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dealings.
    “And where is that?” I stood beside a wagon loaded with bales of wool to be transported to London.
    “To the house of Janyn Perrers.”
    “Who is he?”
    “A man of means.” The wagon master hawked and spat. “On the backs of those who have nothing.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Pawnbroker. Moneylender.” He sneered. “Bloodsuckers to a man. Leeches who’ll drain you dry.”
    “Is he English?” The name did not seem so.
    “A foreign bastard! From Lombardy! All grasping buggers are from Lombardy.”
    “And where does he live?”
    “London.”
    He sniffed and spat again. He was a man of few words and no manners, but at least I now knew more than I had. So this was not an errand of an hour’s duration, but something quite different. Anticipation blazed into exhilaration, racing through me like the fever that had laid the Abbey low the previous year.
    “Pull me up, then,” I ordered.
    “Tha’s a feisty moppet, and no mistake!” he said, but he grasped my hand in his enormous one and hauled me up onto the bales, where I settled myself as well as I could.
    “Why?” I asked when the oxen lumbered forward. The wagon mastergrunted, head cocked. “Why am I going to this man’s house? Does he know I am coming?”
    He shrugged. “Is tha’ to ask questions all the road to London?”
    “But I want to know…!” Happiness tingled through me, to my fingertips.
    “God help th’man who weds you, mistress.…”
    “I’m not going to be married! I have it on authority that no one will have me.”
    “And why’s that, then?”
    “Too ugly!”
    “God help you, mistress. A man don’t need to look too often at the wench he weds.”
    I did not care. I tossed my head. London! “If I wed, my husband will look at me.”
    “Feisty!”
    He cracked his whip over the heads of the oxen to end the conversation, leaving me to try to fill in the spaces. To my mind there was only one possible reason for my joining the household of this Janyn Perrers, moneylender: to work as a maidservant. My services had been bought. Enough gold had changed hands to encourage Mother Abbess to part with her impoverished novice, who would bring nothing of fame or monetary value to the Abbey. As the wagon jolted and swayed, I imagined the request that had been made.
    A strong, hardworking, biddable girl to help run the house.
    I hoped Mother Abbess had not perjured herself.
    I twitched and shuffled, impatient with every slow step of the oxen.
    “What is London like?” I asked.
    The wagon master swigged ale from a leather bottle as if he did not hear. I sighed and gave up. I did not care. I was going to London . The name bubbled through my blood as I clung to the lumbering wagon. Freedom was as sweet and heady as fine wine.
    The noisome, overcrowded squalor of London shocked me. The environs of Barking Abbey, bustling as they might be on market day, had not prepared me for the crowds, the perpetual racket, the stench ofhumanity packed so close together. But equally the city fascinated me: I did not know where to look next. At close-set houses in streets barely wider than the wagon, where upper stories leaned drunkenly to embrace one another, blocking out the sky. At shop frontages that displayed the wares, at women who paraded in bright colors. At scruffy urchins and bold prostitutes who carried on a different business in the rank courts and passageways. It was a new world, both frightening and seductive: I stared and gawped, as naive as any child from the country.
    “Here’s where you get off.”
    The wagon lurched and I was set down, directed by a filthy finger that pointed at my destination, a narrow house taking up no space at all, but rising above my head in three stories. I picked my way through the mess of offal and waste in the gutters to the door. Was this the one? It did not seem to be the house of a man of means. I knocked.
    A woman, far taller than I, thin as a willow lath with her hair scraped into a pair of