The Blackthorn Key (12 page)

I peered at it. “I think it's a sword.”

“A sword? Oh!” Tom pointed to the end of the second line. “There. ‘End swords.' There's another sword.”

A sword. A triangle. Another sword.

Hugh's fourth. Lions and gates. And a jumble of unreadable letters. That was the message.

I didn't understand
any
of it.

Master Benedict had taught me backward writing the very first summer I'd joined him. He knew I'd figured out the number code from the gunpowder recipe. And he'd pointedly stuck the lemon juice in my face. He obviously expected me to decipher this message. But now I didn't know what to do.

I slumped in my chair. Tom put a hand on my shoulder. “Don't worry. You'll figure it out. Master Benedict believed in you.”

I felt like throwing up.

•  •  •

I helped Tom finish scrubbing the back step before his father returned. Tom kept up a chatter, but I wasn't listening. I was thinking about what he'd said before.

When the Guild Council threw me out of my home, I'd wanted to run to Hugh right away. The last line in Master Benedict's message had stopped me.

Tell no one.

When I'd first seen that page in the ledger, I'd thought Master Benedict had left it behind to name his killers. Now, after what Tom and I had deciphered, I wasn't so sure that was the case. Something else was hidden behind these codes.

That's what puzzled me. Codes were designed to fool strangers, as they'd fooled Lord Ashcombe. Hugh was no stranger. He'd been Master Benedict's apprentice, too. He'd decipher this message faster than I ever could.

So why not tell me to go see him?

I shook my head. Hugh couldn't be in the Cult of the Archangel. He wasn't a killer. I was sure of it. Master Benedict would have warned me.

Then again, maybe he did.

Tell no one.

I finished scrubbing and sat on the step. I didn't have
a choice. Hidden in that message was something that mattered more to Master Benedict than his own life. It meant everything to him. To decipher it, I'd need Hugh's help.

I decided I wouldn't tell Hugh about the message. I'd talk around it instead, maybe mention one of the symbols. Say I saw it in a book or something. I had to take the chance. Whatever his ‘fourth' was, Hugh Coggshall was the only one who knew what it meant.

•  •  •

Hugh didn't have a shop. While still with Master Benedict, Hugh had become friends with Nicholas Lange, an apprentice in the Royal College of Physicians. According to my master, the two had spent almost as much time together as Tom and I did. They both became journeymen the same year, both married nearly identical girls, and both became masters a few years after that. As a physician, Dr. Lange needed someone to fill his patients' prescriptions, so he contracted his friend Hugh as his exclusive apothecary. That way, Dr. Lange got a trusted preparer of medicaments, and Hugh—who'd loved every minute in my master's workshop and hated every minute in the store—never had to stand behind a counter again.

That the contract brought Hugh a lot of money didn't hurt, either. His home on Chelsea Street—next door to
Nicholas Lange's—was narrow, but of quality. It was solid brick, and tall, a story higher than most of its neighbors. His workshop was on the ground floor, with living quarters on the three floors above.

Tom and I reached his door, brightly shellacked oak banded with a curled, wrought-iron frame. Though it was growing dark, there were no lights in the house, not even from a fireplace.

Tom peered in the window. “Is he not home?”

I knocked. When there was no response, I knocked again, harder.

A door opened, but not the one I was in front of. From the house beside us stepped Dr. Lange, accompanied by his wife. Both were dressed for a night on the town.

“Dr. Lange!” I ran over to catch him before he stepped into the carriage waiting at the end of the path. “Dr. Lange!”

He turned and pushed his long brown wig away from his eyes. “Yes? Oh. Uh . . .” He wagged a finger, trying to place me.

“Christopher Rowe, sir,” I said. “Benedict Blackthorn's apprentice. We met last Christmas, at his shop.”

“Yes, of course.” He frowned. “I'm glad I ran into you. Have you seen Hugh?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “I was just going to ask you the same.”

