In the middle of a London back alley, between a tavern and a shop, on the way to nowhere in particular unless you counted a small, boring square, Mircea stopped. The alley was damp as it had been raining all day, and unseasonably cold, just a lot of mud and mildewed brick and horse droppings, so I didn’t see the attraction. But I guessed there was one, because he’d paused suddenly, although not as a human does.
There was no tilting of the head to catch a faint sound, or wrinkling of the nose at an unknown scent. There wasn’t even the sudden stillness of an animal, tensing at the barest hint of danger. Instead, it was a purely vampiric pause, a predator’s innate sense that what he sought was nearby, and abruptly reminded me of who I was dealing with.
It also made me unhappy, because I sensed nothing at all.
There was a rat, snuffling some cabbage leaves, a dove cooing from somewhere overhead, and a bit of wind ruffling my hair from the bustling street behind us. I expanded my senses some more, and heard a couple of men arguing in the tavern over a wench and then a fist hitting flesh; a bunch of hawkers crying out advertisements for their wares; horses whinnying and clip clopping by; and above it all, the constant rush of falling water and the cries of the boatmen who plied the river. Because we were only a short distance away from the famous London Bridge.
It was the pride of the city, being the longest inhabited bridge in the world, and spanned nearly a thousand feet, with nineteen arches built on a bunch of boat-shaped berms known as starlings. They were raised bits of ground and rubble into which the pilings that supported the arches had been driven, and they took up a lot of space in the river, restricting the flow and creating dangerous rapids as the current forced its way through. All of that falling water was deafening, and it didn’t help that the bridge was the only way over the Thames into London unless you wanted to take a ferry, so there was a constant stream of traffic.
Merchants, actors, milkmaids and minstrels rubbed shoulders with sailors, blacksmiths, tourists and wide-eyed farmers from the sticks. Magicians, jugglers, beggars and con men vied for the attention of artisans of all types, as well as bejeweled ladies and gentlemen. There were doctors returning from seeing patients in the countryside, overly important types from some village about to get their pride pricked, adventurers, workmen, hawkers, and people on the queen’s business, riding horses through a lane barely twelve feet wide at some points and carelessly trampling anybody who got in their way.
It was barely controlled chaos, and dulled the senses even at this distance. But all of that wasn’t the problem. Nor were the customers, eager to peruse the high-end luxury goods available on the bridge, which groaned under the weight of the shops and houses that lined it on either side.
No, the problem at this time of day were the revelers.
Southwark, the area across the bridge, was outside of the direct control of the strait-laced city fathers, and had therefore become the main pleasure district for the city. Bear-baiting and bull-baiting rings were everywhere, dog fights and cockfights were plentiful, comedy shows, bowling alleys, gambling dens and brothels abounded, and taverns and inns choked the streets. The Rose Theater had even opened up to show plays in more comfort than the usual method of crowding into an inn’s courtyard, and I’d heard that other such theaters were planned.
As a result, all day people had been heading out to the amusements to be found at Southwark, and they would soon be returning, swarming the bridge like a human tidal wave and swamping anyone who got in their way. I wanted to be gone before that. And before they filled the streets around here with a drunken, boisterous mob, easy pickings for the host of cut-purses, con-men and thieves waiting for the tide to break.
That sort of thing wouldn’t normally have bothered me, as I could fight off a thief. But chaos gave opportunities to other people, and today, I had a feeling I couldn’t shake. And it was getting stronger.
It was one I knew all too well, from sometimes being stalked by the very thing that I was hunting. I didn’t just take commissions on revenants, although they were my bread and butter. I went after anything that paid enough, from out-of-control Weres attacking villages, to regular vamps who’d broken the law but weren’t important enough for the Senate to worry about, to dark magic workers doing God knew what.
And some of them tried to hunt me right back.
That was especially true of the magic users, which was why I doubled my fee when dealing with a witch or wizard. And because bought magic, no matter how good it was, didn’t always compensate for not having your own. As had been proven last night, when I’d had my arse handed to me by a damned witch.
One who probably wanted her ring back.
So, I’d been glancing over my shoulder all day, with my eyes flicking here and there, and seeing exactly nothing. Except for the dark tunnel of wood that the bridge had turned into, because people kept building their houses higher and higher. And needed to buttress them to keep the sometimes six story tall edifices from toppling into the drink.
The result had been wooden extensions and passageways from the houses on one side of the bridge to those on the other, which had become so numerous as to form a sort of roof over most of the path. It cut down on the sunlight, deepened the shadows, and made just so many good places for an ambush. If I was stalking someone, that was where I’d be, and I was very good at my job.
