The Broken Token rn-1 Read online

  The Broken Token

  ( Richard Nottingham - 1 )

  Chris Nickson

  Chris Nickson

  The Broken Token

  Here is a token of true love,

  We’ll break it into two,

  You have my heart and half this ring

  Until I find out you.

  Riley the Fisherman, Traditional

  1

  Sometimes he thought he’d been Constable for too long. After fourteen years he believed there was nothing that could shock him any more. He’d seen all of man’s inhumanity to man, not just once, but many times over, and he understood nothing was going to change the way people were. They’d continue to steal and kill whether he caught them or not. All too often he felt he was trying to stem a tide with a bucket. Why, he often wondered, did he persist?

  His title certainly sounded grand enough: Richard Nottingham, Constable of the City of Leeds. But for all the fulsome words, it paid barely enough to keep his family in a modest house on Marsh Lane. And to earn it he had to suffer the whims and demands of the Mayor and the aldermen, all of them grown fat and florid off the wool trade. They expected him and his men to solve all the city’s crimes. By the year of Our Lord 1731, that was almost impossible.

  He pushed the fringe off his forehead and stretched in his chair. It was ten o’clock on a September night and the raucous noise from the White Swan Tavern next door to the jail filled the air. He’d been working for fifteen hours and he was ready to go home.

  He locked the building and walked down Kirkgate, past the shadowed, brooding bulk of the parish church and through York Bar before crossing Timble Bridge to reach Marsh Lane. It took no more than ten minutes, but it felt like an hour as the niggling events of the day played again in his mind. One carter grievously assaulting another over the right of way on Briggate, a drunk tumbling into the River Aire and drowning at Dyers Garth, money and meat stolen from a butcher in the Shambles while his back was turned, and a robbery turned bloody on the Upper Head Row, both thief and victim close to death. Then there was a slippery cutpurse with three victims so far. Plenty of work for today and tomorrow, and for all the days to come. It had been that way from the time, years before, when he’d started as one of the Constable’s men, and worked his way up to deputy and finally Constable.

  There was never any shortage of work for the morrow. The poor would always hurt the poor, then die themselves as they performed the hangman’s dance. The rich, though, were never guilty, no matter what they did — and he’d seen them commit crimes others wouldn’t dream about. The wall of property and influence they built around themselves kept the law firmly at bay. He’d tried hammering at it a few times, but one man couldn’t bring down an edifice, even for justice.

  As he opened his door the dim light of a candle greeted him, and he smiled to see Mary still awake, her face bent over a book. He knew what it would be — Pilgrim’s Progress, the volume she read every autumn to prepare her soul for the long, bleak months of winter. She raised her head and he bent quickly to kiss her.

  “I was beginning to wonder if I should go to bed,” she said with a gentle smile.

  “It’s been a long day,” Nottingham apologised, shaking his head wearily. “And more of the same tomorrow, by the look of it.”

  She stood, the plain fustian of her homespun dress sliding soundlessly as she rose, and he put his arms around her. There was a tranquillity about her features, not quite beautiful but content, and an ease and grace with which she moved. He felt safer with her close, with her warmth and love flowing into him. They’d been married over twenty years now, wed when he still had no idea of his future, and they were just living day to day in a room they shared with her parents.

  And even that had seemed wondrous to him then, after growing up in damp, stinking cellars or sleeping rough. He’d known what it was like to be poor in Leeds, leading gangs of children to scavenge for rotten vegetables at the market so they could eat, cutting purses, doing anything he had to in order to survive until the next morning. He’d managed it, but so many hadn’t.

  Now he and Mary had an entire house of their own, and two daughters who were growing all too quickly. There was food on the table and coal on the hearth, as long as they weren’t greedy. And he had Mary. He was grateful to her for giving him her love. And in turn he loved her.

  The fire had died, but there was still a vestige of its warmth in the room. He settled gratefully into his chair as she brought him bread and cheese and a cup of ale.

