June 15, 1605 London, England
The Globe is packed.
Beatrix sneaks through the gates behind a rowdy bunch of peasants and avoids paying the penny for admittance. She claims a spot at the far edge of the yard where she can watch the jostling crowd filter in, noting who is more than tipsy and who might have more than a few pennies to their name.
She shields her eyes from the afternoon sun with the back of her hand and gazes up at the three tiers of seating rising above her.
It’s where the real money is. She could make up what she lost on the elixir and still have enough to sleep in a bed instead of an alley tonight, if she dared to pick those pockets.
She’d be tempted, if those patrons weren’t the same people who’d call for the execution of someone caught looking at them the wrong way, let alone emptying their purse.
That might have been an incentive, once.
Now, it doesn’t matter that she hasn’t been caught stealing in decades.
She’d rather not find out what happens if she loses her head.
The performance begins and Beatrix bides her time. She pretends to watch the play, steals glances at the crowd as she searches for someone who still has their wits about them—and hopefully, some coin, too.
She spots her first mark at the front and center of the audience.
She can’t get a clear look at the man’s face because he’s completely entranced by the performance, though she doesn’t miss his strong profile or the fact that he’s a good head taller than the men standing next to him.
He pays no mind to the bumps and brushes of the crowd.
She could steal the clothes off his back and be halfway to France before he even realized he was naked.
Beatrix slips through the crush of bodies and positions herself behind the man.
She might think her luck was turning, if she believed in luck.
He’s dressed too finely to be down here, jostling for a decent view, instead of sitting in a cushioned seat high above the fray.
His coat’s not worn or even mended, and though his boots are coated with the filth of London streets, it’s easy to see how well made they are.
And he smells too nice. Like fresh autumn apples and lavender blooming in a cottage garden, and a forest of oaks after a storm: earth and wood and a metallic hint of damp.
She stiffens. He smells like Lancaut, like those bright moments she’s revisited so often they are more fantasy than memory.
Maybe she is delirious. She hasn’t eaten since yesterday and barely slept in her bed of straw last night.
He must be a traveler who hasn’t been in London long enough to reek of the city.
A lithe actor with a crown of leaves set askew on his head steps to the curved edge of the stage. Her hand dips into the man’s coat pocket. The crowd erupts in applause and the actor bows. Beatrix holds her breath. Her fingers brush cool metal. She plucks out a silver coin.
A drunkard bumps Beatrix hard from behind.
She stumbles into the man, and the coin slips from her grasp, falling at his feet.
He looks down at her as she straightens, eyes like the cloudless sky over the Globe snagging on her own mismatched ones.
Her gaze darts to the silver coin lying among the trampled rushes, and the man’s eyes follow it.
She glances away, cursing herself, but it’s too late.
He retrieves the coin and turns it in his hand.
Beatrix’s chest tightens, caught between trying to salvage the job or fleeing the Globe altogether.
She could leave the coin; the man might suspect she tried to take it, but he doesn’t know.
Then again, he can’t prove it isn’t hers, either, and without it, she’ll spend another hungry night on the streets.
She lays her open palm in front of the man and turns her coyest smile on him. “Thank you, sir.” She hopes he won’t notice she doesn’t look like someone who has two pennies to her name, let alone sixpence.
“I heard London was crawling with thieves, but I didn’t expect them to be so persistent.” The man’s lips lift at the corner as he slips the coin into his pocket. “Or so pretty.”
Her fake smile turns into a genuine scowl.
He shrugs his broad shoulders. “It won’t do you any good.”
Beatrix bites her tongue. She’d like nothing more than to tell this man exactly how much good his sixpence could do her.
It could feed her, for starters. She could buy a proper dinner at the tavern, maybe two if she played her cards right.
Or she could stay in a room at the inn that is her own, in a bed all by herself.
“My mistake.” She turns quickly away. She is nothing, has nothing. If it is her word against this man’s, no one will believe her.
“Wait.” The man catches her shoulder.
Beatrix feigns a stumble and drops to her knees. She pulls a short knife from her boot. The man reaches to help her up, and she makes sure he sees the sharp blade in her hand.
He raises his hands in surrender. “I was only going to ask if you’re hungry.”
“What?” Has she picked a madman’s pocket?