I hadn’t even wanted to go over the damned thing, but we couldn’t portal directly into the city. The Circle had declared both it and their other main base of operations at Stratford to be off limits for magical short cuts, and disobedience would bring a bunch of angry war mages down on our heads in seconds. Mircea could have probably talked his way out of that—he was on Senate business, after all, and even the mages didn’t like to tussle with those ancient bastards. But he would have been expected to explain why we were here.
And he had most definitely not wanted to do that.
Because the Circle weren’t the only magic workers in England and we were going to see the other group.
Or we were, if Mircea ever finished poking at a blank wall, as if searching for something. Which I guessed he found, since he stepped through the bricks a second later, gone between one eye blink and another. And when I tried to follow, I hit only hard stone, scraping my hands and cursing.
I cursed again as I started smacking my palms down everywhere, trying to find the hidden entrance. We had a witch on our tail, I knew we did, and the fact that we were going to see more witches didn’t change that. Who knew which ones had grabbed him?
And if I lost him, I didn’t get paid!
But then a hand emerged out of solid stone and—
God’s Bones!
I didn’t even have a chance to put up a fight before I was dragged through a door I couldn’t see and ended up sprawled on a dirty wooden floor. I looked up, a knife in my hand and a snarl on my lips, and saw a small group of people looking at me quizzically. One of whom was the vamp, who sighed.
The others were a woman behind a rough wooden counter and three people who looked to be her customers. Because this was a shop, wasn’t it? An herbalist’s shop, I realized, as a bevy of strong smells hit my nose.
I glanced around, still looking for a threat. But all I saw were dried bunches of flowers and plants hanging from the rafters, fresh greenery spilling out of baskets on tables, and various concoctions in clay pots behind the counter on rows of shelves. And Mircea, looking at me impatiently.
“Dory,” he murmured, making me frown. He had a bad habit of using my first name, and the diminutive form of it, too. It was annoying, but it wasn’t like I could correct him.
It was the only one I had.
I got up carefully, my eyes double checking things on the way. If the door had been concealed, what else might be? Or who.
Damn it, I could feel her!
The vampire shot me a warning look, and I smiled at the other patrons and shook out my skirts.
The sailor’s trousers that I regularly wore for freedom of movement had had to be left behind in Lancashire. In the port towns I typically worked out of, the trousers along with a with a thick leather jerkin, boots and a cap to conceal my hair let me pass as a boy. And anytime it didn’t, people quickly discovered how bad it was to assume that I was prey.
Likewise, in the English countryside, nobody had seemed to notice me much. Or perhaps they just didn’t want to get into it with a wild looking woman surrounded by a few dozen huge, well-armed men. Either way, I hadn’t had a problem.
But London was different. And I hadn’t wanted to end up like Dorothy Clayton, a prostitute who had taken to wearing men’s clothes several decades back, and ended up in prison for her trouble. I had therefore exchanged my leathers for a gray-blue, linsey-woolsey dress that I’d bought off one of the innkeeper’s daughters.
I fully intended to add it to my fee, since I was never wearing this damned thing again. It was lumpy, constricting and slightly too long, and kept tripping me up. I decided to blame my undignified sprawl on the dress, and the fact that the floorboards were slightly wonky, like everything else in here.
Including the proprietress’s face, which appeared to drag slightly on one side. She was a pretty young woman otherwise, with big brown eyes and a few wisps of matching hair escaping from under her cap, but half of her face simply didn’t move. She gave her customer a lopsided smile and handed her a small package.
“Now, that’s yer red sage and pennyroyal. Add it to salt and water to make a brine and have himself soak his feet in it every morning. After that, he needs to walk on the foot a bit, to help with the blood flow—”
“He won’t like that,” the other woman said. “Says it hurts to put weight on it.”
“Well, ‘o course it hurts! He has gout, don’t he? But if he wants to get strong again, that’s the price. And your price is thruppence.”
“A bargain, if it helps him,” the woman said, handing it over. And then leaned in slightly. “And even if it doesn’t. I needed to get out of that house!”
She and the shop girl shared a laugh, and the woman left, sparing me a curious glance as she did so.
There were several more people in line ahead of us, and the vampire politely waited his turn. That was unusual enough to cause them to look back at him more than once, and not because of the fangs they couldn’t see. But because of his clothes.
