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substewards, a longtime jake who would request Agnes’s company for a few days at a time during royal absences.
    “Didn’t come through.” Joan raised her sleeve to scratch at her forearm. “But I had a particular request for her this morning, from a fine gentleman of the Mercery. And a procuratrix’d like to make arrangements, right?”
    “You talked to her mother down Southwark?” Mary asked.
    “Sign of the Pricking Bishop,” Eleanor added quickly, naming a common house in the stews where Agnes’s mother had long peddled flesh.
    Joan scoffed. “Would’ve had to wait in line a half day to get a word in. That whore’s swyving makes her daughter look like St. Margaret.”
    “Did you try her sister?” Eleanor said. “Lives just up Cornhull.”
    Joan wagged her head. “Took a peek in her fancy house, asked about a bit in Broad Street, but no sight of her ladyship.”
    A dungcart turned up from St. Pancras on the way to the walls, banded wheels groaning under the weight, the waste of man and beast souring the air. When the clatter receded, Joan turned back to them. “Can’t have my maudlyns vanishing on me, not with Lents about to pass, appetites built up as they are. Forty days of nothing, then a week of everything, in my experience.”
    Mary groaned, her arms wrapping a post. “Shoulda been a nun, shouldn’t I, maybe took vows with them Benedictines?”
    “Ah, but then you’d really be getting it in every hole, my dear,” said Joan wisely.
    The two of them shared the laughter for a bit, attracting a few looks from other girls up the lane as Eleanor clasped her hands in worry. Joan put a hand to her chin. With a sidelong glance at Eleanor, she said, “Agnes got a little spot, though, don’t she? Out in the Moorfields.”
    “A small walk short of Bethlem,” said Eleanor with a natural shudder. “I’ve been there with her.” This was Agnes’s “lair,” as she called it: an old hunter’s blind outside the city walls where some of her wealthier jakes liked to take her, along with any other maudlyns they could cajole. They were, for the most part, young, reckless men with too much time and coin on their hands. Or fellows whose names might start with “Sir.”
    “Go have a look then, will you?” said Joan. Her sweetest wheedle.
    Eleanor hesitated. “Rather not go alone.”
    Joan heaved a shoulder at Mary. “Take the child with you. Be back bell of six, or shortly after. Sky looks to be clearing, so we’ll likely be busy tonight, the blood of London rising strong.”
    Mary, playing the genteel, crooked her elbow. Eleanor took her arm, and they left Joan Rugg standing beside the stalls. “Bell of six, now,” the bawd called after them. Eleanor waved an acknowledgment, only too glad to escape her sticky work for a few hours, though quite worried for Agnes.
    A muddy trudge in the drizzle took them along Cheapside past the Standard at le Vout, where two vagrants hunching in the stocks chewed at tack as a one-armed boy softened the biscuits in ale. A straight course up Wood Street and they were at Cripplegate. Eleanor looked up as they passed beneath the gatehouse, the prisoners idling behind the high grates, the keepers giving the two mauds barely a glance. Agnes likewise would have strolled from the inner half of the ward to the outer without a second thought from these men. Strange, that she would have let off her work for longer than a few hours, let alone a full day; she seemed always wanting more shillings, the busiest girl on Gropecunt Lane and happy about it.
    Strange, too, that she’d said nothing to Eleanor about her plans, for the two maudlyns had long been intimate, swapping jakes, lending a coin here and there, looking out for each other in their carnal trade, and always mindful of the situations that had led them to it: Eleanor, an orphan, her younger brother apprenticed to a Southwark butcher who beat him mercilessly; Agnes Fonteyn, who had fled her mother’s bawdy house in the