A Beggar’s Kingdom. Paullina Simons

do you mean, silence him? Like tell him to shut his trap? I can do it.”

      “Well, perhaps before you beg him politely to quiet down, you can ask him what he’s done with the lord’s body.”

      So she knows. The Baroness tried to shield her from it, Julian didn’t want to tell her, but she’s found out anyway. There are no secrets in a brothel.

      “Mal, I’m really sorry—”

      She cuts him off. “I heard you tell the imp to take the body far from here, and instead, Ilbert threw it into a canal a few streets away, a canal with barely six inches of standing water. The body isn’t even submerged. It’s what some might call hiding evidence in plain sight.”

      Julian pales. “How do you know this?”

      “Ah, it’s a funny story. I know this,” Mallory says, “because Ilbert told me.”

      “Why would Ilbert tell you that?”

      “Oh, no, dear one. You misunderstand. He didn’t confess to me because he wanted to get it off his skeletal chest. He told me, you see, because he wanted me to pay him to keep quiet.”

      “Pay him? Why would you pay him?”

      Mallory doesn’t answer. “But I can’t pay him because Margrave has stolen my money.”

      “What money? The money we’ve been earning for you on the side? I thought you always keep it on your person? Isn’t that what you told me? Keep your valuables on you?”

      “That little game Ilbert was playing with the constable about the mortar and pestle,” Mallory continues, as if Julian hasn’t spoken, “that was just him letting me and the Baroness know that we’ll all hang unless he gets what he wants.”

      “What does he want?”

      “Half,” Mallory says.

      Julian fumbles inside his waistcoat pocket for the purse with the guineas in it. “Half of what?” he asks dully.

      “Don’t you get it? If Margrave didn’t rob me, then Ilbert must’ve robbed me, in which case, he’s just toying with us. Tormenting us before the slaughter. It wouldn’t surprise me about him, wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.”

      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