He was in dark blue today, with fine linen at his throat and wrists and silk stockings on his legs—the latter an almost unheard-of luxury. Even the queen, it was said, was constantly running out, despite the fact that they had been invented by her own silkwoman, Mistress Alice Montague. But once she’d tried them, she’d sworn that she would never use anything else.
Mircea wore them casually, as if they were the coarsest wool, although his own wool was some of the best I’d ever seen, with a sheen to it that was almost as lustrous as silk itself. Probably a product of Italy, where a lot of the wool that grew on the backs of British sheep ended up to be finished. Although there was nothing ostentatious about his clothes today, none of the frills or expensive touches that made a haberdasher’s eyes light up, but everything was of the finest possible quality.
Which was why the old gaffer in front of him, with the stained slops and sagging, woolen hose, kept trying to give way to him.
But Mircea reassured him with a murmured word and the man turned around again. But he and the woman in front of him looked tense. Fine gentlemen made them nervous, and there were few finer.
I left them to their shopping and glanced around, still looking for tell-tale signs of trouble. There was a curtain behind the counter I didn’t like, which made it impossible to see into the back room. Judging by the smells drifting out, that was where the tinctures, teas and possibly potions were made up, although the only thing witchy about this place so far was its concealment.
Otherwise, it could have been any herbalist shop in London.
There were piles of greenish brown willow bark, still fresh and juicy, on a nearby table, along with off-white, oddly shaped mandrake roots, some with the dirt they’d grown in still clinging to them, both of which were used for pain. They were stored in reed baskets, where you could take as much or as little as you liked. But bright green rosemary, for digestion, and purple lavender, for insomnia, were in large bunches, as they were also strewing herbs, bought in quantity by housewives to scatter among the floor rushes for insect control and to add nice smells to a home.
The brilliant yellow flowers of elecampane, for respiratory problems, and soft green sage leaves for sore throats were mixed in a hamper, as if they’d just been brought in and hadn’t been sorted yet. Pale purple fumitory, on the other hand, which treated nausea and vomiting, and blue bugloss flowers, good for inflammation of the eyes, had been laid out on reed mats as if to start the drying process. Or as if brought in quickly from some outside area before it started raining.
I knew them all, because the same sort of remedies were distributed in Italy by the same sort of women; at least, they had been. The Catholic Church was cracking down on that, seeing the so-called “wise women” who dealt in herbal medicine as witches, or so they claimed before burning them at the stake. In reality, they were competition for the church’s universities, where medicine was taught and then dispensed by church-trained men.
But not everyone could afford such expensive care. The lofty, university-educated physicians who crowded into London charged ten shillings for a consult, which was two weeks wages for a carpenter. Common laborers made even less, and most of that went for food, considering the prices these days. That forced many people into the arms of the charlatans and half-educated types who preyed on the poor—physicians with no credentials, rogue apothecaries, astrologers and bone-setters. And, if you were lucky, wise women who might actually help you.
The latter operated illegally, as women could not obtain the education required to be licensed, unless it was in the one field where women had always predominated.
I moved on to a separate section of herbs.
Midwives attended most births except for royal ones, which were considered too high status. Not surprisingly, royal births had many more complications than normal, as the male physicians were less practiced. It was said that Queen Jane Grey, one of Henry VIII’s wives, died from an infection caused by afterbirth that did not expel itself and was not removed for her, as any good midwife would have done.
But even with experienced midwives, childbirth killed more women than anything else, and took them from all social classes. Men fought their wars on the battlefield, it was said; women in the birthing bed, and many did not survive the struggle. Others did, but were never the same again.
Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VIII’s grandmother, was married at eleven and gave birth at age thirteen. She was small and frail, and suffered a long, excruciating delivery and a prolapsed womb. She never had another child, setting up the Tudor problems with fertility that persisted to this day.
Yet she was one of the lucky ones. Women commonly made out their wills as soon as they discovered that they were with child, knowing the odds against them. Which explained the next group of herbs.
They weren’t delineated in any way from the others, not even here, in a hidden enclave. There were no signs saying what they did, or instructions on how to use them. That information was illegal and was given in whispers, to be carried out in secret.
Rue or herb-of-grace, with its blueish leaves and yellow flowers; hellebore with its small, white blossoms; lovely, sturdy calamint, in profusions of white, red, pink or purple; and a host of others: mugwort, stinking gladdon, southernwood, pennyroyal . . . they were all here, and they all did the same thing, if you knew how to use them.
“Juice of rue drunk with wine,” a soft voice said, apropos of nothing.
