A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger

Edgar, also thinking there was more going on here than Bess Waller would reveal. He gave the bawd a meaningful look. “You tell Agnes her Edgar come by, though.”
    “Sure sure,” said Bess. “Though could be Easter, could be All Souls all I know. But I’ll tell her you were by. You give Joanie a Jesu palm on the arse from her Bess, hear?”
    Edgar turned and walked down Rose Alley to the bankside. There he paused and looked back at the Pricking Bishop. Bess Waller’s arms were in the air, her face beet-red as she let St. Cath have it, for what he didn’t know.
    On the bridge he purchased a farthingloaf and pinched off pieces of coarse bread, washing them down with some warmed beer. As he crossed the Thames he thought of the peculiar twinge of suspicion he’d felt on first telling St. Cath why he was there. What was it about the old woman’s words that had unsettled him?
    Millicent .
    Bess Waller’s older daughter, Millicent Fonteyn, lived in a decent house along Cornhull, had some money and wanted more. She’d had nothing to do with her mother or her sister for a long time. While Agnes had only recently left her mother’s stewhouse for the streets of London, Millicent Fonteyn was no more than a distant memory on Rose Alley. Yet the moment Edgar had asked St. Cath whether Bess Waller’s daughter was about, the old woman had responded swift as you please.
    Millicent? Hunting Millicent Fonteyn in the stews?
    Which meant what? Which meant St. Cath, flustered at Edgar’s prodding, was covering for Agnes. He nodded, sure of it now. Agnes has been at the Pricking Bishop, he thought; may be there still, the little tart. And who, he wondered for the hundredth time, was that poor dead girl on the moor?

Chapter ix
    Westminster
    T wo appointments set for that morning, the first with the wife of a disgruntled notary to the king’s secretary with a copy of a royal writ to sell. We met in an alley above the stone wharf. She had brought a maidservant along for appearance’s sake, and perhaps to impress me. As the servant dawdled at the end of the alley she sidled up close, wanting to flirt. She was an attractive woman, with soft curls peeking from beneath a loosened bonnet, full lips, cheeks pinched a bright pink, and I felt an unfamiliar stir that I promptly pushed aside.
    “The writ?” I finally said, taking a small step back.
    “Here, sir,” she said, offering it to me. The original, or so her husband claimed, had been sent under the king’s own signet, a sign of Richard’s increasing tendency to bypass set procedures in the administration of the realm. I read the hurried copy carefully, scanning for that useful detail. The king to Sir Richard de Brompton, greeting. I command you to do full right without delay . . . A knight of Shropshire, a mercer of Shrewsbury, and a debt of nearly two hundred pounds. Yet I knew Brompton, a notorious debtor I’d had occasion to pluck a few years before. This was nothing new.
    I shook my head. “Sorry.”
    She looked at me, a promise in her moist eyes. “Not even a shilling, Master Gower?”
    I suppressed a shudder. “Nor a farthing, I’m afraid. But do tell your husband to be on the lookout for this sort of thing. You never can tell what might rise to the top. He knows how to reach me.”
    She mumbled something, tightened her bonnet, then slunk off toward the palace with her maidservant. I followed them at a discreet distance and watched as they merged into the crowd around the south doors.
    In the great hall I looked about for Ralph Strode, my second appointment in Westminster that morning, but when I reached our meeting place before Common Pleas at the north end a sudden silence swept the chamber. King Richard, in from Eltham Palace for the day, showing himself off. I went to my knee like every other man in the massive space, watching as the king came to the center of the hall, paused with a practiced deliberation, then gestured for all to rise and go about their