Free The Gilded Lily by Deborah Swift

his mind without a qualm, for she was of no account. She was not the winsome one, with the milky skin,
who was making his peruke, but the ugly ginger-headed one. O’Malley, was she called? Anyway, the one the old boiler had tried to foist on him. Jay hurried his pace, blotting out the
girl’s stare.
    The other girl, the pretty one with the wide-apart eyes and wavy hair, well, she could be useful. Women were like lodestones, drawing attention wherever they went. He had been looking out for
the right sort of girl, and that girl looked simple, obviously from out of town, with a kind of fresh country charm. She was a bold one, he could tell. It was no good if they were too timid. A
certain boldness was always needed for the selling and for what he had in mind. The wigmaker’s girl might do.
    He turned into the main warehouse. The double doors to what had once been a loading bay were bolted back to reveal what at first glance could be taken for an open market, laid out with trestle
tables on which goods were displayed according to type. Brass on one table – warming pans, kettles and candlesticks. Linen on another – starched tablecloths, lawn and lace christening
gowns, pillowslips.
    Once a week the doors were thrown open so that people could buy, and today the place was warm with the press of purchasers. He squeezed past a table with every kind of pewter heaped high,
closing his nose against the sulphurous smell of metal polish, then wended his way past more glinting cutlery, towards the back wall of the warehouse. He passed the tables without a glance, trying
not to brush against anyone lest he soil his fine suit. He had no interest in these goods, for all the fine or valuable stock was in his father’s quarters. All that is, except for the very
best, the most exquisite. Of these treasures his father knew nothing – Jay hoarded them in his own secret hiding place in his upstairs rooms.
    A notice above the stout iron-bound door read:
Walter Whitgift. Privatus. By Prior Appointment Only
. Jay pulled on a trailing rope. A dusty bell on the wall clanged. Its tone was
peculiarly tuneless, as if the note had been squeezed out of it. The bell had once hung in St Stephen’s Church but had been pawned against the more urgent roof repairs. It had been at
Whitgift’s four years now, and rang for a different kind of service.
    Jay wished his father would make haste. At the table next to the door a barefoot woman was weeping over a pile of shoes, clogs and slippers. It was a common enough sight, but still he did not
like the disturbance to be so close to him. He turned his back to shield himself from her tears, suppressing his natural urge to somehow make her stop. It made him uncomfortable, for he did not
know where tears came from – they were mysterious and uncontrollable, and when women cried it made him angry. He felt it personally, as if he should be able to fix it. Women were always
subject to these strange moods, he thought. Unlike men – you knew where you were with men. The fact that he could not seem to help these women, or understand their crying, only served to
point up some lack in himself, a lack he could not exactly name, only feel, like a knot deep in the chest.
    Impatient with the sobbing behind him, he tugged on the bell again. Its joyless noise rattled the rafters causing a sudden commotion and flapping overhead, followed by a shower of dust and
droppings as the pigeons tried to find a quieter roost.
    To his relief he heard the bar on the other side of the arched door shunt back and his father’s wizened face appeared.
    ‘It’s you,’ said his father grumpily, and stomped off into the darker recesses of his private quarters. ‘Lock it after you.’
    He did, and followed his father, stooping under the low lintels, for he was tall and this place had been used as a dairy long ago, in Bess’s reign, when men were smaller. And even before
then it had first been built for a small monastic order,