sending him tumbling down the stairs. For this Julian must negotiate a peace and restitution. One of the girls is sick in the night, vomiting violently in the middle of working, and the Baroness herself must haggle for a reduced fee instead of a refund. The night refuses to end.
It’s after five in the morning when the business of the house finally dies down, the patrons leave, the Baroness goes to bed, and an exhausted Julian locks up and returns to his room. It’s dark blue outside. Dawn is near. After taking off his jacket and puffy shirt, he gets the quill and dips it in ink. How many dots? Six columns of seven plus one; 43 dots in all. His forearm burns as the quill pierces the skin. He wipes up the drop of blood and wonders how many days he’s missed, four, a week, more?
A voice from a corner says, “Julian.”
He drops the quill, nearly falls himself. He thought he was alone.
Mallory is crammed between the dormered wall and the side of the cupboard, huddled on the floor, her knees drawn up. How did he not see her?
“Don’t scare me like that,” Julian says. “What are you doing?” He scans the room. It looks as if his things have been gone through. The journal is not where he left it, the shirts have been refolded. “Why are you on the floor?”
“Shh,” she says.
“What’s the matter?”
She rocks back and forth.
“Is it about Margrave?”
She won’t say.
He perches on the bed. Seeing her distraught makes him distraught. Outside the sun is not up yet, the air is blue-gray with a tinge of amber. The east wind is strong. On this wind, Julian can smell burning wood. What fools build fires in this crazy hot weather?
“You have to help me,” she says in a low cold voice. “This is all your fault.”
What is she talking about?
“Marg robbed me,” Mallory says from the floor.
“Peanut, don’t get offended again, but what could she take from you?”
She doesn’t answer. “You have to silence Ilbert,” Mallory says at last. “Do you know anyone in this town who can do it? Or can you do it?” She says the last part as if she doesn’t expect Julian can silence a mosquito.
“What do you mean, silence him? Like tell him to shut his trap? I can do it.”
“Well, perhaps before you beg him politely to quiet down, you can ask him what he’s done with the lord’s body.”
So she knows. The Baroness tried to shield her from it, Julian didn’t want to tell her, but she’s found out anyway. There are no secrets in a brothel.
“Mal, I’m really sorry—”
She cuts him off. “I heard you tell the imp to take the body far from here, and instead, Ilbert threw it into a canal a few streets away, a canal with barely six inches of standing water. The body isn’t even submerged. It’s what some might call hiding evidence in plain sight.”
Julian pales. “How do you know this?”
“Ah, it’s a funny story. I know this,” Mallory says, “because Ilbert told me.”
“Why would Ilbert tell you that?”
“Oh, no, dear one. You misunderstand. He didn’t confess to me because he wanted to get it off his skeletal chest. He told me, you see, because he wanted me to pay him to keep quiet.”
“Pay him? Why would you pay him?”
Mallory doesn’t answer. “But I can’t pay him because Margrave has stolen my money.”
“What money? The money we’ve been earning for you on the side? I thought you always keep it on your person? Isn’t that what you told me? Keep your valuables on you?”
“That little game Ilbert was playing with the constable about the mortar and pestle,” Mallory continues, as if Julian hasn’t spoken, “that was just him letting me and the Baroness know that we’ll all hang unless he gets what he wants.”
“What does he want?”
“Half,” Mallory says.
Julian fumbles inside his waistcoat pocket for the purse with the guineas in it. “Half of what?” he asks dully.
“Don’t you get it? If Margrave didn’t rob me, then Ilbert must’ve robbed me, in which case, he’s just toying with us. Tormenting us before the slaughter. It wouldn’t surprise me about him, wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.”
She puts her face in her hands.
“Half of what?” Julian repeats in a whisper.
“Half a bag of fucking gold,” says Mallory.
Julian stops being mild or consoling. He gets off the bed, stands in front of her. He doesn’t speak because he can’t speak. He tries to put together his next thought, his next word. The sun drifts up over the gray slate rooftops of Whitehall. The wind is strong and dry. It still smells of burning wood. He crouches in front of her, sinks to the floor next to her. Their feet could touch, but they don’t.
“Lord Fabian hid it in the floorboards in Room Two,” Mallory says. “It’s not there anymore. I didn’t take it. You’re saying Margrave didn’t take it. So if it wasn’t Ilbert, who could’ve taken it, Julian?”
She doesn’t look at him as she speaks, doesn’t see the shock on his face. This can’t be. It simply can’t be. “Why would Fabian hide gold in the floorboards of a brothel?” Julian asks.
“It was ill-gotten gold,” Mallory says. “The lord was Master of the Royal Mint up in the Tower of London. Oh, you didn’t know that? Yes. That’s what he was. These days they use a machine press, but a hundred years ago they hammered the coin in dies. Two years ago, I found one of those hand-made coins on him as I was undressing him. That’s when he told me he was a lifelong coin collector. He said that a few years earlier, in the chaos after Cromwell fell from power, he swiped one of the discarded dies they used to cast the commemorative Elizabethan sovereigns. He said the die had been retired prematurely. It needed a little sharpening on the face side, a little etching. He said the coat of arms side was perfect. After he fixed the die, he started staying late and hammering his own coin. He told his boss, the Warden of the Mint, that he was working overtime on commemorative metal for our new king, Charles II. And he was. But he was also minting coin for himself, using the purloined die.”
His body slumping, Julian waits for the rest.
“It took him over six years to mint just 49 coins! He had to be so careful. He could make barely one every seven weeks, they were so labor-intensive in the hammering and softening. He told me when he got to fifty, he would stop. The risk of getting caught siphoning off drops of liquefied bullion was becoming too great. To make the coins accurately, he had to use drops from the rare 23-carat gold ingots, not the 22-carat they use today. A month or so ago, he got to 49. He needed only one more! And now they’re gone.”
Julian
