The Demon’s Parchment

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“He’s still out there.” Jack Tucker leaned his head and shoulders out the window.

“Close the damn shutters,” growled Crispin. “It’s too cold in here as it is.”

“Sorry, Master,” said the boy, doing as bid. His ginger hair was dusted with snow. “It’s just that that man is still out there, looking up at us. Makes me a bit shivery.”

“The cold will do that.” Hunkered by their meager fire, Crispin held one hand toward the flames. The other was curled around a bowl of tart wine.

“He might be a client, sir.”

“He might be.”

“Why don’t you go look?”

Crispin drank the bitter liquid. Winter did not seem to bring him as many clients as the warmer months. Perhaps fewer crimes were committed in the winter and a “private sheriff” was not in the family finances when it came down to it.

The small room offered little comfort. Its few bits of rented furniture-a chair, a stool, a rickety table-stood in the center of unadorned walls. Crispin’s pallet bed was shoved against the wall near the hearth, and on the opposite side of the small fire lay a pile of straw, the place Jack tucked in at night. Four strides would take him to a chest by the door, which held Crispin’s change of stockings and braies and his few writing implements. He was lucky to have two windows, one facing the back garden and the one Jack had been leaning out of facing the Shambles. But “luck” was a relative term. Today, with London chilled like a frozen lake, two windows only offered more opportunities for an icy draft.

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