He lowers his hands. “Do you want to get some food with me? Preferably after you put the knife away.”
Beatrix is dumbfounded. “You’re not turning me in?”
“What for?” the man asks. “You didn’t steal anything.”
“Not from you,” she mutters as she slips her knife back into her boot. She doesn’t know what to make of the man, but he doesn’t seem dangerous.
“So, food?” he asks hopefully.
She has suffered stranger company for the sake of a free meal. Maybe she will stuff herself with sixpence worth of food and drink to spite the man. “All right.”
The crowd shifts as it filters out of the theater. The man follows the stream of people. Beatrix falls into step beside him.
He glances down at her. “I’m Oliver, by the way.”
She clenches her jaw. She doesn’t want to know his name. His easy smile is making it hard enough to hold a grudge. “Beatrix.” She looks quickly away. She still catches the glint in his eyes.
Oliver stops outside the gates and glances around, as if he were searching for someone. Beatrix looks up at him expectantly. He runs a hand through his mop of dark hair. “I don’t know where to go.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “You’re not from here, are you?”
“What gave it away?” he asks sheepishly.
They are standing on the wrong side of the Thames, for starters. The only way into London proper is to cross over the river on the stone bridge looming ahead of them.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?” he asks eagerly.
“There’s a market with loads of cookshops on the other side of the river,” Beatrix says. “It’s not far.”
She leads the way beneath the gatehouse and onto London Bridge. “Don’t look up,” she warns. The last thing she needs is for Oliver to lose his appetite—or his breakfast—over the spiked and tarred heads rotting in the sun above them. All that remains of England’s worst traitors.
His gaze strays upward. Beatrix shakes her head. She grabs his hand, and then she is staring into his bright eyes. Her heart skips a beat. “This way.”
Oliver’s grip tightens around her hand as she weaves through the crowds of people making their way into the city.
He gawks as they pass the towering shops built right to the edge of the bridge, groceries and haberdasheries mostly, with houses stacked above them.
Beatrix has never visited them. They are far too reputable for the likes of her.
She makes it halfway across the bridge before no amount of tugging will move Oliver along.
His hand slips from her grasp. Ahead of them, a brightly painted, four-story plaster-and-timber building fills the entire width of the bridge.
An arched tunnel through the middle lets travelers pass beneath it, as if some giant burrowing creature has hollowed it out.
A square tower sits on each corner, topped with a dome shaped like an onion, and there are too many windowpanes to count.
It stopped Beatrix in her tracks the first time she saw it, too.
“I wish my brother could see this,” Oliver says, taking in the odd building. “He’d love it. He always wanted to be an architect.”
“I’m sorry,” Beatrix says, because it seems like the polite thing for her to say.
Oliver laughs. “No, he’s not—he’s fine, just nowhere near here, and not an architect.” But Beatrix swears he sounds almost sad.
“The drawbridge tower used to be here,” she says. It has been gone more than twenty-five years now. She points to the elaborately carved building. “They brought this in from the Netherlands in pieces and put it together on the spot.”
Oliver looks at her like she’s grown another head.
“I swear it,” she says.
“No, I believe you,” he assures her. “I just didn’t expect a pickpocket to know so much history.”
She laughs. “It wasn’t that long ago.”
Oliver studies her face. “It must have been before your time, though.”
Beatrix blushes under his scrutiny. “London likes to talk.”
The crowd thins when they reach the other side of the Thames. Beatrix follows the warm scents of smoke and spices down a cobbled street lined with ramshackle stalls, Oliver one step behind her.
She discovered the riverside market a few weeks after she arrived in the city. The food is good and cheap, and all that she can afford most days. She loves the bustle of travelers and traders from all over the world, the perpetual newness of it. Her pulse quickens. She never knows what she’ll find.
Today, Dutch fishermen sell eels pulled from the Thames next to Spanish sailors with barrels of bright oranges beside Frenchmen hawking salt and wine and pottery. Born-and-bred Londoners work the cookshops, pulling all sorts of food from the squat brick hearths. Beatrix’s stomach growls.
“Take your pick.” She points out each stall. “Oysters are fresh from the river, meat pies are your best value, as long as they haven’t spoiled, and the pretzels are good luck.”
“Oh?” Oliver raises an eyebrow at her.
“If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“And do you? Believe in that sort of thing?” he asks.
