Brothers' Fury (Bleeding Land Trilogy 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

him barely so much as noticing.
    ‘Looks like rain,’ Ruth said now, looking up to the slate grey sky as she handed two pails of kitchen slops to a small grubby boy named Snout on account of his snub nose.
    ‘I’ll not complain if it dampens down some of this damn smoke,’ Tom replied, putting a beer barrel down onto the cobbles and straightening to drag an arm across his forehead. The breeze was coming from the west, bringing with it palls of acrid coal smoke from the glassblowers, soapmakers and cloth-makers clustered cheek by jowl along St Saviour’s, so that even Tom’s sweat was grimy with soot.
    ‘When it comes, Snout, you stand out in it for a while, do you hear?’ Ruth said to the boy who nodded contritely. ‘Let God’s rain wash some of that filth off. I’ve known rakers that’d look like gentlemen of the King’s Chamber if they stood beside you. And tell old Jacob I’ll be expecting some bacon from him before long.’ The boy shuffled off with the heavy pails and Tom smiled to himself because he suspected it would be some time yet before Ruth saw any bacon in return for the Lord’s kitchen slops. He knew that old Jacob Payne kept his pigs up past St Margaret’s Hill and Blackman Street in St George’s Fields. Yet several times Tom had seen Snout turn right down Long Southwark instead of left. It was a far shorter walk north past St Olave’s and to the river than to Payne’s farm, and he would put money on the slops more oftenthan not ending up in the Thames mud rather than the pigs’ trough.
    ‘He’s a little devil that one,’ Ruth said, shaking her head as she watched Snout go. The boy, no doubt feeling eyes on him, turned left this time, though that was nothing a detour across the road and through St Saviour’s wouldn’t fix.
    ‘I should go back to my regiment,’ Tom said, turning a palm up and eyeing the grey sky indifferently. A heartbeat later the first fat drop splashed onto his hand and he closed his fist around it.
    ‘You’ve done your part in this whole mess, Tom,’ Ruth said, ‘and no one can say otherwise.’ She did not have to speak then of the scars on his body for him to know that her mind’s eye was completing an inventory of them, and instinctively he closed his good hand around the right one with its ugly stub where the ring finger was gone. ‘I dare say the great argument will rage on very well without you, for all your ferocity.’ There was almost a smile with that last but not quite. ‘Let London’s other young hotbloods follow the drum,’ she said, ‘God knows there are enough of them. Do you good to leave it alone till it blows over.’ She turned back to look through the passage at the traffic of carts and horses and folk on foot streaming past. ‘I’ll bet that little bugger’s going to cross over and double back towards the river,’ she said suddenly, turning to eye Tom as though he were in league with the imp. Tom said nothing. ‘He’s a devilish little sod, that boy,’ she said, then seeing Ralph Hall, the Lord’s cook, who was on the way out, she reminded him to buy more tobacco from Timothy Bowell, but that no matter how much Bowell protested about his starving family, Hall was not to pay more than a shilling a pound for it.
    Then, hefting his own barrel from the vendor’s cart, which had parked on the street because its new young driver had been too afraid of scraping his master Jonas Reede’s wagon against the passage (though there was, all could see, room aplenty), Abiezer Grey swaggered back through the archway into theLord’s courtyard. Seeing Tom resting, the big innkeeper shot him a disapproving look, though said nothing as he staggered on with his precious cargo of beer. Deliberately Tom waited a long moment, as though daring Grey to challenge him, then Ruth shot him a chastising look, the kind of look with which he imagined Snout was wholly familiar, and so Tom bent his legs and wrapped his arms around the barrel, lifting it into