A Beggar’s Kingdom

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 sways. “And he is also gone.”

“Yes,” Mallory says without inflection. “He is also gone.”

“Why would he hide them here?”

“He used to keep them at his house. I was the one who persuaded him that here was safer. And it was—much safer. The floor is nailed down in every room. I made the hiding place for the coins myself. In the lord’s house, the servants were disgustingly nosy. They waited for him to come home, they undressed him, bathed him, they dusted every nook. A locked chest with a key the lord carried on his person had alerted his staff that there was something in the chest worth locking away. He didn’t trust them. But he trusted me.”

“Why would he trust you?” Julian says in a hoarse voice.

“He was lonely. He liked me.”

Julian doesn’t look at her.

“When I found that one coin on him, he was relieved!” Mallory says. “His secret had been choking him. He was dying to tell someone. He was an artist and each coin was his masterpiece. I made a proper show of being impressed. I made a place where he could hide them. Room Two has always been a special, mysterious room. It’s secluded and private, and in it, the candles that fall don’t catch fire, though sometimes you do hear strange noises from the closet under the dormer. Some say the room is haunted. You appeared from the closet in that room.” She half-smiles.

Julian’s face is a mask.

“Every time the lord minted a new coin, we would celebrate. We’d have some wine and admire it. Make a pomp of placing it together with the others. I never took a coin from him, not one. He had to know I could be trusted. That I wouldn’t steal from him or betray him or blackmail him.”

“Why would he trust you?” Julian repeats.

“You’re beheaded for stealing from the king’s Royal Mint. It’s called treason to the realm.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.” He takes a breath. “What were you getting out of it?”

“A way out.”

Rigidly Julian waits for her to say more.

“We were going to leave for the South of France. For Nice or Marseilles.”

“Leave as in … leave together?”

“Yes.”

“Lord Fabian was the benefactor who would take you away to the South of France?”

“Yes.”

“But what were you actually planning to do?”

“I told you I’ve been planning my escape, didn’t I?”

Julian sits on the floor and wishes he could stop listening to her air more misdeeds through her bitter lips.

I don’t know if you are safe with him, Julian says.

Oh, sire, she coos. You are so kind-hearted. Trust me, you don’t have to worry about him.

As in, Fabian is not the one Julian needs to worry about. Julian had heard it all wrong.

“Everything was going perfectly,” Mallory continues. “Only one more coin to cast. Seven weeks to go! So close. But then you came into our life and ruined everything. Everything! At first your blind desire for me allowed me to make some extra money, and gave him a little pleasure, but quickly it all went wrong. And I didn’t even know how wrong until it was too late.”

“How is that my fault?”

“Because you ruined it with your love!” she cries. “At first, the lord thought you and I were just for show, another night of staged ribaldry at the Silver Cross. But soon he began to suspect that you weren’t putting on a show, you weren’t acting—like everyone else in this godforsaken place—but that you really loved me! He thought he was using you, and then it dawned on him that it was the other way around, that you were using him! And when he suspected that I might love you back, that’s when everything I’ve been working for since I was eighteen was destroyed.”

“Might love me back?”

“He and I had violent words about it,” says Mallory. “I told him it wasn’t true. I swore to him I didn’t even slightly love you.”

“Ah.”

“He didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe that when the time came, I would leave you and travel with him to Marseilles. I vowed to him I would. I begged him, I pleaded. I tried, Julian, oh how I tried to save his pitiable life! But he was so stubborn and jealous. He wouldn’t listen.” She wrings her hands. “The other night he came and said he was taking his coin and leaving for good because he was afraid you would kill him and lure me away.”

“He was afraid I would kill him?”

“Yes. So you could have me all to yourself. I tried to persuade him otherwise, but it was no use. He said when he saw us together, he saw the face of love. He said he knew what it looked like because it was how he himself gazed upon me. He didn’t trust me anymore and could never trust me again.”

It’s Julian’s turn to put his head in his hands. Mallory is right. It is his fault. How badly Julian has misjudged another man. How badly he has misjudged his woman. Again. “Fabian was right not to trust you,” Julian says. “You killed him for fifty pieces of gold.”

“Forty-nine,” she cries, “and do you have any idea how much they’re worth?”

As it turns out, he does. “But you were with me all night. You couldn’t have killed him.” He whispers it. He still refuses to believe it’s true. You’re not going to marry another man, are you, when you promised yourself to me, Josephine.

“I wasn’t with you all night.”

“How did you do it?” Julian doesn’t want to know.

“With your help.” Mallory wipes her face. “A thousand ways to kill a human being. That’s what you taught me. Oleander, wild cherry, rosary pea. You made it so easy. You’re a very good teacher, Julian. You explained it well. I learned so much about all the wonderful plants that grow in London’s parks. I pulled off the rosary pea from a bush while we were walking in the palace garden last week. Right in front of you, I dropped the pea in my apron. All it took was a little grinding and a drink of honeyed wine. He drank around eleven. I begged him not to leave until I came back to say goodbye. Then I was with you. At four in the morning when you were asleep, I checked on him.” She shakes her head. “Poor lord. He became so angry when he realized he had been poisoned. He worked himself up into quite a rage. I must say, I didn’t expect him to go into such violent convulsions. Flailing, foaming, hitting his head, falling down right over the spot in the floor where we kept his gold. I didn’t want him to die alone. I sat with him until the end. I held his hand. I figured as soon as his body was removed, I’d get my money. No one knew it was there but me—or so I thought. But then the Baroness shepherded me out for the day, Carling and Ivy mopped up, and when I came back, the gold was gone.”