How fear would brighten my eyes, I could not say. I doubted she could, either, really. I closed my fist around the money and took a step back. “I like my eyes just the way they are, thank you very much.”
The girl shrugged. The bloom on her cheeks had faded. Sighing, she hunkered down into her scarf and fled the market, her well-worn boots splashing in the puddles between cobbles.
“She won’t soon forget ye, and that’s a fact.”
The old woman’s voice, thin as a reed, didn’t have the intended effect. I had seen her lurking, after all, and expected her to pounce sooner or later. I turned slowly at the waist, watching the crone emerge from the soaked overhanging of a market stall. Fewer than a dozen yellow teeth and pale gums flashed at me, a pauper’s smile. Her hair sprang out from under her tattered bonnet in dry bunches, as if it had been lightly scorched over a fire.
Still, there was the skeleton of beauty behind the sagging flesh, an echo of wild loveliness that time or misfortune had tried to quiet. A complexion as dark as hers meant a laborer’s life in the sun or else a foreign heritage. Whatever her birth, I doubted it was anywhere near North Yorkshire.
“Do you make a habit of following little girls?” I asked primly. My true accent vanished. I hoped my arch schoolroom voice sounded half as severe as those of the teachers who had forced it upon me.
“Thought you might need assistance,” she said, lowering her head down and to the side. “A little cheer on this dreary day.”
I might have known she would reach for my hand and the money in it; thieves were as common as merchants on market days. My hand snapped back and behind my skirts, to obscure the coin in the dampening fabric.
The crone sniggered at me and drew closer, staring up at me with one good eye. The other swam with milky rheum. Her clothes, such as they were, reeked of wood smoke. “I’ve no interest in robbing you.”
“Leave me be,” I muttered, eager to be rid of this nuisance. When I turned, her bony hand flashed so quickly toward me it seemed a trick of the eye. Her grip on my wrist was crushing as a blacksmith’s.
“Would it not be better if that paltry sum was more? Not coin enough for scraps and a flea-ridden bed but a real day’s earnings . . .” With that same unnaturally strong grip, she wrenched open my fingers and placed her hand over mine. The space between our palms grew suddenly hot, a lick of fire passing between us, and when she took her hand away it was not pennies but gold in my grasp.
How was it possible?
I sucked in a gasp of surprise, then remembered myself and remembered her, too. If she led a life on the road telling fortunes, then I should not be shocked at her penchant for sleight of hand. No doubt the coin had been hiding up her sleeve, ready for just such a dazzling purpose.
“You must want something from me,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Else you would not be so generous to a stranger.”
“Just a gift,” she said with a shrug, already wandering away. Such moments of luck never sat right with me—surely such riches came with a price. “Keep warm, girl,” the crone added as she hobbled away. “And keep safe.”
I watched her disappear behind a cheerfully painted fish stand, the tattered ends of her coat trailing behind her like a shroud. There was no reason to wait longer. If this fool of a woman was so interested in being parted from her money, then I would not refuse her the pleasure. At once, I ran with the hint of a merry skip to the shop window I had passed on my way into the town. Meat pies. The smell was intoxicating, dampened not a jot by the drizzling rain. Lamb, fish, liver, veal . . . With the coin in my fist, I could afford one of each and be spared the pain of choosing. It would be a feast the likes of which I had not tasted in, well . . . In truth, I had never been faced with such overabundance.
The man tending the shop window pulled up the rain shade as I approached, leaning out and stacking his immense forearms like ham hocks on the sill. Ham. Yes, I’d have one of those as well. Beady blue eyes regarded me from under a cap. His must have been a profitable trade, for his clothes were new and not mended.
“One of each, please,” I said, unable to keep the smile out of my voice.
Those eyes staring down at me shifted to the side. Then they slid over my face, my bedraggled hair and muddied frock. His fingers drummed on the sill.
“Beg your pardon, my girl?”
“One of each,” I repeated, more insistent.
“’Tis five pence a pie.”
“I can well read the sign, sir. One of each.”
He simply grumbled in response and turned away, returning a moment later to face me and my growling stomach, handing across six kidney-shaped pies in piping-hot paper. They were released to me slowly, as if he were allowing me plenty of time to rethink my recklessness and run.
But I received the first pie and then the next, handing over the gold and feeling very satisfied with myself indeed.
The satisfaction did not last. The instant he set eyes on the gold, his demeanor changed from one of reluctant cooperation to rage. He snatched up the coin and kept behind the rest of my food, knocking most of it off the windowsill and back into the shop.
“What’s this? Don’t think a drowned rat like you would be flashing around this kind of money. Where did you get it?” he shouted, turning the gold this way and that, trying to determine its authenticity.
“I earned it,” I shot back. “Give that back! You have no right to keep it!”
“Where’d you get it?” He held it just above my reach, and like an idiot I tried to scramble for it, looking every bit the desperate urchin.
“Give it back! You can keep your bloody pies! I don’t want them anymore!”
“Thief!” he thundered. From inside the shop, he produced a silver bell as big as his fist and began ringing it, screaming at me above the clanging din. “Ho, men, we have a thief here! Look lively!”
I ran, dropping pies and abandoning the gold. The bell rang hard in my ears as I pelted through the market square, feet splashing in puddles, skirts growing muddier and heavier by the second as I tried to vanish into the dissipating crowd. But all eyes turned to me. There was no escaping the mob I could sense forming in my wake, the ones who would come for me and throw me in the local jail or worse.
Up ahead, the buildings cut away to the left, and an alleyway sliced a narrow route toward the outskirts of the village. I had time, but only a little, and this might be my only chance for escape. It might also lead me toward more men who had heard the cry of “Thief!” but I dashed off a hope for the best and slid on mud-slicked feet into the alley.
I collided with a brick wall and paused, catching my breath, screaming when a hand closed around my shoulder and yanked.