He huffed. “I haven't. I'm quite cross about it, actually. Hugh was to join us for supper on Oak Apple Day, and he left us all waiting. Our lamb was cold.” He said it like he'd been forced to swallow hemlock. “Worse, I had several prescriptions to be filled today. I had to send my patients to that idiot on Cornhill instead. He's not with Mr. Blackthorn?”

Obviously, Dr. Lange hadn't heard the news yet. I just shook my head. “You haven't seen Master Hugh since Thursday, then?”

He stroked his beard. “Yes, that sounds right. We had breakfast on Ascension Day. If he's gone to see his wife without informing me, I'll plant my boot in his backside.” He poked a finger at me. “And when you see him, you tell him that.”

•  •  •

I stomped on the cobbles as we walked back to Tom's house. Tom wouldn't meet my eyes.

“Master Hugh didn't do it,” I said.

Tom held his hands up. “I didn't say anything.”

“I can read your mind.”

“All right,” Tom said. “I believe you. But then where is he?”

Maybe it was as Dr. Lange said. Hugh's wife couldn't stand the noise—or the smell—of the city. She often spent months away with their two daughters at Hugh's country house. Maybe he'd gone to be with his family. I remembered the conversation I'd overheard Thursday night.

Hugh, worried:
Simon's already fled the city.

Master Benedict, resigned:
Do you want to leave, too?

And then my master was attacked.

Maybe that pushed Hugh over the edge. So he ran away. But then wouldn't he convince Master Benedict to leave with him?

Well, no. Master Benedict had wanted to stay. And of all my master's qualities, “easily persuaded” was not one of them. I shook my head. If Hugh had already left London, then I had no way of finding out what my master's message meant.

We got to Tom's street, but instead of going down it, Tom took us through the narrow alley that led behind his house. His mother was waiting at the back door, a burlap sack in her hand. “Did you break the news to Master Coggshall?” she said.

“He wasn't home,” I said.

“That's a shame. It's always better to hear this sort of
thing from friends.” She handed the sack to Tom. “Dinner in five minutes.”

Tom stopped me from following her into the house. “We have to wait.”

“For what?” Inside the sack was half a loaf of crusty bread, a hard rye, and a few sweet buns. “Is this what we're eating?”

“No.” He nodded toward the end of the path.

A man turned into view. From a distance, he looked as if he was well off, which was odd, because while this wasn't a bad street, it also wasn't the kind of place you'd find wealthy men strolling through alleys. But when he got closer, I saw he wasn't what I'd thought at all.

His clothes had once been fine, but not anymore. His wig was a bird's nest. His thin wool jacket was ragged and frayed at the edges. His shirt had become so stained, its original color was long forgotten. And his soft doe-leather breeches had worn so thin, you could see his knees.

This was Dr. Parrett. He used to come to our shop. Then, last summer, his house burned down. He hadn't repaired it. He hadn't moved out, either. He still lived there, alone, among the charred timbers and ashes of his former life.

“Pleasant evening, Dr. Parrett,” Tom said.

“Pleasant evening, Tom. And to you . . .” He cocked his head, as if he were listening to something. “. . . Christopher.”

He came closer. He hadn't washed his body any more than he'd washed his clothes. “Good to see you again, sir,” I said.

He looked at me sadly. “I'm so sorry about your master, lad. If you need anything, my home is yours, for as long as you need to stay. And James would love the company.”

I felt my spine freeze. James—Dr. Parrett's twelve-year-old son—had died in the fire.

“That's very kind,” I stammered.

Tom held out the sack. “Here you go, sir. Bread and sweet buns.”

“That'll please James,” Dr. Parrett said. “He adores your sweet buns. It's a task to get him to eat anything else.” He tapped at his torn pockets. “I . . . I'm afraid I forgot to bring my coin purse again. I could go and—”

“Don't worry,” Tom said. “I'll put it on your account, like usual.”

Dr. Parrett took the sack with a trembling hand. He held it to his chest like a baby. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

“See you Monday.”

We watched him go. On our way inside, Tom put a hand on my arm.

“Don't tell my father,” he said.

