A Burnable Book. Bruce Holsinger

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       TWELVE

       Cutter Lane, Southwark

      The knife landed in muscle with a wet spit. A second blade quickly followed, nearly touching the first. The carcass swayed, and Gerald Rykener clapped his hands roughly on his tunic. ‘Have that, Tom.’

      The other apprentice stepped up to the line, a blade pressed between his fingers. His wrist bent, his arm rose, and with a flash of metal the knife was buried in the flank just inches from Gerald’s. The second landed a half foot higher on the beef, missing its target. ‘Damn it to queynting hell,’ he said, then with a scowl handed Gerald a coin.

      Eleanor watched her brother pocket it, and for a moment the simple joy of victory on his face turned him back into the sweet boy she remembered. Then Gerald saw her.

      ‘Ah, by St George. Swerving again,’ he muttered to his companion, his contempt for her undisguised.

      The other apprentice looked over to where she stood by the fence. ‘What do you think, Gerald? Your brother a mare or a gelding?’

      ‘A mare with a cock?’ Gerald taunted. ‘A gelding with a queynt?’

      ‘Either way she-he’s got enough riders to keep him-her filled with oats ’n’ mash till the trumpet sounds, from what I hear.’

      ‘Aye that,’ said Gerald, ignoring her as his fellow turned for the barn. Gerald wiped a long crimson smear across his cheek, then from beneath the carcass removed a bucket of blood. He took it to a heated cauldron at the far end of the yard. Gerald was fourteen, yet already moved with a tradesman’s confidence that would have been endearing if he hadn’t turned so foul. His apron was cut small in the style of the craft. We butchers pride ourselves on leaving our aprons white, he’d explained in those days when he cared. Now it was stained a brownish red, his loose breeches slimed with gore.

      When he returned to the fence she saw the latest bruises had faded. His lip, too, had mostly healed. He was close so she went for his neck, the line of faded scar tissue running from his jaw to his nape. He knocked her hand back but she reached for his head and felt a new knot. Size of a peach pit. ‘What’s that about?’

      He ducked away. ‘He swings the mallet around, you know, got those teeth on it. It’s wood, though, so. But Grimes’d never hit me with the metal one. Not ever.’

      ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘And when he does you’ll be dead as that beef side hanging behind you.’ Why Gerald took his master’s part so often she couldn’t reckon, though Nathan Grimes had been his effective father for going on three years, and children could develop peculiar loyalties.

      He looked at her purse. She handed him the coins she’d come to deliver. ‘It’s hardly much. A shilling and five. Keep it somewhere, use it only in your most needful moments. Not for candied gingers on the bridge, now.’ She half-turned to go, but something in his eyes held her back. ‘What is it?’ Trying to sound impatient: she needed to be tough with him, tough as he was with her, or he’d never make it to his majority. ‘What is it, Gerald?’

      He snarled and spat in the filthy straw. ‘No matter. Go away, Edgar.’

      As her brother returned to his work Eleanor watched him sadly, marvelling at how much the boy had changed. They had been separated since their mother’s death, when Gerald was seven, Eleanor thirteen and starting to discover her second life. A man in body, but in soul a man and a woman both, a predicament that made her wardship a domestic hell: a wife who tormented her with the hardest household labour, a husband who wouldn’t leave her alone once he found out what she was. She had taken to the streets at sixteen. Gerald, though, had seemed to be getting by, floating СКАЧАТЬ