  “How are the girls?” he asked as he began to eat, realising how hungry he was. When had he eaten last — had it been something in the middle of the day?

  “Rose’s man called for her again this evening,” Mary answered, beaming with pleasure. Now almost nineteen, Rose was ready for marriage. “I like him, Richard, I think he’d do well by her.”

  “We’ll see,” he answered noncommittally, although he knew the pair were a good match.

  “He’s scared of you,” she informed him with a laugh.

  “Good.” He gave her a sly smile and a wink. “That way he’ll not be taking advantage of her. And what about Emily? What did the Queen Bee do today?”

  “The usual. Flounced around the house after school, expecting to be waited on hand and foot,” Mary said with exasperation, rolling her eyes. At fifteen, Emily seemed to believe that her father’s office elevated her to the gentry, and she expected to be treated that way by everyone, including her own family. Nottingham grimaced. With her attitude the lass will get a shock soon enough, he thought, one that’ll bring her crashing back to earth.

  He finished the food, picking the crumbs off the plate. But as he swallowed the last of them, a wave of tiredness seemed to envelop him. He needed sleep. He needed his bed.

  He undressed, taking off the stained coat he always wore for work, the smell of wool filling his nostrils as he hung it on a nail driven into the wall. Its style was old and unfashionable, the cuffs reaching back almost to the elbow and the lapels broad as a desk, but it served its purpose, keeping him warm and reasonably dry. His shoes and hose were covered in mud from the courts and alleys where he’d walked all day and much of the evening. The once-elegant pattern on the long waistcoat had faded and rubbed over the years, and his linen shirt had been mended almost everywhere.

  Before he slipped into bed Nottingham tied his hair back. As a young man he’d been so proud of his thick, straight blond locks that he’d refused to wear a wig. Instead, he grew it long, letting it flow on to his shoulders, the fringe all too often flopping into his eyes. Now it was thinner, so pale it was almost colourless, but the vanity had become habit; he still refused to follow the fashion of the day by cutting it short and donning a periwig.

  Under the chilly sheet and rough blanket, Mary curled against his back, and he lulled himself in the heat of her familiar body. He closed his eyes, his mind skipping between despair and contentment, and hoped not to dream.

  2

  The relentless banging pulled Nottingham groggily from sleep. Once he’d identified the sound he slid uneasily from the bed, reaching across automatically to grab the short, thick cudgel from his coat pocket. The pearly light outside showed barely dawn and the floor was bitterly cold under his feet. A thin wind out of the west whistled through gaps in the window frame.

  Wrapping a threadbare old cloak around himself, he wrenched the door open before the pounding roused the entire street. Standing before him, flushed and still panting, was John Sedgwick, the lanky, eager young man he’d made his deputy two years before.

  “We’ve got a murder, boss,” he announced breathlessly. “Two bodies.”

  “Two?” Nottingham asked, his mind coming rapidly awake as the air touched hi
s face. “Where?”

  “Queen Charlotte’s Yard, behind the workhouse.”

  The Constable sighed. This was no way to start the day. He began issuing the necessary orders.

  “Right,” he commanded. “Make sure someone’s looking after the body. Then go and wake the coroner. Ask him to meet me there.”

  Sedgwick gave a wry grin. “He’s going to love that at this time of the morning.”

  Nottingham smiled darkly. Edward Brogden, the coroner, was a fastidious little man who also served as the city’s Sergeant-at-Mace, preening in his self-importance, his wardrobe and the money his father had left him. He despised the poor, always ready to declaim that they were only in that state because they refused to work hard and better themselves.

  But the law insisted he view every suspicious death, so Nottingham was going to take him to a filthy street where he’d complain constantly, cover his nose to try vainly to keep out the overpowering stench of life and death, then leave as soon as he was able. It was going to be a grim pleasure.

  “The bugger’ll live.”

