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FROM CHAPTER 1

The Flea on the Tail of the Dog

STAMFORD, ENGLAND

1481

Steam rose from the darkness of the Welland River, lonely wisps laboring toward clouds in the reddening sky. The river’s haze made Newt shudder, his thoughts drawn to his aunt’s Book of Hours and its images of damned souls streaming like mist to the gates of hell. Newt stood with his brother, John, on the deck of a single-masted barge, a boat narrow enough to traverse twenty-five miles of river to the Wash and then on to the port of Boston. Despite its narrow beam, the barge could store dozens of sacks of wool and hundreds of sheep fells on its deck, and whatever else its captain chose to hide in the boat’s aftercastle.

Newt shifted his weight from side to side to compensate for the roll of the boat. He had earned his ship’s legs during afternoons helping his father and brothers load wool onto barges. Newt was small compared to John, his oldest brother, but the boys shared the same brown hair and dimpled chins. It was Newt’s pale blue eyes that set him apart from his brother, eyes passed down to him from his mother’s father.

The whistles and caws of a starling drew Newt’s attention back to the river. Across the straits of the Welland a handful of boats lined the smaller wharf at Stamford Baron. The little wharf hummed with the activity of men loading barges much like the one leased by Newt’s father and rocking beneath Newt’s feet. Newt stood on the deck of the barge in an aisle formed between rows of woolsacks, each three hundred and fifty pounds of wool packed into a bag made of jute. On every woolsack, tied at its corners, was the mark of its owner, William Browne, the mark a heart with at its center the letter B beneath a cross.

John nudged Newt with his elbow. He gestured toward the gangway connecting the barge to the Stamford wharf. The boys had finished their Saturday morning labor. On a usual weekend, their father would release them to join their mates in football in the meadow west of the wharf or in a mock knights’ battle in the ruins of the Stamford castle. Newt and his brother could hear their father muttering in the boat’s aftercastle. They exchanged a look as the muttering turned to cursing. John was three years older than Newt and in Newt’s mind thirty years wiser. If John thought it expedient to depart without their father’s blessing, Newt accepted that verdict without question. The boys had just set foot on the gangplank to make their escape when they heard their father shouting for them.

“They’re late. John. Christopher. I need you now!”

Newt felt his stomach twist. His father, John Stoke the elder, called Newt by his Christian name only in the darkest of circumstances, the occasion sometimes followed by a whipping. Newt’s brother gave him a look of commiseration before sliding down a ladder into the boat’s aftercastle. Newt followed him, setting his feet squarely on the ladder’s rungs and gripping the rungs in his fists as he descended, thinking again of souls descending into hell.

“There were to be fells, Johnny,” Stoke said. “Two hundred more. They were to be loaded into the castle.”

“I saw them not.”

“Christopher?”

“I read the inventory, Fader,” Newt said. “One hundred twenty fells. And they’re all here.”

“No. These would not be on any inventory.”

Stoke began cursing again. He paced in the narrow aisle in the boat’s hold, the aisle formed between stacks of woolfells. Newt and John leaned into the fells as if by that act they might make themselves disappear.

“And did I not mention the new fells?”

“No, Fader.”

Stoke paused to suck in his breath. He had brown hair like his sons Newt and John. He was stocky like his oldest son, his chest a barrel and his arms like ropes from years of lifting woolsacks. Stoke’s face had turned a troubling shade of red. The pressure at times seemed to overwhelm him. He had wool to receive at the wool hall in Stamford, wool to ferry down the Welland River to Boston or Lynn, wool to escort past pirates in the North Sea to the staple in Calais, wool to weigh and tax and sell to merchants in Flanders. He had a wife to feed, two daughters and three sons. A household to maintain. A demanding employer who accepted no excuses for mistakes. On another day, Stoke might have met the delayed shipment of fells with more patience, but this boat was set to sail and Stoke’s own profit would suffer without the fells.

“I need your help,” Stoke said. He was calm again, the storm receding from his brow as quickly as the passing of a late spring squall. Both boys offered a silent prayer of thanks.

“Johnny, go to the wool hall and take Newt with you.”

John the younger grimaced.

“Trust me, Johnny, I’m in no mood for impudence. You’re to speak to Will Potter, and him alone. Find out why the two hundred fells have not arrived. But if Mr. Browne is there, just give him your greeting and don’t mention this. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Fader, but I thought Mr. Browne was in Calais.”

