The Lost Duchess by Jenny Barden

those who had nothing? He knew about such people; he had been one of them once.
    He took Rob towards New Gate where criminals and debtors were kept locked in the towers: ruffians and thieves – and those who didn’t deserve to be there.
    Along the way he bought food: knotted biscuits, cheese and cold capon pie, all wrapped up in cheesecloth, which he gave Rob to carry. At the prison he offered alms, and passed some of the victuals between the bars of a hatch into the hands of ragged men: about forty desperate, famished wretches who shared a dark room, slept on the bare floor and who pleaded with him to help them.
    ‘Have you any more, master?’
    ‘Please, for pity …’
    ‘Some for my friend who is sick …’
    ‘Bless you, kind sir.’
    To an able-bodied man who thanked him and asked for nothing else, he promised he would return and pay for his release, if the man was prepared to risk his life and sail with him to the Americas.
    The man gripped his hand. ‘My name is Jack Tydway. You won’t forget me?’
    ‘I won’t forget,’ Kit said, breathing in the stink of damp and ordure, remembering the cell in the City of Mexico in which he had waited for his execution. The smell brought it all back: the dark, the cold, the hunger and the fear. He had been seventeen years old and he had expected to die, held hostage by the Spaniards before the battle of San Juan de Ulúa, imprisoned after their treachery, and marched to the City of Mexico two hundred miles away over mountains and desert. He had been incarcerated, mocked, starvedand beaten; then, instead of being hanged, he had been sold as a slave and toiled until degradation had left him indifferent to life. In all the suffering he had borne and witnessed he was not sure which moment could be singled out as worst, but he had never forgotten the misery of being denied his freedom, waking in darkness, shivering on the floor, and feeling cold walls between himself and the sun. He could offer release from that.
    ‘I’ll come back for you,’ he murmured. ‘I promise.’
    Suddenly Jack Tydway was wrenched away, pulled off balance and punched in the stomach. He stumbled and struck back, but men fell on him, raining blows.
    A prisoner slammed against the hatch, reaching out between the bars, his hands like claws.
    ‘Take me, not ’im!’ He caught at Rob’s sleeve. ‘Gi’me that, darkie.’
    Rob recoiled as the man lunged for the remaining food, but Kit was quicker. He drove his fist onto the man’s wrist and slammed his arm onto the hatch sill. With a scream, the man let go.
    Rob jumped back clutching the bundle to his chest.
    Kit drew the boy aside, leaving Jack Tydway in a brawl that was already petering out, curtailed by famishment and weakness. He gave the gaoler a crown to ensure that Jack Tydway was looked after, with the promise of another if the man was hale when he returned.
    Rob followed Kit outside in silence, shoulders hunched, head down. Perhaps the prison had been a shock for him but Kit was glad Rob had seen it. One day he would tell him everything; one day the boy would understand that his father had been locked up in a place far worse, that he was captured as a youth, escaped as a man, and that the experience had shaped him and set him apart. The sound of the door slamming shut sent a shiver down his spine.
    He led Rob back into Cheapside, and then across to Christ Church, past the conduit in the marketplace with its broken statues of the Virgin and Child, and its taps wrapped in sackcloth dripping daggers of ice. They passed through the gatehouse of the old Greyfriars’ monastery, and Kit saw the way Rob looked about him, taking in the dilapidated cloisters and the vast edifice of the church with its empty niches and broken corbels, and the blanks in its windows where there’d once been coloured glass. What was going through his mind? What did a church mean to Rob who had been brought up believing in demons? He had been baptised, but what did he