Fire Catcher Read Free Page B

Charlie.
    ‘They might be there still,’ said the card maker. ‘If the man wants his money’s worth.’
    Charlie nodded his thanks and made to leave.
    ‘He paid enough,’ the card maker called after him, ‘to keep her all week.’
    But Charlie didn’t hear. He was already heading back down the stairs.

Chapter 2
    Fetter Lane was an oppressive jumble of chaotic wooden buildings. Charlie knew it well. There were three possible buildings where the girl might be. His attention fastened on a flame deep behind a dirty window. The steady amber of a fine wax candle. The kind a wealthy man might buy.
    The window was too grimed to see through. Charlie moved to the badly built wood wall and fixed his eye to a gap between the boards. His heart missed a beat. There she was. Red silk. The girl was undressing. Charlie watched transfixed as the red silk moved lower and lower, revealing two buds of white breast against the sun-browned collarbones.
    A stray calf barged Charlie, knocking his eye from the crack in the wooden wall. For a moment he was back in the oppressive filth of Fetter Lane. The calf stumbled away, re-joining its herd on their switch-driven journey to Smithfield Market. He refastened his eye to the crack in the wall.
    The girl had paused to take a deep drink from a cup of wine, making a smiling toast to someone out of Charlie’s eye line. Then she resumed her sashaying undress.
    Suddenly her gaze locked with his. Charlie stared back, unable to break the contact. Then she stepped across the room suddenly and out of sight. Charlie tried to swallow but his mouth was dry. He strained to see further into the darkness. She was sitting astride something. A chair or a lap. On her naked back was a crescent scar. It dipped in and out of view like a livid crimson moon rising and falling.
    An unusual movement drew Charlie’s attention to the girl’s hand. It was dancing over the man’s fingers in a familiar technique. So she was a jewellery thief. A good one. Charlie watched as she extricated a ruby ring from the unwitting wearer. Then the girl’s hand came out with a deliberate carelessness, knocking over one candlestick and then another. Charlie shook himself back to reality as the flames danced against the dry wood of the house. He looked right and left along the tiny street, and then back in at the little scene, where the candles smouldered threateningly and then leapt into life.
    ‘Fire!’ A shout came hoarsely from inside the house. There was a hammering on the inside wall. ‘Fire!’
    In the alleyway the people froze in their morning business. Laundry women, hod carriers and pie men stood wide-eyed in panic. Charlie looked back to the crack in the wall. The girl had seized her opportunity to pickpocket a weighty purse and in a little jump she ran from the room, grabbing a silver candlestick as she fled.
    A man stumbled into view, his fashionable breeches and shirt undone, face slack with confusion as the flames crackled around him. An expensive wig was perched atop his greying hair.
    Beside Charlie a door banged and the girl tripped past light as a bird, with one hand holding her shift over her breasts. The other clutched her dress, and the stolen goods, to her body.
    The girl turned a quick glance behind her and then halted suddenly. She was staring at him open-mouthed. For a brief moment Charlie was taken aback. His soulful brown eyes and fair hair appealed to certain women. Particularly in the context of candlelight and strong drink. But the kinked nose and scarred upper lip lent a bandit quality. And Charlie’s frame, whilst passably tall and muscular, was of a wiry configuration best suited to running and street-fighting. He was nowhere near handsome enough to stop a woman in her tracks.
    Then he realised. The girl wasn’t staring at his face. Her attention was fixed on the key he wore around his neck.
    Her expression was of pure terror. Slowly her lips mouthed two words.
    ‘ The Brotherhood .’

Chapter