The Counterfeit Crank by Edward Marston

ale.’
    ‘I’d sooner blame it on the itch that took you to the card table,’ said Nicholas. ‘That is where this all started. You were so elated by your win that you had to spend the money at once. It was gained too easily to stay in your purse.’
    ‘Good fortune sat beside me.’
    ‘Well, it did not do the same for Nathan Curtis or Hugh Wegges. Both of them lost heavily at cards. Others, no doubt, will do the same.’
    ‘Do not ask me to weep for them,’ said Elias with a hint of truculence. ‘Everyone knows the risk. Like me,they take their chance. Master Lavery makes that clear.’
    ‘What manner of man is he?’
    ‘A marvellous strange one, Nick.’
    ‘In what way?’
    ‘Look at him and you would not believe that Philomen Lavery had ever seen a pack of cards. You would be more likely to take him for a lawyer, if not a priest. There is a weird innocence about the fellow.’
    ‘Does he dissemble?’ wondered Nicholas.
    ‘I think not,’ replied Elias. ‘I have been in many gaming houses and know how to smell out a cony-catcher. Master Lavery is not one of them. The first thing he did was to let me inspect his cards to see for myself that they were not marked in any way. How many would do that?’
    ‘Very few, Owen. Unless they work by the quickness of their hand.’
    ‘I take him for an honest man. How else could I have won?’
    ‘I see that I will have to talk to Master Lavery myself,’ said Nicholas, curiosity sparked by what he had heard. ‘But leaving him aside, have you had any sight of those young beggars we met the other day?’
    ‘The counterfeit crank and his girl?’
    ‘Yes, Owen.’
    ‘No, I’ve not spied them. What about you?’
    ‘I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of them. The pity of it is that I found them both a place here at the Queen’s Head. As a favour to me, Adam Crowmere would have given them work, food, and shelter. They would have been rescued fromthe street.’ Nicholas thought about them for a moment and felt a surge of compassion. ‘I fear for them, Owen. They are strangers here. They do not know the perils of the city.’
    ‘You forget something,’ said Elias airily. ‘Hywel Rees is Welsh. He has the same unquenchable spirit I do. That will see him through.’
    ‘I do not descry any of that unquenchable spirit in you now,’ said Nicholas with amusement.
    Elias mustered some defiance. ‘It is still there, I promise you,’ he said, thrusting out his jaw. ‘But have no qualms about Hywel and his pretty Dorothea. They will survive. Whatever troubles they meet in London, I am sure they will overcome them.’
     
    Though he could neither read nor write, Hywel Rees had a great capacity for learning. His ears were sharp, and what they did not pick up, his other senses somehow gleaned. In his short time in Bridewell, he had gathered a deal of information about the place, much of it profoundly troubling. It was both a house of correction and a workhouse, an institution that took in children of the poor, capable of nothing more than manual labour, invalids who were sufficiently recovered to undertake light employment, and vagrants. It was a severe blow to Hywel’s pride that he and Dorothea were considered to belong to the group of sturdy rogues and loose women who had been convicted by a court.
    Bridewell was also the home of captives from the Spanish Armada as well as those who were persecuted for theirreligion. Like Dorothea, he had heard the anguished cries of nameless Roman Catholics and the occasional Puritan as they were put to the torture in order to extract confessions from them. It disturbed him that he was under the same roof as these unfortunate prisoners and therefore might be subject to the same punishment. Yet the keeper who stood over him while he toiled with the other men told Hywel that he was there to be cured. Hard labour seemed to him a cruel medicine.
    ‘How many of us are there?’ he asked.
    ‘Less than there used to be.’
    ‘They let people