  Sedgwick gave a wheezing laugh, and strode away with his long, powerful lope. Richard Nottingham dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before, grabbed the dry heel of a loaf for his breakfast, and left the house soundlessly, to walk back into town.

  There was a faint crispness under the dawn air, a sense of seasons beginning to change. Another month would probably see the first frost of the year. Wisps of smoke were already rising from a few chimneys on Vicar Lane as servants lit the early fires in the grand houses, and in the distance he could hear the muted sound of weavers setting up their trestles for the Tuesday coloured cloth market on Briggate.

  Nottingham had lived on Briggate once, in a grand house near the top end where it met the Head Row. He still passed it every day. He’d been just eight when his father had discovered that his wife had taken a lover. He didn’t understand it at the time, but he remembered the furore, his father yelling madly at his mother to get her body from his house and take her bastard son with her. Afterwards came the confusion of where to go, how to live… and then the hunger that governed their lives.

  He still remembered his father faintly, although he’d done everything he could to push the man from his mind. Charles Nottingham had been a gentleman of high pretension and loud airs, a drinker and gambler who often stayed out all night — or all week, if the whim took him — with little regard for his wife and child. In his cups his temper would rise; he’d beat the servants, and even thrash his son. And when it finally suited him to be outraged by his wife’s behaviour, he’d thrown out his family, even though she’d brought all the money to the marriage. But she had no rights; they all rested with him. Someone had told him that his father had left the city not long after, gone with his new mistress to join rich London society. In the sour tenements of Leeds, the boy and his mother had enjoyed no such choice.

  He passed the grim face of the workhouse, took a deep breath and entered the maze of small alleys off Lady Lane.

  Queen Charlotte’s Yard was a majestic name for the row of hovels cramped on top of each other behind a thin archway that led off another small, ruined street. The houses struggled out of the mud as if they’d exhausted their strength, one, sometimes two, decrepit storeys tall, places of plunging, desperate poverty. The kind of places he knew all too clearly, where damp streams coursed down the walls and sewage backed up on to the floors after a heavy rain.

  A small crowd had gathered, brought together by the dire spectacle of death. Nottingham forced his way between them, and they shrank away as they recognised his face. The Constable was authority, he was the city, and his presence never brought good news for them.

  The bodies had been pushed face down against one of the houses, then roughly covered in rubbish and excrement so only the limbs showed. It was a man and a woman, the male on top in a splayed parody of animal fornication. Nottingham reached down and touched the woman’s small hand for a moment, her flesh clammy and unyielding against his fingers. Dead a few hours, he decided. He’d wait for the coroner before uncovering them.

  “Who found these two?” Nottingham raised his voice and looked around the people.

  A scrawny man with long, matted hair shuffled forward. He had a pale face under a unkempt beard, his coat torn, dark breeches baggy over his thin thighs. Mould was growing in the seams of his coat, and dust, like beggars’ velvet, lay on the nap.

  “I did, sir,” he answered, his eyes lowered deferentially.

  “What’s your name?”

  “John, sir, John Chapman.”

  “You live here, John?” the Constable queried kindly.

  “Over there.” He looked up, showing ruined teeth, and indicated a house where the glass had been broken from all the windows and the door hung perilously loose. “With my brother and his family. I’m a potman at the Talbot Inn. I was leaving for work this morning and saw them there.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I went and found one of your men,” he explained carefully. “He told me to come back here and wait for you.”

  “Did you hear anything last night?” Nottingham wondered. He knew it was a pointless question, but he had to ask it. “A fight, shouting?”

  “No more than usual,” Chapman demurred, and glanced quickly around the other faces in the crowd. “This isn’t a quiet place at night, sir.”

  Voices murmured assent.

  “But none of you heard anything like murder?” Nottingham asked them.

  They all shook their heads, as he knew they would. There was no sense in asking more.