•  •  •

Tom called for his sisters. Within a second, the five of them came thundering down the stairs. Then we sat down for dinner. Under different circumstances, I would have savored the beef, roasted to perfection with pepper and sage, but with every bite, Tom's father pinched his lips as if I were eating his future. And I couldn't stop thinking about poor Dr. Parrett. It scared me. I'd lost everything, too. One year later, would that be me? Living among my own life's rubble, begging for scraps, imagining Master Benedict was still alive?

After dinner, Tom and I were ordered to clean the table and scour the pots. Normally, the Bailey girls would have been assigned their own tasks, but Tom's father seemed to feel he'd get his money's worth out of my staying there if I did all the chores. Free from their usual duties, the girls decided to hang around the kitchen and use us for their own amusement.

Cecily, delighted at this turn of events, decided she'd be taskmaster. She kept up a steady stream of orders as we
worked, telling us how
this
pot needed more scrubbing, and how
that
pot should be scraped
just
so. Plump and cheery Isabel sat on the countertop, swinging her legs under her frilled orange petticoat and chattering away at us—something about a duck who had a sheep for a friend—not seeming to care whether anyone was listening or not. The other three, Catherine, Emma, and little Molly, found a ball of yarn and played some game called stick-tock. I don't know what the rules were, but the girls appeared to score points each time the ball hit me or Tom. Double if it bounced off our heads.

As Tom and I finished with the pots, the three youngest girls clamped onto my legs, declared I was their prisoner, and refused to let me go until I paid for my freedom with a story. So upstairs we went to the girls' bedroom, where the Baileys kept their only book, a dog-eared copy of
Le Morte d'Arthur
.

We all piled onto Cecily's bed as I opened the cover. Cecily, sitting behind me, seemed more interested in braiding feathers into my hair than listening to the story. Isabel amused herself by smearing rouge on my cheeks and giggling a lot. The other three listened, ears pricked like wolves, as I read them the tale of “King Arthur and the Giant of Mont Saint-Michel.” The
giant terrorized the countryside, killing its people and pillaging the land until the villagers begged King Arthur to save them. Molly, the youngest at four years old, hid her face in my lap as the giant ate twelve children like roast chickens on a spit. And she and gentle Emma both clutched at my waist during the final battle, when the two rolled down the hill to the sea, until the Great King of Britain smote the monster with his dagger.

Cecily leaned her slender frame against me, her head on the back of my neck. “I wish he were here,” she said sadly.

“King Arthur?” I said.

“Uh-huh.” She rested her chin on my shoulder and locked her arms around my chest. “He'd stop the Cult of the Archangel. Then they wouldn't have hurt your master.” She sighed. “But I guess he's just a story.”

She held on to me as Molly and Emma turned to the next page in the book, pleading with me to keep reading. Tom, watching from the doorway, hushed them and tucked them in. “That's enough sport for one day. You'll get another tale tomorrow.”

Tom and I blew out the candles and went outside, sitting on the well-scrubbed step in the back alley. Tom handed me a woolen rag so I could wipe the rouge off my cheeks. As I
did, he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

“What?” I said.

“You've gone all quiet,” he said.

“Have I?”

“Uh-huh.” He sighed. “So what are you getting me into this time?”

“What do you mean?”

“I've seen that look in your eyes before.”

I don't suppose I could have kept this one inside. Cecily was right: King Arthur was just a story. No one was coming to save me. But that didn't mean I had to let everything I cared about get taken away. I might not know how to solve Master Benedict's riddle, but I did know what I could do tonight.

The Cult of the Archangel took my master. The Apothecaries' Guild Council took my home. I had only one thing left of my life: my puzzle cube. And I'd burn in the pits of hell before I'd let anyone take that, too.

“THIS IS MADNESS,” TOM HISSED.

“You said that already,” I whispered.

“And yet, here we are, still doing it. So, if you don't mind: This is madness.”

He had a point. Sneaking through the alleys of London at midnight wasn't the smartest idea in the world. At best, you'd meet a parade of drunks. At worst, you wouldn't see the sunrise. And if you ran into a parish constable on patrol, he'd be as likely to crack your skull as question you, since he'd just assume you were up to no good.