophony, Master Magnus called it. There had been talk of regulating the striking of the hours, so that only one clock’s bells would be heard at a time, but the owners of the various clocks, who had spent large sums of money in building and maintaining their instruments, fought every proposal. Instead, they vied – with the assistance of the Worshipful Company available to all who could afford it – in making their particular clocks either the first or the last to strike, and this incremental competition, which had been going on for years now, with passions swelling in inverse proportion to the ever-smaller intervals of time involved, had served only to render the bells increasingly useless in
what was, after all, their primary function: the imposition of a central temporal authority over the city and its environs. At least, so it seemed to Quare and his fellow guildsmen, whose sensitivity to such things was far more acute than that of even the most time-conscious curate or man of business, men who made use of time but did not, so to speak, inhabit it as Quare and his fellows did.

  He could delay no longer. Telling himself that he was being foolishly suspicious, he took a deep breath and came out into the street. Though he felt as if a hundred hostile eyes were following him, he reached the boarding house without incident and entered, only to find himself face to face with his landlady, Mrs Puddinge, who drew back from the door with a small shriek of surprise, her face going as white as her apron. In her fifties, the childless widow of a master in the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, she was a merry matchstick of a woman who took a lively maternal interest in her ‘young men’, as she called them.

  ‘Merciful God in heaven, is it you, then, Mr Quare?’ Mrs Puddinge’s brown eyes narrowed beneath her cap as she took in his dishevelled state. ‘Lord bless us, but he told me you were dead!’

  ‘Dead?’ Quare echoed, the surprise now on his side. ‘What do you mean, Mrs P? Who told you?’

  She pursed her lips, giving her face the aspect of a shrivelled prune. ‘Why, your friend and fellow guildsman, Mr Aylesford. He told me there was a brawl last night at the Pig and Rooster. How often have I warned you young men against that den of iniquity?’ Tears sprang to her eyes, and she wrung her hands in the folds of her apron. ‘He told me you were all killed.’

  ‘All?’ Quare’s brain was reeling.

  ‘Mr Farthingale, Mr Pickens, Mr Mansfield and yourself.’ She raised the apron to dab at her eyes. ‘He said some young lords started it, and that they were killed as well. Made it sound a regular massacre, he did! And now here you are, a bit worse for wear but still among the living, after all! Why, ’tis a miracle! That’s what it is. A blessed miracle. And the others? Are they also alive and well?’