  Sedgwick strode through the archway, followed by the coroner. Brogden picked his way daintily through the filth and puddles. He’d taken the time to dress in clean hose and breeches and there was a shine to his shoes. As expected, he had a scented handkerchief clamped to his nose. Nottingham greeted him noncommittally and turned to the bodies.

  “I’ll need them uncovered,” Brodgen ordered brusquely, distaste in his voice. The Constable nodded to Sedgwick, who pulled and turned the male corpse.

  Nottingham knew him immediately. Just three days earlier his men had helped rescue him from a mob by the Market Cross at the top of Briggate. Daniel Morton, his name was, a dissenting preacher from Oxford who’d been invited to Leeds by one of the merchant families intent on saving the wicked souls of the poor. But from the way the poor had reacted on Saturday, they had no desire to be saved. Now Morton’s expensive grey broadcloth coat had been ruined by bloodstains across the chest where a knife had ripped wounds and taken his life.

  Then with a grunt Sedgwick heaved the woman over, and Nottingham felt his heart lurch. Hers was a face he knew far better than the preacher’s. For a while she’d been almost as close as family to him. Now she was here, violently dead, humiliated, and beyond his protection.

  “Christ.”

  The word tore quietly from his mouth, although no one seemed to hear. He bunched his fists in his coat pockets and turned away as Brogden bent to look at the corpses. Nottingham bit down on his lip and offered a silent prayer for her soul.

  She’d been Pamela Watson when he first knew her, barely thirteen when she came to work for him as the serving girl. His daughters had been young and boisterous then, and Mary, struggling desperately to recover from pneumonia, had needed plenty of help looking after them.

  Pamela had come on the recommendation of her grandmother, Meg, a seamstress who’d raised the girl after her mother died. She’d soon learned the ways of the place and made herself invaluable, always cheery and good-natured, even when the children were fractious.

  She ended up staying for four years, sharing every hour of their lives, until she’d become like a third daughter. When she met Tom Malham, a farm labourer from Chapeltown, it had been Nottingham who had vetted him and approved the match. And when she left for a new life with him, there had been a hole in their house for a long time.

  So he couldn’t understand why she was h
ere, stabbed and bloodied and left with the rubbish, beside a minister who’d only arrived in the city four days before.

  He studied her face again, but there was no mistake; it was Pamela, beyond doubt. There had been no peace in her when she died; her lips were pushed back in a cruel rictus of pain. She was clothed in a tattered dress of cheap homespun, ripped at the hem and mended many times, her legs and feet bare, the skin already pale and waxy. A broken scrap of blue ribbon hung round her neck, as if someone had torn something off it.

  “Definite murder, the pair of them,” Brogden announced, doing his duty and dragging the Constable sharply from his thoughts. The coroner replaced the handkerchief over his nose and Nottingham caught the heavy smell of lavender.

  “From his appearance, the man must have been of a little substance,” the coroner continued unnecessarily. “That coat and breeches didn’t come cheap. The woman was probably a servant or a whore, though. A bit old for the tastes of most men, I’d have thought.”

  “I know who they were.” There was a coldness in Nottingham’s tone that caused Brogden to glance warily at him for a moment.

  “I’ll bid you good day, then,” he said, and tried to find a reasonably dry track out of the yard. Nottingham watched him leave, then turned to Sedgwick.

  “You stay here and watch no one tries to strip this pair clean. I’ll send some men to bring them to the jail. After that I want you to talk to everyone you can find in the court.” His deputy nodded, and Nottingham continued, “You can trust Brogden to miss the obvious. These two weren’t murdered here, there’s not enough blood. So they were brought here, and it couldn’t have happened silently. Someone must have seen or heard something.”

  “I’ll find out, boss.”

  They wouldn’t talk to him but they might open up to Sedgwick, he thought. The man looked more like one of them, his shoes barely holding together and his coat the product of many better years before it ever came into his possession. They wouldn’t fear him the way they did the Constable. Nottingham might have come up the hard way himself, from Constable’s man to deputy to Constable, but now his authority scared people.