“A quieter street would please me. Where is this Inn of the ‘Crossed Keys’?”
“I know it, down by the harbor. This way.”
She turned aside into a dark and narrow lane, where the gables of the houses nearly met overhead. Lines festooned the alley, carrying all manner of garments hung out to dry. It was a lane of slatterns, and of dirty children playing in the gutters, and the smell of it was not sweet.
“How does this please my lord?”
“I would sooner sleep in the woods.”
She drew close in under his arm.
“And so say I. A clean attic at the ‘Crossed Keys’ will serve. Pray God old Swartz is there.”
The lane led them down toward the harbor, where the painted masts and tops of the ships showed above the town wall. Here were the shops of the ships’ chandlers, and the place began to smell of tar and the sea. There were yards full of timber, spars, anchors, casks, old iron, chains, oars, gratings, lanterns, and pumps. A rope-walk ran along the town wall, with pent-roofs for the storage of cables. The taverns and inns were for the men of the sea, boisterous houses full of strong liquor and loose women and foreign ship-men who were handy with their knives.
The Inn of the “Crossed Keys” lay a little way from the harbor and next to “Little Spain.” It was a solid and orderly inn, and no “stew” house; men of substance and many merchants lodged there in their comings and goings, and for the ordering of their affairs. No man had ever been found stabbed in the “Crossed Keys,” nor had a robbery ever been committed there within the memory of any living gossip.
Dusk was falling when Martin walked into the inn yard and asked for the master. An old fellow with white hair and a lame leg came out of the parlor, buttoned up in a sober black cloak, and with a black velvet cap on his head. He looked more like an Oxford clerk than an innkeeper, but his eyes were shrewd enough in his smooth, debonair face.