He did not see the crush which spilled over a butcher’s stall, the flood of contents like a glistening shoal of fresh-caught eels. He did not see Kirkpatrick, leaping back from another wild Malise swing, collide with someone’s back, slip on the coiled guts and offal and disappear into the mass of it. He did not see Malise flung away from Kirkpatrick, losing his knife but slithering out of the fray and up an alley.
The oxcart driver wanted to see it; Lamprecht felt the cart stop, heard the man climb laboriously up into it, swing over and drop – then the world exploded in howling pain as the driver’s thick-soled wood and leather clogs ground Lamprecht’s plank-clutching fingers to pulp.
He shrieked, which made the driver move to the side to find the screamer beneath him, allowing Lamprecht to tear his fingers free and fall to the cobbles. He scrambled out, whimpering and stumbled away, ignoring the shouts of the driver, nursing his broken fingers and blinded by pain – by sheer animal instinct he headed for the one refuge he had known for some time now.
Malise, wiping his mouth and aware that he was covered in blood and guts and shit, sidled out of the alley and along the fringes of the howling maelstrom that was now Ironmonger Lane; somewhere in there, he thought to himself with a grim, hot glow of malevolent satisfaction, was Kirkpatrick – another second and I would have had him, liver and lights.
Reminded of his lost dagger, he instinctively looked down and round for it – then caught sight of a familiar figure.
Lamprecht, hands tucked under each armpit. Headed for Old Jewry, Malise thought. The little shit, putting him to all this trouble.
Kirkpatrick was still on Lamprecht’s trail. He had not drowned in the writhing, sodden spill of animal entrails, but fought out from it with his dagger still in his fist, surfacing like a breaching whale into the rat-eyed stare of a thief stuffing offal in his jerkin before darting off.
Kirkpatrick hid the dagger, skated his way across the slip-sliding cobbles between the struggling, bellowing fighters. He ducked a swung fist, half-skidded on the slimed cobbles past a shrieking harridan and was out of the struggle, moving swiftly along the side of buildings, then up an alley in the wake of the hurrying Malise. Old Jewry, he thought. They are headed for Old Jewry.
Old Jewry was a sinister place, abandoned a decade before when Longshanks had expelled the Hebrews from England, immediately plundered and now left to the rats and the rain and the wind. Houses, boarded up when their owners fled, had been ripped open like treasure kists, though they found precious little of worth left from a people too used to fleeing in a hurry with all that was worth taking.
A few folk had moved in, the desperate poor who preferred to shiver from fear of what heathen devilry still lurked in the shells of Jew houses than from the cold and wet of no shelter at all.
At the end closest to the lane, where the houses huddled round St Olave’s like children round a mother’s skirts, a few Lombard goldsmiths had moved in. They were the unlucky spill of Longshanks’ generous invite, who came too late to reap the benefits of the fine houses along the Street of Lombards and were now trying to raise the status of Old Jewry by donating generously to St Olave’s.
The old church had been there forever, Kirkpatrick knew, a refuge for Norwegians who came to the City – he knew this because the Bruce’s relations used it. He frowned, for the tall ragstoned edifice was where Malise was headed, sure as a night ship to a beacon.
Old Jewry in daylight was bad enough, Kirkpatrick thought as he crabbed up the overgrown street, with the gaping doorways leering at him and the half-splintered window shutters seeming to glare balefully, like injured eyes. At night, it would be a place of horrors, real and imagined, and he was glad to reach the sanctuary of St Olave’s, sliding through the open doorway into the dim and cool illusion of safety, all balm to his sweating fear.
Voices. He paused, feeling the sweat slide down his back, but he forced himself to speak when he saw the owners of the voices – a priest in black habit and scapular, tall, gaunt and angular, arguing with a white-haired, red-faced man in paint-stained tunic and hose which an apron, as riotously daubed as Joseph’s Coat, had failed to protect.
‘Ho,’ Kirkpatrick hoarsed out and both men whirled, startled.
‘Is this some alehouse?’ The red-faced man thundered, staring accusingly at Kirkpatrick, ‘where folk can rush in and out as they please?’
‘There is a riot in Ironmonger Lane,’ the priest said gently, adding woefully, ‘again.’
‘Have folk come in here?’ Kirkpatrick demanded in a rasp even he did not like. ‘A scuttling little man followed by another, black and spider-like?’