Southwark – May 1654
Chastity put her eye to the peep-hole and looked into the room. It had a large bed, on which a naked man lay. There was also a large armchair on which the man’s vestments were neatly folded. Unless she was mistaken, which was possible, as she wasn’t familiar with his bare, hairy back, it was the pastor of St. Mary Overy. Verity was massaging the rather fleshy, not to say obese, back in question. She looked rather bored, but considered there were worse ways to keep her clients entertained.
Chastity must have made a small noise as Verity looked up and straight at the spy-hole. She smiled and winked, knowing who it was that was looking. Chastity let the cover over the hole fall back into place and moved on. It looked like the only harm likely to come to Verity, other than dying of boredom, would be if she had to try and lift the man to turn him over.
Chastity moved silently through the narrow passages which riddled the Dutch House, stopping at the observation points for each of the rooms on this floor. The next two also held scenes of the women of the house servicing their clients, while the fourth was empty. The next room, however, told a very different tale. For a start, Amity was fully clothed and simply sat on the bed. Her client, too, had not disrobed at all, and though he was in the process of removing his belt, it became evident that it was just because Amity was nervous of the dagger that hung from it. The scabbard that could also be seen, was empty. George, the doorkeeper, would have taken charge of his sword when the man entered the building.
Chastity did not like the look of this man. He reminded her of Quartus, the man who came to check on her from time to time, who wanted to know everything about what she did. He had Quartus’s hard look about him: the way that he constantly looked around him as if to check where an attack might come from and where his dagger was in relation to his right hand and just the constant over-alert look of him – all reminded her of Quartus. She did not like Quartus. How could anyone like a man whose parents were so unimaginative that they called their fourth child ‘Fourth’? Though she was not sure that Quartus knew enough Latin to know that that was what his name meant. And she did not fancy the look of this man.
Although she could see what was going on in the room, she could not hear clearly. The man appeared to be questioning Amity about her clients. Then she was shocked to catch the name ‘Quartus’, though she wasn’t even sure whether it was the man or Amity that said it. Was she mistaken – had she just allowed her thinking about the man to misinterpret something they had said? Surely they could not be talking about her so-called ‘guardian’. Then she heard it again, and this time she was sure. And Quartus was a very unusual name. Chastity became very nervous and decided she had better let Ma know what she had seen.