Free Veil of Lies by Jeri Westerson

few disks of silver in charity, but he never walked among them. And now walk he did.
    He scowled the more he thought about his state but owed his temper to the wine and Eleanor’s harangue more than a querulous disposition.
    They walked silently for a time before Jack nudged him.
    Crispin slowed and stopped. The boy held out the little portrait to him. Dammit! He thought he was rid of that.
    Jack raised it higher, urging it on him.
    Sullenly, Crispin snatched it. He slipped it between the buttons of his coat and felt it slip down his shirt and settle near his midsection where the belt stopped it.
    “Where are we going, Master?”
    Crispin didn’t know. Distracted, that’s what he was. And by a silly portrait? His neck flushed. “Tell me, Jack. Is it so wrong?”
    “Marrying better, you mean?” he said, not understanding Crispin’s question. “A servant marries a master. Their children marry better than they, and onward. Haven’t you heard them minstrel songs?”
    “But that obscures everything. The race is mongrelized. What point is there at all in being born noble?”
    Jack scowled and rolled his shoulders uneasily. “‘Mongrelized’? I ain’t certain of your meaning.” But by the scowl on his face Crispin guessed he was more certain than he let on. “But I see it all around us,” Jack went on. “Look at the Lord Mayor. He is a grocer, after all. The one before him was a draper. Nobility don’t sprout out of the ground like cabbages, do it? Where’d your family come from, eh?”
    Crispin arched a brow. “My family was noble as far back as Adam and Eve.”
    “’Slud!” Jack lifted his nose mockingly and straightened his shoulders as if they wore ermine. “Course, that ain’t the situation no more.” He seemed to relish saying it, and Crispin resisted the urge to strike him. “But if you should marry well, say Walcote’s widow, then you’d move up again.”
    Crispin’s black mood deepened. “Marry in a class beneath me,” he said, voice deadly, “in order to advance ? You must be mad.” He twisted. His cloak spun out around him like a raven’s wing.
    “The trouble with you—begging your pardon, Master—is that you can’t forget yourself; your old self. You can’t let yourself be who you are now.”
    “The only thing different about me is my status,” he growled. “I am myself.”
    “That’s your true image, right enough,” Jack grumbled.
    Crispin halted and Jack ran into him. Swiveling his head, he eyed Jack. “What did you say?”
    Jack swallowed and raised his hands to ward off a blow. “Now Master, I don’t mean nought. I was raised on these streets and I say what comes into me head. You live here now, and so I think of you as one of us, see. Course your manner and your skills say otherwise, don’t they?”
    “No. I mean, what did you say? Just now.”
    “Er…y-you said ‘I am myself’ and I said ‘that’s your true image, right enough.’ But I didn’t mean nought by it.”
    “What made you say ‘true image’?”
    Jack scratched his flat chin. “Dunno. It just popped out of me mouth.”
    Crispin’s wine-dampened mind rolled the thoughts one over the other. True image. So many “true images” from so many false ones. “I’ve been distracted.” He chuckled, though it came from no place near good humor. “A pretty face will do that. I’ve been acting like a child.” He looked at Jack’s eager expression, sometimes as wily as Robin Goodfellow, sometimes as frightened as an infant. “There is a cloth I am supposed to find and it very well may have to do with murder. Let this ‘true self’ concentrate on that.”

    Instead of entering through the Walcote front door, Crispin and Jack walked around to the servant’s entrance situated in a dingy alley smelling of moldy vegetables and rotting bones from past feasts. An old woman with matted hair under a stained kerchief was just opening the door and looked up at Crispin. Her etched features were accentuated