I looked up to see another shop assistant, a light blonde with eyes so pale that they were almost white. She was making a show of rearranging flowers that did not need to be rearranged. She did not look at me.
“Or leaves of calamint crushed small in a mortar and given in a pessary. Or birthwort drunk with wine, pepper and myrrh. Or Savin boiled in wine. All have the same effect.” She glanced at me. “You understand?”
I stared back for a moment, caught off guard. And then nodded. She moved away.
I stood there after she left, my fist clenched around some petals, smelling the sickly-sweet odor they gave off and yet unable to let go. A feeling I couldn’t quite identify had swept through me, causing my hand to spasm. It felt like anger, although not at her.
Women and men were treated very differently when it came to intimate matters in England, as they were anywhere else. Brothels were technically illegal, but men visited them all the time, along with the many taverns spread throughout the city that often served the same purpose. And while the punters were occasionally fined, the prostitutes were paraded through the streets, taken down to the river, stripped naked, and beaten before the public.
Men could be punished as well if the “crime” was particularly egregious, like in the case of Dr. Christopher Langton, a Cambridge educated physician, who had been caught in bed with two women at once. He had been paraded through the streets of London in his finest clothes, with someone running ahead of the cart to cry out his sins to the masses. He wasn’t physically harmed, however; the humiliation was considered punishment enough.
Others were not so lucky, being dragged behind the cart and beaten until the blood flowed and the gouges left by the unrelenting leather were as deep as a finger. But it was often difficult to prove that a man was at fault, unless he was found in flagrante delicto like Dr. Langton. Otherwise, it was his word against the woman’s, and the woman often lost. Men frequently carried on affairs, then, while adulterous wives were forced onto “cucking stools” and dunked repeatedly into a body of water, to “cool their immoderate heat.”
And, of course, women were the only ones who could have a child, the unmistakable sign of their supposed moral failing. Unwed mothers were considered “ruined women” and they, along with their bastards, were ostracized. No one would consider them fit for marriage, and with few well-paying jobs available to them, they were often doomed to lives of poverty and humiliation.
And that was assuming that the church courts didn’t hear of it.
The arbiters of moral purity, the courts run by the church worked in tandem with the civil authorities to keep the populace in line. And they were happy to hand down charges of fornication, including to women who had been violently raped. Bridewell Hospital in London, which was less a hospital than a prison, had many women with such stories, who were kept in filthy conditions with food not fit for dogs, while the men who had fathered their babies went free.
There was no equality in sex, any more than there was between the sexes.
But while my anger for the treatment of women was justified, there was more to it than that. I turned away from the herbs used to end dangerous, unwanted pregnancies and blinked back tears. Which was stupid!
I’d known for a while that I couldn’t have children. No dhampir could. And that was a good thing.
What kind of life could someone like me give a child? I could barely take care of myself! What was I supposed to do, drag him or her along with me, sleeping under bridges or inside convenient barns, in between monster hunts?
Even when I had money, which was seldom considering how much the tools of my trade cost me, life wasn’t easy. The people that I sometimes glimpsed in fine houses or in humble peasant dwellings, sitting around a table, talking, laughing, and jesting to each other in terms that would have made no sense to outsiders . . . were more alien to me than the creatures I hunted. And what they had, and seemingly took for granted, was as unobtainable to me as the moon.
Dhampirs were dangerous outlaws doomed to an early death. If one of our berserker rages didn’t kill us, or our prey fell us, or the vampires who tolerated us cease doing so, it wouldn’t matter. We had no families.
No vampire clan would claim us, no human group would trust us. I had never met a dhampir who even knew who his family was. We were usually abandoned immediately, and left to fend for self, as I had been—
The headache that always accompanied attempts to recall my past predictably tore through my skull, like a lightning bolt straight to the brain, causing me to raise the hand with the crushed flowers to my forehead, smearing them across my skin. And then to throw them down, stripping the delicate petals and their juices off my fingers, the familiar tide of anger swamping me. My family had even removed their memories from me, or blocked them off to the extent that my past was fractured, broken, mostly missing—and painful.
Like shards of glass.
I supposed that was one way to make sure that I never came back.
And yet I wanted a child? Me, who had less knowledge of what family meant than anyone? It was laughable.
And why did I really want one? For the sake of the child, or for myself? For someone who was mine, for the family I’d never had and never would, for a sop to the loneliness that was a dhampir’s constant, and usually only, companion?
I thought I knew the answer, and it was not a good reflection on me.
Fortunately, the whole thing was absurd. And my current state was a blessing. I was glad I had been made the way that I was.
I was glad.