Kirkpatrick saw this one, bemused, half turn to see Malise scuttling away in pursuit of Lamprecht, then turned back into the half-crouched figure of Kirkpatrick, who now realized that the man was with Malise. No henchman thug, he thought, a serjeant no less, wealthy enough to own a decent set of clothes – and a sword, which he hauled out just as the crowd jostled up, the cry of ‘thief, thief’ thundering joyously out.
The sight of the sword balked them, spilled them round the man who held it like a stream round a rock. People yelled at him to watch what he did with that blade – then the shriekers at the back, unable to see anyone who looked like their prey, spotted the wink of a drawn blade and decided that this was enough to mark their man.
The serjeant, surrounded, slashed wildly and sealed his fate with the first spill of blood; the baying mob, ignoring the flailing sticks of the bailiffs and the wild hornblowing of red-faced beadles, seemed to surge on him like a tide.
Kirkpatrick slid away, moving fast but not running; ahead he could see the bobbing head of Malise. Keep him in sight, Kirkpatrick muttered to himself, a litany that kept the curses damped; he had not spent all this time living like a beggar to lose Lamprecht now. Keep Malise in sight and, let him lead on like an unleashed rache.
Malise felt Kirkpatrick at his back like the heat of an unseen flame, but did not dare turn to look for fear of losing sight of the fleeing Lamprecht, beetling along the Lane. He slammed into a Crutched Friar, stammered apology and had back a less than holy spit of viper venom – when he turned back, Lamprecht was gone.
Lamprecht, sweating and gibbering to himself like a madman, knew only that he was pursued by everyone and that, if he started to sprint like a frantic hare he was a dead man. He fought the urge, sidled round a stall laden with red slabs of meat, collared with succulent yellow fat and only briefly flicked his eyes to them where before he would have stood and drooled.
He should have left London ages since, but was, in a bitter irony that did not escape him, the richest pauper in the country, his bag full of unsellable bounty and his purse full of nothing but wind. He had to get away.
Now he was pursued – he half-turned at a stall full of cabbage and celery and saw Malise, knew the man at once and was transfixed by fear. Him too? Christ’s Wounds – the Comyn had determined to hunt him out as well …
Lamprecht found himself staring at the shambles, realized he was at the place where offal was sold and the stalls were rich and ripe and dripping with heart and tripe, sweetbreads and kidney, pale white, blue-veined collops in strings and folds. Flies hummed like the murmur of chanting priests and the entrail piles on the stalls slithered over each other like glistening, mating snakes.
When Kirkpatrick came up on the place a moment later Lamprecht was huddled in the lee of an oxcart, mere feet away. If Kirkpatrick turned, he could not fail to see him …
Kirkpatrick felt it more than he saw it, a chill on the side of his neck and he whirled in time to see Malise launch at him, all snarl and feral scything with a blade that seemed to whine through the air, so that Kirkpatrick had all he could do to avoid it.
‘Ye hoor’s slip,’ Malise bellowed. Seeing Kirkpatrick hauling out his own blade, those nearest shied away, shouting, and a butcher called out to his companions that there was trouble.
‘Ye bloody-handed, cat-wittit crawdoun …’
It was a roaring invective to put fire in his belly; Kirkpatrick knew it as the sparks flew from their clashed knives and they circled in a slow-stepping half-crouched dance.
‘Here, here,’ said one of the fleshers indignantly and made the foolish move of stepping forward with one hand out to separate the combatants – then he reeled back, shrieking and holding his hand, the blood welling up where Malise had cut him.
‘Murder, murder …’
The cry went up just as the ones of ‘thief’ were fading into the distance and it was enough to fan the old embers into fresh flames; the baying horde surged out of Cheap, a wave that tossed aside a ragged, bloodied corpse that had once been a serjeant and left the gasping, weary, flustered beadles and bailiffs in its wake, washed up like flotsam.
Lamprecht could not believe his fortune when Malise attacked Kirkpatrick and kept those black eyes from him. He slithered right under the oxcart, jammed his fingers up between the boards and lifted his feet up in an awkward, splay-kneed stance, on to the axle. In a second they were moving and he almost laughed aloud at his cleverness, for he had realized in an instant that the oxcart owner would want beast and vehicle well clear of damage from a riot and men fighting with naked blades.
The cart lurched away from the shouting butchers and their shrieking customers, away along the lane, swaying and ponderous but fast enough for Lamprecht, who clung on underneath, like a barnacle to a hull.