“I used to,” Beatrix admits. “A long time ago.”
Oliver considers her. “You strike me as someone who makes her own luck.”
“I suppose I do.” She takes it as a compliment, though she’s not entirely sure he meant it as one.
She gestures to a hunched old woman scowling behind a stall that looks one good gust of wind away from falling over. “Don’t believe a word the brewster says about her sick husband. He’s been dead for twenty years. And don’t pay more than tuppence for her ale.”
“What about you? What do you want?” Oliver asks.
He sounds slightly panicked, but he needn’t worry. She’ll eat any of it, especially if she doesn’t have to pay. “Surprise me.”
Oliver heads into the market, and Beatrix claims an empty bench set between two stalls.
She has become an expert at reading people over the years, but he is a mystery.
With his fancy clothes and more money than sense, she would have sworn he was highborn, except he doesn’t carry himself like a lord or speak like one. And she can’t place the accent.
When he joins her, his arms are overloaded with food. Beatrix takes a bucket of oysters and a pot of ale from him. “Did you buy everything?”
“It all looked good. I couldn’t decide.” He sets some sort of meat pie, a hunk of gingerbread, a warm pretzel, a basket of Kentish cherries, and two Spanish oranges between them. “So, I didn’t.”
Beatrix stares at the food, wide-eyed. “You bought a feast.”
Oliver grins at her, a dazzling, contagious thing. He tears the pretzel in two and offers her half. “I thought we could both use a little luck.”
“Cheers.” She bites into her pretzel, and it is warm and doughy and deliciously salty. She devours it in three bites.
They split the oysters next. Beatrix makes quick work of prying the shells open with her knife.
“So, where are you from?” she asks, her curiosity conquering her desire to keep Oliver at a distance.
“Near Cambridge,” he says. “What about you?”
She hesitates, remembering the man and his potion, how he looked at her with no sense of recognition when she asked him about her home, even though he knew of the Wye and the abbey. “Lancaut.”
She’s not surprised by Oliver’s blank expression, only by the sinking feeling in her guts. “It’s a tiny village on the Welsh border, in Gloucestershire. No one’s ever heard of it.”
He drops an empty oyster shell into the bucket. “Tell me about it.”
But the memories of her lost life are too fresh in her mind after yesterday—too raw. Better to leave Lancaut buried. “There’s nothing to tell.”
They sit in a heavy silence. Beatrix doesn’t mind. Silence is better than whispers. Oliver shifts under the weight of it. He picks through the basket of cherries sitting between them. “What did you think of Shakespeare?”
Beatrix is glad for the change of subject. “That’s the third time I’ve seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s an audience favorite.”
“But not yours, I take it?” Oliver asks.
Beatrix shrugs. “I don’t care for the faeries.”
Oliver nods as if he understands. “Too far-fetched?”
“Something like that.”
Shakespeare’s faeries are unbelievable, but not in the way Oliver means. They are mischievous, often endearingly so. Well-meaning tricksters. Not malevolent. Not scheming and selfish.
“What about Romeo and Juliet?” he asks.
“Hated it.” She didn’t cry at that one at all, the only dry eye in the place. William would have loved it. And maybe she would, too, in another life, but it only made her angry. “Love conquers all” is a lie. Even Shakespeare knows it.
“Me, too,” Oliver admits. “Too far-fetched.”
Beatrix gives him a wry smile. “You know, I don’t go to the Globe for the theater.”
He offers her an orange. “I noticed.”
“Well, most people don’t.” She scowls and snatches the fruit from his hand. “You wouldn’t have either, if that drunkard hadn’t shoved me into you.”
He glances up from his half-peeled orange. His eyes meet hers. “In that case, I’m glad he did.”
Heat creeps up Beatrix’s neck. She looks quickly away. “So, what’s your business in London?”
Oliver hesitates. “I just finished my university studies. I thought I’d do some traveling while I have the chance.”
She’s not exactly surprised. She knew he was too well-off to be in the pit. But she imagined a scholar would be more… uptight.
“What about you?” he asks.
“I wanted to see the city.” It will be another hundred years before she dares to utter the truth aloud. Of dying. Of the curse. Of the boy who shattered her heart with two whispered words.
Of running without looking back, all the way to the doors of St. Paul’s.