“He was, but his mayor’s duties in Calais waned enough for him to return home to Stamford for a time. No word of the fells to Mr. Browne. That goes for you, too, Newt.”

“Yes, Fader.”

Newt turned to follow his brother as he scampered up and out of the aftercastle as effortlessly as if walking on flat ground. Newt could never keep up with either of his brothers, and neither of them had the patience to let him try. Newt was small for his age, with little love or aptitude for the rough games played by his brothers and classmates. Newt might have been a target for bullies had not his older brothers, John and William, made it plain that anyone who troubled Newt would have to go through them. Newt’s oldest brother, John, had acted as Newt’s protector almost from the first weeks of Newt’s life. When Newt was a newborn, the family’s house had caught fire. Flames were licking at Newt’s wooden crib when four-year-old Johnny grabbed him and ran with him to safety. When Newt’s oldest sister later said she thought only a salamander could live in fire, John had said the baby looked more like a newt than a salamander. Since that day, Newt was rarely called Christopher.

“Wait,” Stoke called out. “Your mother would tan my hide. Newt, take this grocery record from Moder. After the wool hall, go to the market. You’ll need to bring the groceries home. After dinner, you’re both free until supper. You can have this for your help.”

Stoke pressed two farthings into Newt’s free hand, his other hand clasping a rung of the ladder. Newt reached to give one of the farthings to John. He almost slipped from the ladder as he fought to keep his brother from snatching both coins. Newt slid one of the coins into a money purse tied to a rope around his tunic. He checked to be sure the biscuit his mother had given him, an angel-shaped cookie, was still safely in the purse. Newt flashed a smile at his father before following his brother across the barge deck and gangplank. As Newt stepped onto the wharf, he was greeted by his brother’s punch to the shoulder.

“I do all the work and you get half the wages. Give it.”

“Here’s the record, then. I’ll run along home.”

The grocery list, scribbled on a scrap of paper, was in his mother’s tight scrawl, and in Latin. John studied the words a moment before scowling.

“What’s this first one? Peckers?”

“Piscis. It’s fish. Duodecim piscis. Twelve fish.”

“And the next one?”

Newt stared at his brother for a long moment.

“I know you, John. If I tell you, you’ll run off without me.”

“Fine. I’ll take you along, but what’s this last one? It’s something about you.”

“Oculus Newt. Eye of newt. Moder is making a jest.”

“At my expense, as usual. My own mother conspires against me. Come on, then.”

John mussed his brother’s hair before setting off along the wharf at a trot. Newt broke into a full run to try to keep pace, avoiding wheel ruts and oxen dung on the dirt Wharf Road. They darted between carts queued at the Water Gate, their drivers waiting to pay a toll to cross under the limestone arch into the walled city.

“Good day, Johnny, Newt,” the tollkeeper said with a tip of his cap. He turned away from a farmer sitting atop a horse-pulled cart, who scowled at the delay, his whip poised to urge his nag once the tollkeeper made change. Although the boys’ father was not a merchant, like Mr. Browne, he was high enough in Mr. Browne’s wool business to warrant respect in the town. Respect for a man extended to his family.

“Thanks, sir,” Newt said.

“Thanks, sir,” John mimicked, shoving Newt through the gap between the farmer’s cart and the Water Gate’s arch. The boys passed onto Blackfriars. The road turned from dirt to cobblestones that were mostly buried under three centuries of muck and dung mashed beneath feet, hooves and flat cart wheels. The boys were indifferent to the stench of excrement wafting from stone runnels along the sides of the road, the smell to them a hallmark of home. They walked between stone houses lining the road from the Water Gate up the hill where it would open into a square in front of St. George’s Church. The sound of bells echoed down the road from the bell tower at St. George’s, soon joined by the sound of bells ringing from parish churches throughout the town, a holy cacophony that culminated with the tardy tolling of the bells of St. Paul’s, a daily reminder to the townsfolk of the drunken bell ringer in St. Paul’s parish.

Blackfriars Road, too narrow for carts to pass side by side, funneled traffic one way into town in the morning and the other way out of town in the afternoon. John strode up the center of the road with the swagger of a soldier taking the field. He rushed past an oxcart before dodging to avoid a horseman. Newt struggled to keep up.